The Saturday Evening Post November/December 2022

Two weeks before Christmas every year, Mom would load the five of us kids into a station wagon and head downtown to see the department stores’ lavish and imaginative giant window displays. As fascinated onlookers took in animated figurines. I stood transfixed by a model train winding its way through an elaborate setting. Then and there, the only wish on my list was a Lionel train set. At the time, a toy train was an extravagant gift — one I knew Mom and Dad couldn’t afford. But on Christmas morning, I stumbled down the stairs, and there it was: Under the tree was a Lionel Santa Fe Passenger Set. Dad and I unboxed the set and then carefully assembled the tracks and watched. I loved the buzz and click of the…

The joke was on our parents, really. They fretted endlessly about the kinds of friends we were hanging out with. Were they future hood lums? Were they destined to be come upstanding members of the community? But while Mom and Dad were scrutinizing our flesh - and - blood buddies, they never dreamed of checking out our cathode ray pals the ghouls and gravediggers who slunk across our flickering black and white TV screens late Saturday nights, long after our parents had gone off to blissful dreams. It was then, the weekend witching hour, when local TV stations from coast to coast unleashed their late night horror hosts. Most of them were men; virtually all of them lurked in minimalist TV studio dungeons. cackling and rumbling mordant introductions to well worn horror movies like…

Fright Night Delight Kudos to Bill Newcott for resurrecting the good old days in “Night of the Horror Hosts” (Sep/Oct). In high school, I was a regular watcher every Saturday late night of Morgus the Magnificent and his giant hooded sidekick, Chopsley, with his ready axe. His “experiments,” whose progress was updated during the breaks, always had something to do with the theme of the movie being presented. I lament the passing of that era. Lyman Barry, email Growing up in the Pittsburgh area in the mid-’60s, Saturday night at 11 p.m. was Chiller Theater with Chilly Billy and his sidekick. Terminal Stare. Turning out the living room lights was a must. Thank you for mentioning Bill Cardille, a Pittsburgh TV icon for many, many years. John Nyahay, Conway, South Carolina M*A*S*H at 50 As a…

I believe that the biggest investment we can make in the future of our population is to build a reliable, highquality, safe, and affordable care infrastructure, focused on childcare from birth to age 5, and to expand our thinking to include the whole cycle of life. The COVID crisis exposed the beleaguered state of the U.S. care economy. One consequence of this mess was that hundreds of thousands of women who had been managing jobs and kids felt they had to quit their paid work. We were also reminded that so many of our essential workers, including caregivers to both children and the old, don’t earn enough money to live on. Fixing this issue will remove barriers to work for women and young families and help many women achieve financial independence. This…

For the last 20 years, Anderson Cooper, CNN’s marquee news anchor, has emceed a live New Year’s Eve special from Times Square. If you’ve watched, you know that Cooper — a nondrinker on any other day — careens through the shows in a state of giddy semi-sobriety, sharing out-of-school tales about celebs, guffawing at his co-hosts’ irreverent wisecracks, and generally struggling to appear anchor-y. In other words, he behaves rather badly — as do countless millions every New Year’s Eve. Clearly, it has been drilled into our collective brain that the year’s final night comes complete with a license to be stupid. This is not a recent phenomenon, nor is the carousing limited to our shores. Extreme merry-making is practically a global New Year’s sport, but here in the States we…

With the holidays fast approaching, there’s no avoiding the crush of relatives descending upon our homes, some welcome, others less so. After hosting Thanksgiving for 23 years, my wife and I are descending on my brother Glenn’s home. This past summer, he was showing us pictures of his expanded and renovated kitchen, and my wife, sensing an opportunity, said, “That’s a lovely kitchen. Let’s have family Thanksgiving at your house this year.” And so we are. It’s 600 miles from our house in Indiana to my brother’s house in North Carolina, 18 hours round-trip, most of which I’ll spend sleeping while my wife, who loves to drive, is at the wheel. The woman is a marvel. When our son was in basic training, we drove straight through to Fort Sill, Oklahoma,…