Charles Ota Heller

How sad that money drives college sports — particularly football and basketball! The Big Ten (which is really an “Eleven”) has its own TV network and, consequently, millions of dollars in revenues. At the same time, it is very weak in the two big revenue sports. In football, it has two powers and nine also-rans and, in…

It seems that many of my writer friends are busy publishing these days. In recent blogs, I’ve talked about books by Lillian Lincoln Lambert, as well as Jim Rosapepe and Sheilagh Kast. This week, I finished a provocative book by one of my newest friends, Peter Hruby, a distinguished historian. Peter and I have a couple of…

I’ve been derelict in that I’ve failed to blog for an entire month. The main reasons: I’ve been attending board meetings, writing — and reading (o.k., I admit to the fact that I’ve played a little golf, too). Interestingly, most of the books I’ve read recently have been written by friends. I’ve reported on a couple…

One of my favorite writers, Anna Quindlen, says that “the stages of a writer’s professional life are marked not by a name on the office door, but a name in ink.” For some 30 years — as CEO of two software companies and later head of a nonprofit organization — I had my “name on…

I am privileged to know some wonderful and accomplished people. In my last blog, I wrote about Bernie and Rita Turner, and the book about their founding of Walden University. I had just finished reading Aspire toward the Highest at the time. Yesterday, I completed another wonderful book by yet another terrific married couple I know. The…

For several years now, I have served on the Board of Directors of Walden University, a unique international institution. Walden is a for-profit, accredited, university which — by virtue of offering all its courses online — is designed for the nontraditional student, typically a professional who is working full-time, has a family, is looking to…

What a weekend for my alma mater! On Saturday, the Oklahoma State Cowboys took on the number one basketball team in the nation, the Kansas Jayhawks, in Stillwater. In no time, we led by 16 points, as James Anderson, Keiton Page, and Obi Muonelo destroyed KU with their sharpshooting. We handed the Jayhawks their second…

I’ve been a skier since the age of three, so it’s frustrating to sit inside and watch a blizzard here in the flatlands of the Chesapeake Bay, rather than being out on the slopes or the trails. But, a 25-inch dump is good reason to do some serious writing. I am working on my second…

The best thing about going on a big-ship cruise is the opportunity to read books, uninterrupted by phones, e-mails, or pressures of deadlines. We returned yesterday from such a cruise on board the “Carnival Pride” — from Baltimore to Port Canaveral to Nassau to Freeport and back to Baltimore. The first day out in the North…

A couple of weeks ago at a meeting of writers, a novelist whom I had just met told me that she was “impressed by all the things you’ve done in your life.” She had read my bio on my web site and was reacting to the fact that I’ve gone through five distinct phases of…