When I Was a Boy

Langan's stories are brimming with wonderful characters and scenes of a small blue-collar city in the 1940s. They offer not only a marvelous sense of place, Lackawanna, New York, in the heyday of Big Steel but more importantly, an evocative sense of time. This was the America when mothers feared a polio epidemic, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt thrilled citizens with a drive through town in an open car, and when the only way a young Catholic boy could get out of the house at night was to visit the public library. It wasn't very long ago, but it is long gone. Luckily, Langan has captured it through a child's eyes, and we're the richer for it.