The Embedded Quote

As frequently mentioned, obituaries are a great source of quotes, usually from the subject while they were still breathing, obviously. No séance stuff there.

But those are quotes directly from the subject. There is another category aside from the ones found in obituaries made by the subject and thrown in as a bit of what is called a kicker, and they are what I'll call the Embedded Quote.

These are quotes made by people about the subject of the obituary, or maybe any other profile piece found in a newspaper. The Embedded Quote fits the context of the writer's narrative. They can be from people living or dead themselves, but are about the subject. And since I love to read newspapers, particularly obituaries, I'm writing about a few embedded quotes I have just read.

This embedded quote comes from a profile piece, 'The Last of the Hollywood Squares' on Pat Boone in the Wall Street Journal. Pat Boone is only pretty much known to those who are now checking their zip codes and finding out if they can get a better Medicare Advantage Plan. He was on the cover  of Life magazine in 1959, "The Million Dollar Idol of U.S. Teen-Agers."

Pat Boone is still with us at 88, so it is not an obituary. He was a pop singer in the '50s and '60s and so straight-laced and clean cut as they come, and remained so. An insulting remark (or curse) has still never escaped his lips.

Pat Boone is religious, quotes scripture to the interviewer, Matthew Hennessey, all while keeping a well-thumbed Bible on his lap for the whole interview. He is as pure as the driven snow. Dean Martin once quipped. "I once shook hands with Pat Boone, and my whole right side sobered up." (To those who don't know, Dean Martin, singer, actor and charter member of Sinatra's Rat Pack, always portrayed himself as a heavy drinker, true or not.)

The next embedded quote appears in an obituary for "Don Christopher, 88, Who Turned Lowly Garlic Into a Staple."

Don was a third generation farmer in California, who found growing garlic to be quite profitable as it gained a foothold in American cooking habits. He and several neighbors created the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Gilroy is a farming community 80 miles south of San Francisco, and a town well known for growing garlic. The town has been known for producing garlic for so long that Will Rogers once commented that "Gilroy was the only town I know where you can marinate a steak by hanging it on the clothesline."

I don't know how the obit writer, Clay Risen, found that quote to embed, but it's a beaut. Will Rogers (1879-1935) was a comedian, actor, columnist and vaudeville performer in the early 20's and 30's. He was a ladder day Mark Twain, and a predecessor to Bob Hope. The quote Mr. Risen makes use of does not appear in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, but it fits the narrative about garlic and the town of Gilroy. 

You could fish out embedded quotes all day, but I'll use one more subject to mine from, Pelé, the legendary soccer player who just passed away. I read two obits on Pelé and both had the quote from Andy Warhol, the deceased artist who made paintings of Campbell Soup cans and himself famous.

Warhol is often famously quoted something to the effect that we all enjoy 15 minutes of fame in our lifetime, But he said of Pelé, he has "15 centuries of fame." The NYT obit shows a photo of Warhol with Pelé.

Today brings two more obits of famous people, Barbara Walters and Pope Benedict XVI. Some will claim that by adding Pelé's passing we now have "the three-in-a row" cluster (deaths come in threes) that happens when famous people die. Maybe.

I haven't yet read these latest obituaries, No doubt there are some embedded quotes there and some history. That's why I read.

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Stick 'Em Up

I have no idea why there are images that stay in my mind seemingly forever. All it takes is a trigger of some kind and I'm metaphorically off to the races; something always reminds me of something else, and one of those triggers can occur when I'm reading an obituary.

Take Barry Feinstein, New York Union Boss Toppled by Corruption, who just passed away at 87. The name rang a bit of a bell; NYC municipal workers head from the heyday of the '60s and '70s, whose name was always in the paper threatening to pull some group of workers off the job, unless...

Mr. Feinstein gets the Robert McFadden treatment, so the obit is filled with NYC events and pictures  of people I remember, following of course the great McFadden lede.

Early on in Mr. Feinstein's rise to more power, McFadden tells us: 

"It was a relatively small base for an ambitious labor leader. Out of  a municipal work force of  of about 200,000 he represented 20,000 Housing Authority and hospital workers, school guards and bridge tenders."

Bridge tenders. Trigger. Did this guy have something to do with the bridge tenders going out on strike decades ago? You bet.

New York City is surrounded by a vast waterway that most people are unaware of. If you only think of New York City as Manhattan, then the only water you're aware of is that which surrounds Manhattan, an Island; the East River, the Hudson River and the Harlem River.

Right now the Department of Transportation website identifies 24 "movable bridges" over New York  City waterways.  There are many classifications of these bridges, but Federal regulations require they be constantly attended. By whom? Why bridge tenders, of course.

At the time of Mr. Feinstein leadership of these bridge tenders there were 26 movable city bridges. There are now 24. There is no longer a drawbridge (bascule bridge) on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn over Mill Basin. That was once stuck in the open position one Father's Day and caused a monumental tie-up.

Likewise, there is no longer a drawbridge over the Flushing River on Northern Boulevard just east of Main Street on the way to then Shea Stadium, now Citifield. New construction of these overpasses eliminated the drawbridges.

There are no less than eight movable bridges over the Harlem River connecting the Bronx to Manhattan, which is why I always get a kick out of the NYT describe any borough other than Manhattan as an "outer borough."

The Department of Transportation identifies the movable bridges as: retractile, swing, draw, and lift. There are 11 drawbridges. The bridge pictured above is the Pelham Bay bridge over the Hutchinson River, or Eastchester Creek at that point. There are a lot of movable bridges over the Gowanus Canal and Newton Creek, waterways between Brooklyn and Queens, which is why so few people are aware of them.

So, imagine this. Those movable bridges are left in open positions, making roadway travel over them impossible until they're swing back in place, or are dropped back in position. 

Well, Barry thought about that when he pulled the bridge tenders off the job in 1971, who as they left their posts, left the bridges in open positions and took with them the special tool used to work the gears, the only key so to speak.. The bridges were left in a state of perpetual priapism. 

The Army Corps of Engineers has jurisdiction over the waterways. But, alas and alack, they didn't have the special tool to bring the bridges back to their closed state. Traffic? Fuhgeddaboudit! Twenty-four hour gridlock. And no work-around without the special tool.

As I encountered the news that Mr. Feinstein had bridge tenders under his leadership, I immediately thought of all those open bridges, and particularly the one I could see from the Flushing line, No. 7 train that I relied on to go to and from work every day.

