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 […]
The PaPER and the Poets Two
This is unsigned but there is no question in my mind it was written by Nanlee Haston. One of the few things of value out of the three times I was on Facebook was hearing from one of the young people who had been among my followers in those days of environmental activism. He told […]
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. […]
The Birth of The PaPER
I was asked by local newspapers and magazines to write articles about the environment during those two years of activism, 1969-1970. The publisher of the underground newspaper in Miami, Strawberry Fields, Jerry (again, his last name is lost to my memory) approached me to do an entire issue on the environment. What an opportunity! I […]
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 […]
The PAPER and the Poets
I (We) published one of the two underground newspapers in the 1960’s in Miami. I did this while working full time on the research team in the Everglades. My next post will tell the story of how it came to be. We lasted something longer than a year, and I recollect four issues (I believe […]
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). […]
Frank Sinatra and My Mother
While I was growing up there was a family lore that my Grandma Julia knew Frank Sinatra. When he became famous he asked her for the pictures she had taken of him as a young man back so they could not be used against him. I always had the sense he wanted them back so […]
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 […]