Joseph Lieberman + 24

Can it really be 24 years since Joseph Lieberman was Al Gore's vice presidential running mate in the 2000 election that elevated the word chad beyond the name of one half of the British singing duo of Chad and Jeremy and the first name of a soon-to-be Hall of Fame thoroughbred racing trainer, Chad Brown?

The turmoil of the 2000 seems so long ago that maybe it didn't happen. Trump's loss in 2020 and that turmoil overshadows it. There are people in their 30s who do not remember the machinations of the 2000 election because they were too young to know what was going on.

My wife and I were in Toronto, Canada. We voted by absentee ballot. We dovetailed the Toronto visit with seeing our younger daughter at Geneseo college in Geneseo, New York. She had just started her freshman year. Then we went on to Toronto.

News of the contested election of course reached us in Toronto. Hearing about all the fuss and crazy claims of Nazis voting in Florida, the state whose results were challenged, I was glad not to be in the office hearing everyone's cock-eyed conspiracy theories. It's 2024, and they've only been replaced by the 2020 election conspiracy theories.

I liked what the journalist Jerry Nachman—who has since passed away—who said that all the media from the Northeast was descending on Florida because they had relatives in the state and were eager to see them on the employers' dime.

And who knew Chicago's former mayor, Richard Daly, had a 50-year-old son who was leading the charge in Florida for a recount. The 2000 presidential election might be in the rear view mirror, but in today's WSJ there is a story that a poorly designed Florida paper ballot cost Gore the election.

Perhaps. Whoever thought that a version of how we played battleships as kids by drawing figurative ship on graph paper, turning the paper over, and challenging our friends to "sink" the ships by guessing where they might be on the reverse side by stabbing at the paper with a pencil. Voting then in Florida was an adult game of battleships. And for the want of a state the election was lost. But it wasn't Florida that cost him the election.

If Al Gore had managed to take his home state of Tennessee and its 14 electoral votes, Florida would have been a sideshow, and we wouldn't have been treated to someone trying to determine intended votes by staring at poorly punched paper. That photo is as famous as the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square at the end of WW II.

Frankly, I never understood why they needed to try and discern the intention of a vote that was poorly cast leaving a "hanging chad." Why consider it a valid vote? DQ it. But no, Joe Lieberman was too close to getting to the White House for that to happen.

The Democrats wanted a continuation of the Clinton presidency badly. But most vice presidents don't go on to win the presidency when they run on top of their own ticket. I distinctly remembering when Al and Joe and their wives went together to see the then current movie Men of Honor, the biopic starring Cuba Gooding about the disabled Navy diver Carl Beshears who went on to the top rank of Master Diver. The newspapers couldn't get enough of dovetailing the appearance of the four with the title of the movie.

The NYT obit by Robert McFadden empties out his advance vault by one. Someday it will be empty, but the octogenarians, nonagenarians and centenarians keep passing away, and Mr. McFadden is ready to see the off.

The best pun I ever heard about a "hanging chad." is one made by a British racing broadcaster, Nick Luck. Chad Brown is a highly successful, soon-to-be Hall of Fame thoroughbred horse trainer, whose charges win top flight races, generally on the turf, here and abroad. Nick Luck is a racing broadcaster from England who comments on many of the foreign race telecasts.

After one afternoon of racing in 2018 with Chad Brown having a remarkable day of saddling the 1-2-3 place finishers in the Beverly D stakes race from Arlington Park in Illinois (now gone) for three different owners, Nick Luck just had to close the telecast with..."on a day that Chad left them all hanging..."

Reading McFadden's obit about Joe you get the sense a good man missed being president. Enough obscurity is guaranteed when you're the actual vice president, but when you lose on as the vice presidential candidate on a ticket, the dustbin of political history awaits you.

Mr McFadden write how Joe worked both sides of the aisle, and was one of the first to take President Clinton to the woodshed in a speech after Bill's affair with Monica Lewinsky spilled out into the open. It was a harsh rebuke for Clinton's behavior, and one that Bill later told Joe that every word in the speech was true. He deserved it.

So, where do political candidates and former four-term Senators from Connecticut go when they start to fade away? Alan Dershowitz tells us in a just published op-ed piece in the WSJ  that he and Joe were working on a piece about Democrats and Israeli support and the coming election.

Well, you go to work for a law firm and live in the Bronx. But not just any part of the Bronx, but in Riverdale, a bucolic corner of the Bronx the belies its 104... zip code. People in Riverdale will never tell you they live in the Bronx. They will always tell you they live in Riverdale. When the phone company was producing phone books they used to produce a separate one for Riverdale residents.

The year 2000. Y2K. I almost see 2000 as a dividing line in my life: B.C. and A.D. Can anyone remember what was the big issue on the presidential mind was just before 9/11? Stem cell research.

President George Bush addressed the nation for 11 minutes on TV on August 9 about stem cell research just before the events of 9/11 forever changed the world. You won't hear about stem cell research in the same way ever again.

2000 and after, when all that's happened seems so clear in my mind. Getting out of Tower One of the World Trade Center from the 27th floor; the execution of my two colleagues at work on September 16, 2001 by our vice president at Empire BlueCross BlueShield from our temporary quarters after the towers fell.

Good things. My daughters graduating college; marrying, having children. My leaving Empire after 36 years and getting the best job I ever had for 7 years at a consulting firm; retiring at 62.

Can the year 2000 + really be 24 years ago?

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Someone I'd Like to Have Met

You never know where the idea can come from to write one of these postings. A ceremony giving medals to centenarians and nonagenarians on the surface would hardly seem where a spark might come from. But the story of one such ceremony did.

President Biden signed a bill in February 2022 that bestows the Congressional Gold Medal to the members of a "traveling road show of deception" that build inflatable tanks and trucks to trick the Germans.

The story of the "shadow army" and rubber tanks, etc. is hardly a new story. There were tremendous efforts to keep the Nazis from knowing for certain where the invasion was coming from, Calais or Normandy?

It is amazing that a military operation—Operation Overlord—could have been kept a secret for so long. But those were different times. The building of the atomic bomb was a secret as well.

