Speaking with Harry Swartz of Fostoria, Ohio, was one of a number of highlights working on this 75^th-anniversary D-Day story with our friends at the World War II Museum in New Orleans. I was able to find Harry through the kindness of Lee Adams, whose grandfather is a Normandy veteran and who helps coordinate the D-Day re-enactment every August in Conneaut, Ohio, on Lake Erie. Please consider visiting both the museum and that event. Harry was there as a scout on the shores of western France early June 6, 1944.  Speaking with him viscerally connected me to those hours: the incessant German machine guns on the ridges, the beach barricades set by Rommel’s Atlantic Fortress crew, the swirling cold water. His heroic fight for survival that morning, and that of his comrades, ensured the survival of democracy, of us and our children.

Henry DuBay was there for the Normandy Invasion 75 years ago. He was there for his country. He was there for his family. For freedom, for democracy, for decency. The Gilbert, Arizona, resident, a C-47 pilot during World War II, was honored at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans June 6, 2019, for his participation in the most important battle of the last century, which took place along 50 miles of French coastline. He and other D-Day veterans were flown to the museum to discuss Operation Overlord and meet well-wishers from around the country. The costs had been high: approximately 2,500 Americans and almost 2,000 British and Canadian troops were killed just on the first day, June 6, 1944. Another 7,500 were wounded. But the battle was won, and the war in Europe would be over less than a year later.

Every story written brings some enjoyment. This one brought stories and stories of enjoyment. The Hings are a fourth-generation grocery family living and doing business in Superior, about 30 miles from Mesa, Arizona. Theirs is a story of hard work, toughness and persistence through 100 years of providing the mining town with fresh provisions and other necessities. Michael Hing’s grandfather started the business in 1920, less than a decade since coming from China; next year, then, is the centennial; he befriended Eddie Basha Sr.’s dad, who started that Arizona grocery company in nearby Kearney. He was also friendly with Colonel Boyce Thompson, the Magma Copper owner who founded the beautiful Boyce Thompson Southwest Arboretum. Please come through these doors, shop a spell and read about a family that makes Arizona, and America, great.

Some assignments have a chilling effect. A recent visit to Ice King did this, while also inspiring the final text. The small business produces ice products, such as blocks and cubes, for the Phoenix area. An early morning interview transpired during a winter chill that had brought wind and rain to the desert areas of the state and record snow to the high country. Starting out in the cool parking lot, we warmed to the snow-making machines that are hot in the sizzling Valley summers. Then we moved inside to a cooler space where giant cylinders harvested ice. Next was the inventory freezer, cooler still, and, finally, an especially frigid freezer set at 6 degrees. All the while, we met The Robot, which, undaunted by the cold, palleted the products, without so much as donning an Extra Large sweater. This piece is served un-neat for your sipping pleasure.

Watch for this name when the precious-medal medals are awarded next year: Giles Smith. The Scottsdale resident hopes to travel to Tokyo for the Summer Olympics, where he would participate in the 100-meter butterfly and the 4x100-meter medley, if he qualifies for the first. While training for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, he ruptured the bursa-sac in his left elbow, leaving him unable to pull on the arm at full force for several weeks. After months of physical rehabilitation, the Baltimore-born Smith and U of A All-American is training six–eight hours daily at various Valley locations. Looking forward to the Omaha Olympic Trials in June 2020, he plans to be one of the 52 men and women to become U.S. Olympians. He’s now beating the world’s best. For a Youtube, see youtube.com/watch?v=qrzEFxIT3XI.

Scott and Debbie Jarson founded their Phoenix-based real estate company, azarchitecture/Jarson & Jarson, in 1990, specializing in post-World War II Mid-century modern vintage homes. Their life expresses a passion for the work of significant Valley architects/designers, including Al Beadle, Eddie Jones, Steven Holl, Wendell Burnette, Ralph Haver, Cal Straub, Ned Sawyer, Fred Guirey, George Christensen, Darren Petrucci, John Kane, Bennie Gonzales, Paolo Soleri, Brent Kendle, John Douglas, Rich Fairbourn, Hugh Knoell, Taliesin fellows such as Blaine Drake and Charles Montooth iconcoclast Paul Christian Yaeger and Will Bruder, who designed their home adjacent to the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. “The Jarsons . . . [combine] a passion for quality design and architecture, a richly informed awareness of the history of Phoenix and a keen ability to bring to this conversation buyers, colleagues and community members,” says Bruder, FAIA.

