Miss Magill's Monitor
posted 15 days ago | 0 comments
Because of her age, Miss Magill would leave the room for a few minutes from time to time. When she did, she brought in one of her former students, now in the upper grades, to serve as monitors. (This was before they opened Joan of Arc Junior High;...
Miss Anna F. Magill
posted 23 days ago | 0 comments
“First, children must want to read,” Miss Anna F. Magill would tell the teachers who came from all over the United States to learn her methods. “And second, they must have something worth reading.” She’d taught longer than any other teacher in any...
Way Things Used To Be 44, Horrors Of War Cards 3
posted about 1 month ago | 2 comments
One day when I came home from school, a woman who didn’t speak English was in our living room sewing a dress on my mother’s sewing machine. My mother spoke to her by using the dictionary she’d bought for her Spanish class. After the woman left, my...
Way Things Used To Be, 43--Horrors Of War Cards, 2
posted 2 months ago | 1 comment
After card eighteen the compositions of the Horrors of War cards seemed to open up and grow less crowded. In addition, the subject matter expanded from the Sino-Japanese War to the Spanish Civil War that began in July of 1936 and to the October 19...
Way Things Used To Be, 42--Horrors Of War Cards, 1
posted 2 months ago | 2 comments
The pastel-colored scenes on the front had a yellowish tint and depicted so much death and violence some parents forbade their children to buy them. The first twenty in the series were as lacking in perspective and as packed with figures and incid...
Camus, Lincoln And Coquillages, Part 2
posted 2 months ago | 1 comment
Part 2—The Coquillages
I left the café, strolled up the boulevard, took a table in a seafood restaurant and ordered mussels, a green salad and a bottle of Rhone red. As I finished Camus’ chapter on nihilism through history, the waiter returned and...
I left the café, strolled up the boulevard, took a table in a seafood restaurant and ordered mussels, a green salad and a bottle of Rhone red. As I finished Camus’ chapter on nihilism through history, the waiter returned and...
Camus, Lincoln And Coquillages
posted 3 months ago | 3 comments
Part 1—Camus and Lincoln
A couple of months ago, I was sitting in a cafe on Boulevard du Montparnasse, having a drink before dinner, rereading THE REBEL, half-hoping to be interrupted by some intellectual Parisienne, fluent in English or willing t...
A couple of months ago, I was sitting in a cafe on Boulevard du Montparnasse, having a drink before dinner, rereading THE REBEL, half-hoping to be interrupted by some intellectual Parisienne, fluent in English or willing t...
Way Things Used To Be 41- Ma's Junk Shop
posted 3 months ago | 2 comments
When you walked into Ma’s Junk Shop on west Eighty-Ninth in Manhattan, you saw a small soda fountain with three stools to your left, and then a long glass display case filled with the hundred different kinds of penny candy they made before the War...
Stanky And The Record Books
posted 3 months ago | 1 comment
Baseball record books are filled with statistics on home runs, runs batted in, errors, double plays, earned run averages, etc. but there’s nothing on the intangible factors. For example, Chicago traded Eddie Stanky to the Dodgers in 1944. He playe...
Stanky In The Field
posted 4 months ago | 0 comments
Eddie Stanky and Alvin Dark complemented one another in the field, just as well they did at bat and on the bases. In 1950, with Stanky at second and Dark at shortstop, the Giants executed 181 double plays in 154 games, close to the-then National L...
