Since the death of New York radio personality and TV talk show host, Joe Franklin last Saturday in Manhattan at 88 years of age, everyone’s been telling their own Joe Franklin story. This is mine. It’s 1996, I’m on a book tour for my first book, The Lone Ranger’s Code of the West (An Action-Packed Adventure in Values and Ethics...

This remarkable story of a confession coming decades later is surpassed only by the extraordinary power of forgiveness. As reported on the CBS Evening News (Jan. 5), it’s a reminder to us all about the power of redemption. “Nearly four weeks ago, Ricky Jackson was exonerated after spending 39 years in prison — serving the longest sentence for a wrongful...

While everybody is posting their own end-of-the-year list, here’s my selection of ethical stand-outs. Mike Carey – Carey is the first African-American to referee the Super Bowl and has been honored as one of the best in the game in 2008. While honesty and fairness are critical to his job, so is respect. So, in 2006 Carey quietly requested that...

And it only took 529 years to solve this “cold case” of the… millennium! According to a report in Nature (Dec. 2), DNA tests have confirmed that the skeletal remains found in a parking lot in Leicester, England in 2012, are, in fact, those of the infamous Richard III, the last king of the House of York and the last...

After a week of protests following the grand jury decision that Officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, another image and story took off on social media proving that compassion can win out against tragedy, and it took place at a rally 2,000 miles away. “In the hours after The Oregonian posted...

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.” – Atticus Finch, “To Kill a Mockingbird” There’s a moment in the film, To Kill a Mockingbird that’s particularly compelling. Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small...

With the possible exception of Lincoln, the politician whose speeches and quotes I return to the most is Churchill. Why? When it comes to  wit, wisdom and statesmanship, Winston Churchill truly stands alone. “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” He could be inspiring: “Success is...

After learning of the death of Jo Ann Harris yesterday, I felt a great sense of loss at someone who was the definition of integrity. A former assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division under then-Attorney General Janet Reno, Harris was not only the first woman to head that post, she was also an uncompromising fighter to...

Watching the end-of-the-season games between the Sox of Boston and the Bronx Bombers, the TV cameras would frequently cut-away from the action to catch a glimpse of Yankee Captain Derek Jeter. The 40-year-old Jeter has amassed enough stats to easily make Baseball’s Hall of Fame on the first ballot. According to Baseball Reference, a website devoted to tracking stats of...

“Facts are stubborn things…” – John Adams On March 5, 1770, the Boston Massacre began as a flash mob of citizens who surrounded and heckled British soldiers quartered in the city. With the local citizenry up in arms about the incursion of British troops by England’s King George, the growing crowd of Americans-to-be threw snowballs, sticks and ultimately stones at...