Column: The Elevator

In last week's column I wrote about how much I missed my big green trunk full of collectibles from my youth. While thinking about the contents of the trunk I remembered one of the favorite books from my childhood.

It was a book about the 50 states, and I can remember spending hours reading it and learning the state capitals quite possibly before I learned cursive. I'm not sure I ever learned cursive correctly, but there was a time I could rattle of a capital quicker than most adults. When I was in grade school, we had a project in geography that involved each individual state and I was very ex...