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Leah Dunaief

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By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief,
Publisher

Given all the chaos, both globally and domestically, in today’s world, it is surprising that the stock market is back to just about where it was before the decline started with the pandemic. So what does that tell us about investing, and especially about investing in stocks?

According to Charles D. Ellis, a Wall Street guru, who has written a new book called, “Rethinking Investing: A Very Short Guide to Very Long-Term Investing,” it’s not what is happening in the world at any given moment that matters, according to him. The magic element for financial success is time. When most people think of long-term, they may think five years, maybe ten years. Ellis is talking 60 years.

So who has a 60-year horizon?

There are two ways to answer that question. If you are in your 20s when you start investing, and if you believe in the incredible returns you get from money compounding as you reinvest the dividends over the decades, you can realize significant wealth by your 80s. 

In other words, let’s say you buy a stock or an index fund at $100 that pays a five percent dividend when you are 25. A year later, you have $105, if you let the principal compound, meaning, you automatically reinvest the dividend into more stock. You now have more dividends from more stocks to reinvest after the second year, and so it goes. The dividends keep increasing as the number of stocks increase and perhaps also appreciate—most of the time. If the stocks should drop in price for a while, the dividends get to buy more stocks at the cheaper price.When you are in your 80s, you will be a happy camper if your stocks remain untouched for 60 years.

This is good advice for those in their 20s, or thereabouts, today.

If you are older, the other way to think about a 60-year time horizon is if you consider that you are investing for your grandchildren, who have a long-term future. Of course, they would have to leave the stocks untouched to allow them to compound, so you need to explain this essentially passive strategy to them. They would hope to make enough money from their day jobs to pay their bills so they can let their inherited investment  compound undisturbed.

Low-cost stock index funds that are diversified are a recommendation from Ellis. They reduce the risk of picking the wrong individual stocks, and they do as well as the overall market. And the overall market, over the long-term, is a winner. From January 1926 through March, 2025, the annualized return for the S&P 500 (a combination of selected stocks) was 10.43 percent, according to analysts. That includes the several severe market declines, over those years, that are overcome with long-term investing. While that’s almost 100 years, if we look over the past 60 years, the number is almost the same: 10.46 through June 20.

That means, an investment would have doubled in less than 7 years, on average and that repeated doubling continues. Further eye-popping statistics: The cumulative return for the S&P 500 for those 60 years was…wait for it… 38,881.17 percent. Yes, really! So, if you had invested $1000 60 years ago, it would be $390,000 today. Woulda! Coulda! Shoulda!

That said, losses over a one year period happen 30 percent of the time for all stock portfolios. And according to analysts, for an investor to have withstood all the losses since 1926, they would have had to hold the S&P 500 for 13 years.

For all of the above statistics and information, I am grateful to The New York Times’s writer, Jeff Sommer, who likes the way Ellis thinks, as reported in his column, Strategies. This appears in Sunday Business each week. Thank you, Jeff. I like the way you think.

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Photo by Josh Willink/Pexels

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief,
Publisher

Whew! That was blistering heat we just endured for the last few days. When it gets that hot, I have two reactions. I need some ice cream, preferably a cone filled with coffee ice cream dotted with chocolate chips. And I have to switch to wearing shorts.

So it gave me a chuckle to read an inquiry by a reader of the New York Times Style Questions column asking about wearing shorts to work. Now I’m supposing that she works in a large city office, where there is a formal or informal dress code, and like me, she wants to beat the heat by donning shorts. 

Her question amuses me because it reminds me of how far wearing shorts has come, and also how lucky we are.

First the shorts evolution. It must have been a slow news day back in 1960, when The New York Times ran a front page story about Barnard students wearing Bermuda shorts as they meandered through the Columbia campus. Imagine the scandal. It seems President Grayson Kirk of Columbia was offended by the casual dress and asked Barnard President Millicent McIntosh to clamp down on her students. Only skirts were to be worn, came the directive, with some sort of appropriate blouse.

Well, we students protested, with petitions and rallies, until the ban was rescinded to a “request” to wear a coat or slacks over the shorts when on the Columbia campus, which was across Broadway from Barnard. Think how innocent the uproar when measured against today’s protests on the same campuses.