The Flushing drawbridge spans what I'll call the Flushing Creek, but I've seen more recent maps that call it a river. It's a body of water, that is so sulphureous and polluted that I've never seen any maritime traffic on it. Maybe barges for the sand and gravel outfits on the bank.

I'm not sure you couldn't walk across it, because it is not really liquid. If you stepped in it you'd leave footprints. The LIRR Port Washington line crosses the creek just west of the Main Street stop. If you're paying attention and it's low tide, there are the remains of some kind of rowboat that has been decaying in the water since at least the 1950s. It is almost completely rotted away now, but if you look hard enough you can still see a small portion pointing up through the gelatin waterway.

Reading the obituary about the bridge tenders strike, Mr. McFadden tells us it lasted two days. I thought it lasted longer, but the image of the open Flushing drawbridge always stayed with me since I doubt there was ever a need to open it for maritime traffic to pass underneath.

What I didn't remember as I read the obituary is that at the same time as the yanking of the bridge tenders off the job, the sewage treatment plants were shut down and a billion gallons of raw sewage was dumped into the city's waterways. 

Mr. Feinstein had gotten everyone's attention.

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Notoriety

Once the NYT does a story about you, for whatever reason, it is probably hard to stay anonymous. Not that I think Gersh Kuntzman is going to start wearing a disguise, complete with dark glasses and a baseball cap pulled down low. Gersh already has the everyman look, and aside from the beard he might be hard to describe to the police for a composite sketch.

Gersh, as anyone should know by now, is the leader of the license plate vigilantes, a self-appointed squad of do-gooders who react to license plate obfuscation with remedies of their own.

These vigilantes have no power of legal enforcement, just the ability to piss off the offenders who will probably go back to doing what they do as soon as the vigilante goes away. 

In a prior posting I made mention that I would like to get Gersh's self-penned and sung song, "Criminal Mischief" from iTunes. "Criminal Mischief is what a predecessor vigilante was charged with when he was served with a ticket by the police as he re-altered a license plate back to its intended appearance. His case was dismissed.

Gersh has adopted the phrase as his theme song, and plays it on his short Twitter tweets as he reveals another license plate alteration. He is quite entertaining. He's embraced his new-found celebrity status by adding a QR code to his Tweets that lets you download his ditty. (I don't know how to do this.)

This shows you how Gersh is not out to monetize his fame. Years ago the young woman who was identified with then Governor Eliot Spitzer in a cash only transaction involving sex, Ashley Dupree, had a song she had recorded prior to her call girl activities which you could download for a small fee. The downloads starting going viral, and I guess she made a few shekels.

I remember when this happened in 2008. I worked in the area where she was identified as living by the paparazzi press. There was a squad of photographers camped out hoping to get a shot of the young lady as she went in and out of the building. I don't think they ever did. Ashley is very much a footnote, as is the former Governor who resigned over the scandal.

Gersh has no sex appeal, so he will likely remain fairly anonymous. Since I follow Mr. Kilgannon on Twitter, the NYT reporter (@coreykilgannon) who wrote of Gersh and his efforts and Gersh himself (@gershkuntzman), I have taken to categorizing the methods the license plate obscurers have taken to evade speed cameras, toll readers, and traffic enforcement agents.

Mr. Kuntzman is resolute in his endeavors. I don't know if he's been invited to be on morning talk shows. Goodness knows they love to interview people like Gersh, but he stands to make a bundle if New York City ever rewards those who report the scofflaws and cuts them in for a piece of collected fines, somewhat like the reimbursement whistleblowers can get for bringing down fraud under the Qui Tam statutes. Reporting scofflaws might replace bottle returns as a form of income.

Here are the categories as I see then, so far:

The Environmentalists

This form of plate recognition evasion is simple. Pick up a few fallen leaves from the gutter and wedge them between the frame of the plate holder and the plate. Do this front and back if you have to have front and back plates. Use enough leaf cover to obscure one or more characters of the plate's identification numbers and letters.

This is the probably the best one, since if you are confronted by an enforcement agent you can claim you were driving through Vermont during leaf-peeper season and didn't realize that leaves had gotten stuck in such a position. It might work.

Gersh's remedy is simple, but not very permanent. He simply removes the leaf camouflage and sticks it on the windshield. It's his way of letting the perp know he's been identified, like someone who leaves a pebble on top of a tombstone after a visit to someone's grave.

The Banskys

This one involves scraping off the paint on the lettering, leaving an unpainted finish that is likely not readable by toll readers and speed cameras.

Gersh's remedy for his is to pull out his Sharpie and retrace the lettering, darkening the characters and making them more visible.

If caught by traffic enforcement a defense might be that either acid rain or poor workmanship at the penitentiary is the cause of naked characters. Good luck with that one.

Stealth

The most intentful deception. Buy what it takes to have your license plate flip back into the grill work, leaving no plate to be read by a speed camera or toll reader. Flip the plate to a more visible position when not driving or going toward a toll.

Gersh can only point these out. He doesn't damage the vehicle in an attempt to thwart the stealth flip.

The Translucents

Available on all kinds of websites are coverings for sale that render an opaqueness over the plate, making it hard to read, but not impossible.

Gersh can only point these out. He is able (and you can too) through a Twitter bot, How's My Driving, to bring up the history of the plate and its infractions. The list is often extensive, and if there were a 10 Most Wanted List there are those that would qualify. Apparently, infractions are public record. There are some serious desperados out there.

The Strongman

This involves bending the edge of the plate back over the plate and obscuring one or more of the characters. A defense might be you park in front of a middle or high school and those damn kids are always messing with your plate. Another defense might be shopping carts keep crashing into your plate and bending the edges. 

Gersh of course bends the plate edges back.

Gersh and his merry band of vigilantes are only a few people who are combating plate unrecognition. They're pissing in the ocean, since in Mr. Kilgannon's piece he quotes the loss in toll and fine revenue to be near $100 million annually. Which shows you how high the fines and tolls are, when the few who engage in obfuscation can aggregate that much in evaded money

And of course all non-payment of tolls and fines is not due to plate evasion. I'm sure there are plenty of drivers who drive through the toll readers with fully readable plates who either never get a bill in the mail, or have found a way to ignore the bills and still register a vehicle.

We always live in interesting times.

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No More Morning Sports

It came to and end yesterday—World Cup Soccer, and the team wearing the pajamas won, Argentina, in a shootout against France.

The ageless Lionel (Leo-nell, not like the train set) Messi came through and won his first World Cup. As already acknowledged, there isn't a helluva a lot of scoring in soccer, but that's what probably makes it so exciting. An American football game with each team scoring three times is probably not an exciting game. In soccer, it is.

