Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

By way of preparation for what I myself hope to write about Dorothy day after tomorrow, this afternoon I pulled out a book I’d bought when it first appeared in 1981: “The Last Laugh” (Simon & Schuster), a collection of odds and ends left by that master humorist S. J. Perelman when he died.  I [...]

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On August 22d 114 years ago, the Rothschild couple who lived in New York but had a summer cottage at 732 Ocean Avenue in the New Jersey village of Long Branch became parents there of a baby girl they named Dorothy.  In due time she married a gentleman named Parker, and in the years after [...]

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A used item discarded onto a sidewalk in my Berlin neighborhood took me back down Memory Lane this morning to a splendid example of political humor that came my way back during the Eisenhower administration.  (Can you remember?  Five-Star U.S. Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, victorious as Supreme Commander of the British, French, and American [...]

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Egbert Roscoe Murrow, later known as plain Ed Murrow, born April 25, 1908 near Polecat Creek, near Greensboro, in Guilford County, North Carolina, half a century ago set the standard for responsible American television journalism.  His finest hour came on March 9, 1954, when a half-hour documentary quoting the documented utterances of Wisconsin’s hysterically red-baiting Senator [...]

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Due to my having left the USA for Europe as early as I did, I never even heard her live, let alone meet her, but her death so comparatively young saddens me every bit as much as if I had.  Out of the recesses of my memory comes an apparently characteristic story I read long ago [...]

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The facts, folks - just the facts, as summarized by The New York Times:

    I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted March 6, 2007, of lying to F.B.I. agents and grand jurors investigating the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative amid a burning dispute over the war [...]

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Missouri-born Lucien Agniel, the first American I had the rare good fortune to meet when I arrived in Germany in 1951, worked for the United States Foreign Service in the Munich Press Office of the U.S. Land Commissioner’s office; six years after the end of World War II, Munich still had no Consulate proper in [...]

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Let me refer you to this official statement dated September 18th, 2001 - in German, but I assume you can read that - issued by the city-state Hamburg the day after the press conference there that ignited that brouhaha.   The night before, only hours after that outrageous utterance, Dr. Christina Weiss, Hamburg’s Senator for Kultur, [...]

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Any of you non-whippersnappers remember the crackerjack Alabama-born journalist William Bradford Huie?  Last night a flashback documentary on Jack Kennedy’s murder in Dallas unexpectedly took me back to a visit I paid Huie in his little Alabama birthplace, Hartselle.  He picked me up at the nearest commercial airport in Huntsville, already famous/infamous for two reasons: an electrocution-happy [...]

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Since I recently brought up Germany’s perennially avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, apopos of the musical mountebankery above the city of Braunschweig, I feel constrained to drop the other shoe so I herewith drop it - rather unconventionally since this takes us all the way back to a report I wrote for www.musicalamerica.com almost six years ago:
September [...]

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