Clearly President McIntosh wasn’t similarly offended because she advised us during an ensuing assembly of the entire college “to turn over your book covers when you are riding the subway (some two-thirds of students were commuters then) so no one knows you are from Barnard.” And any ban would not take place until September, which was one way of kicking the can-or ban-down the road.

Other women’s colleges treated the issue of showing knees differently. Radcliffe, adjacent to Harvard, only permitted shorts for athletic activities. Vassar College allowed shorts both on campus and in town (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.). Smith College, in Northampton, Mass., allowed shorts on campus and in class, but no shorter than two inches above the knee. All that was researched by The NYT reporter for the 1960 article.

Today’s reporter, Vanessa Friedman, answered the reader this way. “Shorts are often longer than skirts these days and often more conservative. There is no reason a woman shouldn’t wear them to the office.” She goes on to say that any hesitation might stem from the association of shorts with play and summer weekends rather than work. As such they are not considered professional garb.

There is also the question of what kind of shorts, she advises. Very short shorts are not any more acceptable than very short skirts. To professionalize the look, a blazer, a belted T-shirt and conservative shoes — platform shoes or even pumps — might complete the outfit, or an oversize button-up shirt.

So now I come to the point of our being lucky. First, most of us are not in a large city office but rather a suburban environment, which, culturally, is more relaxed. We live in the land of the sweatsuits.

Furthermore, times have so radically changed that no one, for example, expects a doctor or lawyer, the epitome of professional, I guess, to appear in a suit. Not even a tie. A button-up Oxford shirt is pretty dressed up these days, and we often see professionals thusly outfitted: men in golf shirts and trousers, and women in short sun dresses.

Finally, we, as journalists, are allowed to look casually dressed. Few people would expect to be interviewed by someone in a suit. It might even make them nervous. Yippee!

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Yuka Mobile App. Photo from Yuka Facebook

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief,
Publisher

In a world of apps, I have recently added two to my cellphone. One has to do with what we eat. The other tells me what birdsong I am hearing. Both are useful and please me, so I will share them with you if you haven’t already discovered them.

The first is Yuka.

“The app prompts users to scan the bar codes of foods and personal care items—in grocery stores and at home—and then offers a score out of 100 to indicate how ‘healthy’ it is for you or the environment,” according to The New York Times, where I learned of this clever app. 

When you touch the icon, a scanner opens. Then all you have to do is position the bar code of the product in the box provided on the screen, and you are immediately rewarded with both a specific number and a verdict.

It’s an irresistible toy. I went running around the house, first to the pantry in the kitchen, then the bathroom and the bedroom, pointing at items I use. 

I was often shocked. The first bottle I evaluated was a peanut salad dressing I use frequently. It came out with a score of 24/100 and the word “bad.” Who knew? The app further broke down the rating by listing negatives: additives (1 limited risk), sugar (10 grams too sweet), sodium (220mg too much), and calories (120 a bit too caloric). It then went on to list the positives: protein (2g some protein), fiber (0.9g some fiber), and saturated fat (1g low impact).

Sadly, since I like the flavor so much, the app could not offer a better alternative for this dressing under “recommendations.” 

On the other hand, a green lentil pasta I enjoy is rated 100/100 excellent. No additives, no synthetic herbicides and therefore organic, excellent amount of protein (21g), excellent amount of fiber (9g), no saturated fat, low sugar (1g), and no sodium. The only negative was its caloric count: a bit too caloric (310 calories). That was all welcome news.

Now I am going to have to stop putting the peanut dressing on the pasta and find some other topping, perhaps Silver Palate Marinara sauce with low salt, which was rated excellent at 75/100.

It was fun checking out my foods on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

Originally introduced in France in 2017, this app came to the United States in 2022 and has more than 40 million followers now. Yuka uses an algorithm to score the products based on 3 parts: nutritional quality (60 percent), additives and their risk (30 percent) and organic (10 percent). As you might guess, high protein and high fiber are “good,” high sugar, sodium, saturated fats and calories are “bad.” 

This app is just one offering toward the goal of eating healthy, but it can help.

