Donald J. Trump, real estate mogul and salvation of NBC with his reality show The Apprentice, lived in Cincinnati for a year.

That much he remembers, except that just now Trump can't remember exactly which year it was, only that it was three decades or more back in time.

"It was in the early '70s," he said by phone recently from his New York City offices, presumably with a right there view of Manhattan. "I loved it there."

Trump was at a loss for the exact year because when you're an mogul who has built and sold an American empire a couple of times over, well, the years must fade one into another. How does a guy like Trump measure time, anyhow? By project? Wealth? Wife? Children or lack of children?

Because of the popularity of The Apprentice this spring, it was a good time for me to track Trump down, fax him down, actually, repeatedly, until one day the phone rang and an assistant was there requesting that I hold for Donald Trump, please. I talked with possibly the world's most famous boss about workplace issues and his memories of living in Cincinnati.

He does remember Cincinnati, and it's easy to understand why: This is where the Trump brand was born.

Trump remembers, too, the last time we spoke - the 1989 Super Bowl when I was a Metro reporter for the Enquirer.

My job was to quote fans in orange who'd made the pilgrimage to Miami to see this overwrought football game, and I met Trump during a second-quarter chat with a Colerain Township body shop owner.

Police interrupted the interview because I would not leave my stadium step/seat. Ushers wanted me out of the aisle. But I was not in anybody's way, I was just doing my job and, well, I simply wasn't going to leave.

Read this, I told them, and then I read aloud the press pass on my neck: "Good anywhere in the stadium."

I followed the reading - pure poetry, it was - with a supplicating, palms-up gesture, eyebrows in a state of wonder: Now will you leave me alone? They did. The body shop owner gestured to my left and said that's why they wanted me gone. I glanced over: Trump.

The hair was majestic.

"I remember," Trump said, maybe because he appreciated hard work and the last time our paths crossed, I was, indeed, working hard. Or maybe he didn't remember it at all. "A lot of time has passed."

Trump's career began in Cincinnati because that's where his dad, the late Fred Trump, decided it would begin.

At the time, his father had offered him an unusual present: an apartment complex in Bond Hill. Trump remembered the exact number of units, too.

"There were 1,164. Almost all were vacant. They were a disaster," Trump says. "We turned it around, and it became a great success."

Much of America watched him judge talent and ability. So how should it be measured? What is the value of an education? Are the eyes a window to the heart?

"There is nothing quite like education. If somebody went to Wharton School or Harvard, it certainly tells you that they've done a lot, that they've done a good job and they're smart," he said. "But ability is not exclusively that. I think you have to look in their eyes. I know I can see a lot."

Trump then said he had to run - although there were people in his office that he had just invited in - but added that he would like nothing better this summer than to take in a ballgame with his friend, Carl Lindner, and that I should say hello to Lindner.

I said OK, and so here it is: Carl, your friend, Donald J., says hello from New York. I think he's ready to come back to town to his beloved Maisonette and the Reds. Can you fix him up?

E-mail jeckberg@enquirer.com