By Jeffrey Page
The first thing I did on my first day of retirement was to drive to Edenville and have a celebratory breakfast (just me and The Times) at Country Dream, the great little restaurant just off County 1.

The second thing I did was call a couple of friends and ask them to keep me in mind for freelance writing and editing assignments.

Third, I called Jewish Family Service in Middletown and asked if they needed a volunteer. You should know that you don’t have to be Jewish to work for this organization, or to take advantage of its services. By way of background: I’d never signed up for volunteer work while I was commuting 450 miles a week to The Record in Hackensack. Now I had the time.

I spoke with Margie Faber at JFS and agreed to be a driver. I would have no set schedule. Instead, Margie would contact me several days ahead of time to see if I was available to drive someone to a doctor’s appointment.

The people needing rides might be too old to drive themselves safely, or without cars of their own. Some normally rely on a friend or relative but occasionally need a volunteer.

The first woman I drove turned out to be a former parishioner at Our Lady of Czestochowa Church in Jersey City. She was very impressed that I knew how to pronounce it. I told her that was because I used to cover the neighborhood for The Jersey Journal, a paper she’d read every day before moving to Orange County. Whenever I drove her for treatmwnt we talked about Jersey City and what I great town it was, and remains. I was devastated when she died about a year later; it was like a member of my family had passed.

Two of my more frequent riders are a retired Wall Street broker and his wife. He manages to ignore my question every time I ask about the quickest and safest way to get rich. “God, if I only knew,” he says.

I drive this couple to their dental appointments. When we’re heading back to the car, she usually calls him over and says, “A little kiss,” and he leans down to oblige.

There’s the Spanish speaking woman who let me know that she liked my pronunciation, and who handed me $5 for gas money that I returned to her. This encounter left me wondering: Do I turn down the $5 in the name of volunteerism? Or do I accept it in the name of helping someone maintain her dignity and self-respect? I think it’s the latter but I’m uncertain. I have to talk to Margie about that.

I drive a guy to his doctor. The patient tells me how much he hates the New York Giants. “Hate?” I say. “Hate,” he says. “How can you hate the local team that’s going to the Super Bowl?” I say. “They’re not the Jets,” he says. The doctor wants him to stop smoking. No way, he says.

It’s been said before. Volunteers often get as much out of their work as the people they assist. That’s the truth.

If I hadn’t signed up with Margie, I might never have met the fabulous 96-year old woman I take to the podiatrist and the eye doctor. Her children live far off. They are not well.

“I did what I could for them,” she says. “I wish I still could.” Then she changes the subject and tells me about all her years as a volunteer at a senior citizens facility in New Jersey. “I can’t complain. When I was in Jersey I helped stroke victims who couldn’t move so good anymore. You know what it’s like after a stroke?” she says. “I would get a container for them and pour their coffee. If they couldn’t do it themselves, I’d add some sugar for them.

“People need a hand sometimes,” she says.

Sound interesting? JFS (845-341-1173) is always looking for volunteers.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

There are just three rules concerning eligibility to be president. The Constitution, in Article II, Section 1, states you must be 35, must have been born in the United States, must have resided in the U.S. for at least 14 years.

I’m hereby proposing an amendment: You can’t serve as president if you walk around with not even a touch of understanding of the people you wish to govern.

This eliminates Mitt Romney from consideration.

By now you may have heard about Romney’s interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show last week. That was the Q&A in which Mitt unintentionally revealed to Matt that he is George H.W. Bush’s long-lost clone. Both Mitt and George are hugely rich players of presidential politics who don’t know squat about ordinary people. Surely you remember when Bush was running in 1988 and asked a waitress at a truck stop for “a splash more coffee?” A splash. Like it wasn’t Chock Full O’ Nuts, but Johnny Walker Blue Label.

Four years later Bush marveled at the ingeniousness of a supermarket scanner. What a wonder, he said. I imagine the last time Bush drank coffee from a container or went into a supermarket was in 1940. By accident.

Nowadays the Bush role is played by the incomparable Mitt who this week said his tax rate was “probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything.” I guess he couldn’t be sure. I’ll bet you can be sure of your tax rate.

