By Patrick Whitehurst The year 2022 is upon us. In my mind, however, it should still be early 2021, but time is ever elusive and waits for no one. In 2020, I set my eyes upon a total of thirty books. This last year, in 2021, I read only fifteen. No clue what happened. I read some amazing work, however, written by some amazing authors, and thought...
By Patrick Whitehurst There’s no better time to explore those things that go bump in the night, and those topics that make us lock our doors at night, than the month of October. Tucson’s scary tales range from the hard to beilieve to the police blotter.Tales that truly happened, such as the Pied Piper of Tucson, have shaken the...
By Patrick Whitehurst My fifth nonfiction book, “Murder & Mayhem in Tucson,” (In bookstores throughout Tucson on September 27, 2021) began on the Central Coast of California. Monterey would soon be in the rearview mirror, I knew, and a return to Arizona lay dead ahead. Having just finished my 2019 book, “Haunted Monterey County,” I quickly set...
By Patrick Whitehurst They say watching too much news can make you twitchy. What they don’t say is what happens when you watch too much biased news. And today that form of “entertainment” is bountiful. When one consumes biased news, one begins to think exactly how the corporations want you to think. This means news from left...
By Patrick Whitehurst Remorse. Sadness. Regret. These were my resounding thoughts after setting up a bird paradise in the backyard of our home. Bird baths, seeds and mealworm (not to mention hummingbird feeders) are stationed everywhere. And the birds came. Did they ever. Only I wasn’t ready for the tragedy.I don’t mean the inevitable cooper’s...
By Patrick Whitehurst Tay’s Brew House and Tay’s BBQ, located at 16461 S Houghton Road in Vail, closed their doors this month, but will reopen again. Original owner Natasha Herzig recently sold the popular businesses to move with her family to Texas. The Brew House and BBQ, with a staff of ten, is named for their daughter, Taylinn, or Tay for...
By Patrick Whitehurst The school offered a spectacular view of Monterey Bay, just a bike ride away, though it might as well have been washing the shoreline of another world. As a kid on the coast I rarely made it to the sandy shoreline. I knew the alleys and back streets of Seaside. And I knew which streets to avoid. Broadway stretched from Martin...
By Patrick Whitehurst Whether it comes as a gift for the holidays or just a gift to yourself, your heritage is worth knowing, if just to explain why you prefer cold, rainy days over those sweltering summer ones. Could be that, genetically, you’re from a place with more ice than grass.Born of Irish ancestry, McElwee to be exact, I changed my...