France was down 2-0 for much of the game . A team that's only scored twice like Argentina does not have a run away with time on the clock. And in 1:33 seconds France scored two goals and made the  score even at 2-2.

Penalty kicks are a little unfair to me. I know they can be missed, despite the enormity of the 24' x 8' soccer net, but when a penalty kick is awarded because a player is fouled in the box they aren't the one who gets the kick. The best player gets the chance, and for Argentina this means Lionel Messi, and for France this means Kylian Mbappé. In hockey, the offended player has to take the penalty shot, which in hockey is much rarer than a penalty kick in soccer.

And as much as a penalty kick looks like a gimme, it isn't. Ask Harry Kane of the England who missed a critical one in a shootout. Twelve yards in front of a fairly skinny guy standing in front of an opening three times the size of a Manhattan kitchen looks like an easy score. But kickers miss, wide, high, or the skinny guy guesses right and gets enough of his gloved hands on the ball and keeps it from going in.

I don't think any of the matches went past the 5 shots apiece of penalty kicks after playing to a tie in regulation and two 15 minute extra periods. It would be sudden death kicks after that, if you want even more drama. It was fitting that this final went to the penalty kicks. All that soccer, and they were still tied.

Soccer and hockey are similar. There is a great deal of passing. But hockey has way more shots on net than soccer. It is surprising how few shots on goal there really are in soccer. These guys stick to each other like glue in what is deceptively a rough sport because those bodies go flying and tripping each other, with no protective equipment worn. Their heads get a workout, and its not from thinking. 

As France came back dramatically, the TV camera found the French president Emmanuel Macron jubilant in the stands right next to world energy suppliers in white clothing. Despite France losing in a shootout, perhaps President Macron made some deals to keep his country warm this winter.

I paid close attention to this World Cup. It was on TV at a favorable East Coast time, and could be relied on to be over before sundown. I will be looking forward to the women's World Cup next year from Australia and New Zealand. The U.S. women have won the last two Women's World Cups. I've only ever really watched parts of those wins. The next cup I'll be paying more attention because even with the tremendous time difference between East Coast USA and Down Under, the viewing times should be easy to view as live broadcasts. It may not be the same day, but the timing will be conducive to viewing.

When yesterday's score was 2-0 Argentina it was easy to beleive the French were out of it. Then it happened. A penalty kick scored by France's Kylian Mbappé breathed life into the players. Then, quickly it was 2-2 after Mbappé scored on a breakaway. 

A good deal of soccer scoring is through those set pieces from the corner or the spot of the foul if outside the box, or through penalty kicks. Scores from the regular flow of play are exciting because you can almost feel they're on the way, much like hockey when a team is on a power play and play is being dominated in the defensive zone by the power play club.

I watched all that soccer over several weeks and never once felt like I wanted some of the merchandise available through FIFA store.com. The fans in the stands were indistinguishable from the players on the field in what they were wearing. They ordered big time from the FIFA store.

I have two granddaughters who do not play soccer. A shame really. Soccer merchandise for Christmas would have been so easy to choose from.

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License Plate Vigilantes

If you're not already aware of it, Corey Kilgannon of the NYT, aside from writing general assignment pieces for the paper, also presents a lively Twitter feed (@CoreyKilgannon) that lately has been featuring videos from Gersh Kunztman (@GershKuntzman), a license plate vigilante who delights in exposing the scofflaws amongst New York City's drivers that comes with its own theme song, "Criminal Mischief," written and sung by Mr. Kuntzman himself. (I was hoping for an iTunes download.)

And sometimes the reporting and the Twitter feed collide, as in Monday's dispatch (12/19) about Mr. Kuntzman's efforts to embarrass the legions of license plate obscurers who roam and park on the City's streets.

If nothing else, Mr. Kuntzman has old-fashioned Moxie for making videos of himself uncrumpling license plates, or filling back in the obscured characters that have been purposely defaced to avoid enforcement cameras and E-Z Pass readers.

One such photo taken by a NYT photographer, Hilary Swift, shows the dexterity of the bicycle riding Mr. Kuntzman who with his left hand is restoring the lettering as if he were a sign painter filling in gold leaf lettering on a frosted glass door in a 1940s movie, while taking a video of himself doing the job with his right hand, all the while talking. Gersh can do more than walk and chew gum at the same time.

Some of Mr. Kuntzman's best work comes within sight of precinct and fire houses. Cops and firemen have always held themselves to unwritten privileges. One of my favorite stories, while not of parking violations, but illustrative of the point, is when decades ago I lived in Flushing several officers from the 109th  Precinct—a sprawling tract of land and massive population in Northern Queens—were arrested when they were busting up a Main Street Asian brothel, probably observing a bachelor party,

when they demanded a discount from the Madam for their numbers. When they were repeatedly refused  a discount for volume, they got angry and started smashing and busting up the joint. The Madam would have none of that, and called the police at the 109th Precinct, who responded. The paperwork on that one must have been monumental.

And then there once were a group of cops from the same precinct that were caught operating a chop shop within the precinct boundaries. What's done in the 109, stays in the 109.

As you might expect, even coming near the car of an owner can incite parked car rage. Mr. Kuntzman chooses to make sure there is no one around as he quickly removes the leaf that is so delicately obscuring a letter or number, or apply some old fashioned elbow grease to uncrumple a plate.

No doubt Mr. Kunztman's efforts do not have the same effect as a more official summons, or fine, they are filmed to make a point. He even summarizes the violations that a plate has racked up by using a Twitter bot "How's My Driving" (@HowsMyDrivingNY) that with a simple query can read back to you the accumulations of violations associated with that plate. It's accurate, because I queried the family car and found the two minor fines that we did receive over the years, all paid.

As you would expect, there can be autos with thousands of dollars in uncollected fines. Mr. Kilgannon's piece outlines the $100 million black hole that exists for evaded and uncollected fines. 

Mr. Kuntzman's is not alone. There are many others who post bus and bike lane parkers as well. Mr. Kilgannon doesn't tell us what, if anything Mr. Kuntzman does for a living, but he does tell us there might be a bounty in store for the people who point out scofflaws. If so, it will pay far better than returning bottles for their deposits.

And it's not just a New York City happening. In the local shopping center in Nassau County I casually noticed a car that had the first two characters of its plate obscured.

Not all evasions are of course accomplished by plate alteration, and there are some doozies, like the front plate that can be flipped back by the owner, like the plates on an Aston Martin driven by James Bond. Amazon.com is full of equipment for sale that can help you obscure your plate.

