By Michael Kaufman

There was the time I double parked in front of the OTB on Broadway in Riverdale so I could run in for a quick look to see if I’d won a bet I’d placed earlier at a parlor downtown near my job. Not only did my horse finish out of the money, but when I went back to the car a cop was writing out a ticket.

“I was just in there for a few seconds,” I pleaded. “Can’t you cut me some slack?”

He apologized and recited the standard explanation that once he starts writing a ticket he has to finish it. Then he told me he didn’t like his job. When I drove away I felt worse for him than I did for myself.

Once, when I was a single father raising two young daughters, my little one entered my name in a contest for “mother of the year.” This still warms my heart. She is all grown up now and recently I heard her laughingly tell her younger sisters about the time I took her into the seedy, smoke-filled OTB in the George Washington Bridge bus station so I could get a bet down.  “When we walked in, dad turned to me and said, ‘You’ll never get the father of the year award if you take your kid into this place!’” 

During a big protest march against the war in Vietnam that was eventually broken up by mounted police, I ducked into an OTB parlor to bet a race.

Al, the art director where I worked as editor of a medical newspaper, was also an avid horseplayer and we often would go partners on small exacta or quiniella wagers, which require picking the horses that finish first and second in a race. One of us would run out to the OTB to place the bet. During his lunch hour, Al would draw clever cartoons based on the names of the horses we were playing that day. These were so well drawn and funny that I sent some to Vic Ziegel, sports editor of the Daily News, suggesting they might use Al as a cartoonist. Vic replied that he loved Al’s work but the paper already had a daily cartoon with a horse racing theme. I still have a batch of Al’s old cartoons.

As a young sportswriter I had covered the opening of the first OTB parlor in Grand Central Station in 1971. Each time the powers that be have threatened to shut down the operation (Catskill OTB is unaffected) I have dug out the old article to use as grist for Zest. But at the last minute there was always a settlement that kept the parlors open and the old article went back into the file.  Not today. They shut it down Tuesday night, putting 1,000 more people out of work right before the holidays.

Few if any of those who lost their jobs were present for the opening at Grand Central, where a section in the middle of the upper level of the bustling railroad station became the first OTB site in the city. Mingling through the crowd that day were eager young men and women, employees of the new OTB Corporation, offering to explain things and asking if anyone needed help filling out their betting slips. A lot of people needed help. Nobody asked.

An old woman moaned when she saw the long lines. “I’ll miss my train!”

“No,” said her friend, “the train is over there. This is where they have the betting for the horses.”

A man waiting on line to bet said, “I like this, you know. You can’t change your mind. You make a bet, that’s it. I go to the track I always watch the odds and change my mind at the last minute. I get killed that way.” As he got closer to the window he had second thoughts. He said he likes it better at the track. You can’t feel the “action” at Grand Central Station. When it was finally almost his turn he looked nervously at his betting slips and then at the racing section of his Daily News. Then he said, “Save my place! I’ll be right back. I changed my mind.”

A young man with an old-fashioned bullhorn announced, “There are plenty of slips under the Big Ben clock. Winning tickets from last night’s races are being cashed at windows one and two. Bets on tonight’s races are being taken at windows three through 10.” The lines at windows three through 10 were about 40 and 50 deep. Hardly anyone stood on lines one and two. No one will stand on line today. 

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

By Michael Kaufman

One day last week my wife went to Akin’s Pharmacy in Warwick to have a prescription filled. Akin’s has been our family’s pharmacy since we moved to this area some 10 years ago. We appreciate the attentive personal service offered by the pharmacists, Robert Newhard and his sister Jean, and their associates and support staff.  In the last few years we have shunned the insistent urgings of our respective employers’ health insurance companies to use their mail-order services to have our prescriptions filled. Their hard-sell approach includes discount offers and other incentives designed to convince us of the advantages of abandoning our home-town pharmacy in favor of an impersonal, far away post-office box.

As she awaited her turn to be served, my wife overheard a conversation between an Akin’s customer and employee. The customer, an older woman with a physical disability, had just expressed her shock at the high cost of her prescribed medicine.  “Medicare always covered it before. Why aren’t they covering it now?” As the employee gently explained that she had arrived at the perfidious “donut-hole” stage of her coverage, my wife heard another patron grumble something about “Obamacare.”

The woman said she didn’t know what to do. She needed her medicine but she didn’t have the money to pay for it. After conferring with the pharmacist, the employee returned with the filled prescription. “We’ll put it on your tab,” she said, “and the pharmacist will call them and try to see what we can do to get it covered.”

Several lessons may be drawn from this episode. Obviously, no mail-order pharmacy would have provided this woman with her medicine without payment.  The same is true of big-chain drug stores like CVS and Rite-Aid, both of which have branches in Warwick.  But this incident also illustrates the widespread ignorance on the part of citizens who are unfamiliar with the implications of the healthcare-reform legislation passed last year. For all its faults, “Obamacare” aims to eliminate the donut hole—that is, if the Republicans about to assume control of Congress allow reform to go into effect.

