The Vietnam War was happening, but Lubbock was... They put a pinch on it.
You had to be tough to survive being in the hospital during the Civil War.
Communications are better now than in my Vietnam days.
For me, true beauty has nothing to do with wrinkles and everything to do with the fact that my maternal grandmother raised five children just after the war and remained a fighter throughout her life. True beauty is the slick of red lipstick my paternal grandmother would put on before going to church on Sunday.
I was 20, and my reality was that people either went to college full-time, or they were draftable. The dear friends that I went to high school with that didn't go to college eventually wound up in Vietnam, and I noticed that they came home different. I was in Ohio during the Vietnam War era.
Sure, I acted in films in the Third Reich, entertainment films, which distracted countless people inside and outside Germany from daily life during war.
I think that I got committed to physics at the age of - oh, it must have been 1942 - ten, when most countries were at war and children were interested in airplanes and bombs and such things.
But my point is these Civil War songs were gruesome. The hatred that's so bad in this country today, and for the past 10 or 15 years, bad as it is, is nothing compared to the kind of things people would write down and sing back in the Civil War.
I liked the clear morality of 1941, when you had no doubt about good and evil. There was a lot of idealism, people fighting for a cause. People are searching for morality today.
My folks were busy. My dad was a teacher, and it was during the Second World War, and my mother was working. So I got my stories from films and books. I read a lot, and I love to read to this day.
The safest period of my lifetime was the Cold War, when Europe was more sharply divided than ever.
I've always been a Civil War buff. In fact, the ships that always fascinated me the most were the ironclads, because they were the start of an era.
'Pearl Harbor' is definitely about December 7, 1941, but it is not of December 7, 1941. It's not even really of our age, either. It has more of the feel of a film from, roughly, mid-war.
John Paul was the first modern pope to grow up in a secular culture: He attended public schools, danced with girls - indeed, as a teenager he had a crush on a beautiful Jewish girl who fled his hometown just ahead of the arrival of the Germans.
As Bill Clinton said so eloquently at the convention, during Vietnam there was a chance to serve; there was a chance not to serve.
I welcome all the signs indicating that a more manly and warlike age is commencing, which will, above all, bring heroism again into honour!
When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War.
When television came roaring in after the war (World War II) they did a little school survey asking children which they preferred and why - television or radio. And there was this 7-year-old boy who said he preferred radio "because the pictures were better.
I grew up in an era when money was not readily available. We were into the post-Depression years and World War II.
That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.
During Vietnam, I was in college, enjoying my student deferment. The government wisely felt that, in my case, military service was less important than completing my studies to prepare me for my chosen career: comedian.
John Quincy Adams most certainly was a part of the Revolutionary War era. He was a young boy, but he was actively involved.
The modern cineplexes are mundane, dull boxes. But 'The Majestic' pays tribute to the movie palaces that made people feel like royalty. It honors a time when pictures helped Americans get through grim periods like the blacklist and the war.
I met my wife in Washington, D.C. I was a senior in college. WW II was about to descend upon us. Jobs were starting to open up after a prolonged depression.
Dad wouldn't let me fool with his guitar much, because I'm left-handed, and I'd pick it up upside down. But I remember learning to sing 'Paper Doll,' the Mills Brothers song - this was during the war - and I remember my dad taking me down to one of those little record booths where you could make spoken letters to send home.