WW II veterans are all nonagenarians, or centenarians at this point, and are the next generation to disappear into history. The effort to honor those who were part of the massive deception and are still living, or have relatives still living, was lobbied for for years. It finally culminated in President Biden signing a bill, and a ceremony where Speaker Mike Johnson gave out Congressional Gold Medals.

The story of the ceremony appeared in the NYT print edition of March 22, 2024. It reminded me of how little I ever knew, or asked of my mother and father and how they came to serve in the war. Of course now it's impossible to ask.

But not all veterans were going to talk anyway. As part of the story by John Ismay, it is described that Mike Bagby flew from Birmingham, Alabama to attend the ceremony in honor of his father who served as an officer in the Ghost Army, but who passed away in 1992.

The activities of the Ghost Army were only declassified sometime in the 1990s. Much like the people who worked at Bletchley Park decoding German communications who signed the Official Secrets Act, these participants couldn't tell anyone until the veil  of secrecy was officially lifted.

With 600 people in attendance (lunch must have been served) three of the seven Ghost Army members were in attendance, many wearing a sort of Ghostbusters pin that I'm sure was not what they wore in the 1940s.

Mike Bagby said of his father, William Wright Bagby, "he took it to his grave. He just didn't talk about it."

Mike said his father worked as a mechanical engineer after the war, mostly in the coal industry. He said of his father, "he had a temper like a match head, No. 1, but he had an amazing vocabulary and did the NYT Sunday crossword in 15 minutes. But all of is conversational language surrounded four letters." 

I would have loved to have met a salty Southerner who sounded like a New Yorker.

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What Were the Odds?

The New York Times reporter Corey Kilgannon and Ben Zimmer have unwittingly provided the spark for another posting, this one about O Henry and Banana Republics, a combination you would not think could ever lead to anything.

First up is Mr. Kilgannon's contribution to the muse when he wrote a February piece about the Rikers Island inmates who write novels, poetry and stories and even have them published, or self-published. It's quite a revelation, and one of the more positive things to read about Rikers aside from all the crappy news.

Mr. Kilgannon is a senior reporter for The New York Times who I like to think is in an enviable position of self assigning his stories. His articles tend to be about parts of New York that only a native, or long-term transplant might know about.

The first time I started to pay attention to his byline was when he wrote about Murph the Surf, Jack Roland Murphy, and the Star of India sapphire 1964 heist from the Museum of Natural History. The "brains" if you can give the robbers that much attention of the heist, was Murph, a Miami based surfer dude into crime. I remember the heist and wrote about  it in three postings. 

Murph had gotten out of prison for a murder he committed and made good copy for the evangelical bent he went on after getting out of prison. Murph has remained such a memory for me I even repeated a bit of the story in a posting about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. I think Murph the Surf will always be a part of my memories.

Corey, along with a photographer did a great piece about the slowly shrinking junk yards in Willets Point hard by Citi Field in Queens.  The view from the 7 train was always filled with the junk yards where auto parts can be found for maybe anything ever built.

There once were so many junk yard operators that they literally took over a city street to dump the wrecks. The city eventually claimed the street back, but there has always been a movement to get rid of the yards completely and build perhaps a soccer stadium. Might happen yet.

If you ask even a native New Yorker what goes on in Hart Island in the East River they may draw a blank. But Hart Island is where NYC has long, and continues to bury the unclaimed bodies. It's a potter's field. Corey did a pieces on that speck of land that also serves as nursery for growing the trees that the city needs to plant at curbs.

 

Finally, Corey  gets to cover the unraveling of the Gilgo Beach serial murders now that there is a suspect, Rex Heuermann awaiting trail with no bail. Mr. Heuermann has been positively linked to four of the 11 bodies found along a strip of highway in Suffolk County near Gilgo Beach, a surfer's beach.

My guess is perhaps of his senior reporter status and his familiarity with that section of Long Island ,Corey has been filing several updates on the release of new evidence and the people who are involved in bringing Mr. Heuermann to justice.

One of the aspects of the case has been the long-standing condition of Mr. Heuermann's house in what is a middle class suburban neighborhood of usually well-maintained homes in Massapequa, NY, Nassau County, near Gilgo Beach in Suffolk County. Rex's suburban home became such a dilapidated suburban home and neighborhood eyesore no doubt because after the day job and dismembering women, there is just not enough time left in the day to mow the lawn or fix the roof. 

Mr. Kilgannon gets to island hop around New York City. How is that possible? Well, after Hart island there is Rikers Island where on 413 acres there are housed 6,200 detainees. Rikers Island will never be the site of a tour bus.

It is accessible from an exit off the Queensboro/59th Street Bridge/Mayor Koch Bridge. Where else but in New York can a piece of infrastructure carry multiple names? There was of course the family of Abraham Rycken who once lived there in 1664, when the Dutch were the principle inhabitants of NYC.

And finally, the source of what Mr. Kilgannon wrote that has served as a muse for this posting. In February 2024 Corey wrote a piece on how a notorious jail has become a hotbed for literary efforts, principally from the incarcerated.

It is an inspiring fell good piece about a bad place that would hardly seem to be a place that would give growth to writing. But Mr. Kilgannon points out that there several writers who have become famous who did a stretch behind bars: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde and E.E. Cummings are offered as examples.

I finally caught up to Corey's February piece and read it and was a little surprised he omitted O Henry, the pen name for William Sydney Porter who famously wrote short stories like The Gift of the Magi and Cabbages and Kings, and The Cop and the Anthem.

Porter did time in Texas for embezzling a bank. He was known for writing many of his short stories from a booth in Pete's Tavern on Irving Place and 18th street in Manhattan, a place I'm greatly familiar with since it was a block from the family flower shop. (I've written about Pete's often.)

Pete's keeps the above photo of O Henry in a back dining room. They used to make a deal of being called the Tavern that O Henry Made Famous, which proved to confuse me a kid when I passed Pete's and saw that slogan on their awning.  

