When the Boss Writes

On getting up in the morning my habit is to check the NYT for freshly posted obituaries. I do this online, because although the print edition lays delivered in the driveway, I'm not yet fully dressed. I'm in my skivvies.

I wouldn't do it anyway, but my wife has warned me about wandering out there in my underwear to anxiously pick up the paper. She tells me the Frank Barone character on Everybody Loves Raymond has done something similar, taking the chance of the neighbors seeing him his underwear.

I wouldn't do it not so much that I don't want to be compared to Frank, but there are way too many people with cell phone cameras out there who could easily take delight in an "I gotcha moment."

I remember some guys at work many, many years ago who liked to drink quite a bit. They liked it so much that they bought a bar in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. This was in the '70s, when the area was a heavy working class neighborhood where many Poles lived, who somehow were frequently window washers. There was a saying then that the cleanest windows in all the boroughs could be found in Greenpoint.

I remember hearing one of their friends describe a visit to the bar to see how his co-workers were doing. They basically came back and said "Jeez, what a dump. And the neighborhood! I saw a guy bringing the trash down from the stoop in his underwear." The image never left me. That's why I first look at the paper online.

And today, first up, I was treated to an obit written by he NYT obit boss, the editor William McDonald on the passing of a sports legend, Joan Joyce, perhaps the most gifted female athlete who has now passed away at 81.

Joan's prowess was softball, and apparently she was one for the ages. When I read that she started in Waterbury, Connecticut I quickly thought that Bill McDonald might have seen her play, since I knew him to come from somewhere in Connecticut.

Yep, the gut was right. Bill's Twitter feed this morning makes reference the obit he wrote, and tells us he saw Joan Joyce pitch on many occasions. If you're a regular NYT obit reader you know that Richard Goldstein usually gets the byline on sport figure obits. But when the boss writes the obit, it's personal. Move over Dick, I got this one.

McDonald's writing about a famous sports figure made me think about the witnessing of great sport figures, or other memorable moments in history. My father would tell me he saw Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium sometimes throw out slow-poke runners on a single to right field when they couldn't beat his arm to first.

My father, born in 1915, would tell me of having the day off from school (taken or given, I don't remember) to go down to lower Broadway to witness the ticker tape parade for Charles Lindbergh in 1927.

I just read in an obit that Judge Demakos was there at Yankee stadium when Lou Gehrig ended his career with his "luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech. There are events that you will remember for the rest of your life.

I'll narrow my memorable experiences to two sporting events. The first Ali-Frazier fight at MSG in 1971 when I had $20 seats in the  last row of the Blue seats, attending with my father and a friend from work. I had gotten the three tickets in the mail when I read about the upcoming fight. No Ticketron surcharge either. I just wrote to MSG with a $60 check. I later read three people were so excited at the start of the fight that they had heart attacks.

The other was witnessing Secretariat win the 1973 Belmont stakes in still track record time and become the first Triple Crown winner since Citation in 1948. My friend and I were at the track when the gates opened. We ran for the last section of seats that were not reserved in the clubhouse. We secured our claim to the seats with the then time-honored tradition of taping part of your newspaper to the seat. We did this so often when we went to the track that I used to carry a short pencil with a wad of masking tape spooled around it. My own tape dispenser. No that long ago I found that pencil with the now very dried out tape still attached.

If you've ever gone to Belmont you know that the sight lines stink. The stands are parallel to the racing surface, and if someone stands up anywhere to your left you're blocked from seeing the horses come down the stretch. Unless you stand on your seat.

Which is what my friend and I did as Secretariat was posting ungodly fractions on the telemeter and Turcotte took a peak at the board as he motored by. I still get goose pimples thinking about it. He was "a tremendous machine" that day.

I'm sure the passing of Joan Joyce flooded Bill's memories of growing up in Connecticut, much like when I think of that 1973 Belmont Stakes I think of the friend who is no longer with us, Fourstardave.

