Part 28: Sunday Post

In the summer of 1982, Sandee Lippmann, my new aquaintance from , invited me to join a group of her friends to go swimming at Oregon Ridge.

There’s an old quarry filled with water, with a nice beach, located in the county north of Baltimore City, she told me. You’ll like it.

On a blazingly bright Sunday, I packed up a beach towel, coffee and pastries, and my new-found pleasure – the Sunday Washington Post.

It was a wonderful, lazy sun-drenched day.  I spent most of my time leafing through the newspaper. The Sunday Post provided terrific reading material – well-crafted feature stories, an extensive op-ed section, a book review and magazine section.

A news story at the bottom of the front page caught my eye. It was about a report from the Centers for Disease Control.

“Hey Sandee, listen to this,” I said. “There’s a new kind of cancer that affects young men. It wipes out the immune system. It’s been seen in gay men and people with hemophilia. They think it might be caused by some kind of virus.”