At 10 years-old or so I didn't know O Henry was a person, let alone a writer. So, why would a bar that I thought was called O Henry say they made themselves famous? There are things that stumped me then, and still stump me. My speech pathologist daughter tells me I "do not process things well." Yeah, so? Get them an education and they start to diagnose you. No matter.

Further on is school past the age of 10 I was exposed to short story anthologies and there were a few of O Henry's stories in there. I liked them, and still do. It was then I learned that O Henry was the pen name for William Sydney Porter

As a youngster I read lots of Landmark books and tons of Hardy Boys books by Franklin W. Dixon. I was devastated to later learn that F.W. wasn't a real person I could met, but was rather a pen name for the stable of writers the publisher chose for the more than 200 Hardy Boy books. Quelle dommage.

So, finally reading Corey's piece this past Sunday morning I felt it would be a good time to Tweet (X) him  (@coreykilgannon) that he omitted O Henry. I never heard from him. No big deal.

Sunday's a day for trying to get current with the tidal wave of newspapers that can pile up if I don't stay with it. 

So, on the same Sunday, in the afternoon, I take in Ben Zimmer's column, Heard on the Street, in the weekend Wall Street Journal. Ben's column consists of taking a word or phrase of the week that seems to have become prominently uttered in the media and analyzing its origins and many meanings through time. If you liked William Safire, you will like Ben.

For those who have an ear for this kind of thing, paying attention to the latest flavor of news that has a half-life of a Tsetse fly, you might recall that New York's Chuck Schumer, the leader of the U.S. Senate, took Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to task and said basically he should leave office or get replaced: he's gumming of the peace talks regarding Gaza.

It was a bold stance to take, and it didn't go unnoticed by many once Bibi's response to the good senator became news itself.

Bibi shot back that Israel is not a "Banana Republic." Chuck didn't say that, but by definition he was calling for a change in Israel's leadership much like those who wanted to oust Latin American dictators from office, Latin America being a major exporter of bananas. Thus, their countries were Banana Republics.

Ben latches onto the weekly media utterances and provides a disquisition on the origins of the word or phrase. Even if you know what the reference to Banana Republic implies, his pieces are always interesting.

Thus, we are treated to how bananas came to shipped to Western, North American countries. Unmentioned in Ben's piece that how Harry Belafonte launched a career singing the Calypso hit "Day-O. The Banana Boat" song, "Come mistah tally man tally me bananas, daylight come and I wan go home," is about working at night loading bananas onto cargo ships. It was too hot during the day, so the labor was done during cooler night. Day-O of course is a stadium organ favorite to get the crowd going, and I really doubt the fans know it's about loading bananas. 

Within Ben's Sunday piece—wait for it—are the names of some of these Latin American countries that have been exporting bananas. Honduras is mentioned in connection with that because that is where in 1890 William Sydney Porter (O Henry) lived trying to evade bank embezzlement charges. He was a fugitive in a Banana Republic.

And there it is! A thought about O Henry in the morning, and reading about O Henry while learning more about the origins of the phrase Banana Republic in the afternoon, on the same day!

Is this a fluke? A coincidence? Divine intervention? No, it's life on a Möbius Strip where we are all connected.

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Ah, Those Europeans

Not every teenage wedding is scandalous. The most notable one that was scandalous in modern times was the rock n' roll singer Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his 13 year-old cousin when he was 22. The extremely young age of the bride and the family relationship did more than stun America and the world, and just about sunk Jerry's career.

Thursday's NYT carries the six column obit of Ira von Fürstenberg who has passed away at 83, You might expect to then read a story of a Teutonic playboy and or billionaire, but no. Ira was born Virginia Carolina Theresa Pancrazia Galinda von und zu Fürstenberg in Rome in 1940. Her obit headline tells us she was an "actress, artist and globe-trotter," which is code for extremely wealthy. The obit doesn't disclose how she came to be known as Ira.

I never knew of anyone who was a "von und zu." Google to the rescue tells us the words von und zu are nobility particles meaning of and at, denoting the family's place of origin and the family's continued possession of the estate. Make that filthy rich. 

The rich comes from being an heir to the Fiat fortune. Ira's mother was a granddaughter of Giovanni Agnelli and a sister of the "dashing" Fiat chief, Gianni Agnelli. The obit writer Alex Williams tells us Ira's home in Paris was fitted with solid gold bath taps because as Ira put it, "everybody needs to see something beautiful in the morning to have a good day." And that's before looking in the mirror.

Ira had homes in Rome, London, Paris, Madrid and on Lake Geneva and went back and forth by jet so often she felt her children would believe she was a flight attendant." Think of all the toothbrushes the woman had to have.

And if the name Fürstenberg sounds familiar it is because fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg married Ira's fashion designer brother, Egon, in 1969 before she married Barry Diller. Ah, all those vons.

What puts Ira in the Jerry Lee Lewis-like spotlight is that she was married at 15! to a Spanish-born prince and playboy (what else?) Alfonso Hohenlohe-Landenburg, known "affectionately as the King of Clubs for his work founding the Marbella Club, a haven for stars and socialites on Spain's Costa del Sol." What happens at the Marbella Club stays at the Marbella club. Prince Alfonso is straight out of central casting for oily looking princes.

Their wedding however was not luridly sensational as Jerry Lee's. Life magazine coved it on their cover in 1955 as "the wedding of the year." A special dispensation from Pope Pius XII likely kept the marriage from being considered statutory rape. But never mind that.

If George Clooney thinks he made a splash marrying Amal Alamuddin, the international human-rights lawyer in 2014 by tooling down the Grand Canal in Venice and having his reception at the Aman Canal Grande Hotel, then he knows nothing of Ira and Alfonso floating down the canals of Venice with a flotilla of 100 gondolas and having a celebration that lasted two weeks attended by 400 European aristocrats.

George and Amal needed no special dispensation from clergy. George is 17 years older than the stunning Amal, but both are full-fledged adults.

So, how did Prince Alfonso and Ira make out? Well, about as well you might expect. In 1960 Ira took up with Francisco Pignatari, a.k.a. Baby, a Brazilian industrialist and notorious playboy (what else?). They married in Reno in 1961 (not a good sign for longevity in a marriage) and divorced three years later.