The donut hole is a carryover from Medicare legislation  enacted in 2006 during the Bush administration, when elected officials who are in the pocket of the big pharmaceutical companies insisted on its inclusion. After a Medicare beneficiary surpasses the prescription drug coverage limit, they are financially responsible for the entire cost of prescription drugs until the expense reaches the “catastrophic coverage” threshold.

This paved the way for the big health insurance companies to start selling “gap insurance” to those seniors who could afford it.  According to a study done in 2007, premiums for plans offering gap coverage are roughly double those charged by the same insurers for their standard plans. 

With the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (so-called  Obamacare), people who fall within the donut hole receive a $250 rebate within three months of reaching the coverage gap to help with payments. (The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services began mailing rebate checks earlier this year.) The donut hole is slated to be completely phased out by 2020, but that seems a long way off and we are currently witness to an all-out assault against “entitlements.”

As U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wrote recently, “The billionaires and their supporters in Congress are hell-bent on taking us back to the 1920s, eliminating all traces of social legislation designed to protect working families, the elderly, children and the disabled. No ‘social contract’ for them. They want it all. They want to privatize or dismantle Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and let the elderly, the sick and the poor fend for themselves.

“They want to expand our disastrous trade policies so corporations can continue throwing U.S. workers out on the street as they outsource jobs to China and other countries known for low wages. Some want to eliminate the minimum wage so American workers can have the ‘freedom’ to work for $3 an hour. They want to eliminate or slash the Department of Education, making it harder for working-class kids to get a decent education, child care or the help they need to go to college.

“They want to curtail the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy so ExxonMobil can remain the most profitable corporation in history and oil and coal companies can continue to pollute our air and water.

“They want to make sure billionaire hedge-fund managers have a lower federal tax rate than middle-class teachers, nurses, firefighters and police officers by maintaining a loophole in the tax code known as ‘carried interest.’

“We know what billionaires and their Republican supporters want. They’ve been upfront about it. But what about Democrats? Will President Obama continue to reach out and compromise with people who have made it abundantly clear that the only agreement they want is unconditional surrender? Or will he use the powerful skills we saw in his 2008 presidential campaign and bring working families, young people, the elderly and the poor together to fight these attacks on their well-being?

“Will Senate Democrats continue to pass tepid legislation, or will they use their majority status to protect the interests of ordinary Americans and—and for a change—put Republicans on the defensive?”“

While it’s true billionaires and their supporters are ‘fired up and ready to go,’ there’s another, more important truth: There are a lot more of us than there are of them. Now is the time for us to stand together, educate and organize. Now is the time to roll back this orgy of greed.” 

This is a lot easier said than done. So far the billionaires have done a good job of misleading people by pointing the finger and blaming “big government,” “government spending,” and “Obamacare” for all our country’s woes. But Bernie is right. We see the victims of the orgy of greed each day of our lives, even in our own little drug store in Warwick.

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

By Michael Kaufman

David Cay Johnston sent the following message in response to last week’s post: “Thanks for the kind word s in your blog post, but the income data was revised, the first time the Social Security Administration has ever done that. The very top incomes fell sharply, in fact by so much that the average fell.”

The agency had originally reported Oct. 15 that the 74 highest paid workers in the United States were paid an average of $518.8 million in 2009, compared to 131 making $91.2 million in 2008. Johnston reported it in a post at Tax.com and the stunning news was picked up by many media outlets and blog sites around the country, including Zest of Orange.

However, as Johnston explained in a follow-up post, “My column, and coverage of it by others, prompted internal questions about the reasons the average pay of the highest paid workers quintupled.” According to Mark Lassiter, a Social Security spokesman, the inquiry established that two individuals filed multiple W-2 forms reporting $32.3 billion of pay for work.

After further examination the agency determined those forms were phony. Lassiter said he doesn’t know if the filings were part of a scam or just a prank, and the matter has been referred to the agency Inspector General.

So as it turns out, removal of the bogus reports shows that the 72 remaining highest-wage earners averaged “only” $84.1 million each, down $7 million or 7.7 percent from the 2008 average. “As a result of the revisions, the data show that the average wage in 2009 dollars declined by $457 (not $243), a 1.2 percent decline from 2008,” explains Johnston. “The revision shows that since 2000 the average wage, in 2009 dollars, barely changed in real terms, increasing only $347 or 0.9 percent after nine years.” The median wage remained unchanged at $26,261, which is $37 lower than in 2000 and $253 lower than in 2008.

“The revised data strengthen my conclusion since the new numbers show that total compensation and average compensation was even lower than originally reported,” notes Johnston. “And the fact remains that every 34th worker in 2008 had no work in 2009.” Moreover, he adds, “That median pay in 2009 was below 2000 and average pay was up less than 1 percent from 2000 both show that our policies since 1980 have failed.”

