In the late summer of 1942, my family moved from an apartment in a two family house on Rosedale Avenue in the east Bronx to an apartment at 3235 Grand Concourse in the west Bronx. I was seven years old and starting the second grade at PS 80, having transferred from PS 46. Our apartment was on the third floor and I soon became friends with the other boys in the building. My best friend in those years was Garry Marshall whose family lived in a first floor apartment. His mother Marjorie was a dancing teacher, and he had a younger sister Ronnie. In 1943, his sister Penny was born but I only knew her as a kid. Of course, Garry became a famous movie and TV director making such films as “Pretty Woman.” Penny became famous for her acting role in such TV shows as Laverne and Shirley and later for directing films such as “A League of Their Own.”

Garry died in 2016 and Penny just last week.

When Garry and I were 12 and 13 (he was a year older than me), in 1947, we hit on the idea of forming our own baseball team, which we called the Falcons. We assembled a motley crew and played for a while in a Police Athletic League which scheduled games for us in nearby Harris Field. Garry and I were both avid Yankee fans and often went by subway to watch games from the bleachers –50 cents a ticket. or in the grandstands with tickets provided by the PAL. Garry played shortstop and I played second base and my hero in those days was George (Snuffy) Stirnweiss, the Yankees second baseman in 1944 and 1945, who won the batting championship with an anaemic average of 309 in 1945.

In those years, Garry had a scrapbook put together by his grandfather, which had clippings about the Yankees in the 1930s, which I devoured. and I guess helped propel me into the world of journalism where I worked my entire adult life. In 1948. my family moved to New Rochelle, N.Y. where I went to high school and I got my first journalistic job writing sports for the New Rochelle Standard-Star (now defunct). Garry went to DeWitt Clinton High School which was walking distance from our apartment house. And then he went to Northwestern University to study journalism. When Garry turned 50 in 1984, he invited all the Falcons he could find to his home in Hollywood for a weekend birthday celebration. He paid for everyone’s plane tickets and motel rooms. I did not see Penny there. Garry and I also met a few times in New York during the ensuing years. I am truly sorry that we did not keep in closer contact during his days in Hollywood.