While my peers listened to the Beatles, and Richard Nixon was on the verge of being impeached, and the war raged on in Vietnam, my mother and I watched black-and-white films together in our one-bedroom apartment in Yorkville. She would see, in the New York Times TV section, that a classic such as His Girl Friday was on Million Dollar Movie, and the evening would be arranged in order to watch it. It was my first study in contrasts, as life looked so different in the 1940s compared with my gritty New York 1970s childhood.