The pungent package arrived without a return address, but I knew exactly where it came from. Nick Asashon has been sending me miner's garlic every year since 2016, when he mailed me the first batch and connected me to Colver, Pennsylvania, a little mining town I used to love to visit, but haven't seen since [...]
Like everybody else, I will be very happy to say goodbye to 2020, when I went the whole year without seeing my immediate family all together under one roof, even for a night; and watched people I love struggle to rebalance their relationships on solid, common ground in a brutally divisive climate; and worried every [...]
The first time my husband Vince visited Sisti's Tavern in Colver, PA he came home sweating Jim Beam. We were seniors in college then, and I had brought him east to meet my grandparents, the formidable Jay and Micky Kostelnik. They greeted us from their front porch and fed us an enormous meal of veal [...]
Mike Semko became the man of his family when his father died following a house fire in 1930. He was 10-years old. For the rest of his life, "Uncle Mikie" remained the go-to guy for his family, his parish and his country. He enlisted in the Navy in August of 1942, but never spoke about [...]
In what turned out to be one of the NFL's strongest classes ever, my dad, Ron Kostelnik, was chosen 26th overall and, at the time, he didn't even know he'd been drafted. In December of 1960, my dad's mind was on other things. A defensive tackle for the University of Cincinnati, he had just played [...]