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THE RIGHT WAY; THE WRONG WAY; THE ARMY WAY
In recent months, it seems to me that there is renewed interest in hearing from veterans of World War II. Perhaps it is the building of the memorial on the Mall in Washington. Perhaps it has to do with the thought that very few of us will survive the first decade of this century. There…
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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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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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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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THE OLD REXBILT BRIEFCASE
Last week, I was startled to read in New Jersey’s leading journal, the “Star Ledger,” that the deposed head man of Lucent, Richie McGinn, got a going away present of 12 million dollars. His Chief Financial Officer, Debra Hopkins, who had only a year of service with Lucent, got pretty close to 4 million dollars.…
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THE PASTICHE
In recent months, a collection of essays has emerged from my participation in the Kessler Speech Therapy Program. As a general rule, these were travel experiences in various parts of the world. In effect, they were a little like a travelogue. And in nearly every one of those several episodes, the tone was positive and…
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DIDGERREDOO
The title to this little essay is an aboriginal name from the Outback in Australia. There is no written language in the aboriginal culture, so every one is free to spell it as he sees fit. I spell it as DID-GER-RE-DOO, a musical instrument. So keep that name in mind while we spend a few…