His name was Ira Stevens. He was tall and shy, towering over me, and it was the 50’s. I lived on Montgomery Street and then on East 18th in Flatbush – a Brooklynite. His only problem was that he had a stutter, but I never viewed that as a problem. Perhaps my mother did, and he went off to the Korean war – and I waited for letters from him, which never arrived. Then my mother told me years later that he had written, but she’d destroyed the letter. I think it was the most hurtful thing she ever did to me, if not to him.