The Observatory
Jeremiah Horrigan
- Location
- New Paltz, New York, USA
- Birthday
- February 04
- Bio
- Former Knight of the Altar, St. Martin's parish in South Buffalo, NY. Old enough to remember ducking-and-covering from the nukes that Sister Jeanne assured us were coming our way, defending Santa Claus until age 10, hating sports, being effectively blind until fourth grade, wanting to fly, escaping to Westchester County for three years, re-escaping to Buffalo for most of high school, escaping to Fordham U to grow a moustache and smoke a lot of oregano-laced pot, escaping school, getting political, getting arrested, getting tried, convicted and released for crimes against the draft. Husband to Patty, father to Grady and Annie. Housepainter, cab driver, idiot, then newspaper reporter in Poughkeepsie, years of freelancing (Sports Illustrated, New York Times, Negligent Mother Magazine) and shameful indulgence, followed finally by 15 more years of reporting, column-writing, some awards, discoveries large and small along the way, including these: Sister Jeanne was full of beans, writing is good for the soul and I'm the luckiest man alive.
MY RECENT POSTS
- Some snapshots of a beautiful
woman
May 13, 2012 12:32AM - What a teenager's "prank"
tells us about the man he's
become
May 10, 2012 09:35PM - The football draft? It used to
be a lot simpler (a re-post)
April 26, 2012 10:37PM - Saying good-bye to the
Gentleman from Arkansas
April 19, 2012 02:54PM - A forgotten anti-war history,
remembered and recounted
April 16, 2012 06:57PM
MY RECENT COMMENTS
- “Emily:
thanks.
Stathi: It's
the truest conclusion I could
draw. I may
have
taken…”
12:19AM - “Thank you Bell.”
May 16, 2012 10:15AM - “Every day, thousands of
people "deliver" the news
to
millions, the
way…”
May 15, 2012 10:19AM - “Jerry Jeff? One word:
"Yee-hah."”
May 14, 2012 11:57AM - “Usually, I'd respond to
each of you individually. And
at
length. But I find
ther…”
May 13, 2012 10:15PM
Jeremiah Horrigan's Links
Some snapshots of a beautiful woman
She's been that way all her life. Let me show you:
Here she is sitting on a picnic blanket, looking up at my adoring father, the the guy behind the camera. They're not married/
What a teenager's "prank" tells us about the man he's become
Amid the furor surrounding Mitt Romney’s admitted take-down of a fellow student at Cranbrook Academy 50 some years ago, one thing stand out starkly. It wasn’t what Romney admits doing as a teenager but how he responded to and explained his acts only a day or so ago.
I'm not surprised… Read full post »
The football draft? It used to be a lot simpler (a re-post)
The multi-million-dollar melodrama that the NFL Draft has become used to be a simpler affair. Time was, any two skinny kids could run the pro football draft. I know, because me and my brother Joe did exactly that about 45 years ago.
I was 14 and Joe was maybe 12. Lord… Read full post »
Levon Helm, drummer, singer and songwriter for The Band, died Thursday at 1:30 p.m.
I'd sing him a song, but I can't sing. Hours after his death, I heard a song on the radio that he sang not too long ago. To me, it's his elegy. I've wrapped my memories of him around the… Read full post »
A forgotten anti-war history, remembered and recounted
I’m standing in a vast, darkened office filled with row after row of filing cabinets. It’s a hot August night in 1971. I’m wearing only BVDs and a t-shirt. I have to open those filing cabinet drawers—that’s what I’m here for. But the cabinets are locked and I… Read full post »
Fidel Castro: The Contender Remembers
So, my people, it has come to this… Read full post »
Class clowns take note: your job just got a lot harder
Five years ago, I wrote about a pending lawsuit involving a school district, a 10-year-old boy and the crayoned message that triggered the suit. Last week, a federal appeals court ruled on the case. Below, you’ll find that column as it appeared in the newspaper I work for, The Middletown Times… Read full post »
Comedy takes a hit: Firesign's Peter Bergman dies
One of the four funniest, smartest and most under-rated satirists of the 20th and possibly 23rd centuries has died.
Peter Bergman, one of four friends who joined forces to create Firesign Theater in the late 1960s died at the age of 72.
Firesign was an astonishing, cutting-edge comedy troupe. They… Read full post »
I always wanted to be a writer like my dad. He was a sportswriter. Ever since he was a kid, he was mad about sports. After he got out of the Navy in 1945, and for as long as he lived, he made sportswriting the center of his life.
