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About Paul Alan Fine, USAF, B.A., technical writer
- Over the years my genealogical research has focused primarily on people of German, French-Canadian, English, Dutch, and Eastern European ethnicity.
- NOTE: Although I was born in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, my folks and my sister Joan and I moved, in late 1951 or early 1952, to the Kew Gardens Hills neighborhood of the Town of Flushing, Queens County.
- Flushing was one of the oldest settlements in what became the state of New York. It was founded on 10 October 1645 as the Town of Vlissingen, in the Dutch colony of New Netherland. The English took over New Netherland in 1664 and renamed it New York. In 1683, when Queens County was created and became one of the twelve original counties of the Province of New York, the Town of Vlissingen was renamed as the Town of Flushing.
- Flushing was the site of the 1939 World's Fair and 1964 World's Fair; the location of the Flushing Meadows tennis tournaments; and, if you read the first of Walter Farley's The Black Stallion books, it was set in Flushing, where the Black Stallion was stabled.
- See the "Sources" tabs of this profile and Karen Reuter's profile for photographs of Paul, Karen, and members of their respective families. To view a photograph, click "Add Sources". At the next screen, click on the desired image. At the next screen, click on the thumbnail image.
- In 1973 and 1974, I served in the United States Air Force (with the rank of Airman First Class) and learned Czech and Slovak at the Defense Language Institute, Presidio of Monterey, California.
- I retired in November 2016 from Air Liquide, a French-owned global gases & chemicals corporation. I was the technical writer for the corporation's Advanced Equipment Systems Division in Chanhassen, Minnesota. This engineering & manufacturing division designs and builds state-of-the-art (and often one-of-a-kind) chemical blending and chemical or gas distribution systems for the world's largest semiconductor wafer-fabrication facilities. I wrote the operations & maintenance manuals for those systems.
- Prior to working for 5+ years at Air Liquide, I was an independent contractor, with technical writing assignments at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension; Wells Fargo; Verifications, Inc.; and Thermo King.
- Over the decades [1980s to 2010s] I also worked as a full-time technical writer at Ciprico, Inc. in St. Louis Park, MN; at Dot Hill Systems Corporation in Plymouth, MN; at Honeywell, Inc. and Alliant Techsystems in Hopkins and Minnetonka, MN (in the Defense Systems Division, which became the Precision Weapons Division after Honeywell spun-off the division & it became Alliant Techsystems), and at FSI International and BOC Edwards in Chaska and Chanhassen, MN (for the same Chemical Management Division, which was sold by FSI to BOC).
- During my time as a logistics analyst for a Department of Defense contractor in Maryland, I worked on a SIGINT program.
- During my years at Honeywell and Alliant Techsystems, I worked as logistics analyst on numerous tank and artillery projectile development programs, and a mine-detection & detonation development program. These programs included VEMASID; the SADARM 155mm howitzer projectile; the STAFF 120mm tank projectile; and a 120mm mortar round for use aboard M113 armored personnel carriers. These programs required me to attend live-fire exercises or maintainability demonstrations at the United States Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Picatinny Arsenal, and the United States Army Armor School at Fort Knox.
- My five published genealogy & family history books include:
- The House That Kirscht Built: The Ancestors and Descendants of Mathias Kirscht and Angela Achen (two volumes). This book won 1st Place in the 1996 Anna Ford Family History Book Contest, sponsored by the Heart of America Genealogical Society in Kansas City, Missouri.
- Our Family In America: The Fine and Kudlick Families, 1886-1999. This book received an Honorable Mention Certificate in the 2000 Anna Ford Family History Book Contest.
- An Amazing Heritage: The Ancestors of the Harens and Telthoester Families (two volumes).
- Their Roots Run Far and Deep: The Ascendants and Descendants of François Carrier and Marie Adélaïde Demers (four volumes).
- A River of Many Streams: The Ascendants of Harry Anacker and Kathryn Allen.
- I have written, but not-yet published, two Civil War history books: Words in Time of War: Civil War soldiers' letters, and the people and events of their era and A Man of Two Rivers: The Life and Descendants of John Lawrence Sparks of Delaware and Minnesota.
- I wrote five articles for Minnesota Genealogist, the magazine of the Minnesota Genealogical Society. Those published articles were:
- "Archives of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis," Minnesota Genealogist, September 1993, Vol. 24, No. 3.
- "ELCA/Luther Seminary, Norwegian-American Historical Society Archives," Minnesota Genealogist, December 1993, Vol. 24, No. 4.