And certainly not all drivers are doing this. Today my wife and I completed around trip to Freehold cemetery to put down wreaths and a grave blanket. From Nassau county this involves using toll roads and bridges. In fact, it is nearly impossible, to leave Long Island through Brooklyn or Queens and not pay a toll. Today's drive, 76 miles in one direction, using a round trip on the Verrazano, a round trip on the Outerbridge, and a toll in each direction on the Garden State Parkway will diminish the E-Z Pass account something near $27. By tonight I'll get a notice that the account as been automatically replenished. (It doesn't feel like real money then, does it? I once worked in Georgia for a bit and my boss told me there was one toll in the entire state!)

On today's trip I purposely paid even closer attention to license plates than usual. I always look for the vanity plate that is sending a message of some kind, or I unscramble the letters and see if they spell anything. (A lack of vowels hampers this.) The best vanity plate I ever say was on the Thruway going to Vermont or Saratoga years ago on a red convertible sports car with the top down driven by a young blonde woman that proudly proclaimed: DAD PAID. (Whatta a guy!)

I have to say on the entire trip through toll road city today I didn't spot one obscured plate. Plate obscuring doesn't need to occur on highways for it to exist. There are so many speed cameras near school zones and red lights within the boroughs and the suburbs that there is great incentive to obscure your plate if you want to preserve your way of driving.

Just wait for congestion pricing to take hold in Midtown in Manhattan. That ought to produce the biggest free-for-all of all.

My favorite possibility is that they'll invoke congestion pricing on sidewalks and try and score beaucoup bucks as people flood Midtown to see the Rockefeller tree and Broadway shows.

There is nothing in New York you can't be made to pay for.

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Supply Chain Issue

A long, long time ago—decades ago actually—I read in the  NYT a piece by one of their reporters, Anthony DePalma on longshoremen.  Woven into the story was his father, a honest, hard-working longshoreman on the Newark docks I think, who liked his job and saw poetry in how sacks and sacks of coffee could look when stacked properly on a palette.

Mr. DePalma's father worked on the docks in the era before containerized cargo, when guys went down into hold of a ship and stacked crates of good onto a palette that was hoisted onto the pier, then loaded onto trucks. This was the era depicted in the movie On the Waterfront, and pilferage was rampant. 

Part of Mr. DePalma's story was something his father told him of the Italian shoe manufacturer who grew so tired of having his cargo shrunken by pilferage he took to shipping only the left shoes. On the next shipment he shipped the right shoes, hopefully to meet their match.

I've always loved that story, and myself wove it into my work when I discussed fraud, when fraud detection was my job. Those huge containers eliminated all the handling that took place below decks, but no doubt just pushed the chicanery into other forms, like maybe a container or two that go missing.

There is a senior reporter for the NYT, Corey Kilgannon, whose eye is as sharp as his writing. His Twitter feed (@coreykilgannon) can be relied to to have photos of New York City scenes that only someone with a keen eye and a ready camera (cell phone camera?) can snap.

I've suggested to Mr. Kilgannon that enough of his photos could be used in a NYC calendar. Recently he posted a photo of three people walking down the street carrying tubas, certainly not something you  often see.

His photos have often inspired some of my postings. Before the tuba players, he posted photos of an abandoned upright piano under the BQE; a subway rider with an upright bass wedged between his legs—bass spreading; a sidewalk Christmas tree employee wearing the sweatshirt with the name of the business, Uptown X-Mas trees on its back.

I don't know how many "views" Mr. Kilgannon gets, but I know there are never many replies. Sometimes it seems I'm the only one. I hope that paucity doesn't discourage him. I'm rather sure it won't

His latest observation from being a flâneur is the above photo. I first came across the word flâneur when I read something about Pete Hamill, another newspaperman, who would walk around the city and get just look. The OED definition of flâneur is: "an idler; the man who drifts around the streets, gazing at everything." Nice work when you can make it pay.

It might be a bit hard to read the sign in the shoe store window, but it goes: Due to shipment issues we have only received right feet for the Jordan 11 "Cherry." We will provide further updates when we receive the left. Thank you for your support.

You have to wonder if the manufacturer only turned out the right ones first, then calibrated the machines for the left foot. But why make two shipments?

Have containers gone missing? Some things never change.

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The World Cup

I could never be a soccer player. I shave too often, and I don't have any tattoos, or plan to get any. Did they let some of these guys out of prison?

I once played soccer. Or should I say myself and the rest of a high school gym class in the mid-'60s was shown the elements of playing soccer. I don't remember any of us playing even a simulated game, and if we were to, there was no goal to shoot at. This was the '60s, and soccer in the United States was more alien than a Martian.

We were shown that you move the ball with the inside of your foot, not your toes. This was completely foreign to us. We were shown the overhead toss in, the header, and the body trap. Not using your hands was nearly impossible. A five-year-old in Argentina was better than any of us.

Well, maybe not the Hungarians kids who were actually on the soccer team. Stuyvesant, despite being an urban Manhattan dwelling built in 1904 and wedged between 15th and 16th Streets between First and Second Avenues, did participate in all Public School Athletic League a (P.S.A.L.) sports, even bowling and fencing, in which for some reason we always seemed to win the City Championship.

There was a football team, despite not having a home field, and a soccer team, likewise with no home turf to kick that ball, There was a swim team with no pool. I have no idea where these guys practiced.

There was even a rifle team which used the 71st Regiment Armory's shooting range for practice. I tried out for that team, but that was before I was wearing glasses. I did not present a good grouping.

I was on the track and cross country teams, with track practice on the oval track over the gym, or in Van Cortlandt Park. Sometimes we worked out on the drill floor of the 71st Armory where the National Guard met.  The Armory is long gone. It is now an office building, 3 Park Avenue at 34th Street. I would go to stamp shows that used to be held there.

Thinking of those Hungarian kids on the soccer team, there were the Gogolak brothers, Pete and then Charlie from Hungary, who each went to different Ivy League schools and became place kickers for N.F.L. teams. Pete was the first soccer-style kicker in the N.F.L., first playing for the Giants, Google tells us they are both still alive ay 80 and 77, likely showing the grandkids the finer points of how to play soccer.

In 1966 I was staying a week with the Piermont family who annually rented a house in Milford, Connecticut a few blocks from the water. One of the families took us to a New York Giants practice held nearby at their training camp at Fairfield University. It was no big deal then to watch the workout, the highlight of which was watching Pete Gogolak practice kicking the ball through the uprights soccer-style, with the instep, rather then the toe. This was revolutionary. Kicking a ball with your instep was like whacking a tee shot using Big Bertha with the entire sweet spot. 

