To the loyal readers of Octogenarian

This is being written by Mort's wife...

About 10 days ago Mort was severely injured while driving his car out of his garage.
He's had two back surgeries and has not regained mobility in one of his legs.
It will take months of rehab before he's back writing on his beloved blog.
I wanted to thank everyone for all of their wonderful comments over the years.
They have meant the world to him and you have brought much joy to his later years.
My family and I look forward to the day when he can return to working on his blog again. Sybil

MEMOIR: When Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas rented my old apartment

After sharing apartments in Washington, D.C. for three years with other young bachelors, I reached a sufficient state of affluence in 1951 to rent my own apartment. My new home was Apartment 233 at 3701 Connecticut Ave., N.W. It was defined as a "studio apartment." It consisted of a single room, a Pullman kitchen, a tiny dressing alcove, and a bathroom.

Despite the limited facilities, I was now privileged to live in a brand-new, centrally air-conditioned building that had been advertised as a "luxury" apartment house. I was among its first tenants.

As an upscale building, it featured a concierge who was stationed in the beautiful lobby to handle the mail and to monitor the entry of residents and guests. As I recall, the monthly rent was $89.(Several years ago, I learned that the apartment house had been converted into a co-op.)

I furnished my small new apartment with a studio couch, a book case, a kitchen table, a desk, and two upholstered chairs. The focal points in the apartment were an expensive high-fidelity radio-phonograph system with giant Wharfedale loudspeakers and a Capehart television set. A reproduction of a Marc Chagall painting entitled "The Rabbi of Vitebsk" adorned one wall.

After coping with the often conflicting social needs of my room mates, I now had an attractive bachelors pad of my own to entertain lady friends. Two years after moving in, I married one of them, Sybil, a young woman from Boston who was employed as a service representative for the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co.

Almost immediately, Sybil insisted that we move out. Although she never brought up the subject, perhaps she was bothered by the vision of other women who may have slept in the apartment. More important, however, she saw the need, with which I readily agreed, for a larger apartment more suitable for a married couple. We soon found an attractive two-bedroom apartment in a garden-apartment complex in Langley Park, a Maryland suburb.

About two weeks after our departure from 3701 Connecticut Ave., I received a phone call from the young man, with whom I had become close friends, who lived in a studio apartment across the corridor from mine.

"Do you know who moved into your old apartment?" he asked excitedly. Before I even had a chance to guess, he said breathlessly:"Supreme Court Justice William Douglas!" My friend was a lawyer for a Government regulatory agency. He was obviously overwhelmed by the idea of having a Supreme Court justice as his neighbor. Both he and I were great admirers of Douglas, who eventually served for 36 years on the high court.

We soon learned that Douglas had recently separated from his wife. According to Washington gossip, he was apparently having an affair with a young law student in her twenties. We suspected that my former apartment was now functioning as the justice's "love nest."

Several months later, Edward R. Murrow's popular TV program, "Person to Person," featured an interview with Douglas in the Connecticut Ave. apartment. My wife and I eagerly watched the program. From the screen we could see only a couple of chairs, a huge desk and a studio couch in my old apartment. The judge had evidently furnished it very sparingly.

Douglas eventually married the young lady law student. According to a Douglas biography that I have read, they divorced nine years later. Douglas married twice again before his death in 1980 at age 82.

Well before his death, I was aware of Douglas' Washington reputation as a womanizer. During his many years on the Supreme Court, resolutions were introduced four times in the House of Representatives calling for an investigation of his "moral character."

Aside from his marital affairs, Douglas was always a highly controversial figure as one of the Supreme Court's most liberal members. Sen. Bob Dole, one of Douglas' most ardent ideological foes, once compared Douglas' "bad judgment from a matrimonial standpoint" to his court decisions.

Nevertheless, I have always regarded Douglas as one of the most brilliant and influential Supreme Court justices of his time. And I will always remember that he ended a marriage while moving into the Washington apartment that I vacated to start a marriage that is now 56 years old.

Isaac Bashevis Singer vs. Marc Chagall

Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel laureate in literature who wrote in Yiddish, is my favorite author. In 1975, taking a break from my regular work as a journalist who specialized in business, I wrote profiles about him that were published in the New York Times Magazine and the now-defunct Harper's Bookletter.

As I disclosed in my previous blog post, I am now preparing to move from my home in New Jersey, where I have lived for nearly 25 years, to become a year-round resident of Florida. This involves the painful need to explore and discard decades of files no longer needed.

Among my discoveries were voluminous notes of my interviews with Singer in his Manhattan apartment. In the course of the interviews, I told Singer that he had always struck me as being a literary counterpart of painter Marc Chagall, who like Singer was an East European Jew, rendering in print what Chagall had done in paint.

Like Singer, I said, Chagall concentrated on his own "shtetl" (Jewish village) background for material. And in Chagall's surrealistic paintings--the fiddler on the roof always comes to mind--I told Singer that I find the same enchanting mystical quality that I enjoy in his novels and short stories.

Singer was not complimented by my comparison. A close friend of famed painter Raphael Soyer and others in the New York art world of that era, Singer regarded himself as something of a maven on painting.

For reasons I cannot recall, Singer's colorful response to my comparison failed to appear in my old articles. I now find it so provocative that I am belatedly publishing it here in my blog.

"I'll tell you the truth," Singer said to me in his Yiddish-accented English, "I'm not too hot about him. As far as I can see, Chagall is an artist who repeats himself already for 50 years. I don't admire him as much as I admire a Cezanne or a Monet.

"I don't think that when you paint a man, and you put him with the head down and the legs up, that you accomplish something, that this is real originality. Anybody can do it. [Chagall] has a feeling for color, but he's not really dabbling with the supernatural. He is stylizing all his life, and there is a limit to stylizing."

So much for the great Chagall, as the equally great Isaac Bashevis Singer evaluated the painter's work.

Jimmy Carter: Enemy of peace

I don't normally publish material written by others on this blog. I am making an exception here to publicize this article by Israeli journalist Ben-Dror Yemini, which exposes ex-President Jimmy Carter as a phony "peace activist." As an accomplished Israel-basher, Carter continues to feed the Palestinian rejectionism that has prevented the establishment of a genuine and equitable peace in the Middle East.
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Are the so-called "peace activists" actually the enemies of peace? The fascinating case of Jimmy Carter requires a special look. Carter recently visited Israel-–one of his many visits here--with a special delegation of "Elders." They are a group of such international personalities as Nelson Mandela, renowned for solving important global problems. There is no doubt that this group has good intentions, and maybe ability. They have considerable gravitas. But the main question is: What are they doing with their moral weight?

Immediately upon his return to the U.S., Carter published an article in the prestigious Washington Post, which was an invective against the State of Israel. Invective cannot rest on foundations of truth. It needs lies.

Carter tells a few, for example, about the Hanoun family, which was, he wrote, "recently evicted from their [Jerusalem] home of 65 years." Really? In fact, the entire compound in which they lived belongs to Jews who were expelled from Jerusalem during the 1948 War of Independence.

There is no argument about the Jewish ownership, which dates back to 1875. A Star of David is still to be found on one of the old stone structures at the site. The Hanoun family, by contrast, did not reach the place until 1956. If Carter would have checked, he would discover that this is a family of refugees from Haifa.

Haifa's Arabs were not expelled; they left voluntarily. They were moved into the Jerusalem structure, along with another family, by the Jordanian authorities. The Jewish owners of the property sought to exercise their proprietary rights. There is not a word about this in Carter's article.

There are thousands of tenants in Atlanta, Ga., Carter's home state, who were evicted from their homes because they could not make their mortgage payments. The rights of the Smith family, which was thrown onto the street, are much more established than the rights of the Hanoun family.

But Carter is not looking for justice. He is looking for invective. And therefore, he presents his readers with a partial picture, replete with erroneous details, and conceals the fact that the eviction was carried out only after lengthy judicial proceedings in which the proprietary rights were held up to detailed scrutiny.

It is worthwhile to be precise. The Israeli court granted the Arab families living in the compound the status of protected tenants. Moreover, some of the evicted families had the option of generous compensation even though they had no proprietary rights. But the families rejected every offered settlement and every legal defense due to political pressure, and received a political visit from Carter and his friends. Nobody offered compensation to the Smith family in Atlanta, and Carter did not visit them.

The criticism of eviction of the Hanoun family could be justified. Even if the eviction was legally justified, there is room for political criticism. And on the condition that if Carter seeks to deny the Jews' proprietary rights, he should also make it clear that the Palestinians have no right to claim abandoned property.

He has failed to recognize that property expropriated and confiscated from Jews in Arab countries as a result of legislation, pressure, persecution, flight and expulsion is worth more than the property that was expropriated and confiscated from the Palestinians as a result of flight and expulsion.

The Palestinians underwent the experience of flight and expulsion following the declaration of a war of annihilation against the Jewish State, which had barely been created. The Jews in Arab countries underwent a similar experience--of flight, expulsion and property expropriation--even though they had not declared war on the Arab countries. If so, whose rights are greater?

Has Carter ever told the Palestinians this basic truth? The answer is well known. Like other so-called "peace activists," he treats the Arabs in general, and the Palestinians in particular, like retarded children. They must not be told the truth.

They must not be told that if there are rights, then both the Jews and the Arabs have them. And if not, then neither the Jews nor the Arabs have them. He does not tell them that during the 1940s, tens of millions of people underwent the harsh experience of population exchanges, and there is no reason why only the Palestinians should have "the right of return." He does not tell them that more Jews fled and were expelled from Arab countries than Palestinians who were expelled from or fled Israel.

It is possible and permissible to criticize Israel over the settlements. Occasionally, this criticism is justified. But Carter, like thousands of other "peace activists," does not advance peace. Their demonization of Israel strengthens those who reject peace.

The position of Abu Mazen, the Palestinian leader, also appeared in the Washington Post. The sole significance of his demands is opposition to the existence of the State of Israel. He officially agrees, of course, to a two-state solution, but on the condition that one of them be a Palestinian state and that the second one also be a Palestinian state after the implementation of the right of return.

He admits that he received an amazing compromise offer from Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, that included the Israeli evacuation of 97% of the West Bank territories. But he rejected it outright because he insisted that masses of Palestinians flood the State of Israel.

Did Carter issue a condemnation of Abu Mazen? Instead, Carter published an article condemning Israel, one of many he has written. Instead of offering fair criticism, Carter has become part of the incitement enterprise against the State of Israel.

Carter is capable of much more. He has succeeded in making achievements in other areas. For some reason, when he touches the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he loses his fairness and his balance. He does not contribute to the advancement of peace. On the contrary. This is Carter's contribution to strengthening Palestinian refusal to compromise and to pushing the chances of peace further away.

MEMOIR: How I almost became a Texan

George W. Bush was born in New Haven, Conn. to a patrician family of staid New Englanders. When he was a child, the family moved to Midland, Texas. Their new home town was then a small, bustling oil town that was culturally and socially far removed from their prim, sedate community in Connecticut.

I have often wondered how different Bush would have been had his parents not moved to Texas with their children. Would the ex-President's personality have reflected the traditional style of his New England forebears? Or would he still have still turned out to be like the stereotypical, macho, cowboy-like Texan that he is?

The question is relevant to me because I almost became a Texan myself when my father seriously considered moving from our home in the Bronx to Texas during the mid-1930s when I was still a child.

My Dad was often unemployed during that period, after having worked for many years as a traveling men's clothing salesman. His territory ran from Georgia westward through Texas. He did not drive nor fly, and covered the region by train and bus. He took pride in his intimate knowledge of the territory, and particularly of its train and bus schedules.

He often passed through Colorado City, Texas, a small farming town with which he became very familiar. The town had very few retail stores. In 1936, my father decided to open a retail men's clothing store there, despite the grim economic climate plaguing the nation at the time. It was obviously a serious business gamble. Dad figured, however, that the absence of local competition would make the enterprise successful.

He left my mother and me behind in New York when he departed for Colorado City. Apparently, the venture did not require a significant investment because my father's sole New York supplier was my mother's uncle, who was very supportive of my father's plan. Dad intended to operate the store for no more than a year. If successful, my mother and I would then join him in Texas. If not, he would abandon the store and return to New York.

Texas was celebrating its one-hundredth year of independence from Mexico when the store opened. I still recall that my father mailed me an official centennial yearbook, which would probably be a valuable collectors' item if I had kept it. My father wrote home regularly (we did not own a telephone in the Bronx), shipping me such local souvenirs as toy bales of cotton and bags of pecans.

But my father's enterprise was a flop, and Dad was back home, as I remember, in less than a year. I was nearly 12 years old when my father returned from his unsuccessful Texas venture.

I have always wondered what would have happened to me if Dad's store had been a success, and we had settled in Colorado City. I would have been raised in an alien environment radically different from a Bronx tenement neighborhood.

Colorado City is in the heart of west Texas, 296 miles from the closest major airport in Amarillo. Its 2008 population was 3,888, down 9.2% from the 2000 figure. I doubt whether it was much bigger when my father opened his store.

If we had moved, would I have grown up to be a stereotypical Texan with George Bush's macho, cowboy-like personality? Would I have become a small-town redneck who preferred a pick-up truck to a sports car and whose friends included at least two guys named "Bubba"? Would I have sought recreation by clearing brush in the torrid heat of a West Texas summer?

Nearly three decades later, my superficial connection with Colorado City proved to be a valuable professional asset. I was working in Washington as the Pentagon correspondent for Business Week magazine. The chairman of the House Military Appropriations subcommittee was then Rep. George Mahon, a longtime Texas Congressman.

He was an important news source for journalists covering military affairs. I interviewed him a couple of times and never found him very helpful. And then I learned that Colorado City was in his district. I wasted no time on my next interview date with him, informing him about my father's unsuccessful store in that town.

Perhaps it was because he was sympathetic with my Dad's Depression-era business failure. But George Mahon suddenly became one of the most cooperative news sources that I ever developed during my career as a reporter.

The unwinnable war in Afghanistan

I rarely agree with Pat Buchanan, the right-wing pundit and onetime Presidential candidate, on anything. But there is one issue on which we do agree: the war in Afghanistan. In a recent column, Buchanan described the war as "unwinnable" and called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

"We were seduced by the prospect of converting a backward tribal nation of 25 million, which has resisted every empire that set foot on its inhospitable soil, into a shining new democracy that would be a model for the Islamic world," Buchanan wrote.

When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan eight years ago, nation-building was not the Bush Administration's mission. The invasion, which was thoroughly justified, was aimed to destroy Al-Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist organization responsible for 9/11, and to punish the country's ruling Taliban regime for providing Al-Qaeda a haven.

Until we foolishly invaded Iraq two years later, we were on the verge of winning in Afghanistan. The Al-Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban hosts were retreating to the neighboring tribal areas in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, and a pro-American government had been installed in Kabul, the capital city. These achievements were derailed by the Iraq invasion.

Much of the U.S. military force in Afghanistan was withdrawn to fight in Iraq. The initial objective was to destroy nuclear and chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein's government was supposed to be stockpiling. But there were no Iraqi stockpiles of such weapons. To justify the Iraq invasion, the mission was subtly altered. We were now going to punish the Saddam government for promoting international terrorism, including the 9/11 attack on the U.S.

When these phony goals were no longer credible, we assumed the role of savior for the oppressed Iraqi people. We would introduce democracy to a country where such a concept was unknown. This goal, of course, was contrary to the Bush Administration's supposed scorn for nation-building.

There was a brief semblance of peace established in Iraq after the Saddam regime had been overthrown and the anti-American insurgency tamed. In recent months, however, communal violence has threatened to tear Iraq apart. The U.S. is being forced to referee conflicts between Arab Sunnis and Shiites, Kurds and Arabs, and even civil battles between rival Shiite factions.

As the action in Iraq distracted U.S. forces from our original mission in Afghanistan, the Taliban is rapidly regaining control in Afghanistan while the nation's pro-American regime has proven to be corrupt and incompetent.

Moreover, a civil war between Afghanistan's dominant Pashtun (Pathan) people and the Tajiks, Uzbeks and other ethnic minorities is breaking out. Once again, the U.S. military is being forced to play referee.

Al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies remain hunkered down in neighboring Pakistan, where an allegedly pro-American regime seems unenthusiastic about fighting them. One reason is that Pakistan's huge Pashtun population is sympathetic to its Afghan kinsmen.

Against this complex backdrop, the new Obama Administration has unwisely shipped more U.S. troops to Afghanistan and is planning to send even more. Although the Taliban would impose an autocratic rule on the Afghan people, it appears to be gaining support from a local population that has become increasingly hostile to a U.S. presence.

Even if the Taliban regains full control and dethrones the present government, however, it does not pose a serious national security threat to the U.S.

Al-Qaeda, of course, does remain a major threat. Its leadership is dispersing throughout the Muslim world to such places as Somalia, Yemen and Algeria. All the while, it is recruiting to its ranks local anti-American Islamic terrorists. Indeed, there may even be so-called "sleeper" contingents based in the U.S. ready to conduct operations here.

In effect, Al-Qaeda has become a sort of franchise operations, bestowing its name, resources, and training on disaffected Muslims with no affection for America.

So why the need for more American troops in Afghanistan? There is none. An expanded U.S. military presence there would do nothing to strengthen our defense against Islamic terrorism.

My love affair with the Yiddish language

I can no longer speak the language in which, according to my parents, I uttered my first words as a small child. The language is Yiddish, the native tongue of East European Jews.

Although I can no longer speak Yiddish, largely because of disuse, I can pretty much still understand the language, particularly if it is spoken with a "Litvak" accent. That's the accent characteristic of Jews from Lithuania, the northeastern tip of Poland, and Belarus. My mother's family migrated to the U.S. more than a century ago from the Belarussian province of Minsk.

Sadly, Yiddish is essentially a dying language. The Holocaust, combined with cultural assimilation by East European Jews and their descendants who have settled in new countries, have combined to make Yiddish almost as obsolete as Latin.

Yiddish is now the primary language only of ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious sects like the Hasidim. Even in Israel, where Hebrew is the official language, the ultra-Orthodox Jews prefer to speak Yiddish. They regard Hebrew as a sacred language to be used only for religious study and worship.

Ironically, the insular ultra-Orthodox communities are indifferent to the vast secular world of Yiddish literature, music and theater. Yiddish art and intellectual endeavor are now the province solely of professional scholars and those who, like myself, still maintain strong emotional ties to the language.

My relationship with the Yiddish language is a matter of nostalgia. The very sound of Yiddish conversation or music links me to a cultural environment in which I was raised and which I have abandoned. I never fail to experience an odd blend of joy and sorrow on the rare occasions when I hear it. It is a love affair that will persist until I die.

Jews of eastern and central European origin are known as Ashkenazim. Ashkenaz is the ancient Hebrew word for the German-speaking territories from which their ancestors migrated eastward in Europe more than a thousand years ago. With them came the Yiddish language.

Yiddish is essentially a blend of other languages. I'm unaware of universally accepted estimates, but I would guess that about 75% of Yiddish is based on medieval German and 20% on Hebrew. The rest is composed of bits of Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Romanian or Czecho/Slovak, depending on where the speaker lived.

A century ago, East European Jewish immigrants to the U.S. began adding English to the linguistic mix. My maternal grandmother, who never learned to speak English, would casually ask me to "open der vinder," failing to realize that she had absorbed words from the language of her new homeland.

Linguistic migration, of course, is a two-way street. Yiddish has been slowly creeping into English. Many non-Jewish Americans may be unaware they are using Yiddish when they casually say words like "hutzpah," "meshugah," "shlep," "shlemiel," and "chochkeh." And if they are not concerned about being crude, they will call some one they dislike a "putz" or "schmuck."

Yiddish is one of about a half-dozen distinctive Jewish languages. Until the early 1900s, it was the world's most widely used, largely because Ashkenazi Jews outnumbered other Jewish communities before the Nazi Holocaust.

Descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th centuries are known as Sephardim (from the ancient Hebrew name for the Iberian peninsula). Their language is Ladino. It is largely medieval Spanish with heavy elements of Hebrew and the languages of the countries in which the Sephardim settled--e.g., Turkish, Greek, Bosnian, or Arabic.

The Sephardic Jews' new homelands, particularly in north Africa, Italy and Greece, contained tiny ancient Jewish communities (the last two called Romaniot) existing long before the Sephardim arrived. They spoke Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Italian, and Judeo-Greek. In most cases these Jews were culturally absorbed into the larger Sephardic community.

Still another Jewish community, the Mizrahim or Eastern Jews, lived in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Kurdistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan. They speak Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Arabic and other local languages that mix the native tongues with bits of Hebrew.

Aside from a common religion, what binds the three Jewish ethnic communities is Hebrew, the language of the Torah, used universally by all Jews for religious worship. Despite their different origins, each Jewish language is written in the Hebrew alphabet.

As the official language of Israel, now the home of about half the world's Jews, Hebrew has replaced Yiddish as the world's most widely used Jewish language. And like Yiddish, Ladino and the Mizrahi languages are becoming obsolete.

I am confident that their devotees, even though they may no longer speak the languages, maintain the same strong emotional links to them that I do with Yiddish. They have linguistic love affairs of their own.

The tormented Robert McNamara

My local newspaper recently carried an editorial cartoon showing Robert McNamara, the controversial former Secretary of Defense who died on July 6, standing in front of St. Peter in heaven.

"There are 58,000 soldiers in here who'd like to have a word with you," St. Peter angrily tells McNamara, citing the number of U.S. troops killed in Vietnam. Taking a similarly harsh view of McNamara, the New York Times' front-page headline reporting his death described McNamara as "Architect of Futile War."

From the start, I vigorously opposed the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. But I believe that McNamara has been unfairly vilified as the person primarily responsible for the war.

McNamara, a Republican, knew nothing about Vietnam when President Kennedy selected him in 1961 to head the Pentagon. McNamara had been president of Ford Motor Co., where he had gained a national reputation as the ultimate professional manager.

The seeds were sown for a U.S. role in Vietnam as far back as the Truman Administration. After World War II ended, Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader of Vietnam's independence movement, sought U.S. aid to gain freedom from French colonial rule.

With the Cold War already under way, President Truman ignored his plea. Had Truman, and later President Eisenhower, shown some sympathy for the Vietnamese independence cause, perhaps Ho's regime might have tempered its Soviet ties.

France finally granted Vietnam its independence only after its disastrous military defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The country was split in two. A pro-Soviet regime was established in the north and a pro-Western government was created in the south. The two states were soon at war, with North Vietnam sponsoring a Communist insurgency, the Viet Kong, in South Vietnam.

U.S. military advisers began to arrive in 1959 to support the battle against the Communist forces. When he became president, Kennedy expanded the number of American military advisers from a few hundred to about 17,000. In 1963 his successor, President Johnson, sent U.S. combat units in for the first time to fight the Communists. By 1975, when the U.S. forces finally departed from Vietnam, President Nixon had expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia.

To use George W. Bush's terminology, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were the "deciders" in getting the U.S. involved in Vietnam and for prolonging the war for 15 years. Robert McNamara, who had such a prominent role in Vietnam, quit the Pentagon in early 1968 after belatedly deciding that it was a mistake for the U.S. to continue the war.

As Business Week's Pentagon correspondent for nearly a decade until 1963, I have long had a personal interest in McNamara's career. I interviewed him several times and consider him to be one of the most interesting men I've ever met.

In an industry where eggheads rarely flourished, McNamara made his mark as a thoroughgoing intellectual in his years at Ford Motor Co. He shunned Detroit society, socialized little with auto industry tycoons, and lived instead in Ann Arbor, a university town 40 miles away. His friends there were largely professors and the kind of academic people who go into business. I reported and wrote a cover story about McNamara for Business Week's Feb. 11, 1961 issue.

Although I considered the Vietnam war a tragic blunder, I concede that McNamara vigorously improved the management of the Defense Dept. He firmly unified the three military services that had been plagued by costly rivalry and wasteful duplication of weapons development. He also strengthened civilian authority over the military establishment and enforced managerial control over the billions of dollars worth of military procurement.

Despite McNamara's sudden policy disagreement with the President over Vietnam, Johnson obviously thought so highly of McNamara that he recommended him to become head of the World Bank, where he served until 1981. In his years there, McNamara shifted the bank's focus to the problem of world poverty.

"[McNamara] is like a jackhammer," President Johnson once said. "No human being can take what he takes. He drives too hard. He's too perfect."

I developed a great deal of sympathy for McNamara after he left the Pentagon. For many years before his death, he was seriously tormented by the prominent role he had played in the tragic events in Vietnam. In books, articles, speeches, and a widely publicized documentary film, The Fog of War, McNamara became an anti-war crusader. He was particularly critical of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

McNamara died at age 93. He spent the final years of his life wrestling with the Vietnam war's moral consequences. He lived long enough to see how terribly wrong he had been and how much turmoil and tragedy the war brought to both Vietnam and the U.S. It was rare to see a man of McNamara's stature repent so publicly.

MEMOIR: Returning to Washington from New York

In November 1949 I returned to Washington, D.C. to begin work for the U.S. Labor Dept.'s Bureau of Labor Statistics as a press officer and editor. I had moved back to New York City three months earlier after having lost a similar job with the U.S. Interior Dept.'s Fish & Wildlife Service. A subsequent temporary summer job with the AFL-CIO Machinists Union's weekly newspaper had ended, and I had been unable to find a new job in Washington.

Nor was I able to find editorial work in New York. I had lost the FWS job because I lacked regular Civil Service status. By now, however, I had taken an exam--the first one conducted since the war's end for "information & editorial specialists" (the formal job title)--and had obtained the credentials making me eligible to take the BLS position. It had been offered to me as a result of contacts made during my work for the union.

The new job was at a higher grade, GS-9, than my previous government position. The annual salary was $4,600, a $748 increase. Sixty years ago, this was a respectable wage for a 25-year old only two years out of college.

But more important than the pay hike, I was now dealing in the new job with subject matter of far greater personal interest to me. Instead of trumpeter swans, whooping cranes and Canada geese,I was now writing about employment statistics, the cost-of-living index, labor-management relations, and the occupational outlook. These were matters that were far more related to my background.

In addition to writing press releases and dealing with the media, I also edited and wrote articles on these subjects for the Monthly Labor Review, a BLS publication that is a leading scholarly journal in the field of labor economics.

My return to Washington enabled me to resume evening classes at American University, where I had been seeking a master's degree in sociology.

I had already selected a subject for my thesis: community life on Alaska's Pribilof Islands. My interest in the subject stemmed from my work at the Fish & Wildlife Service, which at that time governed the islands.

The island's inhabitants were descendants of the Aleuts who were forcibly brought to what had been uninhabited land by the Russians. Their own homeland was in Alaska, which Russia had yet to sell to the U.S. Their function was to kill and process the commercially-valuable pelts of the Alaska fur seals, which annually migrate northward in the Pacific Ocean to breed and give birth on the islands.

The Aleuts, like the Inuit (Eskimos) and Indians, are a separate North American indigenous ethnic group. Those living on the Pribilof Islands are a product of racial mixing with the Russians. They possess Russian names and belong to the Russian Orthodox Church.

I had met a few Pribilof natives who were visiting the Interior Dept. I was fascinated to learn about their unique community life; it appealed to my intense interest in ethnic affairs. It was a subject little known to outsiders, and it struck as being a worthwhile topic for a master's thesis.

My plan was to visit the Pribilof Islands to do research in my capacity as a FWS employee. But I never got the opportunity to go there because my career with the agency ended abruptly. Nor did I ever complete my graduate studies. I was soon to get a new and far more demanding government job that made it impossible to take night-time university courses.

During my evening classes at American University's graduate center in downtown Washington, I became friendly with an African-American student who shared my interest in social issues.

One evening I invited him to join me after class for coffee. He casually informed me that it was highly unlikely that he would be served in restaurants or coffee shops in the local neighborhood, a commercial area near 20th and G Streets in Washington's Northwest district.

I had sadly overlooked the fact that the nation's capital in those years was still very much a Jim Crow town. I hope my African-American classmate is still around 60 years later to see a black man living in the White House.

The Michael Jackson hysteria

Maybe because I am a geriatric sourpuss, I find it hard to stomach the widespread hysteria over the death of Michael Jackson and the worldwide celebration of his musical talents.

I have never been able to understand the lyrics of his songs. And although I am not a choreographic maven, his dancing has always reminded me of an epileptic fit. Moreover, I do not understand how an apparent pedophile with a tendency for freakish behavior deserves global acclaim as an epic personality.

But what really puzzles me is why the African-American community regards him as such a heroic figure. Here is a man who has undergone tortuous medical procedures to whiten the color of his skin and to restructure his nose--all evidently designed to reduce his Negroid physical features.

Rather than resent his obvious effort to look more like a white man, however, the African-American community seems to be holding him up as a person worthy of extraordinary admiration and a place in the pantheon of African-American historic figures.