- "The Archives of St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville," Minnesota Genealogist, March 1994, Vol. 25, No. 1.
- "Archives: First (Swedish Mission) Covenant Church," Minnesota Genealogist, March 1995, Vol. 26, No. 1.
- "St. Paul Diocesan Records on Microfilm," Minnesota Genealogist, Spring 1997, Vol. 28, No. 1.
- For nearly all of my genealogical research I use original source materials (perusing church and civil records, and examining thousands of digital newspaper pages for birth, engagement and marriage announcements, and obituaries.) Most obituaries are tame and refer to the deceased person's professional and avocational background. But some obituaries can be emotionally searing. After such obituaries are read, the gruesome contents can never be un-read. The imagery of those peoples' awful deaths has haunted my mind for years thereafter.
- Since we were married in June 1973, Karen and I resided in:
- Pacific Grove, Monterey County, California.
- Shorewood, Hennepin County, Minnesota.
- Acton, Middlesex County, Massachusetts.
- Columbia, Howard County, Maryland.
- New Hope, Hennepin County, Minnesota.
- Plymouth, Hennepin County, Minnesota.
- Minnetonka, Hennepin County, Minnesota.
- The most stupendous and thrilling place that I visited as a teenager was the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair, held in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens County. My folks, sister and I lived 2½ miles away, in the Kew Gardens Hills section of Queens. The fair grounds (encompassing over 645 acres) was segmented into five immense areas. To see most of it, I attended the fair 4 to 5 times during the two spring-to-autumn seasons. Each time I toured new sites or returned to my favorite venues. The fair was a dreamland of fountains, esplanades, futuristic buildings, foreign, state, and industrial pavilions, rides, food locales galore, the glorious Unisphere (still standing), and hordes of bedazzled sightseers (like me).
- A scene of knightly pageantry appeared before my eyes...
- When I was a junior at York College, CUNY, I worked part-time as a copyboy at the New York Daily News in Manhattan. It was a sensational job, to be in the editorial room of one of the great newspapers in the United States and participate in its fast-paced activities.
- I worked primarily on weekends. One bright Sunday morning in 1970 (at about 7 a.m., when midtown Manhattan was astonishingly devoid of people and traffic), I exited the subway station at Bryant Park, behind the palacial New York Public Library, and headed to the Daily News Building.
- As I strolled eastward, I heard cloppity-cloppity-clop sounds behind me. I turned and stopped dead in my tracks. Scores of mounted New York City police officers, in two equestrian columns that stretched for a few hundred feet along 42nd Street, approached. Other awe-struck pedestrians, like me, had halted as well, to watch a cavalcade of blue-uniformed police and their chestnut, brown or black horses stride magnificently along the usually vehicle-filled street. What an enchanting and unforgettable sight!
- I acquired the travel-bug, in a major way, between college and graduate school. From 2 January to 4 July 1972, I backpacked mostly by myself throughout Europe (I traveled for a month with my sister Joan when she came over in March). I visited England, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Monaco, and Czechoslovakia. That was a grand time to bum-around Europe. I slept at youth hostels, camped-out on the floor of Joan's hotel room, or stayed for several weeks in London with an English girlfriend. For $5 a day I could eat hearty meals and pay for the hostel. My experiences during those six months, good and bad, made a mensch out of me.
- I will now relate how I was alone, or almost alone, in three of the most famous and/or beautiful places in the Old World. That aloneness occurred in 1972, while I was backpacking for six months throughout western and central Europe. It could not happen today, not in the terrorist-afflicted, police-guarded era of the early 21st century.
- On 16 May 1972, I checked-in at the youth hostel in Florence, Italy. The hostel was located on the south bank of the River Arno, in a working-class neighborhood. After securing a cot for the night in the men's section and stowing my backpack (with nary a worry that it might be pilfered or stolen while I was out & about), I departed the building and turned right from the front door.
- The quiet, mostly deserted and unimpressive street along which I strolled in the late afternoon was the Via Santa Monaca. I had no knowledge about whether it contained tourist-worthy museums, palaces, and the like. I simply wanted to stretch my legs, after hours on the train and galumphing from the station to the hostel with 45-plus pounds on my back and sore shoulders.
- After walking a few hundred feet I stopped at a church. As I learned later, its name was Santa Maria del Carmine. I pushed open its heavy door and stepped inside. Surprisingly, I was alone: no sexton, no janitor, no tourists. Slanting sunshine illuminated the interior as I paced along the nave, which was silent except for my footsteps.
