Friday, November 11, 2011

Opening paragraphs.................















     My first encounter with the American press, more than eighty years ago, was unforgettable and probably determined me to be a newspaperman.  My brother, Gilbert, and I were farm boys; in summer we hoed and dug potatoes and picked strawberries at one cent a quart - the selling price was eight or nine cents at the nearby Wallabout Market in Philadelphia.  In autumn we joyfully skipped school to pick grapes, which Grandfather sold to a man named Charlie Welch, the inventor of alcohol-free wine he called grape juice.  This, our only crop, brought us three hundred dollars a year, which, plus the $16.66 we earned every month by keeping the fourth-class post office in the family, made us one of the more affluent families in Alliance, New Jersey.

-George Seldes,  Witness To A Century

photo courtesy of

No comments:

Post a Comment