The Joan Joyce obit is a beaut. Better read online for the photos, but hopefully you still buy the print edition. The NYT may not need the money, but paper print is till my favorite medium. Just don't wander down the driveway to scoop it up in your skivvies. There are cameras everywhere these days.

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Drama in New York

Gramercy Park

Oh Chuck, say it ain't so. My Captain, My Captain lay wounded on the Senate floor.

In a stirring turn of events, the New York Attorney General, Charles (Chuck) Rhoades Jr. has been accused by the New York Governor of abuse of power. He faces a trial by the members of the New York Senate.

We finally get to see Chuck and governor Bob Sweeny in Albany, the capitol of New York, and where as elected officials of New York State they have never been seen to spend any time in. But the state capitol is now featured in all its architectural glory as the drama surrounding the removal of Chuck from power unfolds.

The road to this turning point has been building, as the feud between Chuck and Mike Prince and other people of extreme wealth has erupted like Vesuvius. Prince secured the Summer Olympics for NYC for 2028. Chuck is pissed. Chuck manages to torpedo the approval by letting it be known that Mike handed an under-the-table gratuity to Colin Drache, the lip-licking polished foreigner who helped Mike secure the bid. Dirty as hell.

Mike is shattered. Chuck gloats. He visits Mike in the now useless Olympic office space complete with a scale mock-up of Manhattan to offer condolences and a chance to sell the real estate to the NYS building fund.

Mike is in no mood to have Chuck gloat and plots revenge. Sacker outlines a plan to get Chuck out of office. Get 2/3s of the New York Senate to vote to move him for abuse of power. Chuck is on a crusade to stick it to rich people, and the latest one is to secure public access to a private park, camouflaged as Van something, but it's really Gramercy Park, a gated private park in Manhattan between 20th and 22nd Streets, between Third Avenue and Park Avenue South.

Many people have tried to break through to gain public access to that park, but it's withstood all attempts. The residents in the buildings that surround the park are entitled to a key, for an annual fee, that allows them access. They even need a separate key to unlock the gates to leave. In the center of the park is a statue of Edwin Booth, the Shakespearean actor and the older brother of John Wiles Booth, who assassinated President Lincoln.

The Players Club is a prominent building across the street from the park. Many of the town houses have been owned over the years by prominent New Yorkers, one being a mayor back in the late 1800s.

It's a pretty park, and I think was even featured at the end of Soylent Green, that dystopian movie about final days on Earth as being the sole place where there were trees. I remember an unfortunate scene in the movie where an aged Edward G. Robinson seems to be on an exercise bike. Jeez. Is this the end of Rico?

The family flower shop was near the park. I was never in it. Not that ago I worked for a company  located in the area where the managing director thought he had enough influence to allow the employees to gain access to the park to eat lunch.

I knew way more about the park than he did. I told him basically he's pissing up a rope. They're never going to allow a bunch of programmers access to the park, leaving wrappers from Subway sandwiches at lunch time. It never happened.

Chuck is relentless. He witnesses a young Spanish nanny pushing a baby carriage trying to get into the park behind a member who has just opened the gate. No go. She's refused admission.

Chuck strong arms his way to getting a list of the members who have keys. He files a lawsuit. The association that owns the park files a counter suit. The judge is pissed at Chuck for a frivolous suit and waylays Chuck's attempt to get the case in front of a jury. Chuck is making enemies, and tilting at windmills. He's going to have to settle for something that can take up to 7 years to comply with. Chuck loses.

Mike Prince in addition to being a billionaire and running the Michael Prince Fund (MPF) is also now trying to unseat Chuck. Kate Sacker is reluctant to tell Mike how, but later accedes when Mike promises to keep her efforts in the background.

Kate outlines how to get the 2/3s majority of the 63 Senate seats. Mike will need 42 senators to vote to unseat Chuck, then mission will be accomplished. 

