The other thing that happened on Groundhog Day is that Elizabeth Stirba, a Parkland High School senior, became the face of Le Femme Boutique.

There are plenty of ways to tear the shroud off dreary winter days, but one of the very best is to think about baseball: emerald fields, cold beer, hot dogs, sunburn and the hope that springs eternal (or springs, at least, until Chase Utley re-injures his knee).

A long time ago, some poor writer took on the task of novelizing the screenplay of the Burt Reynolds-Dyan Cannon private eye movie "Shamus," filmed in a Hollywood age when leading men had chest hair and big mustaches instead of sallow vampire skin and infection-green eyes.

The last time I saw Debbie Lentz was in the living room of her house. She was surrounded by scores of exotic birds she had evacuated from her Salisbury Township store after someone drove through the front of it.

He was a kid, like so many of the other soldiers who stormed the Pacific island of Saipan to wrest it from the Japanese in June 1944. So it's no wonder Will Yawney's mother worried so much, and sent him so many letters.

It's haunting to open an old book and find the previous owner's name on the flyleaf, or perhaps an inscription: "To Evelyn from Charles, Christmas, 1938," or some such formulation.

Just after Christmas comes the Feast of the Holy Innocents. It commemorates the first Christian martyrs, the children who died in Bethlehem when jealous Herod ordered their slaughter to keep one of them — nobody knew which one — from supplanting him as king of the Jews.

One of the sad, untold stories about the imminent end of the world is that Patrick Sutton and his neighbors will meet their doom without ever having enjoyed cable television and high-speed Internet in the comfort of their own homes.

In my never-ending quest to bring you stories of nice people doing nice things — which I do as a public service in a nation that has defected from the true faith and embraced the heresy of Kardashianism — I offer you the tale of Lauryn Cottrell.

Regular readers of this newspaper may be familiar with a feature called Workout Winner, in which people with more ambition and commitment than I can even imagine show off their rock-hard abs and their Paula Broadwell biceps and talk about how they got that way. (Example: Don't eat sausage at all three meals).

At Christmas in 1826, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point endured one of its great scandals, a whiskey-fueled rampage known as the Eggnog Riot. It resulted in the court-martialing of 20 cadets, though not the best-known one — Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederate States of America.

Sure, there are better ways to start the day. Debbie Lentz was in the bathroom in the back of her Salisbury Township store Tuesday morning, mixing formula for the babies — the baby macaws — when the building shook as if from an explosion.

By the time last Friday rolled around, I was done with Sandy. As were you, no doubt.

Maj. Robert Hornberger had a chance to tell his story to a reporter right after it happened, but he is not the spotlight-seeking sort, so he waved off the young woman with the notepad and went home to change his ruined shirt.

A few days ago, I was sitting around with my younger daughter when she suddenly said, "Oh, look, the devil baby's back."

A few weeks ago I visited a soup kitchen as part of my reporting for a story about Catholic Charities, the social agency of the Diocese of Allentown.

As historical figures go, Sally Priesand is one of the unassuming ones. Forty years ago, she made her mark as the first woman in the world ordained as a rabbi by a seminary, and as the first female rabbi in America. But talk of these accomplishments is met with a sort of verbal shrug.

It was a marvelous bit of theater at Northampton Community College as the Father of Our Country told his life story and mused about how things might have been different — for himself and for his audience — had he followed his early dream of joining the British Navy.

The usual auctioneer's patter about furniture and figurines gave way to something a little different, a little strange, when lots 204 and 205 came up before the buyers at Tom Hall Auctions in Schnecksville on Tuesday.

I have two daughters, so I have read lots of kids' literature, good and bad. The good is good, the bad is usually awful. So when Martin E. Coleman of New York contacted me to see if I would write about his book, I wanted very much for it to be a good book.

Up in Plainfield Township, in a building that used to be home to 2,000 chickens, Tom Turtzo hammers away at his life's passion, blacksmithing. It's the art and craft of making metal bend to the will, and one of the few remaining professions that embrace solidity and permanence against planned obsolescence and annual version updates.

When I was young, I read a lot of nautical adventure stories, the kind where some hapless or spoiled boy ends up on a ship and becomes a man by dint of hard work and sacrifice.

The other day I drove out to Maryfarm, and of course I never got there because it doesn't exist anymore.

Poking around the craft tents at Musikfest on Monday before things got busy, I came across a sweet and lively woman from Emmaus who makes 10,000 bars of soap a year in her home workshop.

After a few hundred emails and online votes, the Wildlands Conservancy chose a winning name for its new skunk.

I promise to someday write a full-fledged story about quarter midget car racing, because it looks like great fun. But this story, while set in that world, is about family — in particular, a sister looking out for her brother.

I have met the enemy, and he is cute.

If you see someone walking with a cane, and the top of the cane looks like the head of a gnome or a fairy-tale dwarf, there's a pretty good chance you've seen a Knobbit.

Sometimes it's hard to know where to begin.

Let's say I'm out on my yacht, the Mal de Mer, and my Rolex slips off my wrist and sinks into the briny deep.

Later this year — the Good Lord willing and the creeks don't rise — this newspaper plans to publish a book about presidents who have visited the Lehigh Valley, and what they did when they were here.

