Ezra's Essays

Category: Travel

  • Birthday Post!

    July 24, 2003 My dear Spockling Churchwallop: As you can see, I began to prepare for your birthday back on February 15, 2003. Since that time, you have changed your name and it seems that an English accent has come over you. You are going to be referred to in newspapers as Churchwallop – nee…

  • ARMY DAYS – AFRICA AND OTHER PLACES

    I suppose it would be well to write this essay in a bit of a hurry. The reason has to do with the grim reaper mowing down people who served in the military services in World War II. Two years ago, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs reported that World War II veterans were…

  • NEW YORK, NEW YORK PART 11 – MOSCOW, MANHATTAN AND THE FBI

    Readers of these essays may recall a story I wrote about Howard Pappert, Dave Dietz and myself setting out to visit some countries behind what Winston Churchill called “The Iron Curtain.” Visiting communist countries in the 1970’s and 1980’s was not a pleasant task for those of us at AT&T who had the responsibility for…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • THE THREE I LEAGUE

    When we were young, many of my compatriots had their sights set on a professional baseball career. Unrealistically, as it turned out. But we didn’t know that then. In the Midwest, one of the leagues to which we aspired had clubs in Illinois, Indiana and Iowa. And so it became the Three I League. It…

  • THE GREAT NEPAL ROBBERY

    In an earlier episode of this great World Wide Travel Report, it was reliably reported that Cal Tuggle, Howard Pappert and I were headed for the mystic delights of Bahrain. Such as they are. And then on to India, Nepal, Bangkok and Kuwait, such as they are. You may recall the Blah, Blah Blah incident…

  • ON TO MOTHER ENGLAND AND THE U S OF A

    Now that we have finished with the Iron Curtain, there may be some small merit in a review of the trouble of a Libyan tour group in Heathrow and finally, a call to personally minister to the needs of a fine group of Overseas operators and executives in Pittsburgh. We may as well start with…

  • BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN

    The world may be broken into three parts, as the French say, but for us in the Overseas business of the Bell System, it had a great many more parts. I found them all fascinating from the Indians, to the Saudi Arabians, to the various tribes in Africa as well as to the more familiar…