Battle plans and a map are needed. Wags and Scooter are on it. There remains one upstate senator, Clay Tharpe, a Strom Thurmond of the New York Senate, who is an old friend who in no uncertain terms tells Mike that he'll not be part of anything to dislodge Chuck.

We finally get some Albany locales in this show. There's the requisite watering hole/restaurant where the powerful meet, Jack's, Oyster House, an authentic place near the Capitol on State Street that's been in business since 1913, run by the same family, now grandson Brad Rosenstein. 

There's a view of the capitol building, a magnificent pile of architectural design that is shown. I've often heard the inside of it is something to behold, and the producers Messrs. Levian, Koppleman and Ross Sorkin have outdone themselves by either recreating the Senate chamber, or gaining access to it to film in there. It's a stirring scene.

Anyone who has been watching Billions knows the writing is crisp and can be counted on having the characters utter "fuck" and "motherfucker" a minimum of times.  There are quick references that you have to be almost on the inside of the story to know what they're talking about.

One scene between Scooter, Wags and Kate makes reference to the Sky Masterson lesson from Guys and Dolls that you should never bet against a man who says he can squirt cider into your ear, because believe me, that man will find a way to squirt cider into your ear. Scooter knew the expression, but Kate had to explain it to Wags, of all people, who didn't know the patois of Guys and Dolls. Please don't tell me he doesn't know about, "I've got the horse right here."

Sometimes the dialogue is too sharp, and makes references to people and things that even stump me. I didn't know what Kate might be referring to when she said something about Mattie Ross, who it turns out is a character in the novel and movie Rooster Cogburn, that was made into True Grit starring John Wayne in 1969, sequeled in 1975, also starring John Wayne, and finally Jeff Bridges in a remake in 2010 titled Rooster Cogburn. Mattie loses an arm. Kate is making a metaphor for something.

New York State Senate Chamber

The 9th episode in Season 6 is titled Hindenburg, and refers to the speech Chuck makes to save his ass from being ousted. His lawyer Ira offers to get up and say the right things, but Chuck is Churchillian in eloquence when he compares their proposed actions to going down with the Hindenburg. We know Chuck admires history, Churchill in particular, since he had a signed set of Churchill's books that he briefly lost possession of, but regained in an episode a few seasons ago.

Of course, Mike Prince is incongruently sitting to the right side of Governor Sweeney as the Senate proceedings unfold. Only in Hollywood does the hedge fund guy get to sit with the governor.

Chuck is on fire. It's the kind of speech they'll use in classrooms for years to come. The senators applaud. Ira tells Chuck that never happens. The vote ticks its way down to Ayes and Nays. Clay Tharpe seems to be the one who will or won't tip the scales.

As much as he was adamant about not siding with Mike Prince, that was before they put the screws to him and waylaid downtown relief money for a rundown city in his district, to a Mike Prince project. Rock and a hard place as his name is called.

In true Howard Cosell fashion, "Down goes Chuck, Down goes Chuck. Wow! 

The governor appoints Chuck's second Daevisa Mahar (Dave) to be Acting Attorney General for the remainder of Chuck's term. (Dave is the nickname, but Daevisa is a woman.) Don Quixote's Sancho Panza gets the part.

Are the producers telling us something in having an Attorney General removed from office?  Are they giving us the playbook? Is this a metaphor for the removal of Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, who is quite unpopular in many quarters since on taking office he pretty much said be wasn't going to pay attention to a lot of crime, even felonies. Oh-oh.

In Bragg's case there would need to be a recall election, as has happened on the West Coast with trying to oust certain Progressive office holders. So far, none have been removed from office.

Senator Clay Tharpe weighed the choices, and "under normal circumstances" he would have helped keep Chuck in office. But not this time. "Aye" for the removal.

Exult O Shores, and ring the bells! 
      But I with mournful tread,
      Walk the deck my Captain lies,
      Fallen Cold and dead.

