Alan Sivell's A Boomer Life

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 signaling it was time to […]

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 own […]

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 science wing which became […]

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 on holidays. I loved my […]

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 for his books for […]

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. But over the winter, going […]

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 beginning-of-the-year, all-school assembly. We were announced […]

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 dancing with Bethani at […]

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 in […]

(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 summer of 1969, just after […]

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 it out a few months […]

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, had gone […]

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 favorite […]

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 each […]

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 […]

After Doom got back from the Pacific, my parents were married in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the majestic New York City landmark, on September 28, 1946. Doom was lucky that both my mother AND grandmother said yes. My grandmother thought he seemed like a nice enough young man but […]

 I had said I wasn’t going to be Page’s bagman ever again. But about a year after the Hard Roll Heist, there was one other escapade that he managed to entangle me in. The two of us were hanging out talking and playing records on the third floor […]

My mom’s parents came to America on a boat. Not the boat that stopped at Ellis Island, my grandmother was quick to point out. Those were the peasants, she said. Our people paid full fare on their boat and had their own cabins and job prospects when they […]

The first time I heard about the “free” hard rolls, I was in the back yard with a bunch of friends. Doom had put up a monkey swing in the big elm. He tied a thick rope to a branch high up in the tree and at the […]

Mickey Mantle should have been my dad. Then I could have been hanging around the New York Yankee clubhouse in 1961, the Yankees’ greatest season. At least, that’s what I thought when I was 10. My dad, about age 3. His mother used to enter him in “cute […]

I still miss my brother. It’s been so long now – more 50 years – that initially it’s hard to remember anything but the great adventures we shared. He pushed me to do things I was too afraid to do on my own initiative. Without him, I probably […]