As some one who may be generationally out of touch with certain aspects of contemporary Pop Culture, perhaps I am missing something.

A tale of computer woe

I've been cut off from the blogosphere ever since my computer crashed more than a week ago. The problem began when a pop-up message box appeared on my screen warning me that the computer was heavily infected by worms and viruses.

The warning came not from my McAfee anti-virus program but from a source identified as "System Security," which provided specific names for each one of the attackers. This lent a sense of authenticity to the warning. To destroy the worms and viruses, I was instructed to double-click a tab on the screen.

I obeyed the instruction. This brought up a message informing me that the attackers would be destroyed only if I paid what I thought was $29.95 for the service and that a new, presumably stronger anti-virus program would be installed. I was so frightened by the virus warning that I foolishly provided my credit card information.

Instead of destroying the malware, my computer screen quickly displayed a barely readable message, allegedly from Windows, that my computer was now infected with genuine worms and viruses. The message could not be removed from the screen. Nor would the computer respond to any action on my part. The computer had crashed. My McAfee anti-virus protection program had been overwhelmed by a criminal intruder because of my foolish behavior.

The "System Security" web page provided an 800-phone number to call for help. When I phoned, I heard several minutes of music and then a heavily-accented message that was unintelligible. I was obviously a sucker who had been taken in by one of those hoaxes that plague the Internet.

I had never before had a computer crash on me. When my computer-savvy grandson, who had solved my computer problems in the past, was unable to cope with this one, I hired a local computer repair service to come to my home.

After carefully examining my computer, the professional expert told me that there was only one way to revive the machine. My hard drive would have to be wiped out and my operating system and all my operating programs would have to be reinstalled. Of course, that would mean the destruction of all my individual computer files.

I had never backed up my files, which is what intelligent computer-users are supposed to do. My policy has been to make hard paper copies of any really important computer files. Wiping out the hard drive would therefore not be too painful for me. I would lose only old e-mail records, a handful of photos and music files, and my bookmarks. Sadly, I told the expert to go ahead.

So now I'm back in the blogosphere, cursing myself for stupidly reacting to the phony virus-warning pop-up.

But now the story becomes bizarre. I have just received my monthly credit card statement showing that the only charge posted on the very day that my computer crashed was one for $129.95, plus a $3.89 "foreign transaction fee."

The charge was not from a business known as "System Security," but from one identified on the statement as "MP3Stones." It is located in Baku, Azerbaijan. That's a former Soviet republic on the Caspian Sea. Their tentacles had snared me half-way around the world in New Jersey.

I immediately phoned my credit card company's customer service office. After listening to my tale of woe, I was instructed to deduct the fraudulent charges from my payment. In checking their merchant files, the credit card representative told me that MP3Stones listed the nature of its business as selling "music."

What they "sold" me was frustration, aggravation, and a valuable lesson summed up in the Latin expression: "caveat emptor"--buyer beware!

It is a "small world" on the Internet

I posted a piece on this blog entitled "My life with music" this past April 4. In it I bemoaned the fact that, as a boy in the mid 1930s, I foolishly turned down a chance to take piano lessons because the lessons would interfere with playing ball. My mother had a distant cousin, Sidney Sukoenig, a concert pianist and teacher at the Juilliard School of Music. He was willing, my mother had said, to give me lessons.

In just another demonstration of how it is indeed a "small world" on the Internet, I recently received an e-mail message from a man identifying himself as Alan Sukoenig, the pianist's son. He had apparently Googled his father's name and was astonished to be referred to my blog. He wanted to know how we were related.

And so began an adventure in genealogical research. I had no idea, I told him, what the family link might be. I did know, however, that a cantor named Sukoenig officiated at my parents' wedding in New York in 1923. Alan confirmed that his paternal grandfather had indeed been a cantor.

In trying to establish a family relationship with me, Alan listed all his family names that he could remember. As part of the genealogical exercise, we began exchanging the maiden names of our maternal grandmothers and great-grandmothers. As we reached back historically, a familiar name emerged, who we concluded was a maternal great, great-grandmother from whom we were both descended. We mathematically concluded that we were third cousins.

The name was Rifkin, which he contributed to our search. I told him that I recalled that my maternal grandmother, with whom I lived as a boy, would frequently mention that name when reminiscing about her life as a child in the province of Minsk in what is now Belarus. It was evidently the maiden name of her own maternal grandmother. (My grandmother's own grandmother appears in a photo posted on this blog March 19 of this year, entitled "My ancestors in Jerusalem.) Alan confirmed that his father's family were also immigrants from the the Minsk region.

This was not my first experience establishing Internet connections to relatives and to the offspring of people I had named in postings on this blog. A second cousin discovered me because his mother's maiden name was the same as my maternal grandmother's.

The children and grandchildren of men with whom I served in the Army in India during World War II and of men with whom I worked as a journalist before retiring 20 years ago have also responded to references to their relatives on my blog.

These are the kinds of fascinating experiences that indeed make the blogosphere a small but wondrous world.

What Obama didn't say in Cairo

I've been pondering how to comment on President Obama's speech this past week in Cairo. He succeeded in mending the U.S. relationship with the Islamic world. But in trying to be even-handed between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he overlooked some background on their conflict.

I hesitate to be critical of Obama because he has brilliantly performed as President in his five months in office. So I will quote from a letter to the editor in today's New York Times by Joel S. Engel to explain what bothered me about Obama's speech.

"To create an appearance of equivalence between the Holocaust and the condition of the Palestinians," Mr. Engel wrote, "[Obama]said of them: 'For more than 60 years, they've endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead.'

"The inconvenient truth, which he failed to acknowledge, is that, for the first 19 of those 60 year, the West Bank and Gaza were administered by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, and that it was under the administration of the Arab nations that the Palestinians were confined to refugee camps.

"At any time in those first 19 years, the Arab nations could have provided 'a life of peace and security' by, for example, establishing a Palestinian state or integrating the people into their own countries. Instead, they kept them confined in the camps as pawns in a propaganda war against Israel.

"At the same time, Jewish refugees from Arab countries [and Iran]were forced to flee their homes by the backlash of the establishment of Israel.

"In contrast to the actions of the Arab nations, Israel took them in, sometimes requiring daring rescue missions, and integrated them into their modern, Western-oriented society, just as they did, one might add, for the Arabs who chose to remain as citizens of Israel."

Mr. Engel's eloquent letter suggests that President Obama sees a moral equivalency between the Israeli and Palestinian causes, which I think is a bit of a stretch.

Ending a "sabbatical" to comment on a horrendous crime

I've been on a sort of sabbatical leave from blogging over the past three weeks as my wife and I have gone through the logistical discomfort of moving back to our New Jersey home from our winter residence in Florida. I often wonder how people like Sen. John McCain and his wife, who reportedly own eight or nine houses, handle such residential moves.

I am still awed by the fact that I now own two houses. I was raised during the Great Depression of the 1930s and early 1940s when my father was frequently unemployed. During those years, I never knew anyone who owned a single house. My psyche has been framed by my boyhood experiences, much to the annoyance of my wife and two children who are distressed over what they regard as my excessively frugal disposition.

I have been impelled to now return to this blog to comment on the horrendous murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kan. on Sunday. Dr. Tiller was one of the few American doctors who still perform late-term abortions. He has thus been exposed to continuing violence and harassment by so-called "pro-life" advocates who oppose women's right to have an abortion.

I have always been enraged by the hypocrisy of these alleged protectors of "life" who have tormented women who want to choose to have an abortion. No pregnant woman casually decides to have an abortion. It is a traumatic decision invariably based on personal tragic circumstances. And in the case of late-term abortions, these are very rarely performed and only because of critical medical factors that threaten the mother's health or the viability of the fetus.

I am unimpressed by the leaders of the anti-abortion organizations who have denounced Dr. Tiller's murder. It is their hysterical, extremist efforts to block a woman's right to choose to have an abortion that emboldened a fanatical crackpot like Dr. Tiller's murderer.They created an atmosphere with the hateful rhetoric that encouraged this so-called "pro-lifer" to take another man's life.

Dr. Tiller was murdered during religious services in a Christian church. It is an extraordinary irony that anti-abortionists base their opposition to abortion on their own religious beliefs.

Right-wing paranoia

I have received a curious comment on my April 20 post, "The right-wing malcontents are bashing Obama." It was written by a highly educated, articulate reader who occasionally visits and comments on my blog.

She wrote: "Just because [Obama] is coming after the Christians, veterans, pro-lifers, etc...doesn't mean the Jews are safe."

I expected disagreement, of course, with my view of President Obama's opponents. But what could have produced such an hysterical response to my criticism about the recent series of anti-Obama" tea parties." At those events, I had written, "paranoid Obama-bashers vented their spleen about taxes, soaring government spending for financial bailouts, and what they regard as government encroachment into their private lives"?

President Obama is a Christian, and his much-publicized search for a church to attend on Sundays suggests that he is an observant believer. I have seen no evidence that he is "coming after" his fellow Christians. And why would he do that?

Nor as a World War II veteran have I seen any evidence that he is about to do something awful to my fellow veterans. Indeed, as some one who has been frustrated by my rare dealings with the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, I am impressed by President Obama's appointment of retired Gen. Eric Shinseki as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. A critic of the Bush Administration's Iraq war, he is a refreshing change from the incompetent political hacks who have headed the department in recent years.

But what really strikes me about my respondent's comment is her frightening claim that Obama's policies do not mean that "the Jews are safe." What does she mean? The only explanation that I can imagine for the provocative comment is her knowledge that I am a Jewish-American who has an intense interest in Israel.

Her point, I guess, is to warn me that Obama is will be less sympathetic to Israel than his predecessor. President George W. Bush's policies were indeed very favorable to the Jewish state. I believe that this was largely because of benign neglect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, rather than of any profound pro-Israel sentiment on Bush's part.

President Obama has demonstrated that he will take an aggressive stance to settle the Middle East conflict. Presumably, this would mean pressure on Israel to make concessions that could affect its security.

I had recognized that this might occur if Obama became President. Nevertheless, I voted enthusiastically for him, and I strongly admire what he has accomplished so far. Like many ardent Jewish-American partisans of the Israeli cause, I am not a single-issue voter.

While I am seriously concerned about Israeli security, I am also interested in other important issues--national security, health, education, and other matters dealing with foreign affairs.

So my respondent's warning that the Jews might not be "safe" because Obama is "coming after the Christians, veterans, pro-lifers, etc." makes no sense.

I resent the use of the term "pro-life" by those who want to ban abortion, and I support efforts to preserve a woman's right to have one. I thus do not worry that Obama is "coming after...the pro-lifers."

Lamenting the decline of the print media

In the previous post on this blog (April 28), I published a poem by my wife Sybil, lamenting her entrance into the ranks of the octogenarians. Now I have a lament of my own to write. But mine involves a matter far removed from the personal issue of aging.

My lament is about the declining importance of the print media as a factor in modern society. As a journalist who was employed by news magazines and daily newspapers for more than 35 years until retiring 20 years ago, I find the trend particularly painful.

Last year, 15% percent of the nation's newspapers and countless magazines were shut down. So far this year, major newspapers in Denver and Seattle have folded and the circulation of the nation's top daily papers continues to plummet.

As a result, daily papers and magazines of all types are trimming their staffs, reducing their publication frequency, and taking other measures to cut operating costs.

The current economic crisis is forcing publishers to take drastic steps as advertising revenue falls precipitously. For the first time ever, for example, the New York Times is carrying advertising on its first page--a traumatic policy change for the Old Gray Lady of journalism.

In addition to the economic crisis, of course, there is another reason for the print media's decline. Readers are being drawn away by the Internet. More than a half-century ago, television began to lure readers from dependence on newspapers and magazines. Now the Internet is proving to be an even more formidable rival.

I may be an old grouch, but I also worry that the print media's decline reflects the general dumbing-down of America and diminished interest--particularly among young people--in the news of the day. Increasingly, I find people satisfied with what I regard as superficial coverage of vital current events.

I subscribe to my local daily paper and to several weekly news and special-interest publications. I also read nearly a dozen on-line news outlets that are e-mailed regularly to me. The Internet sources deal with specialized subjects or often supplement what I learn from print media.

But in terms of in-depth reporting, commentary and analysis, very few of the Internet news outlets offer what the print media--or, at least, publications like the New York Times--can provide.

Moreover, the strain of reading on a computer screen for lengthy periods of time cannot compare with the ease of reading a printed newspaper or magazine. I don't understand how one can comfortably sustain the attention required for prolonged reading material on line.

But that's probably because I'm a cranky old man with both diminished stamina and vision.

My wife Sybil's octogenarian's lament

We now have two octogenarians in my family. My wife Sybil has just turned 80. A group of her friends are celebrating the event this week with a birthday party in her honor.
She has composed this poem to read to them...

AN OCTOGENARIAN'S LAMENT

I look in the mirror and see a strange face.
Oh, surely this image is in the wrong place.

There should be a picture, alive and aglow,
A young pretty girl with no signs of woe.

But alas I see a woman, who's old and worn,
With wrinkles and lines from the cares she has borne.

It's hard to accept
That never again
Will I get the glances of much younger men.

I really feel like I'm out of the loop.
The computer keyboard to me
Looks like alphabet soup.
The mouse is erratic and just won't behave
And I never remember the key
For work that you save.

I don't have a Blackberry, or play an Nintendo game
And all the hip-hop music
To me sounds the same.

I'm even beginning to feel quite bitter
That I have no idea
What it means to TWITTER!

And so like the poet
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high
O'er vale and hill when
All at once I saw a crowd
Not of golden daffodils
But of my wonderful friends.

I really should tell ol' Wordsworth
That a friend brings more joy
Than a daffodil.

Your love and compassion
Have helped me through the years
As you have patiently listened
To my woes and my fears.

So thank you and bless you
For helping me celebrate my special day.
Your devotion means more to me
Than I can say.
I love you all.

The right-wing malcontents are bashing Obama

President Barack Obama has been in office for only three months, but already the right-wing malcontents are up in arms. Their rage was comically displayed at last Wednesday's nationwide rash of "tea parties" during which the paranoid Obama-bashers vented their spleen about taxes, soaring government spending for financial bailouts, and what they regard as government encroachment into their private lives.

The demonstrations were allegedly "grass roots" rallies. But they were actually organized by Republican operatives and promoted by the Fox News cable TV organization. Fox, which jokingly claims to cover the news in a "fair and balanced" manner, is primarily a TV vehicle for Obama-bashing.

In their outrageous claims that Obama is a socialist--or fascist, according to Glenn Beck, Fox's loudmouth, clownish commentator--their fear about higher income taxes is misplaced. The President intends to allow the Bush Administration tax cuts for the rich expire. But for those with annual taxable incomes of under $250,000 taxes will be cut. From their appearances and the rowdy behavior of the tea party participants, it struck me that few of them have to worry about paying more taxes.

In their rage about bailouts and soaring Federal debt, the tea party participants conveniently overlooked the fact that their ideological hero, former President George W. Bush, began the bank bailout parade and was responsible for turning a Federal budget surplus into an unprecedented debt load.

Aside from taxes, the tea bag demonstrators seemed equally infuriated by an alleged government encroachment into their personal lives and by an unnecessary fear that they will lose their guns. I never fail to be amused that the same people who worry about government interference into personal lives are invariably those who want to ban abortion and gay rights.

Many of the right-wing malcontents' fears would be comical if they were not so serious. Some hysteria-mongers even talk about an armed insurrection against the government and the need to prepare for self-defense.

Others worry about the newly-enacted Serve America Act, a Obama plan enabling young volunteers to work on projects involved with education, clean energy, health care, and care for military veterans. For such critics as Rep. Michelle Backmann (R-Minn.), who seems to be replacing Sarah Palin as a heroine of the right, the plan will foster national enslavement and provide "re-education camps" for young people.

The over-riding fear of the right-wing malcontents is that the U.S. is turning into a socialistic or fascist country. They are unwilling to recognize that a capitalistic-free market system like ours has been unable to cope with the current economic crisis without government intervention.

The amazing but sorrowful side of Googling

Whenever I have nothing better to do, I often turn to Google and type in the names of old friends and acquaintances with whom I have lost contact. I'm inquisitive by nature--some might call me a busy body--and I'm curious to know what's happened to these people since I last saw them.

The other day I concentrated on men with whom I had worked during the 1950s and early 1960s at the McGraw-Hill/Business Week Washington news bureau, and I entered the names of three of them.

I was saddened to learn that they are all dead and that two other former colleagues have also passed away. According to a Washington Post obituary shown in Google, one of my former colleagues, Boyd France, died just a month ago in a suburban Washington hospice at age 88.

Boyd I shared a small office cubicle for about 10 years. We used to joke that we spent more time with each other than we did with our wives. Boyd covered the State Dept. and developed an extraordinary roster of diplomatic news sources. He was also the National Press Club's chess champion.

Boyd's father was a prominent corporate and civil rights lawyer. I remember that one day his father visited him and discovered that Boyd had no will. His father prepared one for him, and Boyd brought it into the office and asked me to sign it as a witness.

I casually read the will and was so impressed that I asked Boyd whether he would object if I copied the will's contents and used them as the model for my own will--with the names, of course, changed. I did not have a will of my own at the time. Boyd did not object. Today, so many years later, my current will is still essentially based on the one prepared by Boyd France's father.

Boyd's career began in France where, in 1947, he became widely publicized as the young reporter who swam out from a Mediterranean port to interview the Jewish Holocaust victims aboard the Exodus, the famous ship which the British had barred from landing in Palestine.

My next Google discovery was a reference to the Donald O. Loomis Memorial Scholarship in Journalism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. It was established to honor the man who, as co-head of the Business Week Washington bureau's news desk, was involved in hiring me for the magazine in 1952. Don died in April 2008 at age 93.

The scholarship is awarded for achievement in journalism and for "the demonstration of a well-rounded range of activities and interests outside the classroom as exemplified by the life of Donald O. Loomis."

I e-mailed the university, inquiring how to extend my belated condolences to his son, David Loomis, a sponsor of the scholarship. Don had been in the Washington bureau for 35 years and was, indeed, the type of renaissance man who would inspire the scholarship applicants.``````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````ould
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In addition to being my primary editor, never failing to sharpen and improve my writing, Don was a lifelong, ardent athlete who was my frequent tennis partner. He also introduced me to golf, but on that score he failed. I never could develop enthusiasm for the game.

I received an acknowledgment from Don's son, David, a longtime newspaperman who is now a journalism professor at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. David had some more sad news, informing me that another longtime Business Week colleague, Dan McCrary, who was his father's close friend, died this past January at age 77.

I had worked with Dan both in Washington, where he covered the Justice Dept., and in New York, where he edited what Business Week called "the front-of-the-book," the magazine's section on latest news events.

I also typed the name of another former Washington colleague, Seth Payne, into Google. I was always intrigued that Seth, who had been raised on a ranch in New Mexico, was a merchant marine officer during World War II. He later became a naval reserve officer.

With his Navy contacts, Seth backed me up in my assignment as Business Week's Pentagon correspondent while working on his own beat, science and technology. When the Russians launched Sputnik, creating a new journalistic specialty, space technology, Seth also took on that assignment.

The Google reference revealed that he had established the Seth Payne/Evert Clark Award in 1988 to honor Clark, his longtime friend and Business Week colleague, who died that year. Seth Payne himself died several years later.

The award is granted annually to a distinguished young science journalist. I did not know Clark, a science and aviation writer who later worked for Newsweek magazine, very well. During my time in the Business Week Washington bureau, Clark worked in an adjoining office for Aviation Week, which like BW was a McGraw-Hill publication.

But I had the same kind of office intimacy with Payne that I enjoyed with Boyd France. A glass wall separated Payne's small office cubicle from mine, and his desk was opposite my desk. We could not avoid closely observing each other at work each day. Both Payne and I became the fathers of boys at the same time, prompting us regularly to compare notes on our new sons' development.

I regard Google as one of the technological wonders of our time. It is an extraordinary source of information of all kinds. My search for information about former colleagues, however, brought me both sadness and a reminder of how honored I was to work with these men of great talent and character.

MEMOIR: Job-hopping and networking

My job as a press officer and editor with the U.S. Interior Dept.'s Fish & Wildlife Service, about which I wrote in my last Memoir, was was my first job after my 1946 Army discharge and my college graduation in 1948.

My career there was short-lived. I resigned a year later when I was informed by the U.S. Civil Service Commission that I was about to be "displaced" by a disabled Army veteran who had job preference over me. He had received a medical discharge after six months of military service because of stomach ulcers. (I had served in the Army three years, more than two of them overseas.)

I didn't resent my "displacement," for I was eager to extend my career into a wider field. Moreover, I had already landed a new job as a staff writer for The Machinist, the weekly newspaper of the AFL-CIO International Assn. of Machinists. It was only a temporary three-month summer job, but I had a far greater personal interest in labor affairs than in fish and wildlife.

I had been recommended for the union job by Bill Doherty, the Interior Dept.'s director of information. He was familiar with my work, having had to approve the Fish & Wildlife Service press releases that I had written before they were distributed. His recommendation represented my first experience with the phenomenon of "networking" as a tool for getting a job.

The Machinist was a far more professional newspaper than most labor union publications. Its editor, Gordon Cole, had been a Washington correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, and he had made the paper more than a mere personal house organ for the union's leaders.

In my new job, I reported and wrote about such matters as labor-management contract negotiations, labor-related political issues, organizing campaigns, and union elections. I also wrote the union president's opening statement at a Congressional hearing on a bill to ban discrimination against workers because of age.

During my temporary stay with the union, I took a formal civil service exam for the job of "information & editorial specialist (press & publications)," my job title at the Fish & Wildlife Service. It was the first time the exam had been conducted in about 10 years.

I passed the exam, but that did not assure immediate employment. I had to find a job opening in a Federal government agency. But I now had regular civil service status to qualify for employment without being vulnerable to displacement by applicants with some type of job preference or political influence.

However, when my temporary job with the Machinists Union ended, there were no Federal job openings available in Washington. Nor could I find a journalistic job in the private sector. After two months, I became discouraged about my prospects. Reluctantly, I returned to New York to live with my parents because I could no longer afford to live on my own.

But the job market for journalists in New York was now even tighter than it had been when I graduated from college, because four daily newspapers had recently folded.

Shortly after my return to New York I got a lucky break. The director of information of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, Larry Klein, phoned me, offering a job similar to the one I had had with the Fish & Wildlife Service. I was now on the civil service register, which made me eligible for the position.

I had been recommended to Klein, a onetime editor of the AFL-CIO United Auto Workers Union's paper, by Gordon Cole, my boss at the Machinists Union. It was another demonstration of the importance of professional networking.

I was now on my way back to Washington.

My life with music

I cannot play a musical instrument, and I have never taken music lessons. I cannot read music. And I can barely distinguish the playing quality between a Yitzhak Perlman and a journeyman violinist in the back row of a major symphony orchestra.

Yet I am an avid lover of classical music and a frequent concert-goer. All day at home, I have a good-music radio station or a selection from my vast CD collection playing in the background. My tastes range from the old war-horses, Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, to more modern composers such as Mahler, Shostakovich and Prokofiev.

I believe that my love of classical music was stimulated by my 8th grade teacher, Mrs. O'Mara. She conducted a class called "Music Appreciation" and required her students to maintain scrap books with pictures of prominent musical concert performers. The project competed with my scrap book of major-league baseball players, but my collection seemed to meet Mrs. O'Mara's standards.

I still remember some of the techniques she used to introduce us to the major classical composers. When she came to Schubert, for example, she taught us to sing: "This is the symphony that Schubert wrote and never finished," using the basic melody that flowed through his never-finished final symphony.

The musical influences at home were minimal. We had an old piano in our apartment on which my mother had taken lessons when she was a child. But I don't recall ever hearing her play.

She encouraged me to take lessons. She had a distant cousin, Sidney Sukoenig, who was a prominent concert performer and a conservatory teacher during the 1920s and 1930s, who was willing to teach me. I turned down that opportunity because it interfered with stick ball and touch footfall.

I must have had some inherent musical talent, however, because with one finger, I was able to pick out virtually any melody on my mother's old piano, without knowing exactly what I was doing.

My father used to play operatic and Jewish cantorial records on our old Victrola, but I don't think his attraction to vocal music influenced my love of symphonic music.

I try to educate myself about good music by reading the music critics in the general newspapers and magazines that cover the music scene. But it is not very helpful when I encounter something like the following recent review in the New York Times of a local performance by a Russian pianist, Alexei Volodin, playing a Bach Partita with the London Symphony Orchestra:

"He played the Corrente with sparkling energy and brought a wistful nostalgia to the Sarabande," the critic wrote. "Mr. Volodin clearly articulated the multiple voices hidden in the thicket of counterpointe in the concluding Gigue, whose grandeur he aptly conveyed."

What is an untutored music lover like me, who can't tell a sharp from a flat, to make of that?

The Bronx County Courthouse vs. the Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal is generally regarded as one of the eight wonders of the world. It is located outside the sprawling city of Agra, India. Some Western historians have claimed that the its architectural beauty has never been surpassed. The Taj Mahal, which means "Crown Palace," was built over a period of 22 years during the 1600s by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his favorite wife who died in childbirth.

The Taj is essentially a mausoleum with a mosque, other palatial buildings, elaborate gardens, and reflecting pools in a vast complex bordering a narrow river. The Taj itself is built entirely of white marble with a central dome that rises to a height of 213 feet.

In 1857 a British nobleman, Lord Roberts, vising the Taj for the first time, wrote: "Neither words nor pencil could give to the most imaginative reader the slightest idea of the all-satisfying beauty and purity of this glorious conception. To those who have not already seen it, I would say, 'Go to India.' The Taj alone is worth the journey."

I have gone to India--not voluntarily, of course--and have visited the Taj many times. During World War II, the U.S. Army built an air base several miles away from the Taj to house the 3rd Air Depot Group. I was stationed there for about two months before being transferred to another unit in Bengal Province in eastern India.

During my brief stay at the Agra base, every weekend an American Red Cross lady would lead a group of about dozen GIs to visit the Taj. As I recall, the city of Agra itself was out of bounds to U.S. troops, and there was not very much else to keep off-duty GIs entertained. I believe that I went with the group about a half dozen times.

The woman was a knowledgeable guide, and lectured to us about the Taj Mahal's history. An extremely emotional person, she would discuss in ecstatic terms the Taj's beauty. On one of my night time visits with the group, I can still recall how she rapturously exclaimed: "There is nothing more beautiful in the world that the Taj by moonlight."

Responding to our guide's remark, I shouted: "The Bronx County Court House is more beautiful by moonlight." I was playing the role of a 19-year old wise guy from New York, tired of her repetitive claim about the Taj.

The Bronx County Court House, which is located within walking distance of my family's former apartment house on the Grand Concourse, is a conventional-looking, 12-story government building. Placing it in the same architectural league as the Taj Mahal was, of course, absurd. But I enjoyed the loud laughter that I had anticipated from the other men in my group.

The Red Cross lady, however, was infuriated by my rude behavior. As I recall, she was so upset by my impertinence that she halted her lecture and hastily called for a truck to return our group to the base.

Sixty-five years later, I am embarrassed when I recall my wisecrack. But, oh, to be a 19-year old "wise guy" again!

I doubt whether the American Red Cross maintains an enemies list. But if it does, I'm probably listed on it.

My ancestors in Jerusalem

 

This is a photo of my maternal great-great-grandparents. The photo was taken in Jerusalem about 150 years ago when that city was ruled by the Ottoman Turks.

My maternal grandmother, with whom I lived during my childhood, brought this photo of her own maternal grandparents with her when she arrived in the U.S. in 1903. The family came from the Czarist Russian province of Minsk in what is now Belarus. The picture was obviously an extremely important possession of Grandma's, having survived that arduous journey with her husband, three small children and all their belongings.

I do not know whether these ancestors of mine were visiting Jerusalem on a religious pilgrimage or whether they had come from Russia to settle in the Holy Land. As a boy, I was aware of the photo's existence. But I do not recall that Grandma, beyond identifying the couple in the picture as her grandparents, ever explained their presence in Jerusalem.

The photo, which was restored, was originally on a postcard. The word "Jerusalem" was elaborately printed on its back, as was the photographer's Armenian name.

The couple's family name was Gurevich, which I believe is the Russian version of the name Horowitz. I do not know their first names. Nor have I ever known any relatives who bear their surname. I do take some satisfaction, however, in imagining that I may have been distantly related to the late, great Russian-born pianist, Vladimir Horowitz.

MEMOIR: Whooping cranes, trumpeter swans and a kid from the Bronx

I started my first postwar job in June 1948 in Washington, D.C. shortly after my college graduation. As I revealed in a previous Memoir posting, the job was as a press officer and editor for the U.S. Dept. of the Interior's Fish & Wildlife Service. I was hired as a result of a "situations wanted" ad that I had placed in Editor & Publisher, the newspaper industry's trade journal. This was a highly unconventional route to a Federal civil service position.