On a flight in 1966 she met the film producer Dino De Laurentis who put her in pictures, nothing highly notable, but 20 films is enough to be able to claim you are an actress.

With her closets full of designer clothes Ira never stopped presenting herself in a manner befitting a princess. She said her father always told her, "One must cover oneself."

That and start the day with solid gold bath taps, and you make it to 83 with no regrets.

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Missing

I've always been a bit fascinated by museum heists. It probably started when my father took me to the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan to see how the robbers easily got in to steal the Star of India Sapphire, a priceless gem in 1964.

The heist became a legend, even more so when the robbers were caught six days after. Their ring leader was a colorfully named guy, Murph the Surf, who appeared to be a benign, but ineffectual thief. He later did time for murder, and his story was revisited by The New York Times reporter Corey Kilgannon. Murph has passed away.

The Star of India sapphire was returned. Interesting, my father didn't have any interest in seeing it back in its case. It was the open window and the pried open display case that was of interest, not the gem itself.

There of course have been all kinds of heist movies, some involving casinos, and some involving museums. But those are fiction. The real heists are what send the imagination soaring.

And no heist does this more that the theft of 13 pieces of priceless artworks by numerous artists cut out of their frames at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in the early hours of March 18,  1990. The pieces have never been found.

I used to have a list of three things I wanted to know about before I died. Who was Carly Simon singing about in her song "You're So Vain;" who was Watergate's Deep Throat; and is there life anywhere in the universe other than on Earth?

My interest in Carly's inspiration for "You're So Vain" has waned. It was or wasn't Warren Beatty, or some other guy who screwed her over. Or it was a composite of guys who screwed her over when she was "quite naïve." I know it wasn't me, despite the fact that at Saratoga my horse naturally won. Having your horse win doesn't mean you own the horse. It can mean that you chose to bet on it and it won. And I've made bets at Saratoga where the horse "naturally won." That's why I go back every year.

As for Deep Throat, the identity was revealed for certain to be an Assistant Director of the F.B.I.,  W. Mark Felt. Mark has also passed away.

Life somewhere other than on Earth? Okay, that's still on the list, but it's lost a bit of its steam when you think that the definition of life might be bacteria swimming in a crater on Mars that has some moisture in it. It doesn't by the definition of life have to be Sci-Fi Martians, or Robin Williams playing Mork on "Mork and Mindy."

The current mystery getting all the media attention right now is where is Kate Middleton, Prince William's wife? She's in line to sit on the throne when her father-in-law King Charles III passes away. Where's Kate? gets daily media speculation, but I'm not interested. She's alive somewhere, in some state of health that so far keeps the Royals from planning another funeral.

No, at the top of my list right now is where are the 13 pieces of art so brazenly lifted from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum?

The heist has been in the news again lately. The guard who was fooled into letting two guys at the door in the early hours of March 18, 1990 dressed as Boston policemen into the museum's lobby has just passed away, Richard Abath.

Richard was an immediate suspect to be in on it, but that speculation never came to be true. The death of Richard Abath lead to an article in this past Wednesday's NYT by Tom Mashberg on the artworks stolen and the lack of progress identifying who might have engineered the heist, and where the artworks are.

From Mr. Mashberg's reporting, I learned that in 2015 the F.B.I. identified two long-dead Boston area criminals, George Reissfelder and Lenny DiMuzio. The Bureau doesn't add any details as to why these two might have been involved. The Gardner Museum heist remains the largest art theft in history. And it remains unsolved.

Google entries for George Reissfelder and Lenny DiMuzio shed light on who the F.B.I. believe committed the crime, whose crew they were part of, but not where the paintings can be found.

Are they in some tax haven warehouse on an off-shore island? It seems anyone's guess is as good and anyone's. 

I will wager however that we will find out about Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, before the paintings are ever found.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

The Covered Wagon

I've been reading obituaries for decades, but until yesterday I never read one where it is mentioned that the subject's mother got to his place of birth by getting there with her parents in a covered wagon.

I've often wanted to meet or hear of someone whose parents, or grandparents got to where they lived by covered wagon. Perhaps it's because I rely on The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for my obituary reading—and while they are national papers—I believe an East Coast skewing emerges on how a deceased's ancestors travelled to where the deceased was born.

Usually, the ancestors either escaped Germany while they could before Hitler really took over, or they immigrated into the United States through Ellis Island, like my father's parents from Greece. My wife's father came through Ellis Island from Ireland, but not her mother. She came over first class from England, and as such, didn't have to pass through Ellis Island. Still an immigrant, however.

The obituary for the astronaut Thomas Stafford, 93, Who Led First U.S.-Soviet Space Mission in yesterday's NYT mentions that he was born in Weatherford, Oklahoma, west of Oklahoma City in 1930. His father was a dentist and his mother Mary Ellen (Patten) Stafford had moved to Oklahoma as a child in her family's covered wagon. The horse drawn Greyhound bus.

The obit doesn't say how old the mother was when she got to Oklahoma, other than she was a child, or what year she might have climbed down off that Conestoga Wagon, or when someone lifted her down and said "we're here." I wonder if kids in covered wagons bothered their folks to no end asking, "are we almost there yet" every bumpy half mile or so.

But imagine your Mom being able to tell you stories of how she and her parents got to Oklahoma in a covered wagon. The mind boggles; the head shakes.

Maybe it was because of 1950s television shows like Wagon Train that made me imagine when I was  a kid flying west with my folks for a visit to relatives and friends in Los Angeles and Chicago that made me look at the plane's floor and imagine that we were really flying to destinations that people had to use horses and covered wagons to get to. A little Twilight Zone crept in there as well.

I never got the chance to ask the parents of my daughter's now extended family that were at her wedding who were from the West Coast if any of their relatives got to the West Coast via a covered wagon. It's always fascinated me.

The astronaut Thomas Stafford surely graduated to a much faster mode of transportation in his life. He was a professional astronaut who flew into space four times, one time linking up with the Soviets in their two-man Soyuz spacecraft. As part of Apollo 10, he circled the moon scouting for landing locations for the Apollo 11 mission that saw Neil Armstrong be the first man to walk on the moon in July 1969.

