FOREWORD

All the characters in this book are real. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is not coincidental but is the deliberate intention of the author. The people and places referred to exist, or did exist at the time referred to, although too many of them have changed or gone.

Fact recounted is invariably fiction; any event is colored in the perceiving and the telling. In these pages I traverse more than two-thirds of a century and recall hundreds of incidents. It may be that others will remember some things differently. If my recollection is at any point inaccurate, it is a result of the tenuousness of memory and not for want of a desire to present things as they happened. You may find some bias here, but no malice.

Many of the incidents are told in part through dialogue. My memory is acute but it is not, of course, adequate to recall the exact words spoken. Dialogue is employed as a device to enable me to convey what happened and to break what would otherwise be an overly long narrative.

This is an anecdotal memoir rather than an autobiography. Judging them to be of limited interest, I have not written about my psychic struggles or intimate relationships. My purposes are to recreate various incidents and encounters in what has been an eventful life and, having had the unique opportunity to work at the heart of most of the communications media, to tell what it is like on the inside.

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