With a soft spot for the old vets

The best line I ever heard was when my pal, Jeff Dolan, now permanently deceased, and I were waiting for the draft to grab us in late 1965.

Those were the best of times.

We were shooting pool in our favorite joint, the Viking Bar, early one morning near the West Bank on Cedar-Riverside when in came a lunch-box guy named Jerry, maybe all of 45, who had been in on the D-Day Invasion, and he promptly said, "Boys, I'm in the history books. Buy me a drink!"

What do you say to a guy who's in the history books?

"Hell, yeah!" we said.

He told the bartender, Al Nelson, "Make it a boilermaker."

That was...