Category: reminiscence

  • Foreign Tongues

    Part I When my public school introduced me to French, in 1960-something, I discovered a French-language broadcast from Montreal. Radio, then, was still mostly AM—Amplitude Modulated—and FM, Frequency Modulated, was in its commercial infancy; the radios in our house didn’t have it.  When FM did debut on the newer radios over the next four or…

  • The Price is Weird

    Part III If there was some time you could go back to, what would it be?  My friends and I sometimes kicked this question around, before we had families and on occasion after that event. It’s been a long time since any of those occasions. I suppose that gradually our attentions were simply captured by…

  • Daddy

    We lived in a half-duplex in West Hazleton, Pennsylvania until early February 1954. I think a large object in the cellar was a coal furnace, but our heat came from the kitchen cast-iron coal stove, and something called a “heat-o-lator” in the living room, which was some kind of coal firebox with a protective sheet…