In his original post, Johnston noted that in 1994, when the top category the government reported on was $20 million or more of compensation, only 25 people were in that rarefied atmosphere, and their average earnings came to just under $45 million in 2009 dollars.

“What does this all mean? It is the latest, and in this case quite dramatic, evidence that our economic policies in Washington are undermining the nation as a whole. We have created a tax system that changes continually as politicians manipulate it to extract campaign donations. We have enabled  ’free trade’ that is nothing of the sort, but rather tax-subsidized mechanisms that encourage American manufacturers to close their domestic factories, fire workers, and then use cheap labor in China for products they send right back to the United States. This has created enormous downward pressure on wages, and not just for factory workers.

“Combined with government policies that have reduced the share of private-sector workers in unions by more than two-thirds — while our competitors in Canada, Europe, and Japan continue to have highly unionized workforces — the net effect has been disastrous for the vast majority of American workers. And of course, less money earned from labor translates into less money to finance the United States of America.” We can add to the mix the infamous “Bush tax cuts” for the rich, which will soon be extended unless public pressure forces the politicians in Washington to act on behalf of the beleaguered majority of the citizenry rather than the privileged few. 

Johnston knows from what he speaks. He is a former tax reporter for The New York Times, where he received a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for exposing tax loopholes and inequities.  He currently teaches the tax, property and regulatory law of the ancient world at Syracuse University College of Law and Whitman School of Management. And he is author of two bestsellers on taxes, Perfectly Legal and the recently published, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With the Bill.  His next book, The Fine Print, will be published in 2011.
I don’t know about you but I am going to be sure to read The Fine Print.

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

By Michael Kaufman

Where are all the liberal and left-wing media I keep hearing people complain about? I’ve even seen bumper stickers lately that say, “I don’t believe the liberal media.” One of my neighbors has one of those. Sometimes when I walk the dog I can hear Rush Limbaugh’s voice blaring from his radio when I go past his house.

I know they don’t like MSNBC but I have some news for them. MSNBC is owned by GE and there is only so much “liberalness” the corporate heads of GE will tolerate. They fired Phil Donohue a while back and they’d can Keith Olbermann in a heartbeat if he didn’t have the best rated program on their network. Both Donohue and Olbermann were among the very few employed by the entire US corporate media to raise their voices against the war in Iraq from the start. All the rest of the newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations fell into place, lockstep as it were.

There are still folks around here who think the Times Herald-Record falls into the “liberal media” category. Uh, has anybody seen Beth Quinn’s byline in the paper lately? Did you happen to read the lead editorial in today’s (Wednesday, November 10, 2010) paper? It is titled “End the free ride on health insurance” and it raises a familiar theme: Public employees, including those who work for local governments and school districts, have not been hit as hard by the rising cost of healthcare insurance as have people who work in the private sector. Citing data obtained by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the editorial suggests that if these people “contributed in the same way [as private-sector workers], state taxpayers would reap large benefits, now and in the future.”

These “savings,” estimated at $1 billion a year in New York State, would start as soon as the employees “began contributing.” In the future, “the savings would escalate as the cost of healthcare increases.” According to the editorial, the only people opposed to such a change would be “those employees who have enjoyed the benefits of free health coverage while they worked and when they retired. They can be counted on to use their considerable clout to fight this through their friends in Albany.”

What the editorial does not say and what an editorial in a truly liberal or left-wing media outlet might, is the following: “Free health coverage through the life span is now recognized as a right in civilized countries throughout the world. Despite restrictive labor laws that limit their rights, unions representing teachers and public employees have won better healthcare and retirement benefits for their members than those offered by employers in the overwhelmingly non-unionized private sector. Private-sector employees would do well to follow their example.”

Instead, over the last few years, including those before Rupert Murdoch bought the paper the Record has been running exposes of public workers who put in ridiculous overtime hours to pad their salaries and benefits packages at the expense of taxpayers. We might read of a toll taker whose modest salary balloons into six figures or of a teacher or cop who has figured out a way to retire at a young age with oodles of vacation pay and paid sick time coming to them in addition to the healthcare and pension benefits. 

But where were the Record and the rest of the so-called liberal media when this news was announced last month by the Social Security Administration?  Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar. Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined….but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold.

“Not a single news organization reported this data when it was released October 15,” said David Cay Johnston, former tax reporter for The New York Times and author of the recently published, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With The Bill, about hidden subsidies, rigged markets, and “corporate socialism.”

“To give this some perspective,” says Johnston, “from 1992 to 2000 the number of people earning any wages grew by 21 million, but nine years later just 2.8 million more people had any work. These wage data….tell us only about the number of people who earned wages and how much. They tell us nothing about whether these individuals were underemployed, had to work more than one job, earned fringe benefits, or were employed at a level commensurate with their abilities.