- At the transept, I turned to the right before I entered a chapel (the Brancacci Chapel) and stared upward at the walls above me.
- My mouth opened in stupefaction; I stopped in my tracks. Hanging above me was a painting of exquisite beauty, power, and world-renown, which I immediately recognized from my college art-history class: "The Tribute Money," painted in the 1420s by Masaccio. It was famous for the vigor of its male characters---primarily Christ and his disciples---plus a man in an orange-colored coat whose back was turned on viewers.
- For at least ten minutes I was alone in Santa Maria del Carmine and in the Brancacci Chapel, admiring one famous painting after another at my leisure. If there were hidden security cameras or alarms, I did not see any, and no armed carabinieri came dashing into the church to ensure that I did not damage or destroy the stupendous art in the chapel.
- Sated aesthetically, and pleased-as-punch that I had been alone with so many masterpieces, I left the church. No other people entered. The Brancacci Chapel had been mine alone, as thought I was a king on a private tour. How wonderful was that?!
- Had Jean and I innocently and unknowingly broken-into the Alhambra?
- After the passage of fifty years I cannot recall if we paid for tickets or if we sauntered, on that sunny early morning in March, inside the massive Moorish palace-fortress by simply stepping through an unguarded gate.
- Regardless: she and I were the only visitors when we entered. We had met at the youth hostel; our low-key personalities melded almost immediately. Jean Bancroft was 25-years-old and a pretty, sweet-tempered schoolteacher (on a longish vacation) from Noranda, Quebec. For several days we had bummed-around Granada, and today's jaunt to the Alhambra was our much-anticipated high-point in this ancient city---the last Muslim city to surrender, in January 1492, to the Christian army of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.
- Every cloister, or fountain-burbling courtyard (such as the Court of the Lions), or magical, Arabic interior spaces that we entered, we had to ourselves. The only sounds were our voices, or the splash of water, or the chirping of birds. After we walked to the Generalife Gardens and crisscrossed its flowery lanes, we finally encountered other tourists.
- Jean and I felt contented with ourselves. We, two art-loving North Americans, had meandered through the Alhambra like lost waifs and had not damaged, defaced or stolen anything during our perambulation. We doubted that our incident was typical. Due to luck or happenstance, we had arrived at an early hour and made the Alhambra our private fiefdom.
- England in January 1972 had milder weather than New York City in winter, but the English air was moist, raw, and bone-chilling, nonetheless. It was Monday, the 24th of the month. I (and the full load of the backpack on my shoulders) had galumphed through light snow to reach Canterbury Cathedral. before I checked-in at the youth hostel, I wanted to make a walk-around of the cathedral's loft and gorgeous interior, which included seeing the spot where Archbishop Thomas à Becket was assassinated.
- I will quote from my as-yet unprinted book, With A Pack On His Back:
- ""The stone flooring was undistinguished, a battered, uneven footing tucked away in a down-the-steps niche off the cathedral’s dimly illuminated nave. There were no blood stains after 800 years, but my imagination saw a crumbled body in a chasuble, hacked and coated with his gore.
- ""I knelt and read the inscription. Archbishop Thomas à Becket had been assassinated on this spot on 29 December 1170. If not for a compelling movie, I wouldn’t have known about him. Many other clerics had died over the centuries, many deservedly so for their arrogance and elitism and for the misery they had caused the common folk. I felt sorry for Becket, though. He had principles and stood up against his overweening king. It required moral fortitude and resolve to confront a king with nearly unlimited powers. I could not do what Becket had done or be so fiercely patriotic, faithful, and loyal if my life depended on it. I was not imbued with selfless fervor and an unwavering devotion to a cause, any cause."
- My six months of backpacking in Europe would have been impossible had I not prepared for it by taking two physical education classes while I was in college. Those classes were entitled "Outdoor Living". They consisted of classroom instruction about mountaineering, outdoor survival, and our backpacking equipment, followed by four days of (a) hiking to & camping out in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, and (b) climbing two of the forty-nine 4,000-foot-plus peaks in the park, while carrying 40-50 lbs. of gear, food, water, clothing, sleeping bag, etc., in one's backpack.
- In May 1970 our group (about 50 male and female students divided into 7- or 8-person teams) drove six hours from New York City to Lake Placid, New York; slogged through thick snow to the lean-to structures in which we would be camping for four days & nights; and, on one of the days, climbed to the summit of Algonquin Peak (elevation: 5,114 feet). At night the temperature dropped to the mid-20s. It was no fun arising each morning; getting our campfires going; making breakfast; and preparing for the day's activities.