Merlin Bird ID mobile app

The second app is one for the birds. Literally. It’s called Merlin Bird ID and it will tell you what birds are singing nearby. The way it works, I guess, is that it records the bird sounds, then matches them up with its data base of birdsong. At the moment when I am writing this, the Merlin Bird has identified the American Robin in my backyard. It has also shown me a picture. 

Again, it’s great fun knowing who else is in the neighborhood. Oops, the Robin has just been joined by a Gray Catbird, a Song Sparrow, a Northern Cardinal and a Yellow Warbler. I wonder if they are talking to each other or just thinking out loud.

The other day, when I thought I was surrounded by half a dozen birds, my app told me it was just a Mockingbird holding court.

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METRO photo

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief,
Publisher

Wednesday was National Corn on the Cob Day, and when I saw that, I began to salivate because I love that vegetable. We are now coming into the season when the kernels are sweet with or without butter and salt. 

Everyone eats corn differently, it seems, if you watch people devouring the offering. I bite the corn from the cob as if I were using an old fashioned typewriter, meaning in a single row from left to right. I’ll eat one row, then go back, as if I were slinging a typewriter carriage to the next line, and chew straight above the first.

Others turn the cob so that they are eating in a circular fashion, one circle precisely after the other in a geometric display. Still others just plow right in, chewing wherever their teeth land. They eventually clean off the whole cob.

I guess one could tell a lot about the corn eater’s personality by watching the pattern of consumption from the cob.

My favorite corn on the cob story takes place in the late 1940s on a freezing January day. My dad, who grew up in the mountains and loved the cold, brisk air, would put on his heavy winter coat and take my mother, my brother, my sister and me to Coney Island. 

It was always on a Sunday, when he had off from work. The ride tickled my mother, who thought it was an extraordinary price on the subway for the same 15 cent token that one paid just to go one stop, so that typically would be part of the conversation on the trip to Brooklyn from our apartment in Midtown Manhattan. 

When we emerged from underground, the wind and cold would initially take our breaths away, but before long, we acclimated. We followed my dad down to the beach and watched the wild waves plunge into the shore with a roar and lots of foam, then recede meekly only to repeat the fury. It was Nature showing its dramatic face.

It was also intensely cold.

After a few minutes of beach walking, we would head toward Nathan’s Hot Dog stand, one of the few stores open in the winter. This one Sunday, we were in for a surprise. In the narrow alley between Nathan’s and the next building was a man with a cauldron on what I guess was an electric burner, steam pouring from the pot. As we drew near, we could see butter, salt and napkins on the stand.

When my dad cleared a hole in the steam and peered into the pot, he expressed some happy surprise. “Where did you get corn on the cob in January?” he queried the man holding the tongs.

“They are in the frozen food section of some of the supermarkets,” the man explained. Frozen foods were just beginning to appear in markets at that time.

“Do they taste the same?” my dad asked.

“Try one,” the fellow offered and plucked one from the boiling water, putting it on a piece of white paper.

When it had cooled enough to bite into the cob, my dad approved the purchase and we all ate those steaming corn with butter and salt, crowding around the cauldron for warmth. I still remember those corn as the sweetest as any I had ever tasted in the summer. 

Besides, they warmed my hands.

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By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief,
Publisher

It isn’t often that you see a big picture of a toilet on a front page of The New York Times. But there was one on the Business section this past Friday, and it made me smile. The reporters had fallen in love with a bidet made by Toto, much as I had. Only I beat them, for I discovered this marvel when I visited Japan 10 years ago.

So what is a bidet? That was my question when I first saw the wash basin alongside the toilet bowl in a bathroom many years ago. I couldn’t understand why there would be two toilets and was enlightened by some patient soul to the bidet’s function. Although I am a fan of personal hygiene, it seemed like it provided a nice but unnecessary additional chore at the time. 

Just FYI, the word, “bidet” is French for “pony” due to the straddling position adopted in its usage, according to the internet, which also told me that it is considered an indispensable tool in Spain, Italy and Portugal, in addition to France. Also devotees of its use may be found in Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Egypt and Eastern Asia but rarely in sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and North America.

