They Already Made this Movie

Art imitates life, and vice versa. But what about when life imitates life?

The 2018 movie The Old Man & the Gun tells the story of Forrest Tucker, a gentleman bank robber who cannot seem to stop robbing banks, not with violence or safe cracking, but with kindness and a smile, and just a small display of the large handgun in his waistband. No one ever gets hurt, except the bank's balance, and the take is generally small, only being what a teller or bank manager can manage to stuff in the bag.

Forrest is obviously old, and therefore disarming. The earpiece he wears is taken for a hearing aid, but is really a radio tuned to the police band, alerting him to how soon the cops are going to get there  His escape is well planned, with another stolen car planted somewhere that he drives the initial getaway car to. He sometimes has partners. In one year, they knocked over 60 banks. That's quite a weekly average.

The movie is delightful, produced by Robert Redford, who also plays Forrest. Forrest, has been caught over the course of his decades of crime, but he's also managed to escape from San Quentin and remain on the loose. Surely no small achievement. The real Forrest Tucker died in prison in 2004 after being sentenced at 78 years-of-age and sentenced for the last time in 1999. The movie is based on a 2003 New Yorker story by David Grann.

The movie of course is art imitating life. It adheres very closely to Forrest's story. And now we have life imitating life, with the capture of an octogenarian cat thief responsible for decades of apartment heists where tens of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry was transferred to a new owner.

Sam Sabatino, 82 has walked past his last doorman and taken his last elevator ride to the penthouse and gotten into his last apartment to fill his black bag with tens of thousands of dollars of watches and jewelry, all because the last doorman he tried to slip past knew a cousin named Suarez was not a building resident.

For decades, Mr. Sabatino has been guilelessly cruising past doormen, following tenants back into their apartment house lobby by chatting them up about their dog (In Manhattan, people love it when you talk to them about their dog.) Mr. Sabatino would then take an elevator to a floor and look for signs that someone might be away on the particularly holiday weekend he has targeted, generally Memorial Day, Fourth of July, or Labor Day weekends. He also worked other cities besides New York, doing his thing in California, Pennsylvania and Arizona. You repeat what works, and for Mr. Sabatino, all this worked fine.

Mr. Sabatino was finally arrested when he came back out of a high-rise Manhattan apartment house when the doorman met him at the elevator and told Mr. Sabatino, that there is no cousin of his named "Suarez" living in the building. Mr. Sabatino was met on the sidewalk with an empty black bag and was arrested by the police.

There was no disclosure on how the police came upon his alias, and thus the car that was registered to the alias. But anyone who's watched even a sliver of television cop shows—American or British— knows there was a BIG white board in a precinct somewhere covered in photos and arrows helping the detectives track Sam's movements.

It was not by chance that he was met by the police as he emerged from a target building and was arrested. He was sought for years and years after jumping bail after a string of robberies and arrests. Mr. Sabatino's bail jumping got lost in the system, and allowed him to keep up his burglaries.

His alias was known, James Clement, and his car was tagged with a GPS tracking system. Thus the police knew he was in New York on the recent Labor Day weekend.

The police say Mr. Sabatino would try various doorknobs on various floors in buildings he gained access to, looking for ones that opened. Signs of being away, newspapers at the door, or packages, were the obvious clues that someone was probably away. The rest was easy.

And this is where not everything seems to be told; by the police, and by the reporters. People in Manhattan who might have untold riches inside didn't lock their doors? No mention is made of burglary tools. Finding that many doors unlocked just seems implausible.

I once got a peek at an insurance agents rate sheet for insuring jewelry in the metropolitan area. The insurer might have been Metropolitan, but that doesn't matter. It clearly showed various rates per thousand dollars of insured to be widely different depending on the insured's location. Manhattan, to my surprise, had by far the lowest rate.

I didn't ask why, but my thinking was that with high-rise living, the only way in is generally through the door. After the first floor, windows are out. And access to that door is probably protected with double, or even triple locks. And then there is the doorman and the CCTV surveillance cameras. Burglary just might not be the thing in Manhattan luxury buildings. Or, at least it would seem.

Nevertheless, our Man Sam got in like Flynn and made a livelihood stealing, and I'm sure fencing jewelry. When the police reached his daughter in Florida she shrieked into phone, "But he's 81." The newspaper account has him at 82, so Trina, given the news, just can't do the math in her head that fast, or, she missed the old guy's birthday. No matter now. Bail has been set at $1 million because he's a flight risk.

Thanksgiving dinner just might be somewhere else this year.

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Serendipity

Looking for one thing and finding something else that you didn't know you had, but were just thinking about, is the best.

When I read Gerry Murray's obit there was an outtake from something Gay Talese had written about Gerry in 1958. When I read that, I thought, I'd like to read the whole thing of where that outtake came from. Then I forgot about it.

I have books and magazines on my nightstand. Perhaps unlike how other people have books on their nightstands. My nightstand is a bookcase on its own. The truth is, I have no room to build another bookcase. So I stack.

And in that stack was a collection of garden magazines that I now want to give to my daughter Susan who just bought a house with her husband. Almost still newlyweds. She plans to be an ardent gardener.

Spine out, "The Silent Season of a Hero" by Gay Talese, a collection of his sports writing. Inside are essays on sports and sport figures. Length varies greatly. Did Gay include anything in there about Gerry Murray, a Roller Derby Queen? He certainly did.

"It's a Wonderful Whirl to Gerry," page 55. A short piece written in 1958 when was 26. (He's now 87 and still with us.) As much of the NYT as I've read, I have to admit I wasn't reading it in grammar school, which is when his piece on Gerry appeared. But there in the second paragraph is the outtake Richard Sandomir took to describe Gerry and I put in my prior posting on Ms. Murray.