My objective was a job as a newspaper reporter. But only the Fish & Wildlife Service responded with a legitimate job opportunity. I also heard from a commercial printer in Moundsville, W. Va., who offered to make me editor of a new weekly newspaper if I would invest $5,000. I did not take the offer seriously.

The FWS mailed me a civil service employment application and soon invited me to Washington for a job interview. I was hired several weeks before my college graduation.

I had not even known that the Fish & Wildlife Service existed. Nor was I aware that the Federal government hired people to work as an "information & editorial specialist (press & publications)," which was the official job title. As I recall, the annual salary was about $3400.

As a boy raised in the Bronx, my only exposure to "wildlife" had been during visits to the Bronx Zoo and in several encounters with snakes in India, where I had served in the Army. The FWS was therefore an exotic working environment for me. My primary function was to report on the agency's varied operations, and to write press releases on what I considered newsworthy matters. In short, I was to be a press agent.

One of my new colleagues was the late Rachel Carson. She was yet to become a national celebrity as a pioneer environmental reformer through her best-selling books, "The Silent Spring" and "The Sea Around Us." Carson was trained to be a marine biologist. Her job at the FWS was to write the popular pamphlets about wildlife that were published by the Government Printing Office.

In my first week on the job, I handled a story that was a press agent's dream: the birth of a two-headed terrapin in a government fisheries laboratory. I arranged for Life Magazine to publish the terrapin's photo on its cover.

From then on, there was rarely a week in which I did not find a story worthy of publicity. One of the strangest involved reports from farmers across the country complaining that growing hordes of raccoons were ruining their crops. They demanded that the government do something about it.

I don't remember what if anything the Fish & Wildlife Service did about the problem. But the situation inspired me to write a press release linking the raccoon epidemic to the vagaries of women's fashion that had reduced the demand for raccoon fur coats. The result, of course, was that commercial trappers were no longer killing raccoons and were now concentrating on other varmints.

Many of my press releases dealt with the FWS's program to protect whooping cranes and trumpeter swans, two species of waterfowl facing extinction. Another regular story was the agency's widespread effort to expand the nation's duck population.

As some one to whom duck-hunting was an alien sport, that effort seemed contradictory. After all, the Fish & Wildlife Service was the agency responsible for issuing Federal licenses to hunt ducks. However, my ideological indifference about ducks, never intruded into my work.

Census-taking was a major undertaking at the Fish & Wildlife Service. When I wasn't reporting on the populations of whooping cranes, trumpeter swans, and other migratory waterfowl, there were fish to count. I spent one week at sea aboard a fisheries research vessel, observing scientists conducting a census of herring on the Georges Bank fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland.

Still another regular census involved the Alaska fur seals who annually come ashore on the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea to deliver a new crop of seal pups and to breed. The islands are part of Alaska, but the FWS was the territory's official administrator.

Based on the annual count, the agency determined how many seals could be slaughtered for their pelts. As I remember, the victims were only two-year old males. The actual killing was done by Aleuts hired by a private contractor, the Fouke Fur Co. of St. Louis.

My press release disclosed the number of young seals that could be legally clubbed to death. I believe that these annual reports eventually helped animal-rights advocates to win their campaign to halt the commercial slaughter of the fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. But the native Aleuts are still allowed to kill a very limited number of animals for food and clothing.

One of my most widely-publicized stories disclosed the mystery about the rubber rings found around the necks of many of the fur seals. After years of speculation about the origin of the rubber rings, the agency determined that they were the remnants of parachutes that the Japanese had dropped to supply their troops occupying the Aleutian Islands during World War II.

Aside from writing press releases, I had other assignments. One was to write a speech for the then Secretary of the Interior, Julius Krug, about the virtues of wildlife conservation. It was an awesome task for a young guy just out of college, dealing with a subject about which I knew nothing.

I was also assigned to deliver a speech. My audience was a rod and gun club in Elizabeth City, a town near the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Its members were infuriated by the sudden death of flocks of waterfowl that they had hoped to hunt. Many of the club members were conspiracy theorists. They were convinced that Washington bureaucrats were deliberately killing the birds to punish the local hunters.

I had never delivered a public speech before. My task was to explain that FWS scientists had discovered that the birds were dying because of an epidemic of fowl cholera. Serious efforts were under way, I assured the members, to combat the disease. I never found out whether my speech convinced the conspiracy theorists.

Still another interesting assignment was to write a booklet promoting the leasing of industrial facilities at the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge, near Herrin, Ill., to private manufacturers. During World War II, the plants had been built on the refuge for production of munitions.

When the war ended, the plants were closed. The result was a surge in local unemployment. The Interior Dept. decided to attract manufacturers to lease the idle industrial facilities to produce civilian products and to hire local jobless workers.

I never had a chance to learn whether my promotional effort succeeded. My career with the Fish & Wildlife Service abruptly ended in June 1949, one year after I had been hired.

Shortly after my pamphlet was published, I resigned to take a temporary summer job with a weekly labor union newspaper published in Washington. I had been informed that I was about to be "displaced" from my job with the Fish & Wildlife Service.

My replacement was a "disabled" veteran who had job preference over me. He had been in the Army for six months and had a medical discharge because of stomach ulcers. I had been in the Army three years, had served overseas for 26 months, but had not suffered a "disability" in the service. Such were the civil service rules.

The U.S. Civil Service Commission had not conducted a formal exam for the information specialist position since the start of World War II. Those subsequently hired for these jobs thus did not obtain formal tenure--or what was known as "permanent status."

The situation enabled military veterans with a formal "disability" to have employment preference over non-disabled veterans. Assuming that the applicant had the required professional qualifications, the disabled vet could simply submit a civil service application form and thus displace a worker who was not favored with job "preference."

I had no regrets about leaving the Fish & Wildlife Service because I was still eager for a career as a journalist in the mainstream media. But it was to take me three more years before I was able to realize my ambition.

Why Octogenarian has been silent

This blog has been silent for the past two weeks as I have assumed the role of caretaker for my wife Sybil. For the third time in about eight years, she has undergone spinal surgery. The surgeon defined it as a "lumbar laminectomy and fusion," and hinted that some other surgical goodies were included in her near-five hour operation.

Sybil is now out of rehab and back at home, saddled with all sorts of restrictions on how to move, bend, get in and out of bed and chairs, and enter a car. She must wear a tight-fitting brace and, for four hours daily, an electrical device to promote the growth of bone. She calls it "a torture chamber."

I have a feeling that the surgeon was undoing or correcting the procedure performed by another surgeon 15 months ago. But, of course, I have no way of proving it. All I know is that my wife continued to suffer severe back pain after the previous operation.

Our experience has underscored for me the urgent need for a Federal universal health care program. Without Medicare and the supplemental medical insurance provided by my former employer's retirement package, I could never have paid for Sybil's enormous medical expenses. But what about the medical needs of our citizens who do not enjoy these benefits?

Opponents of a universal health care system make nonsensical arguments about what they call "socialized medicine." They claim that under such a system the freedom to select one's own doctors would be lost and that "bureaucrats" and not medical professionals would be making crucial health decisions.

As Medicare recipients, we selected the surgeon, the hospital, and the rehab center. The only factor that we were unable to control was a guarantee that the operation was fully successful and that my wife will now be pain-free.

A blogger's anniversary and unexpected gifts

This month I am beginning the fifth year of publishing this blog. When I began in 2005, I had no idea who if anyone would ever read the stuff that I write. I also wondered whether there was anything of social value to justify my efforts.

In the past two days, I have been delighted to receive unexpected evidence of the merits of blogging. I regard the evidence as anniversary gifts for the blog.

On April 14, 2005, only two months after I started Octogenarian, I posted a story entitled "Reflections on a 64-year Old Photo." Accompanying the text was a picture taken in the spring of 1944 at a U.S. Army base in India showing nine GIs posing in front of a volley ball net outside their barracks. I was one of the soldiers.

In the text I identified each man and revealed as much personal background of each one that I could still remember. Considering the declining state of my memory as a 84-year old, I am still astonished at what I was able to recall about most of the GIs in the photo.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from a woman named Elizabeth Elfring, who identified herself as the daughter of Marlan J. Miller, one of the men pictured. He was one of my closest buddies in our outfit, the 903rd Signal Co., about whom I was able to recall considerable detail. Perhaps that was because we had had a reunion about 30 years ago at his home in Arizona, when my wife and I were on a tour of the Grand Canyon.

"What a great thing to find something about his his life, remembered in such a fond way," Ms. Elfring wrote, commenting on my blog posting. She revealed sadly that her father had died in July, a month shy of turning 85. "He had a rich life, full of music, art and friends," she said.

Then she really made my day, closing her e-mail message: "Thank you for opening a door into the life of my father."

Today, by an odd coincidence, I received an e-mail from Ronni Bennett, who publishes "Time Goes By," a valuable web site devoted to aging. Her site contains a regular feature entitled "Elder Storytelling Place." I had submitted my blog posting about the 64-year old Army photo to her, and she published it last August.

Ronni forwarded a comment that she had just received from a man identified only as John E. He identified himself as a younger brother of Marlan Miller. He said he "had been born the year the photo was taken!" [The photo can be seen on Ronni's web site; it has mysteriously vanished from my own blog archives.]

"Marlan was very reluctant to discuss his Army experiences with his family," John wrote. "So this photo and your brief mention of him is a delight! Thanks for posting it."

I regard the kind comments of Marlan Miller's daughter and brother as gifts to celebrate Octogenarian's fourth anniversary. They demonstrate how worthwhile the blogosphere has become as a social institution.

MEMOIR: Settling in Washington, D.C.

Shortly after my college graduation in June 1948, I moved to Washington, D.C. to work as an editor and press officer for the U.S. Department of the Interior's Fish & Wildlife Service. I had been hired after the agency's information director, an ex-newspaper man, responded to my "situations wanted" ad in Editor & Publisher, the newspaper industry's trade journal. It was a very unconventional way to obtain a Federal civil service job.

I knew no one in Washington. And except for three years in the army, this was the first time that I had ever lived away from my parents in New York. I was 23 years old.

Before I arrived in Washington, I had arranged to stay at the national headquarters of the American Veterans Committee, which was conveniently located in a townhouse on New Hampshire Ave., N.W. The organization maintained temporary sleeping quarters on the building's top floor for visiting members.

AVC has been extinct for about 50 years, but it was a much-publicized new veterans group during its brief but spirited existence. It was founded during World War II as a liberal veterans organization that would be an alternative to the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. As a young guy turned off by what I regarded as the Legion's and VFW's support of reactionary political and social causes, I had joined AVC while in college.

Actually, I had briefly been an involuntary member of the VFW while still in military service overseas. My commanding officer, a World War I veteran who had evidently been active as a civilian in the VFW, had the unmitigated gall to sign up all the men in our outfit as new VFW members without our approval.

Among AVC's leaders were such celebrities as Richard Bolling, an influential Kansas City, Mo. Congressman; author-cartoonist Bill Mauldin; Merle Miller, President Harry Truman's biographer; popular radio comedian Henry Morgan; and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., the President's son who became a New York City Congressman.

The organization's idealistic motto was "Citizens First, Veterans Second." Its New York chapter went so far as to oppose a state veterans bonus. That was not the kind of political position likely to attract a mass membership of former servicemen.

AVC broke up about a decade after the war's end, following a bitter struggle between extreme left-wing and and moderate factions. I was saddened by AVC's demise, but I was grateful that the organization helped me quickly find a comfortable new Washington home.

My second day in town, I responded to a notice on a bulletin board in the AVC building, seeking room mates for a two-bedroom apartment. The notice had been placed by two former naval officers, both AVC members, who were sub-leasing an apartment on Adams Mill Road.

I was one of the men selected to replace two occupants who had moved out. The apartment was on the top floor of a five-story, walk-up building. It was modestly but adequately furnished for four young bachelors sharing two bedrooms. One memorable recollection of my stay in the apartment was listening to the nightly roar of the lions at the nearby Washington National Zoo when we kept the windows open during hot weather.

Once I had settled down in regular living quarters during my first few days in Washington, I was now ready to report to my new job with the Fish & Wildlife Service.

A poet I'm not

For nearly a decade, I have belonged to a writers workshop in the Florida retirement community where I live half the year. We have about a dozen regular members and meet twice monthly. About another dozen residents occasionally show up at our meetings. A couple of the members have had professional writing experience. The others regard their writing endeavors as a hobby and, obviously, as a source of creative pleasure.

At our meetings we read our own handiwork and critique the work of the others. It's all handled courteously and in good humor, and we have become a very congenial social group. Both non-fiction and fiction is offered for discussion.

A considerable amount of the work discussed is poetry. I've never been a devotee of poetry. I regard poetry as a very specialized type of writing for which I have no talent. And I will confess that I have never fully appreciated poetic output.

But I stand in awe of those who do write poetry, and I am impressed by the highly skilled work that many of our workshop members produce.

I recently recalled that I did once write a poem myself. But I have not dared to read it for serious discussion at our workshop meetings.

For posterity's sake, however, I will expose my poetic creation here.

When I returned to New York University after my Army discharge in 1946, I was enrolled as a journalism major. Curiously, the journalism department was then housed in the university's college of commerce, where I was obliged to declare an academic minor. I selected marketing even though, in all candor, I consider it presumptuous that marketing is considered an academic discipline.

The only marketing class that I did find interesting and challenging was one in advertising copy writing. Shortly before the class began, Coty, the world-famed beauty products manufacturer, introduced a new fragrance named Muse.

One class assignment that I still remember was to produce an advertisement for the new Muse perfume. I don't know whether our professor had any business relationship with the company, but he evidently considered the project professionally relevant and topical.

That's when I turned to poetry-writing for the first and only time in my life. This is what I wrote:

Was it said by Homer that no man can refuse
The come-hither aroma of Coty's new Muse?
Oh no it was not a maxim of Homer,
But of truth there's a lot in this quip on aroma.

More than 60 years later, I'm proud to reveal that I received an A-grade for my poetic creation. I have never had the inclination or courage, however, to write poetry again.

Afghanistan: A lost cause

The incoming Obama administration will be making a grievous mistake if it goes ahead with its plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan by shipping more troops there.

We were fully justified to invade Afghanistan in 2001. The 9/11 attacks on the U.S. were launched from Afghanistan by the Arab-led Al-Qaeda terrorist organization, for whom the local Taliban radical Islamic government had provided a base. Our goal was to destroy Al-Qaeda, capture its leader, Osama bin-Laden, and topple the Taliban regime.

The U.S. was on the verge of achieving these objectives until the Bush administration unwisely invaded Iraq two years later, deploying resources away from Afghanistan. The military focus shifted from fighting a war against an enemy that had attacked the U.S. to invading another country that had posed no threat to our national security.

Since the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated. The pro-American Karzai regime, which we had installed, has proven to be so corrupt that public confidence has collapsed. Moreover, resentment of foreign military forces has grown as U.S. air strikes have caused heavy civilian casualties.

The Taliban has thus regained much of its power and influence while Al-Qaeda has shifted its major bases to the ungovernable tribal areas in neighboring Pakistan's Northwest Province.

The Obama administration now faces the problem of battling Al-Qaeda in Pakistan. That country has a new, presumably pro-American government that is increasingly under pressure from radical Islamic forces that are sympathetic to Al-Qaeda and eager to install a Taliban-like regime in Pakistan.

The much touted "surge" of American forces did strengthen our position in Iraq, at least for the short term. But sending more troops to Afghanistan is unlikely to help the fight against Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.

This is a situation that could probably be handled more effectively with covert counter-insurgency operations, combined with delicate diplomatic moves, rather than with conventional military action.

A letter from Israel regarding the Gaza tragedy

I have received the following letter from an Israeli citizen, offering a personal view about the tragic events unfolding in Gaza.

Dear family and friends,

I feel that events are such I should once again try and relay to you my thoughts, in order that you will be able to have a better understanding of the situation here. Again, as in many times before, I am dismayed at the lack of proportions in the in-depth information from Israel as opposed to that coming from other sources. Due to this unfortunate state of events, the international community is too frequently exposed to communications which are far from being "even-handed" or fair.

I will try to be as fair as possible, in portraying the very sad situation here. This is the first report I will be sending you, and I would welcome any comments or questions, and would certainly be happy if you thought that this was something you would like to pass on to your friends.

First some questions:

· When was the last time you ran for your life to a shelter to avoid being bombed?

· When was the last time your children were terrorized to the point where they wet their beds even at ages of 6 and 7?

· When was the last time your child demanded that the light stay on all night, and even then told you of his nightmares the next morning - all this on a daily basis?

· When was the last time you realized that your child will need a psychologist to help overcome his/her fears of loud noises and sirens?

· When was the last time your house had a near miss of a rocket fired at you, or worse, had your house crumble under the impact of a mortar shell?

· When was the last time that you could not tend to your crops, because the last time you went out to your fields you were fired on by snipers?

· When was the last time you lost your job because you wanted to stay at home with your family when your town was under attack?

· When was the last time that your child saw your neighbor lying in a pool of blood?

· When was the last time you checked to see if your child's kindergarten had a bomb shelter, and if not you took the child to another kindergarten which had one?

· When was the last time you went with friends to have a drink at a pub and had a suicide bomber blow himself up in front of you?

· When was the last time you made sure your child had an armed escort when he/she went on a school outing?

· When was the last time your government decided to spend over 400 million dollars on bomb shelters for your town?

· When was the last time your neighboring country swore to wipe you off the face of the earth, and does not recognize your right to exist?

· When…..

Now some facts:


· For the last 8 years (yes… eight whole years, which are 96 straight months) , the southern part of Israel (population around 250,000) has had over 22,000 rockets and mortar shells fired into its cities and villages. This is an average of approximately 2500 per year (since January 2008, we have counted over 3000). This means an average of approximately 8 (!!) rockets a day. Can you even imagine such a number?

· There is no child in Sderot under the age of 10, who knows any other existence than that of daily fear of a bomb landing on his home, school, or shopping mall. How would you feel if this happened in your town and to your children?

· Over three years ago, we unilaterally left the Gaza Strip, removed all vestiges of our army, uprooted all the civilian population which lived there, and abandoned all the homes, fields, and industrial complexes. All this without a reciprocal agreement on the side of the Palestinians to cease all hostilities. This action was intended to allow the Palestinians to fulfill their own dream of a sovereign state, without any interference on our part.

· Since June 2008, there has been a "cease-fire" agreement brokered by the Egyptians. The only trouble is that we have "ceased" while the Hammas has "fired" an average of 6 rockets a week (this is their understanding of an agreement). Besides trying to spot the launchers, and pinpoint attacking them if we were able to do so with 100% certainty, and only then, we did not reciprocate in any other way.

· During this period, we restrained ourselves not to hit back. The only recourse we had, when words, agreements, unilateral restraint and requests did not work, was to warn the Hammas government that if they did not stop the rocket attacks which totally disrupted any sort of "normal" existence for our citizens in the region, we would reduce the entry of supplies to the Gaza Strip. However, out of humane considerations, we continued to send urgent supplies, even under fire.

· To this day, we supply 70% of all the electricity in Gaza, and have never stopped this supply, except for one day when the electric plant in Ashdod, which supplies the "juice" to Gaza, was attacked by a suicide bomber. There is no "darkness" in Gaza, whatever is said or shown to the contrary.

· During the three days prior to our attack in Gaza over 200 rockets were fired at southern Israel, mainly at the city of Sderot, but also to many of the agricultural settlements around the Gaza strip – all inside Israel's international borders. This was the response of Hammas to our willingness to sit and discuss the continuation of the so-called "cease-fire" between us.

· Every such attack has had the entire civilian population of these towns and agricultural settlements running as fast as they can for a shelter - women, children, the elderly, sick people, in short, the whole civilian population.

· These rocket and mortar attacks are aimed specifically at civilian concentrations, to kill and injure as many innocent people as possible.

· Countless times over this period, and before, we have deliberated how to combat this situation, and each time we have opted for another concession towards peace, and have responded infrequently and even then at a very specific location from which the rockets were launched

· The fact is that of the hundreds of Palestinians killed over the past 2-3 years, 95% have been terrorists either setting up their rocket launchers , or on their way to an attack on one of the settlements in the region

· Sgt. Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was abducted to Gaza by the Palestinian terrorists over 920 days ago, has not been allowed to send or receive letters, the Red Cross has not been allowed to visit him, and he has spent the whole time, close to three years, in a hole somewhere in the Gaza Strip. This is outrageously inhumane.

· During the past ten years, we have signed at least five agreements, in which we requested the same demands that were initiated by the "Quartet" (The USA, Russia, the U.N., and the European Community), namely:

o Recognition of the State of Israel (which all countries of the world have done)

o Cessation of all terrorist activities

In return we would be willing to negotiate for a fair settlement to all the problems between us

· Even though the Palestinian leaders, first Arafat then Mahmoud Abbas (Abu-Mazen), signed the agreements, the attacks continued unabated


Now to some comments:

· When we left Gaza, with all the small industrial works and the very modern and sophisticated greenhouses intact, at the request of the world community so that the Palestinians will have the ability to support themselves, they destroyed all of these down to rubble. This has to mean that they had little intention of trying to help their population to self-reliance and the country to some income.

· How can the world sit back for so many years and look upon what was going on in our towns and villages around Gaza, and only become outraged when we finally say: "enough is enough" and hit back?

· What is this nonsense about "excessive force"? For years we have restrained ourselves, we have made every effort to find peaceful solutions, such as those we have in our peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, while we are being shelled on a daily basis. How long can any country stand this? I bet not even Norway, which has grave concerns about our intentions, would stand for this for even one month without retaliating

· As to excessive force, should we send our kids out to throw stones at passing Arab vehicles, as Arab kids do on our roads? Should we sporadically shell cities in the Gaza Strip, just so that our response is "measured" against theirs? Should we recruit maniacs who are willing to commit ritual suicide in Arab restaurants? What are we, as a normal and democratic country, supposed to do? Continuously "understand" that the Palestinian demands should be met so that the world community can finally have some peace in the Middle East? These "salami" tactics will find us in the Mediterranean within five years!

· No. As in any country you are familiar with will do, we will use whatever means we have to achieve peace and quiet for our citizens. If we do not, then are failing our duty as a country to its citizens.

· In addition, since we do not intend to carry out such actions on a regular basis, then on the one time we do strike back, we will do so until the Hammas does not have the will to continue its policy. We have attacked only Hammas installations, and if there was a fair reporting of the events, you would notice that over 90% of all the Palestinian casualties were wearing uniforms. We have tried to be as accurate as possible in our attacks so that we spare the civilian population. We have NEVER targeted civilians, as they have ours

· No one asked Joe Louis to fight all comers with one hand behind his back because he was stronger than his opponents, and no one has asked Michael Jordan to shoot only with his left hand, because he was so much better than all other basketball players.

· We are a country, and we have an army to protect its citizens. Our army has been carefully built so as to be able to answer any threat to our existence. We will use all measures necessary, once all other avenues have been blocked, to thwart this threat.

o The Hammas does not recognize us or our borders.

o The Hammas has sworn to continue to attack us until we drop

o The Hammas gets its weaponry and orders from Iran and the extremist Islam leaders of the world, and will not listen to anyone or any other voice

· We cannot allow this to happen, and cannot allow another Holocaust to our people

· What would you and/or your government do if your border towns were shelled on a regular basis? Sit and wait for the world community to give your neighbor a slap on the hand? I would venture to say that in any Western country, you would hit back after the second or third rocket attack, whether there were casualties or not, irrespective of what the world community says or requests. We have been holding ourselves in restraint for years!

· Barak Obama, when he visited Sderot a year ago, said that if his house, and his girls, were attacked by rockets, he would not stand for it and retaliate

· The Hammas, as part of the radical Islamic groups, is a serious threat not only to Israel, but perhaps even more so to the moderate Arab countries, as well as the Western world. It is inflaming the minds of the Islamic youths, teaching them to hate while not giving them any hope for a future

· During these last few days, we have heard the Egyptian foreign minister and the editor of the official Saudi newspaper, say that the Hammas can only blame itself for what is happening to it now. The other moderate Arab countries have the same sentiments. The Hammas, as the representative of the extremist Islamic groups, is a real and present danger to them and their countries

· What are the ultimate goals of the Hammas? If it is to establish a sovereign state, then three years ago when we left Gaza they had the opportunity to show themselves and the world, that they can do so. We opened all the crossing points to Palestinian workers, assisted Palestinian officials in all the professional activities that a country needs (agriculture, medicine, sanitation, education, etc), and what we got back were suicide bombers and rocket attacks. In this situation, what does any "normal" country do? It closes the border crossings and discontinues its open policy. Would you shake your neighbor's hand, if on a daily basis his dog attacks your child despite your requests from him to rein in his dog?

· If the goal is not to establish a state, then it seems as if is their only aim is the annihilation of Israel. We will not stand for this moment.

MEMOIR: Back home from the war

As noted in a previous post, I was discharged from the Army in mid-March 1946 after three years of wartime service. I was only 21 years old, but I felt considerably older because of my experience as a soldier.

There was a culture shock in making the transition from exotic India, where I had been stationed for nearly 26 months, to the familiar but mundane world of the Bronx, where I had been raised and to which I returned to live with my parents.

As a new civilian, I felt that I had a lot of catching up to do, both in my education and in what I euphemistically called my "love life."

Before my Army induction, I had attended evening classes at New York University's School of Commerce for about 15 months. But I hadn't earned enough credits to have advanced beyond the freshman class.

Most night school students require at least six years to earn a degree while working full time during the day. I am not sure I could have endured that challenge. But the GI Bill of Rights, which granted World War II veterans a tuition-free college education, enabled me to return to college as a regular student.

In my urgent desire to obtain a degree and begin a professional career, however, I embarked on what I now consider a foolish schedule. By taking evening and summer classes in addition to the standard day time courses, I crammed 3-1/2 years of academic study into two calendar years. I graduated in June 1948, but it was not the conventional route to a college degree.

It was not as simple to catch up on my so-called love life. Not that I had an active one before entering the Army. Since the age of 16 I had had a full-time job. This put a severe strain on teen-age social activities. I never had the opportunity to acquire a long-term girl friend before I went into the Army.

I did become attracted to Ruth, a classmate in my evening college journalism class. But since she lived in Brooklyn, she was "geographically undesirable"--or "GU" as the condition was popularly known--because I lived in the Bronx. The arduous subway ride discouraged me from dating her very often.

Our relationship primarily grew as both of us worked together on Sunday afternoons in the print shop producing the weekly college newspaper. We had both quickly become editors as the older staff members left school for military service.

After my military discharge in mid-March, I had to wait until June for my classes to begin. I therefore signed up with what was was known as the "52-20 Club," another benefit program for ex-GIs. It paid jobless veterans $20 a week for a year.

I now had the resources to replenish my skimpy civilian wardrobe and to go out on dates. My father, who was a men's clothing salesman, helped me buy new clothes, enabling me to finally take off my Army uniform.

I recall that he was disturbed when I returned home from one date and noticed grass stains on the knees of the most expensive of my new suits. It was produced during a walk in Central Park with my date after we had attended a Carnegie Hall concert. It was also evidence that my postwar love life was progressing.

After my return to civilian life, I also began to date Ruth again. She had by now graduated from college and was working as a newspaper reporter. We had corresponded while I was in the Army, although I cannot recall any vivid romantic flavor to our letters. For reasons that I can't recall, our relationship withered. Perhaps it was that "GU' factor in play again.

Another factor may have been the availability of many other girls for me to date for the first time. While I was in the Army, the weekly newspaper of a union to which I had briefly belonged urged its readers to "write to our boys in the service." I received more than a dozen letters from young New York City women who were obviously frustrated by the shortage of men at home.

I corresponded with the most interesting-sounding of the writers. Now that I was back at home, I began to sample the girls with whom I had corresponded. Most of them failed to live up to my expectations. I probably failed to live up to theirs.

Shortly after my classes began, I joined a college fraternity, Phi Alpha, which was later merged with a larger national organization. I figured that it would foster an active campus social life to break up my heavy academic load, which it did.

Like virtually every other NYU student at that time, all the fraternity's members commuted from home. The fraternity "house" was simply the basement of a three-story brownstone building on West 4th Street in Greenwich Village, a few blocks from the NYU campus. The building basement had formerly been a nightclub; its major feature was a dance floor.

Many decades earlier, the building had been a rooming house that became known in Greenwich Village lore as "the House of Genius" because such celebrated authors as Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson lived there. NYU's School of Law now occupies the site.

Like other fraternities, Phi Alpha was heavily involved in school politics. This influenced my appointment as editor-in-chief of the college yearbook, whose staff I joined when I had returned to school.

In March 1948, three months before my college graduation, I placed a situations-wanted ad in Editor & Publisher, the trade journal for the newspaper industry. My search for a job in New York had not been successful. I did have one job offer from Time Magazine to be a copy boy. The pay was $35 weekly. As a former Army staff sergeant with a college degree, however, I considered myself over-qualified.

