Posts Tagged ‘ American ’

Remembering George McGovern

November 10, 2012

James J., 60, is a doctor who lives in Connecticut. The audio interview will tell how James met George McGovern as he campaigned for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination in Massachusetts. Click the red link below left to listen to the interview. Forty years ago, the Democratic Party could not have been in worse disarray. They had succumbed to the new Republican “Southern Strategy” and were left with a small, ultra-liberal core. But George McGovern bravely galloped into battle against Richard Nixon and was soundly thumped. People may not...

And The Word Was Made Hip

May 16, 2012

There was an explosion of language when I was a girl, something my parents, grandparents and the cop on the corner highly disapproved of. “You were such a nice girl,” my worried mother would say when I was 20, “Now I can’t understand a word you’re saying.” “Ma,” I’d say coolly, Don’t flip your wig, ok? In my mother’s case, this was particularly apt since she actually did wear wigs, changing them like hats for different occasions. There was a musical explosion, a movie explosion, explosions in style and...

St. James Place, Atlantic City, Late 1950s

April 25, 2012

Jim Comey has written the coming of age e-novel, Uncommon Glory and a novella, Death Of The Poet King, Branden Press, Boston. (http://www.amazon.com/Uncommon-Glory-ebook/dp/B006MINMJA), For more on his fascinating career, you may CLICK HERE. If you’re interested in his e-novel, you should CLICK HERE. From my earliest memories to my mid twenties, I was granted entry to a fantastical world, a place of unexpected smells and sounds and tastes. It was a city of majesty and poverty that never slept. People from all over the world, speaking dozens of tongues, flocked to...

Scavenging Bottles To Ride The Big Dipper

April 22, 2012

Maryvonne H. grew up in Medina, Ohio, about 35 miles south of Cleveland. A high school English teacher, she now lives in Toronto. My father worked in the B.F. Goodrich tire factory in Akron as an inspector. My mom stayed home and took care of her three children. Summers, we would rent a cottage on Chippewa Lake, about 10 miles from Medina. It was the one “extravagance” we indulged in all year. There was an amusement park (closed in 1978 finally) that had a roller coaster called The Big...

The Promise Of Summer, 1974

April 17, 2012

Betsy B. was born in Muscatine, raised in Waterloo, and now lives in the Chicago suburbs where she teaches special needs children. It was early May, the Longfellow School, in Waterloo, Iowa, 1974. The 5th grade class I was a part of had just run in red-faced and panting from lunch recess. It was about 78 out, the first hot day building up like a head of steam in an old tractor. As we were being dismissed it would touch 85. Miss Giffords, who was very pregnant, had a...

Eyewitness To RFK’s Assassination

April 2, 2012

Act I – The Night RFK Was Shot Robert M Cohen is an attorney who lives in Los Angeles. His voice crackled with enthusiasm, confidence, youth, and charm as he acknowledged just winning the California Democratic Presidential Primary. I was right there, five feet away from Robert F. Kennedy, edging in as close to the podium as I could. Barely 18 years old, a very green freshman at UCLA, I was reporting for KLA, the university’s radio station. I wasn’t on cloud nine – I was on cloud ten thousand and nine....

What Am I?

February 8, 2012

James Redmond teaches Ancient History at a college in central Connecticut. My folks were from Jamaica, my daddy black, my momma white. Daddy was a technician on a sugar burner on a plantation, an engineer except for the fact that he was “colored,” as they called him. But colored in Jamaica in those days didn’t carry much sting, although opportunity could be limited. It was more like calling a redhead “carrot-top.” People were unsure what to call me because of my mother. My complexion was medium. In 1962, when...

Growing Up IN Woodstock (Bethel) – 1969

January 8, 2012

Malena L. was born in Albany, New York, in 1954, then lived in New York City’s Greenwich Village until she was 8, when her family moved to Woodstock, then a fledgling “art” community, and finally to Bethel, NY. I remember my parents mortified me at every possible turn. They were, for lack of a better description, Beatniks, and by the time I was 15 that affectation was well past its sell-by date. I remember watching an Audrey Hepburn movie where a whole bunch of Beatniks did some weird dance...

Bucky Dent And Me

December 13, 2011

Rick B. was a sportswriter around the country for many years and now works for IBM. As a point of reference, in the year of the Dent home run, Rick was making about $200 a week for his efforts. For Rick’s sports website and his top 10 sports moments, click here: SPORTSLIFER BLOG It was 1978. The Bucky Dent game, Yankees versus Red Sox. At the time I was a sportswriter with the Fitchburg Sentinel & Leominster Enterprise. Although I wasn’t a beat reporter, I had a pass to...

15 Books That Rocked My World – 1972-1984

November 29, 2011

Jason W. is a reporter for a metropolitan newspaper in the Midwest. He and his wife also own a yarn shop. Their children are “progressive.” I grew up reading a lot, and indiscriminately. Lots of Reader’s Digest condensed books, comics, some classics I didn’t understand at the age I read them. Wuthering Heights springs to mind. Here is a list, somewhat random in order, I know, of books that affected me...

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