PD and former BJ pop culture critic Mark Dawidziak, my TV critic when I was Television Editor inside Ol’ Blue Walls for the final 16 years of my 26-year career there, won first place at the 32^nd annual New York Book Show for his “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in The Twilight Zone” book cover.

To be precise, it was for the hardcover nonfiction cover/jacket category.

Writes Mark:

“One of the major gripes you'll hear from authors is about the covers publishers put on their books. But I've always been enormously fortunate in this regard -- a point that was driven home in delightful fashion last week.

“I don't get to take the bow, since all credit goes to designer Rob Grom and illustrator Phil Pascuzzo (and my daughter, Becky, for taking the author's photo). Still, it's a grand high-profile victory for ‘The Twilight Zone.’ Carousel rides all around!”

The carousel reference is to the 1959 “Twilight Zone” episode about advertising executive Martin Sloan, played by Gig Young as the adult Sloan, injuring himself while falling off a carousel after he is transported to his childhood and learning a life lesson to stop looking back in nostalgia but forward in anticipation to still more enjoyment and pleasure in your life.

I’ve followed that advice all of my life. I remember my past fondly in most cases, particularly growing up in the coal mining town of Monongah, West Virginia where I could run the hills all day as long as I came home when the street lights came on and where the residents all over town were my parents’ volunteer babysitters.

If I did something wrong, when I walked in the door at home my parents let me know about it. It DID take a village to raise THIS child.

Mark also is renown for his knowledge of another Mark, humorist Samuel Langhorne Clemens, whose pen name Mark Twain came from a Mississippi River boatman term of measuring the depth of the water.

Famed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns once wrote: “Nobody gets Mark Twain the way Mark Dawidziak does.”

Hell, Mark looks more like Twain than Twain did, now that he’s aged from stage makeup to real-life beard color.

His multitude of books include “Columbo,” Peter Falk’s famous detective series.

I still remember fondly the day that Falk called the BJ and asked for Mark, who was writing the book about Falk and his rumpled raincoat character.

After telling Falk that Mark wasn’t there, I said: “Oh, one more thing.”

Falk dutifully laughed as if his famous Columbo line hadn’t been repeated back to him in real life a zillion times. Well, Falk was a great actor.

The co-star in Mark D.’s life is Sara Showman Dawidziak, both on stage and in marriage. Their Largely Literary Theater Company performs works linked to Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens and anything else they can think of.

They first met in Tennessee in 1981 when they appeared together in Neil Simon’s “The Good Doctor.”

A year later they were married in Johnson City, Tennessee.

Another year later, Mark began his marvelous adventure at 44 E. Exchange Street.

After I “trained” him well enough, he took his talents to the PD.

Mark and Sara live in Cuyahoga Falls with daughter Becky, who is never without a camera in her hand to memorialize her father . . . and mother.

Mark’s email address combines tributes to H.L. Mencken and Groucho Marx, two guys who were fantastic, too, when it came to sarcasm and criticism.

Mark is justifiably in the Cleveland Press Club’s Journalism Hall of Fame.