Some Like It Hot

Home Depot is doing well these days. Macy's isn't. At least that's the story in yesterday's NYT. And I can understand why. But not in my household. My wife might not be going to Macy's, but there are enough Macy's boxes that show up at the door due to online shopping that I'm a little surprised to hear Macy's might be ailing. The weak mall traffic is understandable.

One thing you can say about Home Depot, once you get to know where everything is you don't get intimidated by a building that could hide a few 767s in Aisle 12 alone.

But poor Arthur Blank, founding owner of Home Depot and owner of the Atlanta Falcons who paced the sidelines and the 4th quarter wound down and watched Tom Brady take the Super Bowl away from the Falcons in 2017 in overtime. It wasn't his fault. I hope he's gotten over it. His stores are great.

We're been to the Syosset Home Depot so often that we even know where they keep the bird seed. There are enough people in orange aprons to help you, but at this point we know where things are. They do sometimes move things and we have to ask, but they're always helpful. One of the perks of the store.

When there is snow on the ground, like there still is now, we set out a plate of bird seed on the covered picnic table on the patio and let the party begin. Naturally, squirrels get involved, but they are one of God's creatures, despite the fact that no one is ever going to report a squirrel sighting on the Internet and have a flood of people descend on Central Park. One grey squirrel looks like any other grey squirrel.

We used to sling a bird feeder over a maple tree branch, but the tree is gone now. And when we did, the squirrels couldn't reach the feeder, but plenty of birds did. We kept the feeder filled in all seasons, but it got to be too much. The birds quickly emptied the sucker, and the droppings started unwanted growth on the grass. We gave up on the feeder when the tree came down.

But it's easy to put a plateful of seed out there and watch the mocking birds, sparrows, cardinals and blue jays fly in for a snack. Of course some squirrels also are attracted, but they co-exist. Squirrels do not attack birds.

Hope Depot offers selections. Unit price 10 lbs. of Pennington bird seed vs. 5 lbs. of Wagner's, and it's easy to see Wagner's is twice the price. Pourquoi!

Well, the label on the Wagner's promises that squirrels won't eat it. There's red pepper in it, and they'll stay away. The bag of Wagner's looks like trail mix. There are so many different particles in there that I can't tell which one is the repellant. And wouldn't the squirrels just nibble around it? Okay, let's try it.

The first customers were squirrels. And not at all hesitant on eating what they wanted. My wife and I theorized that the squirrels were from Mexico, probably illegals, and got here with their spice craving palates. Leave them be.

But the birds have continued to come as well. I thought these guys went to Florida for the winter, but I guess not. The only birds that seems to be missing that we usually see are orioles and robins. Maybe they go to Florida and watch baseball training camps.

Since we bought two bags of the alleged squirrel repellant seed, we won't need to be going back anytime soon. There won't be much more snow, and what's there will melt away soon.

Of course it's silly to think we've got Mexican squirrels. In the Northeast, we're just about as far away form Mexico as you can get and still be in the United States.

And anyway, Biden is president now, and all people and animals from Mexico are welcome. Even I'm sure squirrels who eat hot seed.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

You Know What They Say...

"...One man's trash is another man's treasure." Even gender neutrality will not change the sentiment. It's just plain true.

And leave it to the NYT to put a sheen on an activity that's been going on ever since someone plucked something out of the trash and put it to their own use. It was disgusting, but I used to see what were once called "bums" pull cigar and cigarette butts out of the trash in the 14th Street area of Third Avenue of 3rd Avenue, fittingly just a few blocks from what was then New York's Skid Row, the Bowery. Any length long enough to smoke was good enough for them.

As always, @CoreyKilgannon has proved to be a muse for my memories. The at-large NYT reporter has linked a Tweet to a story by a colleague about how the pandemic has seemed to elevate the quality of the trash that is sitting out there on Manhattan curbs waiting to be picked up; and that until it is picked up, it is fair game for strolling scavengers, or Internet-guided hawks who swoop down and walk off with the "other man's treasure" and furnish their living quarters with items of used, but desirable quality.

The beauty of a story like this is that when you view it online you get several full color, high quality photos that make you envious that by now someone has beaten you to a bargain. There is the photo of a fellow who seems to have scored a lamp that you'd find in Restoration Hardware with a nifty price tag who brought it home to his flat in Astoria to complement his end table, which does look like something he had to buy. And honestly, the lamp looks like it had a catalog number. It probably once did.

Of course there is an Instagram account where two people have made it their lot in life to post photos of desirable items, provide the curb locations, and let the market do its thing. 

I can just see being pummeled by Alec Baldwin who has rushed out of a cab and wrapped his fists around a lamp you were led to by the Web account. Alec has seen the same image, and is now ready to fight for the curb item. It's got to happen. He's flunked anger management several times.

The NYT, always a paper given to thinking about things, attributes the elevation of the quality of the trash to people staying at home because of the pandemic and suddenly seeing their surroundings as a place that needs improvement. After all, the Web has plenty of online opportunities to consider as replacements for their threadbare items.

People are spending more time inside their places of abode, and are probably sober at home for more hours than they used to be, so it's only natural that they'd like to jazz the joint up a bit.

Dumpster diving is nothing new, and calling it "stooping" is not a new term, despite what an anonymous couple @stoopingnyc claims to be their invention of the word. "Stooping" may soon appear as getting the William Safire treatment by Ben Zimmer in the WSJ. 

The term has long been applied to those at an OTB (there are still OTBs, but nowhere nearly as many, and none in NYC) who scour the floor for discarded tickets and see if perhaps there is still value on them that the "dropper" missed.

You'd say, "who would throw away a winning ticket" but you have to know a little more about horse racing. The scratching of a horse after bets have started will entitle the holder to a refund. This is often overlooked by the ticket purchaser.

A change in the order of finish after the race has been reviewed by the stewards after a claim of foul will create new payoff numbers. If the holder of a ticket doesn't realize they've been "moved up" and discards their ticket, they are throwing away a winner.

If the stooper is any good, they will pick up any and all discarded tickets and run them through the machine that day, or even a day later. Somewhat like a MetroCard reader, the validity of the ticket will be displayed, along with its value. There's gold in the discards.

There is however a lot less of it than there used to be. There are far fewer OTBs and a great deal of wagering is placed online, where no tickets are issued, but accounts are automatically debited and credited. Thus, if you deserve a credit because of a scratch, the computer posts it to your account.

There was one fellow who years ago basically derived all his income from "stooping" from discarded tickets. He had the janitor from the Seventh Avenue Winners Circle OTB, save the trash bags for him and run the tickets through the reader. But the closing of the OTBs and the online platforms have put a crimp in his "found" income.

There have been others beside Jesus at 7th Avenue. There has even been a casino version of the racetrack stooper, the slot machine scooper. When there were pay telephones and coin returns protected by a swivel scoop I used to always see guys hustling past the pay phones, quickly tip the scooper to see if anyone left their change, or returned money for an incomplete call. They always worked fast because it was a quick dipsy doodle, and there were a lot of pay phones in a rail or bus terminal. Not so now. 

And before that, when there was just a drop, not protected by a swivel scoop, the clever stuffed tissue paper up the chute to block the money from hitting the bottom of the coin return. Periodically, these folks would pass by their territory and pull the tissue out and hopefully collect a little windfall that came their way, almost like tapping maple trees for syrup. Times change.

But back to dumpster diving. If my  father were still alive, we'd be able to furnish a second home these days. Because the home I grew up in was certainly furnished with other people's furniture.

My father was born in 1915, so the Depression was a reality for his family of four boys and mother and father. But they did okay, even owning a flower shop, selling a commodity that you'd like no one would have any money for in those times. Not so.

But he did have a mentality of used being just as good as new. Rugs found their way home, and I distinctly remember a "drum" table that came from the Sabatini's trash two houses away. The table tilted a bit, but the beer bottle and glass of scotch didn't fall off, so it was good enough to keep. He didn't even try and level it off. As is was good enough.

I never got that drum table in the living room out of my mind And when one of the Keno brothers declared one an antique on 'The Antiques Roadshow' I wished my father had been alive to hear that. That's how I then knew that while I'm sure we didn't have a valuable antique there was now a design name I could attach to something that came from in front of the Sabatini house.

