Late one September night in 1906, a 16-year-old boy’s misunderstanding escalated into a violent knife fight as he escorted two girls home from a dance in north St. Louis. The story made headlines in four newspapers.
The girl at the heart of the misunderstanding, Carrie Becker, was my great-great-great aunt (I included a diagram showing our relationship further down). I discovered this story unexpectedly while doing some newspaper research recently.
Josh gives his presentation, “Reflections on Middle-earth from a Middle American,” at Westmoot on May 10, 2025.
This week, the Tolkien Society posted videos from last year’s inaugural Westmoot, including my presentation, titled “Reflections on Middle-earth from a Middle American.”
Because of poor lighting, it was hard to see my slides, so I created a new video using my high-resolution originals. I hope you enjoy it!
Want to read the talk instead of watching? Here’s a PDF of the text.
Frank Becker. Photo reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
My great-grandfather Frank Becker was a fireman. I knew that he had been promoted to captain at some point, and some relatives had once told me they thought it had been covered on TV or in the newspaper.
I wanted to see if I could find a news story about the promotion.
From the vaults of the Renaud Empire, I bring you a recently-unearthed journalistic gem.
What is it? It’s Josh Renaud interviewing his father, Joe Renaud, sometime in the early 1990s for a school project. You’ve GOT to give it a listen. Josh is a pretty smooth interviewer, I have to say. And Joe was a pretty good interview. His anecdotes are top-notch!
I think it lasts roughly 20 minutes, which may be a little long for some of you. But the first 5-10 minutes are definitely worth it.
I was recently reminded of a short essay I wrote in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It was published as a guest commentary in UMSL’s student newspaper, The Current, a month after the attacks.
I was a computer user from an early age. Our first machine was an Atari 800, complete with a tape drive. It was a sort of hand-me-down machine, so we were using it many years after its heyday.
I can remember my dad spending days typing in a long BASIC program that had been published in a computer magazine (ANTIC?). I think it was probably for a game. Later, I typed in programs from books and magazines myself. That sort of thing was common for computer hobbyists in the 70s and 80s.
Josh uses his Atari 520ST computer to type a message on a BBS circa 1993.
Anyway, for all the advantages of digital communication, one thing is clear: digital files are more ephemeral than we realize.
Most of the emails, projects, and stuff from my early computing days are gone. Even modern stuff like webpages can disappear suddenly. For example, with very little warning, Yahoo last year killed the once-popular website GeoCities. Millions of people had created homepages there since the 1990s. A few of the homepages were saved in various archives, but many are gone forever.
Among my own lost projects is a choose-your-own-adventure style game I wrote for the TI-8x series of calculators when I was in high school. It was called “Doom at West” and was related to my “S.S.S.” stories. I loaned my own calculator to my younger brother when I was in college. He lost it and by extension all the stuff on it.
Seeing the work of digital historians like Jason Scott has motivated me to preserve what I can of my own old digital stuff, and to share at least those bits that might be of some small interest to other people.
So here are a few little archives I’ve put together that you might want to check out:
BBS-related
ANSI ads – A collection of ANSI art advertisements I made during my years as a BBSer in the 1990s.
He was a first cousin to my great-grandfather, Frank J. Becker and had grown in up in north St. Louis not far from the rest of the Becker family.
At that time I had made a lot of progress in developing my Becker family tree. As I was looking at all these first cousins, I realized that Ed was still living. On a whim, I wrote him a letter, and asked if he would be interested in some of the family history stuff I had uncovered.
I was excited to hear back from him and eventually to meet him in person. As it turns out, he lived only about 15 minutes away — just a straight shot down Chambers Road.
We talked on the phone and met at his house several times. He remembered quite a bit about his aunts and uncles on the Becker side, even though he wasn’t especially close to them. I learned things from him that never would have turned up in old censuses or church records.
During the time I knew Ed, he was diagnosed with cancer. At the end of March 2009, he died. But I didn’t know about it until recently — and I feel pretty bad about it.
My great-uncle Bill (William) George died this morning.
I didn’t know him very well, but the times I remember meeting him, I liked him.
I remember once visiting his house in Arkansas probably when I was in my teens. Turns out that he and aunt Betty liked Star Trek. They had recorded “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” my favorite movie of all time, once when it was broadcast over the air by CBS. This was a big deal to me. I already had the movie on VHS. But this CBS broadcast included a lot of deleted scenes which I had never seen before (in those days, broadcast networks would add scenes to pad out the films to fill a longer time slot). Thanks to Uncle Bill and Aunt Betty I got to! It was many, many years until I could see those scenes stuff again, when a “director’s edition” of the movie was released on DVD.
After my Papa died, I realized how much uncle Bill reminded me of Papa: his face, his voice. This was somehow comforting to me.
Uncle Bill was a pilot and flew his own planes. I always hoped I could fly along with him someday. When I was in my teens I was fascinated by the notion of getting a pilot’s license myself. Unfortunately I never got to go up with him in a plane.
He also liked to buy old houses, fix them up, and sell them to make money. I remember that for a while he was doing that with my mom’s sister, my aunt Karen.
