Word: pete
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...city scorned because it has no seasons, Los Angeles residents now say there are four: riots, earthquakes, fire and floods. The sturdy, aerobic city of dreams is out of breath, its spirits fragile. "We don't call them disasters anymore," says Dan Schnur, an aide to Governor Pete Wilson. "We call them plagues. And we're just two behind ancient Egypt -- frogs and boils...
Memoirs from columnists Art Buchwald and Pete Hamill...
...note vibrates, unexpectedly, in memoirs by two veteran newspaper columnists, Pete Hamill (A Drinking Life; Little, Brown; 265 pages; $21.95) and Art Buchwald (Leaving Home; Putnam; 254 pages; $22.95). Both men record bruisingly uncushioned childhoods shadowed by their families' bleak vulnerability in the Depression -- an era that still accounts for more residual haunted notes than Americans realize. Both men are New Yorkers. Buchwald is deadpan-Jewish-funny, with an underlayer of almost quizzical pain; Hamill is Irish saloon-polemical, with an exuberance undermined by a taste for boozy lyricism, machismo and occasional self-pity...
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...
...poem Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?, W.B. Yeats wrote (among other things) about the way that promising lives go wrong. For example: "Some have known a likely lad/ That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist/ Turn to a drunken journalist." Some have indeed. Pete Hamill is still a likely lad, too good to go on indulging the drunken journalist...