His life, I always thought, was an open microphone. Back when I was in the ninth grade, in the middle fifties, there he was on WOR every Sunday night from 9 until 1 in the morning, just... talking. Talking about his mother's rumpsprung bathrobe and a baseball game in Chicago, about something he'd just read in the paper and that time in the Signal Corps during the war, about striking out on a date and . . .