It’s difficult to view myself as having grown up in hard times in the 1950s in Long Beach, Calif., when the biggest disappointment I faced as a young child (and thought of as deprivation) was that we didn’t have a fenced yard, and Mother couldn’t afford to fence the vard or buv me a dog like Lassie or Big Red.
When I was a bit older, though, I recall having to call Joe Van Coutren (an “older man”—a year older than
