December 2018
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In 1951, when Broken Arrow hit the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue, I was just an ungrown twelve-year-old. I wasn't an assiduous movie-goer because weekends were for basketball and softball, but when I did invest my 14 cents in a matinee, it was for a Western – not for a soppy musical or scary…
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Here's a picture of the house in which we lived from 1969 to 1973. It's 1521 9th Street in Boulder, Colorado. It's a small, old Craftsman, probably right out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog, which retained, in those years, many of its original dark-wood-and-stained-glass beauties. It was good to us but there weren't enough…
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Two nights ago [this would be October of 2009, of course], I watched the Phillies trounce the Dodgers, 11-0. What a colossal drubbing! HDTV let me appreciate Cliff Lee's southpaw masterpiece in exquisite detail. But for me the most memorable moment of the evening wasn't Lee's artistry or 270-pound Ryan Howard's mad-dash triple to right.…
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I've been reading about the death of Alexander at the beginning of the Hellenistic period. It's all new to me, and much of it is fascinating, especially about cultural matters, but there's also page after page of difficult-to-retain accounts of warfare and of particular battles. Here's an example of the kind of material that takes…
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378 Broadway in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1960 to early in 1962. It was a two-family frame house in which the second floor had been turned into two apartments. We were in one of them, a bedroom, a living room with a kitchen and a detached bathroom down the hall. Perfectly fine for a newlywed graduate…
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Some childhood summer residences. 1944: my mother had surgery (I was never informed what sort — such things were kept secret in those days — but I suspect a hysterectomy) and I was sent to live with my grandmother Sonia, who rented or owned a house near Monticello, New York. It was a plain…
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Between 1956 and 1961, I lived in five different places in Ithaca, New York: four bad, one good. The first was a cinder-block dormitory room, less a home than a cell, which I shared with a young guy from Virginia who was a not only a smoker but a classic Southern bigot of a type…
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From my birth in 1939 until I left for college in 1956, I lived at 539 East 9 Street in the Flatbush (now gentrified to "Kensington") section of Brooklyn. 539 was a three-story, three-family wood-frame Victorian, which my parents had acquired in 1937 for $4500 — a depression-era fire-sale price financed by my generous "maiden…
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In 1957 (I was 18 and in my second year in college), the reverend doctor Billy Graham led the largest revival meeting in history — an average attendance, in the old-old Madison Square Garden, of eighteen thousand people a night for three months. What was his message? It was half jingo, half Christian fundamentalism. "Let…
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Ho-hum. Another day, another amnesia movie. Crack-up offers still another variant on this most malleable of diseases: amnesia that is chemically-induced. George Steele (played by too-old-for-the-part Pat O'Brien) presents a danger to a doctor-thief played by reliable Ray Collins. To discredit him, Steele is kidnapped and injected with "narcosynthesis" which causes him lose his…