And so my ad in the trade journal. It read: "Available in June, 23-year old New Yorker, B.S. journalism, Kappa Tau Alpha [journalism school academic honorary society], seeks job as reporter, copy reader, rewriteman or editorial writer. Ex-GI (3 years), single and sober. Willing to travel anywhere. Well-versed in domestic and foreign politics, the arts, social sciences, and sports. Experience: New York University newspaper and yearbook editor, U.S. Office of War Information copy boy. Box 9328."

I received two responses. One was from a commercial printer in West Virginia, asking me to invest $5,000 to start up a small town, weekly newspaper of which I would become the editor. The other was from the chief of the Division of Information of the U.S. Dept. of the Interior's Fish & Wildlife Service in Washington, D.C., seeking my application to become an information & editorial specialist (press & publications).

I did not answer the West Virginia printer's letter. And I had never heard of the Fish & Wildlife Service. Nor did I realize that the Federal government hired writers. The government letter included a formal application form.

Shortly after I submitted it, I was invited to Washington for an interview. The job was at the GS-7 civil service level and paid close to $4,000 annually. About a month after the interview, I was notified that I was hired.

Within days of my graduation, I was headed to Washington, accompanied by a foot locker carrying all my worldly possessions. A new chapter in my life was about to begin.

Caroline Kennedy's husband and me

First, an explanation of why nothing has been published in this blog during the past two weeks. I have had to assume some care-taking chores for my wife Sybil, who has been ill. This activity has obviously taken priority over blogging. She is now feeling better, and so this first posting since Dec. 8.

I have now been prompted to return to the blogosphere by the news about Caroline Kennedy's sudden interest in becoming a Senator from New York. Specifically, my curiosity has been aroused by the strange absence of any mention of her husband, Edwin Schlossberg, in all the publicity over Ms. Kennedy's political campaign.

I am a political news junkie and have read reams of material about her request to New York's Governor David Paterson that she be considered for appointment to Hillary Clinton's seat in the U.S. Senate. But as I write this, nowhere has her husband's name cropped up.

The news has been filled with personal detail about her being the daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy, the niece of two U.S. Senators, and other political history of her famed family.

Caroline Kennedy has always been exceedingly shy of publicity and has carefully shielded her three children from public exposure. Her husband, Edwin Schlossberg, has been even more publicity-shy.

As New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams wrote last year: "Besides marrying Caroline Kennedy, what else has he done? I mean...[does} anyone actually know what [Ed Schlossberg} does?"

What he does is own a Manhattan-based company called ESI Design, whose web site describes itself as "one of the world's foremost experiential design firms...we create physical and virtual spaces to interact, exchange ideas and learn from each other." In short, he designs museums and such structures as the American Family Immigration History Center at Ellis Island.

I have a special interest in Ed Schlossberg, and thus my personal curiosity about his role in his wife's unexpected entry into the political arena.

His surname, which in German means "castle mountain," is an uncommon family name. My late mother had first cousins in Cleveland who bore the name. As I recall, one of them was a house painting contractor. I do not remember ever meeting any of them. But if Ed Schlossberg ever had family members in Cleveland, it is likely that he and I have a distant family relationship.

Like me, Caroline Kennedy's husband is the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia. Perhaps that is what stimulated his interest in the immigration history project at Ellis Island.

It is not unusual for Russian Jews to bear German-sounding surnames. Their Yiddish language is heavily based on medieval German, demonstrating that their ancestors lived in Western European, German-speaking territories many centuries ago before migrating to Eastern and Central Europe.

If Governor Paterson does select Caroline Kennedy to be a U.S. Senator from New York, Mr. Schlossberg's anonymity is certainly going to be shattered.

The Obama-bashers don't give up easily

Having lost the election, the Obama-bashers haven't given up trying to prevent Barack Obama from becoming the President.

I have received an e-mail message, entitled "Update on Obama birth certificate law suits," from Human Events magazine, informing me that an organization known as the United States Justice Foundation is engaged in a legal battle "to compel Obama to produce a valid birth certificate that he is constitutionally eligible to be President of the United States."

The foundation, which was founded in 1979, describes itself as a "non-profit public interest, legal action organization that instructs, informs and educates the public on, and litigates significant legal issues confronting America."

The organization evidently doesn't believe that Obama was born in Hawaii. It argues that because Obama's father was born in Kenya when it was a British colony, somehow there is a question about the President-elect's legitimacy as a native-born American. The group has filed suit in California to push the issue and is helping to fund similar suits in Mississippi and other states.

In its e-mail message to me, Human Events notes that the U.S. Justice Foundation's campaign "does not necessarily reflect the editorial position" of the magazine. (Ideologically, the magazine can best be described as standing to the right of both the Bill Buckley-founded National Review and the Bill Kristol-edited Weekly Standard.)

So why does the magazine, which boasts such arch-conservative luminaries as Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter as columnists, go to the trouble of sending me information about the foundation's absurd campaign?

"From time to time," the magazine's message explained, "we receive opportunities we believe you as a valued customer may want to know about." The "opportunity" is for me to contribute money to the U.S. Justice Foundation so that it can finance the effort to keep Obama out of the White House.

I am not a paid subscriber to the magazine, so I can not be accurately described as a "valued customer." I am uncertain how I wound up on its e-mail mailing list. But I'm not complaining. It is always interesting to keep up to date about the right-wing loonies' current crusades.

Bombay/Mumbai Remembered

Last week's murderous terrorist attacks in Mumbai revived memories of my month's stay in that fascinating Indian city as an American soldier during the late winter of 1944. (I still find it hard to accept that the city was renamed from Bombay in 1996 in order to shed colonial Portugese and British influences and to restore the city's Hindu origins.)

I arrived there in mid-February aboard the HMS Empress of Scotland, a British passenger ship that had been converted into a troopship. The vessel carried about 5,000 U.S. troops, virtually all of whom would eventually wind up in eastern India, Burma or China, closer to where the battle against Japan was being waged.

I landed shortly after Japan's army had captured much of Manipur, a state in northeastern India. The Japanese were pushed back into Burma only about a week after our arrival. I cannot claim, of course, that my shipmates and I had an impact on the Japanese retreat.

We were greeted in the Bombay harbor by a U.S. Army tugboat blaring Artie Shaw's popular recording of "Begin the Beguine." As we neared the dock, scores of fishermen on flimsy boats surrounded our ship, shouting "baksheesh" at the soldiers lined up on the vessel's deck. This phrase is the universal plea of beggars and bribe-seekers in the Middle East and Near East for a tip or gift--a term, I believe, derived from the Persian phrase for "give me."

We interpreted the expression as a request for "boxes." Quickly, empty fruit crates from the ship's mess hall were retrieved and thrown overboard. The Bombay harbor was soon littered with gifts that were undoubtedly not what the locals had expected.

As we struggled off the troopship's gangplank, loaded down with barracks bags over our shoulders, a pack of peddlers awaited us. They were selling photographs of naked Oriental young women with their legs spread apart. The photos were airbrushed to show that the women's vaginas were horizontally shaped.

The picture depicted a myth, popular with some GIs, that the genitalia of Oriental females were shaped differently from Western women. Some of my shipmates obviously believed the myth. They rushed to buy copies of the altered photo to satisfy their naive belief about Oriental ladies.

After we landed, my outfit was sent by truck to a Royal Air Force base in Worli, a part of southern Mumbai. Our group was made up of men like myself who had been shipped overseas unassigned to any regular Army unit. In military jargon, we were designated as "casuals."

I remained at the RAF's Worli base until mid-March while awaiting an assignment. I was eventually shipped to an Army base outside the city of Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal, hundreds of miles to the northeast of Mumbai.

Worli was originally one of seven islands that were consolidated in past centuries through a series of reclamation projects to create the modern city of Mumbai. It contains the Towers of Silence, a structure on which the Parsis, one of India's many ethnic/religious minority groups, deposit their dead to be consumed by vultures. Worli also is the site of a popular race track where, much to my surprise, the horses run clockwise.

Every few days I was allowed to go into the heart of the city by train, where I had the unusual privilege of being a soldier-tourist. Mumbai offers extraordinary contrasts--far more extreme than any city I have ever known. Tall skyscrapers, speedy commuter railroad trains, theaters, night clubs, luxurious hotels, palatial suburban homes, and other features of a prosperous metropolis were matched by the starkest signs of poverty I have ever seen.

A teeming sea of humanity filled the streets. Diseased, malnourished beggars clad in rags were everywhere. Hordes of people made their homes on the sidewalks with no access to fresh water and toilets. Cows, sacred to the Hindus, wandered undisturbed
through the streets. Corpses were a frequent sight along the street curbs, vultures hovering above the dead.

I was to see similar scenes in Calcutta, in Bengal province, where I was primarily stationed during my two years of military service in India.

Sixty-four years have passed since I was in Mumbai. From what I've read, the contrasts have been magnified as India has become a more modernized industrial and commercial power, and Mumbai has become the site of a hugely successful movie industry.

During last week's three-day terrorist siege, a sense of the city's rousing and bustling atmosphere was vividly captured on TV as reporters described the horrific attack.

I don't know what the city's population was in 1944, but it now is close to 19 million people, making Mumbai one of the world's largest metropolitan areas.

It is noteworthy that Mumbai's population is bigger than the world's Jewish population--a fact that comes to mind because of the terrorists' selection of the Chabad-Lubovitch Jewish community center as a special target in last week's terrorist assault.

There are probably only about 5,000 Jews who live in Mumbai, most of them members of the Bene Israel or the Baghdadi Jewish communities. The former are descendants of Jews who settled in India during the Biblical era. The Baghdadis arrived in India several centuries ago from Arab countries.

During my 1944 stay in Mumbai, there were also a handful of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria living in the city. I particularly remember a store owned by one of them that featured Viennese pastries and chocolates. I am confident that it was the only store of its kind in all of India.

As it was for all troops stationed overseas during wartime, our outgoing mail was heavily censored. For about a year, we were not even allowed to reveal to our families back home that we were in India.

I was accidentally able to violate the restriction because of a visit I made to a local synagogue. While there, a British Jewish army sergeant invited me to play Ping Pong with him in the synagogue's community center. He was stationed in Mumbai after having been severely wounded in the British retreat from Burma two years before.

When he recovered, he was assigned as a drill instructor for Indian troops at a local military installation. We became friends and usually met when I had a pass to leave the Worli RAF base.

I complained to him about my inability to inform my parents where I was. He told me that his outgoing mail was not censored, and he volunteered to write to my family back in the States disclosing my presence in India. My parents quickly developed an intense interest in that huge exotic land about which they knew very little.

More than a half-century later, I also have that same intense interest in India and particularly in the city of Mumbai, where I had such memorable experiences as a soldier-tourist and which sadly became the focus of last week's news about the brutal terrorist attack by Islamist extremists.

MEMOIR: What I did during the war

On March 16, 1946 I was discharged from the Army as a staff sergeant after three years of service. For two years, I had been stationed in the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations. Aside from bouts of amoebic dysentery and dengue fever, I was lucky to come home relatively unscathed. I was 21 years old, but felt at least 10 years older.

I had not seen combat, and except for a depth charge dropped on a German submarine attacking my India-bound troopship off the coast of Brazil, I had not heard a shot fired in anger. Nevertheless, I was treated like a conquering hero by my family and neighbors on my return home.

But I had done nothing that could be regarded as heroic. I had been trained as a Signal Corps Teletype operator and cryptographer. I had also received three months of infantry training prior to being shipped overseas. But when finally assigned to the 903rd Signal Co., which was attached to the Army Air Forces, I was never called upon to use any of these skills.

My accomplishments as a soldier were quite mundane. My outfit supplied and serviced airborne electronics equipment for the 14th Air Force in China, the 10th Air Force in eastern India, and the Air Transport Command, which flew supplies over the Himalaya Mountains to both U.S. and Chinese forces.

The 903rd also operated a major military message center in Bengal and built portions of a telephone line along the Burma-Ledo Road running from Calcutta to China. I worked as a warehouseman, an armed guard on supply missions to Assam, Burma and China, and wound up as the company clerk after it was discovered that I was a skilled typist.

My chores as company clerk were sufficiently heavy that my commanding officer hired a civilian Bengali lawyer as my assistant. His name, as I recall, was either Mukerjee or Banerjee. He was at least twice my age and earned more working as a clerk for the U.S. Army than practicing law in Calcutta. He spent much time turning me into an ardent supporter of Indian independence from Great Britain.

After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, I was promoted to be the company's acting first sergeant, replacing a man who was eligible to return to the States. A few months later, when I became due for shipment home, our new company commander offered me the permanent job of first sergeant and promotion to that rank if I signed up for at least six months of additional overseas duty.

I was eager to return home and turned down the offer. I later learned that the outfit was eventually transferred to Shanghai to disarm Japanese troops and to help restore order in liberated Chinese territory. I began to regret my decision because the new assignment sounded far more exciting than what I did during the war.

How Obama must cope with Bush foreign policy blunders

I have often wondered about the sanity of the Bush Administration's foreign-policy makers. What prompted them, for example, to negotiate with Poland and the Czech Republic to install anti-ballistic missile sites in those two countries?

The sites are supposed to be a defense against long-range missiles launched by Iran. But neither the two Slavic countries or other Europeans have been threatened by Iran. The Iranians do not lack for countries they regard as enemies. But how would radar systems and anti-missile missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic provide a defense for Israel and the U.S., the two nations on Iran's hit list?

The Russians initially responded by threatening to establish offensive ballistic missile sites in Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave located between Poland and Lithuania, a territory once known as East Prussia. But the Russians have moderated that threat. They evidently recognize that President-elect Obama is likely to abandon Bush Administration policies that they have regarded as provocative.

On the more critical Iraq/Afghanistan front, I believe that Obama should speedily withdraw from Iraq. The Iraqis have established a relatively stable government, and increasing numbers of the country's political leadership are demanding that U.S. armed forces leave.

Instead, we continue to spend billions of dollars building Iraq's infrastructure and to bribe once-insurgent Sunni tribesmen to behave. Meanwhile, Iraq is keeping its growing national treasury, built by increased oil production revenues, sitting in a bank.

As for Afghanistan, I think Obama's intent to deploy more troops there is as unwise as President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. The original decision to invade Afghanistan was a logical effort to punish the forces responsible for 9/11. The enemy was both the Afghan Taliban regime and the Arab-dominated Al-Qaeda terrorist organization that had planned and launched the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The Taliban had provided shelter for Al-Qaeda after the latter's leadership had been forced to leave Sudan. Ironically, the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic movement, was an outgrowth of the Afghan forces that had been supplied by the U.S. to fight the country's Russian invaders.

But I fear that it is too late to win the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. was well on its way to destroying both the Taliban and its Al-Qaeda allies. We were forced, however, to reduce our forces in Afghanistan and to concentrate on the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

This allowed the Taliban to regain much of its strength. It now threatens to overthrow the pro-American and increasingly corrupt Karzai regime. Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda's leaders have established their primary bases in neighboring Pakistan's lawless tribal region and probably in Somalia, a nation torn apart by civil strife. They have also sponsored the creation of allied anti-American Muslim terrorist groups in North Africa and the Persian Gulf area and perhaps even in Europe.

The U.S. has inadvertently caused heavy civilian casualties in Afghanistan while seeking out the Taliban and Al-Qaeda bases. The result has been a deterioration of popular support for the Karzai government.

I do not believe that the deployment of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan will destroy the Taliban. Indeed, with the move of much of the Al-Qaeda organization to Pakistan, there is evidence that the U.S. has taken preliminary diplomatic steps to deal with the Taliban.

The alternative to defeating Al-Qaeda and capturing its leader, Osama bin-Laden, would be to invade Pakistan's tribal region, where the terrorist group is now headquartered. I cannot imagine, however, that the incoming Obama Administration is prepared to undertake such an adventure right now.

Honoring our war veterans

As a boy growing up in the Bronx during the 1930s, the annual Armistice Day parade on the Grand Concourse, the borough's broad, tree-lined boulevard, was for me one of the most exciting events of the year.

Armistice Day celebrated the ending of World War I. The holiday was officially renamed Veterans Day in 1954 to also honor those of us who served in World War II or the Korean War.

I will always remember the legions of aged World War I veterans, grouped by American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts, marching down the Concourse with flags and military banners flapping in the wind. Army bands and formations of soldiers and sailors on active duty in the armed forces marched briskly with them. The colorful patriotic scene was a welcome break to the dismal atmosphere of the Depression.

A special place of honor was reserved in the parade for a handful of survivors of the Spanish-American War and Civil War, most of them walking with canes or being pushed in wheel chairs.

I assume that the Veterans Day parades are still conducted each year on the Concourse, now dominated by Vietnam veterans. But I envision geriatric World War II veterans like myself--all now in our 80s and 90s--replacing those Civil War and Spanish-American War veterans in that special place of honor for heroic relics of past wars.

Welcome, President Obama

Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Princeton professor who recently was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, had an extremely poignant comment about Barack Obama's election. "If the election of our first African-American president didn't stir you, if it didn't leave you teary-eyed and proud of your country, there's something wrong with you," he has written.

I did not initially support Obama as the Democratic candidate. The party had an impressive lineup of candidates during the primary election race, each of whom, I believed, was far more electable than Obama.

My primary interest was to see the Republican candidate defeated. I recognized that Obama was an exceptional political figure. But I feared that bigotry would prevent an African-American from being voted into the White House.

Happily, I was proven wrong. The election of Obama demonstrated to the world that the United States is indeed a unique multi-racial and multi-ethnic democracy. His victory should restore the magnificent international image that we enjoyed until President George W. Bush's irrational and aggressive foreign policies destroyed it.

In response to Obama's election, American flags are once again being waved enthusiastically abroad rather than being burned in anger. Bigots are unfortunately still around in our country, but they have been defeated.

Adventures in blogging

I was saddened and astonished to receive an e-mail message earlier this week from a man in Miami Beach, Fla., identifying himself as the grandson of Owen Crenshaw.

In December 2006, I published a story in this blog entitled "Tales of the 903rd Signal Co." (That was the Army outfit in which I served in India during World War II.) The posting contained a photo of six soldiers, one of whom was Owen Crenshaw. I am standing next to him in the picture.

"My grandfather passed away two days ago at age 92 in a San Antonio, Texas hospital," the grandson wrote. "Until he suffered a severe stroke three weeks ago, he continued to live 100% independently, including driving himself to breakfast every morning from the house he built for his retirement in 1975."

Out of curiosity, I assume, the grandson Googled his grandfather's name and came up with a reference to my blog piece about the 903rd Signal Co. Unfortunately, when he downloaded the story, all he came up with were the first several paragraphs in which his grandfather's name is mentioned. The group photo also failed to appear. The blog archives had evidently deleted or damaged the material.

The grandson asked whether I could send him a copy of the picture and the full text of the blog piece. "I would love to know if there is anything you remember about [my grandfather]," he added.

I am not very skilled in blogging technology, but after considerable effort, I was able to extract both the full text of the nearly two-year old blog piece and the photo from the bowels of my computer. I successfully e-mailed them to the grandson. He was delighted to receive them. He told me that the photo would be displayed at an upcoming memorial to his grandfather.

I am now in my Florida winter home, not far from the grandson's residence. We are planning to meet so that I can tell him everything that I can recall about Owen Crenshaw. I had not seen or spoken to Owen in 63 years. But I remember him well because of the intimate bond we had formed during our two years of World War II Army service together in India. He eventually became the outfit's first sergeant. I was the company clerk, so we had an especially close working relationship.

The grandson e-mailed a photo to me of his grandfather which was taken shortly before his death. I could not recognize him.

A 1945 Army guide on behavior for GIs returning from overseas service

During one of my periodic efforts to clean up old personal files, I recently found a copy of the Army Adjutant-General's Office Order 4110.99, dated Jan. 5, 1945. The order provides guidance on how to behave for GIs returning to the States after overseas service during World War II. [Full disclosure: The order is fictitious and may sound dated. But it's good for a laugh, especially for those of us still around who served overseas during that war.]

To: All units.

1. In compliance with current policies for rotation of armed forces overseas, it is directed that, in order to maintain this high standard of character of the American soldier, and to prevent any dishonor to reflect on the uniform, all individuals eligible for return to the U.S. under current directives will undergo an indoctrination course of demilitarization prior to approval of their application for return.

2. The following points will be emphasized in the subject indoctrination course:

A. In America there are a remarkable number of beautiful girls. These young ladies have not been liberated, and many are gainfully employed as stenographers, sales girls, and beauty operators or welders. Contrary to current practices, they should not be approached with "How much?" A proper greeting is: "Isn't it a lovely day?" or "Have you ever been to Chicago?" Then say: "How much?"

B. A guest in a private home is usually awakened in the morning by a light tapping on his door and in an invitation to join the host at breakfast. It is proper to say, "I'll be there shortly." Don't say, "Blow it out your ______."

C. A typical American breakfast consists of such strange food as cantaloupe, fresh eggs, milk, ham, etc. These are highly palatable and though strange in appearance, are extremely tasty. Butter, made from cream, is often served. If you wish some butter, you turn to the person nearest it, and say quietly, "Please pass the butter." You DO NOT say, "Throw me the goddamn grease."

D. Very natural urges are apt to occur when in a crowd. If it is found necessary to defecate, one does not grab a shovel in one hand and paper in the other and run for the garden. At least 90% of American homes have one room called the "bathroom"--i.e., a room that in most cases contains a bathtub, wash basin, medicine cabinet, and a toilet. It is the latter that you will use in this case. Instructors should make sure that all personnel understand the operation of a toilet, particularly the lever or button arrangement that serves to prepare the device for re-use.

E. In the event the helmet is retained by the individual, he will refrain from using it as a chair, wash bowl, foot bath or bath tub. All these devices are furnished in the average American home. It is not considered good practice to squat Indian fashion in a corner in the event all chairs are occupied. The host will usually provide suitable seats.

F. Belching or passing wind in company is strictly frowned upon. If you should forget about it, however, and belch in the presence of others, the proper remark is, "excuse me." DO NOT say, "it must be that lousy chow we've been getting."

G. American dinners in most cases consist of several items, each served in a separate dish. The common practice of mixing curious items such as corn beef and pudding, or lima beans and peaches to make it more palatable, will be refrained from. In time,the "separate dishes" will become enjoyable.

H. Americans have a strange taste for stimulants. The drinks in common use on the continent, such as under-ripe wine, alcohol and grapefruit juice, or gasoline bitters and water (commonly known by the French term "cognac") are not ordinarily acceptable in civilian circles. These drinks should be served only to those who are definitely not within the inner circle of friends. A suitable use for such drinks is for serving to one's landlord in order to break an undesirable lease.

I. The returning soldier is apt to often find his opinions differ from those of his civilian associates. One should call upon his reserve of etiquette and correct his acquaintance with such remarks as "I believe you have made a mistake," or "I'm afraid you are in error on that." DO NOT say, "Brother, you're really f----d up." This is considered impolite.

J. Upon leaving a friend's home after a visit, one may find his hat misplaced. Frequently it has been placed in a closet. One should turn to one's host and say, "I don't seem to have my hat. Could you help me find it?" DO NOT say, "Don't anyone leave this room. Some S.O.B. has stolen my hat."

K. In traveling in the U.S., particularly in a strange city, it is often necessary to spend the night. Hotels are provided for this purpose, and almost anyone can give directions to the nearest hotel. Here, for a small sum, one can register and be shown to a room where he can sleep for the night. The present practice of entering the nearest home, throwing the occupants into the yard and taking over the premises will cease.

L. Whiskey, a common American drink, may be offered to the soldier on social occasions. It is considered a reflection on the uniform to snatch the bottle from the hostess and drain the bottle, cork and all. All individuals are cautioned to exercise extreme control in these circumstances.

M. In motion picture theaters, seats are provided. Helmets are not required. It is not considered good form to whistle every time a female over eight or under ninety crosses the screen. If vision is impaired by the person in the seat in front, there are plenty of other seats which can be occupied. DO NOT hit him across the back of the head and say, "Move your head, jerk, I can't see a damn thing."

N. It is not proper to go around hitting everyone of draft age in civilian clothes. He might have been released from the service for medical reasons. Ask for his credentials, and if he can't show any, then go ahead and slug him.

O. Upon retiring, one will often find a pair of pajamas laid out on the bed. (Pajamas, it should be explained, are two-piece garments which are donned after all clothing has been removed.) The soldier, confronted by these garments, should assume an air of familiarity and act as though he is used to them. A casual remark such as, "My, what a delicate shade of blue," will usually suffice. Under NO circumstances say, "How in the hell do you expect me to sleep in a get-up like that?"

P. Air raids and enemy patrols aren't encountered in America. Therefore, it is not necessary to wear the helmet in church or at social gatherings, or to hold the weapon ready, loaded and locked, when talking to civilians in the streets.

3. All individuals returning to the U.S. will make every effort to conform to the customs and habits of the regions visited and to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Any actions which reflect upon the honor of the uniform will be promptly dealt with.

For the commanding general:

[Signature illegible]

Colin Powell: All is forgiven

I used to be an ardent admirer of Colin Powell, and always followed his career closely. One reason for my unusual interest in Powell may have been that we shared some common elements in our personal backgrounds. We were both born in Harlem, both had foreign-born parents, and both were raised in the South Bronx. And then, of course, we both also served in the Army. But that's an even bigger stretch.

I lost my respect for Powell, however, when he failed to quit as Secretary of State in the Bush Administration after objecting to the invasion of Iraq. He recently said he spent 2-1/2 hours trying to persuade President George W. Bush not to invade. It was particularly disappointing that he allowed himself to be disgraced when he appeared before the United Nations to defend the invasion.

All is forgiven now that Powell has endorsed Barack Obama to be President. He declared his support for Obama in the eloquent style that I had always associated with Powell. His critique of the Bush Administration was so penetrating and his assault on John McCain's Presidential campaign tactics so devastating that it erased whatever hard feeling I had harbored about the former Secretary of State.

I am amused by Pat Buchanan's denunciation of Powell's Obama endorsement. Buchanan made a big deal of the fact that Powell's career was largely promoted during Republican Administrations, starting as an Army major on the White House staff when Richard Nixon was in office. Powell was subsequently named National Security Adviser and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W.Bush and then was appointed Secretary of State by George W. Bush.

Buchanan complained that Powell was therefore disloyal to the Republican Party because he has failed to show his appreciation to the party for his meteoric career success.

By endorsing Obama, Powell has actually shown a greater loyalty to his country for he recognizes that Obama is a better choice for the Presidency than John McCain.

MEMOIR: Waiting to go to war

I graduated from high school in January 1942, one month after the Pearl Harbor attack. I was 17 years old.

Military conscription had been enacted nearly two years earlier, probably because of Washington's expectation that the U.S. would inevitably be drawn into the war in Europe. As I recall, the draft age was then 21.

As the nation now formally entered the war, I assumed that the draft age would eventually be reduced. I considered enlisting in the armed forces, as a couple of my friends had done. At age 17, however, this would have required my parents' approval. But this wasn't a realistic option for me. I was an only child with an anxiety-prone mother who would not have approved.

I decided to enter college and study to become a journalist, my longtime ambition, until I was inevitably drafted. My father was unemployed during my last high school semester, and I decided to attend college at night while working full-time. I had intended to apply to City College of New York, a tuition-free municipal institution.

But I learned that CCNY offered only a handful of journalism courses, and none were available in night school. Actually, my academic record in high school was average, and thus my acceptance by this highly selective college was uncertain.

I therefore applied to New York University, a private school which had a formal journalism program that offered evening courses. Strangely, the journalism department was located in the university's School of Commerce.

If I had known that my much of my subsequent career would be in business journalism, I would have taken advantage of the school's excellent finance and accounting courses. But my initial goal was to become a sports reporter or foreign correspondent, and the business courses held no interest for me.

Fortunately, when I entered NYU's night school, I already had a full-time job. During the summer before my senior high school semester, I had gone to work as a delivery boy for Goldsmith Bros., then the nation's largest office supplies retailer, located near Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. My pay was $12 weekly, a princely sum for a kid my age. Goldsmith's went out of business in the early 1950s after an ill-fated attempt to expand into an uptown department store.

After I returned to school when the summer ended, I was promoted to shipping clerk. As a senior, I had been assigned to the school's morning session.Classes ended at 1 p.m., which enabled me to have a quick lunch at home before taking the long subway ride downtown. My work hours were from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. six days a week.

When I graduated from high school and started my night-time college studies, I was promoted to salesman. I was assigned to the loose-leaf binder department. My wage was now $16 a week, plus commission on sales of both the loose-leaf binders and other office products.

The demands of the job and my school work left little time for a social life. At school, however, I became the associate editor of the evening section of the college's weekly newspaper. The vacancy occurred when the previous editor--and many other students--left for induction into the armed forces.

