Another Round

My friend, who worked for the Bomze family at 'Racing Star Weekly' and 'Winning Points' in the early 70s used to have lunch with Bert Sugar at least three times a week.

Bert was trying to peddle 'Boxing Illustrated' to the Bomzes and had taken up residence in their 8th Avenue office space.

The father, Henry Bomze was not interested in anything Bert was selling with regard to boxing, but Bert did have a basketball magazine they were interested in.

My friend, who likes boxing, but more so college basketball, remembers talking to Bert endlessly about college basketball, of which Bert did know a lot. More than half the boxing events Bert ever claimed to be at he wasn't. He never even mentioned boxing during all those lunches.

Bruce Weber, in today's NYT obituary on Mr. Sugar, gently alludes to Bert's persona of amiable bullshit. Occasionally I'd see Bert in Manhattan, more gassed up than a Getty truck making a delivery. Only a few months ago I was walking through Grand Central Terminal and heading out the Vanderbilt Avenue exit by Michael Jordan's steak house. Even before I was going up the stairs I could see Bert at the bar, smoking his cigar "dry", wearing his hat, and kinetically regaling what looked like a graying middle-aged out-of-town couple something about boxing. Sports for sure.

I shook my head and wondered who bought the last round.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/

Rush Hour on the Mount

Imagine you've just scaled Mount Everest, started to descend, become deathly ill and unconscious and are left for dead at 28,200 feet by the Sherpa guides who have been instructed to cover you with rocks, only to find yourself rescued the next morning at sunrise by the morning rush hour of climbers going up the mountain. This is basically the sequence of events for Lincoln Hall, who was rescued from Mount Everest in May 2006.

The whole description reminds me of the very old joke I used to hear as a small kid that was told to us by bigger kids, who of course were tremendously smarter because they were two years older than us. A variation goes: A plane goes down right on the border of Canada and the United States. The front of the plane is in Canada, the back is in the United States. Where do you bury the survivors?

Usually with a little head scratching, the younger, unknowing kid will attempt an answer that favors the country he's in, which in my case was the United States.  At this answer the older kid smirks and tells the wet-behind-ears that "they don't bury survivors, stupid." Geez, I can't wait till I'm as smart as Eugene.

And the Sherpas didn't bury Mr. Hall, but only because they couldn't find any rocks nearby, and it was getting late, and there wasn't anything more they could do for guy, so they finished coming down the mountain and perpetuated the news to the family that Mr. Hall was dead.

The entire story of this event, and more, can be read in Mr. Hall's obituary. He just passed away at 56, not from mountaineering, but from exposure to asbestos that he and his father apparently suffered from when they were building playhouses in 1965 and 1966. Mesothelioma is considered the cause of Mr. Hall's death.

Certainly none of this is good news, but it does go to remind the rest of us that unless you do it to yourself, you never really know what's going to get you, and when.

http://www.onofframp.blospsot.com/

The Bagel Man

Murray Lender, whose enthusiasm and business skills put Lender's frozen bagels at the top of the national market, passed away on Wednesday at the age of 81, after complications from a fall several weeks ago.

Will Rogers, the depression-era American humorist would claim, "I never met a man I never liked." Mr Lender claimed he never met a bagel he never liked, nor ever met a person who never liked a bagel. Both men traveled extensively. And with 90% of a national market that put the product in at least 30 states, his boast would be hard to refute. The company was sold to Kraft in 1984 for $70 million, with Mr. Lender staying on as national cheerleader.

Is it irony, coincidence, or nothing at all, to admit that I really was thinking of Mr. Lender on Tuesday as I made my way down the breakfast aisle at the local supermarket looking for frozen waffles. I passed the bagel section, gave an acknowledgment left and thought to myself that while I've certainly had Lender's bagels, I always thought they were too small, surely nothing like what you can buy at the local bagel place where you get 18 for the price of 12: maritime lifesavers compared to dissolving lifesavers.

No matter. I've run into a fair share of transplanted New Yorkers who always moan about not getting a good slice of pizza, or a good bagel at wherever they've now relocated. Lender's at least bridged an ethnic food gap when geography got in the way.

Since my employment status has changed check-off boxes, I sometimes find myself in the supermarket. This has allowed me to go out on a morning mission and obtain what I really want, rather than have my wife tell me that six local supermarkets have incredibly just run out of whatever it was I just mentioned that would be nice to have now and then. It's truly amazing what there is nothing of when there is no current coupon that will help you lower the cost.  I have become the master of my gastric fate.

Will Lender's ever make it back into our freezer now that I've been turned loose to roam the American retail grocery system?  I suspect so.

