Authors Electric

Probably due to my advanced age, assembling a memoir, among my  various writing projects, throws me back to a childhood that I remember in a time that now seems more like history than recollection.   Original "Hollywoodland" sign, 1938 I was a pup before television, computers, the internet, social media, the polio vaccine, jet airliners, the cold war, and nuclear weapons.  My boyhood memories blend with what my parents heard intently on our radio - a sleek, deco, maple-panelled, 1930s Philco cabinet in the living room that broadcast soap operas, the evening news, mysteries, variety shows and Franklin Roosevelt's "Fireside Chats."  My memories span from America's post-WW2 rise to free world leadership to its present, self-immolation, from the Great Depression's end and Allied leadership to being led by a self-destructive, traitorous, sociopathic president who commands the American miliary to forget the Constituion, and turn on fellow citizens. UT & fa...

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...