Like father like son? Not really. But I will confess that only a few weeks ago I picked up one of those lime green/yellow fluorescent vests from outside a LIRR waiting room and tucked it in my bag on my way into the city.

I no longer run, but I knew it could be used as a great reflector vest for running, because that's what it was, a reflector vest. There was nothing wrong with it. No stains. No rips. Like new. When I brought it home to be washed my wife questioned its origin. I confessed, and then I really confessed.

I described finding it outside the waiting room. "And you brought it into the city, and then brought it home?"

"Yes."

I was getting a look from my wife that Red Smith once described as that of a man who just bit into an apple and found half a worm. I further felt compelled to give even more disclose, to admit that I took the SHOP AND STOP name tag off before keeping it.

The waiting room is nowhere near a SHOP AND STOP, so I saw nothing wrong with this. No one was going to come rushing out of the woodwork to reclaim it.

"So, now there's a kid pushing shopping carts through a parking lot who's not wearing his reflector vest?"

"I don't know. He should get another one I expect."

The vest was thrown out. It never made it into the wash. I was then called my father's first name, Ted. The daughter I saved the vest for heard the story and also made a face like she had just bittern into an apple and found half a worm.

When she next dropped me off at the train station I was instructed: "Do not pick anything up this time."

I love it when they make fun of you.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Hand Sanitizer @ the 7th

On Friday, I found myself in the 7th precinct on Merrick Road in Seaford, New York. It was only the 2nd time in my life I needed to be in a precinct. The last time was well over 30 years ago when I went to our precinct in Flushing, the 1-O-9, to make a report of someone who walked down our long driveway, into our garage while I was working on one side of the house, and walked out with a cheap stereo/radio unit I had on a shelf. I was hopping.

Friday's visit was for a totally different reason, but for one I'll save for a later date. The contrast between a NYC precinct and a Nassau County one is night and day. While a NYC precinct can seem like rush hour in Grand Central Terminal, a Nassau county precinct can resemble a church cellar with a Cub Scout meeting scheduled for later.

The lobby was like walking into a bank in Vermont. After being buzzed in I was directed to sit down at one of the two desks in front with two visitor chairs at each desk. I was the only civilian in the place. There were three uniformed officers behind a bit of a high wooden ledge, a barrier that it was clear you weren't supposed to go near.

While waiting for an officer to attend to me I looked around. There was a long steam radiator along the wall by the desk I sat at. There were photos of the COP OF THE MONTH. There was a small ledge behind me where you could write something if you had to, or take a brochure about crime.

There was what looked like an ATM machine alongside the door that was of course not an ATM, but rather a receptacle, like a small clothing drop box, that you could dispose of your empty prescription bottles. NO NEEDLES, please.

This surprised me, because I didn't think an empty Rx bottle represented medical waste that needed to be disposed of . But perhaps it was for unwanted, unneeded medicine. I didn't explore.

It was not hard to notice the huge bronze plaque that I could easily read from where I was seated that told me that the building was built in 1968 and dedicated by Eugene H. Nickerson, the County Executive. Lesser names beneath his didn't mean anything to me since I lived in Flushing Queens in 1968 and considered anything east of Bell Boulevard to be almost requiring a passport for entry.

Easily being the oldest person in the place, I was familiar with the name Eugene Nickerson from newspaper stories, and particularly from his stint as a Federal judge for the Eastern District, which includes Staten Island, Queens, Brooklyn Nassau and Suffolk counties.

In 1988 I was called for jury duty for the Eastern District Federal Court. A lot of people were part of the call and the process is to herd you into a large courtroom, describe the case to you, and wait for your name to be possibly called. 

If called, you are asked to sit in the jury box, and when there are at least 12 people seated the judge gets to ask the potential jurors questions—not the defense or prosecuting attorney. The judge rules who stays, who goes. The lawyers are allowed a few preemptory challenges, sort of like replay challenges these days.

Typical for me: something always reminds me of something else. At one of the sessions I was pulled into Eugene Nickerson was the Federal judge. I hadn't seen him in years. I knew him from some TV news interviews, and knew he had a dulcet-toned way of speaking. Almost like William F. Buckley Jr. But right now it was obvious he had aged from the last time I saw him. He was how he was described in the 2002 obituary I later reread, wearing, "square lens glasses at he tip of his nose."

I wasn't called from the general pool to sit in the jury box and be interviewed this time, but when there were 12 or so people in the box I couldn't help spotting a somewhat elderly fellow who had all the appearance to my trained eye to be a Greek immigrant, someone I've seen in countless diners and flower shops growing up.

Judge Nickerson asked the gentleman a question and it was clear from his thick, Greek-accented English response that he was from Greece. Nickerson and the potential juror went back and forth with questions and answers, and it was clear the gentleman was polite, and was not trying to "throw" his answers to get out of service; he was genuinely not grasping the questions. He and the judge went back and forth a few times until Nickerson politely said that if they were to continue like this that it was going to turn into a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby routine. The Greek fellow didn't understand, but I know I laughed, as did a few others. He was not selected.

I remembered reading the obituary for Judge Nickerson, but when I got home I refreshed my memory. He was of a pure patrician background. On his father's side he was descended from a relative who in 1637 bought Cape Cod from the Indians (price not given) and who eventually founded the town of Chatham. His mother was a direct descendent of President John Adams, and by extension John Quincy Adams. The obituary described what was on display that day in the courtroom: "a soft-spoken, often humorous man." Judge Nickerson went to Harvard, and of course Columbia Law School. Ivy all the way.

Immediately to my right was a free-standing dispenser of hand sanitizer, the new accessory to almost any public setting due to the pandemic. I couldn't tell if the dispenser had been moved from another location, but the paper sign taped to the pole did seem to have advice that might be premature for someone just sitting in the lobby: 

Do Not Use Hand Sanitizer Before Being Fingerprinted.

No problem here.

http://onofframp.blogspot.com

Commonplace Book, Chapter 6

Nephew Melvin Powers and Candace Mossler

Time to go to the well again and memorialize the out-takes I was once making a book of.

I'm reminded of Dick Schaap, another sportswriter that was worth reading who is no longer with us. His son Jeremy is in the biz, but on the air on ESPN, not really in print like his father, who was decidedly in print at the drop of a ball. Dick turned out sports books, almost before the game was over.

My first exposure to him was when he was a columnist in New York's long-defunct Herald Tribune. a venerable newspaper (my favorite) that eventually lost the battle of making money after the 1963 newspaper strike that famously went on for 114 days that left it on life support.  You can fold a newspaper, and newspapers can fold themselves.

Dick and Jimmy Breslin worked side-by-side at the Herald Tribune for a while. A video of the two of them at work would be a treasure. Even just the audio. 

I still remember Dick writing about the Candy Mossler trial in Florida in which the blonde bombshell wife and her nephew were acquitted of killing her rich husband, whose fortune was made from Mossler safes. 'The Postman Rings Twice' in real life.

Dick, sensing that there must still be a killer out there if the jury said no, the defendants didn't do it, echoed a line from a commercial of the day for Florida tourism by Jim Dooley, who was always on TV telling frozen New Yorkers to "come on down." Dick thought the real killer should "come on down."

It's not an expression you hear anymore, but in the '60s when Mayor Lindsay managed to piss off nearly every union group in the city and have them go out on strike, Dick Schaap caught a comment His Honor made as he emerged from a helicopter ride looking over the city as it was grid-locked from Lindsay's first strike, the Transport Workers Union (TWU) who ran the subways. The ever buoyant mayor told no one in particular that he still thought "it's a fun city."

Dick on hearing this, ran as fast as he could to his typewriter and told anyone who bought the paper his story was in that despite the grid-lock and hardship of a bus and subway strike, the mayor still thought "it's a fun city." Mayor Lindsay's "popularity" only grew after the end of his second term and Abe Beame became mayor as someone who was disliked even more as the city now faced bankruptcy. The good old days.

Johnny Carson started using the term in his opening monologues on 'The Tonight Show making serious fun of what wasn't fun about NYC. A peep show in Times Square called itself "Fun City."  In fact, when I worked at 1440 Broadway after the Trade Center collapse, I could see the building that Fun City was in and its old signage. The building was slated for demolition, the peep show having long disappeared as Times Square got cleaned up.