Mitt went on to say that in 2011 he received $375,000 in speaking fees. This he described as “not very much.”

Mitt told Matt that when his opponents raise the issue of how his millions were derived, it’s nothing more than the politics of envy. “I think it’s about class warfare,” he said, and blamed it on President Obama. Actually there are countless Obama admirers who fervently wish he’d open mouth a little wider and speak much more forcefully in discussions about the political and economic classes that exist in the allegedly classless American society.

When Matt asked Mitt to elaborate, Mitt told Matt that when Obama tries to separate the 99 percent from the 1 percent, he is doing something that is “entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”

He said that. Mitt really thinks that God is a rich Republican with a good golf swing. He really thinks the Lord is offended when people point out the differences between rich and poor. And Mitt really seems to think that St. Matthew was some misguided liberal when he uttered those unfortunate words about rich people getting to heaven only after a camel slips through the eye of a needle. Good old St. Matthew: nice kid, a bit naïve.

Matt asked if questions about wealth can be posed without being seen as class envy. “You know, I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms,” Mitt allowed.

Quiet rooms? That means stay off the streets and shut up. It means don’t bother making those goofy signs.

Consider where we’d be had Romney’s rules of political conduct been the law of the land. School desegregation, Vietnam, reproductive rights, gay marriage, Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party, independence from Britain? All would have been relegated to quiet rooms, most likely with no recording devices, no pesky reporters, no critics.

There’s no there there, the perceptive Gertrude Stein said of the city of Oakland, Calif. in 1937.

There’s no there there, my perceptive cousin Amy said of Mitt Romney this week.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
Where do I start this? Probably with the fact that the man I knew as my brother, 16 years older than I, was really my half-brother. I only learned this when I was about 18. Some families keep their secrets well, even from their own members.

I remember a sweet Sunday morning in Queens. My father was playing the piano and my mother was reading The Times. I think they knew it was the day he was coming home from the war. All at once there was a thud in the corridor outside our apartment and a knock on the door. My mother flew across the room. My father stopped playing. The door swung open and there he was, the man I didn’t know, because I was about 2 years old when he was drafted. My mother screamed and cried and clung to him. My father smiled. I did not smile because all this attention usually was heaped on me.

The age difference explains some things. When I was 5, and he 21 and the war over, he wasn’t much interested in the babysitting chores imposed by my parents. Thus did he toss me into a bedroom closet and inform me that he wouldn’t let me out unless I promised to be good. I promised, and I carry a fear of dark confined places to this day.

And it probably explains why, when I was about 7 and had the measles, I touched a wooden tongue depressor on an electric hot-plate to see what would happen. It ignited. I panicked. What to do with the burning wood? I tossed under his bed, not my bed, and they had to take it outside as smoke billowed from it.

As I made my desultory way through grammar school, I grew impatient with him though it was not his fault. Always with lousy report cards would I get the word meant to soothe from my mother: “Gerry always did better in school because he wasn’t distracted by television and because he liked to read.” She identified us as “the smart one” and “the nice one.”

I grew up knowing beyond question that he was her favorite. Not that my mother didn’t love me. But if she loved me a million, she loved him 1,000,001.

But with all that and despite the adult-child age difference, he was my terrific big brother. When an older kid bloodied my nose, my brother spoke to the boy’s father, suggesting he would “wipe the streets” with his son – who never bothered me again. He took me to the beach, just the two of us. Me and my big brother. He informed me at an early age that we were a family of Brooklyn Dodger fans. He made me best man at his wedding when I was 14. Once, he bought me a boxcar for my electric trains; push a button and the door opened, and a little man came out to wave a lantern. He taught me how to play chess and gin rummy and never threw a game to me with an obviously stupid move. He taught me some magic tricks. He taught me some of the songs of the Spanish Civil War. He taught me to love classical music, Mozart and Handel specifically. When our cousin rode in the opening procession of the Madison Square Garden rodeo and gave us free passes, my brother took me – except in the years he got home too late the night before.

