Based in Brooklyn, Timothy Bay has freelanced for dozens of newspapers and national publications, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Newsday, Chicago Tribune, Self, Harper’s Bazaar, and Omni. He is also the author of books for young readers, and has contributed to several anthologies, including The People’s Almanac.

As a travel writer, he has written for the inflight magazines and is the author of a Frommer guide.

After graduating from Columbia Journalism, he worked as newspaper reporter on The Providence Journal, and as an editor/writer on both consumer and business trade magazines. For many years, he was a public affairs officer at one of the CUNY senior colleges. Most recently, he has worked in advertising.

His greatest inspiration for this piece was growing up in New York in those long-ago dark ages, before the advent of electronic wizardry, in the infancy of the industrial/entertainment complex when a $25 Christmas gift certificate to F.A.O. Schwartz was bliss.

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