- In October 1971 (in a different Outdoor Living class, in which I was now one of the team leaders), we camped out in autumn weather at a different lean-to site. This time our goal was to climb to the summit of Phelps Mountain (elevation: 4,160 feet). It had rained overnight and was drizzling lightly during our ascent. It took us nine hours to ascend & descend Phelps, in the mud and cold. Indeed, at the summit, the wind was so strong, and the air so chilly, that I fell asleep while standing upright & hefting my full backpack! Our group leader had to break-open a vial of smelling salts to awaken me, so that I could begin our slog back to our base camp.
- Despite the physical exhaustion of those treks, I was very proud of having accomplished the challenges and to have climbed to the top of two of the "Adirondack High Peaks".
- Traveling with Karen has been a hallmark of our marriage. Our travels have included:
- About a dozen self-driving trips throughout western, central, and eastern Europe between 1984 and 2003, including France, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Italy, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, and Norway. France was our favorite country, because we journeyed through its wild, remote areas, which relatively few Americans did by automobile in the 1980s and 1990s. We journeyed to the Dordogne and Perigord regions, to castles and fortified villages hardly changed since the Hundred Years War in the 1300s and 1400s. We drove thousands of kilometers through Gascony, the Basque Country, Normandy, Provence, the Cote d'Azur, the Loire River Valley, the Savoy Alps and Dauphine Alps, Picardy, the ancient Saintonge and Aquitaine regions, the green and hilly Rouergue, and exquisite villages and cities where, except for an occasional British voice, we did not encounter the English language for days on end. My knowledge of French sufficed, and the French people we encountered in hotels, shops, restaurants, and marketplaces were friendly, curious, courteous, and pleased to find two Americans wandering in their rural departements.
- A 19-day escorted bus tour of India (January-February 2007), which included visiting New Delhi, Agra (the Taj Mahal), Ranthambore National Park, Fatehpur Sikri, Humayun's Tomb, Jaipur (the Red Fort), Guruvayur Elephant Camp, a backwaters cruise at Alleppey, having dinner at the home of a retired Indian Army major general, and the city of Cochi in Kerala State.
- A one-week bus tour of Greece, followed by a week's cruise of the Greek Isles and Turkish coast in 1992.
- A 15-day escorted bus tour of Morocco in 1998, with sight-seeing in Rabat, Tangier, Tetuan, Chefchaouen, Erfoud, the Sahara Desert at Merzouga, Ouarzazate, Fez, Marrakech, the Middle Atlas Mountains, and Casablanca.
- A cruise along the coasts of Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile (February 2008), including four days in Buenos Aires and three days in Valparaiso and Santiago, Chile. We visited Montevideo and Punta del Este, Puerto Madryn, the Strait of Magellan, Punta Arenas, Tierra del Fuego, the Beagle Channel, Ushuaia, Cape Horn, the Argentinian and Chilean fjord & glacier country, Puerto Montt, Puerto Varas, Frutillar, and La Serena.
- Cruises to Puerto Rico, St. Croix, St. Martin, St. Kitts, Guadeloupe, Domenica, St. Lucia, Grenada, Barbados, Tobago, Curacao, and Aruba (December 2009); Florida, Cozumel, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Grand Cayman (January 2011).
- A cruise in July 2011 from Alaska to British Columbia, with stopovers in Anchorage, Homer, Haines, College Fjord, Hubbard Glacier, Wrangell, Icy Strait Point, Juneau, Sitka, Ketchikan, and Vancouver.
- Trips to New York City (October 2011, September 2012, and December 2012).
- A cruise to Virgin Gorda, Tortola, Grand Turk, St-Barts, Antigua, and the eastern Caribbean (February 2012).
- A Baltic Sea cruise to Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Germany, and Denmark (September 2012).
- A multi-day stopover in Tampa and a cruise to Key West, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico (January 2013).
- We took several excellent self-driving trips to Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia.
- In the early 2000s we made self-driving trips to North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah.
- In 2004, 2005, and 2006 we took superlative, multi-week self-driving trips in Guadalajara, Queretaro, Jalisco, Michoacán, Morelos, Leon, Quintana Roo, Yucatan, and Campeche states in Mexico.
- We traveled extensively throughout Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine when we lived in New England in 1976-1977, and in California when we lived there in 1973-1974 and when we revisited the state in 2000.