The other evening we saw Thing One (Norah) and Thing Two (Clare) perform in the school play at Lincoln Elementary in Emmaus. It was called "Alice in Wonderland Jr." and it had a cast of thousands, more or less.

I spent Monday morning in the 1750s, or thereabouts. Colonial times, anyway. I could tell because all the children around me wore bonnets (the girls) and britches (the boys) and they were churning heavy cream into butter and chanting a little song:

I met a man named Thomas Horn who once spent 16 hours gluing strands of his own hair onto the legs and torso of a wooden tarantula, and that is far from the most extraordinary thing he's done.

Barry Dorshimer worked for PPL for 37 years, four months, three days, 48 minutes and 16 seconds — this is his own good-humored estimate — and took an early retirement package that suited him financially but left him a little out of sorts because he isn't the kind to sit still.

I don't think it betrays any journalistic bias to tell you that my favorite polling place is my own, at the Ridge Manor Senior Center in Emmaus.

I saw the notice in the paper — "Lehigh Valley Postcard Club Meeting" — and knew I had to go. I have it in the back of my head that this column is a weekly postcard of sorts, where I write wish-you-were-here missives to all of you from soda fountains and barnyards and cobbler's benches.

When I saw the sign on the side of the road — "Pigeons" —I immediately thought of people with rooftop coops sending clouds of birds into the sky to swoop around for a while and find their way home. So I turned off Route 222 and headed a mile north to the Brubakers' farm in Maxatawny Township.

If you are going to write a story about a gargantuan lottery jackpot, you might as well go to Lump's, the corner delicatessen in Bethlehem where the owner, Lump, dispenses gobs of good luck with his egg sandwiches and potato salad.

In March 1962, a terrible Nor'easter dubbed the Ash Wednesday Storm churned up the East Coast and devastated hundreds of miles of shoreline, including my favorite shore spot, Ocean City, N.J.

I'm sorry to tell you, friends, that this is the very last column I will write for The Morning Call.

Don Cook's new leather jacket has a patch that says "Three Million Miles Safe Driving," and this is not an ambition but an achievement in his nearly four-decade career as a truck driver.

Our greyhound, Murphy, who is mighty and fears naught but the wind, was having trouble getting up and walking. It was sad to see, because a greyhound is a noble-looking dog, except when he can't put one of his hind legs down. Then he looks shabby and sad. Still lovable, mind you. But sad.

We wrote about a clockmaker last week, so it seemed like the right time to visit a shoemaker. We favor vocations that seem to be in their twilight and yet persist, like newspapering.

I'm glad to be able to revisit the story of 8-year-old Simon Ernst. I wrote about the Upper Milford Township boy last month, when he was getting ready to undergo a bone marrow transplant.

I went looking for Joe Meischeid the other day because the Palmer Township man just turned 90 and is still working at the Northampton County Courthouse as a security officer.

After all these years, I have finally traced the River of the Past to its source. It's on the property of a Mennonite couple named Mahlon and Lizzie Sauder, who live in Maxatawny Township outside Kutztown and are, in their way, living the beatitudes.

Eleanor Wavrek Kublic is an elegant woman of 89 whose life has been suddenly and unexpectedly enriched by the return of a lost treasure.

At our house this year, we used an Advent calendar that didn't have any chocolates in it — just little doors that opened on Bible verses and pictures of magi under starry skies. But even without the chocolates, Thing Two, the younger daughter, was quite fastidious about bringing the calendar to me so we could open the day's door and read the verse.

Apart from microbiologists and particle physicists, nobody spends more time among miniature things than clockmakers.

An Army soldier in Afghanistan — we'll call him Joe — has spent the last couple of years wondering if the Valkyries will spirit him off to the afterlife or choose someone else.

Old country stores and neighborhood taverns aren't the only places where lasting friendships blossom. The ladies at Curves in Hellertown — who struck me as the kind of ladies who wouldn't mind being called ladies — bonded over 30-minute strength-and-cardio regimens set to the thumping beat of Loverboy and other guilty-pleasure music.

In 1919, Eugene and Hattie Haines opened a flower shop in Whitehall Township, and it's still there. Despite the march of time, despite the mammoth garden centers at Home Depot and Lowe's, despite the fresh-cut flowers in the supermarkets, despite it all, Haines Florist carries on.

Christmas — the commercial version — is wearying. But then you hear a group of kids singing in the middle of Lehigh Valley International Airport and the spirit of the true Christmas wriggles its way up from the bottom of your soul, where it's been hiding from the mirthless minions of the market.

In the borough of Nazareth, in that marvelous place that my younger daughter has finally quit calling the lie-berry, they are doing something lovely for strangers.

Every man has a train running through his heart. It's a million cars long and has been chugging along since boyhood, uphill and down.

We stopped by Renee Achey's house in Bethlehem to see her dog scarves. Man, did we see a lot of dog scarves.

I walked into Lisa's Kitchen the other day and Lisa Urffer had me right where she wanted me. I almost hit the ceiling as the invisible waves of Thanksgiving nostalgia bore me aloft and made me crave pie.