But in the elegant Talese piece, there are many more nuggets that describe Gerry and the world of Roller Derby as it existed in 1958.

The setting is the 9th Regiment Armory in NYC, located on West 14th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. The armory was demolished in 1969, like other armories in the city. There used to be a 71st Regiment armory on Park Avenue at 34th Street, where I went to many stamp shows as a kid. and had high school track workouts on the drill floor. The school's rifle team also used the shooting range there. I tried out for that team as well, but didn't make it. That armory was torn down in the '60s as well, and the site is now occupied by an office building, 3 Park Avenue, where the company I worked for had office space.

Gay's first paragraph could have been used as well to describe Gerry: "a curvsome woman pushing 40 with the gentility of a waterfront bouncer, elbowed and bumped the New York Chiefs to a 21-17 triumph over the Chicago Westerns in the opening of the roller derby season..."

Gay describes how the scoring works: "to score, a player must circle the entire field and then pass a member of the opposing team." This lead skater is called the "jammer" and they wear a helmet that identifies them as such. Each team on the track has five skaters, drawn from the 16 players on a team—eight men and eight women. The match alternates the men and women on the track.

The popularity of the sport in 1958 is acknowledged, having been built up by nearly a decade of televised matches. That would put Roller Derby right up there with Milton Berle, when TVs came into homes in the early '50s. I never remember watching Roller Derby at that early an age, but I did see it still on television when I was a teenager.

Gay recognizes the warm spot the crowd of 2,380 has for Gerry, the star of the evening. "I skate because there's action," Gerry says. "As a girl back in Iowa I played with the boys and I never read cookbooks. I played softball with the boys and I guess I was a tomboy."

On that evening, Gerry's 17 year-old-son, Mike Gammon, competed. The step-father Gene Gammon also competes for the Chiefs.  Mike has been on skates since he was two. If Roller Derby were to get a boost, it might be an Olympic Sport, given what now becomes an Olympic sport. "Ultimate," a Frisbee  (flying disc) throwing game is trying for inclusion. It's "a mixed gender sport" Hmm. Sounds like Roller Derby.

Talese can't help but recognize the crowd's demographic, "because of the dramatic appeal, more than half of last night's audience were young girls. between 16 and 19, many of of them pony-tailed and noisy."

"We like the game for the speed," says Pat Cotter, 20, of Queens. "There's action," explained Terry Scarpati, 20.

"This is one sport where women feel needed," said Pat Dillon, a television actress and the wife of James A. Farley Jr,* the owner of the Chiefs.

Robert Lipsyte in 1971 recognized the appeal of Roller Derby to women. The young ladies in the crowd that Gay Talese writes about are now grandmothers to the audience at Taylor Swift concerts, and probably just as noisy.

As the world turns, so does Roller Derby.
-----------------------------------------------------
*Mr. Farley passed away in 1986 at 58 from complications of heart-bypass surgery, and unmentioned in Mr. Talese's piece is that he was the son of the former Postmaster General,  James A. Farley. James Jr. was on the New York State Athletic Commission, as was once his father. The Farleys were huge in the Democratic Party, the father being FDR's Postmaster General and the national chairman of the Democratic Party (and the originator of a special series of stamps that became known as the "Farley Issues.")

The main post office in Manhattan is known as Farley Station, and when it finally become an Amtrak railroad station (perhaps before I pass away) it will be known as Moynihan Station, in deference to New York's Senator Patrick Moynihan who allocated funds for the conversion a lifetime ago, himself passing away in 2003.

†Somehow in the Twitter world I came across @janesports, a young woman whose profile reads:
Director Marist's Center for Sport Communication, New York Daily News sports columnist. Also Roller Derby, ESPN, The Journal News, Columbia J-School.
(Since she obviously went to college, Jimmy Breslin would have understood if she used semicolons.)

Roller Derby! That stood out. Until I read Ms. Murray's obituary, Roller Derby was waaay back there in my memory. And here's someone who is obviously into sports, and whose whose Twitter feeds are almost a play-by-play for the now concluded U.S. Open, listing Roller Derby in their profile!

Jane lists Roller Derby! Did Jane make a Tweet of Gerry Murray's passing? No. Perhaps she's not into reading obituaries, despite her news background.

Was Jane's mother/grandmother in the crowd at the 9th Regiment Armory when Gerry was kicking ass and taking no prisoners? I'd love to know.

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The Sky Above

Anyone who lives long enough will always mark the passage of time with some reference to a major event in their lives. My parents would always remember where they were when Pearl Harbor was bombed. My high school classmates will at any reunion I've been to discuss when we were released early on November 22, 1963, not yet knowing the president had been shot.

And so it goes. I'm sure there are those younger than myself that might remember when they heard the news that John Lennon had been shot. It's usually an act of violence that etches itself in our memories, and 9/11 is right up there.

In this weekend's edition of the WSJ Tanku Varadarajan reviews two books, Garrett M. Graff's "The Only Plane in the Sky," along with "Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11" by Mitchell Zuckoff. It's 9/11 season. The 18th anniversary is just days away.

I remember Mr. Varadarajan's byline in the WSJ years ago. He is now an executive editor at Stanford University's Hoover Institute. He has a way with words.

He opens his book reviews with a  lede that tells us the professional weather people called the sky that day "severe clear." To me, that's like saying "you're awfully nice." but I'll go with it. I never heard "severe clear" before..

