There was a dozen of us occupying a three-story Victorian that was built in 1903. Chickie lived on the ground floor with his country wife, Ann, and their two kids, Shirley and Gary.…
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life sketches
...I arrived to find another soldier was occupying the room—and the piano. His name was John Sellers. He was black, soft spoken and from the south. I later learned that he was a Seventh Day Adventist. He had a nice baritone voice and was using the piano to help him go through his vocal exercises.…
Having a boat in the city might seem like an expensive luxury, but Harry ran what one might call a poor man’s boatyard—run by a guy who had dragged a sea-weathered barge onto a sandy, wreckage-strewn shore, making it a home that eventually evolved into a business.…
Boyle was a leading founder of what eventually evolved into an organization called “Riverkeeper,” dedicated to preserving and revitalizing the Hudson River which, according to Boyle back in 1970, was already contaminated with PCBs.…
A cannon blast announced the beginning of the run. It would take a while for the bulls to make their way through the narrow street to the arena. I said goodbye to Nicole and climbed over the fence. At first the braver men stood pat, waiting for the sight of horns.…
Of all the farms I worked on as a boy, the most memorable was the old Borden Farm, which was on the east side of Canadarago Lake outside of Richfield Springs.…
My son Jonathan called me the other night to tell me that he missed the old house in Brooklyn. He had lived there his whole life as I did mine—except for the Army, and my longest winter in Richfield Springs. I told him that I missed the house, too, and described my last days there.…
The portraits were the size of baseball cards. I recognized one of the names, Stanley Musial, a great outfielder who, in his heyday, had been known as “Stan the Man.”…
One frog was foolish enough to hop under the enclosure and was immediately set upon by Rosie, one of my golden comets that looks more like a Rhode Island red than the rest...…
In Richfield, on top of being confined, snowy weeks would go by without the sun shining. It didn’t take long for the ache of loneliness to get to me and sometimes I’d find ways to get out of the house to visit a friend, even if I had to climb out my second floor bedroom window.…
