Word: buchwald
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Memoirs from columnists Art Buchwald and Pete Hamill...
...comes as a surprise that Buchwald, a man of impressively reliable, virtually industrial-strength merriment, was formed by such a grim beginning. Buchwald's mother was mentally ill and, shortly after he was born, departed to spend the rest of her life in mental institutions. Buchwald has no memory of her. His father, a draper at a time when few could afford drapes , was forced to place his four children in foster homes. One of the first was a boardinghouse for sick children, run by Seventh-Day Adventists, where Arthur stayed until he was five. His father visited on Sundays...
...Buchwald tells the story in the short, strong declarative sentences that are his style -- an artful, solid kind of brick masonry. Twice in his adult years, he has fallen into serious psychological depressions. "For a humorist," Buchwald admits, "I think a lot about death. During both my depressions, I contemplated suicide. My main concern was that I would not make the New York Times obituary page." He consulted a Dr. Morse in 1962: "What made him unique among psychiatrists I have known is that he stretched out on his couch and the patient sat in the chair. Morse would stare...
...unbearable note arises from a child's humiliation -- when he must impersonate an adult, must pay the price for grownups' failures and follies. Buchwald seems to have got through it with a sturdy and precocious self- possession. He shares with his father, he says, the habit of smiling no matter what -- a sort of armor, a mask of self-containment. Buchwald writes: "I must have been six or seven when I said, 'This stinks. I am going to become a humorist.' " He got some minuscule revenge by refusing to be Bar Mitzvahed, which grieved his father, and by running away...
Alcohol made Pete Hamill's father just as absent as Art Buchwald's mother was. The father, Billy Hamill, who came from northern Ireland, had only one leg: he lost the other after it was brutally broken in a soccer game. When Billy came home from the saloons at night to the family's Brooklyn apartment, he would remove his artificial leg along with his trousers. Pete remembers them hanging over a chair in the bedroom and the smell of vomit. He had his first fight when a boy named Brother Foppiano taunted in a singsong, "Your...