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Franz Lidz’s introduction to the world of archaeology came early.
His uncle, Arthur Lidz, was “a full-blown hoarder,” said Mr. Lidz, who writes archaeology and science dispatches for The New York Times.
“He had newspapers that went back to the 1920s piled up in stacks, trusses — and his favorite, shoelaces — in his apartment in the Bronx,” he said. “So I think what piqued my interest in archaeology was wading through it all.”
But Mr. Lidz, who grew up on Long Island and then in the Philadelphia suburbs, didn’t initially pursue a career in writing about archaeology.
A whirlwind path took him to Antioch College in Ohio, where he was a theater major (“It was between that and creative writing; I was trying to figure out which would look better on a résumé”); to the pages of a weekly newspaper in Maine (“my first feature was about the town drunk”), to Sports Illustrated, despite having never read the magazine or covered a single sporting event (“except one pigeon race”).
Recently, he has written about a manuscript that contains a tax evasion scheme in ancient Rome; chronicled how soccer may have originated in Scotland rather than England; and profiled an archaeologist in Sweden who spent three years traveling in Viking vessels.
“This takes the place of learning another language or taking piano lessons at this age,” said Mr. Lidz, 73, whose first byline for The Times was a Metropolitan Diary tale in 1982.
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The post A Writer Who Delights in Demystifying the Arcane and Obscure appeared first on New York Times.