I hated playing… Read full post »
The bitter & the sweet: what love tastes like, then and now
My grandmother, who we called Mom Mom, lived with my grandfather, who we called Pop, two blocks up the street from where I grew up in South Buffalo, N.Y. Every Saturday morning Mom Mom would get out her giant battered aluminum mixing bowl and a five-pound bag of Pillsbury Enriched Flour… Read full post »
On the occasion of my son's birthday: a toast
This is a re-post of a story I wrote in my earliest OS days. I wanted then, as now, to mark my son's birthday, a time he can't remember but one I'll never forget. He means more to me than even the most carefully chosen words can say:
My son Grady will be 39… Read full post »
Writers on writing: some hard-fought wisdom for a new year
A new year is upon us, and if, as it seems to me, the future looks bleak at times, then there’s no better time to look to the past for inspiration and insight.
Writers in particular can draw on what must be the deepest well of inspiration – the words… Read full post »
A Heartwarming Story of Staggering Genius
A small boy and his mother braved winter winds one December evening some years ago. They walked through slushy snow to buy some milk and beer. The milk was for the boy and his baby sister. The beer was for their father, who liked to wash down his cigarette smoke… Read full post »
Occupiers: beware of boomers bearing gifts
My fellow boomers!
Remember back in the late '60s, how intently we listened to our elders when they told us what to do and how to do it as we tried to make accountable a government gone berserk?
Remember how eagerly we wanted to hear what mom and dad and Uncle Harry and… Read full post »
Read all about it! A bible for baseball fans
Some still call it the National Pastime, though everyone knows the time of pastimes is long past.
I’d say that tired description hardly does the game justice, because at some down-deep level, baseball is something closer to the National Religion. That idea came to me after spendin/… Read full post »
Re-post: 9/10 remembered, reluctantly and thankfully
In answer to my friend Writer Adam's request asking people to tell their 9/11 stories, I'm re-posting a bittersweet reminiscence I wrote a year ago. I think it speaks to the ambivalence a lot of people, including myself, have experienced about why some of us need and want to remember thos… Read full post »
Superman: when being invulnerable just wasn't enough
"Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts" -- Paul Simon
Superman has been given a complete makeover by DC Comics, in hopes he and all his partners in crime fighting will make it to the Top of the Pops again.
The guy formerly known as The Man of Steel… Read full post »
Hard news about a hard rain; a re-post with backstory
AUTHOR’S NOTE: What follows is a re-post of an AP-style news story told from an unusual perspective. I offer it as someone who has long practiced just-the-facts-ma’am journalism and who will probably be doing so again on Sunday, when Hurricane Irene is expected to make a slow, rains… Read full post »

NFL training camp will begin within days. That means football is back from the bargaining table. This makes me happy. But there was a time when the arrival of training camp was a pure misery for me.
Many years ago, in the summer of 1966, I was… Read full post »
What it was and why it was perfect
We found each other in the parking lot outside the hilariously misnomered Tiki Resort on traffic-clogged Lake Avenue in Lake George NY on the Fourth of July weekend. We shook hands then drew each other into an embrace -- a brotherly embrace if ever there was one.
Joe is my brother,… Read full post »
Father & Son, at Each Other's Side
It was 6:30 in the morning. Soon a nurse would take my vitals and an orderly would wheel me down the dim hallway to where a guy I’d only met the day before stood ready to cut me open like a ripe casaba.
Anxiety coursed through me like a shot of… Read full post »
I was a 19-year-old college freshman who felt unduly burdened by my father’s insistence that I get a job as well as attend the occasional class at Fordham University in the Bronx in the autumn of 1969.
Dad did more than insist I work – he got me a job. Every… Read full post »Being a 14-year-old putz wasn't easy for someone who'd never planned on being one. But the mysterious introduction into my teenage body of strange hormones, the sudden emergence of an outsized honker, a generous splash of zitz and the resultant blast of teenage lonlieness provided less… Read full post »
Why I Write: a Meditation and a Story

Approaching Marwencol . . .
A note about this story
I wrote the story that follows last year for the newspaper I work for, The Times Herald-Record out of Middletown, NY. It wa… Read full post »
My father cleared his throat and fixed me with a serious eye.
“Let’s go down to my office,” he said.
I was only 10 years old, but I knew trouble was on its way. Downstairs was Dad’s domain. None of us were expected there, unless we had a load of laundry… Read full post »
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