What will become of Chuck? We know they're not writing Paul Giamatti out of the show. One of the quick coming attraction scenes shows Dave pissed at Sacker, since she surely suspects she helped orchestra Chuck's removal.

Chuck's survived admitting to using a dominatrix's service and held office when he was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern New York District.. But he couldn't keep the ramparts from being scaled when he helped 86 the 2028 Olympics from NYC, and lobbied to get programmers into Gramercy Park on their lunch hour, leaving behind Subway sandwich wrappers. There's only so much the billionaire populace will stand for.

What does come to light in a quick flashback is that Chuck was out-Chucked. Wags is seen paying off the persona that staged the scenes that fueled Chuck's outrage that certain parts of the New York City world are cloistered from John Q. public, like sitting in the lobby of the Bates Club without a member (the NYAC was once like that), or a Spanish nanny trying to use Gramercy Park with her charge in a carriage.

It was all a ruse to get under Chuck's thin skin and get him to start flinging his weight around to invoke  personal vendettas. He was duped. He didn't see it coming.

Billions is must see TV if you're a New Yorker of any stripe.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Final Jeopardy

It may have occurred to even a part-time viewer of the game show Jeopardy to ask themselves, why is it that you never see a contestant who appears to be over 65 years old, and certainly not a septuagenarian, no matter how many marbles they might still possess? Being now a fairly regular viewer of the show I'll tell you why this is.

No one over the age of 65 can answer a Final Jeopardy clue—Disney Characters— that goes like yesterday's: 

In the source material from more than 3 centuries ago, her name was Badr Al-Budur, "Full moon of full moons." I knew it wasn't Tinkerbell, but after that, who?

Are they kidding me? My recall of Disney characters probably reaches as late as Old Yeller. The clue was completely unanswerable to me at the age of 73, but not to any of last night's three contestants who all correctly wrote "Jasmine" as their response. Those three who couldn't even apply for AARP membership, could probably name the movie, as well as hum the soundtrack.

Not all clues are titled toward those who are too young to run for president, despite what the constitution says about their eligibility. The other night "Tony Bennett" was the Final Jeopardy answer to the clue that asked about someone who was 95 who released an album of new material. Aced that one.

Two of the three for some completely unknown reason each answered Diana Ross, certainly to her publicity agent's and Ms. Ross's dismay, and probably to whomever she might be in a relationship with. The oldest of the three did answer Tony Bennett, and I think emerged as a one day champion. 

We don't know what world the contestant who got it right over the others lives in, but perhaps she visits dad more often and he's playing something when she visits.

When there's a category that I have absolutely no idea what the answer might be, for any dollar amount, it's usually about some pop culture that's occurred sometime after the emergence of a crotch-grabbing music video of Madonna singing "Like a Virgin."

Sure I've heard of Beyoncé, Adele and Taylor Swift, but other that Lady B's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It") I can't name a single tune they're known for. Rappers? Fuhgetaboutit.

Movies and actors? After The Godfather (I), a Jack Nicholson or Robert DeNiro movie, maybe a Michael Douglas thrown in there, I have no freaking idea who won what award when. The last time I watched the Academy Awards either Bob Hope or Johnny Carson were hosting them. Ever hear of them?

The demographic divide on Jeopardy can be very predictable. When the clue was looking for an answer that would be Greta Garbo the other night, no one even moved toward their buzzer.

I'm sure the 9 research people that Jeopardy employs to create categories and clues try for demographic balance. But how many codgers are on that staff? Someone snuck in a baseball clue that required someone to correctly answer Tinker (as in the double play combination Tinker to Evans to Chance) but again, the buzzers didn't buzz in. No takers. Do they get more pay if they devise a clue that no one can answer? Someone's keeping track, because someone is always keeping track of everything.

It is for all these reasons that I won't be taking the Jeopardy nationwide online audition quiz that's coming up again next week.

I don't stand a chance.

