James R. Stout

            Chances are you are wearing something made out of cotton. I know that I am. In fact, just about everything that I am wearing as I write this is made out of cotton or some kind of cotton blend. Most of us don’t think about what it took to get from a field of planted cotton seeds to the cl…

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             From as far back as I can remember my mother always had a subscription to Reader’s Digest. I became interested in the magazine about the time I turned 10-years-old. At first, I was mainly interested in the various joke sections. These included “Laughter, The Best Medicine”, “Humor in Un…

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            It was the fall of 1974 and I was 19-years-old at the time. It was during that perplexing time in life when I was not quite a man and not a boy either. Late one night about 1 o’clock in the morning I had just gone to bed. I wasn’t asleep yet, but all was quiet in the house and the lights…

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             I saw a picture recently of an old bridge that was made out of concrete and steel. There’s no telling how many cars have been driven over that bridge over the years. Even the best engineered bridges will weaken over time. The stress applied to the bridge by movement, wind, rain, cold, h…

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