We thought when we returned Monday from a trip featuring 10 days in California’s Palm Springs that we could produce a few raised eyebrows by telling people that a week ago we had been in 105-degree temperatures.

    How could we know that the temperature had shot up to 93 degrees in Dover, which isn’t a three-digit mark but is certainly an unusual high for one of the last days of April.

    Humidity was low in Dover as well, we were told, but not near the 5% humidity figure in the dry desert area where Palm Springs is located.

    During the summer, desert temperatures there go up to 115 degrees and in that heat just about all activity stops.

    On a cold winter’s day here, however, there are some local sun lovers who would like to at least try the plus-100-degree heat.

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    No doubt the percentage of people watching “60 Minutes” Sunday evening was higher in Delaware than in most states. Vice President Joe Biden was featured in one of the three segments. His interviewer, Leslie Stahl, smiled almost as much as he did, but she tossed in some pointed questions just the same.

    Nothing fazed Joe.

    “Much of the ridiculing of me is well deserved” he said in a comment on his previous gaffes.
    It also was noted, however, that since February he hasn’t given commentators who search for slips of the tongue much to go on.

    The vice president being “his own man” and giving President Obama the benefit of straight talk was pointed out as an asset to the administration, as is the Delawarean’s natural “exuberance.”

    A clip of a previous comment by the president — that “nobody messes with Joe” — underscored the president’s high opinion of the man who flies in Air Force Two.

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    Sandwiched in between the trip to California and concerts at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., was the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association dinner in Linthicum, Md., at which four new member of the organization’s “Hall of Fame” were inducted.

    I was privileged to be one of them, and the evening gave me the opportunity to see many newspaper people I hadn’t seen for decades.

    One of the other inductees was Bill Burton, who, following 37 years as a full-time outdoors reporter for the Baltimore Sun, became and still is a columnist for the Bay Weekly on Kent Island, Md.

    Another was Sid Yudain, publisher of “Roll Call,” a Capitol Hill newspaper he founded in 1955 and which now has a staff of 70. It is published four times per week and has become an intimate newspaper considered the only source of non-legislative news about Congress.

    And the third is Dan Tabler, whose newspaper career began in Centreville, Md., when he was 16 years old. He has since worked for dailies and weeklies, and continues to write a weekly column for the Queen Anne’s Record-Observer.

     I knew Dan when he was editor of the Record-Observer and at that time he not only wrote much of the paper but at times ran the Linotype machine that turned out the metal lines of type. I have watched him grab a handful of type in column form and piece together the front page of his newspaper. My guess is that he is the only living person in this area with newspaper experience that extensive.

    It’s tempting to talk more about the old days but I’ll stop here. Again, it is a privilege to be in the company of the men I have mentioned and to join the other “Hall of Fame” members recognized by the MDDC since 1947.

    As I mentioned the dinner guests last Thursday, my family was of prime importance in the Dover Post starting and continuing and they share in the recognition. Of special importance is the lady who has long put up with odd schedules, etc., my wife of nearly 57 years, Mary.

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    An oddity that happened in connection with the dinner was my meeting David Fike, publisher of the (Easton) Star Democrat and president of MDDC, in the Westin Hotel near Baltimore/Washington International Airport on the morning of the dinner. That’s where the dinner was held.

    We met in a hotel hallway and as he looked at me intently he asked, “Were you in Dallas last night?”

    I said I was. We had stopped there at the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport on the way back from Palm Springs.

    “So was I,” he said, and explained that he thought it might have been me that he saw but dismissed the idea as too much of a coincidence.

    Another “small world” incident.

    *****

    A couple of other recent Delmarva Peninsula news stories that happened in Maryland might have escaped your attention.

    One was the death of actress Bea Arthur, 86, who grew up in Cambridge, Md.

    The other was the capture of the lone and roving young black bear that has been seen time and time again in Queen Anne’s and Talbot counties since early last summer. The bear was finally enticed by his love of birdseed and captured, then relocated to western Maryland. There was concern he had become too used to being in the vicinity of people.

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    A man and a woman are standing at the altar, about to be married, when the bride- to-be looks at her prospective groom and sees that he has a bag of golf clubs with him.

    “What on earth are you doing with those golf clubs in church?” she whispered.

    He whispered back: “This isn’t going to take all afternoon, is it?”