I think 1966 was going to be Pete Gogolak's his first year with the Giants. One of the adults who brought us there watched Pete and said he shouldn't come out in a uniform. He should trot onto the field in a tuxedo, kick, score points, and go back to the bench.

Needless to say, soccer-style kicking is all you see. One year Pete's career was interrupted with a bad back he had gotten shoveling snow as part of his Army Reserve duty at Fort Dix, in New Jersey.  It was the Vietnam era, and men were being drafted left and right. If you agreed to be in the Reserves, you could keep from being called up, but you had to do basic training and weekend meetings each month, in addition to two weeks at camp in the summer. No pampering for athletes.

As soccer-style kicking became more common, and more kids started plying soccer, high schools had reliable place kickers who could put the ball through the uprights. Suddenly, field goals became possible.

I will admit I've been enjoying the World Cup competition. It's live, not "plausibly live," like Olympic coverage, and provides a reason to have the TV on at 10 o'clock in the morning. I do wonder how many players actually know the words to the country's national anthems, coming from so many different country and soccer clubs themselves.

As I've been watching the games that start at 10 A.M. I've come to realize that by 11 o'clock it's halftime. Soccer is a timed sport that really doesn't take much more than its scheduled time to play. Two 45 minute halves and you can go home in a little more than two hours, unless of course it's a match that's tied that allows no ties. Then, two 15 minute overtime periods, and ten penalty kicks, 5 a side. But those overtimes are exciting, and the penalty kicks more so. Even if the penalty kicks are tied after 5 attempts each, they proceed to sudden death penalty kicks. First miss loses after each team gets a chance.

The reliable swiftness of play is not lost on Jason Gay, the WSJ sports reporter who had a gem of a column on Friday, Soccer's Greatest Beauty: It Takes Two Hours. Jason recognizes the same thing: soccer games move along, unlike our football and of course that most glacial of games, baseball. Jason jokes that he's graduated medical school in the time it took him to watch a college football game.

I'll never actually go a soccer game, and I'm not likely to even try dribbling a ball with my feet, but I can't help but admire the skill these guys have in moving the ball, how far and how hard they can kick it. They seem to keep the ball inbounds as they race with it down the sidelines, almost as if there's a magnetic force keeping the ball from going over the end line.

In the mid-1960s CBS seemed to be behind the creation of a North American Soccer League that they would televise. It didn't work. They didn't understand that the game didn't really stop, so there was no way to break for commercials.  A scandal arose when it became revealed that CBS was sending signals to the referees to somehow stop the game so a commercial could be inserted.

Despite the hugeness of the soccer goal, an immense 24' wide and 8' high, there is little scoring. There are not a lot of shots on goal as there are in hockey, but the games have some similarities in setting up plays. Perhaps it is the low scoring that makes the games exciting. 1-0 often wins a game. And if it's 1-0, all it takes is the team with no goals to score a goal. They don't have to crawl back from blowouts. There are numerous scoring chances, but the defensive play usually gets the ball rocketed back upfield.

At this point, with the United States eliminated by Holland, I'm still finding the games worth watching.

However, I'm still going to shave, and I'm not getting a tattoo.

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The Catch, Part II

One thing I can say for the NYT obits page and its editor William McDonald, they've got class. I wasn't sure they'd do a tribute obit for the passing of Sal Durante, 81, who as a 19-year-old from Brooklyn caught Roger Maris's 61st home run in the right field bleacher seats at Yankee Stadium on the last day of the 1961 season. But they did.

It's a nicely done piece bylined by Richard Sandomir and coincidently appears on the day the news breaks that Aaron Judge was signed to a multi-year, multi- million dollar (is there any other kind these days?) with the New York Yankees. All's well in the Bronx expect the cost of parking for a game.

The NYT does a much better job of filling in the empty spots left over from other obits. Sal caught the ball one-handed, then survive all the guys who jumped him to take it away from him.

Sal did get $5,000 from  a California restaurant owner, Sam Gordon, to buy the ball and display it for a while in his Sacramento restaurant. But Gordon later gave the ball to Maris, who then donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Sal, in addition to being there with his fiancée, Rosemarie Calabrese,  was there with his cousin John and his date. Sal was broke, so his fiancée paid the $10 for the four seats. Imagine that.

Sal and Rosemarie were married three weeks after the catch and then flown out to California by Sam Gordon to collect the $5,000. Gordon also footed the bill for Sal and Rosemarie's honeymoon in Palm Springs.

After catch Sal was whisked to the WPIX broadcast booth and met Phil Rizutto who greeted Sal with warmth and said, "I'm glad you're a paesano."

After reading that in the obit I was reminded of how Rizzuto once with Bill White in the booth explained that names that ended in a vowel denoted an Italian. Bill White, who was black never missed a beat and then asked Phil, "Oh you mean names like White and Shapiro." Phil probably choked on his cannoli.

Mr. Durante was invited to the 50th anniversary of the catch in 2011 (pictured above) at what was now a new Yankee Stadium built in 2009. Sal proved to be more than a capable interviewee when he was asked if the 61 homer season should stand against the Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire records that of course exceeded 61 homers, but also carried the taint of being from the so-called "steroid-era."

Sal replied, "How about I just say Roger deserved it. He did it on his own, you know, the skill."

We all know by now the effects of dementia, and sadly the dementia that Sal passed away from prevented him from even being able to absorb the year Aaron Judge was having this year when he finished with 62 homers in a season, an undisputed America League record.

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The Box

I don't usually take on what might be called a serious subject—the problem of the homeless and mentally ill in NYC, but after reading an insightful piece by Corey Kilgannon in the NYT the other day I couldn't help remembering something that I've carried around with me for 40 years about the time the City allowed a woman to freeze to death on a city sidewalk because they were slow to get a court order to remove her.

It's stayed with me all these years because perhaps my mother was schizophrenic, and if hadn't been for her family and her service connected VA benefits, I always imagined she could have been the woman who froze in that cardboard box in January 1982.

Perhaps I'm just showing off my memory and my ability to find the NYT stories that appeared in the paper, an opinion piece, and two by Robin Herman, a star reporter who has only recently passed away herself.

Much is currently being made of Mayor Eric Adams announcing that there will be a policy in place for the police and social services to remove the mentally ill from the streets and subways and get them in a hospital setting if they appear to be harmful to themselves and others. Well intentioned, but good luck with that. 

