attended on Long Island, I came home for lunch almost every day. I made it a daily ritual to
watch a program that aired on local television around that time which featured various true
stories from American History. It was a rerun that had once been broadcast on national
television, but I didn’t care. I would have been too young to understand or appreciate it when it
first ran anyway. That program really peaked my interest and made me look to books, my set of
encyclopedias and people I knew for more.
Another ritual I created for myself was having daily conversations with my grandmother on my
father’s side. She lived with my father, mother and myself on the second floor of our home.
Grandma was elderly and by the time I was an adolescent, she could do little more than play
cards once a week with her ever-shrinking group of friends or go shopping with us once in a
great while. My conversations with her were based on whatever historical event had been
featured on my lunchtime TV show and always seemed to bring her to life. She loved talking
about what my folks called ‘the good old days.”
My grandmother’s name was Lou and one of her pet peeves was the price of groceries.
Whenever she felt well enough to go shopping with us, she would comment on the price of
essentials like bread and meat. My father often lovingly mocked her by saying, “Go ahead Ma,
tell us how you remember when bread was five cents a loaf and tasted like real bread, and steak
was ten cents a pound and so fresh it mooed when you tried to cut into it!”
My grandmother didn’t mind the good natured criticism and was proudly nostalgic. She enjoyed
our conversations and loved to tell me stories about the 'old times’ and her many years with my
grandfather, who died when I was still an infant. Most of my peers did not relate well to older
folks. All of us had been somewhat indoctrinated with catch phrases of the 1960s rebellion like,
“Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” That wasn’t me. I appreciated the first hand accounts of life so
many years ago that were shared with me by my immediate family and other relatives.
Like my grandmother, I really didn’t have too many other people to talk with when my friends
weren’t around. I really enjoyed hearing about her take on history and what life was like living
through it. She could remember going to school one day and having her teacher read a story out
of a local New York newspaper about a guy who was robbing trains out west, a guy named Jesse
James. She also remembered a time when horses, not motorcars, dominated the streets of New
York City.
When Neal Armstrong set foot on the Moon, my grandmother was watching it live on television
and commented to my father, “They think this is something, but people were a lot more excited
when Lindberg landed safely (after flying over the Atlantic Ocean by himself in an airplane).”
That was Grandma! Despite the fact that she was disinterested and unimpressed by most things
modern and hopelessly dug into the days of time past, the historical value of the stories she told
me did not go unappreciated and made me hunger for more.
My parents were equally chatty when it came to discussing their lives and what things were like
when they were young. That, combined with the national nostalgia over all things World War
Two that seemed to permeate the days of my adolescence, brought me to the point that I was
ready to write this book and share the stories I heard with you. These are individual memories of