It's going to rain really hard on the day my wife has a Lender's coupon and I'm slow to get out of the house. She'll buy several packages and we'll eat several at one sitting. Murray Lender didn't become the nation's Bagel Man without business sense.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

24/7

At the intersection of words, images and imagination is surely Advertising.  I don't know if this is profound, obvious, or if I read it somewhere before. It just strikes me as true when I consider what you might be able to do with a few words I gleaned from a book review in this past Saturday's WSJ.

The book is titled, 'Island of Vice' by Richard Zacks. The review is by David Woodrich, who is credited with a few books of his own.

I love engaging book reviews, especially ones with editorial cartoon illustrations, as this one has of Theodore Roosevelt depicted as trying to 'clean up' New York City. The review is titled 'Teddy's Tough Ride,' and basically tells the reader that while there are current people of good memory who can correctly say things are better now than they have been in their memory, New York City has historically been a place of many textures.

Certain things do seem to have disappeared, but closer analysis reveals they have really only disappeared from open view: air conditioning, electronics, and better building construction has brought certain activities more indoors, and kept them there.

So, when the review opens with a summary of the activities that fall under the definition of "vice"--gambling, prostitution, indecent exposure and selling and consumption of alcohol and drugs at self-regulated times--the nickname for New York as "The City That Never Sleeps" seems quite appropriate when you consider the "amount of things worth staying up for."

And there you have it. "The City That Never Sleeps" because there is certainly a fair amount of things worth staying up for.

Of course, you would want to advertise all the legal things there are to do, but the the message is clear: so long as you're up, enjoy yourself.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/

The Cover

I liked the album and the album cover when it came out nearly 50 years ago, and I still like it. Only now, because of reading obituaries, I know a little something more about the album's cover.

Sometime in the very early 60s, Harry Belafonte released an album called 'Streets I Have Walked.' The subtitle, on the back reads: songs of people, places and traditions.' In those days of course records were not only vinyl, 33 1/3 LPs, they could also be Hi-Fidelity, or Stereo releases. Record stores carried a Hi-Fi and a Stereo version of the same release, with the stereo one being about $1 more. I always bought the Hi-Fi release since I only had monaural equipment, at least until about 1969.

The album is an eclectic mix of American, African, Australian, Israeli, Portuguese, Japanese, South African and West Indian songs. The album's cover is a color, overhead shot of Mr. Belafonte strolling on red brick herringbone patterned pavement with his back to the camera, caught in profile, looking left, with his jacket casually slung over his right shoulder.

The back of the album shows a black and white photo of Mr. Belafonte seated with a group of youngsters with whom he recorded several of the tracks. They comprise a choir from New York City Junior High School No. 59 from  Springfield Gardens, which for the unknowing is located in Queens County, which, if you're The New York Times, is usually described as an outer borough. Hard to believe the youngsters could now be grandparents, but they surely could be, because the purchaser of that vinyl album is now one himself.

Credits. There were always credits given on an album, but in those days nowhere near as many as there are today. Never mind. The cover photo is attributed to Roy De Carava, whose name at the time meant nothing to me, and remained so until just recently when I ordered a CD version of the album and re-explored old ground.

But now, in 2012, the name sounded familiar. Is this the Harlem photographer who fairly recently passed away that I read about, whose obituary showed a photo of his of a young black girl in a very nice dress standing on a rubble strewn street, or lot?

Yes. And now easy to understand why his work was used to create the album's cover.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/

The Parade

Paddy Moloney, leader of The Chieftains, plays the tin whistle and uilleann pipes, but last night, in addition to those accomplishments he played traffic cop when he basically diverted a huge portion of yesterday's New York City
St. Patrick's Day Parade onto the stage at Carnegie Hall for a thunderous finale of Irish song, dance, bagpipes and drums.  Being a bit of a wee fellow himself, when it was over he just disappeared into the crowd he had created to hopefully plan it again.

Mr. Moloney and The Chieftans have been at this type of entertainment for 50 years, but last night be might have topped anything he has done before. He created such an air of joy that it might well have been impossible to comment with regret about the audience that was Conga-lined onto the stage, with one overweight ham--in an solid orange sweater no less--thinking he was the center of attention. For some people, he might have been.

It's easy to understand how Paddy and his band have been around for so long. He does some of the work himself, but delegates well to the very accomplished, assembled musicians, singers and dancers, who last night included the core of the band, Kevin Conneff, Sean Keane and Matt Malloy, along with Jon Pilatzke, Triona Marchall, Jeff White, Deanie Richardson, Alyth McCormack, Cara Butler, Nathan Pilatzke, along with the group, The Low Anthem.

After 50 years, does one Chieftans' concert resemble another? Sure, but you'll never care.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/

Where the Boys and Girls Are

Spring break in Antarctica.






 http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com