Seeing some of then names from these out-takes I'm reminded of what's gone from the newspaper: columnists I like the read and to whom I gravitated every day.

Certainly the NYT Sports section is greatly changed, currently shrunken because of the pandemic, but also because of staff cuts that do not even allow beat report coverage of local teams. The articles are more long-form that you might have found in Sport Illustrated if you were to read that tissue paper anymore.

Certainly ESPN, the Web and other cable outlets have changed how people absorb their sports news. And with it, comes less and less print, literary writing. So, aside from collecting these nuggets, I've started a museum in a way. The way we were.

********************

All over Alaska, there are stories of such perseverance in extreme or unusual conditions. In the southeast, Haines did not have flat space in mountainous terrain, so it used the municipal airport runway for high school track meets. Which was suitable until an aircraft with engine trouble made an emergency landing on the eve of the 110-meter hurdles, wiping out half the school's hurdle supply. Undaunted, Haines started running meets on the state highway in front of the school. The local police halted traffic to allow the events to continue.

–Bill Pennington, NYT, "In Alaska Getting There is Half the Fun." March 1, 2004

********************

For Trish McLeod, a beautiful Scottish Highlander, my third and final wife, of whom Mickey Mantle said to me, “You’re over married.”  If I were not already in love with her, I would have fallen for her the day she met Reggie Jackson for the sixth or seventh time, and he said to her, “What’s your name again?” and she said, “Trish.  And yours?”  Reggie did not laugh.

I was equally proud of her the evening we had dinner with another formidable athlete, Wilt Chamberlain, who had just written a book in which he casually mentioned, as casually as you can mention such things, that he had enjoyed twenty thousand sexual experiences.  Trish reached out and touched Wilt’s elbow and said, “Does that count?”  Wilt did laugh.

Darling, this one counts.

–Dick Schaap, introduction to his autobiography, Flashing Before My Eyes

********************

The only way you could drop more names than Dick Schaap does in Flashing Before My Eyes would be to shove a Manhattan telephone book off a desk.

–Anonymous

********************

I’d demand a recount.

–William F. Buckley, Jr.’s (who was running for Mayor of  New York City, in 1965, on the Conservative Party ticket) well-timed, sonorously elocuted reply, when asked what would he do if he were elected.

********************

Politics is the most demanding trade I know.  Not even prostitution demands that its practitioners surrender so many pieces of themselves.

–--Dick Schaap, Flashing Before My Eyes

********************

My favorite topic in my newspaper columns was John Lindsay.  At the start of his administration, I introduced the nickname Fun City to describe New York. Lindsay himself inspired the phrase. The subways went on strike his first day in office, and after he toured the grid-locked city in a helicopter, someone asked him if he was still glad that he had been elected mayor.  “I still think it’s a fun city,” Lindsay said.

–Dick Schaap, Flashing Before My Eyes

********************

Jimmy Breslin encouraged me to be different, to stand out on television.  “Do something outrageous,” he recommended.  On the eleven o’clock news one night, I did.  I talked about Secretariat and Riva Ridge, the back-to-back Kentucky Derby winners from Meadow Stable, and referred to them, innocently, as the two most famous stablemates since Joseph and Mary.

(This utterance did not gently into the night air.)

–Dick Schaap, Flashing Before My Eyes

********************

Smith was trying to get out of Philadelphia and into New York, where the money and prestige were substantially greater. Look magazine was seeking a sports editor, and Smith applied. “Look represented his ticket to get to New York,” his daughter Kit Smith recalled years later.”  I remember him saying, ‘I’d leave the newspapers for that dumb magazine.’”  But Frank Graham got the job in September of 1943.  Smith was very disappointed.  Another time, he received an offer from the Brooklyn Eagle. “But I decided, “ recalled Smith, “that Brooklyn was farther from New York than Philadelphia was.”

–Ira Berkow, Red, A Biography of Red Smith.

*********************

On January 16, 1983, one year after Red smith died, some 250 people—including friends, colleagues, and a few Red Smith family members—attended a Red smith Pipe Night at the Players Club on Gramercy Park South in Manhattan.  Jack Whitaker, the sports announcer, served as master of ceremonies.  Whitaker said he had a tape recording of Smith speaking less than two years before at a dinner in his honor at the National Arts Club. The lights were dimmed, the audience grew quiet, and on a screen at the front of the dining hall appeared a silhouette of Smith at his typewriter.

And then Smith’s words, slightly scratchy, a combination of the recorder and the man, were heard in the room.  Smith said:

This is a peculiar business we work in.  I have to tell you a little about what it’s like.  There was a sportswriter in Cincinnati years ago named Bill Phelon.  He was a bachelor and a lot of people considered him eccentric because he shared his apartment in Cincinnati with a five-foot alligator.  And he had a pet squirrel that he carried around the National League circuit in his topcoat pocket.

Bill Phelon loved baseball and he was kind to animals, and above all he loved Havana.  The city of Havana.  As soon as the World Series was over, he would go to Havana, join up with his friend Pepe Conte, who was a sportswriter in Havana at the time, and spend as long a time there as his bankroll and the patience of his paper would allow.

And eventually the inevitable happened.  Bill Phelon died.  And in obedience to directions in his will, he was cremated and his ashes shipped to Pepe Conte.  Pepe got a letter and a little package.  And in the package was a small urn. The letter said, “Hello Pepe, this is Bill.”  Bill asked that Pepe rent a small plane and scatter his ashes over Morro Castle.

Pepe was deeply grieved by the loss of a friend and he took the little jug under his arm and went down to El Floridita, one of the places they had frequented, and there were a few hangers-on sitting around the joint, and Pepe put the urn up on the bar and said to the guys, “Remember Bill Phelon?”  Sure, they all remembered Bill Phelon.  Pepe Said, “This is to bill Phelon.  Have a drink on Bill Phelon.”  So they all had a drink on Bill Phelon, and Pepe tucked the jug under his arm and went on to Sloppy Joe’s.

Went through the same routine. “You guys remember Bill Phelon?”  “Sure.”  “Drink to Bill Phelon.”  He went onto the Plaza Bar, maybe the Algleterre, I don’t know.  All the spots that were the favorites of Bill’s and Pepe’s.  But somewhere on his appointed rounds, Pepe achieved a state of incandescence and he mislaid Bill Phelon.

Bill was undoubtedly swept out the next morning with the cigar butts and the empty bottles. And I tell the story to make it clear that sportswriters lead glamorous lives and come to unexpected ends. And I thank you.

–Red Smith, in Red, A Biography of Red Smith, by Ira Berkow

*********************

The look on the man’s face was that of someone who had just bitten into an apple and found half a worm.

–Red Smith, as recounted by Ira Berkow, in Red, A Biography of Red 

http://www.onoffram.blogpsot.com

Manhattan Scanned

I've already made a posting referring to Becky Cooper's first book, 'Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers.' But now I've filled out one of the blanks in the book and have presented it here on the right.

I had done this a while ago and mailed it to Ms. Cooper, but it came back 'Addressee Unknown." My guess is since the book was published in 2012 Ms. Cooper is no longer collecting submitted maps by readers.

Ms. Cooper also doesn't seem to respond to Tweets, even ones that tell her I'm a 1966 graduate of the same Stuyvesant High School she went to and that I enjoyed 'We Keep the Dead Close' and listened to a few podcasts of her being interviewed on her latest book. She probably won't respond when I link this posting to her either. Oh well.

The Manhattan mapping book is a great book, and of course Ms. Cooper has moved on to her true-crime investigation of a long ago  unsolved murder case of an graduate archaeology student, Jane Britton, in an off-campus apartment at Harvard, 'We Keep the Dead Close.' The map book was fun, but her bones are made with 'We Keep the Dead Close.' It will be more than interesting to see what Ms. Cooper produces next.

Filling out the Manhattan map was of course a trip along Memory Lane. Until 2011 when I retired, I'd been coming in and out of Manhattan since I was 11 in 1960. I lived there briefly at my grandmother's and went to high school there. Outside of working at the family shop which never yielded a reliable salary but rather handouts and tips, I worked in Manhattan from 1967 to 2011.

It's fairly impossible for anyone to be able to read the map I've completed in a scanned copy. I finally got a scanner for Christmas and it works great. I've used it to send family photos to a cousin in Wisconsin. The scanner is a great device. Of course I'm quite late to the party to use one. But who cares?

