Old Acquaintances Help Us Remember History
Justice Holmes spoke of his Civil War service to his clerk, who relayed the story to me in the 1970s.
I have been blessed for most of my life by friendships with people older than myself. Now that I’m in my 80s, the number of elders is dwindling. But these friendships connected me to history going back centuries.
As a grammar-school kid in the early 1950s, I enjoyed hanging around a small, struggling haberdashery store in my Hamden, Conn., neighborhood whose proprietor was a fellow named Christie Pontillo. Those were the days of the Yankees-Giants-Dodgers rivalry, and Christie and I would sit in his back room and debate the...