Chip Jacobs

Had my uncle, Gordon Zahler, been alive to see the leadership of his beloved country bickering and cowering from the job at hand — you know, throwing an emergency patch over a credit meltdown created by a whole slew of reasons, from Wall Street profiteering to over-hyping people’s ability to buy a home — he [...]

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Four years ago, when I wrote this cover story for Los Angeles CityBeat about my day down there, Rancho was on the precipice, too expensive for the county’s ailing healthcare system to manage and too shaky to attract outside investors. Since then, Rancho has associated itself with USC, sparing thousands of people with spinal cord [...]

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This is the Kevin Everett story in Sports Illustrated. It still gives me goosebanks to see how someone who probably never would’ve walked and likely faced an abbreviated life a few decades ago is now up and around and walking on his own — a month after his injury! The doctors who treated the Buffalo [...]

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The man was a larger than life personality. He didn’t just read the news. He put his conservative, authoritative stamp on it. He just had this credibility, an aura of perspective and calm, just as Walter Cronkite displayed during his years anchoring CBS’ nightly news. Click here for the Los Angeles Times obituary on old [...]

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Anybody familiar with Wheeling the Deal knows it’s primarily a biography of my over-achieving, under-weighted firecracker of an uncle. There are subthemes aplenty, though, and a driving one is how my grandparents scrambled and strained to give their son the care that his terrible condition – C3/C4 quadriplegia — demanded in an era without rehab [...]

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And, for your complimentary set of Ginsu Knives (puma sharpening-stone extra), answer this: what was the name of the series that this young, chocolate-faced, early Hollywood personality was starring in during the point this apparent Fudgsicle/popsicle-facsimile commercial was shot in the early 1930s? My connection to him, should you wonder, is through my grandfather, Lee [...]

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