Cheryl a Flagg

Brief Encounters Cheryl a Flagg

This collection of sixty short stories chronicles the adventures and memories of an Italian grandpa living in the twentieth century in Northern New Jersey. A gardener who reached age 86, Grandpa is a paragon of fairness, honesty and decency in a world of con men, bigots, and hustlers. In the process he meets some major personalities of his time: Einstein, DiMaggio, and Sinatra among others. Each story tells a tale of how he deals with human problems and how a moral can emerge out of experience, morals that influence all of us in our own lives. He comes to teach the importance of nature in our mechanized world, the strong ties of family, the need to value service over money, and most important the centrality of love above all else. Grandpa was a real individual who lived for over a half century in Madison, New Jersey, a town in the midst of the transition from a small rural town to a major affluent commuter borough into Manhattan. With these developments in the town and more importantly in the United States, he retains his basic values that guide his life and once guided our parents and grandparents. The compiler is his grandson, Michael P. Riccards, a former college president of three colleges, and also a noted presidential historian. His collaborator is Cheryl Flagg, whose background is in higher education.