My biggest win was getting the meal money bumped from $5 to $7.

We lived in Yorkville, which is located on the East End of Manhattan. It's further east than Hell's Kitchen, and back then it was the kind of place where the roaches and cockroaches were big enough to carry away small children.

Indiana gets credit for having the most rabid basketball fans in the union, but Maine is a very, very active basketball state.

We lived in Yorkville until 1940, at which point we moved into the St. Albans neighborhood of Queens.

My biggest win was getting the meal money bumped from $5 to $7.

These days I smile benignly at the fights that I see in NBA games. There aren't any broken noses or black eyes, which happened quite often when I played.

Every jock gets up and tells the world how lucky he is. But I feel that I may be the luckiest one of all in terms of timing and being at the right place at the right moment-even though, for the last 30 years, I was told I was born 20 years too soon, for obvious reasons.