“But they do give us a stunning picture of what’s happening at the very top of the compensation ladder in America.” According to Johnston, “The average wage in this top category increased from $91.2 million in 2008 to an astonishing $518.8 million in 2009. That’s nearly $10 million in weekly pay!” Further, “These 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers.”

Johnston says the story the numbers tell is one of a strengthening economic base with income growing fastest at the bottom until, in 1981, “we made an abrupt change in tax and economic policy. Since then the base has fared poorly while huge economic gains piled up at the very top, along with much lower tax burdens.”

I would love to see an editorial in the Record about the savings and benefits that would be derived if these fat cats were made to pay their fair share in taxes.  I’m not holding my breath.

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

By Michael Kaufman 

So the Democrats have retained the majority in the United States Senate. For this they owe thanks to the Tea Party for offering tomato cans as opponents of Harry Reid in Nevada, Richard Blumenthal in Connecticut, and Chris Coons in Delaware. Each of those three would have been certain losers to any traditional run-of-the-mill Republican candidate. Too bad they didn’t have anyone similarly wacko running against Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. His defeat made it a particularly sad night for progressives around the country.

Locally there were few surprises.  I watched Andrew Cuomo’s optimistic victory speech with a healthy dose of skepticism.  He spoke proudly of the New Yorkers who elected him as being united as one, “rich and poor, black and brown and white, upstate and downstate, gay and straight,” blah, blah, blah.  I guess he couldn’t say, “Thanks for voting for me instead of that scary dude Paladino.” He sounded a lot like his father Mario, the former governor, who could stir the emotions with that sort of inspirational rhetoric appealing to “our better instincts” even if we knew it was just rhetoric. Coming from Andrew, about to inherit the titular leadership of the sewage in Albany amidst a tanking economy, it just sounded hollow.

I didn’t believe Andrew when he said that everywhere he went as he campaigned around the state people told him how much they missed his father. It was a nice thing for a son to say, especially with his mom and dad standing on the dais with him, but still kind of hard to swallow. The elder Cuomo served as governor from 1982 to 1994 and was not terribly popular by the time he left office. Besides, folks have a lot of other things on their mind today….missing Mario Cuomo isn’t likely to be one of them. But maybe they were being polite. I could see saying something like that to Andrew if he shook my hand and asked for my vote. Telling him I miss his father would be a lot kinder than telling him I think he is the lesser evil.

I hadn’t seen Mario in a while. He seems to have shrunk into a little old man but he stood beaming on the dais Tuesday night, as if watching his son accepting a trophy as most valuable player in Little League.  It struck me that if Mario had pursued his youthful dream of being a ballplayer instead of studying law and entering politics, Andrew might never have run for governor either. And Mario was a darn good ballplayer, as I learned while doing research for an article on Billy Loes. About 60 years ago he even had a tryout with the Pittsburgh Pirates…. although he preferred basketball to baseball.

“I loved baseball almost as much as I loved basketball, but basketball’s better because you’re always in a crowd in the center of the court,” he said in a 2005 interview with a Catholic magazine. “In baseball I was a center fielder, and it gets very lonely out in center field.

“I was a good ballplayer. The scout who scouted me saw me play against Whitey Ford (who went on to a Hall of Fame career as a left-handed pitcher for the Yankees) as a member of the Bridgeport Bees.  I was playing under the name of ‘Connie Cutts’ because I was still at the time in high school. The scout said: ‘Gee, you looked comfortable out there.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I played against him three years ago.’  I also played against Billy Loes. Billy Loes was with the Astoria Cubs and Whitey Ford was with the 34th Avenue Boys.”

“Anyway, I had some very good weeks, and the scout said: ‘Would you like to play major-league ball?’ He offered me $2,000 for signing a contract. I got $2,000 for signing, and around then, Mickey Mantle got $1,100 from another scout.

“I went home and told my father in the grocery store. My father said: ‘Why is this good?’ I said: ‘Two thousand dollars is why.’ My father said: ‘I’ll ask some of the customers.’ The people he asked said: ‘Better he should go to college.’ I told the scout that, and he had Branch Rickey (the Pirates executive who a couple of years earlier, at Brooklyn, with Jackie Robinson, had shattered baseball’s color line) write a letter to my father, who of course couldn’t read it. The letter congratulated my father for realizing that my going to college was the right thing to do.

“The contract said I wouldn’t have to show up until after graduation from college, but I went down for two weeks (tryout) in Georgia until the end of August. I got injured, hurt my wrist running up against a wall, and after that I got hit in the head. There were no MRI’s or CAT scans in those days, but the X-ray showed I had a hematoma, a blood clot on the brain. The Pittsburgh doctors said: ‘We want to open you up, take a look.’ I said: ‘I feel fine.’ Just the idea of it….well, that was the end of my baseball career.”

