Where I Learned To Not Be Good At Sports

electchester playground

The photo (above) shows the playground where the Electchester Athletic Association had its games when I was a kid. I played softball there… poorly

I caught in a softball league that had no stealing! The Witness Protection Program couldn’t have found a better place to hide me.

It’s tough to see the field’s surface from Google Streetview, but there’s no grass. The surface is probably forgiving today, but when I played there on busy 164th Street the field was paved!

Yeah, we played on concrete.

No sliding in our league either!

Not that it would have presented a problem for me. I don’t think I ever hit the ball out of the infield.

Most folks are surprised to learn baseball can be played on the same surface used to land airplanes or park trucks. Oh yes it can. And, if I’m any indication, it can be played poorly.

electchester sledding hill

As long as I was looking, I slid Google Earth a little farther down 164th to the hill where we went sledding. After a snowstorm this little topographical bump would be crawling with kids.

No!!! Who did this? I am incensed. There are now fences and hedges to prevent sledding.

Sure, we used to slide out into traffic from time-to-time, but this was our place. For a kid in an apartment this was the great outdoors.

Is nothing sacred?

Here’s To The Phone Phreaks

I sent him a shot of record grooves magnified 1,000 times. He’d seen it before, but to quote Dave, “It’s neat stuff.” It really is.

I swapped emails today with Dave Kulka in Burbank. We first met when we were in our teens–a story in and of itself since I lived in Flushing, NY while Dave was a resident of Greenbrae in Marin County just north of San Francisco. Dave’s company masterfully repairs and restores older audio equipment used in recording studios.

record_groove.jpgFor years Dave was a mastering engineer. That’s the person who supervises the process of taking a song from recording to the lacquer masters that produce phonograph records. Knowing Dave, his records on your turntable sounded just like the session sounded in the studio. He is detail oriented.

I sent him a shot of record grooves magnified 1,000 times. He’d seen it before, but to quote Dave, “It’s neat stuff.” It really is.

In return Dave sent me a link about “phone phreaks” and a book being written about them. These were people who:

listened to the clicks and clunks and beeps and boops to figure out how calls were routed. They read obscure telephone company technical journals. They learned how to impersonate operators and other telephone company personnel. They dug through telephone company trash bins to find “secret” documents. They solved puzzles.

model 500 phone.jpgOK–that’s a little on the romantic side, but not incredibly far off base.

The author claims there are still phone phreaks today, but why? Forty years ago making long distance calls was expensive!

There were different rates in effect for different times of the day. People would wait to make calls after 7:00 PM or after 11:00 PM when the rates fell. A daytime call was outrageously pricey!

Nowadays long distance phone calls flow like water from a faucet. Most cell plans don’t even bother to differentiate long distance from local because there’s really no incremental cost in carrying either! Nearly all the costs are fixed whether you make calls or not.

This crime has been solved by pricing it out of existence. Isn’t that strange? That doesn’t happen too often.

History Channel’s 1968

For me, 1968 was the seminal year. I graduated high school, left the comfort of my family to travel out west with a pen pal I’d never met, and started college.

I watched Tom Brokaw’s paean to 1968 last night. The History Channel is running it.&#185.

For me, 1968 was the seminal year. I graduated high school, left the comfort of my family to travel out west with a pen pal I’d never met, and started college.

In July 1968, I was working at Sears on Northern Blvd. Flushing. It was a store so obscure, until I worked there, I didn’t know it existed (I’d lived in Flushing nearly 15 years at the time). I was saving my $1.50 an hour wage to buy record albums.

In 1968 I bought Janis Joplin, Blood Sweat and Tears (pre-David Clayton Thomas), The Doors and Cream albums. As I remember, the going price for an album was $2.79. I was also going with my Cousin Michael and our friend Larry to concerts at the Fillmore East in the pre-stylish, quite seedy, East Village.

1968 is when I registered for the draft.

The Vietnam War was raging in the late 60s. The real controversy started a few years earlier, but by ’68 it was a festering national sore. Even with film instead of videotape, and without the immediacy of satellites, we were seeing more of the battles and horrors of war than we do in Iraq. Anti-Vietnam War sentiment was rising – rising rapidly.

1968 was the year the police went wild at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I remember the horror in the face of Dave Kulka’s mom as she watched (while Dave and I didn’t) at their hillside home in Greenbrae, California.

Lyndon Johnson was abandoned. Bobby Kennedy as killed. Richard Nixon was elected. Men circled, but didn’t land on, the moon.

Of my 57 years, 1968 was undoubtedly the most historically significant. I wonder, in retrospect, if I was less cognizant of the nuts and bolts of the social and political tumult than I thought I was at the time? There was so much going on.

I liked how Browkaw treated this year. I remembered most, though not all of what went on. He connected some dots that I had not. I was disappointed in myself for not doing that sooner.

It was funny to see Tom Brokaw talk about his suited and skinny tied self, while portray his inner life as significantly hipper. Was he, or was he just a wannabe?

If you get a chance, this will be two hours well spent.

&#185 – The good news about cable TV is, even if you’ve missed it, it will run again… and again.

Steffie Finds Photos

It’s good to be a college student. Well, it wasn’t good when I was a college student, but it’s obviously good now.

No sooner did Steffie return from our Pacific cruise than she was on a plane (actually two) heading to Florida. Though she just told me on the phone it was “overcast,” it’s also currently 70&#176. I’ll save my pity.

Do I have to tell you how glad I am she enjoys spending time with my folks? I think she appreciates their company on two levels. First, of course, it’s just them. Second, she enjoys being an observer in their “seniors on steroids” life.

