The First Year : A Retirement Journal Book

John Mosedale retired on February 1, 1991, after a half-dozen years as a newspaperman and three decades of writing network news, sports, and documentaries for CBS Television. "The people I worked with kept getting younger," he writes. "It occurred to me that if 'The CBS Evening News' were a war movie, I would be the man called 'Pops.' We all know what happens in war movies to the man called 'Pops.'. Now he faced the great unknown of retirement with the same questions that trouble all those who have worked all their adult lives: What will fill the hours once occupied by work? What will occupy the time and the mind? The journal he kept during the first year of retirement answered those questions. The first year brought birth and death, unexpected adventure, days of routine that did not seem at all routine, and days of doing nothing that proved to be treasures. The challenge of retirement projects, the pleasures of Shakespeare and football, music and boxing, reflections on wars past and present, on politics past and present, and city walks and canoeing under a north woods moon - all are part of this report from the Republic of the Retired. The Los Angeles Times called John Mosedale's The Greatest of All: The 1927 New York Yankees "the sort of book that transcends fashion. It is a fascinating bit of social history." And The Chicago Tribune, reviewing The Men who Invented Broadway: Daneon Runyon, Walter Winchell and Their World said, "Mosedale so effortlessly leads you through his bawdy reconstruction of the 1920s boom, the '30s bust, and the '40s bloodbath that you forget how difficult his task really is." The First Year is an explorer's account of a journey into a time that is both beginning and end, an odyssey of strengthened love, renewed friendships, and instructive excursions into a personal past.