Cuomo’s interviewer was Jerry Tallmer, former entertainment editor at the New York Post. When Cuomo told him how he felt after losing his job as governor, Tallmer said he could relate.  “I know something about that kind of thing,” he told Cuomo.  “Rupert Murdoch fired all of us, 287 of us, including some who’d been there for a lot of years, when he broke the union – the Newspaper Guild local – at the Post.” Newspaper work hasn’t gotten any better since.

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

By Michael Kaufman

In the last few days alone I’ve gotten phone calls from Ed Koch (twice), Carl Paladino, Nan Hayworth, Chris Christie, and a happy-sounding guy who sounded like he was from Texas. The guy who sounded like he was from Texas invited me to attend “the mother of all tea parties” Saturday in Putnam County.  Last week there was a call from someone who told me that “Rockland County needs Scott Vanderhoef.”

Because these messages are recorded, I was unable to respond.  I would have liked to have told Koch that his endorsements mean nothing to me. (I would have voted for David Carlucci anyway and I have no intention of voting for Nan Hayworth.) I would be more careful talking to Paladino: I wouldn’t want him threatening to “take me out” the way he did Fred Dicker, the venerable reporter who covers the dysfunctional political scene in Albany for the New York Post. That Paladino dude scares me.

I’d have politely told Hayworth that I prefer to have someone in Congress who will fight to preserve the Social Security system and who will work for better healthcare reform.  I would thank Governor Christie for taking time out of his busy schedule to call me—a  voter in a neighboring state—just to urge me to vote on Election Day. He didn’t even mention any candidate or political party by name. He just sounded like a swell guy with no ulterior motives such as national political aspirations.

And I would have read the tea party guy something someone emailed to me the other day. It goes like this:

To the Tea Party crowd….
You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.
You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.
You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.
You didn’t get mad when we spent over 800 billion… (and counting) on said illegal war.
You didn’t get mad when Bush borrowed more money from foreign sources than the previous 42 Presidents combined.
You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars in cash just disappeared in Iraq .
You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.
You didn’t get mad when Bush embraced trade and outsourcing policies that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country.
You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.
You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.
You didn’t get mad when Bush rang up 10 trillion dollars in combined budget and current account deficits.
You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
You didn’t get mad when we let a major U.S. city, New Orleans, drown.
You didn’t get mad when we gave people who had more money than they could spend, the filthy rich, over a trillion dollars in tax breaks. You didn’t get mad with the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades.
You didn’t get mad when over 200,000 U.S. citizens lost their lives because they had no health insurance.
You didn’t get mad when lack of oversight and regulations from the Bush Administration caused U.S. citizens to lose 12 trillion dollars in investments, retirement, and home values.
No…..You finally got mad
When a black man was elected president and decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.
Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, job losses by the millions, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, and the worst economic disaster since 1929 are all okay with you, but helping fellow Americans who are sick…Oh, Hell No!!

And finally, to the guy who told me that Rockland County needs Scott Vanderhoef, I would say, “I don’t know about Rockland but Orange County needs him like a hole in the head.” 

As for my choice in the State Assembly race in the 97th District, I’m going with Myrna Kemnitz over Assemblywoman Annie Rabbitt. Not only do I agree with Kemnitz more on the issues, but I haven’t gotten any robot calls from her or her supporters.

FROM THE VIRTUAL MAILBAG—Thanks to Tom Karlson for his suggestion for a campaign slogan to set the record straight on healthcare reform: “They passed the bill, healthcare went up, without this law, we’d be (bleeped).” Now why didn’t the DNC think of that?

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

By Michael Kaufman

Is it just me or is this the craziest election season ever? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I think about it. It was bad enough when we had a choice between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Now it’s a choice between Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Worse.  But I am clear about who I will be voting for on November 2 and I think it is not too late to mount an all-out campaign for my candidates.

People have been saying that we need to match the Tea Party crowd in enthusiasm so I’ve come up with some campaign slogans to get the ball rolling:

For any Democratic candidate running anywhere in the country:  “I’m Not a Witch. I’m the Lesser Evil.”

For Andrew Cuomo: “So What If He Took Jonah Mandelbaum’s Dough! At Least He’s Not Carl Paladino!”

For John Hall: “He Spoke for Peace and Voted for War but Nan Hayworth Would Be Worse for Sure!”

But we need more than those if we are going to give the Tea Party a run for their money. People are justifiably angry that their health insurance costs have gone up since the passage of the healthcare reform bill. We need a catchy slogan to convey the message that they would have gone up even more if there had been no reform. I couldn’t think of any. Can you?

If you can think of some catchy campaign slogans on this or any other issue, leave a comment below or send an email and we’ll share it with our readers.

One thing that has intrigued me so far in this campaign is the loud criticism meted out to Representatives John Hall and Maurice Hinchey for obtaining money from the federal government for local projects. Isn’t that a good thing? 

