Bill Essex is a news junkie. From birth he was interested in his surroundings and attentive to even his mother’s friends’ gossip, but he was bitten by the news bug in fifth grade. He had a good teacher then: one of the too few each student remembers. Mr. Bingham came up with unusual ideas for motivating kids, and the current events quiz was one of his best. Each morning, right after the required pledge-allegiance (this was a few years before the phrase “under God” was temporarily removed from the oath), the class listened to a five-minute, top-o’-the-hour newscast on the radio (AM radio, powered by tubes instead of transistors). Then sometime in the next hour Mr. Bingham would call, “Okay: quiz time! Grab your pencils!” and he’d fire off a few questions about the broadcast they’d just heard. Bill was good at the quiz and got better. Within a couple of weeks no one in the class could beat him. He retained the facility as he grew. He paid attention to the news and he marked the memorable moments in his own life with the current events headlines of the day or season or year.

He was sixteen and a half, for example, and had just kissed the first love of his life, when JFK was shot in Dallas. He forever mixed the memory of Gwen’s warm tongue with the bleakness of that funeral weekend, when all normal TV and talk was pre-empted, when shock and suspicion and amorphous worry prevailed.

He turned twenty-one the spring King and Kennedy were killed, but that was also the year he met Mary. She was a smooth-haired blonde with deep blue eyes and a lyrical laugh. She had long shapely legs and full deep breasts. She was the prettiest girl he ever dated, and she became his wife and the mother of his five children. For awhile Bill thought meeting Mary was the luckiest event of his life.

They were married in 1971. He remembered it as the year of the catalytic converter. The state of California began requiring one in the engine of each new car, cutting down on fuel economy and making home tuneups elusive, for the sake of the environment. Bill and Mary had grown up in the car culture of southern California and, frankly, they resented the state telling them what had to go under the hood of their new Chevy. It made a difference; their honeymoon was a road trip, and Bill’s business was cars.

(to be continued on Wednesday)