Alan Sivell's A Boomer Life

You’d think there’d be no inheritance from an 18-year-old kid who was an assistant night manager, making barely above minimum wage. However, I knew Page had left something behind. But I wasn’t sure how to break it to my parents. I had figured it out a few months […]

Most of the time Page was out of it. Mom spent all her time at the hospital but Doom had to work. Having a child hovering between life and death didn’t seem to matter to his bosses at the home office in Minnesota. A few days after I […]

When my parents got the call, they put everything down and left immediately for a hospital in rural Connecticut. Page and Bobby Higgins, a guy with whom I had played baseball and still stares out at me, frozen at age 14, from an old team photo, had gone […]

I got the job at Lincoln Dairy through Page. It paid much more than the paper route so I didn’t mind starting on my 16th birthday. On the other hand, I really didn’t want to give the route up. It had been my identity for four years and […]

When I was 15, my life passion switched from baseball to girls. To this day, I don’t know if it was a natural evolution or if it was because my favorite players, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, were limping to the end of their careers and my favorite […]

My father, Doom, had a couple of lines on the back of his neck that made what looked like the letter “X.” There was an indentation where the lines crossed. When we asked about it, he always said, “That’s where I got shot during the war.” Until each […]

At first, Doom wasn’t going to pay me anything to mow the lawn. Then he settled on 35 cents. Thus began my life of work at the age of 9. The neighbors paid more: I earned 75 cents from the Herman’s family in the house to the north […]

After Doom got back from the Pacific, my parents were married in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the majestic New York City landmark, on September 28, 1946. Doom was lucky that both my mother AND grandmother said yes. My grandmother thought he seemed like a nice enough young man but […]

 I had said I wasn’t going to be Page’s bagman ever again. But about a year after the Hard Roll Heist, there was one other escapade that he managed to entangle me in. The two of us were hanging out talking and playing records on the third floor […]

My mom’s parents came to America on a boat. Not the boat that stopped at Ellis Island, my grandmother was quick to point out. Those were the peasants, she said. Our people paid full fare on their boat and had their own cabins and job prospects when they […]

The first time I heard about the “free” hard rolls, I was in the back yard with a bunch of friends. Doom had put up a monkey swing in the big elm. He tied a thick rope to a branch high up in the tree and at the […]

Mickey Mantle should have been my dad. Then I could have been hanging around the New York Yankee clubhouse in 1961, the Yankees’ greatest season. At least, that’s what I thought when I was 10. My dad, about age 3. His mother used to enter him in “cute […]

I still miss my brother. It’s been so long now – more 50 years – that initially it’s hard to remember anything but the great adventures we shared. He pushed me to do things I was too afraid to do on my own initiative. Without him, I probably […]

My neighbor (Stephen Folker of Giraffe Photography) was experimenting with his new camera and grabbed this shot. I’d make it the cover of my latest album … if I could sing. Or if I could play something other than a record player. But what about using it for […]