The electronic bidet featured in The NYT is built into the toilet seat, thus taking no extra room and requiring no additional movement on the part of the user. Many different controls make for a pleasant experience. Adjustable water pressure, adjustable temperature, direction of the spray, a heating element for drying the user’s bottom, a night light, a deodorizer, and even a knob for warming the toilet seat are common features. The control panel with these options can sit on the edge of the seat or hang on the wall. Or a wireless remote control may be employed.

The first electronic bidet, as opposed to a wash basin, I saw was in a restaurant in Japan. My travel companions waited a long time outside while I figured out how to use the feature. It was a life-changing moment for me and for them, too, after I re-emerged and told them what I had discovered. I was impressed to find bidets in Japanese department stores, hotels, the airport and in private homes on that trip. 

When I returned home, I called our plumber, explained what I wanted him to install and had to work hard to persuade him that such a product existed. He told me that if he could find it, he would order two: one for me and one for him. I guess it was a life-changing moment for him, too.

“From an environmental standpoint, bidets can reduce the need for toilet paper. Considering that the average person uses only 0.5 liter (1/8 US gallon) of water for cleansing by using a bidet, much less water is used than for manufacturing toilet paper…Scientific American has also reported that if the US switched to using bidets, 15 million trees could be saved every year,” according to the internet.

In 1982, an actress in a pink floral dress drops paint on her hand and tries in vain to wipe it off with toilet paper. She then looks into the camera and asks, “Everyone, if your hands get dirty, you wash them, right?”

She then continues, “It’s the same for your bottom. Bottoms deserve to be washed, too.” This was a commercial, according to The NYT, from Toto for its Washlet, and started the electronic bidet offering. It took decades for the Japanese overwhelmingly to accept the innovation, but they certainly have now. More than 80 percent of Japanese households have them, and, as I discovered, they are found in all sorts of public places.

Now Toto is looking forward to a similar swell in the US market, which measures only 2.5 percent currently. Helped by the COVID-19 pandemic, with its shortage of toilet paper, Washlets here flow on.

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Pixaby

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief,
Publisher

Perhaps you have noticed that there is little to no national news in our newspapers and on our website? We assume you understand that it is not because we are unaware of what is happening in our country and in the world. Most of us here at the company start each day with the news via radio or television or cable and even with news flashes from different sources on our cellphones. We talk about those items in the office and listen or watch when we return home. 

In fact, that’s the problem.

We can’t seem to escape the plethora of upsetting news that fills our waking hours. But we strive to provide one retreat from the chaotic world in which we live: the hometown news.

That is not to say we report no bad news in our towns and villages. Of course we do. News is news. But one positive about local news: to a large extent, we can bask in the good events that occur and have some degree of control over what happens around us. We can take pride in our students’ achievements, we can make our voices heard in development plans if we know what is going on, we can get to know our interesting neighbors from their profiles, we can plan our weekends from the many offerings in the calendar. In short, local news is a mirror held up to our daily lives whose many details can’t be found anywhere else.

We strive to make local news an oasis amid a sea of distressing troubles.

That means, we regularly turn away letters and opinion pieces that protest against national and international politicians and policies unless what is happening affects us only locally. But if you want to express your strongly held views on a local matter, however minute, we provide a platform from which you can be heard. 

To get broader news, there are many sources. To get local news, there is only us, the hometown paper or website. We don’t want to be thought of as smaller versions of daily newspapers any more than children are to be considered smaller adults.

In that way, we have not changed.

However, gathering and disseminating the news has dramatically changed, even as computers and the internet started to alter the industry fifty years ago, right around the time our company began. 

Pixabay image

You are probably aware of the revolutionary switch from hot type associated with Ben Franklin’s day, to the cold type that referred to mainframe and then desktop computers half a century ago. Now, when you walk into a news building, if you can find one, you see that the offices are largely empty. Many staff members are working remotely.

What does that mean?

In some ways, it is a win. We can interview by FaceTime, cover meetings by zoom, write up our stories, sometimes in record time and send them into the office or post to the web via the internet. All of this can be accomplished while we are still in our pajamas, drinking our coffee, and without our having to pay a babysitter if we take turns with our spouse, who is also working remotely.

