Mama had relatives in St. Louis. Family rumor was they had moved there with the invention of beer.

That year 1919, when Gramp and Mania and myself were crossing America the hard way, via a Model T, was a year of sun and dust in the Middle West.

GRAMP used to say he'd done everything in life twice. But even he wasn't a cordon bleu. He didn't come right out and say it, but if you cornered him and asked, he'd have to admit it....

Gramp held the steering wheel like death's other brother and pulled the gas lever down until we hit a neck-breaking thirty miles an hour.

It was spring all the time. Spring when it was summer and spring when it was autumn; because I was very young and Gramp was very old.

The Hawaiian archipelago is a string of wonderful pearls. The best of all is the island of Oahu, where sits the city of Honolulu above the Kaiwi Channel.

If you like eating beyond sin and calories, the place to go is the group of islands known as the Polynesian group.

Wars were boiling up all over the world, and talk of war was every place. It was time, I felt, we went home.

I went to Turkey because a New York art dealer had cabled me to fly to Istanbul to look over a Rose Period Picasso that had just come into the market.