The Mayor is of the opinion that subway crime is up, way up, because these people are committing acts of violence. He's right. Some are, most aren't. And by the time they get even one person, or a 100 committed to a mental health setting, crime will in no way decrease.

Despite living in the suburbs now for over 30 years I can never stop being a so-called New Yorker. I care who the Mayor is; I care about crime; I care. I was born and educated in the city's public schools, and worked in Manhattan for decades. I got out of the World Trade Center on 9/11. I survived a workplace execution in 2002 that saw two of my colleagues murdered.

Until I retired in 2011 I went into Manhattan, sometimes from Manhattan, and other times from Queens, or the suburban home I'm now in, for 46 years to work. I still make trips into the city for certain things.

The woman in the cardboard box, who they later identified as Rebecca Smith was 60 when she froze to death. As with homeless people, they are somehow resourceful in their own way. The instinct to survive. Her's was to live in this cardboard box in a Chelsea neighborhood near 10th Avenue. She was a fixture.

As the temperatures were dipping near zero in January 1982 there was concern about her chances of freezing to death. She is reported to have refused all outreach attempts to make her situation better.

If you are able to call up the Robin Herman piece links you will read of these attempts. I remember Mayor Koch going to where she was and trying to get her removed. The ACLU and others declared she couldn't be moved against her wishes. Wishes from a person who is not is not in their right mind, but that's not the point, right?

Social services from the Manhattan Mobile Geriatric Unit, a State Department of Mental Health outreach team couldn't convince her to move. The police claimed they had no authority to move her. There were those who brought her blankets and who thought she was warm enough. But there is a glaring gap there. These were weekday efforts. There was no weekend staff to check on her. 

In one of Robin's pieces it is disclosed that someone from social services couldn't get back to the woman because they had no staff on weekends. The woman froze to death while they were waiting for a court order to remove her.

Rebecca Smith froze to death on a city sidewalk because no one worked on a weekend and a court order wasn't obtained soon enough. In 1985 there was a front page story in the November 14, 1985 edition of the NYT: Homeless in City Facing Koch Edit. People on Street to Be Ordered to Shelters on Cold nights.

In Mr. Kilgannon's piece we hear a retread of all the excuses that nothing could be done. Mayor Adams knows this, but hopes common sense will prevail.

Don't count on it.

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There's a Python, Where?

Through the magic of Twitter there is someone I keep in touch with, @justjenking, Jennifer King, who is a retired OR nurse who took up journalism and is an obituary writer Down Under, and who I once met in Penn Station as she and her husband were passing through New York on their way to Washington, D.C. where Jen, with press credentials, got to stand at the White House press conference lectern for a photo. A thrill.

Australia is known for its habitation of snakes and spiders. What we here don't realize that while we might expect the average Australian to encounter those creatures outdoors, they are both very much a presence indoors—in an Australian household.

I have seen Tweeted photos of snakes hiding behind refrigerators, and other household hiding places that if they were to occur here, we'd lose our minds. The occurrence would lead off the evening news.

I've seen Tweeted photos of frogs outside the King garden. But a most recent Tweet was a cry of anguish as Jen was mad at their dog for not doing something about the python that gained access to their bathroom at 2 A.M. Just another average day Down Under.

The dog named Postie, apparently is in the dog house as Jen Tweeted:

Our dog Postie has zero awareness of pythons. Walked right by this one just now and slept through another in the bathroom knocking everything off the sink at 2am! He does seem alert to other snakes though…[Something to be said for him, I guess.]

Along with the Tweet was a video of a python slithering its way through their garden. Lovely, colorful creature, but not something you'd like near your tooth brushes.

I was never a fan of snakes. A trip to the snake house at the Bronx Zoo as a youngsters put me off snakes forever.

Before the snake Tweet there was one about the army or frogs (that's what you call a group of frogs) that had taken up a presence as a ribbitting chorus outside their door. They were keeping it up all night. Apparently, there had been a lot of rain, and the frogs come out when it's wet in Australia.

I really don't know what a dog was supposed to do upon seeing a python (if in fact they did see the snake) in the bathroom at 2 A.M. Bark a lot? Call 999?

There are of course smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors that go off if there is a smoke/fire condition, or the leakage of odorless carbon monoxide gas.

But snakes? Snakes are cold blooded, so anytime they can get where it's warm they are appreciative. Some rural, and near-rural households in the states might have a hungry bear problem, but not snakes.

I remember one Tweet that showed kangaroos setting up shop on the King's suburban road. We've had the occasional gaggle of geese that wander up from the park at the end of the block, but the town has a "Goose Lady" who can come around with a very energetic dog who chases the geese.  I don't know what would chase a snake. Another snake?

Despite the disappointment in Postie's ability to inform the occupants of the snake in the bathroom, I can't really blame the dog. Don't pythons eat animals like dogs and cats? I wouldn't go near the damn thing either.

How do you get rid of a snake in your house? Do you call animal control?

Better the Aussies, not us.

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The Catch

I have no idea, and no influence if the NYT is going to mark the passing of Sal Durante, 80, the man who caught Roger Maris's historic 61st homer on the last day of the season as the Yankees played the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium.

It's almost poetic justice conceived by the fates that Sal would pass away in the same year that saw Aaron Judge break the record Maris set with 62 home runs. Maris's 61st homer was set in the 1961 season. There was the expected hubbub of setting the record and breaking Babe Ruth's season record of 60 homers playing in 162 games vs. the 154 game season Ruth played in. More games, more chances at bat. Is Maris's record tainted?

A record book asterisk was always called for the by sportswriters of the era to denote that the record was achieved with more games in the season. An asterisk, or a dagger, never was appended to the record.

I was 12 when Maris and Mantle were knocking the cover off the ball. I followed the team at the time, despite not being a diehard baseball fan. It was hard to ignore the news as Maris crept closer to Ruth's record.

What I always remind anyone who cares, the controversy over Maris vs. Ruth and 162 games vs. 154  would be moot if the homer that Roger hit toward the end of the season in Baltimore entered the books rather than being wiped out by a rain delay that stopped the game before it was an official game. What might have been.  I don't know if Ruth had any homers nullified due to an unofficial game. His 60 might have been more.  Water under the bridge.

Sal caught the treasured ball in the right field bleachers. You had to appreciate the dimensions of  Yankee Stadium at the time that put those bleacher seats a mere 296' from home plate.

Sal had the look of a male, NYC 19-year-old teenage. His hair was slicked back, leaving a dip in the front; he wore a t-shirt under a leather jacket. It was guys like him and their leather-clad girlfriends that kept me from ever eating 15¢ slice pizza. The older teenagers of the era hung out in pizza joints and were scary to me. I was afraid I'd get beat up.