Manhattan is 13 miles long and about 2½ miles wide at its widest point. As far as square miles go, there aren't many. Disney World is probably larger. But my God, what's come out of it.

The long ago crime TV crime series 'Naked City' said there '8 million stories in the Naked City.' Then they'd go on to introduce their episode, "And this is one of them."

Of course 8 million, or 8½ million do not live in the city, (what anyone who is from NYC refers to Manhattan as) but that's generally the population of New York City within its 5 Boroughs (counties). And it would be exceedingly rare for someone to grow up in any of those boroughs and not somehow, sometime, come into Manhattan. Bridge and Tunnel.

So filling out the map for myself gives anyone who looks at it the visual that not much in my life has been above 59th Street, where Central Park begins. Well, it hasn't. That's the one thing about Manhattan, you can spend a lifetime in one part, and rarely touch on other parts. It's an island of small towns.

But's it's all there, from the beginning. Arriving at Penn Station to visit grandma and grandpa and the family flower shop, to my places of living, education, work, recreation and the near misses at the World Trade Center in 2001 and the workplace murders and suicide on September 16, 2002 at 1440 Broadway.

There's so much that despite a small handwriting, I couldn't squeeze in Penn Station, the pool parlor at Broadway Billiards on 51st Street and other emporiums I shot a stick at; all the bars I got to know the bartenders, owners and other people at, some of whom became lifelong friends. But all these places are below 59th Street.

My oldest daughter, who grew up in Flushing and Nassau County, now lives in Westchester County, north of I-287, Cross Westchester Expressway. Weather forecasters will tell you of colder weather and more snow "north of 287." My daughter refers to where she lives as being in "Upstate New York." It hardly is, but mentally it can be seen that way..

I saw a re-Tweet the other day from a comedian Max Marcus (@MaxMarcusComedy) who shares a similar sentiment: "When you live in NYC and see Upstate NY trending and you assume it's something about Westchester."

Maybe I'll do another map exercise using Queens. A lot of people come from Queens who contribute to the "8 million stories."  

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Leslie E. Robertson, 92, Twin Towers Engineer, Dies

I never really thought about it until I read Mr. Robertson's obituary, that perhaps the luck and relative ease I had in getting out of Tower One, 29th floor, on 9/11 might have had something to do with a structural engineer's design.

Mr Robertson and his firm were the chief structural engineers for the WTC project. He was basically just starting out when the architect, Minoru Yamasaki chose the firm he was with, Worthington and Skilling, to do the engineering design for the Twin Towers. To show you how long it takes to plan and execute one of these projects, consider that these contracts were awarded in the early '60s. The Towers opened in the mid-70s.

Unique to the design of the Towers was the fact that the walls supported the floor, there were no columns. Thus, the floors were nearly an acre of open space. This was a phenomenal opening of rental space.  One hundred and ten stories times two times an acre of rentable space.

After the collapse of the buildings there was considerable outcry that the buildings weren't safe to start with, that the floors were not adequately supported. This was nonsense. Each tower withstood the impact of a Boeing 767 flying into them.  When designed, the engineers accounted for a Boeing 707 hitting the Towers and withstanding the impact. A 767 is significantly larger and wasn't around when the Towers were designed and built.

Yet, of course the towers did survive the impact of the 767s ramming the buildings at full speed; even withstood the giant fires afterward for a while. They did not immediately collapse. That took some time. The impact about 40 floors above my head pushed me into my desk on the office chair and caused drawers to fly open.

I remember Mr. Robertson in one of those post 9/11 documentaries almost crying when describing watching the building going down. He apparently was in Hong Kong at the time. His wife, and engineering partner SawTeen See, watched from the firm's New York offices on Broad Street.

Mr. Robertson apparently felt tremendous remorse about what he saw his role in not building something that could withstand what was thrown at it that day. The ferocity of the fire was not factored in, but then it was not the engineer's role to do that. It was the architect's. Nevertheless, he always carried a heavy heart.

He described getting hate mail after 9/11, but also recalls being upgraded to first class on a flight by a thankful airline attendant who told him he attributed his survival that day to the buildings' design, and by extension Mr. Robertson.

Mr. Robertson would describe the buildings as being made "by hand." The pieces were fitted into each other by construction crews that guided the sections into place from massive cranes. When you think about it, buildings are all made "by hand." Machines craft the parts and lift them, but people fit them together.

After 9/11 and the collapse of the Towers Mr. Roberston expressed concern that his career was over. But that was not to be the case. Commissions still came in. I remember soon after 9/11 being on campus at Geneseo College where my daughter Susan was going and looking at the project sign accompanying the construction of a science building with steel framework. There on the sign was the name Leslie Roberston as the structural engineer. I pointed it out to my daughter.

Until reading the obituary I never knew Mr. Robertson carried the feeling of design failure for so long. "My sense of grief and my belief that I could have done better continue to haunt me." he wrote in the "The Structure of Design." 

Mr. Robertson, obviously a sensitive man, seems to withhold any personal triumph for the fact that perhaps 25,000 left those two building basically unscathed. Perhaps a bit dusty and wet, but physically okay.

I once listened to a retired NYPD Captain tell me that they're trained to avoid the "what if" syndrome. "What if I had done something else,? Then what followed wouldn't have happened." Mr. Robertson built a lifetime chain of event following 9/11. 

"Perhaps had the two towers been able to survive the events of 9/11, President Bush would not have been able to project our country into war. Perhaps the lives of our military and women would not have been lost. Perhaps countless trillions of dollars would not have been wasted on war. Just perhaps my passage into and through old age, comfortably, without a troubled heart."

That's a lot of "perhaps" that doesn't take into account the responsibility of the terrorists who perpetrated the events. Perhaps if they hadn't been born..." You can go on and on. And some people do.

But there is an interesting "what if" paradox that argues that if you changed something in the past you'd still get to where you are today. If the grandfather you have or had weren't around, (that person) then someone else would have gotten your grandmother pregnant.  

Playing the "what if" game is futile. If the Boeing 767 hit Tower One significantly lower, I wouldn't be writing this. But here I am. Because Mr. Robertson thought about a plane hitting the buildings.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Penn Station. Old and New

The old Penn Station has been gone so long there are nearly people on Medicare who were born after its demolition. Or it is really gone? The past isn't even the past?

The second original sin—the demolition of Penn Station—is still being talked and written about by those who care about old things and buildings, always the architecture columnists for the NYT.  They've been sobbing over Penn Station ever since the wrecking balls took two years to remove the place in the mid-'60s and plop an office tower and Madison Square Garden where the architecture of the Roman Baths of Caracalla were recreated by the architects McKim, Mead and White. The father, son and Holy Ghost triumvirate.

The John Huston character, Noah Cross played by John Houston in the movie 'Chinatown' says, "politicians, public buildings and whores all gain respectability if they last long enough." Penn Station lasted, but not long enough.

Unless of course you're watching a movie that has recreated the upper level, via I guess CGI magic. Take the scene in the movie 'Motherless Brooklyn' where Lionel (Freakshow) takes the key to a locker in Penn Station to retrieve papers left by his murdered P.I. boss Frank Minna.

My mouth flew open. They've got Edward Norton striding through the upper level, going past 1950s travelers and their luggage, a serviceman in uniform kissing his sweetheart goodbye, track postings, all under the linty, slightly smoky air lit by the massive overhead skylights.

 The steel arches are there. The clock is there, the one Alfred Eisenstadt took a photo of that appeared in Life magazine, benches and of course the lockers, something at was in train and bus stations until the early to mid '70s until they were removed because of attracting bombs. There were explosions. It's Brigadoon. The place is back for a brief, shining moment.

The CGI people created a scene so realistic that you can see a train heading west on the lower level platform. 

It's always great when there is an old movie on Turner and they've used a scene from Penn Station  The 'Seven Year Itch' is one of my favorites for many reasons, and one of them is the scene in Penn Station as Tom Ewell hurries to catch a train to Maine to catch up with his vacationing family while juggling a canoe oar and luggage though the station. Marilyn Monroe also makes the film memorable.

We were always going in and out of Penn on the LIRR railroad, taking the train on the Port Washington line to Murray Jill, a stop in Queens between Main Street Flushing and Broadway. They still use the station, despite its extremely short length, only able to accommodate four cars of ten car trains.