He kept his secrets. Of course I knew he had been in the Army during the war but it was only a few years ago I learned that he was in the Battle of the Bulge, that he was the medic who drove George S. Patton to the hospital after the general suffered fatal head injuries in an accident, that he liked the army and had thought about making a career of it, that he wanted to marry an English girl – a romance my mother managed to dismantle without leaving New York.

He moved to California about 25 years ago and I saw little of him, maybe once a year when I would go west to visit him and my mother, who was living close by. We managed to maintain a relationship on the phone and in the mail. He wrote short, witty letters and preferred typing on paper over email. He sent old family photographs. Not long ago, I opened a package and found a cigarette case he had bought for my father near the end of the war.

His second wife’s daughter called two years ago to say he had been rushed to the hospital with severe respiratory problems. He survived. She called again last week to say he was gone.

He was not in good health. Yet he kept smoking right to the end, and didn’t carry the bottle of oxygen he was supposed to have with him at all times. He did things his way. When my daughter asked me this week how I was doing, I was about to say I was OK but realized that would have been a lie.

I wish that we had time to talk some more, that we had another cup of espresso together, that he could have enjoyed one more cigarette, that we could have listened to the G Minor Symphonies together one more time.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
–You’ve seen it at Ringling Bros. and now you see it in real life. The people running the Gingrich campaign have stepped into a bucket and are walking funny. Seems Newt didn’t file enough valid signatures to get on the primary ballot in Virginia.

The excuses followed forthwith.

First, Newt’s Boys attacked the Commonwealth of Virginia for running “a failed system.” Translation: One that Newt fumbled.

Then they said – and parse this carefully – “voters deserve the right to vote for any top contender, especially leading candidates.” Meaning Gingrich. So if Newt is the contender in question, the rules don’t apply, but if, say, Michele Bachmann filed too few signatures, well, the hell with her; she should have known better.

Then Gingrich announced he would wage an aggressive write-in campaign to win Virginia on Super Tuesday, March 6, but he forgot one important matter. Virginia doesn’t permit write-in voting in primaries.

Now it’s just a matter of time before he blames his foul-up on the press. He blames the press for most things.

Question: If Gingrich, the self-identified genius, can’t get the rules of a primary right, what can the country expect of him in such matters as war and peace, jobs, the economy, taxes, the debt, and health care? (Speaking of health care, it now turns out Newt approved of Romneycare but flipped like a flapjack when its carbon copy – Obamacare – was on the table.)

–Recently, the chief of staff of the Air Force expressed his official sorrow regarding the dumping of incinerated remains of cremated service members in a landfill in Virginia.

This barbarous practice ended in 2008. But the chief’s statement of regret came only recently – last month, to be precise – after the Washington Post reported on the disposal of 274 soldiers’ remains.

“We regret any additional grief to families that past practices may have caused,” said Lt. Gen. Darrell Jones. “May” have caused, he said. Only a three-star general, like Jones, could get away with such an idiotic declaration.

The Times, meanwhile, reported that the Air Force has begun an investigation into this disgrace and found that some service officials at Dover Air Force Base, where the bodies and remains of all dead service members are returned to the United States, had grossly mismanaged their duties.

Question 1: Where is President Obama on this? Surely he has an interest since it was he who stood at attention and saluted at Dover after allowing the press to photograph the returning coffins.

Question 2: How many of the 274 soldiers who wound up amid the day’s garbage and trash were generals? (I’ll take a guess: None.)

–While we’re on the subject of the shabby way soldiers and veterans often are treated, the Army has informed Congress that there are discrepancies between the information on some of the 260,000 headstones and other monuments at Arlington National Cemetery, and information contained in the cemetery’s office records.

How many instances of error might there be? The army estimates it could be as many as 64,000. In some cases, the mistake is in paper records and fairly easy to correct. But in others, the army says, the mistake – a misspelled name, incorrect birth or death dates, improper rank and/or organization – might be chiseled into the headstones. This will require major repairs or replacements.

This comes a few years after Congress learned of instances in which more than one body was buried per grave at Arlington.

Question: Do any of these mistakes appear on the headstones of generals? Were any generals laid to rest in the same grave as a PFC?