Mr Graff's book is described as containing an oral history of the day, as told in 64 slim chapters. It sounds like a "Portraits of Grief" spoken by the soon to be victims of the attacks, as well as by those who survived the attacks.

Mr. Varadarajan calls them "curated" stories, assembled for the future adults. He tells us the incoming college freshman of 2019  were not even alive when the planes hit.

One of my daughters who is an Associate Professor at Hofstra, is well of aware of the continuum of time that keeps putting faces in front of her her were born x-plus years after her.

Mr. Varadarajan tells us in Mr. Graff's book how people describe the sky: "a gorgeous blue;" "deep blue;" "deep, deep, blue;" "cobalt blue;" "cerulean blue;" "the bluest of blues;"  They're all good descriptions, and accurate, but after coming out of Tower One from the 29th floor I 've just always called the sky, "the 9/11 sky."

There had been a heavy rain storm the night before 9/11. And like any day after a storm, the weather is beautiful.The Yankee game had been rained out. I mentioned this to someone from Legal who I met on the stairs who I knew was huge Yankee fan, as we made our way down the stairs, as the fireman were making their way up the stairs; one lane in each direction.

Particularly at this time of the year, as fall starts to settle in here in New York, I look up at what might be a clear blue sky. I judge it's blueness, its cloudlessness, and rank it with the 9/11 sky. Only the other day coming back from the store there was a morning sky so close to the 9/11 sky that I looked at my watch and remembered where I was at that time on September 11, 2001. Because as anyone who was as close to the events of the day as I was—and the estimate is there were 25,000 people in the two towers, not to mention the other surrounding buildings in the area—you remember everything about that day.

Mr. Graff did his research, and constructed his oral history from recordings of the victims, to interviews with the survivors. I don't feel bad be never reached me. Anonymity has its perks.

I remember going to work that day, wearing a somewhat new sport coat and thinking about our New Assistant Vice President, John Harrison, who had just started the day before, Monday, coming to us from Horizon Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Newark.

But my 9/11 was just the beginning of another reference point in my life, September 16, 2002, when that same John Harrison, a person I had grown to dislike and was very wary of, became the assassin of my co-worker Isabel Munoz and my manager Vinnie LaBianca, before thankfully taking his own life in his office right next to where I was sitting, in our temporary location necessitated by the collapse of our workplace.

You won't read about that from me, but you might follow the link to the NYT story that was almost tucked away in the second section, albeit the front page of Section B. I'll only say that the speculations of a love triangle are completely off the wall. John Harrison was an arrogant, misogynist man who held a grudge at not having his advances reciprocated. He was also a man jealous of his manger's popularity.

There are many things I remember about 9/11. And the color of the sky is just the beginning.

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Round and Round They Go

I had a small pile of newspaper clippings that needed trimming and dating. With so much online access to archives, it seems I might be clipping less these days. But I still do it because the tactile touch seems to bring back more memories.

I didn't fully think of a posting when I read that Gerry Murray a "Speedy Skater and Stalwart Star of Roller Derby" passed away at 98.

The obit was in the NYT on August 20 and written by Richard Sandomir. Since Mr. Sandomir is fairly new to the obits desk, my guess is the piece was written on deadline. Anyone who passes away at 98 is usually is sent off with an updated advance obit that is generally written by Robert McFadden, Margalit Fox, or Bruce Weber. No matter.

Gerry is a woman who started skating in the Roller Derby as far back as the late '30s. It occurred to me, and probably Mr. Sandomir, that there is likely a very huge segment of the population that knows nothing about Roller Derby. Maybe they've heard Jim Croce's song "Roller Derby Queen," but probably have no idea what the sport looked like. And it was sport, with teams comprised of males and females, skating separately, but on the same team nonetheless. In that sense, Roller Derby was waaaay ahead of any movement that  exists today.

As with almost any obituary I read, I come away knowing something I didn't know before. In this case, there is a children's book that came out in 2014, "Roller Derby Rules" that depicts the on-track rivalry between Gerry Murray and Midge (Toughie) Brasuhn.

I was looking for a sport-themed children's book for my 8-year-old granddaughter who definitely shows signs of being competitive, if not somewhat aggressive, when  as early as 4-years-old she told some older kid who wanted her to get off the swing that, "No, I was here first. Wait your turn." Schoolyard rules learned and applied early. Roller Derby with an elbow in the ribs might just be the sport she'll be looking for.

Turns out Gerry and Toughie were enemies on the track, but friends off the track, even though Toughie once sent Gerry flying into the rail giving her a serious leg injury. Roller Derby, much like hockey, permitted fighting, even encouraged it for crowd appeal. And like hockey, it was penalized. There were actually penalty boxes the skaters could be sent to, a three-side cardboard enclosure with a stool in the middle of the rink. Roller Derby might have been a bit hokey with a wrestling atmosphere, but the fans loved it.

Roller Derby came to Madison Square Garden in 1971, playing to a packed house that already knew everything about the sport from the broadcasts on Channel 9. I was there, and so was Robert Lipsyte, a NYT sports reporter who wrote a piece in the Sports of the Times column the Thursday after the Sunday afternoon event.

Lipsyte was one of my favorite sports writers. You never really knew what angle he was going to take. Perhaps he was a "Gonzo" journalist, but that doesn't matter. His take on Sunday's event had nothing to do about the teams that were competing, or even the score. There is only one skater's name mentioned, and it's Mike Gammon, who is mentioned as being as being Gerry' son, a then-current star who even skated with his mother on the same team when he was a teenager.

Bob spins a beautiful column that is more about the psyche of the crowd—"that screamed and jumped without stop"—than the sport. He theorizes that women (there were plenty in the crowd) love the sport because they can show aggression.