- After I retired in 2016 we traveled in the USA, primarily to historic districts, stately homes, Civil War battlefields, or museums in Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, with multi-month autumn or wintertime stays in warm, sunny Florida.
- This might be considered a form of insanity, but I drove up & down many vertiginous and extraordinary alpine roads in Europe and North America---and lived to write about it. With Karen navigating and me at the driver's wheel, we took drives through:
- The Great Dolomites Road in the Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy. It is an all-day drive from Bolzano to Cortina d'Ampezzo. The road churns up, over & down the Falzarego, Pordoi, and Costalunga passes, and through astounding alpine scenery.
- The Col d'Aspin, Col de Peyresourde, and Col de Tourmalet (the latter during a snow storm) in the French Pyrenees.
- The Grossglockner-Hochalpenstrasse in Austria.
- The Col de Montgenèvre, Col d'Iseran, and Col du Mont Cenis in France.
- The Great Saint Bernard Pass between Switzerland and Italy, and the Little Saint Bernard Pass between France and Italy.
- The Julier Pass, Susten Pass, and Grimsel Pass roads in Switzerland.
- The Julian Alps in Slovenia.
- The German Alpine Road through the Bavarian Alps.
- The Geirangerfjord Road in Norway.
- The Icefields Highway between Banff and Jasper in Alberta, Canada.
- The roads through Rocky Mountain National Park and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Colorado.
- I enjoy quiet chats with Karen or with my long-time friends.
- I relish long walks in our hilly suburban neighborhood.
- As much as I was a walker and a driver of alpine pass-roads, I was a climber of structures. I climbed to the tops of these towers, temples, cathedrals, and mountains:
- The Torre del Mangia in Siena, Italy.
- The Giralda Tower in Seville, Spain.
- The roof of Notre-Dame de Paris in France.
- The apex of the Temple of Kukulkan in Chichen Itza, Mexico, and to the top of other Mayan temples in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.
- The belltower of the Sankt Georg Dom in Nordlingen, Germany.
- The summits of Mount Phelps (elevation: 4,161 feet) and Algonquin Peak (elevation: 5,114 feet) in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, while hefting a backpack with 45 pounds of food, clothes, and equipment.
- Like my grandfather Barnett Fine and grandfather Ruben Kudlick, I have a sardonic and puckish sense of humor. Karen and my friends call me a smart-ass, an imp, or a clown.
- My personal habits are ascetic: I do not drink alcoholic beverages, smoke or chew tobacco, or use illegal substances. I do not gamble, either. My primary "sin" consists of drinking two cups of black coffee a day. I exercise every day with weights, do 40+ pushups each morning, and, depending on the weather, take daily outdoor walks. I am 5-feet, 6-inches tall and weigh 155 lbs.
- Although I was raised as a Jew, I do not practice Judaism. I am philosophically a Stoic. I believe in the four main tenets of Stoicism: courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. It emphasizes leading a moral life, a life of moderation, personal responsibility, and contemplation.
- A favorite quote of mine, from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: "I am quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself."
- My musical interests are overwhelmingly 18th- and 19th-century in nature: opera, operetta, chamber music, Spanish zarzuelas, jotas aragonesas, and European (mostly German) marches. Although Johann Strauss the Younger composed amazing music for his operettas, Franz Lehár's music is ethereal, such as these three arias or duets: "Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiss" (from Giuditta); "Dein ist mein ganzes Herz" (from Das Land Des Lächelns); and "Lippen schweigen" (from Die lustige Witwe).
- From the mid-1980s to the mid-2010s Karen and I were season subscribers to The Minnesota Opera Company, The Guthrie Theater, The Gilbert & Sullivan Very Light Opera Company, and the Park Square Theater. On & off throughout the 1980s and 1990s we often attended concerts of The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra at Colonial Church in Edina, and the Minnesota Orchestra in downtown Minneapolis.
- I love cats and horses (sometimes dogs...).
- I love the evocative, uplifting, emotionally fulfilling, and often humorous novels of Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Pickwick Papers). The novels of Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure) are darker and haunting, but marvelous in their depiction of rural life in southwest England in the late 19th-century. And as for the social mannerisms and daily adventures among the English leisure-class, nobody described them better than Jane Austen in her novels Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park. Gustave Flaubert receives kudus from me for the evocative imagery and character development of Madame Bovary. For guffaws, whimsy, and brilliant depictions of people and places, I dote on the masterful short stories of G.K. Chesterton, especially his Father Brown detective stories. Speaking of detectives...the many Sherlock Holmes tales were excellently portrayed by Arthur Conan Doyle; I often relaxed on a recliner on our screened-in porch and relished Sir Arthur's adventures of Sherlock, Dr. Watson, and the diabolical Professor Moriarty. And when I want a deep-throated chuckle, I read one of P.G. Wodehouse's jocund short stories about The Drone Club or the daft Bertie Wooster and his sage valet Jeeves.
