Is there a solution? Probably not. Yet there is a glimmer of hope, and on my last days here, I offer it to you, gratis. Incorporate every township an… - Arnold Hano

Jim Dilley, the father of the Laguna Greenbelt, used to take roses to the secretaries of the county Board of Supervisors when he'd go to do battle over open space with the secretaries' bosses. Jim Dilley was a nice man, kind and gentle. He smoked a pipe. His eyes twinkled as though he knew a joke the rest of us didn't. But he's dead, and the Board is still alive, and that is a joke on us of monstrous proportions. I'm not nice, kind or gentle. The Board keeps rubber-stamping building permits, and this is my goodbye to these shores. After 36 years, my wife and I will soon leave Orange County for Costa Rica, to join the Peace Corps, and that, too, is a joke. We traipse off to bring peace to Costa Rica, which hasn't had an army since 1948.

I’m the luckiest fan in the history of the world. When I was a copy boy at the Daily News, I was sitting in the Ebbets Field press box when that ball got away from Mickey Owen. I won a limerick contest and I sat in right field and watched pitch his perfect game. Now, I had to be smart to write the limerick, but Larsen had been bombed in the previous outing in that Series, he could’ve been bombed again. It could’ve been an 11–9 ballgame.

All the great people and great things in life are failures. It is in doing what we cannot do but must try to do that humans rise to their exalted fulfillment. Maglie had tried to do with an old man’s arm and back what a young man might not have been able to do as well. Of such failures is greatness made.