Nora and I worked at Esquire at the same time -- she as a columnist, me as a lowly fact-checker. It was 1973. We'd passed each other in the halls occasionally, perhaps rode an elevator together, but she had no idea who I was, and I wasn't quite bold enough to tell her. Not that she would have cared.

Esquire was my first editorial job, and I was lucky enough to serve under the magazine's legendary editor, Harold Hayes, who plucked me out of obscurity from a job as a house painter and whale's tooth polisher on Nantucket Island. Esquire paid me exactly $65 a week, which, even in those days, was chump change.

One day, Nora stalked into the fact-checking area -- a large room containing the four of us who made up the overworked department.  It wasn't hard to discern that she was unhappy. For some reason, she chose me to snap at. I forget what it was about, but I snapped back, and she strode angrily out of the room.

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In those days, TV sets featured fuzzy black-and-white images and, not infrequently, something we used to call "snow," a term that decribed the screen’s appearance when the reception was poor -- which was most of the time. We used rabbit ears to improve the reception, which meant that one of us had to watch while standing on a sofa.

 My usual mode of watching TV was to sit on the floor, clad in a cowboy hat and holster, consuming milk and cookies.

And in those days, my favorite show was "Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour," which was our version of "American Idol." Although it was actually called "The Original Amateur Hour," and later "Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour," everybody called it "Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour," after its host, Ted Mack.

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