Authors Electric

Mary Reinholz '70 West    The jobs I had as a kid and even later, as a young man don't exist anymore. I had no inkling I'd work on a newspaper or write books, or be in "media." My "big get" was getting a job. I started earning pocket money at age 10 delivering newspapers to home subscribers on de Luxe Schwinn I loved that sleek, red-and-black bike, with its whitewall balloon tires, shiny streamlined chrome fenders, built-in horn, head-and-tail lights, front-wheel shock-absorber and rack to carry the afternoon dailies I delivered to my afternoon paper's forty subscribers.  I became adepted at sailing fat copies of rubber-banded,  Hollywood Citizen News onto subscribers' front porches without breaking a window - most of the time.  Schwinns of that era were like our plush, chrome-laden, dreamboat, fintailed cars -  as stylish as they were unsafe, gas-guzzling, and impractical. I lusted after just a second-hand one that I could restore. To save up, ...

Gavin and his book on city wildlife One of my earliest childhood memories is of scattering breadcrumbs around my grandmother's back porch on a bright, snowy, New England winter morning. It must have been a Sunday because she was rolling ravioli dough in the kitchen. The porch extended from the rear of her upper floor Victorian flat, perched on a hillside overlooking an icy Mystic River in the then mainly Irish, Italian and Portuguese, Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts. Feeding "nonna's birds" was a "big boy" treat for which I bundled up in navy blue woolen coat, cap and leggings. She felt a kinship with those birds, espcially for the sparrows, pigeons, blackbirds who braved the frigid, Northeastern winters instead of migrating south. "Just-a like-a we do," she smiled her big warm smile, "Dey no run away to Florida. So dey need-a little-a help-a sometime," she would add, " poverini " [poor little ones]. Once I h...

I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if my parents had stayed in Boston instead of taking me west to California in 1942 when I was five years old. I suspect I would have been more like most of my New England cousins, whose stable, prosperous lives I've often admired, but rarely wished for. I wouldn't have been as itinerant, definitely not married so many times. If I had children they would not be the four I have now, and that I wouldn't want. It's unlikely that I would have become a journalist by trade and a writer by aspiration. I might have applied myself to the piano better, given the musicians in the family. There's no going back, of course. I could not imagine growing up anywhere but California, with its beaches, Pacific palisades, deserts, and mountains, its dreamers and con artists.       Back  then,  I still wore short pants . There was a world war on , and the Great Depression had far from given way to war-inflated prosperit...