Conscription is part of American history — a distant part. The Selective Service isn’t selecting like it used to.

Cold weather is coming eventually, so I’m in the process of moving summer things down to the shelves and wardrobes in our basement.

October, 1960: It was a time of optimism. (How quaint, but how refreshing.) It was a time when change actually looked like it was going to happen — and not for the worse.

Actor Sterling Hayden was certainly a special case when I first met him one afternoon in 1975 at New York’s Algonquin Hotel restaurant.

Just because we hear music Doesn’t mean we have rhythm

n late 1969 I drew a high 303 in the Selective Service pool, which meant I was not going to be drafted to fight in the war in Viet Nam.

Conrad Neuman’s new book, Up-Island Poems, is a short lyrical diary of a poetic soul who went out and came in with the tides, an oceanographer who traveled the world and returned to his Island birthplace to rest, to fish, to tell tales.

In 1967, the average cost of a new car was $2,750 and the average cost of gas was 33 cents a gallon.

When summer rolled around, my dream as a kid of eight or nine was to join some pals on a lake somewhere in Wisconsin or Indiana to see how the rustic half lived and played. I spent my formative years in an urban neighborhood of crammed apartment buildings on the north side of Chicago. A time away in an overnight camp for a few weeks seemed like an idyllic interruption. But being the only child of a Jewish mother whose hobby was planting and nurturing fears, I was lucky if I was allowed to cross our street by myself.

I picture Horse Rossin as a large avuncular man.