A few decades ago, a crowd of people, in confusion, mistook me for a huge Hollywood movie star. The cameras clicked, and the flashbulbs popped in front of me. It was mesmerizing for a moment. For a couple of years in the late seventies, I… Read More »I Am Not Sylvester Stallone
My father taught me to drive. That was a mistake. It is fair to say that my father had a driving style that reflected the man himself. His formative years in the 1920s were spent on the streets of South Philly, running with a bunch… Read More »How Not to Learn to Drive
Customers are the lifeblood of every business. That is true in all types of enterprises but is especially so for retail establishments, from the behemoths like Walmart to your local Mom and Pop store. Dave’s Deli, where I worked as a teenager, was a bit… Read More »Six Pounds of Corned Beef???
There are just a few times in your life when you consciously make a decision that you know will alter your life significantly. Most of our decisions do not rise to that level of importance, although even the seemingly unimportant ones hold the potential of… Read More »A Hurricane and a Decision
How do you approach an unusual or new and difficult task, assignment or challenge – one for which your body of knowledge holds little or no related experience? You want to accomplish the objective, but you don’t know how to get from A to Z.… Read More »The Well-Worn Path
From the time I was a young child, I had a savings account at PSFS – the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society. My mother had opened it for me and said that if I wanted to go to college one day, I would need to pay… Read More »How I Turned a Five Dollar Bill into Four Years of College
Human beings are imperfect, and we are all prone to making bad decisions. The best we can hope for is to learn from the consequences of those choices. Some decisions, though, result in no tomorrow. That almost happened to me. It was 1979, and I… Read More »Going Down for the Third Time
Do the names Gramm-Rudman-Hollings mean anything to you? No, they were not a legendary baseball double play combination, nor were they a power rock trio from the U.K. They were influential United States Senators – Phil Gramm (Texas), Warren Rudman (New Hampshire) and Fritz Hollings… Read More »My Oddest Interview
(This originally appeared in American Libraries, May 1990, back in a much more primitive computing age.) I thought it would be easy to write a book about the use of serials in reference services. I told myself, with all due conceit, that I knew just… Read More »The Agony and the Ecstasy
The first time that I stepped through the doors of Dave’s Deli in Northeast Philly, I was sixteen years old and had no way of knowing that what I would learn there would shape the rest of my work life. It was my first real… Read More »My First Boss