If the children have already grown up and left home, well then, we can put in a load of wash, go back to work, pause to change the load to the dryer, and resume where we left off. And if we move, we can still keep our jobs. 

In some ways, it’s a loss. Talking with each other digitally is not the same as talking together in the office, where we can bounce ideas around the room and watch each other’s body language. I believe we are more polite, stilted even, on a zoom gathering. Digital has sucked away the personal.

We at TBR News Media are functioning with four key positions filled remotely. Quality may not be suffering, but we certainly miss our staffers, their chatter and their random thoughts. 

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Pixabay photo

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief,
Publisher

It wasn’t easy getting to The Big Easy last Thursday. On our way to my youngest grandson’s graduation from college, we were leaving from JFK in the afternoon, and there were delays all along the way. Even after we finally got to the departure gate and onto the plane, we were held on the tarmac for almost two hours, taxiing from runway to runway, until the pilot was given the signal to take off. 

A consolation was the relatively smooth three-hour flight. The ride to the hotel, in the dark, took about half an hour and was made pleasant by an interesting driver. Originally from the Ukraine, he filled us in on his immigration tribulations and his family’s situation back home. Although hungry when we arrived, we were more exhausted and fell right into bed.

We were well rewarded the next morning. One by one, with lots of hugging, the family connected with us at the Bearcat Cafe, one of the best breakfast restaurants I have ever had the pleasure of eating in. 

Now, New Orleans does have a fine reputation for eateries, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. The clever pairings of offerings, the way the dishes were prepared and the joyful manner of the wait staff in serving us were unparalleled. So if you find yourself in NOLA, you know where to go to start your day in fine style.

We returned to the hotel and changed for the first of the two graduation ceremonies. Did I mention the heat? Yes, we knew it would be hot in Louisiana, and it didn’t disappoint. It was both oppressively hot and humid for me. I should explain that I am generally more comfortable in the cold, so I hastened from one air conditioned location to the next, where it was often too cold for some. But those were the extremes of the city.

The ceremonies were in Caesars Superdome, which was both huge and cool. We took our seats high above and far from the stage, and watched the graduates file in like ants below, wearing their black robes and caps, as jazz music played. Each student’s name was called, and he or she in turn walked across the stage to shake the hand of the patient college official. We waited with interest to hear how our name would inevitably be mangled, a common consequence at all family graduations. Surprisingly, it was not. All the visitors did their best to utter loud, congratulatory cheers for their graduating loved ones, and we made sufficient noise to be heard by our grandson as he accepted his diploma.

The second ceremony, for the entire university, was not until the following night, and so we had time to explore the city. Several of us had been there before, so we passed up Bourbon Street, although I made sure to enjoy a beignet at the branch of Cafe du Monde on the Riverwalk. Instead, we went to The Fly along the bank of the Mississippi River, sat in a small gazebo, and watched the muddy waters rush by. 

The River was almost two miles across at that point, and several tankers and tug boats traveled stately past in either direction. It occurred to me that I had never seen the Mississippi before, and since I had just recently finished reading “James,” a highly decorated novel that is a take off on “Huckleberry Finn,” the scene was populated by Mark Twain’s characters in my imagination. Additionally, several residents were cooking crawfish nearby in a big kettle, and the smells were delightful. They offered us a taste, in that polite Southern fashion; the crustacean was too spicy for me.

Also spicing up the trip was the news of 10 escaped prisoners, five of whom have now been recaptured. One was found in a fancy hotel, clearly a man of good taste.

We did drive through the Garden District, impressed by the historic homes, and we  viewed the house in which our grandson lived near the campus. We left the city and its bananas foster reluctantly, for there was much more to see.

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William H. Luers. Photo from Bakers Institute

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief,
Publisher

The worlds of art and politics might seem quite separate, but here is a life that bridges them both. Two lives, in fact.

In one of those chance happenings that amounts to little more than a footnote but turns the tide of history, William Luers became the new ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1983. It was a time of tumult in the Soviet-bloc country, as the unlikely  poet-playwright, Vaclav Havel, was leading a peaceful uprising to oust the Communist state. Havel was in and out of prison and appeared to be a long-shot among other dissidents to triumph against the Soviets. Nonetheless Luers recognized the potential of the cultural leader and contributed to his very survival and political successes that resulted in the independence of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and the subsequent creation of the Czech Republic.

