Sunday Breakfast

Bob Apter was a pass-first, shoot-second hockey center when his adult league team needed him to be a shoot-often skater in a game decades ago. So, he acquiesced, pummeling the puck past a goaltender seven times. The score stood Apter 7, Opposing Team 3 when Apter, a true-to-his-word guy, exited the rink in the middle

Bedtime stories opened Brian Briggs’ young eyes to the world of visual storytelling and often enlarged them to orbs of wide-eyed wonderment, ruining the primary objective of the nighttime custom—sleep inducement. His late mother, Jane Davidson, an artist of impressionism, would read books by illustrator/ painter/author Howard Pyle and others to Brian at their home

Jim Renke nearly lost his right index finger while operating a press brake at a metal fabrication shop in California decades ago. He was nearly 20 at the time, a community college student toiling in the summer for pizza and gas money for the fall semester. A press brake bends metal bars or sheets—and always

Well before he wrote lines for television characters Laverne and Shirley, penned jokes for Chevy Chase, and screen-wrote the movie The ’Burbs—starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, and Carrie Fisher—a young Dana Olsen entertained an audience of two at home. Older sisters Virginia and Jane. “They told me I was funny,” says Olsen, a Northwestern University

Terence Blanchard had a pair of audacious dreams while growing up in New Orleans. He’d be a hard-hitting linebacker in the National Football League and a serial hitmaker in the field of jazz. He’d recover fumbles and run in for scores in the fall and winter months and compose scores for movies in the offseason.

If you grew up in Iowa in the 80’s, you practically knew all about walking beans before you knew anything about crawling between a beanbag and a sturdier piece of den furniture. Ann Rieder was born in Ames, Iowa, and grew up on a Hawkeye State farm 50 miles due west in Scranton. “Most farm