- My two most-favorite movies are Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago. Other favorite movies are: Casablanca, The Man Who Would Be King, The Last of the Mohicans, The Bridge on the River Kwai Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, The Maltese Falcon, "Unforgiven", The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, It's A Wonderful Life, Oklahoma!, Ran, Kagemusha, Somewhere in Time, Barry Lyndon, Amadeus, Out of Africa, Breaker Morant, 1917, Open Range, True Grit [2010], Blazing Saddles, and History of the World, Part I.
- I enjoy improving my marksmanship skills at a gun range. For years I have possessed a "State of Minnesota Permit To Carry A Pistol" and a "Concealed Weapon or Firearm License, State Of Florida".
- My favorite places are: Lake Bled, Slovenia; the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia; Paris, France; Canyon de Chelly, Arizona; the Monterey Peninsula, California; Seville, Spain; Florence, Italy; Prague, Czech Republic; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; Patzcuaro, Mexico; the Auvergne, Languedoc, and Savoy regions of France; the Dolomite Alps, Italy; Lucerne, Switzerland; Fez, Morocco; and Delphi, Greece.
- Things or types of people at whom I look askance:
- Fanatically religious ghouls (ISIS, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.).
- Non-scientific ignoramuses (creationists, anti-evolutionists).
- Chronic gamblers, drug addicts, and alcoholics (how sad to have these diseases).
- Karen and I do not have children. And because of that, after I die, the following (quoted from Charles Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities) will come true: "I have altogether perished from the remembrance of the living, and in the next generation my place was a blank."
- One of the most enjoyable things I did in my life occurred when I was 14 years old. I was a camper at a sleep-away summer camp near Hopewell Junction, New York. My parents, though, had notified the camp operators that I loved horses. The camp had a six-horse stable on-site, to teach campers how to ride. On the second day at camp, I introduced myself at the stable, and that is where I "worked" for the next eight weeks. I was the person who rose each morning at 6 a.m., strolled through the dew-soaked grass to the stable, took a shovel & broom and cleaned the stalls of manure and urine-soaked straw, put down fresh straw, walked the horses to the lake to drink, filled their feed-bins with oats and hay, and used a curry brush on their withers and necks. Before the campers arrived, I'd emplace, on several of the horses, their bridles and reins. position blankets across their backs, lift old McClellan cavalry saddles into position, tighten the rear billets, and adjust the stirrups. Later, in the cool late afternoon, I and the other four workers at the stable would saddle-up and race on the dirt road that surrounded the lake. My, oh my, I had such fun during the summer of 1964.
- I was in Manhattan on Monday, 10 September 2001, the day before 9/11---when I was also in Manhattan, minutes after the World Trade Center towers were attacked...but that's another story...Monday was a sunny, warm and emotionally uplifting day, and I had a checklist of things to do:
- Visit Castle Garden at the southern tip of Manhattan, where, in 1886, my father's father, his grandparents, and other members of the Feinstein family arrived in the United States.
- Sit on the steps of Federal Hall, at the juncture of Wall and Exchange streets, and watch hundreds of New York Stock Exchange personnel mosey-around during their lunch break.
- Sit on a bench in the beautiful and serene graveyard of St. Paul's Chapel and eat my own lunchtime sandwich.
- Stroll around the 18th- and 19th-century neighborhood near Fraunces Tavern.
- Take a boat to Liberty Island and climb the interior staircases of the Statue of Liberty, up & up to the crown, so that I could peer through the windows in Lady Liberty's head at the magnificent panorama of New York Harbor. (Unbeknownst to me at that time, I would be one of the last tourists, for many years after 9/11, to go inside the Statue of Liberty and climb the stairs to the crown.)
- Take another boat to Ellis Island and visit the Ellis Island Immigration Museum.
- The emotional contrasts between those back-to-back days---of seeing such natural and architectural beauty, and New York City history, on that Monday, followed by utter terrorist destruction on that Tuesday---rattles around my mind decades after the events, and will stay in my recollections until my passing.