This is a very wide-ranging column on the very broadly defined “passing scene.” It’s based on accurate reporting, with opinionated comment.
One of my first jobs in the news business was as a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer in the first half of the 1970s. I subsequently was a beat reporter and a city editor at various major papers, including 19 years as a weekly columnist with The New York Times, and before I was an assistant national editor at The Wall Street Journal.
I have written five books, one of them a novel (co-written with former NYPD detective Angela Amato), three of them true-crime books and one an investigative book on for-profit psychiatric hospital scandals. I’m now finishing a new nonfiction book, “Wreckage,” about a homeless young altar boy who was sexually molested by a priest, and who went on to accumulate a criminal record as long as a bishop’s stole.
As a journalist, I’ve covered every kind of story. In 2006, I survived a horrific mid-air collision at 37,000 feet over the central Amazon that killed 154. My story ran on the front page of The New York Times and as a magazine article in the Sunday Times of London.
Column-writing was always my first joy. It’s a pleasure and a challenge to embark on this one without an editor. I frankly never knew an editor who improved anything, except good copy editors, and The Times used to have the best copy editors in the business. I live in southern Arizona. I am a Vietnam veteran (1968).
I was born in and grew up mostly in Philadelphia, though I went to the first six grades of elementary school (in a Catholic school back when the teachers all were slap-happy nuns in those scary black costumes and veils they used to wear) in Maple Shade, a very old town in South Jersey, before my parents hauled us all back across the river to the same block in the city from whence we’d come.
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