In an exchange with Jerry Seltzer, the son of the founder of Roller Derby, Leo, Bob adds his interpretation to the story that Jerry tells of the wife of an executive, suffering from tension and sleepless nights who was able to stop seeing her psychiatrist after watching the matches from her box seats for a year.

Bob: "Are you saying Roller Derby is a sexual experience for women?"

That was Lipsyte. Reading him was like playing golf in your bathroom: you never knew where the ball was going to come from.

Laugh, but Lipsyte was more right than sexist. Gerry Murray is quoted in her obit as admitting that as a female who was shy and athletic..."the kid wakes up and learns it's great to bounce, people off their feet and onto their heads." All the things you'd like to do in the subway, but would probably get arrested for. No wonder the Garden was filled that Sunday afternoon.

I of course saved Bob's piece. Re-reading it he tells of how the portable track was placed in the center, over the covered ice for Ranger games. The cold popped screws out of the assembly. But they were fixed, and the match proceeded.

Being a Rangers season ticket holder at the time and someone who just about got their mail at the Garden, it occurred to me how small the track looked, seemingly not much bigger than the center ice face-off circle.

A banked track is a doozy to skate on. I never got the opportunity, but an older fellow we played Roller hockey with, Tony (older: wife, two kids), who was a smooth skater in the schoolyard, told us of trying out for the Roller Derby and falling flat on his ass. He didn't make it. Couldn't handle the banked track. Armories were generally where matches and tryouts were held.

Gerry told the story of trying out on the banked track at a fairgrounds and didn't believe she could ever get good enough to compete on it, did, with encouragement, get good enough to become a star on the circuit.

In Flushing, there was neighbor across the street whose son I used to play with, who told me his mother tried out for the Roller Derby. She didn't make it, but she had the right name: Dorothy, known as Dottie. The Roller Derby was filled with women named "Dottie, Joanie, Shirley, Wanda, and like wrestling, they generally had nicknames.

The names I remember most are Charlie O'Connell, Joanie Weston and Ronnie Robinson, the son of the champion boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. Roller Derby was big in the '70s, even seeing Raquel Welch in a movie, Kansas City Bomber. Raquel is perfectly casted. Gerry Murray had red hair as well.

Serious people wrote about the sport, even as far back as 1958, where Richard Sandomir in Gerry's obit quotes from a piece by Gay Talese of the NYT describing Gerry:

"a female terror swishing around the track at 30 miles an hour, hipping her opponents, zigzagging recklessly, her red hair, tied in a ribbon, winging along behind her."

Frank Deford had a book in 1971, "Five Strides on the Banked Track." There was a documentary,  "Derby." I saw that documentary in the theater. Charlie O'Connell stands in Madison Square Park (23rd Street, Flatiron district) and points to the pond's iron-fenced oval that he skated around as a kid. He tells us that is where it all started for him.

The pond is still there, and whenever I go by it I see the iron fence that is no longer there and think of the Roller Derby. I can see why someone would skate in circles around it. But the kids are in the fenced in playground, dedicated to a deceased female police officer who died in 9/11. Kids still play.

I remember how the match ended that Sunday, between the two teams whose names I can't remember—Bombers-something for sure—when the "home" team was behind and miraculously won when all the team members squirted through the "picket fence" defense, ducked down low on the inside, and scored the winning points.  We win! We win!

The ending had all the makings of something that was fixed. Lipsyte writes:

[The press] were surprised to find themselves lifted out of our seats, as if by overhead magnets, in the closing moments of the Roller Derby.

But the crowd loved it. Robert Lipsyte was right.

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A Life of Firsts

Yesterday was the first day of school for the kids in the district I now live in. It has no bearing on my wife and I anymore since our girls are quite grown, out of the house, married, one with two daughters.

Yesterday was the first day for the youngest of the granddaughters, Olivia, who started third grade. My daughter cannot believe Olivia is going to be eight in a few days. It does seem remarkable. The other granddaughter, Emma, starts seventh grade today.

We got a picture of Olivia in front of the house with her backpack in front of her. The backpack looks nearly as big as her. It looks heavy. Of course you can't see in it, but it looks like it is filled with bricks. What the hell do you take to school on your first day? Shouldn't be books. You get those on your first day, no? Maybe lunch. Or maybe they need the backpack to bring stuff home? I have no idea.

Of course neither my wife or went to school with a backpack. When Obama became president I was convinced we were then going to see presidents from here on it who went to school with backpacks. It's going to be impossible to elect a candidate who is so old they didn't go to school with a backpack. Right? Then along came Trump, who is just a little bit older than myself. So much for the backpack theory.

Olivia was smiling, and looks completely ready for her first day. Aside from the backpack observation, it was plain the see she was wearing shorts. She goes to a public school, and not a public chartered school either. "They can wear shorts to school." Yep. Not much of a dress code other than you shouldn't arrive naked.

My wife went through her education in Catholic schools, so she always wore a uniform. I went to public schools (aside from a stint in Greek school where I too wore a uniform) and never wore shorts. The girls in the photo of my second grade class are all in dresses.

Aside from the backpack and the shorts, I started to think if I remember any of my first days at school—any grade? Nope. Even college, I can't remember the order of the classes on my first day.

And I got a chance to have two first days of college since I dropped out of the first one and enrolled in New York's City College, CUNY.

I don't remember the first class I went to there, either. But I do remember delaying my attendance to the point that I showed up for what might have been the third session of the French class I was supposed to be in. I can still remember handing the instructor my admittance card and her annoyance that I was just now showing up.

