I Was A Naturalist At A Young Age
When we moved to Miami in 1956 we lived in the historic (now, not then) Betsy Ross Hotel on Ocean Drive. The beach was across the street. Wow! From Brooklyn to Paradise. After a year Dad bought us a home in West Miami, near the famous Tamiami Trail. It was pretty much the western edge […]
The Postcard – Part 2
I reconnected with George Blackwell, the now recording engineer and his wife. A couple of years later his wife inherited a couple of oil wells in Michigan. George wanted to open his own voice over recording studio. He knew nothing about business and asked me for my guidance. This was the beginning of my clientele […]
The Postcard – Part 1
“He’s not just another suit…” This post originally appeared on my professional website, philipspitzer.com. It was a bit different than the usual investing thoughts or educational ideas that I shared there. This is more personal. It is for fun. My team asked if this would not just be better as a post on a personal […]
Steve Goodman
Steve was a folksinger from Chicago. He was the one who wrote The City of New Orleans (Arlo Guthrie managed to get himself added to the credit later. Another story). Having become friends with many of the folksingers in those days, I often hung out at The Flick Coffeehouse in the afternoons. One day Steve […]
War and Peace Part 2
When we were growing up Dad never talked of the war. My brother Jan and I had a scoutmaster who talked about it a lot, and knew other adults who told stories about it. We pressed him to tell us about his experiences. He refused. There were only four things he ever said about it. […]
War and Peace Part 1
When my father Leon was a boy he had rheumatic fever. They sent him upstate to a rest home called Valhalla. It’s a good thing he didn’t know what “Valhalla” meant! They fed him nothing but boiled fish. That was the treatment for rheumatic fever and other heart ailments in the 20’s and 30’s. He […]
Building the Shark River Station 2
That same day I saw my first bald eagle, perched many tens of feet above the forest at the top of a very tall dead tree. We stopped, drifted, looked. Eventually we shook ourselves out of our reverie, started the motor and continued on our journey into the Heart of Darkness (apologies to Joseph Conrad). […]
A Good Woman
Grandpa Sam’s wife was Julia. I loved this woman. I left home at 18 (under the circumstances in the precious post). After six months I could not continue living in hippie crash pads in Coconut Grove because by then I had been hired by the research team in the Everglades, and let’s just say when […]
Building the Shark River Station – Chapter 1
Some well meaning folks, when I was still on Facebook, said my posts were too long, people wouldn’t read them. Well, I write them as much if not more for myself than my “audience”. And the origination of the ones I am finally sharing here was that they were kind of intended as a book. […]
The New England Summer and Carl Sagan
I hitched north in July 1973, to get my place to live for graduate school which I was starting in the fall. My first stop was to stay with my friend the park ranger in the Smokies (she was one of my nightly visitors to the mission dig sites, tune in for that story!). Then […]