a city reader

It’s maybe 1962 or 63 and I’m a high school kid at a Catholic boarding school outside Washington, D.C. I’d always read a lot but it was almost exclusively sports pages and ‘Sport’ magazine and ‘Sports Illustrated’ and whatever got my attention in ‘Time’ or ‘Life’ or ‘Look’. The books they assigned at school weren’t chosen or presented in a way to make you love them. Latin was the most important subject. The English anthology was like from St. Thomas More Press. One Saturday in D.C. with another kid, killing time in a record store that had paperback books, waiting for the city bus back to school, a book in a rack got my attention. Something Wicked This Way Comes by someone named Ray Bradbury. I bought it and looked at the front and back covers on the bus the whole way. My life was different from that day on. That book and all the books Ray Bradbury wrote led me right up to the books I’m reading now. I guess I could say he’s the most important guy in my life. Once maybe 25 years ago I went to LA to the national book convention. I had an idea to start a book magazine and I went out there to talk about it with anyone I could and I maybe talked to no one, such are my business instincts. The big conference was held in a bright LA convention center. Different authors gave readings. The biggest author was Ray Bradbury. You had to have tickets to get into his reading. I didn’t have a ticket. But I was in the big crowded lobby when he went through with his thick horn-rim glasses on people scurrying around him. They maybe loved him like I did.

There’s going to be a virtual reading by well-known people of his Fahrenheit 451 on Saturday, August 22. It’d be his 100th birthday. This piece in ‘Rolling Stone’ tells about it: https://apple.news/AM0g-1xHKSTiXTS2ZIEkgIw