SST Blog

9/28/17   It all started for me when I was seven years old and my dad took me to my first baseball game.  We drove to Brooklyn, to Ebbets Field to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play the Cincinnati Reds.  We walked in Gate 8 and when we came out of the tunnel and I saw that magnificent expanse of perfect looking grass, I was in awe of how green it was and how it went on for what seemed to be forever.  I asked my dad how come our front lawn didn’t look like that.  “Sod, they use sod.”  ...

9/25/17   33 years ago Morley Safer interviewed Jackie Gleason on 60 Minutes.  He asked him where his nickname, The Great One, came from.  It was Orson Welles who dubbed him, and then Lucille Ball picked it up.  When Safer asked if he believed it, Gleason said, “You just saw me play pool, didn’t you?”  In the immortal words of The Great One, “Give me a little travelin’ music…and away we go.”   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTPGjXzKHw4   I grew up watching The Jackie Gleason Show and The Honeymooners on TV.  I loved all the characters and the jokes, but what made it...

9/22/17   If you ever wonder whether getting older has its advantages, try revisiting books, music, visual art and movies.  Things that we thought we understood and appreciated in youth continue to acquire new meaning as we add years to our lives.  I first noticed this in my 20s when I reread most of the books from my high school years.  I was amazed to find that my adolescent hero, Holden Caulfield, was the biggest phony of them all.  My appreciation for Van Gogh and Jackson Pollack grew so exponentially that they eclipsed my interest in other painters.  Singers who...

9/20/17   When I was a young man I read a few books on how to be successful.  After all, my parents were obsessed with success, which to them meant making more money than they were currently making, having a happy marriage, and raising successful kids.  Somehow I must have gotten their message all messed up.  For me, success meant being happy—finding what makes me happy and devising a life that maximizes the time spent in those pursuits and minimizes my involvement in unpleasant activities.    As to me achieving my parents’ definition of success, I suppose that I have...

9/17/17   I’ve told this story so many times that you’ve probably heard it. When I was a kid in the late 1950s, I was ill one day and stayed home from school. I remember lying down on the couch watching TV in our front bedroom, which used to be my room, but now was our den. My mom was standing beside me ironing. A quiz show came on where the orchestra would play three notes, and the contestant would have to guess the title of the song. If he or she got it wrong, the orchestra would then play...