Steel Wagstaff
Trying to do good things for good reasons
Tag: childhood
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In Search of Lost Whittenbergers
It’s been a little bit of a whirlwind ever since I dug out the old issue of the Whittenberger Summer Writing Project and decided that I wanted to try to find and contact everyone who had attended. I can only imagine what organizers of high school reunions have to deal with, but this has been…
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Whittenberger Summer Writing Project: 1998
One of the other things that I’ve recently decided to do (apart from weeding my library and pruning my record collection) is to finally dig into the huge pile of papers, photos, notes, letters, and memories I’ve stored in boxes and carried from apartment to apartment over the past decade or so. It’s just been…
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The Memory Collector Project: Post 1
A few weeks ago I decided it was time to tame the archive of my life. I’ve been something of a collector over the years, accumulating all kinds of things (papers, notes, writing, letters, books, music (especially records), baseball cards, coins, etc.). Most of them I never use, but keep in closets, only pulling out…
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I’m going to be a radio DJ!
When I was in 6th grade, and living in Oklahoma, one of the DJs on a local radio station moved into my family’s neighborhood. I think his name was something terrible, something like Jimmy Rocket. I was really pumped, especially when I’d see him pulling his car into the garage every couple of weeks. I…
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“Happy Geeks”: A Story by Steel Wagstaff, age 16
This past week I started teaching an introductory college composition course for a group of incoming UW student athletes. It’s a small group, just 14 male students, and most of the group are football players. For their second writing assignment, I gave them an essay that I wrote was I was around 16 years old…
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10 Years Later: Quotations for a Friend
When I was a freshman in college, my best friend was Mark Eliason. He and I went almost everywhere together, and so nearly imitated one another’s mannerisms, speech patterns, and stock phrases that we’d regularly have other people ask us if we were brothers. We usually lied and said yes. After our freshman year, each…
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Beck & the Greatest Music Video of All Time
As a teenager, I was wild for Beck. It started with “Loser,” a song I liked so much when I was 12 that I bought the Mellow Gold album and started collecting everything else I could find by the musician. I think that the larger opinion of Beck at the time was that he’d probably…
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The Last Thing To Go
I play basketball on Wednesday nights. Pick-up games, at a church building in Madison, five on five, really nice courts. So it’s on my mind today. I’ve played basketball ever since I was a kid. I’ve always been into sports, and have always liked playing them more than watching them. Commercials don’t help–I abhor them,…