Since bleacher seating at he time was general admission, those that got there early enough always headed for those seats. They might have cost 75¢. 

I remember heading for those seats with my father. There were always broken pint booze bottles and other debris when you sat down. The people who got there early were not ones you wanted to sit next to. My father always steered us away from the undesirables.

As the record was neared in 1961 it was very much like what went on this season when Aaron Judge was pursuing Ruth's and Maris's record. Fans were clustering in the seats where the ball might land. The difference was the price and the reserved seating.

When Maris's shot looked like it was headed into the stands the jockeying for catching the ball got heavy, very rough. Sal emerged with the ball but only after taking a licking from those who were trying to take it away from him. Sal prevailed, and headed for the locker room to meet Maris.

Sal apparently wanted to give the ball to Maris, but Maris insisted Sal keep it and make some money from it. What I remember is that eventually some restaurant guy on the West Coast gained possession after buying it from Sal for $5,000, a titanic sum at the time. At some point the ball has been donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Sal was a 19-year-old teenager at the game with his girlfriend and future wife. Sal retired as a bus driver, having suffering with dementia.

Despite Maris's record achievement and his superb outfielder skills, he never endeared himself to the crusty cadre of New York sportswriters. I think it was Lenny Schechter of the NY Post who would sourly claim Maris had "a red ass," meaning I guess he was easily irritated. Maris was eventually traded to the St. Louis Cardinals.

Since Sal lived in Staten Island, the Staten Island Advance did a brief obit on him.

It won't really matter if the NYT does or doesn't do an obit on Sal. Take away the distinction of catching a historic home run ball and Sal might not really have enough pizzazz to rate a tribute obit.

No matter. His passing frames an era for me.

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There's a Fox in the House

One of the joys of reading obituaries is that even when a writer leaves the staff of the NYT, you can count on one of their obits popping up when one of their subjects passes away who they wrote an advance obit for. It's almost like the ballplayers coming out of the rows of corn in Field of Dreams. The writer gets exposure, even if they've died.

Professional obituary writers refer to the phenomena of an obit writer passing away before their subject as a "double down" when the advance obit finally bobs up in the water. This happened most famously when the advance obit for heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey was written by Red Smith, and Red passed away before Jack. The editors always make a small note of this.

Mel Gussow's obit for Elizabeth Taylor appeared after Mel's death. Liz outlived a lot of predictions that she was on her last set of costume jewelry and husbands.

Generally, when these advance obits hit the pages and the writer has left, for whatever reason, you will see that the deceased is quite old, usually over 90, oftentimes over 100. Robert D. McFadden's byline appears over lots of these obits, even though he's probably retired. He was a Pulitzer Prize winning rewrite man, probably the best ever in the business in the business, and writes the best ledes. I think he night still show up at a desk at the paper even although he's 85.

Part of the duties of being an obituary writer are writing for the freshly passed away for whom there may not be an advance obit on file, and updating the advance obits in the morgue for those subjects still not going gently in to the night.

My guess is the late, great Robert McG. Thomas Jr may not have been on the obit desk very long. I like to think he pissed off some straitlaced editors and was assigned obit duty as a journalist's entry into purgatory.

If so, the editors did him and all of us a favor, since all he ever did was turn out gems on the departed. He passed away at 60 in 2000. I don't think I can recall any obit of his that appeared after he passed away. He probably didn't get assigned to do too many advances. Maybe none.

An obit bylined by Margalit Fox appeared in the NYT the other day for Eleanor Jackson Piel, Steely Lawyer for the Marginalized, who passed away at 102. Ms. Fox is still with us, just no longer with the NYT. I know she wrote about the story of Conan Doyle, the author of all those Sherlock Holmes books and stories becoming a detective himself, Conan Doyle for the Defense: The Story of  Sensational British Murder, A Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer.

Obviously she left the NYT to write books, because last year she turned out another called, The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History. 

The life of Eleanor Jackson Piel is as interesting as her cases. She in effect becomes My Cousin Vinny in a case that springs a man on Florida's Death Row 16 hours before his execution. He had been framed by the police in Dade City Florida in 1979 for the murder of a woman. He and his brother were guilty in the eyes of the police because one was a biker, the other a roofer, and they were involved in growing and selling marijuana. I guess you could attribute that to the '70s.

Another of her famous cases was taking on the NYC Board of Education over its late 1960s refusal to admitting a teenage math prodigy, Alice de Rivera into Stuyvesant High School, then considered an "elite" all-male high school that also required the passing of an entrance exam. (It is still considered an "elite" school, despite numerous school chancellors trying to water down its admission selection process.)

Stuyvesant High School has been around since 1904. My father went there and graduated in 1932; I graduated in 1966. Although in the era I entered the school you had to pass an entrance exam, I don't think my father had to pass one to be admitted, despite its specialized curriculum.

The school was always a blend of science, math, and vocational shops. I learned wood working and ceramics there, with wood working still something I engage in. Vocational curriculums were big in the city then, almost the training ground for union jobs. NYC was once a manufacturing, blue collar hub.

The newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, a child of the New York City's education, would joke that any kid with a German surname, like Fittig, Schroeder or Schneider, was put in front of a wood lathe to learn making table legs and carpentry.

Almost coincidently, Eleanor married a Gerard Piel, "the publisher of Scientific America magazine and a scion of the family that brewed Piels beer."

There are a few things I remember about Piels beer. The commercials done by the radio comedy team Bob and Ray, pretending to be Bert and Harry Piel; Piels was a lousy tasting, low-budget beer, and was once hawked by Jimmy Breslin in a television ad when he was at the height of his newspaper column popularity. Jimmy was also once an evening newscaster who supposedly knew everything there was to know about the machinations of New York City politics, unions, and the police. I sincerely doubted he really drank Piels.

Eleanor won an out-of-court settlement for Alice de Rivera, but she never entered the school. Her family moved away. After the 1969 ruling, 12 girls were admitted to Stuyvesant, and of course have continued to be admitted with no restrictions, other than acceptance by taking the entrance exam.

Alice married and is now a physician in Maine, Alice Haines. Stuyvesant awarded her a Stuyvesant diploma in 2013.

Eleanor's obit gets the full-monty—six columns, two photos, and lots of column inches. The emergence of the advance obit by Margalit tells me that the advance obits in the can by McFadden night finally be nearing their own end.

We can therefore look forward to more nonagenarians and centenarians passing away under the byline of Ms. Fox.