We pay taxes to the federal government, why shouldn’t we get money for local projects? Why is that derided as “pork”? I prefer to think of it as a nice brisket or maybe potato kugel or kasha varnishkes. Come to think of it, I’ll bet you’d never hear anyone say, “Let’s put an end to kasha varnishkes once and for all!” In any case I would much rather see my tax dollars go towards community projects than things like military occupations of countries on the other side of the world that pose no threat to us.

It just seems like it would be against our interests to support candidates who pledge to bring NO money in for community projects because they are against so-called pork. It’s like asking senior citizens to vote for candidates who would “reform” Social Security by privatizing it, raising the retirement age, and/or killing it altogether. The same goes for Medicare. No senior in their right mind would do that.  Or would they? Like I said, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

FROM THE VIRTUAL MAILBAG—Regarding last week’s post wherein I expressed regret for not speaking up when an obnoxious person made bigoted remarks, GENE KAUFMAN (brother of me) wrote: “Dumb(bleep)  bigots will be dumb(bleep)bigots all their lives. Common sense, reasoning,challenges of ‘what if it were you’ and ‘put yourself in someone else’s place,’ even anger and outrage won’t change them, although they might be more discreet about where they sound off.  A response might make you feel better, but then afterward you also go through the  “I shoulda said” phase, wishing you had been more devastating, finding words that  would turn her into a pile of dust.  In the end dumb(bleep) bigots are still dumb(bleep) bigots who can’t help themselves.  People stink. The goal is to be with the people who don’t.” Thanks, bro, but I still think I should have spoken up.

TOM KARLSON agrees with me.  “Yeah. The tell off is the way to go.” Tom also sent a scathing Columbus Day poem that I’ll save for next year.

Reader DEAN of Queens (first to notify us of the death of Billy Loes in July) wrote:   “My family grew up with Billy back in Astoria, Queens. Since he was an only child, and had no family at the time of his death, my wife and I were among the first to be notified here in Queens by a public fiduciary in Arizona, where he resided until he passed….Finally after two weeks, they settled; his body was cremated and sent back to NY. The NY Times was notified thereafter. May he rest in peace…enjoy the memories!

MARCO RIBEIRO left this comment below the posting at the Zest site:  “My first wife’s aunt married Billy Loes, and so I got to know him. I grew up in Maryland, so I was an avid Baltimore Orioles fan, and was thrilled that I actually got to know a former Oriole. Of course, Billy was much more famous as a Brooklyn Dodger. What I can say about Billy is that he was very modest and had a great sense of humor. He was full of funny stories. Here’s one: Billy told me that he was pitching one game where there was a very attractive lady fan wearing a short skirt sitting at the railing right near first base. She kept crossing and uncrossing her legs. The first baseman was distracted by her antics, and when Billy made a good throw to the first baseman to hold the runner, the ball flew right past the first baseman because he was staring at the foxy lady instead of paying attention to the game. The runner advanced to second base, and a minute later the official scorer’s decision flashed up on the scoreboard:  Error 1 (meaning the error was charged to the pitcher and not the first baseman). Billy shook his head and yelled up to the press box (where the official scorer sat), ‘What the hell? Are you staring at her too?!’ Billy always said some of the quotes attributed to him were not true….that he was not into bad mouthing anyone…Billy gave me a ‘Salute to the 1985 LA Dodgers’ Lite Beer mug, and I still treasure it. He was a great guy.” Thanks, Marco. As Dean said, enjoy the memories. 

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

By Michael Kaufman

Last weekend my daughter Gahlia and I went to an audition at the Newburgh Actors Studio. The waiting room was full of people of all ages, each hoping to land a spot as an extra in a movie being filmed in the area. Gahlia recognized an older woman who had appeared in a community theater production of Mame at her high school, The Storm King School in Cornwall. Then Gahlia made a big mistake.

She said hello.

The woman took Gahlia’s greeting as an opportunity to engage in a loud, flamboyant, and boastful rant that began with her family ties to Storm King (she said her family founded the place) and ended with a disgusting anti-Semitic joke. In between she offered views on everything from “women’s lib” to affirmative action. “I was against women’s lib,” she announced. “Equal pay for equal work is fine but I don’t want some four-foot little girl coming to my house to rescue me from a fire.” Neither did she want any non-white firefighters who only got into the fire department because the entrance exam had been “dumbed down.” Several people murmured their agreement.

And then she told of a recent encounter with a Hasidic Jew who she said was soliciting funds “for some charity of theirs.” She said the man was wearing a big diamond ring so he was “obviously not in any need of funds.” She said she told the man she would not give him a penny, after which he invoked the Holocaust in an attempt to enlist her sympathy.  But she wasn’t buying it.

“Can you imagine? I mean, it’s been 60 years….Get over it already!”
My brain was still reeling from this remark when she said the man told her, “You WASPs don’t understand….” At this point I decided she was making the story up, which is most likely the case as it was the perfect setup for the nasty little joke that followed.

