Now that he’s no longer here, I wish I had more to say; there isn’t much. I met him once in Toronto in 1994 when my first books were being released and he’d already had a long (but by no means finished) career. It was an odd gathering of writers. I can’t quite remember the occasion; maybe we were all Harper authors, but Milton was at my table. I can’t recall either how the conversation got around to the WPA, but it did, and as a writer and worker in the Federal Theater Project, he began to talk about Orson Welles and the Mercury and those early days in New York, before the enfant was drafted by Hollywood.

That night, that conference, were special to me in many ways, but that short conversation, which I recall wanting to go long into the dark hours, was what I think now was my first brush with living history. You don’t get too many of those opportunities, and fewer with each passing hour. But Milton was there at the creation, so to speak, and I was in awe, being just across the table from him and through him so much history.

Of course, he was a working writer, made his living at it, and when he died on Saturday at 94, his bibliography was long and varied from picture books to full-length monographs on topics like pirates and potatoes and horses, as well as Negro, Jewish, and Labor struggles in America. One thing he never forgot in his writing, though, was the rich history of it. The rich history of all of it.

The old soldiers are going away and going away and going far away.