Elie Wiesel (1928−2016) changed many lives; mine, too. Writer, professor, political activist, Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor. His first book, Night, harrowingly describes his survival of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, which his parents did not survive. My thanks to The LaSalle Collegian staff in native Philadelphia for finding this story in the newspaper archives, or morgue, as we once macabrely called it. This is an early piece written while I was the features editor and trying assiduously not to write for a career. The opportunity to interview a surviving child of the Nazi horror came about. Hearing him speak in such soft tones about the hardness of those years piqued this reaction, which earned a first prize the next year from Pennsylvania Collegiate Press Association. Wiesel went on to accept the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, and, despite my efforts, I succumbed to the passion of a career in writing. Thanks, Elie, for being a witness to history and watching over my history, too.

Kentucky's Jeanetta Holder, 84, has been gifting Indy 500 winners hand-made quilts for four decades. Last May’s winner,  Alexander Rossi, received one. Mario Andretti of Nazareth, Pennsylvania, the 1969 winner, received his 40 years ago after claiming the 1978 Formula 1 title. The Unsers, Al Sr. and Jr. and Bobby, winners of a fabulous nine Indy’s, have a collection in Albuquerque. Roger Penske, the transportation-industry giant and race promoter, has some, as does Arie Luyendyk, the Phoenix-area resident who won in 1990 and 1997. And four-timer A.J. Foyt has some as does another quadruple winner, Rick Mears. The family of Jim Rathmann, the 1960 winner, received one, as did Parnelli Jones, who took the checkered flag in 1963. “She has always been a close family friend for 50 years, including babysitting my children,” says Bobby Unser, who won three times. “Thanks, Jeanetta, for being part of what makes the Indianapolis 500 and open wheel racing great!”

Alice Cooper likes good tight shocks as well as Shock Rock, a classic Mustang as much as a vintage guitar. The Phoenix-area resident, and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, has been a car fan since growing up in Detroit, where his dad sold cars and shared his automotive love with his son, who would combine music and business talents to create the legendary stage persona celebrated worldwide. Today, Alice combines these passions with his enduring love for wife Sheryl — 40 years of marriage — his children, church and community and golfing. Slip on your dancing shoes, grab your car keys, and let's rock!

Michael Pollack, who lives and works in the East Valley of Phoenix, just doesn’t renovate shopping centers; he helps renew communities by adding value to older local shopping centers. “The Renovation King of Distressed Properties,” Pollack is in his fourth decade of real estate development and is widely known, and appreciated, for acquiring and refurbishing deteriorating commercial and industrial properties. He has been involved with 11 million square feet of renovation and newbuilds in his career — about half of that in the Valley of the Sun. Most of these centers are in East Valley cities — Tempe, Chandler, Mesa — but Pollack has also completed them in Phoenix, Peoria, Scottsdale, Glendale and Tucson. The Michael Pollack product: centers with “check-me-out” curb appeal — and check-in high-occupancy rates. Better communities, too.

Valley of the Sun resident Charles Keller, multiply masked as the Caped Crusader, wealthy Bruce Wayne, and indefatigably loyal family butler A.L.F.R.E.D. — Ambassador & Liaison for Research, Education & Development — maintains a super-equipped Batcave and fires up the turbines of the Batmobile to entertain children with lifelong or life-threatening illnesses. Together with his family and loyal cave cohorts, Keller offers them, their families and friends the superhero experience of Batman and his unBatlievable underground lair, beneath stately Wayne Manor secretly south of Gotham City. What’s next at the Batcave? Stay roosted and tuned in: “Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!” Want to hang out? Write brucewayne@gothamcitymotors.com.

In both music and interior design, Scottsdale’s Esther Boivin stylishly expresses herself. Notes are well-articulated and passionately sung. Spaces are crisp, colorful and resonate emotionally. Components are integrally connected, with bravura passages of color, embellishment and craft. “For me, a well-designed space is a music composition –– a symphony –– with themes, rhythm, dynamics, accents, embellishments and layers of meaning,” says Boivin, a skilled mezzo-soprano whose multifaceted Scottsdale-based firm provides sophisticated interior designs for custom homes, residential remodels, retail spaces and restaurants. Usually, she introduces a theme, a leitmotif, repeats it, varies it, adding new themes to complement it or play against it, as a master symphonist or sonata composer does to add drama to a composition.

Phoenix skylights star, Mark Morganstein, looks upwards for his salvation and sings hosannas to low-e glass. His Sky Design Concepts has been supplying skylights for commercial projects and custom luxury homes throughout the Southwest for almost three decades. He saw the light early in life. Born in Washington, D.C., he grew up near Silver Spring, Md., taking in traditional Jewish values such as acquiring a good education, hard work and self-motivation. In the Phoenix area since 1982, he says the biggest difference between skylights is the glazing. For customers interested in performance and longevity instead of price, higher performing polymers, special coatings and dual-pane low-e glass are, well, just divine.

For our servicemen and -women.

