Recollections
MAKING AN AUDIO BOOK
MAKING AN AUDIO BOOK A few months ago, I made an audio version of Ninety-Day Wonder, How The Navy Would Have Been Better Off Without Me, a memoir I had just finished writing about my two-year hitch as astonishingly unqualified officer in the Navy from 1953 to 1955. I [...]
Mr. Zeetzee’s Terrible Temper
We lived in Riverside, CT, on a point of land that reached out into Greenwich Cove, on Long Island Sound. Our back yard went right to the water, and at the end of the point, less than a quarter of a mile from our house, [...]
My Father Finally Succumbs to Old Age
My father was a young man until at the age of 87, he had a stroke while fly fishing from his canoe on Kidney Pond, near Mt. Katahdin in Maine. He was in the act of casting a dry fly at a [...]
Miss Henry
Miss Henry, our 7th grade teacher in the Riverside, CT public school was a very large, very round person. When she stood at the front of the room, it was hard to see the blackboard. On the first day of school, during lunch recess, when all my classmates were on the [...]
THE SINKING OF THE US.S. VERMILION
Not long ago, my grandson asked me to show him a picture of the ship I served on as a very junior naval reserve officer from August, 1953 to February, 1955. I pulled my I phone out of my pocket and typed in USS Vermilion, AKA 107, expecting to see [...]
HOW MISS EDITH OLIVER FOUNDED MISS OLIVER’S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS
HOW MISS EDITH OLIVER FOUNDED MISS OLIVER’S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS LIFE IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE ARE PLANNING SOMETHING ELSE In April, 1925, Miss Edith Oliver, of Hartford, CT, twenty-two years old, the daughter of a wealthy man, lost her mother to pneumonia. A year later, almost to the [...]
MIXED METAPHORS
Every Saturday in March and April of 1946, I’d get in the back seat of our new, post-war Chevrolet, my dad behind the wheel and my mother, bundled in fur, beside him in the front, and we’d drive to some rural place in Connecticut, or [...]
A Weekend I Wish Had Never Happened
I went to a very prestigious, excellent boys-only boarding school deep in the woods of New England, graduating in 1949. The school was covered in ivy, both the real kind and the metaphorical. We wore blue blazers, grey flannel pants and ties to classes and to every meal, even [...]