After about three months selling office supplies, it became obvious that the job was doing nothing to polish my credentials as an aspiring journalist. I decided that I needed a job where I would at least be in the company of professional writers.

I found a job that did bring me closer to such a working environment. I became an office boy in the New York City publicity department of RKO-Radio Pictures, the Hollywood movie company. The office was in a tall building attached to the Radio City Music Hall.

The sixth floor of the building led to the upper reaches of Radio City. One of the perks of the job was the freedom to watch the rehearsals of the famed Rockette precision dancers during my lunch time. But the highlight of my RKO career was to deliver a bottle of whiskey to movie star Lucille Ball's hotel suite. My humble contact with movie stars and press agents, however, was clearly no more professionally satisfying than selling office supplies.

In October 1942, I finally obtained a job that at least exposed me intimately to the work of professional writers. I was hired by the U.S. Office of War Information as an "under-clerk"--Federal civil service jargon for an office boy. The annual salary was $1,260, the lowest civil service pay level.

The OWI was the government's propaganda agency during World War II. It was headquartered in Washington, D.C., but I was employed in its Overseas Operations Branch, which was based at West 57th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.

From there, radio broadcasts were beamed to European countries, reporting the American version of how the war was faring. The branch also produced propaganda material, often personally distributed in German-occupied territory by staffers who mysteriously vanished from the office for months at a time to perform their hazardous underground missions.

Our office was staffed by dozens of seasoned writers, many of them celebrities like the branch's director, Robert Sherwood, the famed Broadway playwright and Presidential speech writer. I became his personal office boy, pulling dispatches for him from the wire service news tickers and performing other personal tasks. It was an exhilarating atmosphere for an aspiring young journalist.

I even had my own desk and typewriter, where in spare moments I would handle college home work assignments. It was a far better setting to do school home work than the wide window sill in my parents' bedroom, my normal site for such assignments.

I turned 18 in November 1942. That month the draft age was officially reduced to 18, requiring me to register at my neighborhood draft board in the Bronx. A few weeks later, I was instructed to report to an Army recruitment center in Manhattan for a physical exam.

The examination was conducted on an assembly-line basis, as the recruits moved from one medical specialist to another. When I reached a medical officer who was presumably a psychiatrist, I was astonished when he asked me: "Would you sleep with your mother?" When I quickly said no, that evidently demonstrated that I was mentally sound as well as being in physical good health.

I was classified 1-A, which meant that I would soon be inducted. In January 1943, I completed my first college semester. The question now was whether to register for the spring semester, not knowing when the Army would order me for induction.

I did register for the new semester, again hoping to squeeze in as many college credits as possible before my Army induction. As the months passed, I watched my friends leaving home for the Army while I had heard nothing. I accused my mother of tearing up my induction notice. She never allowed me to forget my accusation.

I was finally ordered to report for induction on April 14, 1943. My records show that the OWI offered me a "furlough for military service" and stated that I "be paid through 5-1/4 hours, March 29, 1943." My last day of work was actually March 20. In typical bureaucratic language, my official separation document notes that I "am to be on LWOP through COB."

I can translate "leave without pay." But I never found out what "COB" is.

I was given a farewell party on my last day at work. My boss Robert Sherwood, who was rarely seen without a pipe his mouth, gave me one as a going-away gift. I had never smoked either cigarettes or a pipe before.

Now I was ready to go to war.

Thoughts about the election

My wife and I have just voted for Barack Obama, and for the first time since 1996 we think we have voted for a winner in a Presidential election. We voted on an absentee ballot in New Jersey, our legal residence, because we plan to be in Florida on Election Day.

Just a few months ago, I was not very optimistic that Obama would be the victor. I feared that John McCain would win because he was much better known and experienced. I was worried that Obama was handicapped by both his limited record of political achievement and his race.

But Obama has clearly demonstrated that he possesses the credentials to be President. He has campaigned with dignity and has shown himself to be a man of superior intelligence and integrity. He appears to be far more suitable than McCain to cope with the current economic crisis and with the national security and foreign policy issues facing the nation. He is far more impressive as a force for the political change that both candidates claim is needed.

McCain is still ideologically linked to the disastrous policies of George W. Bush. Moreover, McCain has displayed extraordinarily poor judgment. The most obvious example was his selection of Alaska's Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.

McCain has failed to explain how he would meaningfully bring change to government. For instance,he talks about economic reforms, but sticks obsessively to the idea that the free market, unfettered by government intervention, will solve basic economic problems. In his many years in Congress, he has been a consistent champion of deregulation of business and the financial markets, a philosophy that helped produce our current economic plight.

McCain has behaved so erratically that I am concerned that his temperament makes him ill-equipped to handle the very serious and complex problems that the next President must handle. In particular, I worry that his macho-aggressive approach to foreign affairs could revive the cold war with Russia.

In contrast to Obama's well-mannered style, McCain and Palin have conducted a disgraceful election campaign, employing gutter tactics with slanderous personal attacks on their opponent. This is the kind of campaigning that twice brought Bush to the White House.

Obama still faces a serious obstacle. As they see Obama gaining in the polls, the McCain-Palin team seems to be turning even more aggressively to hate-filled personal attacks on Obama. Example: Palin's absurd argument about Obama "palling around with terrorists."

The big question is whether white voters' fears about the financial crisis will overcome any unwarranted concern that some of them may still have about Obama's race and patriotism.

MEMOIR: Memories of the Great Depression

The current financial crisis, generating fears that the U.S. faces a serious depression, has triggered my memories of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

My earliest memory was seeing my young, unmarried aunt, who lived with my parents, coming home from work one evening sobbing hysterically. I can still recall that she carried a newspaper emblazoned with a huge headline printed in red, reading: "Stock market crashes!"

The paper was undoubtedly the now-defunct New York Journal-American, a Hearst newspaper that routinely published red-ink headlines in large type to stir up reader excitement.

But this was no routine story. It was 1929, and the Great Depression had begun. I was five years old, and I still vividly remember my aunt's behavior that night. She had invested her meager savings, earned as a secretary, in the stock market. Now the savings had been wiped out.

She and other relatives, all people of modest means, had been encouraged by a stock broker/cousin to buy stock. That I can still recall the incident about my aunt and the newspaper headline so many years later demonstrates how traumatic the experience was, even for a young, impressionable boy.

I have other painful recollections of that era. In the early 1930s, my father's business collapsed. My father, who had not invested in the stock market, had operated a small shop in New York, manufacturing men's clothing in partnership with an uncle and brother-in-law.

Over the next decade, he was often unemployed, frequently holding down only temporary jobs as a salesman, usually in the men's apparel or food industries.

I always wondered how we were able to maintain our two-bedroom apartment during those years. We lived very frugally, but I do not recall that we suffered the severe economic indignities that afflicted so many others during the Great Depression.

But I do remember depending on hand-me-down baseball gloves, sleds, bicycles, and roller skates from a more affluent cousin whose father's business survived the nation's economic meltdown.

Only in recent years have I figured out how my parents were probably able to maintain our home during the Great Depression. I have a cousin who has an inordinate interest in genealogy.In his research, he discovered that the New York Times published probate notices at one time in its classified advertising columns. He found one notice revealing that my maternal grandmother (his great-grandmother) had inherited $5,000 from a wealthy older brother.

My grandmother had lived with my parents since their marriage. The inheritance, which she received about two years before I was born, was an enormous sum of money in that era. I can only assume that the funds wholly or partially produced the rent for our apartment when my father was unemployed. By then, my aunt had married and moved out.

When I was a teenager, I played a vital role in my father's search for regular employment. He was brought to this country from Poland at the age of nine, but never had a secular American education. Until he was 18, he attended a religious Jewish seminary where such subjects as English grammar did not figure prominently in the curriculum.

So he turned to me to help write letters applying for work. I remember spending Sunday afternoons with him examining the "want ads" in the New York Times. When he found what seemed to be a suitable job opening, I would compose and type letters for him on my second-hand typewriter, spelling out his qualifications.

My letters produced several salesman's jobs. Among his employers that I can recall were Beech-Nut and Colgate-Palmolive. In each case, however, the jobs proved to be temporary, for he was laid off in the personnel cutbacks that were so commonplace during the Great Depression.

The Great Depression ended only when World War II broke out. The U.S. quickly began to expand its armed forces, defense spending soared, and my father was hired by the War Dept. as an inspector in factories manufacturing military uniforms. That was his first solid job since his own business had collapsed.

My father was always struck by the irony that it took a war to get him on his feet economically. Whatever satisfaction he derived from finally having a good job, however, was offset by his sorrow in seeing his only child going off to war as a soldier.

A tutorial for Sarah Palin

I think that one of the most comical events of the Presidential campaign so far is the official announcement yesterday by a McCain campaign aide that McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, is about to meet with Henry Kissinger.

In short, the most unqualified vice-presidential candidate in American history is to get a "tutorial" on world affairs from a formidable expert on the subject. That the meeting with Kissinger rates a formal announcement (and a headline in the New York Times) shows how desperate the McCain campaign is to create "credentials" for Palin.

Not only will she get the Kissinger tutorial, but she will be introduced to a couple of heads of state and probably be accorded a first-class tour of the United Nations headquarters in New York.

No longer will critics be able to complain that Palin lacks foreign affairs expertise.

The "old" and the "old old"

Many years ago, The New Yorker magazine published a cartoon showing a man reading a page in a newspaper headlined “Obituaries.” Beneath the main headline were sub-heads reading “Same age as mine,” “Older than me,” and “Younger than me.” The man had a studious expression on his face as he obviously compared himself to the three categories in which the deceased fitted.

During my 60s and 70s, I also carefully read the N.Y. Times obits, making the same comparisons between myself and the deceased. I was saddened about those my age and younger--senior citizens the gerontologists regard as the "young old." I was comforted, however, to learn about those who had survived to more advanced years and had become "old old."

Now that I am about to turn 84 in November, I read the obits and feel fortunate that I have lived long enough to have qualified for "old old" status. And I recognize that my views and behavior are becoming markedly different from the "young old."

I'm not proud of it, but I’ve become less tolerant. I scorn much of the contemporary art scene—-music, the theater, films-—finding the works so inferior to what I enjoyed as a younger man.

I’ve become more indecisive about the most trivial matters. I often cannot make up my mind about what shirt to wear after I awaken each day. I struggle as I decide what to do first. Should I go shopping or stay home and read or take a walk? What's more important, to see a doctor about some new ache and pain or to take my car for maintenance at the service station? These are, for me, mind-boggling decisions that have to be made. But at least I'm spared from solving the national fiscal crisis.

I’ve lost my confidence in the medical profession, although I’ve had successful surgery to replace my aortic heart valve and my right hip. But I’m reluctant to call a doctor for every ache and pain. I’m dubious about the doctors’ ability to help some one my age and fear that I’ll be ordered to have an uncomfortable examination and procedure that really won't help me.

I now seem to regard physical comfort as the most important element in my life, a fact that really distresses me. I’ve always had an active social life, eager to go to concerts, the theater, art shows, and the like. Since having open-heart surgery about six years ago, however, I become more of a home-body because I frequently feel fatigued even though I've not engaged in any strenuous activity.

I have become less enthusiastic about going out and driving long distances, particularly at night—-much to the distress of my wife. But I have not become a social recluse. I still enjoy socializing with neighbors and friends (as long as they don't live too far away).

As an old old man, I am most disturbed that I find myself questioning whether I really had the talent to do what I did as a journalist for 40 years. I study the hundreds of clippings of articles that I wrote decades ago and can not believe that I actually produced the stuff. Was I faking it, I ask myself. I feel relieved that I am no longer called upon to handle the tough professional demands that I once faced.

I observe what some journalists are now being called to do-—covering the war, for example, in Iraq and Afghanistan under fire—and I wonder whether I would have been able to handle such assignments.

The issue is particularly relevant to me because I covered the Pentagon as a reporter in the 1950s and early 1960s during the non-shooting cold war years, and there was no call for me to become a war correspondent. (My wartime experiences were as an 18-21 year old soldier in India during World War II.)

For 23 years, I have lived in a community restricted to residents who are at least 55; younger spouses, however,are allowed. I was 61 and still working when I moved in. (I retired nearly three years later.) For years I played tennis, traveled with my wife, and took advantage of all the leisure activities available for the residents.

I am now too weary to do much of that. I enviously look upon the younger residents as they enjoy so many of those activities in which I no longer participate. And that's where the distinction between the just "old" people and the "old old" becomes dramatically evident.

I see a social schism developing between the two groups of elderly neighbors. The community has a clubhouse in which dances are held and professional entertainers perform. The cultural tastes differ markedly between the two generations living in what has been advertised as “an active adult” community. There’s a generational gap between the active “young old” and the far less active “old old.”

I am saddened as I see a steady stream of friends and acquaintances pass away. I am gratified, however, that I am still around to enjoy the company of my wife and children and that I still have a passionate interest in what’s going on in the world around me.

Guns, God, gays and abortion

I've been trying to think of something profound and original to say about the tendency of many low- and middle-income voters to embrace such issues as guns, God, gays and abortion, and to vote against their own best personal interests.

Having failed to come up with new thoughts of my own, I will take the liberty of quoting two extremely insightful letters-to-the-editor in the Sept. 8 issue of the New York Times.

The first one, written by Kathy Roberson of Middlesex, N.J., has this to say:

"One thing President Bush has done well has been to get so many people, often at an unconscious level, feeling that smart or educated or intellectual equals un-American.

"The result has been that the less educated you sound, the more of a patriotic American you are perceived to be.

"In this way, Mr. Bush and other wealthy elites have been able to install policies that hurt poor working- and middle-class Americans, while casting as snobbish elites those who think in nuanced ways about how to solve the real problems of ordinary Americans.

"We live in a world of staggering complexity. As the last eight years have shown, we ignore that at our own peril."

This is the other letter, which was written by David Rawson of New York City:

"The Republicans are blowing the usual smoke to get working-class people to vote against their economic interest.

"Can you imagine Americans voting for John McCain to strike a blow against the wine-drinking, brie-eating coastal elites and denying themselves a decent health care system, a better economy and competent leadership? Believe it. It could happen."

End of quotes.

Of course, what Mr. Rawson describes did happen eight years ago when George W. Bush was elected.

I fear that it is now more likely to happen again because of Sarah Palin's selection as the Republican nominee for the Vice-Presidency and the enthusiasm it has evidently stirred up in the Republicans' "conservative base."

From what we can glean about the Alaska governor, who is being sheltered from public scrutiny until she is well primed, her political and social opinions can best be described as primitive.

Once again, as in the past two Presidential elections, this election is likely to degenerate into a Republican campaign on "family values" and those old election standbys--guns, God, gays, and abortion. The Democrats will have to struggle to put the focus on the far more vital issues of the economy, health care and the war on terrorism.

The Democrats must also stress the threat that the cold war with Russia will be revived because of the Bush Administration's hard-edged foreign policies. Like Bush, McCain is provoking Russia with the campaign to gain admission of former Soviet bloc countries into NATO. (I have always felt that the Soviet Union's collapse made NATO redundant.)

But not to worry. McCain is acquiring expertise on Russian affairs from his new running mate, Alaska's Governor Palin. After all, as McCain's wife Cindy has pointed out, Palin is very knowledgeable about Russia because Alaska is so geographically close to that country, separated only by the narrow Bering Strait.

A glimpse of the past

 

I've been retired for nearly 19 years, and it's sometimes difficult to remember what it was like to hold down a regular job. My memories of what I did as a magazine writer and editor were revived by this clipping from the March 11, 1972 issue of Business Week, where I was employed for 31 years before retiring. The clipping was retrieved by a friend while cleaning out his files.

The clipping is a Publisher's memo that describes how a colleague and I reported and wrote a cover story about the late Michel Fribourg. He was a secretive, Belgian-born American who was CEO of Continental Grain Co., a giant, family-owned, multinational corporation now known as ContiGroup. A competitor described him as "the premier figure in the world trade in food during the 20th Century."

It took a considerable amount of journalistic detective work to prepare the article. Fribourg had carefully avoided publicity about himself and his 200-year old company until we prevailed upon him to allow us to tell his fascinating story of business adventures.

The article was published at a time when federal regulations and the dictates of public relations were inducing many traditionally publicity-shy companies to reveal details of their corporate operations to show that "our company has nothing to hide."

I was the project's editor. The Publisher's memo, which was written by the magazine's managing editor, was overly imaginative about my knowledge of Middle Eastern languages.

The American dream

The nomination of Barack Obama, an African-American with highly exotic roots, as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency is the most heralded example of the realization of the American dream.

On a far less dramatic level, the American dream has also been achieved in my own family. A century ago, my two sets of grandparents immigrated to this country from Poland and Belarus, both then part of the Czarist Russian empire. They came with few resources and no knowledge of English.

They fled to escape the pogroms and religious persecution that their ancestors had endured for many hundreds of years. In America they sought and found a refuge and a tolerant environment in which their children could employ their talents and fulfill their ambitions.

During the two generations that have followed my grandparents' arrival here, the family has produced two doctors (one of whom is a medical school cardiology professor), four school teachers, two artists (one of whom was also a college professor), a dentist, an art historian, a pharmaceutical chemist, a social worker, an investment banker, a Republican politician, three wartime soldiers, an Air Force career officer, a lecturer at the former Royal Iranian air force academy, a musician, several corporate executives, and this humble journalist.

For me and my relatives, the "American dream" is a magnificent reality.

Georgia and a truculent John McCain

Sen. John McCain has seized upon the crisis in Georgia as an issue that supposedly
points up the importance of his experience in national security affairs. In such crises, he claims, he is far more prepared to be commander-in-chief than Barack Obama.

Considering the complexity of the situation in Georgia, however,I would feel more comfortable with Obama in the White House. Judging from his truculent reaction to the Russian invasion of Georgia, I fear that if McCain was now President, we would be shipping troops to Georgia. "We are all Georgians!" he declared emotionally when the war there began.

What makes the crisis in Georgia so complex is that this isn't a simple issue of "good guys" versus the "bad guys."

Both the Russians and their South Ossetian allies are clearly the bad-est of the bad guys. But the Georgians, who are now victimized by the Russians, provoked the crisis by moving troops into South Ossetia to reclaim a separatist region that had declared its independence.

Russia, which contains the semi-autonomous, related state of North Ossetia, responded with overwhelming force, crushing the Georgians. It continues to occupy part of Georgian territory.

I wonder whether either President Bush or the truculent Sen. McCain even knew where South Ossetia was located before the crisis began. And if they did, they probably failed to appreciate the Ossetians' desire for independence from Georgia to join North Ossetia as a unified state.

Bush squandered America's moral authority by invading and occupying Iraq, which weakens his ability to react to the Russian aggression in Georgia. Moreover, he is stoking Russia's traditional paranoia by insisting on an expansion of NATO, which would have included Georgia, and planning to install an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

McCain may boast about his national security credentials, but he has displayed a hot-headed approach to foreign affairs. Only a decade ago, he was calling for an aerial attack on North Korea's nuclear facilities. He is probably now in favor of doing the same in Iran.

Bush has planted the seeds for a renewal of the cold war with Russia. McCain appears ready to "harvest the crop" if he is elected as Bush's successor.

MEMOIR: Remembering my high school days

My grandson has just entered high school, which reminds me that it was exactly 70 years ago this year that I entered high school. For four years, I attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, which probably had more students than any high school in the country. (The school was named after New York's first governor.)

The school, which was then nearly a half-century old, had about 12,000 students--all boys. It was so big that separate morning and afternoon sessions were required to accommodate the student body.

The school also had an annex, several miles away from the main campus, which I attended during the first half of my freshman year. The annex was then closed and and later became the initial site of a new specialized school, the Bronx High School of Science.

Clinton's main campus was located in a tranquil neighborhood close to the Westchester County line, far removed from the city's crowded streets. Virtually all the students had to take the subway to get there.

I attended Clinton largely because most of my friends and male relatives went there. We received an excellent education, but we never had the kind of active school social life enjoyed by students at a co-ed school.

Clinton always boasted top-notch football, basketball, and track teams. Strangely, however, it didn't have a baseball team. Baseball was my favorite sport, and if the school had had a team, I would have tried out for it. I did, however, try out for a spot on the track team as a sprinter.

I didn't make it, largely because I had the misfortune of having to compete against twin African-American brothers named Calendar, who were such spectacular performers that 10 years later they were members of the U.S. Olympic track team. (One of them eventually became a municipal judge.)

Although I failed to achieve success as an athlete, I was essentially content with my high school experience. I recall that many of my teachers were superior to many of my college professors. But hanging over me and my classmates was the strain of the Depression. My father was frequently unemployed, and economics played an important role in my life during my teen-age years.

Considering Clinton's size, it is not surprising that the school produced countless men who became internationally prominent in their respective fields. The celebrities ranged from movie star Burt Lancaster to fashion mogul Ralph Lauren.

I can still recall the special assembly that was held for incoming freshmen. The main speaker was the head of the school's alumni association. He was Richard Rodgers, the famed composer of classic Broadway musicals.

Rodgers may have been an inspiration for the school's theatrical tradition. When I entered the school, Paddy Cheyefsky, who graduated a year or two before me, was writing the school shows. After he graduated, Neil Simon, who graduated a year or two after me, succeeded Cheyefsky as Clinton's primary student playwright.

Clinton's student body was predominantly Jewish. I would estimate that about 20% of the students were African-American. Clinton, which had an excellent academic image, was known to be the high school of choice for boys in Harlem who aspired to attend college.

Two of the most prominent members of my 1942 graduating class were African-American, the author James Baldwin and Basil Paterson, who became New York's secretary of state and is the father of the state's current governor, David Paterson.

Sugar Ray Robinson, the famous world champion boxer, was also a student while I was in the school. As the lightweight Golden Gloves champion, he was already a celebrity. I can still recall seeing Robinson pridefully wearing a jacket bearing crossed boxing gloves on the back. This was the emblem of the Salem-Crescent Athletic Club, a noted Harlem boxing club, many of whose members were Clinton students.

I believe that the lure of a lucrative professional boxing career probably induced Robinson to quit school before graduating. I seem to remember reading an interview published in the school newspaper, however, in which he claimed that his ambition was to become a doctor.

As an aspiring journalist, I applied to become a writer for the school paper. The paper was a hallowed institution at Clinton. A venerated English teacher (I remember only his first name, Raphael) was the paper's faculty adviser.

Applicants for the paper's staff were required to attend lengthy journalism classes that he conducted after regular school hours. I was either too lazy or busy to attend, and I never did become active on the paper. My record of extra-curricular activities in high school was therefore quite thin. I can recall being a member only of the History Honor Society and the Library Squad.

I pray that when my grandson graduates from high school, he will not face what clouded the future of those of us who graduated in January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor. The following year most of us were in military service.

Obama has embraced a myth about Israel

I am reluctant to criticize Barack Obama, for whom I will enthusiastically vote in November. He's already taking a beating from the same sleazy Republican attack machine that defeated John Kerry four years ago.

But Obama's recent remarks about the Middle East show that he has foolishly bought into the myth that resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is the key to solving all the Middle East's problems.

Obama is not alone, of course, in embracing the simplistic idea that if only Israel and the Palestinians would settle their decades-long dispute, the violence and political ferment that characterize the Muslim world would cease.

For generations, both left-wingers and arch-conservatives hostile to Israel's very existence have been perpetuating the myth of the linkage between the Palestine issue and peace in the Middle East. Such luminaries as Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, and Zbigniew Brzezinski have given the argument some respectability.

Obama's belief in the centrality of the Israel-Palestine dispute was evidently reinforced during his recent Middle East tour when he met Jordan's King Abdullah. Obama said that the king, who he called a "savvy analyst of the region," told him that "we've got to have an overarching strategy recognizing that [all the Middle East issues] are connected."

King Abdullah is the same "savvy analyst" who, when asked in a CNN interview the day after 9/11, whether the attacks would have happened if the Israelis and Palestinians had reached a peace agreement at Camp David two years before, had this to say:

"I don't believe so, because I think that if you had solved the problems of the Middle East, and obviously the core issue is that between the Israelis and Palestinians, I doubt whether [the attacks]would have taken place."

The king conveniently disregarded the factors that probably provoked the 9/11 attacks: Osama bin-Laden's hysteria about the presence of U.S. troops in his native Saudi Arabia, his grievances against the Saudi regime, and his disgust with what he regards as the corruption of Western culture. Israel did not appear on his agenda until two years after 9/11, apparently to gain more widespread support in the Muslim world for his al-Qaeda organization.

The current violence and political turbulence in the Muslim world demonstrate how absurd the linkage myth is.

Sunni and Shiite Muslims are slaughtering each other in Iraq. Arab Muslims are killing black Muslims in Sudan. Anti-Syrian politicians in Lebanon--who are as anti-Israel as the pro-Syrian politicians--are being assassinated by Syria. Muslim Arabs and Muslim Turks are killing Muslim Kurds. Taliban Muslims are battling non-Taliban Muslims in Afghanistan. Somalia, a Muslim country, is in chaos.

How is the Israel-Palestine issue connected to this horrific scene?

It may be impolitic to note, but the root cause of all these conflicts, including the one between Israelis and Palestinians, may reflect a streak in Muslim culture that considers violence and threats of violence as a legitimate means to resolve disputes.

I hope that Barack Obama who, ironically, has been falsely called a Muslim himself, will consider the validity of this theory and that he will recognize that it is a myth that Israel is linked to all the violence and political ferment that besets the Middle East.

Reflections on the Presidential election

I've become more optimistic lately about a Democratic takeover of the White House in November. I've always been a bit of a pessimist, and have been fearful until recently that Barack Obama didn't have a chance to defeat the Republican candidate, John McCain.

But McCain is coming across like a doddering old man far removed from the realities of the nation's serious problems. It takes one to know one, since I am a doddering old man myself. And I'm a decade older than the Arizona senator. But I do hesitate to disparage McCain because I had once admired him as an amiable politician with integrity.

McCain evidently doesn't know the difference between Muslim Sunnis and Shiites--an issue that is basic to an understanding of the Iraqi situation. Nor does he appear to know that Iraq and Pakistan are not neighboring countries, and that that the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan--and not Iraq--is the primary battleground in the war against Islamist terrorism.

He also seems to be unaware that Czechoslovakia, a subject that recently came up in a discussion, has not existed as a separate country for about a decade. So much for the superior foreign policy expertise he was supposed to possess.

I am bored that McCain, like the Bush Administration, is obsessed with what he calls "the success of the surge" in reducing violence in Iraq. To the "surge" promoters, the temporary deployment of about 25,000 fresh troops to Iraq has taken on the aura of a historic new military tactic worthy of a Robert E. Lee or Field Marshall Rommel.

They seem to forget that Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was ousted as the Army's chief of staff, warned that the U.S. was invading and planning to occupy Iraq with an inadequate number of troops. Indeed, there is evidence that he and other Pentagon generals were unenthusiastic about the Iraq adventure from the start.

According to knowledgeable observers, the insurgency in Iraq was already declining before the arrival of the additional U.S. troops. One primary reason, they claim, was the decision to put several powerful Sunni Arab tribes on the American payroll to fight other Sunni insurgents and the local al-Qaeda forces.

Another factor in the decline in violence has been the loss of popular support for the corrupt Shiite Sadr movement, which had battled U.S. troops and opposed the rival Shiite parties that dominate the Maliki government.

When the Maliki regime embraced the idea of a timetable for the removal of U.S. forces from Iraq--which Obama proposed--the absurdity of both McCain's and President Bush's fierce resistance to a withdrawal plan was vividly exposed.

As I have written before on this blog, I have not been an ardent Obama supporter. I would have preferred a more seasoned Democratic candidate like Senators Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd or Governor Bill Richardson.

I have been troubled by Obama's limited experience and political achievements. Perhaps because I am a a grouchy old man, I have also been put off by his boyish persona and the adoring, charismatic movement that has developed around his Presidential campaign.

Nevertheless, I recognize that he is man of exceptional intelligence. More important, we are essentially on the same ideological wave length. I will therefore enthusiastically vote for him, hoping that his coat tails will bring in overwhelming Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.

I was delighted to see Europeans and others waving the American flag during Obama's recent foreign tour. It was more gratifying than seeing the foreigners who burn the American flag whenever President George W. Bush arrives on an overseas visit.

I am scared by the prospect of John McCain, my doddering old compatriot, moving into the White House and repeating and even reinforcing the blunders of the most incompetent Presidential administration in my lifetime.

MEMOIR: Grammar school days

I recently received an e-mail message day from a stranger, who I will call Stanley P., asking whether I would be interested in attending a reunion of students who had ever attended P.S. 64, a Bronx, N.Y. grammar school. I attended this school from kindergarten through the 8th grade and graduated in January 1938.

Stanley had obtained my name and e-mail address from the younger sister of the only one of my boyhood friends with whom I am still in contact. Stanley was evidently a friend of hers, and she had identified me as a P.S. 64 alumnus.

