Happy Birthday, Joe

From a reader comes a much appreciated reminder:

"Patrick: My calendar tells me that October 18, 2008 is A.J. Liebling’s 104th birthday. JVS"

In "Apology for Breathing" (in Back Where I Came From), Liebling writes:

"People I know in New York are incessantly on the point of going back where they came from to write a book, or of staying on and writing a book about back where they came from. Back where they came from, I gather, is the American scene (New York, of course, just isn't America). It is all pretty hard on me because I have no place to go back to. I was born in an apartment house at Ninety-third Street and Lexington Avenue, about three miles from where I now live. Friends often tell me of their excitement when the train on which they are riding passes from Indiana into Illinois, or back again. I am ashamed to admit that when the Jerome Avenue express rolls into Eighty-sixth Street station I have absolutely no reaction."