There is a Stafford Air and Space Museum affiliated with the Smithsonian that has opened in his hometown of Weatherford, Oklahoma.

Thomas Stafford may not have been born in a covered wagon, but his mother could have told you about her missions in one.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Malachy McCourt

Malachy McCourt made it to one more St. Patrick's Day, just not the latest one in 2024. He passed away on March 11, 2024, just before this year's celebration.

Even if Malachy wasn't Frank McCourt's slightly younger brother, he would he no less of a character, and would still deserve the six column, half page tribute he got in the March 12, 2023 print edition of the New York Times by Sam Roberts. 

Brother Frank was the high school creative writing teacher at Stuyvesant High school who famously blossomed late in life as an author who earned a Pulitzer Prize for his memoir of his mother and family life in Limerick, Ireland, "Angela's Ashes." I don't think any dry eyes finished reading that book.

The New York Times wrote a profile piece of the ailing Malachy on March 10, 2023 when Malachy was hoping to make it to just one more St. Patrick's Day. In 2022 Malachy was ailing in a hospice, but not ailing fast enough to be discharged into the hearse parked out back. He was discharged from hospice care to home care, so he did make it to 2023's St. Patrick's Day, but not 2024's. Unless you die on St. Patrick's Day you are destined to die in between St. Patrick Days.

Malachy pretty much made it through life in the United States full of blarney, which of course is baloney with a brogue, which pretty much let him get away with just about anything he told you. Facts never got in the way of a good story, and why should they? It may not still be a good story then.

I never met Malachy, or saw him in an East Side watering hole. But I know his kind. Years and years ago the former NYC city councilman Matthew Troy was giving a talk to us auditors on ethics of all topics at Empire BlueCross and BlueShield.

I may have been the only one in the gathering who was old enough to know that Matthew Troy was disbarred as a convicted felon for embezzling from his clients' accounts. He did 55 days in jail and was now out long enough to petition to get his law license back.

Now Matthew Troy was not from Ireland, but he was Irish-American enough to tell one entertaining story after another, all contemporaneously.

My favorite one was that as Queens County (one of NYC's 5 boroughs/counties) Democratic party head he had a say in who got nominated to judgeships in the county. One afternoon a retired NYPD police captain makes an appointment to see Mattie. He puts a briefcase on Mattie's desk, opens it, revealing the money it is filled with.

The retired police captain tells Mattie, "I want to be a judge." Mattie, in his telling, thinks for just a bit, then asks the retired police captain, "are you at least a lawyer?"

Mattie closed his talk with his motto: "I always tell the truth, unless I can't." I never forgot it.

Malachy was an unelected Matthew Troy. He was a gadabout (you're not going to come across that word too often.) as described in his obit headline:  

Malachy McCourt, a Memoirist, Actor and Gadabout, Dies at 92

A gadabout indeed. Arriving from Limerick after his brother Frank sent him $200 to get here, he had jobs as diverse as: dishwasher, dockworker, Bible salesman on Fire Island, (words you never thought would be seen on the same line) soldier, writer, actor, radio personality. The novelist Frank Conroy said of Malachy: "he was professional Irishman, for which he can hardly be blamed," since "Irishness was all he had." I remember him a bit from his WBAI radio show

There doesn't seem to have been any animosity between Malachy  and his brother Frank. Malachy would tell anyone who listened, "I was blamed for not being my brother. I now pledge to all those naysayers that someday I will write "Angela's Ashes" and change my name to Frank McCourt."

Malachy played a bartender as a recurring role on the soap opera "Ryan's Hope" and was the real thing as the owner of what the obit tells us was the first singles bar in the 1950s, Malachy's on the Upper East Side.

I never heard that one, but it would be very interesting to have what could be considered to be a "singles bar" in the 1950s when most bars in New York City had a policy of not serving unescorted women at he bar, lest they be hookers looking for Johns. In the late '60s I noticed a hardly visible sign tucked behind a Blarney Stone bar that no unescorted women would be served.

If Matthew Troy liked to say he always told the truth unless he couldn't, Malachy would tell you, "I couldn't wait to hear what I had to say next."

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The Dead Are Waiting

The dead are waiting for traffic to ease before the story of their lives can make it to the pint pages of The New York Times. 

The obit desk is churning out so many obits that more appear online than in print. There's a backlog from the online pages to the print pages. It's like a morning traffic report that there are 30-40 minute delays getting though the Holland or Lincoln Tunnels and getting over the George Washington Bridge—upper or lower levels. Do the barely living need to be discouraged from dying? Will obit congestion pricing go into effect?

I have access to the NYT online edition through my home delivery subscription. I use the online editions for browsing and reference. At 75 I'm a creature for the print edition, and only look at the online edition to see what might hit the print edition. There is a lag.

Of the latest 11 online obits, 4 do not show anywhere as being in a print edition. Of the several from March 15—a day with six! tribute obits—there are two that appear in Sunday's, March 17 print edition. I purposely do not get the Sunday print edition. I have enough to do with doing newspaper deep dives than to add Sunday's pile to the mix. The home delivery people do however add the magazine,  Book Review, Arts, Metropolitan and Real Estate sections with my Saturday print delivery at no extra charge. So I already get about half of the Sunday edition to go through, but not the section with obituaries.

Last week I read a print Wall Street Journal story on J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ben Cohen. There was a reference to the name "Bethe" toward the end of the print edition that I could not find anywhere in all of the preceding text where the name had been mentioned. I looked many times and couldn't find it. 

When I dove into the online edition for the piece the name Hans Bethe was mentioned three times before the reference at the end. WTF?

I emailed Mr. Cohen and he responded nicely that they have to make cuts to the print size of a piece, and obviously made too deep a cut with what finally appeared in print. He promised they'd try and do better. Print space seems finite; but online space is not

It's kind of great that there are so many tribute obits to read, and it also seems better that they don't all appear as soon as they're ready to read in the print edition.