But the upstairs, that's where the Pennsylvania Railroad ran their long range trains to destinations all over the country. My mother and I tool the Broadway Limited, leaving Penn Station about 4:00 p.m. due to be in Chicago at 9:00 a.m., a 17 hour journey to the heartland to see her relatives. We did this a few times. 

Trains became what my mother would rely on after swearing off flying. Initially, for the first reunion, we took a United Airlines plane destined for Chicago. These were four engine props that didn't fly above the weather. Going to Chicago the weather got so bad with rain and lightening that the plane put down in Toledo, Ohio. We were put up for the night in a hotel courtesy of United, brought back to the airport the next morning, and continued on to Chicago. It was one of those summer storms that hit the Midwest that dump flood conditions of rain.  It was trains thereafter.

The last trip I took to Chicago by train was with my Uncle Vernon, my mother's brother. He too was afraid of airplanes, and preferred to drive, or take a train. Since he drove out to see us in New York using one of those services that you transport the car for someone else, he didn't have a car of his own.

It was January 1968 and I had already dropped out of my second college, so I was up for a bit of adventure. I followed him back to Illinois, taking the train from Penn Station. I don't think we slept a bit riding coach. Arlo Guthrie's 'City of New Orleans' has always reminded me of that trip. We didn't "pass the paper bag that held the bottle," but we did play lots of pinochle and gin rummy in the Club car.

On getting to Chicago we had to wait several hours for a connecting train to Pontiac, Illinois. We went to the movies to see 'Cool Hand Luke.' Vernon was working as a cook in a bar/restaurant in Odell, a spit of a farming town west of Chicago, right between Dwight and Pontiac. One of those town had a state prison. A local industry.

A waitress picked us up in Pontiac and brought us to Odell. It was near zero most of the time. The farmers came to the bar on their tractors for breakfast, or lunch. I helped my uncle in the kitchen. When I had enough of that I flew back to New York. 

I always remember watching the Chicago news on TV telling everyone of the garbage strike in New York City. Another of Mayor Lindsay's famous municipal walkouts. During his first term in office the transit workers went out shutting the subways; the teachers went out; the police and firemen followed. Now Sanitation. This left mounds of garbage uncollected on city street for days. Luckily it was nearly as cold in New York as it was in the Midwest and the garbage didn't rot as fast.

Governor Rockefeller famously refused to call out the National guard to remove the garbage. He claimed the Guardsmen were not physically up to the job of tossing stuff into trucks. The strike was over within a week, before it became a true health crisis. Chalk another one up for the mayor.

As a kid I used to walk up from the family flower shop on 18th Street to Penn Station just to watch  the destination signs change as the trains were leaving the station. Metal signs slid into the gate displays as trains departed for say, Cincinnati, or Richmond. Penn Station was my Mississippi, and trains were river boats, taking people on their adventures.

There was an arcade of stores outside that was about where 32nd Street is and the entrance to Madison Square Garden and 2 Penn Plaza are now. It looked like one of those arcades in London, stores inside. I was always one to go to libraries and book stores I bought the complete works of Sherlock Holmes in that Doubleday store in 1962. They had to order it for me. I still have it, but without the jacket; and it's water damaged. I bought a  replacement years later. The book is a classic with all the short stories and the four novels. It is still in print.

My trips in to what I will always refer to as "The City" are very infrequent these days, made even more infrequent by the pandemic and the closing of entertainment and restaurant venues. Since barbers are now able to use their scissors in public I've taken to going back to my barber. Local haircuts left A LOT to be desired.

After coming in and out of Manhattan since I was 12, it's quite an adjustment not to go into the city nearly every day.  But when I do, I always dovetail the trip with shopping, or medical appointments. No medical appointments yesterday, but there were other errands. And one of them was to take a look at the recently opened Moynihan Train Hall, the new access point for Amtrak trains that was carved out of the post office behind what would have been Penn Station, if it weren't now buried under Penn Plaza and Madison Square Garden.

The General Post office on 8th Avenue, stretching from 31rd Street to 33rd Street was also designed by McKim, Mead and White. It was built when Penn Station was built in 1902. The frieze in front of the post office carries the complete motto of the postal service: NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE CARRIERS FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR ROUNDS.

When I had the kids in the city I pointed out the wording to them and told them they had to make the building two blocks long just because of the length of the motto. However, if they used a smaller font they might have gotten away with a smaller building. I'm not sure if they believed me.

Of course the motto is no longer true. Don't expect any mail to be delivered if it's snowing out, and don't expect to get it fast unless you're paying a premium for what is billed as "priority" or "express" delivery. Times have changed.

Most people never realized that the Main Post Office was a quadrangle, with a vast open space in the middle. You could only realize that if you were in parts of the building, or looking at it from an overhead shot.

New York's U.S. Senator Patrick Moynihan knew this, and he proposed that the post office be put to use as a stand-in for the old Penn Station. Senator Moynihan was a four-term senator from 1977 to 2001, and passed away in 2003. He was always instrumental in getting federal funds for New York City and was a major factor in getting the money to restore and keep the Hell Gate Railroad bridge that took trains up to New England, Boston in particular.

His proposal was made sometime before the turn of the last century. It languished. But it was never forgotten. How could it? Any chance the critics got to advocate for a new train station to restore some grandeur to arriving in New York by train, they flung out there.

Senator Moynihan passed away in 2003, so he never even lived long enough to see the plans hit the drawing board. How almost odd that a project I kept reading about for over 20 years finally was beneath my feet and over my head.

At one point, the Garden wanted to move even further west and build a news sports arena. Perfect! Now's the chance. Oh-oh. Those plans stalled and the Garden spent perhaps $100 million dollars remodeling the arena with sky boxes and improved access to concessions and bathrooms. No new Penn Station.

Get rid of the Garden! Make them vacate the property. Be gone, infernal sports arena! Vamoose! The NYT was quite vocal about this. Fuhgetaboutit guys, it ain't happening.

Using the post office gained traction, so much so they actually planned and built what is now a new Amtrak station and a bit of a LIRR station in what was the center of the post office. After all, the post office was over the tracks that went west to New Jersey and all points south and east. 

The post office long since didn't need the space, or even parts of the building, since major mail sorting operations had moved to other larger West Side facilities. Break ground.

And they did. And finished. And they opened the train "Hall" on January 1st this year, reportedly even under whatever the massive budget was. Good news all around. Great news all around. The writers gushed. I haven't read why it was named a "Hall."  Likely to give it a European touch.

And so yesterday, I took the opportunity to see for myself. Impressive. The massive skylight keeps the place bright, something you become aware of as you approach it. I chose to enter from the West Concourse of the LIRR, the 8th Avenue end. There was a freshly opened escalator that moved me to the top. The escalator was working.

I knew I'd be able to gt to the Hall this way, unlike the fellow who wrote in th e WSJ that you couldn't access the station from the existing station. They guy's not from New York is all I could conclude. Of course you can. And of course you can from the 8th Avenue entrances that adjoin the massive staircase to the post office, because the front of the post office is still a post office. Need stamps. There's still a window for that. And other services.

The uncluttered vastness of the space of Moynihan Train Hall is immediately striking. No food vendors pushing pretzels and coffee. There was something off to the side, but I didn't explore that. I kept looking up, like a tourist.

The top walls of the ceiling say: MOYNIHAN TRAIN HALL on two sides, and E PLURIBUS UNUM ONE FROM MANY and EXCELSIOR EVER UPWARD, the U.S. and New York State mottos. My wife said they'll rename the station eventually. I told her no, they spent a lot of money carving that into the building.

The floor is white marble. So white and so smooth you think you should be able to ice skate on it. There are 5 pairs of tracks, with escalators at two sides down to the platforms: 15/16; 13/14; 11/12; 9/10; 7/8. The even lower numbers are for Jersey Transit, which has its own station tucked inside Penn Station. The numbers after 16 to 21 are LIRR, which you'd have to got to the LIRR section east of Moynihan, right now being refurbished.

Tracks 15/16 are LIRR tracks, and as such there is a LIRR ticket window. My guess is not many people are going to use this access to the tracks since you're nearly at 9th Avenue. But the West Side is changing. There are more businesses and residences there than ever. The whole place reminds me of Dulles Airport in 1964 when I took a TWA flight with an uncle and cousin to London. Dulles had just been carved out of the woods of Virginia and had about zero flight per day leaving or arriving there. That's certainly changed 50+ years later.