–While the remains of service personnel wound up in a landfill, the Air Force had important things on its mind. Such as this policy: If you’re in the Air Force you may not “attach, affix or display objects, articles, jewelry or ornamentation through the ear, nose, tongue or any exposed body part.”

There’s an exception to the rule.

“Women,” the Air Force says in classic military prose, “are authorized to wear one small spherical, conservative, diamond, gold, white pearl, or silver pierced, or clip earring per earlobe and the earring worn in each earlobe must match. Earrings should fit tightly without extending below the earlobe.”

Question: Doesn’t the Air Force have better things to do than to write general orders regarding the use of bling?

And finally, Donald Trump announced he was ending his registration as an enrolled Republican. He is now an independent, and thus holds open the possibility of running for president as a third-party candidate.

Question: When will people – myself included – stop taking Trump so seriously that they find it necessary to comment on his latest expression of self-importance?

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
Twenty-six Christmases later and they still haven’t figured out who Mama was.

Little is known. Her real name might have been Mary, though some people knew her as Erika. She was about 55 years old when she died cold, sick and alone in midtown. She spoke with an Eastern European accent. She was one of the homeless people of New York at a time when the city was growing more impatient by the hour with aggressive street people demanding handouts.

Actually, Mama didn’t accost anyone. Rather, she sat on a box outside Grand Central Terminal and kept a bowl in her lap for handouts. Sometimes she’d try to cadge a cigarette from commuters rushing to work or to catch an evening train to the suburbs.

She had spent three consecutive winters trying to keep warm at Grand Central. Not long after midnight on the brutally cold Christmas of 1985, she sat huddled in the waiting room. A cop told her to move on. She went outside. The temperature was about 19 degrees. Later, she returned to the terminal. And a while after that, she slumped over on a bench, dead from pneumonia and emphysema, the medical examiner said later.

No one came forward to claim her remains or effects, or to identify her. Mama had been just another New Yorker in ratty clothes and toting a shopping bag. Her very existence irritated the sensibilities of the affluent. The city would ship her to Hart Island in the East River, where New York maintains its potter’s field.

But not everyone was ready to pretend that Mama never existed. Her miserable death on the day of Jesus’ birth was reported in the papers and on television. Jeanne Murphy of the Bronx, happy with the time of year and yet morose over the Alzheimer’s that was stealing her own mother from her, stepped forward. Mama, she said, would be buried with dignity and not just a serial number.

“I feel a connection to this woman, especially at this time of year when she suffered,” Murphy said.

She arranged a burial at a cemetery in Queens. She and a priest she knew managed to buy a casket, a burial plot and a grave marker, all at cost. She spent $1,500. The little funeral ceremony at Maple Grove Cemetery was attended mostly by reporters and cemetery workers. Some grave diggers donated their time and labor. They took the wilting flowers they routinely remove from graves and left them on Mama’s grave for the rest of the day.

“It’s a lousy way to die, but at least she’s getting a decent burial. We wanted to help out,” one of the Maple Grove workers said.

No one knew if Mama professed a particular faith. But in the event she was Jewish, a synagogue scheduled a memorial service for her. In case she was Catholic, Murphy’s friend, the late Father William Guido, prayed for her and then spoke words often attributed to Stephen Grellet, the French Catholic missionary who became a Quaker in the late 18th century: “I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

The words seemed most appropriate for Murphy and individuals and organizations who can’t allow the memory of someone like Mama to just vanish in a wisp. In fact, there are legions of Mamas in New York today. The Coalition for the Homeless reports there are about 41,200 homeless people – 17,000 of them are children – living in public shelters. Thousands more live in the streets. The Coalition, which is always looking for the funds to supply food, blankets and shelter to people with no homes, is at 129 Fulton St., New York 10038. It has received a four-star (highest) rating from Charity Navigator, a charity watchdog organization

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
The people arguing in favor of fracking offered several reasons why this form of extraction of natural gas ought to be approved immediately. Fracking, they said at a public hearing conducted by the Department of Environmental Conservation Tuesday in Loch Sheldrake, would improve the economy, especially the economy of Sullivan County, which has been in the doldrums for as long as I can remember.

