B Is for Brooklyn - D Is for Dog

About the Book

A butcher block table in a Southold, New York, eatery brings back flavors of a Brooklyn delicatessen. Taxis roam under the Queensborough Bridge of the East River while real and model airplanes soar aloft. Out west, Chavez Ravine, a converted sandpit, pinch hits for Ebbet’s Field. California is cool even in the 1950s. Drive-in movies, car hops on roller skates, and open-air school cafeterias present scenes reminiscent of the movie Grease. A Doberman named Nana is first prize on a kid’s TV game show. Then it’s off to college in the Midwest, and Nana leaves for a farm in California. This is a series of essays that move from East Coast to West Coast, from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and back. Race cars in the sands of the fabled Hamptons compare with bicycles along the trees of Brooklyn. Back East again, Shea Stadium was being built, and the expressway was headed into suburbia. There, a hairy black dog, King, came along, and we adopted each other while discovering our boundaries. Writing came after involvement in a Southold memoirs workshop. The class allowed the memories to flow as easily as the East River flows under the most graceful bridges in the world. I hope these stories will recapture some of your memories—they do for me.

About the Author

I began my writing career covering high school sports for a weekly newspaper. I soon expanded my column in the Smithown Messenger from sports to politics, to editorials, a fishing column, and a sequence about the threat of local nuclear pollution. My journalism career followed local and United States senatorial elections.. After 34 years, I retired from teaching Special Education and continued writing for local weekly newspapers. I kept trying fiction and non-fiction, barely getting a paragraph on paper. Then my wife, Anne, who left Brooklyn when she was four, suggested a memoir workshop, and my creative writing began. I left Brooklyn when I was 10, I have been trying to recapture it ever since. Here are my stories, my wanderings from Brooklyn, and across the United States, across a road that doesn't exist anymore with memories of a baseball park that's now an apartment building. Route 66 took me and my family from the concrete of Brooklyn to the lawns of Los Angeles. I slowly worked my way back east, to the vineyards of Southold. This book is for my wife, Anne, who has carefully read every word.