I took my seat in one of those tiered seating classrooms and listened to everyone talking French. I had to take a language. I had already taken five years to complete three years of French in grammar, and high school, and now realized I was thoroughly not ready to go through that crap again. I never went back to the class, and soon after after added CUNY to the list of places of higher education that I dropped out of. (The count remained at two.)

The point is, I have absolutely no memory of any first day of school. There is one photo of myself and a few other neighborhood  kids standing at the curb just next to a school bus door. We were being bused to kindergarten, since the school we could walk to had too many kids in kindergarten. It was a post-war baby boom.

I don't even know if it was a first day, or not. My mother didn't write on the back of the photo, and I think I only remember one of the kids. We were standing there with our names on a card that was hung from our necks with yarn. The bus driver needed to know who got off where, since we probably had no clue.

I do distinctly remember my first day of work at the company I took a job with, the third company I started with after my exposure to higher education.  That one has stayed with me, perhaps because when I was directed where to hang my coat up, and seeing the rack was filled, I wisecracked to the secretary, "Is everyone in today because it's payday?"

Turns out it wasn't. The secretary explained that Friday is the start of the pay cycle, and all new employees start on Friday. It was great to have a first day immediately prior to a weekend.

I'm so old now I can't remember any first days of school at any level, only the start of the third place of employment. I stayed with that company 36 years, so it was a long time before I had another first day on the job. And I do remember that one. And the first day of the next job. I remember the last days as well.

We are born on our first day. We've been living a series of first days for quite a while.

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Covfefe

Covfefe is the name of a fairly accomplished thoroughbred. It is also a "word" invented by President Trump, that due to his propensity to Tweet, has seen the enshrinement of  the combination of 7 letters into what is seen as the downfall of the English language. Oh my.

What President Trump's Tweets have accomplished is full-time employment and enjoyment for those who love to laugh at someone's gaffes. And quite frankly, the president is, if he is nothing else, entertaining.

Sarah Lyall of the NYT in a recent piece, 'Trump's Twitter War on Spelling,' about President Trump's Twitter style and his seemingly obliviousness of even rudimentary rules of usage. It's a decent to-date collection.

The president has used "their" instead of "they're." I remember when in second or third grade the teacher wrote the three forms on the blackboard: there; their; they're.

Yes, when I went to school it was a slate blackboard, written on with chalk, and wiped clean with a felt eraser that required the favorite student to "clap" two together when the teacher wanted to rid the felt of the accumulated chalk dust. Nowadays it's a whiteboard, written on with colorful markers and erased with some kind of solvent, or dry eraser. Chalk dust now would be seen as an environmental hazard that would easily close the building for a month while the contractors vacuumed the air. It would be that or wear surgical masks. But as usual, I've jumped the track.

At this early age when Eisenhower was president and Nixon was his vice president, we were instructed on these three forms, they're, their, and there; how they differed and how to use them properly.

We also learned the difference between its and it's and you and you're. We learned that contractions, like it's were written in place of it is; you're in place of you are. The use of the apostrophe was there to alert us that something has been subtracted, eliminated.

And of course the bugaboos, two, to and too can always be counted on to be misused. I've educated a few email writers on the correct usage. They've been thankful.

I've received email from educated adults—albeit younger than myself—who misuse the variations. The Millenials on their cell phone have effectively flattened the you're/your dichotomy by just typing ur, which of course when you say it, doesn't require you to spell it. Perhaps they are onto something.

Of course The Times loves anything disparaging about President Trump. Ms. Lyall's piece got front page placement yesterday, A1, Sunday, September 1st.

And of course there is a fair litany of presidential Tweets that are head scratchers. Presidents after leaving office publish memoirs. I've often wondered, since the Tweets are transmitted through the Internet, are they in the public domain? Could an adventurous publisher collect all of them and put out a stocking-stuffer book? I mean, Chairman Mao had his little red book; The Donald can have his utterances memorialized in traditional print.

Aside from recapping the president's greatest gaffes to date, Ms. Lyall rolls out the quotes from the language experts, those with all the right credentials and books to comment on the president's baffling "style."

One such expert, Bryan A. Garner, the author of "Garner's Modern English Usage." goes so far to propose a Federal job that could pay $75,000 a year for someone to be a Presidential Proofreader. Already on Twitter there are those who feel this is waaay too little compensation for having anything to do with the president. (I would think with health insurance, the salary and some other perks, it might just be right.)

Other credentialed names and their curriculum vitae are presented to the court of public opinion to convince us (as if it were needed) that the president might not just be harmful to NATO and the environment, but to the English language as we know it today. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

And Trump is not the only whose gaffes are mentioned. Clinton, George Bush, and of course the famous Dan Quayle spelling of potato as potatoe. Everyone laughed at Christopher Columbus, and that one.

The vice president was also chastised for his mailbox that apparently proclaimed it belonged to "The Quayle's." I forgive anyone who blows the correct way to use an apostrophe, Sure it should just be "The Quayles" but my oldest daughter two years ago sent out her Christmas cards signed "The O' Connor's." (She heard from me, my wife, and her sister.)

But while potato got the biggest laughs I still have to take exception to it being considered wrong that potato can be spelled potatoe. Again, back in the Eisenhower, black and white era, I distinctly remember we were allowed to spell potato potatoe, with that trailing e that everyone laughed at. My wife remembers as well.

And judgment. Does anyone remember when judgment had to be spelled with no e between the g and the m? Now it's either way which doesn't seem fair since I've invested a part of my memory that clings to judgment as being the only correct spelling. 'The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage' agrees with me.