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The Four Apostrophes of the Apocalypse

The above photo is from a furniture store I believe to be in Australia, because @justjenking, an Australian journalist re-Tweeted it from @biglhist. No matter. The photo to me is the best proof that the apostrophe should be eliminated from grammatical usage when attempting to denote singular possessive and plural possessive. It is the most misused of all the punctuation marks, and does nothing for the pronunciation or the cadence of the words or sentence. 

Eliminate the misused apostrophes from the signage and nothing is pronounced differently. Add the apostrophe where is seems to be missing from Goodwyns name and you still say, Goodwyns, Sofas,  Chairs, Recliners, Beds, no?

By the tortuous rules in place, Goodwyns needs an apostrophe, and the rest of the signage doesn't. The poor schmuck who thought they were doing good just held themselves up to the grammar police for perpetual, trending ridicule.

The effect might just work in their favor, as elementary school teachers might just take the kids out for a field trip to give them an example of the misuse of the apostrophe. That way, the kids can go home, perhaps absorbing the lesson or not, but can tell their parent that today, "we went to Goodwyns." "Oh, that's nice. Dad and I need to go there for some furniture. There is no bad publicity.

In Lynne Truss's seminal book on punctuation, 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves', she devotes no less than 32! pages to unraveling the usage for the apostrophe. Being a grammar scholar she gives use the history of the apostrophe. Everything has a back story, and the apostrophe is no different.

Apparently, the word apostrophe comes from the Greek meaning "turning away." And hence "omission" or "elision" used to denote dropped letters. Oh, only if it stayed there in usage elementary school children would score better on their exams, only having to learn about contractions. "Its and "it's" mean  two different things. This was its use in the 16th century: denote a dropping of a letter.

But apparently well enough was not left alone. Printers in the 17th century started putting apostrophes before the "s" in possessive cases. Printers! Was this a typo? We have been made to suffer because someone long ago in a print shop thought they should do this? Who told them to do this? The apostrophe fairy?

That's bad enough, but forward to the 18th century and printers! again started placing the apostrophe after the "s" to denote plural possessive. Since no one is currently alive who was alive in the 17th century, we can't lead these printers to the gas chamber. It's too late.

The use of the apostrophe for reasons other than the omission of letters is what has the world walking around with their underwear in a bunch.  And it's why Ms. Truss and other grammar and punctuation experts need so many pages to tell us how to properly apply the apostrophe when there is a possessive word. The rules are diabolical.

Thus, we get people like the poor people who created Goodwyn's sign, think they were being erudite and applying what they surely didn't learn in school. Perhaps they were sick the day the teacher's lesson plan covered apostrophes. Perhaps it wasn't in their curriculum. Whatever the reason, their misuse is painful to look at.

I've said it before. How do you pronounce an apostrophe? Ms. Truss makes uses the movie title "Two Weeks Notice" as a jumping off point to try and impart correct usage of the detested apostrophe. Why not just say: Two Week Notice? I'm giving my "two week notice" in. Two is the adjective for week. Is any meaning lost?

We are stuck with the mark because of some printers hundreds of years ago. Ms. Truss is sympathetic when she tells us, "let us acknowledge the sobering wisdom of the Oxford Companion in English Literature" (once the word Oxford creeps in you know you're dealing with scholars):

Thee never was a golden age  in which the rules for the possessive apostrophe were clear-cut and known, understood and followed by the most educated people.

The Goodwyns in the Australian furniture store shouldn't feel so bad. Few get it for what passes for right these days.

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Lost Art of Communication

Any regular reader of these postings will remember the tirade I unleashed at the Wall Street Journal for what I thought would be the demise of the A-Hed piece, that lovely piece of puns and general interest that has adorned their front page for decades.

As the A-Hed piece seemed to keep disappearing day after day, I wrote letters to Rupert Murdoch, and Robert Thomson, owner and editor for News Service which publishes the WSJ regarding what I thought was wrong-headedness on their part. I even downgraded my print subscription to Saturday/Sunday only, thus depriving them of certifiable weekly readership and some revenue. 

