Memory Lane proves pleasant

Yes, it’s hard for me to believe but I just turned 78 years old and recently had my 60th high school reunion in Roslyn, Long Island, New York.

Roslyn is a charming town that was first occupied by Dutch settlers hundreds of years ago. My father’s jewelry store was right next to an incredible clock tower that is hundreds of years old and the town has a boat launch heading out to the Long Island Sound on one side and a beautiful duck pond on the other side.

I was captain of the football team and batted .517 as a baseball catcher and was undefeated in wrestling my senior year and was accepted at Colgate University despite not being an A-student.

I was sports editor of my high school and college newspapers and my first job after college was as a sports writer for the Long Island Press. Although my family could not afford to send me to major sports events, I got to cover the New York Knicks in basketball and the Rangers in hockey and sat at press tables right by the floor and the ice.

Too many of my friends were smoking marijuana so I decided to get out of New York City and went to grad school in Denver thinking I would go back with a master’s degree and upgrade my journalism career but my first day of grad school, they told me what Hollywood directors did and I decided to head in that direction.

I made a very successful documentary in Denver about illegal aliens crossing the border from Mexico and that got me accepted to the American Film Institute in Los Angeles and my short film there, “The Lost Phoebe,” launched my movie career, which included Oscar and Emmy nominations.

All of this time, I stayed close to a small group of high school friends and we recently started to meet online in a group called The Roslyn Boys, including two female classmates. We all got together at our reunion and it was a wonderful trip down memory lane. I did not recognize all of my classmates 60 years after graduation and brought my yearbook with me so I could sneak away and look up what each person looked like in high school.

I grew up on the right edge of the continent and now live on the left edge of the continent right off Chuckanut Drive. Considering both my parents barely escaped the holocaust in Germany, I’ve lived an amazing life and so appreciate that my high school reunion was a fantastic trip down memory lane and that I’m still a journalist.