It would create jobs. It would lower taxes. Yet DEC says some industries would be negatively impacted by fracking. Industries such as tourism and agriculture, which are the main generators of revenue in Sullivan?

It would help create energy security for the United States, they said. It would allow farmers to remain on their land and not be prey to ever-increasing property taxes.

Maybe.

But after all’s said and done, there are no issues except the water we drink and the air we breathe. Last time I checked, we need both. In fact, I came across an article in Scientific American noting that an infant locked in a hot car without water can be dead in an hour; so can an otherwise healthy adult just in from working out and dehydrated. We can survive longer without food than without water.

I spent an hour at the hearing at SUNY Sullivan listening to the two sides go at each other. It was interesting, though hardly surprising, that not one person speaking in favor of fracking mentioned water and air – except to say that anyone concerned about the effect of fracking on water and air is an “alarmist.” So much for reasoned debate.

The reluctance to discuss water and air as primary issues was understandable. Much easier to address taxes, jobs, and property rights, which aren’t trivial but pale when you compare them with the elements necessary to sustain existence.

Would you put your life at risk or jeopardize your drinking water to ensure the property values of the guy down the road? And now for the emotional pitch: Would you trade your granddaughter’s health for a lower tax bill? You know you wouldn’t.

We’d better be damned sure we know what we’re doing. Have we grown quite so blasé, quite so cocksure that we’d take these chances? You think maybe they were this complacent about their personal safety at Fukushima?

Several pro-frackers spoke of the successes of fracking operations in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia and suggested that there is no danger. But DEC, in a one-page handout, noted several incidents of methane gas pollution, fracturing-fluid releases, and other accidents that have occurred at fracking sites in Pennsylvania. The best DEC could offer was that if we allow fracking in New York, it would be better planned and regulated.

That sounds great, but for me, it recalls the promise of atomic energy back in the 1950s. Were you around? Do you remember when proponents told us that nuclear energy would be “too cheap to meter?”

What a delicious thought. Free electricity. Ask the people of Chernobyl how they made out.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
Look, I don’t know how else to put this so I’ll just come out and say it.

When I grow up, I want to be Newt Gingrich because I can’t think of anyone who gets away with more mischief quite so easily, except perhaps for Dennis the Menace. It’s the kind of naughtiness that would reduce most other pols to a laughing stock. But Newt’s slick.

One stunt after another, our irrepressible Newt just keeps coming back and he’s just so damned cute you want to give him a big hug and say, “It’s all right Newtie. You did bad, but we love ya, ya great little kid.”

Example: What would happen if you were running for president, and took a few weeks off to go on a cruise through the Greek Isles when you should have been campaigning in Iowa? That’s what Newt did, and when his campaign staff quit, he justified his personal Odyssey by saying – without giggling – that the trip had given him sharp new insight into the serious condition of the Greek economy. Newt really did offer that lame brain explanation. He said he spoke with several Greek people about their situation, but he didn’t name any of them.

The story of Newt’s political sliminess has been told before. But there are stories that bear repeating because nowadays, with the Republicans running out of goofballs, Gingrich is striking some people as presidential timber by default.

Most recently, it was reported that Gingrich took $1.6 million from Freddie Mac. It was not for lobbying services but because the federal mortgage agency was interested in history, said Newt, who, coincidentally holds a PhD in history.

It ought to be noted that while Freddie Mac is in the domestic mortgage business, Gingrich’s area of doctoral expertise is elsewhere. In fact, his dissertation was titled: “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo: 1945-1960.”

Then there’s Newt’s undying belief in marriage. He so ardently embraces the traditional form of the institution that he says same-sex marriage is a “temporary aberration” that will go away some day. I don’t know about you, but this somehow strikes me as the moral equivalent of suggesting that the changes in America brought about by Rosa Parks’s bus ride home was a temporary aberration that will go away some day.

“I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman,” Newt said last summer.
So strongly does he hold to the view that if a man wants to get married it must be to a woman that he’s done it three times himself, and some of these relationships even overlapped a little. For more information, consult Jackie Battley Gingrich (No. 1), Marianne Ginther Gingrich (No. 2), or Callista Bisek Gingrich (No. 3) about Newt’s devotion to wedlock.

