I remember Radio Row quite well.

In fact, your mentioning it brings back memories of stuff I did 40+ years ago with my Junior High School buddies.

Long before the WTC was even thought of, we used to go down to Radio Row and browse through the dozens of stores - stores with absolutely no ambiance whatsoever - and the scores of bins and troughs therein (remember them?), which contained small parts and doo-dads and doo-hickeys, none of which did we have the slightest idea of what they were used for but they looked really cool.

We'd put our money together, and for $15 or $20 we could buy a large assortment of this stuff, which we would then take home and use to construct these Rube Goldberg-like contraptions which did absolutely nothing except maybe turn a wheel or click numbers off on a counter, but they were fun to make and look at.

Ah, the care-free days of the early 1960's, when a bunch of 13 or 14-year olds could go into the city by themselves without fear or worry, and have a full day of fun and excitement and shopping and eating without spending more than maybe $5 or so.

Sure, we worried about the world being obliterated in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, but somehow that threat doesn't seem as real or as vivid or as close to home as today's threats posed by terrorism are.

Sure, as 13 and 14-year olds we talked about it, but it didn't seem to bother us all that much for some reason.

I wonder how today's kids of that age - especially the ones from NYC who experienced 9/11 in their city first hand - feel about the threat of terrorism.

My now-17-year-old son was 12-years old at the time of 9/11 - a bit young to make the comparsion to the 13 or 14-year old me, perhaps - but the first time we were driving through lower Manhattan after 9/11, I asked him if he wanted me to park somewhere so we could take a first-hand up-close look at Ground Zero.

"No" he replied. Since I thought that destruction and wreckage were surely something that any 12-year old boy would be interested in seeing, I asked him "Why not?"

And he replied, very much to my surprise, "Because it's too sad."