He was a friend of mine

The PA speaker came on and someone in the school office announced, “President Kennedy has been shot.

I had not heard the PA speaker come on during my first three months back at school. I didn’t even know the school had one. The statement was far more shocking and I am writing about it to the best of my ability without any of the knowledge and experience accumulated since that day 60 years ago.

Someone wheeled a television into the classroom. I didn’t know we had those in the school either, and we began watching the television coverage. Eventually, Walter Cronkite announced the time of death. Someone announced that we were being sent home early. No one could get any work done anyway. As we stood in the school parking lot waiting for our school buses, kids cried and chattered in that way people do when they face something so unexpected and don’t know what to say. One of the girls who was crying complained about another girl who wasn’t: “Nancy said she doesn’t care. ‘I’m a Republican,’ she said.” Then, the girl burst out crying again.

Three Musketeers

I hope you'll enjoy this re-recording of "Three Musketeers." I've entered it in the NPR Tiny Desk Concert Contest. There's a lot of love in this tune. Grandpa sings of days gone by, I guess.

Copyright © 2023, Salvatore Caputo

Three Musketeers

Last night, I finished polishing up a new song I had been thinking about all week, Today, I got to play it for a live audience at the 26th Annual Arizona Songwriters Gathering at the Glendale Public Library. My thanks to everyone there for a wonderful experience, and for the opportunity to get this song out in front of people. It means a lot to me. Three Musketeers

Copyright © 2023, Salvatore Caputo

The writer who used to be ...

I used to write for The Arizona Republic. The Republic was my longest-term employer. I worked there from February 1981 through the middle of January 1997, so pretty much 16 years. 

Being there so long I held a number of positions, most of them behind the scenes. I was a copy editor in the news department, which was responsible for our daily production of international, national, state and local news, for about seven years. I moved to the features copy desk, which was responsible for the daily production of our entertainment and lifestyle coverage. I used to describe copy-editing as "fixing mistakes and writing headlines." Really, it wasn't just fixing mistakes - such as grammar missteps and typographical errors - but also preventing them by asking the right questions to be sure that what the writer meant to say was conveyed accurately to our readers.  

It's not a glamor job.