Once, when he was Speaker of the House, Newt was flying back to America from Jerusalem aboard Air Force One with President Clinton. They had attended the funeral of the assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Gingrich was angry with Clinton’s assigning him a seat in the rear of the plane.

Boy, was he ever miffed. So, being the mature man of principle that he is, Newt retaliated by allowing government to shut down for a while. He figured this was a good way to get back at Clinton.

Enough! I don’t really want to be like Newt. In fact, as a walkaway to this column, I offer you what could be the single best description of Newt ever uttered.

“ … there’s the fact that he appears to be a really irritating, self-involved, pompous jerk. Voters aren’t crazy about that. Not to put too fine a point on it,” said the great Gail Collins in the Times.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
We’ve got an economy in the pits. We’ve got people who would put our drinking water at risk to frack for natural gas. We’ve got several pretty weird people wishing to make the race against President Obama next year. We’ve got a changing climate. We’ve got war.

So on the surface, I concede, my connection of a catalog from L.L. Bean with my still unanswered question about whatever happened to childhood may not be sound like a barn burning issue.

But wait a second. I’m talking about children, which automatically makes it important.

Next time you wonder whatever happened to childhood, remember one of the primary activities of winter when we were kids. In a snowball fight we’d scoop up some snow – the wetter the better – pack it into the shape of a ball and heave it.

We would team up with a friend on one side of, say, a driveway and two of our friends would be on the other side. The four of us would make snowballs as fast as possible, and toss them across the divide. If our aim and timing were good, and if our arm was strong enough, we’d toss a snowball and nail one of the other kids with a snowball that pounded into an arm or a chest – or (best of all) in the face. Then we’d hide from counterattack in the ragged snow forts we had built.

In fact, one of the things that happened to childhood is that we allowed retailers and merchandisers to get their hands on it. Specifics? Here’s one.

Arriving in the mail this week was an L.L. Bean catalogue offering all manner of parkas, gloves, hats and socks to keep you warm and dry. So far, so good.

And there, at the bottom of Page 23, was one of the explanations of what has happened to childhood.

We used to make snow balls with out hands. But now, for $29.95, Bean will sell us a five-piece kit containing two pliers-like devices with attached cups. Fill the cups with snow, squeeze, and presto; you have what the catalogue writer describes as “perfect snowballs.”

Also in this set of “fun tools” are three plastic molds. Fill one with snow and you have a turret. A turret? The thing that goes on castles? What’s next? A moat? Fill the other two molds and you have shapes with which to make snow blocks – your snow fort’s walls.

“These fun tools let kids build their own snow forts and fill them with perfect snowballs,” Bean says.

The most important part of childhood is learning about the world and how it works. One of the things we learned was that scrunching snow in our hands rarely resulted in a “perfect snowball,” whatever that actually is. But we also learned that perfection wasn’t the point. The idea was to do our best and have fun.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
For reasons other than the obvious, I wish Al Page were alive today, sitting at his table, sipping his coffee, and reading the story in the Times about what the great people of Ohio have done.

They basically told the governor, John Kasich, and his Tea Party pals around the country that you don’t ask the voters to go along with you as you try to bust a union representing people who work for the public good. People such as cops and teachers. People such as firefighters and highway workers.

By a resounding vote, Ohioans took a state law that severely restricted public workers’ rights to bargain collectively, and tossed it right where it belongs, in with the soiled diapers, sour milk, rotten cheese and the rest of the trash that other public service workers – sanitation men – haul away.

Al Page was a furrier a long time ago when wearing fur was more acceptable than it is now. He took mink skins and turned them into coats. He was good at it, so good that he was assigned by his bosses on 57th Street to make a mink coat for the wife of King Farouk of Egypt.

Al was a member of a not especially strong furriers union, which, when it seemed like it was going out of business, affiliated with a butchers union. He often complained about working for one of the foremost fur salons in the world – one that made huge amounts of money – and then, around Christmas every year, being rewarded with a bottle of Scotch. What he needed was higher pay, but the boss didn’t listen. Still, Al understood that a weak union was better than no union.

