While I love every station that carries our show, WNET , Channel 13 in New York, which begins airing Life (Part 2) on Sunday, Nov. 1, at 3PM ET, has a special place on my dial.

Until I started hosting LP2, the most fun I ever had on air was on a show called The Eleventh Hour. It was on Channel 13 in 1989 and 1990. Great staff, engaged guests, important topics, new information.

What a thrill it's been to have all that evoked again. Talk about a second act!

Twenty-one years ago, while I was covering the Seoul Olympics for NBC News, I got a call from WNET. They had decided to start a nightly public affairs broadcast. It would be an intensely local show and they wanted a host with a local voice, someone who sounded like he was born in the Bronx, grew up in Queens, went to college in Manhattan, and raised his kids in New Jersey. Me. (As my friend Howard Cosell so often told me, affectionately I hope, I had a face for radio and a voice for print.)

I was thrilled, and if it hadn't been for the drug scandals and Greg Louganis' bloody high dive, it would have been impossible to keep my mind on the 1988 Games.

But then I got back to New York, and earth. No way out of my long-term contract with NBC. I went to see Tim Russert, then an NBC vice-president, and the network's rising star. This was the job I always wanted, I told him. A chance to do smart journalism in a place that could support and appreciate it.

Tim just gave me that grin. Go for it, he said. How could NBC sue you for going to PBS?  I've got your back. Just don't expect a goodbye party.

I've always been grateful to Tim, although it has occurred to me that maybe NBC wanted to get rid of me. And years later he told me he didn't actually have the authority to set me free. And there was a party.

I loved the Eleventh Hour, a nightly parade of engaged, passionate guests dealing with a city in crisis. There was a superb young staff.  We staged mayoral debates, we had everyone on from Trump to Tutu, and we even broke a story or two.

But after two seasons, Channel 13 decided to become more of a national presence. We were eventually replaced by a wider-ranging nightly talk show hosted by a national-sounding voice, a guy with a flower-sounding name, something like Charlie Tulip.

I wonder what happened to him. Maybe we could have him on our show someday and find out how his Life (Part 2) panned out.

After inventing the lightning rod, bifocals and the Franklin stove - this was why he was too busy to be on Life (Part 2) - Benjamin Franklin invented what would come to be known three centuries later as the "Cougar," a middle-aged woman who dates younger men, usually in their twenties.

In 1967, the quintessential Cougar (although the term had yet to be coined) was Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson, who seduced Dustin Hoffman, as "The Graduate." In this century, the actress Demi Moore was often portrayed as a fabulous feline who hunted down Ashton Kutcher, some 15 years younger. They married in 2005.

The movie and the marriage seem to be the main evidence that lots of Cougar and Cub coupling is going on. Women of a certain age and women's magazines of a certain sensibility spin this coupling into proof of a new female freedom and empowerment. While some shrink at calling women who date younger men "predators," they love the conceit that women control these relationships. They also see this as flipping the bird at all those middle-aged Old Lions who are chasing Kittens.

It's a nourishing fantasy for magazines, novels and TV shows, but I don't see that it does much for women in the long run, and it certainly is nothing new. In fact, the Cougar-Cub model was framed in Benjamin Franklin's famous 1745 letter to a young friend who was apparently afraid of commitment. He wants to be free to hang out with his friends, drink ale and watch sports on the colonial green. Franklin urges him to become a "complete Being" and get married.

"But if you will not take this Counsel," writes Franklin, "and persist in thinking that Commerce with the Sex is inevitable, then I repeat my former Advice that in your Amours you should prefer old Women to young ones."   

Franklin outlines compelling reasons, including the superior conversation, sexual experience, amiability, and discretion of older women. And then his most famous reason: "They are so grateful!!"

If women want to think that Cougars are a 21^st Century phenomenon growing out of their new social, financial and psychological muscle, that's cool with me. If women can feel younger, prettier and more powerful playing with a boy toy the way men play with girl dolls, what's wrong? Especially if the Cubs learn some moves for when they grow up and take Franklin's advice and become complete.

I only hope those Cougars aren't aping the Old Lions in their pathetic posturing, aren't fooling themselves into thinking that Cubs and Kittens are naïve pets, instead of savvy predators themselves. The Cubs I know are avoiding commitment and responsibility so they can hang out with their friends, drink ale and watch ESPN, and still have sex. Because they think, as Franklin wrote, "in the dark all cats are grey."

Gail Sheehy and Jane Adams are two of my favorite guests on the show and I got to hang out with both of them last Sunday, one in person and the other between the covers of a smart, sexy new novel. It was also the day Life (Part 2) came to life; we premiered on our producing station, tpt, in St. Paul/Minneapolis.