If the president were to never Tweet again, his offering of the 7 letter combination of letters that "spells" Covfefe will be his everlasting legacy. It's equivalent to Orson Wells and the word "Rosebud" in 'Citizen Kane'.

No one knows what the hell he was saying there. My first thought was that he transcribed some lettering from that block of granite, Kryptos, that sits in front of the CIA that has all sorts of characters on it. Code. The challenge being for someone to crack it. Attempts have been made, and cipher experts have gotten close, but then the agency announced the stone cutter made a typo, thus invalidating codebreakers' efforts so far. Imagine: "Not Calais, Normandy" being mixed up by the Allies. Oh boy.

Thoroughbred owners and breeders love a good pun, or a play on words that combines spelling features from the foal's sire, mare and even their sires and mare.

Thus we got American Pharoah,[sic](Trump's not the only one who can't spell) the 2015 winner of the Triple Crown, from Pioneer of the Nile. A list of examples can go on and on.

But say it's 2016 and the mating of the sire Into Mischief with the mare Antics, herself from the sire Unbridled, presented you with a healthy foal that needs a name to be registered with the Jockey Club.

And say President Trumps plays stump-the-world with the offering that Covfefe is a word. Wouldn't it be a hoot to name a horse Covfefe? It sure would be.

Turns out Covfefe is not just any thoroughbred, but a rather good thoroughbred, who had won races at the highest level of competition, Grade 1, not once, but twice, earning  $483,300 to date.

The president, always quick to bristle at his critics, tells us in Ms. Lyall's piece, "After having written many best selling books, and somewhat priding myself on my ability to write, it should be noted that the Fake News constantly likes to pour over my tweets looking for a mistake."

Ms. Lyall points out he's dangled a modifier and misspelled a four-letter word, all in the course of a single sentence.

"Written best selling books..." Who is he kidding? A small cadre of writers, copy editors, and proofreaders helped produce anything that came out with his name on it as the author. This troop of people can be referred to as ghost writers, and for good reason. Their names do not appear anywhere near the title.

I can spot the misspelled, or rather misused version of the word pore. As for the "dangling modifier," I'm ls lost as The Donald. If it were a split infinitive, I'd be lost as well.

I just finished the book 'Colon' by Cecelia Watson and wrote about it in the prior posting. One of Ms. Watson's last footnotes related the story of being in Grand Central Terminal, feeling very thirsty and very frustrated from a lengthy conference, and ordering "two gins and tonic" from the bartender before getting on the train to New Haven (to Yale, of course).

This cause puzzlement on the bartender's part, and they needed clarification from Ms. Watson on what her drink order really was. Quite honestly, I would too.

The server offered "two gin and tonics" as the solution to the perceived misspeak.This frustrated Ms. Watson, who eventually got her drink order as she assented and told the bartender, "Sure. The gin is more important to me than the tonic" rather than try and educate the server on the pluralization rule.

This confuses me. Did the server then give her two separate gin and tonics—one for her and one for the assumed person she is probably getting one for as well—or, did she really want a "double" gin and tonic, two pours of the gin with one part tonic, in a single cup? Since her conference was stressful, I go with the "double." And of course gin, since Ms. Watson is British.

President Trump doesn't drink, so there's little chance his drink order will be open to interpretation. But with a "pluralization rule"* on the books, what if he's Tweeting North Korea's Kim Jong-un about missiles? One big one, or two little ones?

Jesus, we're fucked.

*I have no idea what the rule is. Alert reader please help.

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Semicolon

After being introduced to the seminal best seller and advice book, 'Elements of Style' by William Strunk and E.B. White, perhaps the New Testament of  style and punctuation advice, I've come across Lynne Truss's, 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves, The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation'; Mary Norris's 'Between You & Me; Confessions of a Comma Queen'; Simon Griffin's 'Fucking Apostrophes'; and Benjamin Dreyer's  'Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style '. Add to this 'The  Chicago Manual of Style' and the New York Times 'Manual of Style and Usage', and you might wonder how I still manage to commit grammatical solecisms. I'm not.

So, did I really need to buy Cecelia Watson's treatise on the semicolon, titled quite simply, 'Semicolon, The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark'? You  betcha.

I like to think if Robin Williams were still alive he'd comment; 'Semicolon, what's left after major abdominal surgery." I guess I'll have to say it  for him.

Ms. Watson appropriately takes us back to the "invention" of the semicolon, hard as it is to believe that a punctuation mark can have an invented origin. It started in Venice, 1494, and was concocted by Aldus Manutius, a printer and publisher, who believed something was needed between the pause of a comma and the full stop of a period. Thus, the hybrid mark was born. Never really thought of it that way. "Hey you, almost a period."

Little did Aldus know, but he was instrumental in creating the alphabet for Millennials. The semicolon gets more use in making faces than gracing sentences. Especially when "Sent from my phone" appears in the message.

Ms. Watson is obviously scholarly. She has an under grad degree from St. John's College (Cambridge) and an M.A. and Ph.D from the University of Chicago. She has taught at Bard College.

'Semicolon' is bit hard to read. It's not a funny romp across the keyboard. It's filled with footnotes, some of which wrap around to the next page. The book, I think, is purposely small and designed to be somewhat in size to 'Elements of Style'.

Amazingly, punctuation has humorously played a role in enforcing early turn-of-20th-century liquor laws in Massachusetts, and not so humorously in someone being sentenced to death. Boy, there's a typo with a punch.

It is a jacketless hardcover, colorfully designed using an overlapping series of semicolons. There are illustrations, using what would appear to be images created by woodcuts.