The only school reunion that I have ever attended was in 1992 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my DeWitt Clinton High School graduating class. The P.S. 64 reunion, Stanley explained, would be open to all former students whether they had graduated or not.

As I recall, only about 200 men and their spouses attended my high school class reunion. It was held in a Manhattan hotel ballroom. The turnout was exceedingly unimpressive, for there must have been at least 2,000 boys in the 1942 graduating class. (DeWitt Clinton High School, which was in the Bronx, was not coed, and it was considered to have the largest enrollment of any of the nation's high schools.)

But the idea of a grammar school reunion intrigued me, and I told Stanley that I would attend. He said that he and a group of other alumni plan to hold the reunion next winter in south Florida, where they felt many former P.S. 64 students would be located. I know of at least five of them myself living or wintering in Florida. As some one who graduated 70 years ago, I assume that I will be among the oldest attendees at the reunion.

P.S. 64 is located on a square block bounded by East 170th and 171st streets and Walton and Townsend Avenues. It is a densely populated neighborhood that was once predominantly Jewish and is now predominantly Hispanic. Long after my graduation, the school began to run only through the 6th grade.

My memory is slowly fading about many important matters. Strangely, however, I still remember that the school's principle was named Jacob J. Shifro and that my first-grade teacher was a Miss Bayer.

I entered kindergarten there on the same day as my cousin Herbert. One of us was so nervous on the first day of school that he threw up. For decades Herb and I argued whether he or I was the culprit. The argument was resolved three years ago at my 80th birthday party when Herb, who was the party's master of ceremonies, announced to the guests that we had both thrown up on our first day in school.

One of my most memorable experiences at P.S. 64 occurred in the second grade, when we learned how to write with the old-fashioned, sharp-pointed pens that had to be dipped into an ink well.

A fellow classmate and I decided to demonstrate that the pen could function as a dueling instrument as well as a writing instrument. I obviously had no talent as a fencer. In less than a minute, my opponent, whose name I still recall (Jerome Stahl), broke through my feeble defense and thrust the pen into the bridge of my nose, close to my right eye.

Red blood, blended with the blue ink from Jerome's pen point, began pouring down my face. The school nurse rushed into the classroom and immediately called for an ambulance. With its siren blaring and its emergency light flashing, the ambulance delivered me to the hospital in minutes.

I was quickly patched up and sent home, where my mother nearly collapsed from shock as she saw my heavily bandaged face. The wound healed rapidly. I remember that Jerome and I remained friends, but I never engaged him again as a dueling opponent.

About 35 years ago,when I was living in Parsippany, N.J., I drove my pre-teen age son and two of his friends to see a baseball game at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.

The traffic was unusually light that day, and it became apparent that we would get to the ball park very early. I decided to take a detour to show my son and his friends my old neighborhood. Our first stop was the P.S. 64 school yard, which I had colorfully described as an athletic paradise during my boyhood.

We were shocked to find an empty school yard surrounded by a tall, barbed wire fence. The yard was littered with broken beer bottles. Several tough-looking teen-agers lounged outside the fence, closely inspecting us as if we might be members of a rival gang.

We quickly departed. For me, the experience had been exceedingly sad. What I had remembered as a boyhood paradise turned out to be like a depressing scene from "The Blackboard Jungle." To my son's two friends, however, my personal image was significantly enhanced by the experience.

To have played and survived as a boy in the P.S. 64 school yard, they figured, I must have been one tough kid.

What Republican reactionaries believe in

I DON'T KNOW WHO IS THE AUTHOR OF THE FOLLOWING IDEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS, SO I CANNOT CREDIT HIM (OR HER). BUT THE SENTIMENTS ARE ESSENTIALLY MY OWN.


To be a Republican reactionary, you have to believe that...

1. Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.

2. Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him; a bad guy when Bush's Daddy made war on him; a good guy when Cheney's Halliburton did business with him; and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find a Bin Laden" diversion.

3. Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is Communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.

4. The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.

5. A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multinational drug corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.

6. The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches, while slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay.

7. If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.

8. A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our longtime allies, then demand their cooperation and money.

9. Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy, but providing health care to all Americans is socialism. Moreover, HMO's and insurance companies have the best interests of the public at heart.

10. Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.

11. A President lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense, but a President lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.

12. Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.

13. The public has a right to know about Hillary's commodity trades, but George Bush's driving record is none of our business.

14. Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host like Rush Limbough. Then it's an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.

15. Supporting "executive privilege" for every Republican ever born, who will be born, or who might be born (in perpetuity).

16. What Bill Clinton did in the 1960's is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the 1980s is irrelevant.

MEMOIR: My grievance against my father

When I was a boy I used to envy my friends whose fathers shared with them a love of sports. Their fathers took them to baseball games, played ball with them, listened to radio broadcasts of the ball games with them and, like their sons, kept up with the news of the sports world.

In contrast, my father regarded athletic activities as a meaningless waste of time. To my father, who nevertheless was a loving parent, the hours I spent playing ball could have been more constructively spent reading a book.

My father's view of sports was more a matter of indifference rather than of fierce opposition. He tolerated my passion for sports as an innocent boyhood aberration that would pass as I matured.(He didn't live long enough, of course, to see me still playing tennis in my early 70s.)

Dad's disinterest in sports reflected his background as a boy raised in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community on Manhattan's Lower East Side. His family, immigrants from Poland, were Hasidim, an insular community that valued learning and intellectual endeavors far more than physicality.

I used to joke that my father didn't know a baseball bat from a tennis racket. He never received a secular education. He attended a yeshiva, a Jewish religious school, until he was about 18. In his day, at least, athletic activities were considered an alien activity in such schools.

In more recent generations, however, the ultra-Orthodox yeshivas have evidently become more Americanized and have apparently added sports to their basic programs of Biblical and Talmudic studies.

In reading Chaim Potok's classic 1982 novel, The Chosen, which deals with a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, I was astonished that the author describes the main character, a teenager, playing baseball.

My father's disinterest in sports was displayed even in his relations with his own friends. As a boy, I recall seeing him once chatting with a group of men who were discussing baseball. He looked bored and frustrated as the other men talked about "the National League and the American League."

With an exasperated look on his face, my father suddenly exclaimed: "National League, American League, lieg in drerd!" In Yiddish, the expression literally means "lay in the earth," or, in effect,"go to hell!" My father's remark, of course, was simply a harmless effort to make his friends change the subject.

Fortunately, I had an Uncle George, my mother's brother,who had a passion for baseball. My mother's family, also immigrants from Eastern Europe, was religiously observant. But my uncle, who was roughly my father's age, never attended a yeshiva. He graduated from a public high school and played baseball as a youth.

He enjoyed attending games at Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds, then the home of the now-defunct New York Giants baseball team. But to his regret, his son, my cousin Herbert, who was my own age, was disinterested in baseball. He showed no enthusiasm about accompanying his father to the ball games.

So Uncle George turned to me for companionship there. Despite my father's bleak view of sports, I thus had an adult who took me to the ball park with him to share his enjoyment of the national pastime.

I don't know whether my own son has grievances against me, but he definitely cannot complain that I did not share his love of sports.

Who's the real flip-flopper? Obama or McCain?

The Republicans and political pundits of all stripes have been dumping on Barack Obama for his decision to opt out of public financing for the general election and to thus avoid the spending limits that come with it. He has abandoned his earlier pledge to preserve the publicly subsidized restrictions on election spending.

The reason is his extraordinary but unexpected success in raising enormous sums through small-bore donations on the Internet.

Obama now rejects public election funding, he says, as a means to contend with the Republicans' ability to raise money through separate party funds and through such sleazy shadow groups known as the 527s. One such group was the notorious Swift Boaters, who were instrumental in Sen. John Kerry's defeat four years ago.

Sen. John McCain has joyfully attacked Obama as a flip-flopper for abandoning the public election financing law which McCain himself helped enact.

But Obama is an amateur as a flip-flopper, compared to McCain. Moreover, Obama's switch on public election financing is certainly not as significant as McCain's ideological reversals.

In his second bid for the Presidency, the Arizona Republican senator, once regarded as a fiscal and social moderate, has embraced the Bush Administration's reactionary economic and social policies.

McCain opposed the Administration's 2001 tax cuts because, he argued, they favored the rich. Now he intends to retain the tax reductions if elected President, and will seek further tax cuts that will benefit high-income tax-payers.

After opposing reductions in capital-gains taxes, McCain voted in favor of them in 2005. The following year he voted to repeal the estate tax, a measure that he had also formerly rejected.

During the 2000 election race, McCain denounced Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, Religious Right movement leaders, as "agents of intolerance." Now he vigorously seeks the support of Evangelical Christian right-wingers.

Once an outspoken critic of corporate influence in Washington, he initially retained a staff of powerful Washington lobbyists to run his Presidential campaign. Only after widespread criticism of the lobbyist's prominent role did McCain reluctantly dump a few of them.

In short, McCain is pandering to the very same special interests that he once opposed so fiercely.

And Obama is a flip-flopper?

"Did you know my father in India?"

During the three years that I have published this blog, I have written extensively about my World War II experiences serving with the Army in India. Those of us who served in what was known as the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations have long been frustrated by the widespread ignorance that there were American soldiers stationed in that part of the world during the war.

I am unaware of any authoritative estimate of the number of U.S. troops that were stationed in the CBI. My best guess is that there were probably about 300,000. In terms of manpower, resources and press coverage, the CBI therefore has taken a historic back seat to the wars waged in Europe and the South Pacific.

Now, as the number of surviving CBI veterans is shrinking, I am discovering that there are countless descendants of deceased CBI vets who are eager to learn about the wartime experiences of their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

I have received dozens of responses to my blog's CBI references making such inquiries about deceased family members. The writers hope to learn whether I might have known their fathers in India. Sadly, I have yet to recognize any of the names provided.

Just the other day, for example, I received an e-mail message from some one identifying herself only as "Connie."

"My father, Robert Vernon Paris, also served in India during WWII," she wrote. "I would love to talk with anyone who knew him."

Obviously, it is very highly unlikely that anyone reading this blog would have known Connie's father. But I have become reluctant to casually rule out the possibility. That's because of my extraordinary experience with a story I told on this blog about a fellow journalist, now deceased, with whom I had traveled to Europe many years ago on a Pentagon press junket.

I was astonished to receive e-mail messages from the man's daughter and son, both inquiring about their father, just as Connie has done about her father. My journalist friend and his wife--both of whom were Soviet Russian emigres--had died when their children were teen-agers.

The son and daughter evidently had only limited knowledge of their parents' backgrounds. My blog posting suggested that I was quite familiar with them. The result of their inquiries was a lengthy phone conversation with the daughter in which I informed them of details about their father's life that were unknown to them.

The situation with Connie's inquiry about her father, Robert Vernon Paris, is far more complicated. Even if I did know her father in India, which was very highly unlikely, I would be unable to respond to her. She is evidently unaware that, unless the person commenting on a blog posting is identified by full name and address, it is impossible for the blogger to get back to the writer. She failed to identify herself more fully.

There are many valuable sources available on the Internet. Google shows at least 80 web sites devoted to the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations. Many contain official historical data. Others are produced by the children of deceased CBI vets as poignant memorials to their fathers.

Connie would have a far better chance of locating some one who knew her father in India through these web sites than through the wartime memoirs that I publish in this modest blog.

I do hope that she will succeed in her search. Time is running out. There will soon be no one around who could possibly have known her father during a war that has become almost forgotten except by those of us who were there.

MEMOIR: My first visit to Florida was no vacation

For the past 17 years, my wife and I have spent the winters in Florida. And 55 years ago, we spent our honeymoon in Miami Beach. But my first visit to Florida was no vacation and certainly not as pleasurable as subsequent visits to the state.

I first came to Florida in April 1943 for a three-month tour of Army Air Corps basic training in Miami Beach, a city that had been virtually taken over by the military. (A similar wartime conversion occurred in Atlantic City, N.J., where another Air Corps basic training center was established.) The resort hotels became "barracks" for the troops, virtually all commercial enterprises in the area were closed, and civilians became a rare species on the streets.

About a week before my arrival in Miami Beach, I had been inducted into the Army in Camp Upton, N.Y. with a group of 18-year olds from my neighborhood in the Bronx. I was separated from most of them because there weren't any empty beds available in their barracks for me and a handful of other inductees. We were assigned to a barracks across the street from the main group.

After a frenzied routine of being tested, inoculated, and given uniforms, the men in the main group were shipped to Camp McCall, N.C. to be trained as glider-infantrymen. When I came home after the war, I learned that they had later been assigned to the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. Sadly, I also learned that almost half of them were killed or wounded in action in Europe.

The handful of us who were unable to get beds with the main group at Camp Upton wound up in Miami Beach. We were greeted by an Army colonel who, with a straight face, announced that we had been "scientifically selected as the cream of the crop for the Air Corps." The colonel was evidently unaware that we had come to Miami Beach only because there had been no beds for us in a barracks at Camp Upton. It was my initial exposure to military nonsense.

Although we were now living in a famed resort area, the Air Corps command did its best to create a harsh military environment. Military discipline was strictly imposed on us. We spent our days doing close-order drill, learning how to use a rifle, doing calisthenics, doing KP and guard duty (I was never sure what we guarding against), and performing all the other elements of Army basic training. When not in training, we were usually restricted to quarters.

As I recall, such Hollywood celebrities as Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable were attending an officer candidate school in Miami Beach while I was there.

Many of the trainees were housed in what had been luxurious hotels. But I was assigned to the Hotel Madrid, a seedy, rat-infested hotel on Fourth Street between Collins Ave. and Ocean Drive. During a visit to the South Beach several years ago, I could not find a trace of it.

I shared a hotel suite with three other trainees. One of them was a farm boy who had never lived in a house with running water. Our suite was carefully inspected almost daily. Unfortunately, the inspections often occurred on days when the farm boy was the last one to use the toilet.

He obviously didn't know, however, that the toilet had to be flushed. The result was that all four of our suite's occupants were punished because of his ignorance. Our punishment was to scrub the hotel lobby floor with a toothbrush, an activity that did nothing to enhance our military capabilities.

A far more meaningful means to prepare us for warfare were regular forced marches, armed with a rifle and carrying a heavy field pack on our backs. We marched northward for at least 10 miles on what was then a barren, empty beach. After the war, the territory developed into what is now Bal Harbour and other upscale, postwar resort communities.

Our destination was a firing range where we practiced the use of various weapons. We began with the Lee-Enfield rifle, a World War I weapon whose fierce recoil made more modern rifles seem so much easier to fire. We bivouacked in pup tents, a problem for me because I had trouble properly wrapping an unopened pup tent around my back pack. On one visit to the bivouac area, a man in an adjoining tent was bitten by a coral snake and died.

As the basic training period ended, we had the option of selecting what the Army delicately calls a "military occupational specialty" before being shipped for advanced training to a more conventional military base. Those with some college education were invited to apply to become aviation cadets and trained as pilots, navigators or bombardiers.

I had only a year of night school college and applied to become an aerial gunner. But I flunked the color blind test and was rejected. I never understood why my inability to distinguish certain shades of blue from green would prevent me from shooting down enemy aircraft.

Before my induction, I had worked briefly as an office clerk at the U.S. Office of War Information. I was an accomplished touch typist, a skill seemingly regarded in the military as almost as vital as firing a rifle. That's probably why I was transferred to the Signal Corps at Camp Crowder, Mo., to be trained as a Teletype operator and cryptographer. (I was never called upon to use those skills while I was stationed overseas; but that's another story.)

I never saw Florida again for another decade. My return to the state was made under far more happy circumstances than my initial say there. This time I came with a bride on a honeymoon, and with no thoughts about close-order drill, rifle ranges, bivouacs, guard duty, KP, and forced marches. I had other matters on my mind.

A personal note

One of the basic principles of blogging is to publish as often as possible in order to maintain a durable presence in the blogosphere. If he has been lucky enough to develop a regular following, the blogger has to demonstrate to his readers that he is still around and kicking.

I have not posted anything on this blog for more than two weeks. And so this note to explain why I have been absent.

The main reason is that, as a snowbird, I have been fully occupied with the annual spring trek from my Florida home to my primary residence in New Jersey. The logistics involved in this move have become increasingly difficult and time-consuming.

And no sooner did I settle down than I had the happy occasion of visiting my son for a couple of days to celebrate my second grandson's bar-mitzvah.

A less cheerful reason for my failure to post on this blog during the past few weeks was being occupied for several days, undergoing a series of medical tests that have become an annual routine as I have grown older. Fortunately, the results have been favorable so far.

To sum up, this octogenarian writer is still active, and I hope that readers of my blog will patiently await my next post.

The last hurrah

I've never been much of a joiner. But two organizations to which I have belonged have had a very special meaning for me. One was the CBI Veterans Association., a national organization of men who served in China, Burma and India during World War II.

The other was an informal group of guys who had been in the 893rd Signal Co. in India and had banded together after the war as a sort of alumni society so that they could keep in touch as civilians. I was an honorary member of the group.

I have been a member of the CBI Veterans Association's local "basha" in south Florida, where I have a winter home. A "basha" is the official designation of the organization's local units. Instead of setting up "posts" like the American Legion and VFW, the CBI vets named their local units after the flimsy, grass-thatched structures that served as U.S. military barracks in India.

For many years, I have attended the basha's luncheon meetings, where we enthusiastically reminisced about our experiences in the CBI. Forced to listen again and again to the same stories from grizzled old men trying to recall our youthful adventures in exotic lands, I question whether my wife--or the other wives in attendance--shared our enthusiasm about the luncheon meetings.

Although I was never assigned to the 893rd Signal Co., my own outfit, the 903rd Signal Co., was stationed together with the 893rd at the same base, the Bengal Air Depot, a U.S. Army base in Titagharh, a village about 60 miles outside Calcutta. We lived and worked together for more than a year, and many of the men in the two outfits became close buddies.

The 903rd had been stationed in Egypt before it arrived in India in the spring of 1944. I had landed in India a few months earlier and was assigned to the company, which was under strength. Over the next year, there was considerable personnel turnover in the outfit as the men with lengthy overseas duty were shipped home and were replaced by newcomers to India.

The 893rd was a far more cohesive group, however, whose members had been together for many years. When the war was over, they decided to create a sort of alumni club so that they could keep in touch. Over the years, they held annual reunions and published a newsletter.

I had many close friends in the 893rd. As a result, I was considered an honorary member and was put on its mailing list. I was invited but never attended its reunions. I always looked forward, however, to the newsletter to learn about the civilian lives of men I had known as fellow soldiers.

For a half a century, I corresponded with several of my 893rd friends, and visited two of them while on business and vacation trips to California. Sadly, I learned of their deaths in the newsletter about ten years ago.

A more cheerful newsletter article reported that another 893rd alumnus, Abe Schumer, whom I had known well, was the father of New York's Senator Chuck Schumer. I found a picture of Abe in a box of wartime photos at home. I mailed the picture to the Senator and was delighted to receive a phone call from his father.

By coincidence, Abe had been planning to visit a former Long Island neighbor who now lived in my New Jersey community. He called me when he arrived at her home, and we had a delightful chat comparing notes on how we had fared since the war so many years ago.

Last year the national CBI organization's quarterly newsletter stopped coming in the mail. Nor did I receive announcements about 893rd Signal Co. reunions and the luncheon-meetings of the national association's Florida basha.

For me, the silence represents the last hurrah for my fellow World War II veterans who served in the CBI. We're now old men, and there are obviously not enough of us still around to maintain our "alumni" groups, which had enabled us to reminisce about our wartime experiences in China, Burma and India. At least, we will no longer be boring our wives with our exotic tales of adventure.

The Palestinians' self-inflicted wounds

Israel is about to observe its 60th anniversary as an independent state. If the Palestinians had accepted the United Nations partition of the former British Mandate territory into separate Arab and Jewish nations, they would also be celebrating an independence anniversary.

Instead, the Palestinians rejected the partition. They immediately went to war, supported by the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, in an attempt to destroy the infant Jewish state. In a historic military miracle, the vastly outnumbered Israelis soundly defeated the Arabs and acquired territory that significantly increased the size of their tiny new state beyond the UN-established borders.

Thus, while the Israelis are celebrating their 60th anniversary of independence, the Palestinians will be observing the anniversary of the UN partition resolution as a day of mourning, which they call the "Nakba," Arabic for "catastrophe."

In a bizarre historic twist, the autocratic-led Palestinians now bear the international image of victimhood, despite the Arab aggression. But Israel, a democratic nation almost wholly composed of refugees, and their descendants, from centuries of persecution in Christian and Muslim lands, is widely defamed as an aggressor occupying foreign territory and and oppressing its inhabitants.

The 1948 war produced hundreds of thousands Palestinian refugees, very few of whom were allowed to settle as citizens in the countries of their former Arab allies. Meantime, equal numbers of Jews who had lived in Arab and other Muslim countries since ancient times, were also forced to flee. They fled primarily to the new state of Israel and were immediately absorbed as citizens. From their ranks have come an Israeli president, defense minister, army chief of staff, and other Israeli notables.

Abba Eban, the late Israeli statesman, once declared that the Palestinian leadership "never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity." Their rejection of the 1948 partition has been followed by other missed opportunities for the creation of Palestinian statehood.

During the next 19 years, Egypt and Jordan ruled the West Bank and Gaza--territories that were allotted to the Palestinians by the UN partition. The Palestinians, apparently content with Arab governance, did not clamor for independence. Those who may have sought independence were presumably ignored or imprisoned.

Israel acquired control over the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 in a war initiated by Egypt, Syria and Jordan. In an extraordinary historic event, the Israelis offered to return virtually all the territory it had captured from the Arabs in return for diplomatic recognition and a peace treaty. But the response, declared by the 22 Arab countries at the famous Khartoum conference, was "no"-- to negotiation, recognition or peace.

During the Clinton Administration, at a conference at Camp David, the Israelis again offered to withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank in return for assurances of military security and recognition of their right to exist. Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, rejected both the offer and an opportunity to make compromises.

Three years ago, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. Foreign financial aid quickly began to pour into the territory, providing an opportunity for the Palestinians to establish a flourishing mini-state that would be a model of responsible and peaceful statehood in case of Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

In a demonstration of what Israel could expect in terms of security and peace in case of further withdrawals, Gaza quickly descended into political chaos and became a base for rocket assaults on neighboring Israeli civilian communities.

Israel has essentially deviated from the historic pattern in which nations that start and lose wars pay the penalty of territorial loss and possible population transfers. After defeating the Arabs in four full-scale wars and suffering prolonged wars of attrition, the Israelis have offered to return territories acquired in warfare in return for peace and security. They have been consistently rebuffed.

Since Hamas took control of Gaza, Israeli civilian populations have been hit by a growing wave of terrorist attacks. In responding to the terrorism, Israel is once again defamed as the "bad guys." In a strange interpretation by the Israel-bashers, perpetrators of terror directed at civilians are presented as "victims," and the targets of such terror are seen as perpetrators reacting "disproportionately."

The suggestion that both Hamas and Israel are to blame for bloodshed is like saying that a would-be victim who fights off a mugger is as responsible for the violence as the assailant.

Are the oldest Americans the "happiest Americans"?

The Associated Press recently reported on an academic study that concludes that "the oldest Americans are the happiest Americans." The study was conducted by a University of Chicago sociologist, Yang Yang, who claims that her research shows that "life gets better in one's perception as one ages." That's because, she says, older people generally have learned to be more content with what they have than younger adults.

The idea that with age comes happiness is supported by a Duke University social scientist, Linda George, who was not involved in the University of Chicago study. AP describes her as "an aging expert." I don't know how old she is.

People tend to think, George says, that "late life is far from the best stage of life, and they don't look forward to it." That dismal view, George claims, should be discarded because of the new research finding that old people are the happiest people.

The University of Chicago study was conducted over a period from 1972 to 2004. Its findings are based on periodic face-to-face interviews with what is described as a nationally representative sample of about 28,000 people, ranging in age from 18 to 88. I don't know how the study handled the issue of widespread depression among elderly people.

Maybe I'm just an 83-year old sourpuss, but I'm highly skeptical about being told categorically that old people are the happiest people in America. I'm also a onetime graduate sociology student (circa 1948), and I'm dubious about grand conclusions that are based on limited but supposedly representative samples.

I've always questioned the validity of social science research that treats so many emotional or psychological matters quantitatively as if they are mathematically measurable. I don't believe that the degree of one's personal happiness can be statistically stated. I wish that I could agree with the Chicago study's finding. In all candor, however, I think its conclusion is nonsense.

How can one generalize on the matter of happiness? I certainly do not enjoy the kind of personal happiness that the University of Chicago researcher claims she found among elderly people. I've had my aortic heart valve and right hip replaced, and I have survived prostate cancer. And, of course, I suffer the general aches and pains that come with geriatric territory and that limit my physical activities.

The best that I can say about my degree of happiness is that I am content with my lot in life. If I had been included in the Chicago study, I would probably have been simply described as "not unhappy."

That is pretty much how I would describe the state of mind of most of the many older people I know. I live among legions of senior citizens. My wife and I live in so-called active adult communities in New Jersey and Florida. One community has about 1,750 homes, the other about 950. Residence is restricted to people who are at least 55 years old and to younger spouses.

The degree of one's happiness, of course, depends on personal circumstances--the state of a person's health, how active is the person's social life, and the nature of a person's family relationships. I am confident that most of my fellow residents would scoff at the simplistic notion that age comes with happiness.

If it were only so!

The Democrats are handing the Presidency to McCain--and woe is us!

The Democratic Presidential primary race has degenerated into such a nasty battle--largely caused by the Clinton camp's unprecedented belligerence--that I fear that Sen. John McCain will win the November election. The Democratic candidate will have run out of steam by then. Many of the party's disaffected members, plus independents, are thus likely to vote for McCain.

Sen. Barack Obama seems to have tied up the Democratic nomination. But I think he is not as electable as some of the candidates who dropped out of the primaries might have been. Nor would Hillary Clinton be any more electable against the Republicans because of the political baggage she carries.

I believe that Senators John Edwards, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd--and perhaps even Governor Bill Richardson--would have been stronger candidates against McCain. Unfortunately, they apparently lacked the "glamour"--and the money--to beat Obama and Clinton for their party's nomination. In short, the media overlooked them because of the phenomenal presence of an African-American and a woman who might become President of the U.S.

The Republican attack machine is already undoubtedly assembling all the ugly stuff that Hillary and her surrogates threw at Obama, planning to regurgitate it during the actual election campaign. With even more venom, we will be hearing once again about Obama's controversial church pastor, his alleged Muslim connections, his neighbor the Weatherman bomb-thrower, his failure to wear a flag pin in his lapel, and his so-called "elitism."

So be ready for another four more years of George W. Bush's disastrous domestic and foreign relations policies! McCain once fancied himself as a maverick who often strayed from the Administration's positions. To gain the Republican nomination, however, he has pandered to the party's right-wing base and has become a Bush clone.

In Iraq, for example, McCain intends to keep U.S. forces at roughly the current level. The situation appears to be growing worse there, however, despite the White House's glowing and absurd claims of the "progress" produced by the highly-touted and amorphous "surge."

Under McCain, there will be no talk of a troop withdrawal in the foreseeable future, even as American casualties continue to soar, billions of dollars keep being wasted, and Muqtada-al-Sadr's pro-Iranian Mahdi army carries out his new threat to wage an all-out "war for liberation" against the U.S. If the situation becomes even more critical, it is conceivable that McCain will want to ship more U.S. troops to Iraq. Such a move would have to lead to consideration of a draft and would provoke widespread political unrest that would rival the Vietnam anti-war movement.

How can we expect a man who didn't know the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims to cope with the convoluted situation in which U.S. troops are performing as referees and policemen in the battles between those two sects, the growing conflicts among factions in each sect, and the infiltration of sectarian militias into what is supposed to be a national army?

And yet McCain echoes the Bush Administration's nonsensical argument that the U.S. presence in Iraq has made our nation "more secure." The truth is just the opposite. Because of our occupation in Iraq, we have been distracted from the war in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas against the Al-Qaeda organization, which was responsible for 9/11 and still represents a genuine threat to national security. Meantime, the nation's defense capabilities have been so weakened that our generals worry whether the U.S. is capable of contending with a new military challenge.

And in the midst of the most serious economic crisis in recent history, what can we expect from a new President who casually reveals that he is ignorant about economic matters. He has already foolishly declared that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, made amidst soaring Federal expenditures and a ballooning national debt, will be retained.

To bolster has right-wing credentials, McCain talks again about privatizing Medicare and shows little interest in the universal medical care issue. He also now seems obsessive of the so-called "values" social issues-- the "pro-family" and "pro-life"causes that did not figure so prominently in his agenda before the Republican primary race.

