Ezra's Essays

Category: Favorite

  • 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…

  • GO SPERMIES!

    As I approach the centennial of my birth, one would think that mellowness would settle around me. That is not the case as sharp elbows and abrasiveness still abound within my soul. It was in one of these moods of contrariness that I began to think of religion in my home town of St. Louis.…

  • A FEW FOND MEMORIES OF BLONDIE

    When Harry Livermore has something to say, it is usually worth listening to. Harry is older than I am and he has a degree from Grinnell College in Iowa. He is a consummate mid-Westerner whom I met on Mother’s Day, 1952. Harry was my boss in Kansas City as well as in Chicago. But more…

  • EZ-REEE’S SILVER DOLLAR JUBILEE

    From the year 1776, the United States depended on the United States Army (USA) to fight its battles. The Army fought in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and in the First World War and acquitted itself very well. However, shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Army brass determined…

  • NUNCE: A NEW NEOLOGISM

    When the British post office delivers copies of this essay to the former Camille Parker-Bowles and her mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth, both of them will pounce on the title as a redundancy or as a tautology. That it is a redundancy and a tautology, I fully agree. But it seems to me that the new word…

  • HUNG AROUND TOO LONG

    At the end of time when historians finally record all of the philosophical thoughts produced by American scholars, it is likely that the contribution of Miss Kay McCormick will be excluded. It may be that her thoughts are excluded simply because she is a woman. On the other hand, it may be that her thoughts…

  • LONELY TOWNS

    Donald E. Wass was a fellow that you should not have known. Mr. Wass was humorless in the extreme. He was a low-level supervisor in AT&T’s Engineering Department in St. Louis. His responsibility caused him to have frequent conversations with other engineers in New York. Those conversations were so loud that work in the rest…