Monthly Archives: May 2012
My Old New Glasses
November 5, 2005 I’ve never been able to throw them away, the wire-rim glasses I bought in San Angelo, Texas, in 1969. I could never look at them without a pang, a rush of fondness, a smile for an old friend. So they have followed me for 36 years, through a succession of dresser drawers […]
My 30th Anniversary
April 13, 2002 Today is my 30th anniversary. Thirty years ago today, on a cloudy morning not unlike this one, I was honorably discharged from the United States Air Force. It was, and remains, the most glorious day of my life. My freedom came six months early, due to a Pentagon budget cut and a […]
Haircuts
Haircuts were frequent in the Air Force, and at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, there were two Mexican barbers who saw to our neatness and military bearing. While cutting, they chatted in Spanish. At this point in my military career, I had purchased new silver wire-rimmed glasses from a friendly optician in […]
The Bars of Solvay
(From the Syracuse New Times, October 31, 1976) Solvay sits close by Syracuse like a small European city-state. Drawing its tradition from Florence and Monaco, this gem-like principality offers the Syracuse drinker a new world of experience just minutes from our drab, cloud-covered city. The stacks of Allied Chemical rise over Solvay like tall, proud […]
Guinevere Sinclair Gould Brodrick
I love stories about rich people. They have a fairy tale aura about them, but they actually happened. I especially like those among the wealthy who are eccentric or hapless, whose foibles and follies are writ large. Such a gem was George Jay Gould. Born in 1864, he was a son of Jay Gould, […]
Father Klauder
I was raised as a Baptist, in a house across the street from a Roman Catholic church. Every day I marveled at the Catholics I saw, how different they were. The Baptist faith of my youth was cut from plain cloth, with simple rules: Everything I did or thought of doing was wrong, and I […]
The Frisbee Artist
One of my fondest memories of college is sitting in Phil Kennedy’s small room under the eaves of our fraternity house and watching him draw. He had small, black, bound books of blank paper, and working with a pen he would fill the pages with images from his imagination. It was magical. A chess piece, […]
Kathie Returns
When I was a boy, I used to take the NFT bus from Kenmore to downtown Buffalo, N.Y., on Saturdays to go to the movies. And often, my friend Russell and I would stop at a used book store, I think it was on Chippewa, and look through a box of movie stills and lobby […]
Ontogeny
November 1999 I had a client in a southern city whose offices crowned a 20-story high-rise. We met in a corner conference room that overlooked a river and afforded us a sweeping view. Of course, I did my best to focus my attention on the people in business dress who ringed the table. But occasionally, […]
Team Sports
December 29, 2003 Several of my co-workers are playing hockey this winter, recalling to mind my own career in team sports. Perhaps my best moment was in 1966, on a cold, crisp autumn Saturday morning, when I tackled Sam Conway in a Delta Tau Delta game on the field by the Women’s Building at Syracuse […]
Faithful Readers 