Henry Wolf

In the fall of 1938, when I was thirteen, my father’s uncle who lived in London came to visit. We were staying at a small “pension” in Versailles, refugees from Nazi-occupied Austria. He brought with him the current issue of Esquire magazine and left for London forgetting it in his room. I grabbed it—and carried it with me through France and Morocco and to New York. I loved the glossy paper, the lush advertisements, the girls, the risqué cartoons and the serious writing. When I was sad, I opened that magazine and a promise of a wonderful sort of life emanated from its pages like a seductive perfume.

The point of this story is not nostalgia. The point is that nothing has changed for me: I still love all these things as much as I did over forty years ago.

-Henry Wolf