Nostalgia grows because it is fed by age. The older I get, the more I look back on the movies I watched, the albums I listened to and the books I read when I was young, even as young as 11 or 12 years old.

Perhaps most important of all that to me back then was "Citizen Kane."

My first encounter with the movie was a surprise: I used to sit up in my parents' bedroom on Saturday afternoons watching the weekly matinee out of a Chicago station on their small black and white TV. It was usually Basil Rathbone in "Sherlock Holmes," Warner Oland playing Charlie Chan, the Marx Brothers, or W.C. Fields.

One Saturday something unexpected came on, a movie I'd never heard of. At first, I was disappointed, but the longer I watched, the more intrigued and even entranced I became. By the end when "Rosebud" was burnt in the fire, I was stunned.

I didn't know until a few months later, after reading about it in a newspaper or magazine, that I'd just watched what many considered to be the greatest movie of all time. That I was probably one of the few people over the last 60 or so years that came to it without such lofty expectations is something I will always be thankful for.

It was, in some respects, the beginning of my love of movies, as I set........

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