In betting on Havel, Luers was in fact recognizing the pairing of politics and art that informed his own life.

Luers was born in Springfield, Illinois, and attended high school there, where he played basketball with a distinct advantage. He was exceptionally tall. After majoring in chemistry and math and graduating from Hamilton College in upstate New York, he went on to switch to the humanities and study philosophy at Northwestern University, then joined the Navy. It was 1952 and the United States was at war with Korea. After graduating from officers’ candidate school and being discharged in 1957, he entered the Foreign Service and in 1958 earned a master’s degree in Russian Studies from Columbia University. He spoke fluent Russian, Spanish and Italian, and worked at embassies in Moscow, Rome and other capitals in Europe and Latin America. Before he went to Czechoslovakia, he was ambassador to Venezuela.

His most important post was his last. He protected Havel by inviting dozens of American cultural celebrities to visit Prague, and after meeting the playwright, “then at news conferences outside the reach of the government-controlled Czech news media, recast him in a protective armor of global publicity,” according to The New York Times. By burnishing Havel’s name “as a writer but not as a statesman, which might have increased Havel’s perils,” continued The Times’ reporter Luer saved him.

Some of the celebrity visitors included John Updike, Edward Albee, E.L. Doctorow, Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, Philippe de Montebello, director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, theater director Joseph Papp, abstract painter Richard Diebenkorn and Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post. 

Since Luers came from a culturally prominent family, many of these people were his friends and they understood their purpose in visiting. “The underlying message…was that harming Mr. Havel might risk incalculable international consequences for the Czech government,” according to The Times. In fact, Luers used the arts to promote, protect and ultimately elect Vaclav Havel as leader of the Czech Republic. 

After 29 years in the Foreign Service, during which time he became an aide to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (and in 1974 personally delivered President Nixon’s resignation letter over the Watergate scandal to him), Luers went on to be president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 13 years. Like Havel, the arc of his life spanned politics and art.

William Luers died this past Saturday, May 10, in his home in Washington Depot, Connecticut, at the age of 95. His greatest satisfaction was the success of Vaclav Havel, according to The Times. “The Communist system was deeply flawed. It underestimated cultural leaders’ influence on the people.” 

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METRO photo

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief,
Publisher

Tuesday was National Teacher Appreciation Day, which reminded me of Miss Rigney, who changed my life. 

Miss Rigney was my sixth grade teacher in the perfectly ordinary elementary school I attended. Housed in a cement building, in the midst of a residential area, it served the neighborhood according to the rules for education in mid-century New York City, with two classrooms and two teachers for each grade. I was assigned to 6A. Next door was 6B.

Soon after entering sixth grade, we became aware of the goal for the coming year. We needed to pass the Hunter Test for the honor of the school and our own benefit.

The Hunter Test, we discovered, was a one day affair that, if successfully navigated, would win us admission to Hunter College High School where classes started with seventh grade and ended with graduation from high school. Open to students from each sixth grade in all five boroughs, a handful of us would be eligible, after scoring well on a standardized test in fifth grade, to travel to the school on the appointed day to take the test.

I liked the sound of that because it was the closest junior high school to where I lived. I sympathized with those students who would have to ride from Brooklyn, Queens and even Staten Island.

There were several special schools throughout the city whose admission was via a challenging test: Stuyvesant, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Tech were three. They were also public schools and were run by the Board of Education with the idea of giving some students a head start. 

But Hunter was different. It was initially started in 1869 as a model school in which to train teachers who were matriculating in Hunter College and was administrated by the Board of Higher Education. Its 1200 students in six grades “represent the top one-quarter of one percent of the City” based on the test scores, according to the school. It was composed of all girls for its first 105 years. The student-teacher ratio was 13:1, and its faculty for the most part had advanced degrees.

“Aim of the entire course through which the Normal students pass is not so much to burden the mind with facts as it is to develop intellectual power, cultivate judgment, and enable the graduates to take trained ability into the world with them,” wrote Harper’s Magazine in 1878.

