In the earliest days of Rock & Roll music, even before it was called Rock & Roll, I was blessed with a brother who was five years older than myself. Growing up in a suburb of Buffalo, we shared a small room, with a radio on the table between our beds. At bedtime, I wanted […]

The son of a German father and a French mother, Peter DeWein was working as an apprentice tinsmith in Buffalo, N.Y., when the Civil War started. He did not enlist. He was 16 years old; I don’t even know if English was spoken at home; perhaps the war seemed far away, in many ways. But […]

June 17, 1998 When I was a boy, my older brother used to get knife catalogs. I oogled the pirate cutlass with the “knuckle duster” grip for close work on deck. My sibling, on the other hand, craved the switchblades because he was in a James Dean phase. But one knife from that catalog keeps […]

November 26, 2008 The other evening I was walking home from work, and my friend Greta, who I had not seen in years, was entering Johnny Angel’s restaurant with a beau. After an exchange of mutual surprise and hugs, I told her that her piano was well. Greta’s piano lives in our dining room, having […]

This piece was written for The Syracuse New Times and editor Mike Greenstein, who in his patience and mercy first gave my writing a public home. At the time, it was entitled “The Day the Ethernauts Descended on Syracuse.” * * * October 27, 1974 Last February, I received a call from the turkey who […]

May 18, 2004 “From the expressway,” the instructions read, “take the Canal Street exit.” How often the romance and mystery of travel spring from what is not at first revealed. Had we known in advance that this was an “exact change” exit, we might have had the appropriate coins on hand; we might have rehearsed […]