No replies. I even gave the recipients the chance to email me. Nothing. No one seems able to reply to a printed and conventionally mailed letter. I used that approach because there were no email addresses, or Twitter handles for the mucky-mucks whose attention I was trying to get.

We already know that years down the road there will be no collection of letters from the famous that will make their way into biographies or collections of those letters. There might be emails if they can be retrieved from electronic accounts, but that approach will likely yield only an incomplete picture of someone's written thoughts. Hemingway's collected correspondence would not be correspondence if it were emails. 

I have no idea if my letters had any effect on the powerful, but I was happy to see that the A-Hed did start to reappear on a regular basis. I couldn't have been the only one to have been annoyed at its disappearance. Perhaps it was just easier to start it up again than try and respond to the disgruntled. We'll never know.

But happily, the resumption has given us some gems, none other than the one about the near 18! pound butt-ugly looking potato that was certified to be a gourd rather than a potato. The New Zealand farmer who plucked the ugly out of the ground was keeping it for a Guinness Book of World Record certification, then possibly turning it into designer vodka, a bottle or two.

Alas. Genetic testing revealed it is in the gourd family. But the WSJ can pat them selves on the back for seeing the interest in the story before the NYT later reported on the same behemoth and the genetic results in their Science section.

The "potato" as pictured above looks like some Henry Moore statue that's been toppled for some reason. Depicted slavery? No matter.

The March 17 A-Hed piece wasn't the first piece restored after my letter of March 3, 2022, but it reminded everyone what they were missing when the A-Hed went dark. The lede slyly opens:

"The record-breaking hopes for a contender vying to be the world's heaviest potato were just mashed."

Think of what we would have missed if the A-Hed piece disappeared forever. The "potato," if certified as such, would have shattered the Guinness world record of 10.9 pounds with its earth-shattering weight of 17.4 pounds. Could world-wide TV appearances have been far behind?

The WSJ is not the only source of play-on-words for the "potato". The Zealand farming couple Donna and Craig-Brown who unearthed the organic beast, referred to it as 'Dug the Dominator from Down Under." After the genetic testing revealed gourd roots, Mr. Colin-Brown's eldest son later suggested, "we should call him the 'Gourd That Thought He Could.'" Can a children's book and a Disney movie be far behind?

As the A-Hed absence started in late February and I was no longer getting the weekday print edition, I still looked at the Journal online to the extent I could and was surprised to see A-Hed pieces. I waited until they consistently appeared before I recommitted to expanding my subscription back to include weekday print edition.

The break in A-Hed appearance seems to have started when a piece on Ralph Nader was "designated" as an A-Hed piece, but wasn't so identified when it appeared way out place for an A-Hed, being buried deep inside the paper.

Since the renewal we've been treated to pieces on trombone players, Japanese Anime cartoons, late-night diners, the Queen Mary ocean liner as a scale model, the study of Taylor Swift as N.Y.U. curriculum and other gems.

I like to think I helped get the pieces back where they belong

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Maureen Dowd and Myron Cohen

Normally, my reaction to the weekly Maureen Dowd column is that I'd like to take her to the woodshed for being lazy for only churning out a once-a-week column. Not always, and not this time.

She starts Sunday's column with the dialogue from a Myron Cohen routine. Who? Precisely. Not many people are able to even know who he was, let alone recite one of his jokes.

And that's what a comedian of his era did—they told jokes as short stories. They didn't use blue language, and the topic of sex was perhaps how it was going with the wife. Always the wife.

YouTube is a gem of a repository for taking in some Myron. I didn't know prior to his frequent appearances on Sullivan's show he was on the Kate Smith show in the very early '50s. This is the absolute dawn of television. But there he is, sort of Dumbo ears, bald with Clarabell hair on the side of his head, thick Yiddish accent, suit and tie going through a routine of funny jokes, complete with all the facial expressions and shoulder shrugs you could count on from a Jewish comedian.