Having survived the Great Depression he was a union man through and through, whose advice as far back as I can remember was that there was strength in organizing.

In the Sixties, when the New York Post called to say the job I had applied for, as a copyboy, was available, I grabbed it. It would pay $48 a week. Only later did I understand the drudgery of my hours: 1 in the morning to 8 in the morning. For working that shift, I got an additional $1 a night.

I started complaining almost immediately.

Al urged forbearance and said I should guess what my pay would be if the Newspaper Guild had never organized the Post. He said I should guess how much night differential would be, or if would be any at all. And anyway, the lousy pay wouldn’t last forever.

I think Al Page would have savored the story in the Times about the Radical Right’s historic train wreck in Ohio, where voters informed Kasich and his friends that public workers are not to be toyed with, that they deserve respect and that they are not the cause of the miserable economy.

I’m sure he would have delighted in the numbers. Sixty-two percent voted to kill that stinking law.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
More than 2 million people without power in the northeast over the weekend. Nine people (later raised to 21) dead, including one man who was electrocuted on a downed wire. Phones not working. Trees down all over the place. And some reporters at The New York Times decided to write a cutesy weather story focusing on the colors of autumn and the first snow’s effect on Halloween.

Saturday’s trivialization went like this:

“October, said the calendar. Before Halloween. And the 2.5 million trees occupying New York City’s open spaces confirmed it was fall – not winter – with glorious canopies of leaves stretching along their boughs.

“Yet snow was falling,” the second paragraph went on. “Not a light, mischievous form of precipitation, but heavy wet flakes.”

How could a reporter write such drivel at a time of great human suffering. More important, how could an editor allow it?

The Times story eventually reported that 2.5 million people from Pennsylvania to New England had no electricity. Which sounds like lead material, but the Times made us wait for the third paragraph. Then, in the fourth, we learned that 750,000 people in Connecticut alone had no power. The ninth paragraph – the ninth! – noted that this was a nor’easter with winds as high as 60 mph. Still, the top of the story was devoted to glorious canopies of leaves in the time just before Halloween.

Sunday’s storm story led with concern about Halloween costumes.

“Is it timely? Is it clever? Does it fit?” the Times fluffily began.

Second paragraph: “From New England down to Maryland on Saturday, revelers heading to weekend Halloween parties added a new criterion to choosing a costume: How would it fare in a northeaster?”

Through the next 24 paragraphs – 24! – you came across no mention of costumes, leading one to suspect that the hunt for the right outfit was more a conceit in a writer’s head than anything witnessed in the streets.

This Times treacle made me recall the advice I got as a cub from a great city editor, the late Marty Gately: Don’t be cute; be clever. I also did some checking in the Times’ library.

Some outstanding New York Times leads have been short: “Houston, Monday, July 21 – Men have landed and walked on the moon.” (Think of all the green cheese, man-in-moon and moon-June clichés that might have popped up in this story if it had been written this week and not in 1969.)

And some outstanding Times leads have been long: “Hijackers rammed jetliners into each of New York’s World Trade Center towers yesterday, toppling both in a hellish storm of ash, glass, smoke and leaping victims, while a third jetliner crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia. There was no official count but President Bush said thousands had perished, and in the immediate aftermath the calamity was already being ranked the worst and most audacious attack in American history.” (The reason you read right past the clichés in that one is because there are none.)

By Monday morning, the Times got the snow story straight, though readers might have wondered why the paper reported that 12 inches of snow had fallen on Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Conn., but failed to include a word on conditions at JFK, Newark, LaGuardia and Stewart.

Still the Times couldn’t get away from its idiotic Halloween fixation.

“It was a storm of record consequence, disrupting large swaths of the Northeast in ways large and small: towns were buried in dense snowfalls, closing down streets, schools and even, in some cases, Halloween celebrations.”

This Times story contained eight consecutive paragraphs about the ruination of Halloween. In fact, four of those paragraphs were about a town official cancelling Halloween and then relenting – in Hollis, N.H.

In the Times newsroom, I guess they call it journalism. What do you call it?

jeffrey@zestoforange.com