Gail and I were guests at an "Inside Media" forum at the Newseum, a spectacular taj of journalism near the National Mall, well worth a visit. Rich Foster, the director of education and programs, moderated. I enjoyed answering questions instead of asking them for a change.I talked mostly about the show while Gail's deft story-telling fleshed out the statistics of the Boomer generation. After all, this is the reporter whose Passages changed the way people thought about their lives and their cohorts. A Newseum volunteer, a social worker during the week, stopped Gail to say that reading her in college had informed his career choice.

Gail, who appears on show #3 (Caregiving) and #8 (Boomer Dating), talked at lunch with me and Naomi Boak, Life (Part 2)'s executive producer, about her latest project, a book on care-giving. She's been researching the final chapter about a community in San Francisco expressly created for mutual care-giving.

Jane Adams' new novel, Sugar Time, was my companion on the three-hour train rides from and to New York. I'm not much of a chick-lit reader and would not have picked it up if I weren't interested in Jane - I know from her appearances on show #2 (Generation Gaps) and #5 (Money Is Love) that she is an insightful, down-to earth social psychologist and I wondered if that could translate into fiction. I packed her book in a bag of reading material, figuring to take just a preview peek. I never got to the Sunday papers or anything else.

I was locked into the funny, poignant, page-turning adventures of Charlotte Sugerman Kane, a fifty-something television writer/producer who has issues with her Mom, her kids, her dog and a conniving assistant as she lunges at what could be her last chance at a successful TV show. If that wasn't a plateful, she suffers a series of stress-induced cardiac events that she hides from the network and from her wonderful new lover lest they both cancel her. And it seems that Mr. Dreamy has a secret, too. Sugar is sharp-tongued, bawdy, intelligent, tough, and engagingly vulnerable. I know enough not to conflate characters and authors, but I do have to ask Jane about those sex scenes. Of course, before I do I'll re-read Gail's "Sex and the Seasoned Woman" so I don't seem totally uninformed.

Photo by Bruce Guthrie

Since late January, my first stop in the Sunday New York Times has been Michael Winerip's GenerationB column in the Styles Section. In a mere eight months, Mike, an old colleague from the paper, has become the Boomer Boswell.

With his signature graceful style, empathy, and eye for vivid detail, he's told us stories about blended families, graying surfers, sex toys, surviving Madoff, caring for aging parents, and on-line dating that bring those Yankelovich stats we so love to throbbing life. Last week's installment of the not-so-young but still restless was about a 58-year-old student loan company executive who went from $225,000 a year to what is beginning to look like everlasting unemployment. He lives alone in an inexpensive suburban apartment, Mike wrote, and "goes for the $2.99 breakfast special at a nearby diner every morning, just to get out and be around people." Mike obviously hit a nerve. He got hundreds of e-mails on that one, some of which will doubtlessly be future columns.

"I have to admit that my first reaction to this assignment was negative," said Mike when I called him off the beach the other day on his Cape Cod vacation. "I thought it would be a series of stereotypes about those entitled, self-absorbed boomers.

"And I didn't think there was really a generation out there with similar values, just people who would change as they grew older."

But with a Boomer's conditioned optimism, Mike took it as a challenge and found that he was right and he was wrong. There was a common  sense of entitlement - no American generation had grown up with such privilege and prospects - but no common political, religious, social, sexual response to that entitlement. All things were possible. The revolutions - which had been started by pre-Boomers - were now the Boomers to keep going.

And as Mike dug into the breezy myths - the Boomers were unstable, just look at the divorce rate, while that Greatest Generation stayed married - he came to understand that Boomers just weren't about to settle for the discontent they'd grown up with in their parents' marriages.

Most of Mike's columns are deeply reported - as one would expect from one of the Times' treasures, a Pulitzer Prize winner who can also write acclaimed children's novels (Google him yourself, this is my blog). But the ones that touch me most are about the lower-middle-class kid from Quincy, Mass. who went to Harvard, missed serving in Vietnam or getting muddy at Woodstock, but like our President, inhaled. Mike has four kids whose alcohol consumption bothers him, much less any pot smoking.

"I know it seems hypocritical but you do change as you get older," he said. "I'm also less sure I can change the world, and I no longer feel the need to be consistent with what I was."

A couple of months ago, Mike, a jogger and biker, found out he had a blockage in an artery. The brush with mortality rocked him. He's 57, about the age when his father suffered his first heart attack. He died after the third, at 65. Mike got a stent, one of the techno advances not available in Dad's day. Would modern medicine outweigh heredity? Now there's a Boomer question.

Soon after the stent was implanted, Mike went swimming in the ocean lifeguarded by Ben and Sam, two of his sons. I loved Mike's image of his college-age boys flanking him shoulders to shoulders as he breasted the waves. Leave it to the Boomer Boswell to find a heart-warming spin on the Sandwich Generation.