My memory of Myron comes from the reference Maureen makes to his appearances on the Ed Sullivan. Show. Maureen is younger than me, so she couldn't have seen Myron be introduced by Kate.

Myron was a silk salesman in New York City's garment district. Anyone who knows anything about the Garment District of the '50s and '60s knows it was basically on 7th Avenue in the 30s, and that it was dominated by Jews.

I remember walking through the area in the '60s and at lunch time there was an army of guys standing on the sidewalk, in their overcoats if it were cold out, smoking and just waiting to go back upstairs to what were really small offices scattered throughout small buildings. 

Myron Cohen apparently loved to tell stories. He must have had a lot the tell, because he was encouraged by his colleagues to pursue a career in telling jokes for a living. How he broke into show business I have no idea, but he became well known on the TV variety show circuit, the Ed Sullivan show in particular.

To this day I use one of his famous tag lines for a variety of situations: "Well, everybody's got to be someplace." In the joke, the line was uttered by the guy who was suddenly found by the husband who came home early, found his wife in bed clearly having just had sex, and suddenly flinging the armoire door open to reveal the naked Tom cat trying to cover his private parts with his hands and arms stammering to explain the situation. Surprises all around.

Maureen uses one of Cohen's jokes as a metaphor for the Goliath/shrimp comparison now emerging between Ukraine's Zelensky and Russia's Putin. The weak looking are performing mightily. 

Picture a skinny little guy, a shrimp, a nothing. He walks into a lumber camp looking for a job.

The foreman is skeptical, so the shrimp steps up and fells a towering oak in 90 seconds.

"Where'd you learn that?" says the foreman.

"In the Sahara Forest," replies the guy.

"You mean the Sahara desert," the foreman corrects.

"Sure, now" the guy says.

This is a typical Myron Cohen joke with a tag line twist like an O Henry story. He ate well off a lot of those jokes.

I am genuinely impressed Maureen knew one.

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Greek Influence

Growing up with a Greek-American heritage and a Greek baptismal meant two things: I wasn't going to be raised Catholic, and I wasn't going to have a Bar Mitzvah.

Neither of my parents were of a religious stripe. My father was naturally baptized in the  Greek Orthodox church, but was not an active church goer. My mother, the best we know, was Catholic, but never mentioned religion. Growing up I was sent to an Episcopal church a few blocks from the house, St. John's, for their Sunday school. I went to Sunday school there for several years, and attended services before class in the choir loft.

I liked Sunday school. The teacher took us to the circus once at the old Madison Square Garden on 8th Avenue. I liked the services, even if there seemed to be a lot of kneeling. I liked the music and singing. To this day I like that I'm a bit of a religious mutt.

New York City education was dominated by either the public, or Catholic schools. I had friends in Catholic school and was always envious of them because they got way more school holidays than we did. As I got older I learned my father had a grudge against the Catholics because he wasn't allowed to be the best man at his best friends wedding. He wasn't Catholic.

Decades later, I don't know if the irony ever dawned on my father when he filled in as the best man at the wedding for the Greek delivery boy when he got married. Steve's initial choice was someone more his age, but was turned down by the Greek church because they weren't Greek Orthodox.

When I married my Irish-American Catholic wife we had a civil ceremony in a judge's chambers. It was easier than creating family drama over getting married in a Catholic church. Our two girls however went to Catholic schools and received all the Catholic sacraments.  By then, I had long come to the awareness that anyone who wielded any influence in New York City was either Catholic or Jewish. A Greek Orthodox never created much of a ripple in the city's affairs.

The legend goes the midnight Christmas Eve mass at St. Patrick's was never started by the Cardinal until Mayor Koch, a Jewish mayor of NYC for 12 years was seated.

This is a long introduction to the reaction I had when I read the obituary for judge Thomas Demakos, 98, who recently passed away. Demakos was a lifelong New Yorker who still lived in Astoria when he passed away. Imagine, a retired judge still living in Astoria and not Boca Raton.