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Wanted

It was one of those things I didn't realize was no longer there until I read about it in an Op-Ed piece last week in the Wall Street Journal: There are no more Wanted Posters/Notices in the post office.

That's probably one of the things most people will tell you they never knew were once in the post office. Or can tell you they never looked through the Wanted Posters. Well, I knew they were once there, and I did look.

It was probably in the '60s when I was a very young and callow fellow and watching oodles of television and taking in way too many episodes of The Untouchables staring Robert Stack.

That was the weekly dramatization of the career of Elliot Ness and how the lawman from Indiana came to Chicago and cleaned up the mob there dominated by Al Capone, and his ace lieutenant and cousin Frank Nitti.

Of course they made a very good movie about Elliot staring Kevin Costner and Sean Connery, who stole the movie and got himself an Academy Award for supporting actor. Connery was everyone's favorite that year. A gruff Irish accent and some good lines about what to bring to a fight earned him the Oscar.

I was watching so much of  The Untouchables that my parents were getting worried that I was becoming unduly fascinated with gangsters when they found a paperback book I had hidden under my mattress that was filled with chapters on all the gangsters of the era. Or where the prisons were when they were convicted. I could have done well with that Jeopardy category if Alex was around then. It didn't matter that I didn't want to be a gangster. or act like one, my folks were worried. The book disappeared.

By parents weren't completely worried about me. At some function my father attended he brought home an autographed glossy photo signed by Robert Stack that showed the cast of The Untouchables in their TV set office.

The term Untouchable took on a different meaning when Barney's the men's store on 17th Street and Seventh started an advertising campaign that let you enter the store and get a lapel button you could wear that said "Just Looking." Until the campaign, Barney's had a policy of assigning you a salesperson as soon as you walked in the door.

One lunch hour myself and two friends from work tested the new campaign and were presented with JUST LOOKING buttons to wear when we entered the store. As we came down the stairs to the floor for suits unhappy salesmen looked up and grumbled, "Oh, here come The Untouchables." And all we did that afternoon was look.

As a kid, I just had a healthy sense of curiosity that lead me to check out the wanted posters in a corner of the main post office on Main Street off Sanford Avenue in Flushing. The building is still there, a grand, brick columned structure decked out with a stately marble lobby. A true Middle America-Washington D.C. looking building .

There on a pair of metal loops were pages of I guess the 10 Most Wanted (maybe more) people as determined by the FBI. I turned the pages and read of guys who were mostly wanted for robbing banks or armored cars. I don't remember any names, but no one seemed local. They all seemed to be wanted in Kansas City. I knew I was never going to use the images in the hopes of catching one of those guys. Hell, they didn't even live nearby. Boring.

None of this curiosity gave me any incentive to become a gangster, or a member of law enforcement, although my last employment saw me writing programs for a health insurer and then a consulting company for detecting health insurance fraud—an activity I never attributed to anything having to do with turning the pages of wanted posters.

I don't know what image Arnold Shuster was looking at of Willie the Sutton when he pressed clothes in the back of his father's Brooklyn dry cleaning store in the '50s. But it paid off. Sort of.

Arnold recognized Willie on the subway and followed him outside and got the attention of the police. who arrested Willie, while trying to take credit for the pinch themselves. Willie had been leaving under the radar in Staten Island after his last prison escape. There was a reward, and Arnold's father insisted Arnold get it. Well, he did get it, but it wasn't money.

In that era they printed your home address in the newspaper when there was a crime event to report. Thus, it was known to the world where Arnold lived as he was murdered outside his Brooklyn apartment supposedly on the order of Albert Anastasia, a Godfather of the time. In Albert's mind, "snitches" weren't to be rewarded, even if they civilians. 

Anyone raised on TV westerns knows all about Wanted Posters. Drawings of those unshaven bad guys were in every town that had a wooden sidewalk, hitching posts, and of course a barber, hotel saloon, and sheriff's office. And of course there was no more famous wanted man than Jesse James.

These Wanted Posters always carried an amount for the reward. Generally, the desperado was wanted "dead or alive." The posters were so much part of Western life that they made a TV series, Wanted Dead or Alive starring Steve McQueen. The series ran from 1958-1961 and to my amazement, was a spin off of a series starring Robert Culp, Trackdown, 1957-1959, something I never saw.

The nostalgia for wanted posters was written by Bob Greene in the WSJ Op-Ed piece of November 29, 2022. The piece, titled Wanted: The World's Sweetest Grandma, points out the post office now carries merchandise. Envelopes, shipping supplies, gift card and greeting cards "perfect for mailing to the world's greatest grandma."

I have a friend who asked me where could be buy business size envelopes.  Used to be Woolworths. Stationery stores have disappeared since Office Max and Staples. I told him to go to the post office.  

Of course the world have gone digital. Paper is no longer the medium used to get someone's attention. The FBI now has a Twitter and Instagram account for its 10 most-wanted list. It is coyly pointed out that the bureau's Twitter account has 146,000 followers, while Taylor Swift has 92 million. Never find you can't get tickets to see her.

But the all-time best wanted poster was the one they used in Times Square asking for information on the whereabouts of Whitey Bulger, the leader of Boston's Winter Hill gang who's been on the lamb for over 16 years. Lot of supposed Whitey sightings, but no Whitey. Where's Waldo? Where's Whitey?

As a kid I always heard that if you stood in front of Hotalings newsstand that sold all the out-of-town newspapers you would eventually see someone you knew. Times Square has been called The Cross Road of the World.

Hotalings is long gone, having succumbed to the Internet, but Times Square is still Times Square, filled with people from all over who pass through it.

The movie The Departed, starring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon was a slight reference to Whitey's hold on the Boston area, and Black Mass, starring Johnny Depp also took its turn as bringing Whitey's life to the silver screen.

Through a hair dresser for Whitey's wife, Whitey was fairly quickly identified as living in a condo in California with $822,000 stuffed be hind the sheetrock. Whitey was convicted, sent to prison, then was fatally beaten by inmates at a prison he has just been transferred to. 

It was always alleged that Whitey's elusiveness was attributed to the FBI who gave him a bit of a pass because be informed on others. The prisoners at the prison Whitey had been transferred to after a few years in the first prison didn't like "rats," those who aided law enforcement in the capture and conviction of like-minded criminal. Hence the fatal beating.

The best part of the Op-Ed piece was learning that there is a book kept at the post office that if you ask for it will be of the Most Wanted. I've never been in line that was held up because some soul asked for this book.

Thank goodness. I'd want to kill them and get added to the list.

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