Berkeley, April 20 – All these years, all these crises later, the advice hasn’t changed. “Get down to Disney World in Florida,” said President George W. Bush after the September 11 premeditated murders, planned and…
Posts published by “Larry Bensky”
Berkeley, 13 April 2020 — It had to happen. And now it has. People, not statistics or anecdotes, have died. They’re people, caught up in the pandemic, who my family knew. One, in his early…
Berkeley, CA 4/4 2020 — Headlines: “Undocumented Farmworkers, Still Deportable, Are Essential” “Data From Cellphones Shows Staying at Home is a Luxury” “Outbreak Rages From Nursing Home” “Business Owners Sue to Reopen, Citing Breach of…
Berkeley, CA. Week of 3/23 – There’s something basically distressing about having to gather almost all of one’s knowledge and experience remotely. Not by “being there.” Phone calls and web contact, some of it accompanied…
Berkeley, CA; Week of 3/16 — Sunday afternoon. Preternaturally quiet. Church on the corner, with its small, aged, African-American congregation, has suspended services. Nothing in the neighborhood is open but the always busy Berkeley Bowl,…
Tom Clark lived, for decades, as his health declined, on a busy street in Berkeley, in a house with many steep stairs. Crossing, haltingly, one of those streets he was struck by a car and…
“The Great Bensky!” The ironic, powerful voice I would come to know so well blasted the ancient telephone in my obscure eighth floor corner of the gloomy New York Times building. Warren Hinckle identified himself.…
The first reaction, from she who is closest to me, when I brought her the news as she knelt on the black cloth cover through whose agency we are trying to turn our small, once…
Everyone will be talking about where everyone was that day. Except that “everyone” in this country now means fewer than one in four people — those of us who were alive and of an age…