Worst of all, McCain has embraced the fanatical belief that the free market can cure any economic problem, minimizing the need for government intervention in the current economic crisis. That is, if you are not Bear Stearns.

Fortunately, a Democratic-controlled Congress is likely to be elected despite a McCain triumph. I hope it can prevent the blunders and excesses of another Republican in the White House.

MEMOIR: The games we played

I am amused when I hear suburban mothers talk about having to make "play dates" for their children. There evidently aren't enough kids on their streets or neighborhoods with whom their own children can play. So arrangements must be made to obtain playmates.

I then remember what my childhood was like on the teeming streets in the Bronx during the mid-1930s and early 1940s. The center of my boyhood play was the single block on Clarke Place, located on a hill that extended eastward from Walton Ave. to the Grand Concourse. As I recall, there were at least eight five-story apartment houses on that street. I would estimate that each building contained an average of 75 apartments.

This meant that there were about 600 families on that single street. The result was an abundant supply of play mates of both genders and a wide range of ages. There was no need for mothers to arrange "play dates." One quick look out of my kitchen window would immediately inform me whether there were friends outside available to play with.

Despite the absence of conventional athletic facilities in our neighborhood, sports dominated my childhood. My friends and I had an unusual assortment of games that were suitable for a narrow, hilly street with parked cars on either side and a steady stream of traffic. Aside from auto traffic, we had to contend with peddlers on horse-drawn wagons selling milk, fruit, vegetables, and other merchandise. We were thus forced to accommodate ourselves to piles of horse manure as we played.

We were very imaginative in devising games derived from baseball. The street was usually crammed with people walking or standing on the sidewalks, and hundreds--perhaps thousands--of vulnerable glass windows and doors providing a backdrop for our game. Obviously, we could not play regular baseball with a hard ball. It was acceptable, however, for two boys to simply play catch with a standard baseball if our adult neighbors were not inconvenienced.

Our most popular game was called "stickball," using a broom stick and a rubber ball in place of a bat and a regulation baseball. The ball was either a pink-colored "Spaldeen," a brand-name ball manufactured by the Spalding sports goods company, or a used tennis ball with the felt cover removed.

A sewer-covering in the middle of the street served as home plate. First base and third base were marked off in chalk in empty areas between parked cars. In an emergency, a car itself would serve as the base. Second base might be another sewer-cover, if it was located far enough up the street from home plate. If not, it would also be outlined in chalk.

Our idea of a power-hitter was a boy who could hit the ball the length of at least two sewers. In terms of distance, that was our equivalent of a hit into the bleachers of a regular baseball field. But with no physical barriers to hold him back, a speedy outfielder was expected to catch the ball on the fly.

The police considered stickball to be a nuisance, if not a hazard for innocent pedestrians. We were therefore frequently harassed by the cops who tried to stop our game. We handled that threat by posting look-outs--boys considered too young and unskilled for our level of play--at the end of the street to alert us. If cops were spotted, the game was temporarily halted.

Because we were on a hill, we usually played stickball without pitching. We often competed with teams from neighboring streets. When we played them on our block, we enjoyed a competitive advantage against opponents unaccustomed to playing on a hill. Of course, we were handicapped when we had to play away games on level streets, especially if the opponents insisted on playing with pitching.

Our stickball teams normally ranged in size from four to as many as eight players, depending on the number of kids looking for a game. When we didn't have enough men for stickball, we played alternative games with such quaint names as box ball, triangle, punch ball, baseball-off-the-wall, and curb ball. These were primitive approximations of conventional baseball, depending on the architectural features of our street and its buildings.

These games were based on the amount of space on the street and the number of available players. Triangle, for example, was played across the narrow street with two contestants and two imaginary bases. One boy slapped a rubber ball with his bare hand, trying to avoid the reach of his opponent. The opponent's failure to catch the ball was the equivalent of a hit in conventional baseball.

We also played games that were our primitive versions of basketball and football. The nearest regulation basketball court was about 10 blocks away at the local school yard. The kids living closest to the school yard monopolized the school's basketball court. Rarely if ever did those of us from Clarke Place get a chance to use the court during non-school hours.

We devised our own basketball game, using the lowest rung of an apartment house's fire escape. That was the "basket" and the sidewalk was the "court." Our "basketball" was the same type of small rubber ball that we used to play stickball.

We had two games derived from football. We naturally played without tackling, so shoulder pads and helmets were unnecessary. We did, however, play with a regular football. In place of a tackle, the runner would be "brought down" with a two-hand touch. But blocking was allowed, and as a skinny kid I would frequently have to contend with guys considerably heavier than me when I played on the line. I preferred playing as a wide receiver. I was a fast runner, and I would rush down (or up) the street, trying to outrun the defensive back to receive a pass.

We played with as many as six men on a team. A run around end often required the ball carrier
to sprint on to the sidewalk, contending with baby carriages and assorted on-lookers. I still recall one incident in which the runner smashed his knee on an apartment house wall while on an end-around play. It was a brutal collision, and the player was rushed to a hospital. As an adult, he was still sufficiently disabled because of the accident to be rated for limited service when the Army drafted him during World War II.

When we didn't have enough players for touch football, we played a game called "association" with a rubber ball. (I never knew the origin of the name.) The objective was the same as in regular football--i.e., to get the ball across a designated goal line.

The goal line was usually a sewer-cover. As few as two men on a side could play this game. It was simply one man throwing the rubber ball to his team mate, who would try to dodge the defending opponent and run across the goal line without being tagged.

As I look back on these boyhood experiences, I wonder whether the young boys who now require "play dates" have as much fun as my childhood friends and I did in those ancient days, playing primitive street games that substituted for conventional sports.

MEMOIR: My father's Hasidic family

I've always boasted that my paternal grandfather, Rabbi Samuel Reichek, was probably one of the first Hasidim to settle in the U.S. In 1906, he brought his family to this country from the Czarist Russian-ruled region of Poland, arriving aboard the S.S. Fatherland after a brief stay in Antwerp, Belgium. My father, the second oldest of his four sons, was nine years old.

The Hasidim are an ultra-Orthodox Jewish mystical sect whose religious practices display far more emotional fervor than other Orthodox Jews. Their men wear beards, black hats and coats, and their rites are marked by dancing, singing and hearty consumption of alcoholic beverages. Hasidism has been described as being "unique in its focus on the joyful observance of God's commandments."

My grandfather founded and headed what was undoubtedly the first Hasidic American synagogue, Beth Hasidim de Palen (House of Hasidim from Poland). It was originally housed on the second floor of a tenement apartment house on Manhattan's Lower East Side. To my knowledge, the congregation no longer exists.

There are many dozens of Hasidic sects, organized largely on the basis of East European geography and on the leadership of individual 18th and 19th century charismatic rabbis. My grandfather belonged to the Gerer Hasidim. The name stemmed from the Polish home town, Gora Kalwaria, of the sect's founder. According to family lore, the Gerer Rebbe (the sect's leader) personally urged my grandfather to go to the U.S. to establish a Hasidic presence in New York.

My grandfather, whom I never knew, would probably not appreciate my boast about his role as a pioneer Hasid in this country. I do not know of any one in my family who still has links to the Hasidic community. My father, Meyer (Yehiel Mayer) Reichek, was estranged from my grandfather after my father quit a New York religious seminary at the age of 18. My father wanted to adopt a secular life far removed from the provincial Hasidic lifestyle.

My paternal family came from Ostrow (also known as Ostrava), a small Polish town in the province of Lomza. My grandfather, the son of a lumber dealer, was a highly regarded Talmudic scholar. He was ordained as a rabbi but never earned a livelihood as a clergyman.

My grandmother, Gussie (Gelya) Reichek, was born in Grodno, a town that was also in the former Czarist Russian-ruled region of Poland; it is now in the independent country of Belarus. Her maiden name was Kuchiniak. She had a brother who decided to "Americanize" the family name when he came here. He was not very imaginative. He changed his surname to Cohen. Grandma also had several sisters in this country, but I never knew them very well.

Grandma's father was an adherent of another Hasidic sect, the Alexander Hasidim. He was a ritual slaughterer, the religious Jewish functionary who butchers kosher meat. Arranging a marriage to a man with my grandfather's impressive religious credentials was considered a social coup. The couple never met until the night of their wedding.

The newlyweds settled in the groom's home town, Ostrow. My grandfather had a pragmatic, older brother named Mayer, who recognized that Talmudic scholarship was insufficient for the support of a family. He was a prosperous businessman who staked my grandfather and his bride to a venture producing vegetable oil. When asked what my family did in Europe, I've jokingly boasted that they were in the "oil business," without mentioning the "vegetables."

My grandfather's brother and his children never migrated to the U.S. I learned only in recent years that some of his offspring perished during the Holocaust. At least one grandson survived the Nazi death camps and settled in Israel. A grand-daughter, who survived as a wartime laborer in Soviet Uzbekistan, eventually came to the U.S. It was through her that I became aware of the tragic fate of some of my relatives.

Unlike his brother Mayer, my grandfather had no interest in business. My grandmother, however, displayed great talent as a businesswoman. Almost alone, she successfully ran the vegetable-oil business. Meantime, my grandfather continued to devote himself to prayer and Talmudic studies.

When the family settled in New York a century ago, this occupational pattern was repeated. Grandma ran a tiny dairy store while raising five children. Her husband was primarily occupied with his religious endeavors. Their marriage was evidently an unhappy one, and they separated about 20 years after arriving in the U.S. I do not know whether they were ever formally divorced.

In the mid-1930s, my grandfather grew discontented with what he regarded as a lack of religious piety in this country and decided to move to Palestine so that he could die in the Holy Land. My father helped my grandfather board a ship and never saw him again.

My grandfather died in 1950, separated from his family, in a Hasidic home for the aged in Jerusalem. My daughter was born four years later. Her Hebrew name, Avigayil Shoshana (my grandfather's first name, which he never used, was Abraham) is a memorial to the paternal grandfather I never knew.

The nightmare in Iraq

Ever since I started this blog in 2005, I have been lambasting the Bush Administration for the Iraq invasion and occupation.

As the war goes into its sixth year, I have become more frustrated and angrier as I see the disastrous results of the monumental Bush blunder: the unnecessary death of at least 4,000 brave American soldiers; the waste of a trillion or more dollars that could have been spent to bolster Medicare and Social Security and to cope with other domestic problems; the weakening of American military capabilities; the serious damage to the nation's international prestige and diplomatic power; the increased threat of Islamic terrorism because of the military diversion from fighting Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Iraq's emergence as a new terrorist breeding ground for radical Muslim extremists.

Despite this nightmare, President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney continue to claim that we are "making progress and making sure that we achieve victory" in Iraq. Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, insists that "we are succeeding...and are on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism."

But there is no victory and success in sight in Iraq. The U.S. invasion and occupation have proven to be a disaster.

The Administration and its supporters argue that we must remain in Iraq to help the country defend itself against a foreign enemy, presumably Iran. With an Iraqi Shiite regime now in power, however, that claim is absurd. The American presence in Iraq has actually increased Shiite Iran's influence in the country. For Iraqi's majority Shiite population, Iran is now a Shiite ally, not an enemy. For most Shiites, the U.S. occupation force is the enemy.

Al-Maliki, Iraq's U.S.-backed leader, recently gave Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a public, red-carpet welcome on his visit to Baghdad. But when Bush, Cheney, McCain and other American political dignitaries visit Baghdad, they have to arrive secretly, protected by a military shield. Iran, incidentally, is now supplying the bulk of electric power to Basra, Iraq's second largest city, and to much of the surrounding southern region.

The absurdity of the American presence in Iraq is underscored by our role playing referee in the string of civil wars plaguing the country. Sunnis, who as a minority ruled Iraq for centuries, are battling the Shiite regime while rival Shiite militias are fighting each other and the al-Maliki regime.

Meantime, Sunni insurgents continue to war against the U.S. occupation forces. In a bizarre tactical move, the U.S. has begun to pay some Sunni tribes to desert the anti-U.S. insurgency campaign and to fight their fellow Sunnis. But American troops, unable to distinguish friends from foes, recently attacked and killed Sunni gunmen who are on our payroll.

Such is the nightmare that is Iraq.

Sen. McCain, on a recent visit to Iraq, claimed that Iran is training and equipping Al-Qaeda fighters and shipping them to Iraq. Until Sen. Joe Lieberman, who accompanied McCain on his visit, corrected him, McCain was apparently unaware that there is deep-rooted religious hostility between the fundamentalist Shiites of Iran and Al-Qaeda, the extremist Sunni Muslim movement based in Afghanistan and the neighboring Pakistani frontier provinces.

I would not be surprised if President Bush himself and some of his top advisers did not know the difference between Muslim Sunnis and Shiites when the Iraq invasion began.

There is a small insurgent group within Iraq that calls itself "Al-Qaeda in Mesopatemia." But American military commanders regard it as a homegrown force led by foreign Arabs and not a major threat. The "Al-Qaeda" name is being adopted by indigenous terrorist groups in various Arab territories. It has evidently become a Muslim terrorist franchise name--like Kentucky Fried Chicken in the fast-food business.

The Bush Administration's much-touted "surge"--shipping about 30,000 additional troops to Iraq last year--reduced violence for a few months. But both the attacks on U.S forces and sectarian strife between rival militias are now on the rise again. Even Baghdad's Green Zone, the capital city's fortress-like, heavily defended neighborhood that houses U.S. military headquarters and the U.S. embassy, is now under attack from the Mahdi army, the major anti-American Shiite militia.

Most important, al-Maliki and his fundamentalist Shiite supporters have yet to meet U.S. demands that they bridge political divisions and establish a "national unity" government. Bush's goal to "bring American-style democracy" to Iraq has proven to be a joke.

In short, the Bush Administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq has been a dismal failure. The most bitter aspect of that failure is the nonsensical insistence by the Bush Administration that the Iraq war has made the U.S. safer from terrorist attacks. Actually, we and other Western democracies are now more vulnerable to Islamic terrorism because Iraq has been turned into a recruitment center and training ground for anti-American Muslim extremists. Iraq has assumed a role that was Afghanistan's two decades ago when there was a Islamic struggle against the invasion by the former Soviet Union and its subsequent brutal occupation.

To justify the war, the Administration--and particularly Vice-President Cheney--continues to imply that there was a link between the 9/11 attack and Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi leader, disregarding evidence that this is a myth.

So is there a solution to the Iraq nightmare?

I see no alternative but to withdraw the approximate 160,000 U.S. troops from Iraq. Obviously, because of logistics problems, this would have to be a phased withdrawal. But we can begin to deploy them out in such a fashion that we are no longer operationally involved in refereeing a civil war and training Iraqi troops to defend their country against both local anti-government forces and the phantom foreign enemy, Shiite Iran.

ABOUT ME: A mini bio (continued)--My mother's family

I am a first-generation American. Both my parents were born in the former Czarist Russian Empire and were brought to this country as children more than a century ago. I have always felt that my personal link to the immigrant experience has profoundly affected my love for America and my appreciation of our nation's very unique nature.

I never knew my grandfathers, but both my grandmothers lived long enough to have seen me grow from infancy until I was a married man with a child of my own. I am most familiar with the background of my mother's family because my maternal grandmother, a widow, lived with my parents when I was a boy. I was thus well exposed to tales of the "old country," since Grandma often discussed her harsh life before coming to this country with me.

She and her husband, Chaim (Herman) Rabinowitz, arrived in New York City with three small children in 1903 aboard the S.S. Nordam. The ship had sailed from Rotterdam in Holland. I never learned the details of what must have been a very arduous journey from the family's rural home in the Belorussian province of Minsk to the Dutch port.

The ship's manifest, which a cousin of mine retrieved from the immigration archives, shows that my grandfather arrived with $110. Only one of the 27 individuals on the same page of the manifest is shown to have landed in this country with more money. The manifest listed my grandfather's age as 34.

My mother, who died in 1989, was about five years old when the family arrived here. She had an older brother and two younger sisters, one of whom was born in the U.S. On the family's arrival, the immigration officials converted my mother's Russian Jewish first name, "Chashkeh," into Katherine. They bestowed the similarly non-Jewish name of Mary on my grandmother, whose Jewish name was "Merkeh," a Yiddish nickname for Miriam.

My mother's father died in 1907, only four years after the family landed here. My mother always said that she could not remember him. When he married Grandma, he moved to her home to work for his father-in-law, Moshe Aharon Tsivin, who was a miller. I don't know where my grandfather came from nor how he met my grandmother.

The mill was located outside a village my grandmother always called Puzhets. It was apparently the Yiddish name for Puchovici. The family lived among the local peasants, far removed from a Jewish community. Grandma had two sisters and five brothers. Because of their isolation, their father employed a live-in tutor to educate his children.

The education was aimed primarily at the sons, but my grandmother evidently sat in on their classes, for she was literate in Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian. She was probably also familiar with the Polish and Lithuanian spoken by some of her peasant neighbors. Moreover, she was undoubtedly far more learned in the Bible than most East European Jewish women of her generation.

Sadly, however, she never learned to speak English, despite living in the U.S. for about a half-century. As a single mother of four children, she apparently had little opportunity to learn the language. And there was little pressure to learn English because she lived in neighborhoods where everyone with whom she came into contact spoke Yiddish.

According to family lore, my maternal grandfather came to this country to escape imprisonment. A Czarist Russian government quota specified how many Jews were allowed to live in the district in which his father-in-law's mill was located. My grandfather exceeded the authorized number.

A Jewish informer eventually notified the authorities about his presence, and he was put in jail. He was released only after his father-in-law bribed the appropriate Czarist bureaucrat, and he agreed to leave Puzhets--and, indeed, all of Russia. He apparently had no desire to return to his own home town.

Financed by his father-in-law, he brought his family to New York City, where they settled in East Harlem. He went to work for his wife's two older brothers, Sam and Ike Sivin, who were prosperous men's clothing manufacturers. (They had simplified the family surname by substituting an "S" for the "ts" sound.)

My grandfather died in Mt. Sinai Hospital nearly four years after arriving here. According to his death certificate, the cause of death was cardiac failure. The certificate also identifies his occupation as an "operator"--of a sewing machine, I assume.

After his death, my grandmother's brothers supported her and her children until the children were old enough to work. After graduating from high school, my mother went to work for her uncles as a bookkeeper and her brother as a traveling salesman. A younger sister took on my mother's job after I was born. Another sister, who had been an invalid, died in childhood.

Two decades later, when my parents were married, my father--who had also gone to work for the uncles--met a man who told him that he came from Puzhets, the Sivin family's home town. When my father told this to my grandmother and described the man, Grandma recognized him as the informer responsible for her late husband's imprisonment in Russia.

I do not know whether she ever sought revenge against the man. Perhaps the opportunity to find a new life in America was far more satisfying than the desire for revenge.

(to be continued)

Advice for Hillary and Obama: Play nice

The Democratic primary battle between Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama is becoming increasingly ugly. Unless they begin to campaign in a less poisonous fashion, they will commit political suicide and ensure the election of Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate.

Despite polls showing that both Hillary and Obama now lead McCain, I am convinced that McCain will win the Presidential election unless the two Democratic candidates tone down their personal attacks upon each other. By November, the poisonous charges they are now exchanging will have been more fully absorbed by the electorate.

The behavior of both the Clinton and Obama camps is a good argument that maybe the Democrats ought to return to the venerable process of picking candidates in smoke-filled rooms during the Presidential conventions. In those days, the dirty stuff rarely emerged in time to affect the voters, particularly independents or the undecided.

As the Democratic primary campaign becomes more bitter, the Republican attack-dogs are collecting all the dirty stuff that the Clinton and Obama camps are throwing at each other. What better ammunition could they have for the November election?

The Democratic primaries are especially pathetic because the policy views of the two candidates are virtually indistinguishable. Moreover, when you compare the abilities of both Hillary and Obama to the White House's current occupant, there's no doubt that both candidates are eminently qualified to be President.

Hillary and Obama have cheapened the primary campaign by trying to tear each other down. The issues should be which one makes the more forceful argument against McCain and the more penetrating and meaningful critique of the Bush Administration's blunders.

Perhaps my view of the primary race is a bit of sour grapes. I would have preferred Al Gore or John Edwards as the Democratic candidate. Or Senators Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Joe Biden of Delaware. I have to hold my nose watching Hillary and Obama go at each other. Their antics, I feel, are making McCain's election inevitable.

I'm reminded of my grandmother's impatience while she watched her small grandchildren playing too boisterously for her taste. "Play nice!" she would demand. I would give the same advice to Hillary and Obama.

The miracles of the Internet--and its dark side

I never cease to be amazed by the miracles of the Internet. Last week, for example, I received an e-mail message from some one describing herself as "a young researcher living in Manhattan who's desperately curious about [a] recent purchase."

The lady had bought what she describes as a "unique, vintage set of scissors and letter opener." She said she is trying to learn the set's manufacturer. All she knows is that the set was originally purchased from Goldsmith Bros., a New York office supplies store that was once the nation's largest retailer of stationery products. It has been out of business for many decades.

"If you know of anything that could help, such as the names of some manufacturing companies Goldsmith Bros. may have purchased from, or the location of some contemporaneous Goldsmith Bros. catalogs," she wrote, "I would genuinely, sincerely appreciate the help."

What does all this have to do with me?

"I Googled around a bit," she explained, "and one of your old blog entries came up." She referred to a story I posted nearly two years ago about having had a job as an office boy with RKO-Radio Pictures' publicity department in the early 1940s. The story told that the highlight of my brief "career" was delivering a bottle of whiskey to Lucille Ball in her Manhattan hotel room. At the time, the famed actress was visiting New York to promote a new movie.

In the piece, I mentioned that I had previously worked for Goldsmith Bros. for several months, starting out as a 16-year old delivery boy and being promoted to shipping clerk and--after graduating from high school--becoming a salesman.

That was it!

I do not understand how the lady seeking information about her vintage set of scissors and letter-opener connected with me. Out of curiosity, I checked Google and found no reference to Goldsmith Bros. under my name and no listing for the now-defunct store. But her inquiry vividly demonstrates how the Internet has become an extraordinary source for information-seekers. In this case, unfortunately, the lady has yet to obtain the information she seeks.

The miraculous nature of the Internet, however, has a dark side: the loss of personal anonymity. Even people who are unfamiliar with computers and the Internet are vulnerable to the exposure of sensitive personal information.

Out of curiosity and possible boredom, I have gone to Google and other search engines, typing in names of old acquaintances with whom I have lost touch just to learn what has happened to them. In a few cases, I was saddened to learn that the subject was no longer alive.

On a couple of occasions, however, I have been startled to find personal and embarrassing information about the subject. The person would be shocked to know how such information has become easily accessible to the public because of the Internet.

One case involved a man I casually knew as a boy. We grew up in the same apartment house but were not friends, largely because he was several years younger than me. Indeed, I do not recall that he had any play mates. He was a shy, reclusive kid who was regarded by the neighbors as a "Momma's boy." He was an exceptionally brilliant boy, disinterested in athletics but consumed in school and books. Now I was curious to know whatever happened to him.

I typed his name into Google and learned that he had become a psychiatrist. His surname is an uncommon one so I was confident that I had the right person. A legal document, derived from the public record, came up in my search, disclosing that his license to practice medicine had been revoked. No reason was provided. Another item revealed that he had continued practicing medicine without a license and was heavily fined. Again, no explanation. There were no subsequent references to indicate his current status.

I had a similarly disturbing experience when I typed in the unusual family name of some one I knew in school. Among the items that showed up was a reference from the public record to a woman bearing the same surname. I do not know whether she is related to my former school mate. Surprisingly, my search uncovered a case that resembled that of the other man.

The woman had been a social worker employed by a state welfare agency. She was dismissed from her job and had her professional license revoked because of what the public record showed was "an improper relationship with a client."

I wonder whether the two people I've written about are aware that their private records are so accessible to the public. The Internet is indeed a miraculous institution, enabling those seeking information about virtually any subject to satisfy their search so easily. As I have seen, however, the price can be the loss of personal privacy and anonymity.

But don't get me wrong. I am not advocating restrictions on the operation of Internet search engines. The Internet has become an integral element in my day-to-day activities, and I would be lost without it.

As a blogger, I regularly reveal personal, often sensitive information about myself, and I have not worried that it is so easily accessible to strangers. Perhaps I have unknowingly sought and found an inexpensive substitute for psychoanalysis.

MEMOIR: Ballistic missiles,Circassian concubines and Lt. Rabinowitz of the Turkish army

For a decade during the 1950s and early 1960s I was the military affairs correspondent in Washington for Business Week magazine and other McGraw-Hill publications. This was a period in which the Korean war was winding down and the Vietnam war was beginning. So I never covered a shooting war overseas.

But there was the Cold War with the Soviet Union, which periodically threatened to turn into a full-scale shooting war. To publicize the nation's military readiness, the Defense Dept. frequently conducted press junkets for Pentagon reporters to visit U.S. troops based abroad.

One of those trips took me to Turkey, where there was a U.S. air base at Eskisehir in the northwestern part of the country. There were also secret U.S. sites scattered elsewhere in Turkey, housing nuclear-tipped Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles aimed at strategic Soviet targets.

In 1962, the Cuban missile crisis came close to producing a catastrophic exchange of nuclear missiles. War was averted by a diplomatic deal, never officially confirmed in detail, in which the Soviets agreed to remove their ballistic missiles from Cuba and the Kennedy Administration, newly installed in Washington, agreed to withdraw the Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

About a dozen Pentagon reporters were in my group visiting Turkey, where we spent more than a week inspecting military bases and interviewing both U.S. and Turkish defense officials. We did, however, have a few free days in Istanbul to play tourists.

We stayed at the magnificent Istanbul Hilton Hotel overlooking the Bosphorus. The Turkish government tourism agency assigned a guide to show us around the city. She was a gorgeous young woman, fluent in English, who inadvertently gave us an interesting bit of Turkish history.

I don' t remember how the subject came up, but she told us that she was a Circassian, one of Turkey's ethnic minorities. They are a Muslim people who originated in the Caucasus region. Most of them had fled over the centuries to Turkey to escape Russian invasions.

But at the same time, the Turks had made their own incursions into Circassian territory. The aim was to kidnap local girls for the royal Ottoman harems. Voltaire, Lord Byron and other European literary figures had written about the erotic charm of Circassian women, commenting on their legendary beauty, spirit and elegance, qualities that made them desirable as concubines.

Our guide, whose name I do not recall, possessed all those charming attributes. That's obviously why she shows up in many of the photos I took of the Haghia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi Palace, and other famed Istanbul landmarks.

She advised us about restaurants and night clubs to visit during our free evenings--on our own, of course, without her company. A friend of mine and I decided to dine at one of the establishments she recommended. The food was wonderful, but the restaurant's bizarre floor show was not conducive to a hearty appetite.

During our stay in Turkey, the country was having one of its periodic conflicts with neighboring Greece. The floor show featured a stand-up "comedian" whose routine produced raucous laughter from the audience. It consisted of improvisations on the theme of Turks "cutting off the balls of the Greeks and stuffing them in their mouths." We received an English translation from a man at an adjoining table who observed that we were failing to understand and to appreciate the "humor."

The restaurant was within walking distance of the Hilton. But when we left the restaurant, it was no longer light outside, and we were unfamiliar with the way back to the hotel. The streets were poorly lit, and we were unable to find a taxi. We began to look for an English-speaking person who might give us directions.

We finally found a young man who spoke excellent English. He volunteered to walk with us back to the hotel. It was only about a 10 minute walk, and along the way he told us that he had been a lieutenant in the Turkish army. He had been stationed in Korea as part of the Turkish/United Nations force allied with the U.S. army. He said that he had polished his English through his regular contact with the American troops.

When we reached out hotel, we invited him to join us for a drink and asked him his name. I was stunned when he said that his name was "Rabinowitz." That is my mother's maiden name and a very common Russian Jewish family surname.

I asked how the ex-lieutenant's family wound up in Turkey. He explained that his grandparents had left Odessa, a Russian Black Sea port, planning to go to the U.S. or another Western country to escape Russian persecution. As they sailed into the Bosphorus, his pregnant grandmother went into labor.

The family was allowed ashore, where she gave birth to a child. Instead of continuing their voyage, the family decided to remain in Turkey. In subsequent years, the family prospered in the textile machinery business, and they assimilated comfortably into the local society.

For centuries, Turkey has had a small community of Sephardic Jews, descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th Century, who had found a tolerant refuge in the Ottoman Turkish Empire. They still bear Spanish names and speak Ladino, a language with medieval Spanish roots. With a name like Rabinowitz, my new friend was obviously not Sephardic. Jews from Russia and other central and eastern European countries are known as Ashkenazim and speak Yiddish or German.

The differences between the two Jewish cultural groups seriously affected the ex-lieutenant's social life. He was a single man and was eager to marry a Jewish girl. To his sorrow, the local Sephardic community was exceedingly clannish and frowned on marriages with their fellow Jews, the Ashkenazim.