Mr. Demakos didn't come to a law career immediately.  After serving with the Marine Corps in WWII from 1943-1946, he earned a bachelor's degree in accounting and later a master's degree in business. Before all this he was even at the "luckiest man alive" speech by Lou Gehrig in 1939 at Yankee Stadium.

Tiring of accounting, he went to law school at N.Y.U., graduating in 1957. The obit writer Sam Roberts tells us, Demakos "was named an assistant prosecutor in 1962 after the Greek Orthodox Church flexed its political muscle for an appointment of a Greek-American to the district attorney's office. He was made chief assistant in 1975.

And here we have it, the first instance of my reading that a Greek-American attainted any position through political influence.

Mr. Roberts is a veteran reporter for the NYT, covering most things NYC for decades. I suspect he remembers when then the subway fare was 15¢. 

That the Greek Church was able to flex any muscle to me is worth including in any obituary. And if Mr. Roberts tell us that's what happened, then it happened.

The obit headline for Mr. Demakos makes reference to a landmark ruling he made as a judge in a marquee murder trial.

But long before the Michael Griffith murder trail where that ruling was made, Mr. Demakos presided as a prosecutor in one of the Alice Crimmins trials, the most sensational trial to ever hit Queens County. It was bigger than Joey Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher by a country mile. The case involved a mother, Alice Crimmins being found guilty of murdering her 5-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter one July evening in 1965.

Ms. Crimmins even took the stand in her own defense in one trial. Talking over the case with my 82-year-old Saratoga buddy Johnny M. last night, he told me that he of course remembers the case well, and remembers that someone he knew who was an assistant prosecutor in Queens District Attorney Thomas Mackell's office at the time of the trial always commented that, "Alice was some cool customer."

There were two trials, appeals, convictions, re-instated convictions, and eventually a parole for Ms. Crimmins in 1977. At 82 she is still alive somewhere, living under an assumed name, and not giving anyone any interviews.

That Alice was an attractive, 1960s cocktail waitress who carried on openly with many men, made the trial tabloid fodder. Her estranged husband even wiretapped her bedroom so he could listen to her having sex. Whether in this era of better applied police techniques any doubt of her guilt or innocence might be better established doesn't matter. The court of public opinion and an all-male jury found her guilty. If she didn't do it, no one else has ever been found who did. The children are no less dead. It is a dead case.

But the marquee case and landmark ruling was the Michael Griffith trial, another Queens case involving three young men who were accused of causing the death of Michael Griffith in 1987 by chasing him one night as he continued to run toward the Belt Parkway, eventually running onto the parkway to avoid pursuit and getting killed by oncoming traffic.

There were obvious racial overtones. The three men who wandered into a pizza parlor in Howard Beach after their car broke down were Black, and the residents of Howard Beach were sensitive to having Blacks anywhere near hem, especially while eating pizza.

A group of white youths from the pizza parlor beat the three guys up, and one of the Black men, Michael Griffith tried to run away. It was then he ran into traffic and was killed.

I remember this case well too. There were comments that went, "well, what were the Black guys doing in their neighborhood anyway?" This elicited a response from a prosecutor, "what, did they need a passport to be there."

Three defendants were found guilty and sentenced to 30 years for manslaughter and assault. The defense tried an appeal based on Judge Demakos denying the defense team their claim that a fair trial wasn't attainted because they weren't allowed to reject jury members who weren't white.

And no less a sage of the era than the reporter Jimmy Breslin praised Judge Demakos that as a man who "had a background that made him seem so predictable  (a white man in his mid-60s, a former prosecutor and a product of the Queens Democratic machine), he read a decision that puts him in another place forever." Mr. Breslin added, "Tom Demakos put splendor on his record."

And true to what some would point to his unpredictability, Mr. Demakos, as a retired judge, passed away at his home in Astoria, and not somewhere in Florida.

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