Teaching and track: Bob Bondurant. This year, the champion race car driver and founder of the world-famous Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving is celebrating twice. On Feb. 14, he, his wife Pat, employees of the school and well-wishers marked the forty-fifth anniversary of the school, proudly located on the Gila River Indian Community in Chandler. Two months after the school event, April 27, he celebrated his eightieth birthday at his Paradise Valley home. Bob brilliantly raced Corvettes in the mid-‘50s, winning the west coast SCCA B Production National Championship in 1959 with a stunning 18 of 20 wins. For Carroll Shelby, Bob participated in the 1965 World Manufacturers Championship, besting Ferrari — almost a half-century later still the only American team to achieve this. Says the octogenarian track legend: “Let’s race!”

Every December, the world-famous Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving hosts post-injury patients with disabilities as well as staff and volunteers from the famed St. Joseph’s Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix, for the annual Driving to Excel  event at the Wild Horse Pass Motor Sports Park on the Gila Indian Community, Chandler. “It’s always great having the annual Barrow event here,” says Bob Bondurant, 83, who founded the Bondurant School in California 48 years ago after surviving a near-life-ending track accident at Watkins Glen, N.Y., in 1967. The school, he explains, has been providing courses using hand controls for about 38 years. “My heart feels thankful when I know I am one of the few places in the world who can give a disabled or partially paralyzed person an opportunity to drive a car again. It just feels great!”

John Dawson is a Scottsdale hotelier in a world destination of mega-resorts based everywhere else. His Scottsdale Plaza Resort, which has served the Valley of the Sun for 40-years, is the only major locally owned resort. For almost four decades, the Paradise Valley resident has hands-on managed the 404-room property, which has been accorded the AAA Four Diamond 12 times and the Mobile Four Star Award five times. Keeping the resort competitive with the area’s other properties has required a local’s commitment to serving everyone as a neighbor, including those living a few miles away in Phoenix or a couple thousand or more. “From the day we started in Scottsdale, ours has been a commitment to a guest experience that exceeds customer’s expectations,” he explains. “Our best compliment? When our customers return — again and again.”

Valley radio entrepreneur Ron Cohen has wielded a full sling of David stones on a battlefield of nine-foot-tall Goliath radio networks. But, defying the pundits, he’s carefully sliced through 25 years of challenges with a sword the ancient warrior king would have coveted. He’s the founder and president of Scottsdale-based CRC Broadcasting and CRC Media West LLC and owner of Phoenix radio station KFNN 1510 AM, Financial News Radio, the nation’s first all-financial and -business news/talk radio format. And, just recently, his KFNN began simulcasting on 99.3 FM –– making Money Radio the only Phoenix-area radio format heard on both AM and FM formats. Listen in, cash in.

For decades, Irene Clark has woven masterful Navajo rugs at the 27,543-square-mile Navajo Nation, where natural art, such as Spider Rock, and human, exemplified by the White House Ruins at Canyon de Chelly, magnificently intertwine. Following centuries of tradition, she finds her rug designs in the sacred landscape of her Diné (Navajo) people and selects colors from the red sandstone mesas and multicolored plants near her home along the western slope of the Chuska Mountains in New Mexico. We try to spin her life story here.

It’s spring training, February 1971, Francisco Grande Resort, Casa Grande, Arizona. Steven Michael Stone, 23, 5 foot, 9 ¼ inches, 182 pounds, a Jewish kid from South Euclid, Ohio, just outside Cleveland, is throwing batting practice to Willie ‘Say Hey’ Mays — for many fans the greatest player in baseball history. The hardest throwing pitcher from the Giants’ farm system, Stone throws Mays fast balls, and Mays pops up; the Hall of Fame center fielder asks catcher Dick Dietz, not happily: "Who is that guy?" Mays throws his bat against the cage and never takes batting practice with the upstart Stone, who goes on to win the prestigious Cy Young Award for the American League in 1980.

Long before Pat Tillman became everyone's hero, he was a hero to anyone his life touched: family members, other Arizona State Sun Devils football players, teachers and mentors at the Tempe-based university and fellow Arizona Cardinals. Here's a look at field level and higher levels of the man who was tragically killed after he walked away from a million-dollar contract to serve America.

Jewish boys are making money in butterflies! A year ago, three Phoenix-area businessmen opened Butterfly Wonderland — it's the country’s largest butterfly pavilion — to winged praise from adults and children. Here 2,000 to 3,000 butterflies fly freely every day, with more than 50 species of butterflies represented. Amram Knishinsky, Martin Pollack and Rubin Stahl recently debuted the first phase of their Odysea in the Desert at the northeast corner of the Loop 101 and Via de Ventura, Scottsdale. On 37 acres leased from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, the entertainment complex will include an OdySea Mirror Maze; an IMAX Theater; one of North America’s largest aquariums; a Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum; a “Taste of the World” with internationally inspired sit-down restaurants; and other experiences.Fly on up!