Despite being a bit difficult to absorb the text and the footnotes, there are some terrific nuggets inside. Did anyone know there was once a rhetorical question mark?

The rhetorical question mark, punctus percontativus,  Latin of course for percontation, was a product of the zeal in 16th century Europe to introduce more punctuation marks. It was developed by Henry Denham and was written as a reverse question mark to be used when the sentence does not require an answer.

Thank God its use died out. Can you imagine having to try and find that one on your iPhone? I never took Spanish, but I know they still start a sentence that is a question with an upside down question mark in order to notify the reader that a question is being asked. I always thought this was a bit silly, as well as awkward to write an upside character. Are you talking to me?

Writers are inherently rebels, so there should be no surprise that Mark Twain would get pissed off at proofreaders and copy editors when he submitted his manuscripts.

Ms. Watson, a thorough scholar who spent 10 years diving into ancient grammar books tells us:

Mark Twain, famously defensive of his right to punctuate exactly how he wanted to, purportedly grew weary of  criticism of his sometimes unconventional choices and published a piece pf writing that was wholly without punctuation marks, but with a string of commas, semicolons, and other marks at  the bottom of the text, along with a note telling the reader to put them where he or she pleased..."

Imagine that. A manuscript from Ikea.

He also famously wrote a threat to his printer about his proofreader.

"Yesterday Mr. Hall wrote that the printer's proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me & I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray."

And lest you think that's just a grumpy old man in a white suit in the 19th century who has a familiarity with firearms, consider what I once read in reply to a letter I wrote to Russell Baker when it seemed the NYT had embarked on a style policy of eliminating the hyphen from hyphenated words, making one long awkward looking spelling.

The letter is from 2001 and sits framed next to this computer.

I surrendered to hyphen idiocy years ago before I left the Times...they're a product of internetaddresstalk.gabble...When one of these appears I think you can be excused for shooting on sight without asking questions.

Ms. Watson claims her affinity for paying attention to punctuation and making a career out of the historical study of language, began when she was young and got "embarrassingly loud hiccups on a school field trip when I was 12 years old because poor grammar on a sign at a national park offended and shocked my constitution on such a visceral level I could hear the crack of an infinitive splitting from miles off." She surely grew up different than most children,

She reveals in a footnote the faux pas was "an errant apostrophe making an its into an it's. Imagine mummy and daddy getting a call from the chaperone that poor Cecelia has been stricken with what...punctuationitis? and is resting comfortably in the nurse's office. Some kids just scrape their knees. Poor mummy and daddy.

Russell Baker, like many writers, feels there is a need to punctuate. At least loosely. In 2006 in a weekend piece for the NYT,  he wrote quite elegantly, "when you write, you make a sound in he reader's head. It can be a dull mumble—that's why so much government prose makes you sleepy—or it can be a joyful noise, a sly whisper, a throb of passion...One of the most important tools for making paper speak in your own voice is punctuation."

And Ms. Watson as much tells us this in that the use of a semicolon is related to style, an author's style of writing.

Samples from several writers are used to illustrate the author's use of this most elusive of punctuation marks. There are writers like Kurt Vonnegut who claimed its use just showed "you went to college." I think Benjamin Dreyer tells us he wouldn't be caught dead using them because they are ambivalent. They are meant to join two independent clauses. They are meant to join two sentences. Which is it? The hell with it.

Certainly you can get through life without ever using a semicolon, but perhaps not after reading Ms. Watson. A recent book review in the Wall Street Journal by Barton Swaim on Ms. Watson's book tells us of his liking to use semicolons so much that the books editor "of this newspaper once asked me if I buy my semicolons individually or by the boxful."

Certainly Herman Melville unloaded semicolons from a clipper ship. I remember reading 'Moby-Dick' twice, once as a high school assignment, and then once more after high school. The semicolons must have made a huge impression on me because when I handed an audit report in to my manager I apparently used so many semicolons that she remarked, "what's with all the semicolons?" I smugly thought to myself, hell, she didn't read 'Moby-Dick', did she?

Ms. Watson writes of Melville at some length, and tells us there are some "four thousand-odd semicolons, sturdy little nails holding narrative thread spread out wide enough to comprehend not just a whale but everything the whale comes to mean to the men hunting it."

Cecelia's not so bad herself at using the colon, (she went to grad school) the stop just shy of a period. Russell Baker in his article on punctuation calls the colon "a tip-off to get ready for what's next: a list, a long quotation or an explanation. This article is riddled with colons."

Think you have to read highbrow stuff to see semicolons used properly? My favorite piece of reading material can be the Daily Racing Form when I'm in racetrack mode.

There is a section called 'A Closer Look', thumbnail sketches of the writer's thoughts on the chances of an entrant being worth, or unworthy of consideration. The Form used to provide a 'Closer Look' analysis for all the entrants for every race. Some time ago they cut back, and only provide it for selected races, the higher priced stake and allowance races, rather than the cheaper claiming races. They have to pay their stable of writers for the blurb, and in the end, everyone wants to cut a corner here or there.

Different writers are contracted to write about the races the Form is willing to provide the 'Closer Look' for. The blurbs, probably because of the editor, are all sprinkled with semicolons. Take an example from the 1st race on August 14, a jump/steeplechase race.

Snap Decision
Has never been worse than second over the fences and collected stylish maiden victory at Monmouth on the Fourth of July; the switch to front-running after two second-place finishes and can be dangerous if left alone; most likely will have some company on the lead; Phipps-bred lacked speed on the flat. 

Semicolon perfect.