There weren't many people milling about. There were some wheelies headed for the Empire Service leaving for Albany-Rensselaer, but no real long range trains. Not sure there are any anymore. The furthest from New York City on the board was Roanoke, Virginia. There is a hanging clock.

The archway and skylight covering the whole expanse is impressive. Looking up you see that you're inside four walls of what was the post office. I don't think Thomas Wolfe would write about the space what he wrote about the old Penn Station, "few buildings are vast enough to told the sound of time," but then again, it's not the 1940s, and there are not vast numbers of people moving through the station, headed off to Army camps and relatives. Times change.

I didn't explore the bathrooms were, or look where the shops might be, or are going to be, or where you would buy a magazine or a newspaper or a NYC souvenir. I didn't go to the entrance that has the impressive upside down 

chandelier-like skyline. I exited at 31st Street and 8th Avenue for the barber. But I'll be back with my camera and take photos.

I'm ten years retired now and with the pandemic I don't go into the city much these days. But I'm still connected. And for me it starts at Penn Station.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

The Tom Brady Show

I happened to go to the grocery store early this morning to buy some bananas and the cashier asked if I watched last night's game. She seemed happen, so I guess she was rooting for the Bucs and the ageless Tom Brady.

I told her "yes, I watched the game. I've seen ALL the games. All 55 of them." I knew the cashier, being somewhat younger than me couldn't match that. She said that was impressive.

Soon after getting home I got a call from someone who identified themselves as a reporter for the local free newspaper.

I understand you've watched all 55 Super Bowls.

Did your mother tell you that? Yes, I've seen them all in various settings. Usually at home or in someone else's home, never at the actual game.

That's impressive.

How did you hear of this? Did your mother look up my name from the discount card I used today?

Well, yes,. I hope you don't mind.

Not at all.

What game do you remember the most?

Any game the Giants won. I have two very good friends who are absolute Giant die-hard fans. They suffer when they're playing bad, which can be often. But when they rise to the top I always wish them the best and root for the Giants. I'm not a particular football fan myself.

Given that your not a real football fan, why do you watch the game year-after-year? Do you gamble on it?

No gambling. I'm not a sports bettor, (I play the horses now and then) although that's getting easier and easier these days, isn't it? I actually see ads giving odds. Times have changed. A few times I bought some boxes for small amounts—even got some golden numbers—but never hit there.

Do you watch the game with others, like at a Super Bowl party? 

No, usually at home Once my friend Johnny M. and I watched the game at a bartender's house in the Bronx some time ago. There was a bit of crowd, and when the lights were turned back on you could see who was sick that their team—I think Oakland—didn't win, didn't cover. They were ashen faced.

I watch the game each year because it's history. It's America. Games that I remember are benchmarks, milestones in my life. Some of the people I watched with are no longer with us, like my father.

One year in Flushing, I think the Dallas/Miami game in 1971, two of my friends came over and we watched the game with my father at home. The games were in January then, and the house was cold. We watched the game with our costs on.

My father didn't pay for oil often. We had no credit. And that January, there was no oil in the tank. He had bought a new Sony color TV however, and we enjoyed watching the game in nice color, but we were cold. My friends still talk about it.

My father was lousy with money. He was continuously employed, so it wasn't a matter of ever being out of work. It was a matter of his not really living with a budget, or obligation, that certain utilities required payments. As a kid our phone was always being turned off. We kept getting new phone numbers by the time the bill was paid and a fresh deposit made. Once, even ConEd came and turned off the electricity. They went right down in our home's cellar and put something in the fuse box that prevented us getting juice. And oil...fuhgetaboutit. No credit there. We were always cold.

Any other games stand out?

Certainly the Jets winning in 1969. They were heavy underdogs, Namath was a bragger, and they upset the Colts big time. I watched that game in Flushing with my father. It really was a stunning upset.

I think that's the first championship game they called a Super Bowl. Prior to that it was the NFL against the new kid on the block, the AFL, a league considered inferior to the NFL, composed of players who couldn't make the NFL.

I remember getting a haircut in 1967 the day after the Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs and there was someone on the radio talking about how close the game was at halftime, and didn't that show that the AFL was just as good? Few thought so.

I watched that 1967 game at my grandmother's where I was living at the time, on a black and white set I had bought at a local appliance store. My grandmother had no use for TV.

There was tremendous rivalry for attention between AFL fans and NFL fans. At the start, the AFL played on Friday nights. I remember going to the Polo Grounds in Manhattan with my father to see a New York Titans game. They were the precursor to the Jets.

My father, never first realizing whatever it was the tickets cost, was stymied at he box office when he tried to buy two tickets. I don't think he had enough money. I could tell because there seemed to some sort of negotiation going on. We did get the tickets, and did get in, but I always took a lesson away from it when I took our kids anywhere. Make sure you can pay for it before you go.

There were Friday night games at Shea when the Jets became the team in New York. The thing about the AFL in New York was that you could buy tickets. There was no such thing as ever buying Giant tickets for Yankee Stadium. Everyone was a season ticket holder, often multi-generational season ticket holders.

And there was no local TV broadcast either. In that era there was a TV blackout against showing a local game in its TV market, even if all the seats were sold.  There were New Yorkers who traveled to New Haven to watch Channel 3 in New Haven because they could show the game because they were I think 60 miles outside the New York City coverage radius.

Lots of cops and firemen did this, then often wrecked the motels afterward because they were always drunk. They used to say there were always lots of fights at Yankee stadium during games. They were rolling around in the aisles. There was even closed circuit TV shown in theaters. Bad reception, but you could watch the game without going to Connecticut.

Of course the only overtime game so far, when Brady overcame that tremendous deficit and beat the Atlanta Falcons 34-28 in 2017. The poor owner of the Falcons, he's come down to the sidelines because the Falcons looked like imminent winners, only to see Brady and New England keep scoring and closing the deficit. 

It was almost like that 1972 Olympic gold medal basketball game with the U.S. against the Russians. The score in that game kept game flipping and forth, the clock kept getting adjusted with time being added, and the Russians won, basically because the timekeeper kept the game going when it should have been over when the U.S. was ahead. At that point, it was the only U.S. gold medal loss in basketball. The U.S. refused to accept the silver medal.

There's the Atlanta owner, a thoroughly good guy who help start Home Depot, watching victory getting eroded away. They kept showing Arthur Blank pacing the sidelines like an expectant father. The Falcons have yet to reappear in a Super Bowl. Only a few get more than one chance.

Are there any other memories, especially of those early AFL/NFL days?

The NFL, to the scorn of many, played the Sunday after JFK was assassinated in 1963. The commissioner was Pete Rozelle, who claimed that JFK's brother Bobby said Jack would have wanted games to be played. It was a big deal, since the nation was basically shut down.

I used to go to Jet games on Friday nights at Shea Stadium. Halftime shows were sometimes contests between women running back and forth emptying refrigerators into shopping carts. The woman who could accomplish emptying the refrigerator the fastest got some sort of prize. I don't remember what. If not that, then a local marching drill band. Twirling rifles and drums sort of thing.

People forget how unique Shea Stadium was to watch a football game. The field level seats used for baseball were repositioned by moving them on railroad tracks to create seats parallel to the field. Most NFL games were played in ball parks with configurations that didn't render that many great seats for watching football. You didn't have the dedicated football-only stadiums you have today.

Halftime shows. What do you think about the current trend in halftime shows?

What can you say. They certainly aren't women emptying refrigerators. Hard to believe that Mary Chapin Carpenter performed at halftime, I think when the game was in New Orleans and she sang "Saturday Night at the Twist and Shout."

Now of course they get a stage out there and do a Vegas show. Certainly last year's show with J-Lo and Shakira was entertaining, even racy, I guess. I mean, a 50-year-old-woman ends up dancing upside on a pole. That was impressive.

And didn't Beyoncé and the flashing lights cause a power outage one year?

I remember Springsteen nearly sliding into the camera man. Now he does a unity commercial for Jeep that was nice. I never know about that chapel in Kansas in what is considered the center of the United States.

