BY JERRY TALLMER | Good morning, children. This object on my desk is a radio. It was invented by a number of people, but mostly by Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) and Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1911). It is an instrument of information, guidance and culture, among other things. Let us turn it on and see — no, hear — [...]

BY JERRY TALLMER  | There was once a mercifully forgotten book and television series called “I Led Three Lives.” Well, David Rothenberg,  a Greenwich Villager for almost all his 79 years, has led more than a dozen very full lives, as clocked via the chapter headings of his just published life story, “Fortune in My Eyes.” As [...]

BY JERRY TALLMER  |  Everybody on Fire Island was talking about Marilyn Monroe that summer. She was somebody’s houseguest, but nobody had seen her. Or nobody that I knew, anyway. In any case, I was more interested in Willie Mays, who — my tiny all-purpose beach radio told me — had, on an unbelievable clothesline [...]

[media-credit name="File" align="aligncenter" width="380"][/media-credit]Mr. Sidney Zion Somewhere out there February 6, 2012 Dear old Sidney: It was on the instant yesterday evening, February 5, 2012, when Tom Brady’s zero-seconds-to-go Hail Mary pass fell harmlessly to the turf in Indianapolis that my eyes suddenly welled with tears. Four years ago, almost to the day, out in [...]

By JERRY TALLMER | This past Saturday night I turned on the tube for no reason at all and was brought up short by the opening titles of a motion picture I hadn’t seen in thirty or forty years. Somebody at Turner Classic Movies — Ted Turner maybe? — had had the dazzlingly bad taste [...]