Here Back East

In February, 2020, an article in the New York Times caught the eye of Lenny Ackerman, a real estate attorney in East Hampton, New York. The subject was The Mountain Messenger, a small, weekly newspaper in Downieville, California. It had just narrowly escaped the fate of so many others like it, thanks to the intervention of a local retiree with the vision and determination to keep the oldest, continually published local paper in the state from going under. A congratulatory letter from Lenny to the new editor-publisher, Carl Butz, led to a cross-country connection and the advent of a weekly column for the Mountain Messenger, entitled "Here Back East." Written in a journalistic or at times epistolary style to his readers out west, Lenny's wide-ranging topics span decades and include, among many others, fishing in Maine, Presidential politics, quail hunting in Florida, Rochester in the 1940s, Rutgers College in the late 1950s, and life in New York City during the pandemic. This volume represents the first year and a half of Lenny Ackerman's Here Back East columns. Together they offer a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a multi-faceted man and his peripatetic life one lived with tireless gusto, at all points up and down the Eastern seaboard.