In his search for a Jewish mate, the ex-lieutenant flew almost every weekend to Tel Aviv, which is relatively close to Istanbul. Indeed, there was an El Al office across the street from the Hilton Hotel. My new friend was enjoying an active social life during his visits to Israel, he told us, but he had yet to meet the "right woman."

I assumed that our lovely Circassian tourist guide was unmarried, but it never entered my mind to try to fix him up with her.

Octogenarian's third anniversary

As I begin my fourth year producing this blog, the masthead statement, introducing myself as a man who has "recently turned 80," is out of date. But I do not intend to make a annual public ritual to update my advanced age.

I believe my blog is unique because it is a mishmash of autobiography and political opinion. This may have turned off some readers seeking some consistency in subject matter. But it has probably produced a wider range of visitors whom I might not have otherwise attracted.

I have always been curious about how visitors discover my blog's existence. When I began publishing it, my big fear was that the blog would be lost and unread in the vast and mysterious blogosphere. I am pleased that my blog has attracted much more traffic than I ever anticipated. Only recently, however, did I begin to appreciate that a primary source of viewers is Google and other Internet search engines into which the reader taps in an inquiry.

The search engines have referred an extraordinary variety of people to my blog. Many have responded with interesting and often provocative comments that make blogging such a fascinating endeavor.

Among these readers: a second cousin I do not know; a New York Times editor who is writing a history of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx; the children of a former Soviet air force colonel, now deceased, who had defected to the U.S. and become my friend; former professional colleagues; fans of Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable; the grandson of one of my college professors; World War II veterans who, like me, served in India; Indian residents familiar with places I knew in their country; a former Slovak partisan who had fought the Germans; admirers and critics of Rachel Carson, a pioneer in the environmental movement; onetime college classmates; an American living in Scotland; a retired English teacher in Paris; and a Dutch farmer who grows eggplants .

I have even received a comment in Polish, a language I do not know. Surprisingly, the writer bore my surname. So I am eager to have his message translated. I do not know of any relatives in Poland, my father's birthplace. The few I was aware of perished in the Holocaust.

A program called SiteMeter is installed on this blog. It measures the number of visits to the blog and identifies the general location of the visitors and the blog pages that they viewed. (Names and addresses are not shown.) Last year the monthly average was about 1,500 visits to the blog and more than 2,000 pages viewed.

Two years ago I posted a piece entitled "My Sex Life in the Army." I estimate that at least 20% of my blog's visitors still go to that page. Virtually all of them are from foreign countries. I assume that most of them seek an erotic charge from a pornographic account of army sex life.

I probably disappoint them because I treat the subject not as a sexual participant but as an observer, functioning in the dispassionate manner in which journalists are obliged to operate.

Republican nonsense about national security

The Republicans are repeating the nonsense that twice helped propel George W. Bush into the White House: that the Democrats are ill-suited to protect the nation militarily and are prepared "to surrender to terrorism." Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate for the Presidency, is already playing the tune about the Democrats' "weakness on defense."

There is an extraordinary irony in the Republican effort to exploit the fear of terrorism by denigrating the Democrats' stance on military preparedness. During Bush's two terms in office, U.S. military capabilities have been so weakened that top-ranking military brass have warned that we may be incapable of responding effectively against any new military threat.

The reason, of course, is Iraq. The 2003 invasion was made despite the skepticism of many generals who did not regard Saddam Hussein's regime as an imminent threat to national security. They regarded the Iraq invasion as a serious distraction from the far more important war against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. As the skeptics feared, the prolonged Iraq war demands have strained U.S. military readiness.

Meantime, what had been a triumph in Afghanistan has escalated into such bitter warfare that the U.S. has found it necessary to call upon its NATO allies to send troops for support. The Taliban regime has regained its strength and much of its authority in the country, enabling Al-Qaeda to become a bigger terrorist threat.

I often wonder about the wisdom of our foreign-affairs policy-makers. The Taliban, which has provided a harbor for Al-Qaeda for so many years, is partially an American creation. It is an outgrowth of the Afghan forces which received substantial U.S. support in their battle against the Soviet Russian invaders. In our preoccupation with ending the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, we failed to anticipate that the Taliban would become a radical Islamic regime allied with anti-American terrorists.

To counter the Republican nonsense about the alleged Democratic weakness on defense issues, the Democrats would very wise to select as a running mate for Sen. Hillary Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama a vice-presidential candidate who has impressive military credentials and who has been an outspoken Iraq war critic. Two obvious candidates: Gen. Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander, who has political aspirations, and Sen. James Webb, Virginia's Democratic senator who was once a Republican Secretary of the Navy and is a former Marine officer.

ABOUT ME: A mini bio (continued)

(I have published many posts on this blog under the title "Memoirs," in which I related various experiences in my life. I will try to avoid repeating myself in this chronological series of autobiographical sketches. Like others of my vintage, I have a tendency to repeat myself. It is an unfortunate habit that goes with geriatric territory.)
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During the late 1920s, when I was about three years old, my family moved from East Harlem in Manhattan to a five-story apartment house in the Bronx, where my parents continued to live for the next four decades. The building, which was at least 20 years old, was located on the corner of the Grand Concourse and Clarke Place, a block north of 169th Street.

The new apartment had two bedrooms, a living room/dining room, one bathroom, and a tiny kitchen. My maternal grandmother and my young, unmarried aunt shared one bedroom. I was an only child and slept in my parents' bedroom. After my aunt married, I moved into Grandma's bedroom. When I was about 10, I asked to move out of it so that I could enjoy "more privacy."

At that point, what had been a dining room was transformed into a living room containing a convertible couch, which served as my bed. Actually, it was Grandma who now had more privacy. But it had seemed improper to me that a growing boy should be sleeping in the same bedroom as his grandmother. I continued to use the window sill in my parents' bedroom as my "desk" where I did my homework.

Virtually all our neighbors in the building, which had about 90 apartments, lived in similarly crammed conditions. Many of the apartments had only a single bedroom, and some families had as many as four or more children of varying ages and genders.

I recall that there was one family in the building who were show business people. The father was a pianist in a dance band, a son and a daughter, both young adults, performed in night clubs, and the mother had been a chorus girl. Almost every day late in the afternoon, they would all go to work dressed in tuxedos and fancy evening gowns. The gossips in the apartment house--of which there were very many--always wondered where this family stored its extensive wardrobe in their one-bedroom apartment.

Our apartment's kitchen was so small that only two people could sit comfortably at the kitchen table. So we often ate in shifts. I rarely ate dinner with my father, largely because he usually came home late after work, assuming that he had a job. (He was unemployed during much of the Depression era or held temporary jobs.)

For the first few years, we had an "ice box" rather than a refrigerator in the kitchen. This meant that we had to depend on the regular delivery of ice. When we finally could afford to buy a refrigerator, it was so small that we installed a metal box outside the kitchen window in which my mother stored less perishable food.

In addition to a small table and a regular sink, our kitchen contained a tub in which my mother and grandmother did the laundry. They would dry the wet clothing by hanging it on a contraption that hung down from the ceiling. We often dined with wet laundry dripping down on our heads.

I entered kindergarten in P.S. 64, which I attended through the 8th grade. I skipped one semester in the 3rd grade because of what the school evidently considered academic excellence. As a result, I've always been handicapped because I never learned how to work with fractions. Actually, I was a very average student. Mathematics was always my weakest subject; my favorites were history and geography.

It took at least 15 minutes to walk to elementary school through very heavy traffic. For the first couple of years, my grandmother usually walked with me to school until I insisted on walking alone or with my friends. As an only child, I had the misfortune of being subjected to an abnormal level of protective cover.

We had to pass a Roman Catholic church located on the corner of Marcy Place and the Concourse on the way to school. A huge statue of Jesus or the Virgin Mary--I don't remember which one--stood in front of the church. I will always remember the look of fear on Grandma's face and her obvious discomfort as we passed the church. Often, she would quietly mutter "getchkeh" (the Yiddish word for "idol") as she glared at the statue.

Even after three blissful decades in this country, for my grandmother, the church symbolized the pogroms and repression, usually instigated by the church, that she and her ancestors had suffered in Belarus, where they had lived for centuries.

(To be continued)

Electile dysfunction

The current election race for the 2008 Presidency has introduced a new term into our political lexicon, "electile dysfunction," and I am a victim of this malady. I define it as "the inability to become aroused over any of the choices for the Presidency put forth by both the Democrats and the Republicans."

As a nominal Democrat, I am naturally underwhelmed by the candidates for the Republican nomination. I shudder at the thought that the likes of Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, or Mike Huckabee could make it to the White House.

Romney is a slick, smooth-talker whose ideological views depend on whether he's running to be governor of Massachusetts or President of the United States. Giuliani is a petty, vindictive man who has exaggerated his role in 9/11 and made that tragedy the keystone of his career. Huckabee, a likable fellow best known until recently for losing 100 lbs., would have been a more appropriate candidate in the 18th Century.

And then there's John McCain, who I believe is most likely to win the Republican nomination. He is an admirable man whom I have respected in the past. But his insistence on sending still more troops to Iraq and his belligerence on foreign affairs in general lead me to fear that he would repeat George W. Bush's policy blunders and accelerate our nation's loss of international influence and power.

If either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton emerge as the Democrats' Presidential candidate, I am convinced that McCain, assuming that he is the Republican nominee, would win the November election. Until now, I have felt that John Edwards would be the most electable Democratic candidate. Sadly, I think the American electorate is still unprepared for an African-American or a woman as President. But despite his impressive talents, Edwards seems to have been eliminated from the race.

Obama is a refreshing political personality. I do not believe, however, that he is ready for the Presidency. Perhaps it's because I'm an old grouch, but I feel that he lacks the gravitas and experience to lead the nation.

Of course, an argument could be made that the importance of experience is overplayed. Not many men, e.g., have had more government experience than Vice-President Dick Cheney. But imagine him as the nation's commander-in-chief! (Actually, he has probably served as such during much of the past seven years, and look at the results.)

I have a high regard for Obama, but I find his political agenda still obscure and his record of accomplishment limited. Hillary Clinton's credentials are at least as impressive, and I have been puzzled why she is plagued by such pathological hatred on the part of so many people.

I am turned off, however, by the dynastic quality of her candidacy. I voted enthusiastically for Bill Clinton, but I do not relish the idea of the dual Presidency that would result if Hillary were elected. Moreover, the Clinton camp's tasteless tactics to defeat Obama in the Democratic primary campaign have tarnished the ex-President's legacy.

Where is Al Gore when we need him?

The "snowbirds" are here!

We're now at the height of the season during which Northerners owning or renting homes in Florida or other Sun Belt communities migrate southward to escape the winter cold. "Snowbirds" we're called by the locals, who probably resent how we seasonal residents create traffic jams and crowds in the restaurants and stores.

As members of the snowbird species--most of us aged retirees--my wife and I deserted New Jersey last week to seek refuge in our Florida home. And, as happens each year, we immediately encountered problems. Our phone was disconnected, the television couldn't be turned on, and I couldn't log on to my computer.

In each case, our telephone company, AT&T (formerly known as BellSouth in these parts) and our cable company, Comcast, had displayed their usual incompetence, failing to follow our instructions to activate our services, which we had sent from New Jersey long before arriving in Florida.

Now that the technical problems have been solved and we have fully unpacked, I'm reorienting myself to the local geography and reacquainting myself with my Florida friends and neighbors.

As I seem to do each year, I've miscalculated on the amount of clothing and other possessions I needed to bring with me from my northern home. I've got twice as many pajamas as I need, for example, and not enough shoes. And then there's the more serious problem of finding important files required for my income tax returns, which I have apparently misplaced in moving between my two homes.

As I settle down in my modest winter residence, I think of my parents who never could afford to own a single home, and I recognize my good fortune as a snowbird with two residences. In my annual migration from one home to the other, I am troubled by matters that my mother and father could not have conceived.

How reactionaries play games with the English language

One of my pet peeves is the way political reactionaries and the religious right play games with the English language. Terms like "values voters," "pro-life," "pro-family," and "socialized medicine" take on significance as ideological code words. They become major political issues as Republican candidates--particularly those on the extreme right-- compete for support from the party's so-called "base" that twice saddled the nation with George W. Bush. In the process, genuine meanings are lost or badly distorted.

Take "socialized medicine," for example. As I understand what "socialized medicine" really is-- as actually practiced in some foreign countries--doctors are employed directly by the government and citizens cannot choose a doctor or hospital for their medical care.

None of the medical insurance plans proposed by the Democratic Presidential candidates contain such provisions. As I've studied their proposals, the plans would essentially extend the current Medicare system, which now limits coverage to the aged and the disabled, to any citizen willing to pay for the insurance.

Since I became eligible for Medicare in 1989, I have always selected my own doctors and hospitals and have never been forced by the government to seek treatment from a specific physician. For me and millions of other senior citizens, Medicare has been a blessing.

As a World War II veteran, I have on rare occasions used the services of the Veterans Administration. I have received hearing aids, which were available free to qualified veterans. I also occasionally buy prescription drugs from the VA at relatively low cost.

Some critics might describe the VA medical system as "socialized medicine." But it covers only those veterans who want to use it. Some veterans may complain about by the quality and availability of VA services. I am unaware, however, of any ideological complaints about socialized medicine, particularly from veterans too young to qualify for Medicare.

The opposition to extending Medicare coverage to all citizens, as proposed by the Democrats, comes largely from some elements of the medical establishment and from insurance and pharmaceutical industries concerned about the potential impact on profits. Allied with them are social reactionaries who want to reduce the role of government in American private lives

These zealots, labeling themselves "pro-family" and "pro-life," are hypocrites. (Have you ever known anyone who is "anti-family" or "anti-life"?) Indirectly, the zealots are proposing greater government interference in private lives. They want to restrict both a woman's control over her own body and to limit the rights of homosexuals on matters dealing with taxes, health care, inheritance, and related legal issues. They also contradict their opposition to government interference in private lives by their efforts to promote religious faith as part of the political dialog.

Interestingly, the anti-abortionists appear more concerned with an unborn fetus than with the welfare of born children. I am confident that the vast majority of the Congressmen who supported President Bush's veto of legislation to provide health insurance for children from low-income families also identify themselves as "pro-life" proponents.

Religious and social reactionaries want to ban gay marriage on the grounds that it endangers the sanctity of marriage. My wife and I have been married for nearly 55 years, and we have never felt that our relationship is threatened because gays and lesbians want the same legal and financial privileges that we enjoy. In all candor, I do regard formal same-sex marriage ceremonies as strange events and believe that the rights that homosexuals seek can be provided through more straightforward civil unions. I am enough of a libertarian, however, to recognize that I have no right to object to what they want to do.

I am insulted that so many political pundits describe the so-called pro-lifers and pro-family crusaders as "moral values" voters because of their obsession with what they regard as the sacredness of marriage and the sanctity of life. The implication is that the rest of us are unconcerned with moral issues. But our moral values are linked to the belief that Americans should enjoy personal freedom that does not interfere with the rights of others.

ABOUT ME: A mini bio

I am the first generation of my family born in the U.S. If my Yiddish-speaking grandparents had not been wise enough--or lucky enough--to have brought their children here from the former Czarist Russian Empire shortly after the start of the 20th Century, I could have been among the 6-million Jews slaughtered by Germany and its Ukrainian, Slovak, Lithuanian, Latvian, Russian, Polish, and Romanian supporters during the late 1930s and early 1940s. But because of the immigration of my grandparents, I was privileged to become an American and to escape the religious and ethnic persecution my ancestors suffered for so many centuries in Europe.
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I was born on Nov. 2, 1924 at 17 East 107th Street, an apartment house located between Fifth and Madison Avenues in Manhattan's East Harlem neighborhood. I didn't live there long enough to have any distinct memories of the place. But our apartment must have been a very crowded home. It housed not only my parents but my maternal grandmother, my mother's two unmarried sisters and, I believe, a rent-paying boarder. Arriving in the U.S. during World War I, my grandmother's widowed father also lived in the apartment, where he died shortly before my birth.

I was delivered by a midwife in my parents' bedroom. The world-famous Mt. Sinai Hospital was--and still is--located only a few blocks away. But my family apparently had more confidence in the birthing skills of a midwife, who was my grandmother's sister-in-law.

To the uninitiated, the idea of living off New York's Fifth Ave. might sound exalted. But our apartment was on the wrong end of that fabled thoroughfare. Fifth Ave.'s opulent, more desirable blocks are nearly a mile south of 107th Street. Our modest and heavily crowded neighborhood was inhabited largely by working-class Jews only a decade or two removed from the ghettos of Central and Eastern Europe.

Several blocks to the east of us was a neighborhood that was predominantly Italian. During my childhood, New York City neighborhoods were primarily defined by ethnic group, religion, or race. With the rise in immigration since World War II, this neighborhood cultural pattern has been reinforced.

When I was born, East Harlem was represented in Congress by Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who was later to become the city's world-famed mayor. With a Jewish mother and an Italian father, he was exceptionally qualified to be the neighborhood's Congressman. Although it probably had no political influence, LaGuardia was also an Episcopalian. His Catholic-born father was a band master in the U.S. Army, and presumably converted in order to foster his military career.

My mother claimed that movie star Lauren Bacall was born on our street a few months before me, and that she pushed baby carriages in nearby Central Park with Lauren's mother. I can't confirm my mother's claim because no where in the actress' own autobiography is there any mention of me.

Still another celebrity reportedly born on East 107th Street--many years before me--was the late Moss Hart, the renowned playwright. A couple of blocks away is the birthplace of another great playwright, Arthur Miller. Sad to say, my life has never been influenced by all this enormous theatrical talent.

By the end of the 1920s, many of the neighborhood's Jewish inhabitants had become sufficiently prosperous to move to more attractive surroundings--to the Bronx in my family's case and to Brooklyn in Lauren Bacall's and Arthur Miller's. As the Jews departed from the area they were replaced by Puerto Ricans, transforming the neighborhood into what became known as "Spanish Harlem."

What had essentially been a Jewish "ghetto" had become a Hispanic "barrio." Curiously, the same kind of ethnic transformation was to occur many years later in the Bronx neighborhood to which my family moved when I was about three years old.

(To be continued)

MEMOIR: Reflections on Panagarh

Ever since the U.S. Army deposited me in Bombay as a teenage soldier during World War II, I've been enthralled by India. During two years service there, my senses were overwhelmed, excited and confused.

As the famed British journalist Geoffrey Moorhouse once wrote, a visitor to India "may have inklings of what to expect, but he can never have more than that, for everything that is about to happen to him is on such a scale and of such magnitude as to defy and almost dissolve all his careful anticipation."

During the spring of 1944, after a couple of months shuttling between two other bases as the Army tried to figure out what to do with me, I was assigned to the 903rd Signal Co. Depot (Avn.). The outfit was stationed outside a village named Panagarh in the province of Bihar, an impoverished region about 100 miles northwest of Calcutta. (I understand that the village is now a city and is part of West Bengal province.)

I remember that a leper colony run by Catholic missionaries was located a couple of miles down the road from our base, which was still under construction when my outfit arrived there.

The Air Corps base commander was short of construction personnel. He therefore assigned about half the men in my signal company--radio operators, code clerks, electronics specialists, etc.--for about a month to what we called "the steel gang" to help build aircraft hangars. (I was exempted when the company commander discovered that I knew how to type.)

The heat was so intense that outdoor work began at sunrise and halted shortly after noon. Despite the heat, a handful of New Yorkers, some of whom had been been bricklayers and carpenters in civilian life, decided to build a handball court. (Because it requires little space, one-wall handball is an exceptionally popular sport in New York City and its environs.)

I don't recall how they acquired the building supplies. However, I can now safely confess six decades later that it was probably through some means that violated regulations. During the torrid afternoon, while most of the men in the company napped or played cards, the New Yorkers--myself included--whacked away at the small black handballs. I do not remember how we acquired the special gloves required to play the game. The other men regarded our playing as evidence that New Yorkers were indeed a peculiar breed.

The primary outfit then assigned to Panagarh was the 1st Air Commandos. Its main mission was to fly gliders carrying Special Force units who were dropped behind Japanese lines in neighboring Burma. One of the glider pilots was Jackie Coogan, the onetime Hollywood child actor. I can still recall seeing a drunken Coogan running around the base one day, boasting of having had sex with movie star Betty Grable, World War II's most popular pin-up girl, who was then his wife.

A more important figure at Panagarh was Britain's famed Brigadier Orde Wingate, commander of the Chindits, a mixed Indian and British force that specialized in guerrilla warfare. During the late 1930s, Wingate had been stationed in Palestine, where he trained Jewish farmers (a youthful Moshe Dayan was one) to be "Special Night Guards" to defend themselves against Arab attacks.

Before coming to Panagarh, Wingate had been transferred from Palestine to Ethiopia because of his pro-Zionist sympathies. In Ethiopia he organized native guerrilla units to fight the Italians. He was killed in late 1944, when his glider crashed in the Burmese jungles on a mission that, I believe, took off from Panagarh.

One of my most fascinating experiences in Panagarh was to attend the wedding of a 16-year old boy named Durga Pasa in the spring of 1944. I was one of a group of GIs who were invited as "honored guests." Durga was a "bearer" ( a euphemism for servant) who cleaned our barracks, shined our shoes, made our beds, and cut the weeds growing outside.

I wrote an account of our experience that was published in the CBI Roundup, a weekly Army newspaper that was the China-Burma-India Theater's counterpart to the more well known Stars & Stripes. At that time I was a 19-year old aspiring journalist. The article was the first journalistic endeavor of mine ever to be published.

I lost a copy of the piece shortly after I was discharged from the Army. For many years I was frustrated that I didn't have a copy of my first published work. Several years ago, however, a man who had served with me in the 903rd Signal Co., Wally Swanson of Iron Mountain, Mich., who also attended Durga's wedding, sent me a copy of the newspaper clipping with the note that said: "Remember this?"

Wally and I had exchanged letters after he saw my name in print some where. During the war he had mailed a copy of my account of Durga's wedding to his local newspaper. The paper published the article, pointing out that Wally was one of the GIs who attended the wedding.

This is the article:

Digging down deep into their barracks bags, 14 "sahibs," serving with the American Air Forces in India, donned their crispest suits and attended, as guests of honor, an Indian wedding ceremony held in a neighboring town. The 16-year old Hindu bridegroom works as a barracks bearer for the American troops.

The GIs attended the wedding as guests after they had collected money to promote the wedding of their bearer. One hundred and fifty rupees were needed to pay off the bride's father and this was quickly subscribed. [A rupee was then worth 30 cents.]

In return, the youthful bridegroom, an Indian named Durga Pasa, extended an invitation to his "sahibs" to be guests of honor at his wedding, and the invitation was warmly received.

Durga, although only 16, had long been eager to marry, and one day confided his troubles to the men in his barracks. Two obstacles blocked his path to happiness: the lack of money and the absence of a bride.

The men in the barracks decided to take steps to remedy the situation, and while the father of Durga bargained for a bride, the airmen [sic] raised the 150-rupee fund for the father of the lucky girl.

The wedding took place one early evening beneath a huge canopy especially constructed for the event in the center of the town's main street. The canopy covered several small tables, each bedecked with bowls of fruit, cakes and hot coffee.

Finally the sun set, and the wedding ceremony began. Accustomed to seeing Durga work each day in their barracks clad in ragged shorts and shirt, the Americans were amazed to see their young bearer wearing a majestic orange turban, strongly matched with a red and yellow dhoti wrapped around him. He walked with difficulty in a hefty pair of brand-new wooden sandals.

The bridegroom's mother paraded the young boy out of their house with the bride on to several rugs in the center of the canopy. Rupee notes were handed to the child bride, who wore a brilliantly colored sari. The couple salaamed all around and then retired to the house.

Durga was given three days off after the wedding for his honeymoon. Then, again clad in his tattered shorts, he went back to work in the barracks.

The article failed to note that we were given permission by our company commander to leave the air base and to attend the wedding only after promising not to eat any food at the ceremony.

Were there "circumcised Nazis"?

In commenting on my Nov. 23 post, "The man who attended my father's bris," Joared, who publishes a wonderful blog, "Along the Way," raised an interesting question. She wanted to know whether a non-Jewish German who had been circumcised would be condemned to the same fate as the Jews--shipment to a Nazi concentration camp.

(I tried twice to respond to her via a personal e-mail message using her gmail address. According to my own gmail "sent" file, neither message got through to her. There is apparently a technical conflict between my gmail program, which I use only to respond to messages originated by the sender in gmail, and my primary ATT e-mail program. Just another one of those Internet mysteries that cause almost as much frustration and aggravation as pleasure!)

I doubt whether there is any data that would provide an answer to the question. I assume that there were non-Jewish Germans who had been circumcised for medical reasons. I can only speculate that they would have escaped the fate of the Jews if they had official documents showing that they were pure Aryans. Considering the hysteria about a person's genetic background then raging in Nazi Germany, I would guess that such documentation was readily available.

Circumcision was certainly not an issue for the many Muslims fighting as allies along side the German army--Bosnians,Turks, Palestinians, Iraqis, and natives from the Muslim-dominated republics in the former Soviet Union.

Like Jewish boys, Muslim boys are circumcised during religious ceremonies. But unlike Jewish boys, who are circumcised eight days after birth, my understanding is that Muslim boys are circumcised several years after birth-- when they are as old as nine or ten years of age. That is one important advantage that Jewish boys enjoy.

My wife Sybil's return to my bed and board

I want to thank the regular readers of this blog for their kind expressions of concern for my wife Sybil, who underwent spinal surgery on Nov. 13. I am happy to report that she returned home this past Saturday and is slowly but surely recovering.

There was an unfortunate comedy of errors involved in her return. After being released from the renowned Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City after eight days, she was sent by ambulance to a rehabilitation facility in New Jersey, which is only several miles from our home. Actually, the surgeon did not insist that she go to such a facility because he does not want her to undergo strenuous physical therapy for at least six weeks.

But we thought a brief stay at a rehab center would enable her to regain her strength more rapidly. A physician visits the center daily. On my wife's second day there, she developed a slight fever, and in examining the incision on her back, the doctor was convinced that it was infected. He phoned the surgeon in New York who ordered that she be returned to the hospital.

The rehab center had difficulty arranging for transportation to New York. A driver and a wheelchair-equipped van were finally located. Unfortunately, the driver got lost finding the hospital in Manhattan. A trip that should have taken no more than two hours turned into a three-hour journey. Sybil, a native of Boston, commented that she was in no mood for a tour of the city after she figured out that he was mistakenly on the way to Brooklyn.

For those three hours, I frantically kept phoning both the hospital and the rehab facility to find out where my wife was. When she finally arrived exhausted at the hospital, her temperature was normal and the surgeon on duty did not find any serious infection in the surgical incision. He decided, however, to keep her in the hospital for a day to assure that the incision was healing normally.

Then it was back to the rehab center in New Jersey. Sybil spent one night there and insisted on going home. She regretted not asking to be sent directly to our home rather than being returned to the rehab facility. So after another day there, I brought her home myself. Sybil was convinced that she would not benefit from a stay there. Moreover, she was depressed being in what she considered an institutional setting.

She still suffers severe back pain, which she was warned would be the case for a couple of weeks following surgery. In the past few months, as she became virtually disabled, I assumed many household chores that she had normally handled under our "marital division of labor." I continue to perform these tasks and to attend to many of her personal needs. Pain-killing medication is relieving some of her pain, however, and she is courageously trying to lessen her dependence on me.

During the past two months we have hired a woman to come at least once a week to help my wife. We plan to have her come much more often as Sybil recovers. The woman, who is a Hungarian/Romanian immigrant, is an exceedingly conscientious person, and we are fortunate to be able to employ her to help my wife.

Best of all, of course, my own morale has vastly improved because of Sybil's return to what matrimonial lawyers refer to as my "bed and board."

(Sybil is a former high school English and Latin teacher who edits all my blog postings. She wants to add this personal note:
I join Mort in thanking this blog's readers who have communicated best wishes for my recovery. After 54 years together, Mort finds it difficult to sleep if I'm not in bed with him. I trust that my return home will improve his ability to sleep soundly.)

The man who attended my father's "bris"

(For the unitiated: A "bris" is a religious ceremony celebrating the circumcision of Jewish boys eight days after their birth.)

My late father was a bit of a raconteur and loved to tell tales about his early life. One of his favorite stories was about an experience he had as a young man working in a store in a small town in Arkansas. He had overcome the objections of his immigrant parents and had quit an Orthodox Jewish religious seminary in New York City. He was 18 and was determined to seek his fortune elsewhere.

Under circumstances that he never satisfactorily explained to me, he wound up in Pine Bluff, Ark., where he was employed by a Jewish merchant who operated a dry goods store. I haven't heard the retail term "dry goods" in many years, and I am uncertain whether it is still in common usage. But the term refers to sheets, pillow cases, towels and related textile products.

One day a Jewish traveling salesman