Unless the NYT adds a dedicated obituary section to compensate for their truncated New York sports coverage from The Athletic,  I guess there will now always be a delay before the online obits get the space to appear in the print editions.

The notable dead will just have to wait their turn at the tunnels and bridges to cross the river and get into the print edition of the NYT.

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Kerplunk

You knew right from the start it couldn't work, the 2000 merger of AOL and Time Warner. Not when Steve Case,  the C.E.O. for AOL, the dot com company, shows up at the announcement wearing a tie, and Gerald Levin, the Time Warner C.E.O. of the historic entertainment and media behemoth, shows up without wearing a tie. Can't tell from the photo if Gerald's also wearing jeans, which would have only been worse.

As soon as the word "synergy' escaped someone's lips, the entire deal was destined to be a Harvard Business School case study, And not because of its success.

As bad as the deal became, it especially put a catastrophic crimp in Ted Turner's net worth. The obit writer for the NYT, Chris Kornelis, tells us:

By the start of 2002, AOL Time Warner's market value was hovering around  $127 billion. The year, the company posted a net loss of $98.7 billion, a record for a U.S. company. Ted Turner, the company's largest individual shareholder at the time of merger, later told The New York Times that the deal had cost him 80 percent of his worth, about $8 billion. Mr. Levin resigned in 2002.

Ted Turner did have a good start to the new millennium. His 10 marriage to Jane Fonda imploded in 2001, resulting in a settlement to Jane in the millions. I guess she didn't take him for better or worse. Who knew mismatched dressed C.E.O.s might have scuttled Ted's marriage.

In 1997 Ted famously donated $1 billion to the U.N. Good thing it preceded the AOL Time Warner merger by a few years.

The obit tells us that Gerald Levin was seen as a media genius by having HBO be the first cable outlet to use satellites to provide national access to the cable company's offerings. Mr. Levin was quoted  as saying in James Andrew Miller's book "Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers" (2021):

"The only way you get ahead is if you see something that no one else sees and it's a little bit crazy." [See "Elon Musk" by Walter Isaacson]

As the expected "synergy" (there's word you won't hear too often these days.) did not materialize, the analysts pointed out how mismatched the C.E.O.s were.

It was said by Mr. Miller, the author of "Tinderbox," that Levin "was the last person that central casting would've sent over" to run the world's largest media company. Levin "was an intellectual who liked to quote the Bible and the French philosopher Albert Camus."

AOL Time Warner dropped "AOL" from its name in 2003 and in 2009 Time Warner spun off the AOL unit to shareholders with a market capitalization of $3.5 billion.

Poor Gerald. He should've worn a tie that day.

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The Office As a Person

If an office was a person, Joe Franklin's office would be a bum.

So said William Whitworth, a "venerated profile writer and editor" who has just passed away at 87 when he wrote a 1971 New Yorker profile piece on Joe Franklin, who I'm call Mr. Memory Lane.

Sam Roberts in the New York Times gives Mr. Whitworth the 21-gun salute of tribute obits across 6 columns, with two photos. spread over more than half a page in this past Monday's print edition.

It is said a picture is worth a thousand words, and the downloaded photo of Joe in his office makes it clear that Mr. Whitworth was not exaggerating.  Oddly enough, the photo I chose shows Joe at the stage of his life closely resembling my father in size, dress, pose and stature. The resemblance is uncanny to me. My wife agrees as well.

The photo of Joe surrounded by what is likely huge amounts of Broadway ephemera is nothing but a cluttered closet compared to how the Collyer Brothers lived. They were the famous hoarders who in the 1940s stuffed their East Harlem mansion with so much clutter that they were found dead buried in it, 15 days apart. A news report from the era gives you a small idea of their hoarding.

On March 21, 1947, an anonymous tip sent authorities to the Collyer brothers' mansion in Harlem. NYPD officers found the dead body of one of the brothers amongst the 120 tons of trash they had collected. It would be another 15 days before authorities found the other brother buried underneath a collapsed pile of trash

Joe didn't shoe-horn a piano and large parts of a car into his office, and at least he was able to move around and go in and out. The brothers were hoarders as well as reclusive. At one point Joe had a restaurant in the theater district where he greeted the theater-going crowd with stories and sometimes risqué jokes.

My own working space here at home is called the "computer room." There are two desks and a desktop computer where the writing is done. The room is filled with so many pictures there is no more wall space to hang them from. The floor serves an easel for the overflow.

My wife calls me a hoarder, but I think that word overstates my proclivity for saving newspaper clippings. There are boxes of saved clippings that I admit I will probably never go through, but that I still want. She managed to convince me that she could toss one of the boxes found in a small closet to make room for Christmas stuff. I have no idea what I'm missing, but I still feel a bit of pain that I no longer have that box. I'm convinced it held many Russell Baker Observer columns. Oh well.

I still actively clip newspaper stories, in particular ones that have lead me to write a posting, like the recent obituary for William Whitworth.

Mr. Whitworth apparently worked at The Herald Tribune back in the day with Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe and Dick Schaap. I still miss The Herald Tribune: news, sports, editorial cartoons and just plain cartoons. To this day I still miss Our Miss Peach.

The Herald Tribune wobbled after the 114 day newspaper strike by the typesetters in 1962-1963. The president of Typographical Union No. 6, Bertram Powers, knew the typesetter jobs were doomed by the advancing ability of a computer that could direct the formation of type rather than huge, clunky linotype machines. Word processing as we know it was coming to the newspaper industry.

Up till then New York City had 8 dailies. Mergers occurred after, one coming from the combination of The Herald Tribune, World Telegram &Sun, and the Journal American: The World Journal Tribune.

A New Yorker cartoon of the era (This was NOT easily copied, despite owning two discs of complete New Yorker cartoons.) showed a massively elongated news truck that resembled the longest of stretch limos with the words World Journal Tribune... on the side. Nightly news that was 15 minutes at 11 o' clock went to a half hour. The dawn of televised news was creeping up over the horizon. Print news media has been shrinking ever since.