I've heard of there being a geodesic center of the country. I thought it was in Nebraska. They must not use the position of Hawaii when determining the center. I'll have to ask my son-in-law who is a land surveyor how they determine the center.

When that Jeep commercial first started I immediately recognized Bruce's voice. I wondered where it was going. He portrays himself as a Main Street guy, looking Western lately.

And what's with Brad Pitt doing a voice over at the game's introduction? He's still in short pants, isn't he? His voice is not Walter Cronkite,  Alexander Scourby, James Earl Jones, or even Peter Coyote. I hope that voice over thing doesn't give him legs to start narrating 'American Experience' on PBS. Ugh.

Of course the famous "wardrobe function" lite up the switchboard. I was watching the game at home, alone, and when halftime came on I turned the sound off because I could tell the music was nothing I wanted to hear.

I watched however, and watched, who was it, Justin Timberlake who ripped a piece of clothing baring Janet Jackson's full left breast, long enough for anyone with open eyes to realize what they were looking at.

My wife walked into the living room and I told her," I think I just saw Janet Jackson's left breast." She told me I must be mistaken. I begged to differ.

When the kerfluffle over that broke, instantly, there was the fact that the song Justin and her were signing about had something to do with rape. Yikes.

Explanations were weak, and the "wardrobe malfunction" explanation had all the qualities of government speak. That was something. But we moved on.

But really, what the hell was that halftime show this year? I went out and cleaned off the car from the day's snowfall, like many others. I knew it wouldn't take long and the show would still be on when I came back in. It was.

A field full of guys? in red jackets and black pants whose heads were wrapped in what looked like bandages. I mean, it looked like a field full of people with head wounds. Or the Invisible Man multiplied. Or a 'Twilight Zone' episode where everyone is ugly and the exception is the normal looking person. A classic episode.

I get it about blending the pandemic mask into the appearance, but really, they looked like they were going to jump out of a vehicle and shoot up a bank.

I never heard of Weekend. Seems like a strange name for what, one guy singing? I didn't get it. Someone else I know said it "sucked."

Did you notice the female official?

Yes I did. I saw this blonde ponytail flopping around under a cap and realized it was a woman official, Sarah Thomas. I thought someone told me, or I read it, that there was a NFL female official. My guess is if it was mentioned, it probably was before the game, and I tune in right at the start. No pre-game banter for me anymore.

What did you think of the anthem?

It was fine. I don't know who those people were, but it was fine. No controversy. I remember when José Feliciano caused an uproar when he sang the anthem in 1968 before a World Series game. At the time, everyone was used to hearing a Robert Merrill-type rendition, and here's this blind Spanish guy playing a guitar and singing. Now, everyone loves his Christmas song, Felize Navidad. Everything changes.

What do you think of the Roman numeral designations of the edition of the game?

That was Pete Rozelle. When they decided to call it the Super Bowl they wanted to promote the game as an epic battle, something that would be fought in the Roman Coliseum. Rozelle was a showman. All those owners own a deep gratitude to Rozelle. He made the NFL into what it is today with all the TV contracts. Now you can watch a local home game, no matter if all the tickets are sold or not. Those owners are rich because of Rozelle.

But really, who's the dummkopf who designed this year's logo? It looks like the Roman numeral means 54. That stupid vertical line with the Lombardi trophy atop it makes it seem like there's  a one in front of the V, which would mean 54 with the leading L. I was confused leading up to the game.

But I guess that's how they portray the logo. Jason Guy wrote a beautiful piece in the Friday January 29th WSJ edition about the few remaining guys who have been to the games, in person, ALL the games. Viewing all 55 games on TV pales compared to their allegiance.

Of course these guys can be in their 80s. They look like the diminishing number of  World War II vets. Turns out there are 5 of these guys left, who wear jackets with the Super Bowl logo over the words "Never Miss A Super Bowl." The photo in the story shows three of them wearing the jacket with the Super Bowl logo as L trophy III, 53. The guy on the left looks like Willie Nelson, who is about the same age.

The photo of the 5 looks like a meeting of Masters winners, only wearing blue blazers instead of green jackets.

Any other impressions?

Look at the difference in how the coaches dress. They look like fighter pilots, or astronauts, wired to the gills. What the hell was on one of them I kept seeing? A pacemaker? A defibrillator? The guy  looked like a suicide bomber.

You had someone imitating Vince Lombardi giving one of his George Patton-like speeches. He was dressed in a camel hair coat, wearing a hat, not a cap. Lombardi looked like Rod Steiger's character Charlie in 'On the Waterfront.' A Mafioso straight out of a Godfather movie.

What did you think of the  game itself?

What can a you say, it was the Tom Brady show. They wanted to hype is like a heavyweight fight between a highly seasoned quarterback and the youngster who they're anointing the heir apparent. Patrick Mahomes did win last year, but winning two years in a row is tough. Like good thoroughbreds, a two race winning streak is sometimes rare.

A good deal is make of Brady's age, 43, but there are figures in other sports who seem to defy age. Gordie Howe in hockey, George Blanda in football, Gaylord Perry, and others in baseball seem to go on forever. I'm sure there's some in soccer, but I don't follow it. Boxing had George Foreman who was still teaching his opponents lessons as he got older. And Ali, although he faded badly.

But people like Brady only come along once in a generation. No interceptions, three touchdown passes, he was a hot knife through butter.

And the Chiefs were snake bitten with penalties in the first half. They were handing the ball back to the Bucs. Mahones got his bell rung more than once. He looked beat up at the end, just hoping it would be over. And eventually it was. Brady all the way.

Anything else?

Of course Tampa is the championship capital of the United States now. Hockey, in the World Series, and now winning  the Super Bowl. I remember in the '70s Baltimore had it that way. The colts won their Super Bowl, the Orioles won the Series and I think the Bullets were in the finals for  NBA championship. Sometimes it just works out that way.

It's been a pleasure talking to you.

You too. Say hi to your Mom.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Killer Cat

We have a cat. Or, as people who have a cat will tell you, the cat has us.

Actually, we have two cats, one inside and one outside. The inside cat is Cosmo and he's with now for about 13 years, a shelter cat who was probably about two when my wife and daughter adopted him. He's an orange tabby who we're convinced thinks he's a dog. He's surely not as frisky now, but he does go out, circles the property, and usually returns fairly quickly. He stays out longer in nice weather, and makes no overtures to go out when it's lousy, or cold out. He's certainly part of the family, and drifts toward his bowl of food when we sit down to eat dinner. It seems he likes to eat when we do.

The other cat is Socks, a female tuxedo tabby who was scrounging so vigorously for food in November 2017 that I took pity on her and started to feed her outdoors. At the time there were LOST CAT posters on the lamp posts at the park down the block that "Reuben" was missing. There was of course a photo. Reuben looked a lot like this hungry bugger. So I fed him. (I assumed male, which later turned out incorrect.)

I called the number on the poster, and told the woman that Reuben was found. She asked some questions about more distinguishing features, said she's been getting a lot of calls, but no, that's not Reuben. Thank you very much. Shit.

Tuxedo tabby was not going away when I informed her the news that no, she's not Reuben and quit bothering us. She's not even male. Turns out the tuxedo tabby is a female, but thankfully neutered, because in the 3+ years we've been feeding her, she has not become pregnant, despite spending her life outdoors.

I fed her two times a day as she came around. She hissed at me vigorously, bared her tiny teeth, and resisted all efforts to pet her. I talked to her about her bad manners and the hand that feeds you, but she certainly didn't turn down the food, and I didn't stop feeding her, despite the aggressive reception.

Food has done her well. She has a shiny coat, gained significant weight to the point that she looks pregnant, but isn't. Over the years she has dropped the hissing attitude, allows you to pet her, and comes inside the vestibule to eat. She purrs like a motor boat these days.

We haven't given her entre to the house. She doesn't seem to want to explore past the kitchen, but heads for Cosmos's food. This is a no-no. We hustle her back to the vestibule.

So, she's been living "rough" as they say, but never straying too far from the front door, back door and the food and treats she knows she's going to get.

Cats are predators, and female cats are more predatory than males. Over the years there have been dead birds found by the front door and the back door. Feathers have been found under the picnic table tarp.  

Once she was caught enjoying a rabbit she had killed. We chased her. These aren't everyday conquests, but hey do occur. Nature.

