Ezra's Essays

Month: May 2014

  • AN ADOPTED GRANDPA

    Over a long span of years, I have been a son, a brother, a grandson, a husband, a father, a grandfather, an uncle, and a brother-in-law. Over that same span of years, I have been a filling station attendant, a soldier, a telephone worker, a union president, a lobbyist, and an international telecommunications representative. But…

  • SO ENGLISH IS OUR OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

    When it comes to goofiness, there is a tie between Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, and the American Congress. For example, in the past week or so, the Senate has passed a resolution announcing that English is our only official language. It is meant of course to bar Spanish, which the Mexican immigrants speak.…

  • BERNICE and WERNER’S UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

    Bernice Hughes and Werner Friedli, two likeable people, have been waiting since 1944 for answers to their questions. At this late date, I am still unable to provide them with suitable answers. But I will offer their questions to you in the hope that you may have a suggestion or two. Let’s deal first with…

  • THE 0-FER FACTOR

    The Salvation Army, the Baptist Young People’s Union, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Luther League (Missouri Synod) have approved this essay only on the ground that I disclose that it is a political and not a baseball essay. But to make my point it is necessary to call on the practice of baseball…

  • RITA, ARE YOU STILL WAITING?

    The Rita referred to in the title is merely an offspeed pitch intended to set you up for an essay about the perception of smoking that has emerged in the last fifty years or so. This story starts in lower Manhattan on a cold blustery day in early March of 1956. I had just returned…

  • REALITY AND AMERICAN CONSTERNATION

    This morning, March 6, Tim Russert asked General Peter Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, how the war in Iraq was going. To save space, I will condense his answer into the thought that the war is going swimmingly. Everything is on schedule and soon there will be Iraqi boys fighting the insurgents over…

  • CRI DE COEUR

    The title of this piece is French, of course. It means “cry of the heart” in English. It must be assumed that the cry of the heart arises from anguish and distress which causes one to cry out. In this essay, I am going to attempt the impossible. It is to place this French thought…

  • EUPHEMISMS

    In the last four years of my career with AT&T, I was a Director of Correspondent Relations. The word “correspondent” is an anachronism. It goes back to the days when people wrote to each other and before the use of the telephone. Nonetheless this job required that I should visit other telephone companies around the…

  • ONAN AND THE GENTLEMAN FROM CHRISTOPHER STREET, NYC

    Larry Craig, the simply superb and sweet-smelling Senior Senator from the great state of Idaho, has been in the news recently and has caused me to rethink my thoughts about homosexuals. As many of you know, I did not attend an Ivy League college. In point of fact, I didn’t attend any college. I spent…

  • PRUDES?

    A few years back, Tom Brokaw, the NBC anchor, wrote a book in which he called the survivors of the great American Depression and of World War II the “greatest generation.” That was a very generous comment by Tom Brokaw, which we may or may not have deserved. But nonetheless, that greatest generation is now…