Three cars were most likely to adorn an adolescent boy’s room in the early 1980s. The first was the brutish Porsche Turbo Carrera with its outlandish fender flairs and whale tail. The second was the Lamborghini Countach which, in its original and purest form, was a single, hard-chined arc from nose to tail. The third was the DeLorean. It might have had a model name but nobody knew what it was. With its unique stainless steel body and gull-wing doors, the car was unmistakable. It was the Potemkin-esque ‘concept car’ you glimpsed at the auto show, but made real and available soon on a lot near you. For a time, the public couldn’t get enough of it...

Listen to the rest by clicking the play button, above. The text version of this essay can be found on Medium where it was published contemporaneously. Alec Baldwin as John DeLorean in _Framing John DeLorean (credit: XYZ Films)_

What caught my attention, and that of a few others, was a small article about an amateur golf phenom out of Cypress, California with the improbable name of Tiger Woods. He had just quit the economics program at Stanford University and was turning pro at just 20 years of age. I think I recall somebody saying “he’s going to regret quitting Stanford!” Now I think about it, that could easily have been me. At that time, however, Stanford was already known for churning out soon-to-be Silicon Valley millionaires. It seemed folly that even if Tiger was there a golf scholarship, he had still managed to get himself into one of the most prestigious schools in the United States. “He should stick it out for another couple of years just in case the golf thing doesn’t work out,” I remember thinking, enviously. I also remember somebody else, not me, remarked “do you suppose that he’s going to have a line of clubs called Tiger’s Woods?”

Listen to the rest by clicking the play button, above. The text version of this essay can be found on Medium where it was published contemporaneously. The key image for this episode is by PeetlesNumber1 via Wikimedia under CC BY-SA 4.0. The image has been slightly cropped to fit the Fireside format.

The burden of a name that has come to mean so much.

The word derives from the Spanish mesteño, which is defined as “wild; untamed; ownerless”. By letting the tongue dwell on the roof of the mouth you get to mestengo, a “stray beast”. From there it’s a small step to the word and an idea that has entered into our modern mythology.

Mustang.

Mustangs are wild horses which roam the North American southwest. These were initially descended from horses which escaped, were turned loose or stolen from...

Listen to the rest by clicking the play button, above. The text version of this essay can be found on Medium where it was originally published on August 15th, 2016. (header photo and cover art: “Wild Horses in the Prairie” ©Giorgio Galano on iStock)