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Alan R Sivell
Alan Sivell's A Boomer LifeEpisodes
Alan R Sivell
Alan Sivell's A Boomer Life
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Episodes of Alan Sivell's A Boomer Life
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Irving Kravsow wasn’t wrong in his assessment of my skills at that time. It was the seeming finality of his words that made the message so cutting. I was a 19-year-old with one semester of journalism classes under my belt. He was used to dealin
I drove down Farmington Avenue shaking with excitement and nervousness. I was heading to an interview for a paid, three-month co-op job at the Hartford Courant. The only thing that could have topped this interview would have been one with the Y
My education for sophomore year had started earlier that summer. That’s because Northeastern only offered dorms for first year men and then they were unleashed on the city to find their own room and board. I had spent just nine short months re
At the end of April and during the first two weeks of May, 1970, my life felt like the crescendo at the end of the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life” when there is this crazy whirl of noise and music that spirals up in energy, pace […]
I was a “love it or leave it” kind of guy when I left for college. I was proud to say I was a reactionary. “Better dead than red” I had written on the binder I carried around senior year. It should have contained notes from my classes […]
Until college, I had no idea that freedom could be associated in any way with the word school. In high school, the piercing tremolo of the electronic school “bell” controlled our lives. It rang almost two dozen times each day, the first blast s
I headed off to college about as unprepared as anyone in the history of heading off to college. When I got my class schedule, I was surprised you didn’t have to stay in school all day like high school. I didn’t realize that your time was your o
Senior year, I lost a fight to a guy on crutches. And it’s worse than it sounds. He wasn’t even standing during the fight. I was. It started because I was in charge of the student lounge, previously an unused, first-floor classroom on the scien
The first time I tasted beer was in my grandmother’s kitchen. We were down from Connecticut in her front-to-back row house in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn on Easter Sunday. I was 4. I had mixed emotions about going to my grandmother’s house
It was a seemingly innocent remark. But with it, early in our senior year, our new school president, John Abraham, set in motion one of the hottest social events of the year. John was at his locker, exchanging his books from the previous class
Last summer I wrote the first 17 chapters of my blog. A couple of those chapters dealt with Bethani, my first serious girlfriend. Since I’m plumbing the depths of my memory and I’m doing the writing, the stories are told from my perspective. Bu
Senior year started off going my way. I was recovering socially after the breakups with Bethani and then Annie. I survived the final football camp of my life. I had made the starting team and that meant something: getting presented at the begin
The coaches could clearly see I was no running back. I had no speed, no athleticism and without glasses, could only see to the end of my arm. I did have talent for gaining weight so I was moved to the offensive line. That was fine with me. […]
The summer of 1968 – after my junior year – had been a good summer. Most of it was spent working at Lincoln Dairy where I got a lot of attention from all the college waitresses who had tried to reform Page, and I had a fine time […]
The exhilarating week of Boys’ State was over. Going head to head with some of the best and the brightest high school students in Connecticut gave me the confidence that I could compete in their world, if I applied myself. And the glamour of da
The relationship crisis with Bethani was resolved and the junior prom was behind us. I was feeling good. It was spring. It was baseball season. Then 3rd quarter report cards came out. Bethani, of course, got all As. I got three Cs, a D and a B
(I skipped over a few chapters, a few stories and my entire senior year to publish this chapter during the 50th anniversary week of Woodstock. Chapters 18-23 will appear at a future date.) It was another one of Bob’s schemes. In the early summe
The fact that our high school had a ski club says a lot about the town we grew up in. Not that we were like the nearby prep schools such as Miss Porter’s or Avon Old Farms. They had Kennedys and their ilk for alums and an actual […]
You’d think there’d be no inheritance from an 18-year-old kid who was an assistant night manager, making barely above minimum wage. However, I knew Page had left something behind. But I wasn’t sure how to break it to my parents. I had figured i
Most of the time Page was out of it. Mom spent all her time at the hospital but Doom had to work. Having a child hovering between life and death didn’t seem to matter to his bosses at the home office in Minnesota. A few days after I […]
When my parents got the call, they put everything down and left immediately for a hospital in rural Connecticut. Page and Bobby Higgins, a guy with whom I had played baseball and still stares out at me, frozen at age 14, from an old team photo,
I got the job at Lincoln Dairy through Page. It paid much more than the paper route so I didn’t mind starting on my 16th birthday. On the other hand, I really didn’t want to give the route up. It had been my identity for four years and […]
When I was 15, my life passion switched from baseball to girls. To this day, I don’t know if it was a natural evolution or if it was because my favorite players, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, were limping to the end of their careers and my fav
My father, Doom, had a couple of lines on the back of his neck that made what looked like the letter “X.” There was an indentation where the lines crossed. When we asked about it, he always said, “That’s where I got shot during the war.” Until
At first, Doom wasn’t going to pay me anything to mow the lawn. Then he settled on 35 cents. Thus began my life of work at the age of 9. The neighbors paid more: I earned 75 cents from the Herman’s family in the house to the north […]
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