Kane Farabaugh's Kanestergram

When my great-great-great-great-great grandfather Augustin Fehrenbacher and his family made their way from Germany to Pennsylvania in the 1830s, the landscape that greeted them were vast rolling hills prime for farming. Farming was something the Fehrenbachers from Kappel am Rheim knew something about. As more and more of them made their way to Cambria County and other areas and towns outside Pittsburgh to set up farms and begin new lives in America, somewhere along the way their last name would change to Farabaugh, and so would some of their vocations. All Farabaughs around the world come from one of six Fehrenbacher brothers who came to Pennsylvania in the mid 19th century, at a time when western Pennsylvania, along with the rest of the United States, was about to enter the Industrial Age. Pittsburgh would be a sort of Ground Zero; the manufacturing home of steel that would build railroads and buildings from Youngstown, Ohio to Spokane, Washington and all points in between. With the...

In 2006, I was assigned to cover the Connecticut U.S. Senate midterm election race between Democrat Ned Lamont and independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman. In the course of that coverage, I would have the opportunity to meet Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. He was campaigning in support of Ned Lamont. While the Iraq war was then the No. 1 issue in America, Kennedy used that election as a platform to once again champion universal health care coverage. Lamont was sweating as he stood outside the Clifford House senior center in Bridgeport, Conn. He was feeling the heat — not just from the sun on this unusually warm October afternoon, but he also was sweating his poll numbers. As Lamont waited for the guest of honor to help him kick-off this latest campaign event, he trailed incumbent Lieberman (running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Lamont earlier in 2006) in several polls of likely voters. One showed him down by as much as 10 percentage points in the November electi...