Category: John Spevak

Neighbors and friends are sometimes taken for granted. They shouldn’t be. A good neighbor or a good friend is one of life’s treasures.When someone is both a good neighbor and a good friend, that’s a treasure of...

Technology is both a blessing and a curse. I was cursed the other day when I was at my desktop computer and the screen started flashing and an annoying voice kept screaming that my computer had been attacked by a trojan virus....

Forty years ago this month, I wrote my first newspaper column. I was working as a summer reporter for a Los Banos newspaper when my editor suggested I write a column. I agreed. I forget now what the topic of that column was, but...

The Westside Express is fortunate to have talented and dedicated writers contributing to this newspaper. Most of them do it strictly for the love of writing about things important to them and because they believe in the...

In my column last week, I talked about the frustrations of going to a Giants game. I also mentioned my irritation with three members of the Giants ballpark staff who gave my wife Sandy and me the wrong information, causing two...

In my column last week, I floated the idea of turning the Los Banos canal trail into a kind of small-scale arboretum. In today’s column, I’d like to lay out what I think is a viable plan to make that happen. As perceptive...

I was honored to give a speech at the inaugural graduation ceremony at the Los Banos Campus of Merced College. I thought I’d share it with my readers. Hello, graduates of the Merced College Los Banos Campus! It is such a...

In a previous column about my becoming an owner of a home solar energy system, I explained why I decided to go solar and how I selected a solar company. I also mentioned I still had a long way to go before I was generating solar...

Today’s column could be called a potpourri, a miscellany, a grab bag or just a random collection of thoughts—my own and my readers’, related to recent columns I’ve written. To begin with, baseball continues to captivate me. The...

Rays of sunshine breaking through an overcast sky is a welcome sight these days, after all the clouds and rain we’ve experienced. A similar sensation is what people who knew Heddie Costa felt whenever she entered a room. Sadly,...

My baseball spirts were given a lift this month watching spring baseball games, but not in spring training. They were lifted by an unlikely group — players from the Czech Republic’s national baseball team in the World Baseball...

Wouldn’t it be remarkable if there were someone in Los Banos who cared so much about animals that she would devote her life to finding homes for dogs? As it turns out, there is. Her name is Christine Tercero, and she runs a...