“I told him, ‘What do you mean I don’t understand. My uncle died at Auschwitz.’”

“Your uncle was Jewish?”

“No! He fell out of a guard tower.” That got a few laughs, although the main reaction was uncomfortable silence, including my own.

I had wanted to object to her comments several times during her spiel but I kept quiet because I didn’t want to make a scene that might jeopardize Gahlia’s and my chances of getting parts in the movie. In hindsight I was wrong.  I should have told her that her joke wasn’t funny. I should have asked her how she would feel if half the world population of WASPs had been placed in concentration camps, beaten, starved, worked or gassed to death, maybe people in her own family…. and  some ignorant blowhard said to her, “It’s been 60 years….Get over it already!” I’m sorry I didn’t.

The good news is that Gahlia and I both made the cut and may end up being seen, albeit for just a few seconds, in Return, starring Linda Cardellini, Michael Shannon and Tim Blake Nelson. Cardellini plays a woman who returns home from war to her husband (portrayed by Shannon) and kids in a small town and struggles to readjust. Nelson plays an older war vet who befriends her. The movie is written and directed by Liza Johnson, a former fellow at the Sundance Institute. Meredith Vieira, television reporter and host, is executive producer.

The audition was my first visit to the Newburgh Actors Studio (“A Little Taste of Manhattan in the Hudson Valley”), which presents live theater offerings at 784 Broadway, Newburgh. The place is indeed reminiscent of the Manhattan theater scene and is well worth a visit. The current offering is I’m Not Rappaport by Herb Gardiner.  At this writing remaining performances are scheduled for Friday and Saturday, October 8 – 9 at 8 p.m., and Sunday, October 10 at 5 p.m. Tickets are $20 ($18 for students and seniors). For information or reservations, call 845-569-8593.

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

By Michael Kaufman

The Town of Warwick has been home to my family for 10 years, which makes me a newbie compared to the many lifelong residents whose families date back generations. During our years here I have developed a deep attachment for the town, the little village that bears its name and the people (well, most of the people anyway).  Yes, Warwick is a special place, set in a beautiful valley, with picturesque farms, orchards, and wineries, fine restaurants, quaint places to shop, and some of the best ice cream on the planet for sale at the Bellvale Creamery on Route 17A.

But somehow it has gotten into a lot of our heads that we are better than our neighbors in adjacent towns and villages. This has led to delusions of grandeur in which we are sometimes joined by local and regional media outlets. A case in point is the extensive press coverage of a community effort to combat teenage drinking. It was front-page news in the daily Times Herald-Record on Friday, September 24, as well as the weekly Warwick Advertiser. The Record devoted a two-page spread, featuring an “open letter” from community leaders, and an article headed, “Group has faith in town’s ability to work out problem.” A quote from the new superintendent of schools appeared in bold type: “Warwick is incredible in its collective approach to problems, and we’re hoping to tap into that.”

What prompted the open letter and the attendant publicity (including a follow-up story on Monday with a banner headline on the front page, “Warwick continues talking about teen drinking” and in yet another edition after that an editorial lauding the effort? According to the open letter, “For the second time in three months we have had to remove a student, by ambulance, from a school event due to alcohol poisoning.” After consulting with parents and students, the authors determined that this is not “an isolated incident.”

I am glad that after years of covering up such incidents under previous school superintendents, school officials and community leaders have decided to address the problem of excessive alcohol consumption by students. But buried 12 paragraphs into Friday’s article is this telling sentence. “The cities of Newburgh, Middletown and Port Jervis have already formed similar organizations, as have the towns of Cornwall and Montgomery.”

So why does Warwick deserve kudos for its past-due recognition of a problem that everyone has known existed all along? Aww, it’s because we’re so special, that’s why. “Organizers hope the strategy will work effectively in Warwick because of the town’s unique cohesion on other social issues, such as sustainability, business development, energy use and land preservation.”

So far this “unique cohesion” has gotten us a new big box supermarket across the street from another big supermarket on Route 94, complete with a traffic light that frequently backs up traffic. But we are supposed to be grateful because the new big box that blocks views of the mountains was built using “green technology.” There is also a tasteful sign by the entrance, welcoming shoppers to a place called “The Fairgrounds.” What next, a sign in the bathroom saying, “Welcome to the botanical gardens?” And dare I mention again the eyesore known as Liberty Green, accompanied by yellow blinking lights and a four-way stop sign on Grand Street?

And as we all know, there is plenty more to come in the way of development along the Route 94 corridor…. but not to worry.  I’m sure it is going to be swell because “our” millionaire developer and the other businessmen involved in the planning discussions only want what is best for all of us and will surely be swayed by the voices of reason.  Uh huh.