Even though the going can be a bit dense, there is a reasonable amount of humor. Ms. Watson even gets a little potty-mouth and lets a "fuck" and a "shit" slip into the footnotes. It's as if she lets her red Rita Hayworth locks down and gets in with Hillary Clinton at a West Virginia miner's bar slinging back beers and shots.

I've heard the expression about "proving you went to college" before, from a Jimmy Breslin quote who would make fun of the NYT writers who churn out cantilevered prose connected by commas and dashes, which he sneers just proves they went to college.

Jimmy didn't go, and I didn't finish. Even if I ran into an instructor looking like Ms. Watson I was probably not going to stay. I read an obit for perhaps the best of all obituary writers, Robert McG. Thomas Jr. that told us he went to Yale but dropped out "to major in New York." I left twice (not Yale, certainly) to major in going to work and making money.

And speaking of Breslin, the Bard from Queens, when I read Mr. Swaim's review in the WSJ I was still considering if I wanted to buy Ms. Watson's book. I was curious if she included the note from Son Of Sam who wrote to Breslin at the Daily News.

I explained that Son of Sam was a serial killer in 1977 who terrorized NYC and was often referred to as the '.44 Caliber Killer.' He taunted the police and the public by writing letters to Breslin at the Daily News. A copy of one of the letters appears at the top of this posting. Attention needed to be paid.

I explained to Mr. Swaim that Breslin commented after reading one of the letters that he never knew a serial killer who knew how to use a semicolon. It takes all kinds.

The image above might not be the best, but it's available on Google, and it clearly shows that when you read the second visible paragraph, 7th line, you see "...to rest; anxious to please Sam. An impressive use of a semicolon from a serial killer.

Given that block handwriting, did the killer go to Catholic school? Turns out, no. David Berkowitz grew up in Co-op city in the Bronx, a massive housing project, and was Jewish. He was eventually captured in what is now a text book case of analyzing the parking tickets on cars that were in the vicinity of one of his murders.

The police found a car registered to someone from Yonkers, and wondered why is there someone from Yonkers parked on Shore Parkway in Brooklyn? Of course he could have just been visiting, but the question begged an answer.

On stakeout, David was found to be coming out of his apartment and headed to his car where he had a stash of weapons he was going to use to shoot up a disco in the Hamptons. "Sam" was a dog, or the devil that was speaking to him to do these things. Berkowitz worked a night shift in a post office sorting packages. But not after that.

That was 1977 and in the years that followed there was a fellow at the Blarney Stone where I went after work, who told us he grew up with David in the Bronx. They played together as 12-year-olds. Of course, there was no sign then that he would become the Son of Sam, but the fellow who knew him was Billy Rogers, (Billy Bang-Bang; Billy Plop-Plop after being knocked out) a journeyman light-heavyweight who would come into the bar and hoist a few beers after (or before) his engineer watch shift at an office building. Billy was a gentle soul who may have had 11-12 professional fights. He once fought on an undercard in Nova Scotia and got an $11,000 purse.

He had fists like grapefruits and was once slated for a fight at Madison Square Garden's Felt Forum, only to flunk his pre-fight Athletic Commission fight physical due to an ear infection.  We never did see him fight.

I was disappointed Son of Sam's literature didn't make it into the book, but then I realized Mr. Swaim said he never heard of the killer, never heard of Breslin even, and admitted to being quite young in 1977. He did his Internet research after we exchanged emails, and did come away with a new found appreciation of Breslin and the low-down on Son of Sam. He did not however appreciate Ms. Watson's book for several reasons.

And as for Ms. Watson, it is now understandable that she never heard of Son of Sam and never heard of Breslin, since she's likely even younger than Mr. Swaim and probably hails from the U.K., even though she has spent time here in the States.

Ms. Watson's penultimate chapter is titled 'Persuasion or Pretension', sub-headed 'Are Semicolons for Snobs'? which if you've been paying attention is a rhetorical question, that centuries ago would have required a mirror-image question mark, ¿. (How's that for research?)

For some reason, Ms. Watson seems to go off on—-really off on—David Foster Wallace, a critically acclaimed writer who was chronically depressed and hung himself at the age of 46 in 2008.

I remember the obit, and I remember it meant little to me because frankly, I had never heard of the guy. Apparently, he was considered a great literary talent who liked to write somersaulting, freight train-length prose. And why wouldn't he¿ He was born when his father was a philosophy graduate student and his mother was an English teacher who was a grammarian.

I remember reading the obit, and after reading seven names—only one of which I heard of—in Bruce Weber's own, and typical cantilevered lede (Bruce certainly went to college), I knew David Foster Wallace was someone literary. Cementing the proof was that the first person quoted in the obit piece was the NYT chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani (herself a daughter of a famous Japanese mathematician), who said "David Foster Wallace can do practically anything if he puts his mind to it."

His mind however was deeply depressed, and David was on medication for decades, coming off it shortly before he committed suicide.

Despite being dead now for nearly 11 years, and in tragic circumstances, Ms. Watson rips him a new one.

It's an attitude in keeping with Wallace's self-proclaimed snobbery. He was profoundly a snob—or, as he called it, a SNOOT*, an acronym Wallace's family used for "somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn't mind letting you know it...Where Wallace sees high moral ground lush with the fruits of knowledge, I see a desolate valley, in which the pleasures of "speaking properly" and following the rules have choked out the very basic ethical principle of giving a shit about what other people have to say.

*Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance
    (Do your own lookups)

Whew! He must have used a lot of semicolons.

Or course the semicolon is not only for snobs. You never know when you might want to make your writing have a lasting impression.

Just ask David Berkowitz. He's still in jail.

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