Celebrating 80 years ...

Lazar was a household name in the Jewish Western Bulletin. The unnamed community columnists – as the writer behind the pseudonym changed – wrote for decades. (And their identities won’t be revealed here.)

In the first column (April 14, 1949), Lazar introduced him/herself, saying that, while there had been previous “columnizers” in the Bulletin, this “trip however will undoubtedly be very different,” because Lazar’s “spectacles” were “a different and unusual shade.”

By the second Between Ourselves column (April 21, 1949), that difference is already apparent, as Lazar jokingly accuses then-publisher/editor Abe Arnold of the “sabotage” of the column’s debut – because “the Bulletin failed to arrive last Saturday ... failed to arrive on Monday.” It wasn’t Arnold’s fault, of course. And Jewish Independent readers are all too aware that mail delivery these days can be as frustrating as it was more than 60 years ago.