I’m glad that the new school superintendent, with the backing of community leaders, has come clean regarding the alcohol problem. Maybe next he can address the drug problem in the high school, which has been similarly swept under the rug for years, and the bullying, which has been ignored with tragic consequences.

I love Warwick but it is about time we stopped congratulating ourselves for how wonderful we are and began taking a closer look at things. I think we will find that our Warwickian exceptionalism some call “unique cohesion” does not hold up under scrutiny.  

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

By Michael Kaufman

Thanks to Bob Gaydos for sharing memories of his days as a young sports editor in Binghamton with Zest readers last week. His post brought back a flood of memories, including one involving Jimmy Cannon, the legendary sportswriter much admired by Bob.

Cannon’s place in the canon of American sports literature is assured, and rightly so. However, my one in-person experience with him was brief and unpleasant: He spat on the sidewalk….though I should hasten to add that I was not the target of his disgust.

It happened outside Madison Square Garden on the chilly evening of February 16, 1970. Later that night Joe Frazier would box Jimmy Ellis in a bout that would be recognized as a world heavyweight championship fight by the New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC).  Muhammad Ali, the true champion, had been stripped of his title more than two years earlier for refusing induction into the Army and expressing opposition to the war in Vietnam. After much hemming and hawing, the NYSAC decided to hold this championship bout to replace the title “vacated” by Ali. The outcome was a foregone conclusion. Ellis, a former sparring partner of Ali and a journeyman fighter, was a sacrificial lamb for the coronation of Frazier. The fight was a sham.

I was walking with Leonard Shecter, one of my sportswriter heroes, when we saw Cannon approach from the other direction. I was hoping the two would start chatting and maybe Len would introduce me to the man who had famously written of Joe Louis, “He’s a credit to his race….the human race.”

Evidently Cannon did not think quite as highly of Shecter as he did of Louis. He glared at Len as he got nearer to us. Len pretended not to notice and nodded a hello but as those two came side by side, Cannon stopped in his tracks. Len and I stopped too. Cannon looked Len in the eye, turned his head and sent a wad of spittle to the sidewalk: “Ptooooooooey!”  Then he straightened his shoulders and calmly walked away.

Coincidentally, among those who witnessed the scene was Rocky Graziano, the former middleweight champion, who Bob also mentioned in his post (“the textbook image of a pug”).  I jumped on the chance to ask Graziano for a comment about the fight. Did he really think this could be called a championship fight? Shouldn’t Ali still be considered the champion until someone defeats him in the ring?

“If da State o’ New York calls idda championship fight den it’s a championship fight!” he replied in textbook pug fashion.

Then I asked Len for an explanation of Cannon’s behavior.

“I guess he doesn’t like me.”

Not many of the old-time sportswriters liked Len much. They blamed him for breaking the supposedly sacred code of silence that had existed over 100 years of newspaper coverage of baseball. It happened in September 1958. The Yankees had just clinched the pennant and were returning home by train from Kansas City, accompanied as usual by the beat writers who covered the team for the New York area newspapers.

During the trip a brief scuffle took place involving Ryne Duren, a young relief pitcher whose career would be plagued by alcoholism, and Ralph Houk, then a coach for the team, who was known as a tough disciplinarian. Houk swiped Duren with the back of his hand, and his World Series ring cut Duren above an eye.

“I pushed him down, and that was the end of it,” Houk later recalled. As described in a 2008 article by Alan Schwarz in The New York Times, “That was what everyone thought — including all the Yankees’ beat writers, who, following longtime baseball etiquette, agreed not to write about the incident. What happened on the team train stayed in the family.

“Shecter, who covered the team for The New York Post, agreed, too. But then he found himself in a jam. The next afternoon, Til Ferdenzi of The Journal-American wrote a small note about how the Yankees’ front office had hired a few private detectives to monitor the players’ wild behavior. When Shecter’s  editor scolded him for missing that story, Shecter offered one better: the Duren-Houk dust-up….

“Shecter did not exactly seem to regret his decision….years later, he recommended that a pitcher he had befriended keep a diary of a full season. Shecter took the notes and tapes and helped write what became Ball Four, Jim Bouton’s seminal account of major league life as it truly was — alcohol, nudity, amphetamines and all. The public rejoiced, bought three million copies and has since expected such details from the news media as a matter of course.”

Len’s 1968 book, The Jocks presents an iconoclastic view of the role of sports in America. He also wrote On the Pad with William Phillips, the bribed policeman whose testimony before the Knapp Commission helped uncover corruption in the New York City police department. My favorite of his books is Once Upon the Polo Grounds, a hilarious account of the first two seasons of the New York Mets.

Leonard Shecter had leukemia and died in 1974 at age 48. On a cold February night in 1970 I saw Jimmy Cannon spit on the sidewalk at the sight of him. Nobody asked me but I think Jimmy was wrong on this one.  

Michael can be reached at Michael@zestoforange.com.