By Temple Stark, Casa Grande, AZ

("Invisible Ink" - Carl Veno, PublishAmerica, $16.95, available from www.publishamerica.com)

Knowing Carl Veno spent more than 25 years in the newspaper business, and being a reporter myself, I looked forward to jumping right in with the ink-stained, flat-soled tales of a reporter from the 1960s on.

But that part of his life doesn't come until Chapter 8 when he moves from the "dull shears" to a sharp pencil and empty pad. He moved from a failed barber career to the dream-job leap of an entry job at the Orlando Sentinel.

You know he's ruminating about a bygone age when he tells you he had no writing experience and still landed a job at a nice-sized daily newspaper. Also it's interesting to note that even by 1967 there was a strong instinct by the Gannett Company (and to be fair, other large media companies) to move in, take over, dominate and obliterate. It was the era of the newspaper wars that has since left many large cities with only one strong newspaper voice. They were wars that centered on closing down the competition rather than a mere clash of personalities at the head-butting publications.

Being now retired from the business has likely mellowed Veno, who once aspired to become a prize fighter and was literally everybody's punching bag and in that way trained for his chosen career. Veno started as a sports writer at the Sentinel.

Despite my initial disappointment in not getting embroiled early into the journalist's story, I got over it. With writing that skips along the surface of about 100 years of family history, Veno starts off with the tale of his own grandfather's seesaw decision to live in America. He moved back and forth four times from Italy before settling the fate of future Venos, and it was perhaps an indicator of restlessness that passed on through the generations, including Carl.

Veno describes growing up part of the harmless Park Bench Gang, as well as the violence created by the Prohibition Era and decidedly harmful gangs - even in Olean, New York.

Nothing gives the flavor of armchair reminiscing more than Veno's almost idle speculation of "Whatever happened to ...?" Nothing gives it the flavor of history and of the passed on, more than Veno's paragraph summaries of men's and women's lives that end with a date of death.

After the Sentinel, Veno moved back up to New York and after an institutional and personal philosophy of fighting Gannett, he worked for them. He edited and wrote at a series of other newspapers and here does nothing to lessen the old stereotype that a good journalist is a drunk journalist. Nowadays it seems to be a competition to see who drinks the wheat grass first. I've often thought of showing up at work drunk. But bosses for some reason seem to be on the look out for that more - darn the luck - and I'd be out on my (sarcastic) ear.