You're right -- I was born in NYC and lived there in the 1960s and early '70s, first on Riverside Drive, then on Staten Island, which my parents imagined -- wrongly -- as some bucolic Elysian paradise more conducive to raising kids.

I agree the attack in "Grand Central Station" was an absurd plot point better suited to a Mississippi Greyhound depot. Hot-tempered rednecks did not patrol Manhattan beating up blacks for holding hands with white women. As a kid I went to diverse public schools, and the only racism I was aware of came from the mouth of my Arkansas grandmother on her tentative visits to Sodom by the Hudson. Whatever the poor woman said was firmly decoded and neutralized for us by Dad and Mom after she left.

Mayors Wagner and Lindsay steered Fun City through the '60s civil rights era with relative sensitivity. Lindsay ('65-'73) walked the streets of Harlem the nights MLK and RFK were killed, defusing who knows what mayhem. But I digress -- point is, for all the verisimilitude in its production design, Pan Am's storylines seem more and more divorced from reality.