Massad ayoob eyes

By Massad Ayoob

Back in the mid-1990s, I got a call from a fella named Dave Duffy. He published a magazine called Backwoods Home, and was looking for a gun editor. I was a little embarrassed to have to tell him I’d never heard of the publication. He sent me some back issues and a current copy. I liked his and his family’s approach to self-sufficiency, and got back to him to say, basically, “Send me in, Coach!”

So, here I am, still on staff and Dave wants a bio. There’s a phrase from the Grateful Dead that my generation uses a lot: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

To start…

I’m from the second generation of my family born in this country. As best I can determine, my paternal grandparents came to the U.S. from Damascus in the last decade of the nineteenth century and settled in Boston, where my dad was born in the year 1900. My maternal grandfather immigrated here from Scotland after a sojourn in Canada and his wife, from County Cork, Ireland, in the first decade of the 20th Century. They too made their home in the Boston area, Dorchester, where my mom was born in 1909

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