“I recall a time when things were very different…”

Work on this piece began one night a few months ago after chatting with a friend on the phone about the state of the world. It was an old friend and like a couple of old codgers, we talked about when times were better. In the middle of the conversation I was struck with the image of a childhood hero — a man in a black hat.

In the end, it became a kind of baby boomer’s lament, a personal acoustic story about growing up in the mid-1950s, in the midst of an explosion of liberating technological wonder, a TV hero that influenced the lives of a generation, and society’s loss of innocence.