Stories My Father Told Me: Notes from "The Lyons Den" - Hardcover

Jeffrey Lyons grew up in a home visited by many of the greats of his father’s time. His forty-year career continues in television, radio, and print. A movie critic and baseball book author, Lyons has acted in two films, reviewed more than 15,000 movies and hundreds of Broadway plays, broadcast baseball for the Red Sox, and interviewed virtually every major star of his own time. Lyons co-hosted three national movie review shows: Sneak Previews, MSNBC's At the Movies, and Reel Talk. Jeffrey Lyons is also the co-author of 101 Great Movies for Kids and three baseball trivia books. He hopes to see his beloved Red Sox win another World Series. Soon.

Charles Osgood, often referred to as CBS News's poet-in-residence, has been anchor of CBS News Sunday Morning since 1994. He also anchors and writes "The Osgood File," his daily news commentary broadcast on the CBS Radio Network.

FOREWARD
by Charles Osgood

In 1999 my CBS Sunday Morning TV program marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ernest Hemmingway with a broadcast from Finca Vigia, the Havana home where the great writer lived for twenty years. When I got home to New York, a neighbor in my apartment building told me he especially enjoyed that show because he'd been to Finca Vigia with his father to visit with Hemmingway and that Papa (Hemmingway) had taught him to shoot. How many people do you know who could say that?
&nsbp;&nsbp; That neighbor is Jeffery Lyons, the gifted writer, critic, television commentator, and author of this book. Jeffrey's father was the incomparable Leonard Lyons, who over a span of forty years, from 1934-1974 wrote a column called "The Lyons Den"which was published in the New York Post. and in 105 other newspapers around the world. These columns contained fascinating anecdotes about comics, singers, songwriters, painters, poets, politicians, presidents, dictators, restauranteurs, all sorts of people. Leonard Lyons disliked the word "celebrity". He used to say that if his sister in Brooklyn became newsworthy, he'd write about her. And when she did, he did.
&nsbp;&nsbp; Leonard Lyons was a lawyer by training. He got the job as a columnist, beating out five hundred other applicants after writing for the English page of the Jewish Daily Forward. "The Lyons Den" was decidedly not a gossip column. Lyons did not write about who was "running around", as George Burns used to put it, with whom, who was cheating or being cheated on, or who was arrested again for drunk driving or drug possession. You might find that sort of thing in Walter Winchell's or Earl Wilson's column, but never in "The Lyons Den." Jefferey's father believed, as do I, that good journalism does not require that you keep your fangs bared or you claws unsheathed. Lions might do that but not Lyons. It was not his objective to embarrass the people he wrote about or destroy their reputations. Like Charles Kuralt, Leonard Lyons genuinely admired the people he wrote about. And knowing this they would open up to him and tell him the colorful stories that were his bread and butter, and that the readers loved.