A letter arrived in the morning mail.

It was squished in with all the supermarket advertisements, the insurance policy offerings, the funeral plots and the real estate situations.

It was from a former dental classmate at NYU and it immediately piqued my interest. We graduated in 1959, so why is he writing me now?

On opening the envelope, I was struck by the photograph in a newspaper article from Jan. 5, 1949 of a 14-year-old boy. He was wearing a white shirt and a tie (opened at the neck) looking very confident. His freckles could be ascertained even in the dull black and white photograph from the World-Telegram (now long defunct.)

It was me!

Below my picture was a quote that was elicited from me to the staff writer, Robert H. Prall. I racked my brain to try to remember the incident, but only a gray fog came to me. Fifty-seven years had passed and my memor neurones were not functioning at a high level of efficiency.

The headline of the article was "Juniors Sound Off on Comic Books; But Ban them? Comes a Silence!"

My dental school classmate was also quoted, along with his 14-year-old photo. He told me in his letter that a Syracuse University professor was writing a book about the controversy over comic books and juvenile delinquency after the Second World War. He had traced my classmate through the Internet from an article under his name in the NY Times. The Professor Hajdo told my friend that this article would be invaluable to his research.

There you have it!

The paper trail of our lives is deep and wide. A barely remembered incident, a newspaper article and hidden parts of a life pop back onto center stage.

My quote you ask? "Most of the guys who say they are against comic books probably have plenty of them stacked in the attic or cellar."

I only wish 57 years ago I had said something more profound and thought-provoking.

P.S. Former columnist Gregg Greenberg and his wife Jennifer recently gave birth to a 6 pound 10 oz beautiful baby boy named Lewis Arthur Greenberg.