Mr. Whitworth however wasn't out of a job. The became a highly respected editor at The New Yorker and The Atlantic. He also wrote profile pieces, like the one he did of Joe Franklin. He might have been the only person who could tolerate The New Yorker's prickly editor William Shawn without resorting to physical violence.

For myself, I never heard of Mr. Whitworth, shown in the obit seated below a blowup of his Joe Franklin profile piece, appropriately holding a pencil for editing. I've read plenty of pieces by Robert Caro, Pauline Kael and other writers he's edited, but never knew of the man behind the curtain.

How nice it would have been to meet him. It's never going to happen now, but I would love to see what a top-flight editor would do to my postings. I might be advised to just concentrate on my other hobbies.

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Flaco the Owl. Rest In Peace

Up to now I haven't had enough words in my head to write about the passing of Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl with the 12 foot wingspan. As anyone who has been following social media and newscasts from New York City knows by now, Flaco, who escaped from his vandalized enclosure at the Central Park Zoo on February 2, 2023, has passed away on February 23, 2024. He met his fate by most likely flying into a building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he was often seen.

It was at night, and perhaps his eyesight, his GPS and his radar failed him, but he was found dead as a Dodo in the courtyard of a building at 267 West 89th Street at around 5:00 P.M. There was no indication if he flew into an unforgiving window, or a solid side of building bricks. Did a TV with naked people get his attention? Did just naked people get his attention? It is not known how fast he was going, or from what height his systems failed him. 

He may not have even been flying when he went to his death. Initial findings state that Flaco died of "acute traumatic injury" mainly to the bird's body, but not his head. He may have just fallen from a high perch. Margaret Renki in the NYT outlines even more scenarios that could have caused his death. Full necropsy results will be weeks away. 

The New York Times did not do an obituary, but did of course report  his death. An obituary for a pet, public or private, might have been seen as going too far. It might set a bad precedent. I can never remember reading an obituary in the NYT for an animal.

There have however been animal obituaries from other sources. Ann Wroe in The Economist wrote about a deceased parrot, Alex, an African gray who was the subject of a 30-year psychology study. I had a friend who bought an African Grey for about $600 decades ago. He had heard that the African Greys could be taught to talk a lot. My friend lived in a lobby apartment in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. The bird didn't last too long, catching a cold by being too close to the drafty front door. It's too bad. A bird talking with a Brooklyn accent would have been unique.

The Times and other papers covered the memorial service that New Yorkers held for Flaco by what they thought was his favorite oak tree in Central Park. Poems were read, eulogies flowed, and flowers were placed at the base of the tree. 

Was Flaco just an owl who enjoyed his short-lived freedom flying around Manhattan, or was he something else, like a Chinese or a Russian drone outfitted with surveillance equipment by the perpetrator that set him free?

We all remember a Chinese spy balloon that was eventually shot down. Was Flaco the replacement? Did Flaco check out water supply sites by perching on water towers, of which there are many in Manhattan and report back? Fire escapes were another favorite perch of Flaco's—checking out escape routes for the population in case of an emergency.

Flaco was a living creature, not fiction. Living creatures meet with natural and unnatural ends. Take Superman. He flew all around Metropolis doing good deeds when needed.  Disguised as Clark Kent, a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, the Daily Planet, Clark as Superman shed his glasses, shoes and socks and suit in the men's room of the Daily Planet (or a phone booth—look it up if you don't know what that is.) and leaped out of a hallway window, cruising over the city until he got where the help was needed.

His colleague Lois Lane always suspected Clark was Superman, because Clark could never be found when Superman appeared. Why Lois, being a brassy chic with major cojones didn't just check the men's room was something I never understood, even as a kid. 

Superman was vulnerable to Kryptonite. It made him lose his powers and his x-ray vision. Mr. Renki points out that Flaco could have become poisoned by eating rodents infested with the poison meant to kill them. He could have also received lead poisoning from eating the pigeons he was fond of consuming to survive in the wild. If poisoned, he might have just lost his balance by compromised coordination.

When I heard of Flaco's death I thought for sure I was going to read they were going to taxiderm him and display him somewhere in the Central Park Zoo. That doesn't seem to be the case. Or maybe plans are still fluid and they'll create a statue. After all, Central Park has a statue of Balto, one of the lead huskies that traveled 674 miles in 1925 to deliver badly needed medical supplies to fight diphtheria during a blizzard in Alaska.

I miss Flaco, and I miss Superman. They both would have been able to fly over the gantries that hold the cameras that are going to soon impose congestion pricing on New York Manhattan drivers.

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The Succsesor

The skien has been broken. A centenarian has passed away and a NYT tribute obituary was not written by Robert McFadden, but rather by Margalit Fox.

To anyone who reads and follows the NYT tribute obituaries this is not a surprise. The day this would happen was always coming. Robert McFadden is 87 years old, but is still with the paper, having started there in 1961. He is the dean of the reporters on the obituary staff, winning a Pulitzer in 1996 for Spot Reporting.  He has written so many obituaries that his pre-written ones are aging in the obituary wine cellar called the morgue, waiting for the subjects to pass away and having the vintage opened.

The subjects in many of these pre-written obits have aged into being octogenarians, nonagenarians, and even centenarians. When some notable passes away at these advanced ages, it's almost a 1/5 cinch that the byline will be McFadden's.

I have no idea how close we are to depleting all the McFadden obits, but we might be getting close when the obit for 101-year-old Juli Lynne Charlot was uncorked from the cellar and poured onto Wednesday's front page, below the fold.

Margalit Fox is no longer with the paper, having left a few years ago to write books, one of which I read—the one about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle solving a crime like his creation Sherlock Holmes.

I know when there is a lull in writing pieces on deadline for deceased notables, the obituary desk writers are assigned to update, or start pre-written obits for notables who are still with us, saving time for when that subject does finally leave us. I know Margalit got these assignments.

On Monday we were treated to a McFadden obit on 102-year-old Iris Apfel, a fashion icon unto herself. And now a day later, we have the life of 101-year-old Juli Lynne Charlot, creator of the poodle skirt, celebrated in an obit written by Margalit Fox delivered to the front page table—below the fold—from the obit wine cellar.