Now we kids didn’t know any of this. I just wanted the shortest commute, and it was impressed on us that Hunter was a good place to be. So we prepared for the test, which was months away, with the coaching of our teachers, four girls from 6B and two from 6A. 

Only Miss Rigney, a trim, freckle-faced redhead with a gentle manner, who seemed old to me, but was maybe 28, stayed after school twice a week and drilled Carol and me with a workbook. When we didn’t do the homework she then gave us, both arithmetic and English, she was uncharacteristically stern with us. It was clear that this was a challenge she wanted us to surmount.

On the day the results of the Test were sent to the school, the principal called the six of us down to her office, along with the teachers, and with a great deal of excitement, opened the envelope and read the results out loud. Carol and I had been admitted; no one had from the other class.

There was screaming and moaning. Miss Rigney smiled, quietly congratulated the two of us and returned to her classroom. I was happy because I thought I should be. I knew my parents would be pleased, but I had no understanding of what had just happened.

I had no idea that my life would be unalterably changed — that I would be attending what was thought to be one of the finest high school in the country, ranked number one by The Wall Street Journal, one of only 225 pupils, with some of the most accomplished teachers for whom teaching was an art, that I would mingle with far more sophisticated students, and because of them, freely explore the City. 

I had a remarkable high school education. When I landed in college, I was immediately offered second year standing because of my AP classes. Miss Rigney knew. 

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Metro Photo

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief,
Publisher

Happy May 1st! 

Just saying that puts a smile on my face. Why? Because May carries the promise of sunny days, blue skies, brilliantly colored flowers on bushes and trees along with baby green leaves, and birdsong everywhere. I know I can just walk out of my house in my indoor clothing and find the perfect temperature outdoors. I won’t need boots or a parka or even a heavy sweater, just maybe a light rain jacket. The world, my world, for this month, is a perfectly furnished place.

That is not to say that the many troubles in current events don’t cause concern. They surely do. But Nature can help offset some of the anxiety with her splendid technicolor show and demonstration of hope and rebirth.

Another positive beacon is a guy named Roger Rosenblatt. He wrote a column for The New York Times on April 13th headlined, “10 Tips for Being Happily 85 Years Old (Like Me).” I’ll share some of them with you, regardless of your age, because they are applicable to all, but first you must shut off the news—whether on radio or television or your cellphone. Let’s just focus on happiness.

The first of his points is probably the best: Nobody’s thinking about you.

“Nobody ever will. Not your teacher, not your minister, not your colleagues, not your shrink, not a soul. It can be a bummer of a thought. But it’s also liberating. That time you fell on your butt in public? That dumb comment you made at dinner last week? That brilliant book you wrote? No one is thinking about it. Others are thinking about themselves. Just like you.” (Of course, that statement doesn’t apply to parents, who regularly think about children.)

A few of his other heartfelt recommendations include get a dog, don’t hear the cheers (about how wonderful you are, just live the life you’re living), know that everyone’s in pain (of some sort) so be kind, look for the exceptional qualities in others, join a group with mutual interests so you stay social, and just live with your regrets (a part of every life). He also advises starting and ending each day by listening to Louis Armstrong—or your equivalent pick-me-upper.

(Just for those reading this who ARE 85 or thereabouts, he does advise making young friends because they are enthusiastic and don’t know when you are telling them lies, and urges that you try to see fewer than 5 doctors because it takes so much time and is depressing if they are your only social life.)

I can also share some upcoming events that make me happy to anticipate. 

Most immediately, my youngest grandson is graduating from college this month. Not only is this a lovely achievement for him, it provides us, the family on both sides of the parents, a chance to get together and catch up with everyone’s lives.

Another joyful occurrence will be a visit from my California cousin, who is coming east in June to celebrate his 65th birthday. I love celebrating birthdays and I also love having visitors. The latter seem to like coming out to stay at our house.

You may not think so, but another singular event next month to which I look forward will be the arrival (finally!) of the plumber to repair an incessant bathroom leak.

Then there are the birthdays of two sons in July, which they will spend here among the whole crew, who will arrive with their bathing suits, and their return in August for another round of birthday observances.

In September I look forward to the resumption of perfect weather and rest.

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