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 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 »

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 »

So, my people, it has come to this… Read full post »

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 »

One of the four funniest, smartest and most under-rated satirists of the 20^th and possibly 23^rd 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 »

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 »

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 »

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 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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

"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 »

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 »

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 »

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. 

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 »

                  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 »