Unlike Chicago or New York, small-town Minnesota did not allow a man's failings to disappear beneath a veil of numbers. People talked. Secrets did not stay secret.

I was brought up in a very small town in upstate New York.

From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

Take it from me - he's got the goods.

It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.

I like the Macy's in New York, but I'm not in New York. I'm in Chicago.