The latest was on Wednesday when I went to the store, left the storm door ajar a bit to allow her to eat her food in the vestibule and leave. Normal operating procedure.

On my way out I doubled back and dumped the NYT and the WSJ that had been delivered in the vestibule. I had taken the papers out of the plastic wrappers and started to read them. The NYT was on top. 

On the return, the vestibule was quite a sight. Feathers everywhere. Looked like a pillow fight with broken seams. But best of all was the dead bird left on top of the NYT. Jesus.

The guess is that the bird for some reason flew into the vestibule and was met by the enemy. It wasn't pretty.

A dead bird on top of the NYT left me believing a message was being delivered. Like fish in a newspaper telling me Luca Brasi was sleeping with them.

Of  course this wasn't the case. I have no ties to organized crimes, and haven't spotted any wanted Willie Suttons on the subway and gone looking for the reward.

I did think my wife should come downstairs and see this carnage. A dead bird on top of the newspaper she loves to call "that pinko Commie rag" was worth a picture. The phrase is from growing up in the Bronx with her father, an Irish immigrant who was an IRT subway motorman who revered the Transport Workers Union, but who despised the NYT.

He wasn't alone. Many people of that era considered the NYT a Bolshevik rag. One of my good friends tells the story of his Jewish father LIVID that an elementary school teacher in Manhattan was instructing his son to read the NYT for current events and cut out a story and talk about it. They were a Herald Tribune, New York Post household and wouldn't even consider wrapping fish in the NYT. The teacher was confronted.

There was nothing I could do about the dead bird. Looked like a mocking bird. They hate cats, and cats hate them. And one of them made a very wrong turn.

My sense of proof that my wife now had proof that even the cat hates the NYT as much as she does was sending me for the camera. I don't get off on pictures of dead birds, but this one was too symbolic to ignore.

Sending my wife downstairs to view the cat's opinion on top of page one she returned and asked, "is there supposed to be a bird there somewhere?"

"Huh? There's no bird?" "No bird." And of course there wasn't. The bird had been carted off, we guess by the cat, and taken outdoors—where, I never found out, despite thinking it would be easy to track because of the snow. Nope.

There were of course feathers everywhere. Hard to vacuum up because they kept floating away, but I got most of them picked up.

Socks, why couldn't you have been Reuben?

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

From and To

Last Thursday I linked into an interview with Sarah Lyall of the New York Times and Doris Kearns Goodwin in conjunction of the completion of work for the Greenwich, CT. library. It was a one hour interview, with some questions afterward.

At the outset Ms. Lyall informed us that Ms. Kearns told her to call her "Doris," and thereafter she did. It simplified things. Ms. Kearns has not granted me any such latitude, but since she seems like a nice lady I'm going to take it anyway.

Doris, who is a pre-eminent presidential historian and winner of a Pulitzer Prize, at this point seems to me to be as familiar to the public as Dr. Joyce Brothers was in her day—for different reasons and background, but just as well known. My friend tells me she was always on Imus, and I'm sure on lots of PBS programs and documentaries.

The NYT thumbnail bio blurb describes Sarah Lyall as a writer at large, working for a variety of desks, including Sports, Culture Media and International. She previously was a correspondent in the London Bureau, and reporter for the Culture and Metro Desks. She is the author 'The Anglo Files,' having spent so much time living in England that she couldn't resist comparing British and American Culture beyond telling us there is a common language separated by an ocean. She has since moved her laptop back to New York.

Even with her widespread popularity and notoriety, I have to say I never really listened to her, or read any of Ms. Kearn's  books, despite being a Teddy Roosevelt fan, one of the presidents she's become an authority on. I tend to fog out at those historical tomes. I once tried to read David McCulloch's opus on George Washington and barely got deep into enough into it to need a book mark.

Ms. Kearns is 78; Ms. Lyall is 58, and I'm 72. I mention this because it plays a part in the interview as to what each of us has experienced historically. Doris and I know the same presidents, she squeezing FDR in there just before he passed away.

Ms. Lyall naturally is trying to make some sense of what we are experiencing now, and does any of it compare to what Ms. Kearns can speak to. Turns out it does. Doris talks of the divisive atmosphere in the country leading up to slavery, to the point that there was a fistfight in 1858 on the House floor when Laurence Kent throttled the Congressman from Pennsylvania, Galusha Grow with his cane over pro- and anti-slavery sentiments.

It was a right old donnybrook, and Doris relates that afterward, with the massive publicity it got in the newspapers, that people in the South started sporting canes as a fashion accessory, sort of like an early form of open carry.

Ms. Lyall prompts Doris with great questions, and leading statements. She's looking for a way to put current events in perspective with past everts. She lets Doris talk, and that's a good thing.

Ms. Kerns has a vast memory of presidential stories. She related to Lincoln's unsent letters of disappointment that he composed to generals and cabinet members that he set aside when his anger cooled. The letters were eventually found amongst his papers.

She talked of TR's hardship of having his first wife and mother pass away on the same day; of course FDR's steely determination to appear to walk and not let the world know he was an invalid in a wheelchair with polio; and LBJ's political acumen and last night calls to members of Congress to get them on his side for passage of the Voting Rights Act. 

I did think the interview was spawned by the publication of Ms. Kearns's book "Leadership In Turbulent Times" about when Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR and LBJ ran the country during highly disruptive periods.

It tunes out that there is no recent book of hers, and the "Leadership" book was published in 2018. No matter. It bears looking into.  

I didn't know anything about Doris's husband Richard Kearns, but apparently he was a speech writer for Johnson and wrote an effective speech Johnson gave on behalf of the Voting Rights legislation. She has a framed pen from Johnson singing the bill. Ms. Kearns herself told the audience that she worked in the Johnson Administration when she was in her mid-20s.

Amazingly, neither Ms. Lyall or Doris mention Donald Trump, but he is the unseen elephant in the room  and is on your mind when other presidents are discussed. Ms. Kearns does outline the qualities of Lincoln, TR, FDR,  and LBJ that she attributes their greatness to overcoming adversities in life.

Asked to describe an especially fraught period that she lived though, Ms Kearns mentions the "duck and cover" drills of the 1950s when as elementary school children we rehearsed going under our desks, facing away from the windows, so that we might survive an atomic blast.

As a school kid who remembers the same thing as Ms. Kearns. I know didn't think it silly that turning away from a window would help you survive an atomic blast.  But it was the thought of flying glass that we were protecting ourselves against.

When I backed away from by desk by the window on the 29th floor of 1 World Trade center at 8:48 a.m.  on 9/11/2001 I thought of "duck and cover." I figured it was best to head for the fire drill exit rather than pick up some personal items like my pen, briefcase and jacket. My thinking at the time was that we'll be back later in the week and get our things. Well, no.

My own period of hard core unease was when soon after 9/11 there was the anthrax scare. Envelopes containing anthrax were mailed to some people and they died. Others got seriously sick. The postal system was turned upside down in trying to determine the source. A suspect working with developing air borne anthrax for the Army did emerge as a highly likely suspect, but eventually committed suicide before anything could be conclusively proven. For me, the wheels were coming off the country.

May own takeaway was how Ms. Kearns thinking about history was equal to my own: we are living inside of it. And right now we don't know when the pandemic will end. There is no second date following 2020; 2020 to...? Spanish influenza owns 1918, but no hyphen.

It's something I've thought of often. I'd imagine my father and mother in the service in WW II not knowing when it was going to end. That was true for anyone living through that era, serving in uniform, or otherwise. When is it over? Will it be over. It's now 1943, it started in 1941 for the U.S, but when does it end? You're an infantryman taking Sicily, then moving on. When do I do home? You live inside the dates, with the second date not being known.

It's very much like the poem I wrote and publish annually on September 16th. It combines the events of 9/11 with the workplace murders I experienced.

"...the dates on the stones let you measure the time/ Of the lives that lived in between...We learned of the others and their bracketed date,/ And our own that remained unfinished."

I watched the first hour of the podcast. There was a question and answer portion I didn't stay tuned for. But it was visible on her face, and she expressed it, when Ms. Lyall expressed relief after listening to Ms. Kearns. She felt a little relieved that yes, we are experiencing hardship and inconveniences, but we are inside the dates of history. And right now, the second date is still to be determined.

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