Round the Square

POPE: By most accounts, Pope Francis was known as a good hearted man. As cardinal, when he was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, he was issued an organ donor car...

ODD: The last Civil War widow died in 2020. Yes, really. Helen Viola Jackson was just 17 when she married 93-year-old veteran James Bolin in 1936. The...

HERITAGE: A recent Lumber Heritage Region newsletter shared a pretty great story about lumber camp cooks, a job that women sometimes held. And what re...

MEMORY: “Caring for someone with memory loss takes strength — and sometimes, a pause for laughter is just what’s needed. That’s why the National Comed...

ALDRIN: The name Buzz Aldrin is pretty well known — an astronaut and second person to walk on the moon. His father, Edwin Eugene Aldrin Sr., was well ...

DON’T: We’re always told that two topics to stay away from in polite company are politics and religion. In 2022, the Pew Research Center assembled som...

MORE: In Rumford, Maine, it’s illegal to bite your landlord. We enjoyed these weird laws so much in the first column that we had to write a second one...

WEIRD LAWS: Isn’t it entertaining to look at some of the laws still on the books? This one, if enforced, might put a stop to storefront psychics — in ...

DRINKING: Folks, our fellow Pennsylvania residents need better coping mechanisms. A study by mybiosource.com measured how many standard alcoholic drin...

SMILE: Early in the morning, before sunrise on April 25, the dark sky will hold a rare sight — a smiley face. Really. The planets Venus and Saturn wil...

GAMES: Now that better weather is supposed to be upon us, we’ll want to be spending more time outside. We found a neat way to keep children and adults...

ODD FACTS: The Today Show has a website with 125 interesting facts to entertain adults and kids — or those of us who write RTS. We think this sort of ...

WORDS: Mea culpa. We had set Ann Weiner’s letter aside to add it to RTS and it got misplaced. She had written to us back in September (we need to clea...

PEEPS: At Easter time, the sugary marshmallow candy shaped like bunnies and chicks known as Peeps are seemingly everywhere. Based in Bethlehem, Pa., f...

MAYFLOWERS: Joe Cucuzza called us from Lewis Run to tell us the mayflowers are blooming behind the old Valley Hunt Club. His family has an annual trad...

TAX DAY: It’s tax day, the day by which your taxes are due to the federal government. We’re sure that’s a date adults can remember. Yet April 15 has m...

BEGINNING: At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor. Less than 34 hours later, Un...

LIBERATION: Eighty years ago, on April 11, 1945, U.S. forces liberated Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. From the United States Holocaust Memo...

APRIL: April showers bring May flowers. What about meteor showers, because April is a great month for those, too! One is the Lyrids meteor shower, whi...

DUCKS: Did you know that April has a Birth Month Bird? We can’t remember where we found the information, but we did note that the duck was the bird in...