In response to Mr. Wieland’s Letter in the October 15 edition of The Madera Tribune: Going to school in the North, I had a history teacher that put a different light on the Civil War. It was mostly about the price of cotton. Cotton was produced in the South and the textile factories were in the North, mostly in New York. They were buying import cotton at a lower price than what the South needed. With no tariffs, the South was being squeezed into submission.

Remember Elon Musk? No, not the disemploymentator. The high-tech industrial genius who was born in South Africa and immigrated to Canada in 1989. There, he attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, for two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, he received a Bachelor of Arts in physics and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the Wharton School. Since then, he has been busy amassing money. Even before he was granted his degrees, he co

For The Madera Tribune Frank Bigelow, great Grandson of Harmon Bigelow, founder of the Ponderosa Telephone Company. I first met the Bigelows while working at Spring Valley School a long time ago. Jess Bigelow was a major patron of the school’s 4-H club and spent a lot of money buying their animals at the Madera and Chowchilla fairs. Of course it wasn’t long before I found out about the connection between the Bigelow family and the Ponderosa Telephone Company, and that is a hi

In a 2016 issue of Forbes magazine, Helen H. Wang wrote, “The new Silk Roads already have momentum.Earlier last year, Beijing announced...

The Silk Road. It was the trade route that ran from China to the West during the days of the Roman Empire. In 2013, President Xi Jinping...

Several years ago, I wrote about the Four Tigers of Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. They were the countries that...

For The Madera Tribune Dr. Mary Butin (far left) ordered a halt to work on a foundation for a Chinese restaurant on Yosemite Avenue due...

For The Madera Tribune The Barsotti bakery in Madera. The 32 year-old Italian packed his bags and prepared to leave his native village of...