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MISTAKEN IDENTITIES
This is a seldom told story of mistaken identities, a nervous decorator, a Polish waitress, a Florida bon vivant and telling the time of day. That is quite of bit of ground to cover but with the help of my long time friend, Charlie Miller, I think we do it with ease. During the late…
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LILA
AT&T Long Lines had its headquarters at 32 Sixth Avenue in New York City. At its peak, that building housed about 10,000 employees with telephone operators accounting for about 80% of that total. Because the operators and the telephone craftsmen worked around the clock, the Company provided two cafeterias and one dining room. The dining…
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FOUR GOOD GUYS AND A VERY BAD GUY
When I sat down to write this essay, my intentions were to deal with four good guys. John Rosenburg, Dick Lewin and Emory Wilbur were all my colleagues when I was the Labor Relations Manager for AT&T Long Lines from 1955 until 1963. Lowell Wingert, the President of Long Lines, came later. Unfortunately, my efforts…
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AN OPERA STORY
The choir at Central Presbyterian Church in Summit has a number of outstanding voices. One of them belongs to Bill Dembaugh, a tenor, who is a retired school teacher. As a young man, Bill seemed headed in the right direction for a career as a tenor. He studied hard and wound up in New York.…
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I’D BE ASHAMED
This piece is being written largely at the request or demand of Miss Chicka. She makes editorial suggestions and tries to correct my grammar. And she does all the typing. So as you can see, I pay attention to her. After I wrote “Lillie,” the piece about my mother and my enlistment, Miss Chicka suggested…
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THE GLUMS
Since September 11, which only happened last week, I have had a fairly bad case of the “glums.” This is a new noun. The dictionary shows glum as an adjective meaning broodingly morose, dreary and gloomy. So I have constructed a neologism, a new word, a noun, the glums, to mean in a funk and…
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EZREE
The World War II Memories Project caused me to write “Lillie,” an essay about my mother. So now I thought I’d say something about my father. He and I share our names. His parents, an immigrant Irish couple named William Meredith Carr and Susan Dent Carr gave my father a Hebrew name (Ezra) and an…
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LILLIE
This little recollection has to do with World War II. Both incidents have to do with my mother, Lillie. I write these thoughts down so that her grandchildren and great grandchildren may know a little more about her. Lillie was born in Pope County, Illinois. She doesn’t have a home town in Pope County because…
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TWO UNSPEAKABLE FOOLS: JERRY FALWELL AND PAT ROBERTSON
Two days after the destruction of the World Trade Center, Jerry Falwell appeared on Pat Robertson’s Television show called “The 700 Club.” That was September 13, 2001. Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times reports that Falwell and Robertson claim “that an angry God had allowed the terrorists to succeed in their deadly mission because…