The father Sidney was alive then, as was his bachelor brother, Benny, a veteran of WW I. Both fellows contentedly fell asleep in their arm chairs after dinner. The reference to Campbell's is the famous funeral parlor on Madison Avenue that has been burying New Yorkers of means for decades. They still do.
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On our leaving the apartment to go drinking and play pool, the mother, gesturing to the sleeping fellows...
"I hope I don't have to call Campbell's twice tonight."
--November 1967.
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With this next installment I can't help but notice out quotes from two people I miss most: Russell Baker and Robert McG. Thomas Jr. Baker of course was a two-time Pulitzer-winning columnist for the NYT who in his final column told us he's been trying to create a ballet of words in a phone booth with a 750 word column. How I wish he could have been around to guide us through President Trump, actually any president for that matter. There no doubt there would be more quotes to remember.
And McG. Thomas is the great obituary writer for the NYT who died far too soon, at 60 in 2000. At this point in my life it's beyond likelihood that I'll ever find myself in a journalism class, but I'd like to think his work makes it into someone's syllabus. McG. gave us the send off for the fellow who perfected kitty litter, Edward Lowe, as we know it today, and the Goat Man, Charles McCartney, who of course spent so much time with his goats in the school bus he lived in he couldn't possibly escape being called the Goat Man.
I remember reading the obit on the Goat Man one morning on the way into work in 1998. I was excited by it and insisted that the fellow who sat next to him give it a read. "You want me to read an obituary?" "Yeah, I do."
In the collection of McG.'s obituaries, "52McGs." there is a reprint of the NYT obituary that he earned when he passed away in January 2000. The obiturist, Michael T. Kaufman tracks McG's life from Shelbyville, Tenn. to joining the NYT as a copyboy in 1959, having flunked out of Yale due to his lifestyle decision to, as McG. described it, "to major in New York rather than anything academic."
What a way to put it. I would have never thought that's why I left two colleges and set out to work full-time at a health insurer that I stayed at for 43 years; attend every New York Ranger home game for 11 years with my season tickets; practically live at Madison Square Garden for other events like boxing and college basketball; shoot pool at various pool halls in Manhattan and Queens; drink fairly prodigious amounts of beer; go to Aqueduct and Belmont racetracks on a regular basis on Saturdays and other days off. Come to think of it, I'm not really given enough credit for still being alive at nearly 72.
McG it seems liked the life he found in New York after a day's work at the NYT. At the end of the introduction to the book "52McGs," Thomas Mallon tells us:
"He was a bon vivant," remembers Bill Brink, "who would literally grab people in the elevators or lobby to get them to go to dinner. We'd start out as a twosome and end up as five." At the restaurant "he'd put together the most eclectic table arrangements, pretty girls next to grizzled newspapermen."
How I'd love to have been scooped up and hauled off for dinner. I've been reading obituaries for decades, before and after McGill, and no one did it better than he did.
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For diplomatic Ruth, having Hilton home all day is like having a piano in the kitchen: “It’s beautiful, but it’s in the way.”
--John J. O’Connor, NYT, September 16, 1996, review of “Cosby” a new Bill Cosby television show.
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Too much of a good thing is wonderful.
--Mae West
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You live life looking forward, you understand life looking backward.”
--Soren Kierkegaard
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The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time.
--Abraham Lincoln; used in an ad for American General Financial Group
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Sloan Simpson, the beautiful young fashion model who married New York’s handsome postwar Mayor, William O’Dwyer, divorced him after his sudden term as Ambassador to Mexico and then became a darling of the jet set as the ruler of Acapulco society, died yesterday at her home in Dallas. She was 80.
Miss Simpson, who told friends she would never marry unless she found a man with wealth and a title, had her share of titled suitors and romances with wealthy men, but never found one with both qualifications.
--Robert McG. Thomas Jr., NYT Obituary, November 1996
She remained unmarried certainly because if she found a man with one quality, he lied about the other.
--Anonymous
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A prominent industrialist was kidnaped on Tuesday, and two men, at least one a career criminal, were arrested after payment of a $500,000 ransom and the springing of a trap by the police and the F.B.I.
They picked up the ransom and released Mr. Wais, unharmed, and with $20 for cab fare, at a busy intersection near Golden Gate Park. As the kidnapers drove off, police officers in an unmarked car rammed their van and arrested Mr. Taylor and Mr. Robinson.
“They wanted a million dollars,” Mr. Wais told reporters. “I didn’t have quite that much on me.”
--NYT, 1996
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I didn’t need to go to The Lion’s Head last Saturday night to remember that whisky-golden time.
I will be handed a menu in some restaurant and remember the night a man fell dead of a heart attack at the table beside me and someone asked the waitress, “What did he order?”
--Pete Hamill, NYT, October 18,1996, on his memories of The Lion’s Head pub as it was about to close for good.
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But maybe the best way to revisit Dawn Powell’s New York would be to drop by Chumley’s, a former speak-easy with a still unmarked door, guzzle two or three gin martinis in quick succession, and rush out into the streets before the buzz wears off. Any city can look magical when you’re bombed, as Powell, Gousha [her husband], and their friends were. Considering how much alcohol they consumed, it’s amazing that Powell was so productive. It’s also fair to say that the city looks after drunks. If she’d moved to the country, like Jackson Pollack, she might well have run into a tree.
--Herbert Muschamp, NYT, December 4, 1998
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Since it is Christmas, a day on which nobody reads a newspaper anyhow, and since this is the last of these columns titled “Observer” which have been appearing in The Times since 1962, I shall take the otherwise inexcusable liberty of talking about me and newspapers. I love them.
--Russell Baker, NYT, December 25, 1998, last Observer column
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The writer Tony Hiss, who spent two years shadowing Mr. Youngman for a New Yorker profile, once counted 80 jokes in 15 minutes; calculating that given the number of Mr. Youngman’s club dates and the size of his audiences during his 67-year career, he had produced 3.25 billion laughs, “and that’s not counting his work in elevators.”
--Robert McG. Thomas, Jr., NYT February 28, 1998, reporting on the memorial service.
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I have all the money I’ll ever need— if I die by four o’clock.
--Henny Youngman
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Accounting is the world’s second oldest profession. It was invented to track the proceeds from that which was first.
--Anonymous
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