Both writers have their distinctive styles, McFadden shoehorning in so many facts of the person's life into the lede you almost don't have to read any further, but you always do, because the stream is taking you over the rapids.

Margalit is a little more playful, and when she can will have a lede that doesn't start with the usual subject's name, comma beginning. She's as close to being like the now long deceased Robert McG. Thomas Jr .who didn't live long enough to leave a body of pre-written obits behind, but did rather leave a book full of ones written on deadline for some of the great characters and ordinary notables that ever walked the earth.

Ms. Fox, being Jewish herself, can get away with a lede for Juli Lynne Charlot that goes: "What's a nice Jewish girl viscountess to do when she has a title but no money, a party invitation but no clothes and a pair of scissors but no sewing skills?

"Invent the poodle skirt, of course."

Everything we see and use was created by someone. We just don't usually know who, and most often don't care. Thus, all Bobby Soxers on American Bandstand in the 50s twirling around in their poodle skirts and Penny Marshall as Laverne DeFazio in Laverne and Shirley who proudly flounced around in her poodle skirt with the large scripted L on the front, owe homage to Ms. Charlot, who in December 1947 cut a huge piece of white felt into a circle with an opening at the top to step through, sewed some appliqués of Christmas tress on the skirt to fit the theme for the Christmas party, and attached it to her waist. And just like that she was a hit and created a fashion industry. 

Ms. Fox sneaks in an alternate meaning of "paid" when she tells us; "by the height of the Swinging Sixties the miniskirt had put paid to the poodle." Huh? 

I am not often sent to the OED for a definition, but this one stumped me. But there is was, the third definition of the noun "pay," labelled "fig" for figuratively, with the definitions, "retaliation, penalty, retribution, punishment..."

Ms. Fox's kicker at the end is almost ruined by a photo and a caption, but she mentions a quote by Erma Bombeck who wrote in a 1984 column, "when I was a teenager, every girl in the Western world wore a poodle skirt."

In 1951 a 25-year-old woman went to a hoedown celebration in Ottawa at the home of Canada's governor general wearing "a steel blue circle skirt by Ms Charlot that was appliquéd with hearts, flowering branches and stylized figures of Romeo and Juliet."

The woman was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor who would be known the next year as Queen Elizabeth II.

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Iris Apfel

Robert McFadden's record for delivering tribute obituaries for the deceased who have lived passed 80, 90, and even 100 remains intact. Yesterday's print edition of the NYT delivers a six-column full color obit for Iris Apfel, 102, who passed away in Palm Beach, Florida.

This might be the first McFadden obit I've ever seen for a subject who was an eclectically dressed woman who was not a fashion designer, but rather a fashion design unto herself.

McFadden's lede is breathless: "a New York Society matron and interior designer who late in life knocked  the socks off the fashion world with a brash bohemian style that mixed hippie vintage and haute couture, found treasures in flea markets and reveled in contradictions..."

She did this wearing, seemingly all at once: "boxy multicolored Bill Blass jackets with tinted Hopi dancing skirts and hairy goatskin boots; fluffy evening coats of red and green rooster feathers with suede pants slashed to the knees, a rose angora sweater and a19th-century Chinese brocade panel skirt." And those were just some of the clothes. The accessories were another story.

I would have loved to have seen her on a NYC crosstown bus.

She may not have ridden a crosstown bus, but she was seen all over town. Her wardrobe was an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005. The request from the Met for her clothing collection to be shown surprised her. She thought you had to be dead to be the subject of a show at the Met.

She started as a trained interior designer. She was born as Iris Barrel in Astoria, Queens in 1921 and married Carl Apfel an advertising executive in 1948. He passed away in 2015 at 100. There were no children.

Together Iris and her husband formed a company called Old World Weavers that restored drapes at the White House for nine presidents, from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton.

She sold scarves, bangles and beads of her own design on the Home Shopping Network. And she wore what she sold. Her arms were weighed down with pounds of bracelets the size of "tricycles tires" and necklaces that went down to her knees. It's amazing she was able to stand up.

The Metropolitan show was titled "Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection." Rara Avis refers to "rare bird," and certainly her owlish eyeglasses were surely made all the better to see you with. She was Flaco the owl long before that ill-fated bird got out of his Central Park Zoo enclosure and flew around Manhattan for only a little more than a year.

I never saw Iris Apfel, and that's no surprise, because we surely traveled in vastly different circles. The only woman I ever saw that came close to being as eye catching was years ago when I saw an elderly woman by the Saks Fifth Avenue elevators on the main floor who was dressed mostly in black with a hat of some kind who had a bearing about her like Bette Davis. She was with some fashionably dressed younger woman who were not wearing all black. They no doubt were headed to a floor I wasn't going to.

Iris Apfel was indeed a rara avis.

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Apropos

 Apropos. 

What a great word. I don't think I've heard that word in decades, or even seen it in print until my good friend Melissa used it in a recent email: "It's so apropos because today is the one year anniversary..."

The word appropriate fits as a more common synonym; even the word suitable, but how much more pleasant sounding is the word apropos?

Of course it is French in origin, which makes it pleasant sounding. Apropos should be part of a Lerner and Lowe lyric in Camelot for Robert Goulet to sing as Lancelot. "C'est moi...It's apropos I slay my foe..."

The OED tells us it can be an adverb, adjective, noun, or preposition. The first definition offered is as an adverb, meaning to the point, fittingly, opportunely; as an adjective: pertinent, appropriate, opportune; as a noun: an opportune or pertinent occurrence; as a preposition: concerning with regard to.

I guess as a preposition it never caught on to be used in legal documents, or we would have heard it more often: "...as it concerns apropos to the first party..."

For any word to gain traction it has to be uttered on the news, Saturday Night Live, or coming from a political candidate or a sports figure uttering a sound byte. Without that exposure the word will never make a weekly shake down by Ben Zimmer in the Wall Street Journal weekend edition. who this week treats us to a dissertation on "hurkle-durkle, which apparently means loitering in bed in Scotland or on Tik Tok.

I just don't think that's apropos to anything I've been hearing.

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