Even as a baby, she enjoyed observing. We used to joke how she’d sit in the back seat of the car, becoming part of the seat, so she could listen to adult conversations unnoticed.

My parents live a very active life in a community with a full social calendar and lots of facilities.

The thing seniors do, which I envy most, is their ability to be totally non-judgmental. It is as if everyone in their complex is living life as karaoke, and everyone else is applauding each song.

If you live there and want to learn to use a computer… even though you’re 70, maybe 80 years into life and have never touched one – hooray for you! And if you want to be a computer teacher – boom – you’re Bill Gates.

No one judges. Only your desire and effort is applauded. My dad becomes Mr. Tech Support for Banyon Springs! The condo complexes newspaper writes about him.

Back to Steffie. I get too carried away with peripheral thoughts.

Last night, as she sat with my parents, my cellphone rang – not with calls, but text messages and photos. Steffie was going through old pictures and snapping shots of the most interesting ones.

First came this photo of me as an infant. My mother said people would stop her to say I looked like the Gerber baby. Probably not, but it was nice to say.

When I showed this to a few people at work, the first two (without pausing a beat) said my hair looked the same. That’s weird, isn’t it?

The second one is more interesting, only because I remember a lot about it.

It was probably 1970 and I was living 15 or so miles from where my parents live now, in West Palm Beach. A friend of a friend introduced me to a photographer. He seemed much older then, so maybe he was in his late 20s or 30s.

He had developed a technique in developing photos. In many ways it looks like the mosaic filtering Photoshop (and other photo software) perform. Back then, this was nothing less than an amazing technique – and if there were others who could perform it, there was little way to know.

I thought the picture made me look too sullen, but others liked it, so I sent it along to my folks (back then, living in Flushing, NY). I can’t believe they saved it all these years, especially considering the limited space they had in that tiny Flushing apartment.

When it was taken, I never imagined a child of mine would see it and maybe get some insight into her father. In fact, I would have never suspected having a child was in my future.

There are so many reasons I’m glad Steffie is spending time with my folks. Sharing photos is just one.

Kennedy Assassination As a Universal Experience

I remember, with vivid clarity, the moment I found out about John Kennedy’s assassination. I am not alone. It has been said that no one who lived through November 22, 1963 will ever forget where they were, what they were doing, when they found out.

For me, it was a sunny, late fall day, in Mr. Friend’s classroom on the back side of the first floor at Harold G. Campbell Junior High school. In New York City school names are ceremonial, at best. It was JHS 218 or JHS 218Q (for Queens).

Mr. Friend was told first and he relayed to the class that Kennedy had been shot. That’s all we knew. I can’t speak for the class, but I can tell you that whatever I thought at that moment, I wasn’t grasping the significance of the moment or that anything more could happen.

It was a time when TV news was much less crime and picture oriented. The grit and grime of violence may have been played out every day in the Daily News or Mirror (in 1963 the New York Post was a liberal newspaper which tended to play toward organized labor and its causes, not crime and debauchery)… but I read The Long Island Press, published in Jamaica, Queens. Violence outside of war didn’t exist as far as I was concerned.

November 22, 1963 was the day newspapers lost their position as ‘news of record’ for most Americans to television.

The windows from our classroom faced east, across open space and toward Queens College. Within a few minutes, someone in the class noticed a flag at Queens College being lowered to half staff. That’s when it hit me.

We were dismissed early and I began to walk home. I know I was with friends… maybe Dennis Westler, possibly Marty Ingber. I’m not really sure but I know I wasn’t alone. We discussed the fact that the president was dead and Lyndon Johnson, the vice president, had suffered a heart attack. I know now that was wrong – I didn’t then. We speculated what would happen. I was 13.

Still, we were discussing facts and the emotion had still not hit me. We were cavalier.

As I came home and turned on the TV, I realized this was major. All regular programming was gone. News, in a somber manner, was on all channels. Slowly, from the adults around me, I began to become aware of the gravity of the situation. We all sat, glued to the television.

Though I was born during the Truman administration and remember Eisenhower in a sketchy sort of way, Kennedy was the first president that I really knew. My parents were good Democrats in a lower middle class area of trade unionists who were also Democrats. The huge apartment complex we lived in, made up of dozens of three and six story buildings, was financed and built by the Electrical Workers Union Local 3 and called Electchester. Our friend Morris Scott, on the first floor of our six story 72 unit building, was a Transport Workers Union and Democratic functionary. He was not an exception in Electchester. The two went together.

During the campaign for the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy spoke at a campaign rally at Parsons Boulevard and Jewel Avenue, a block from our apartment. I found the photo on the left at an NYU site – amazing it’s preserved on the net. The facade of the building behind Kennedy is from the Pomonok Housing Project, which was across the street from us. The camera is shooting from the SE to the NW, across the intersection. My memory is of a huge crowd, but I was 10 at the time. This busy intersection was closed and a wooden platform was built.

Richard Nixon had nothing to gain by coming to my neighborhood. He was everything we weren’t, Kennedy was like us, though nothing could be further from the truth.

Anything I thought or felt about Kennedy during the campaign was based on those things that affect a ten year old; my parents, grandparents and the folks we lived around. I knew nothing about his policies, politics, social standing or any of the things we know today… and there’s no doubt we know a hell of a lot more today.

In my sphere of influence, Kennedy was like a god. I know that sounds foolish or naive now, but that’s the truth. To me, he was much larger than life. And he was the first adult I knew of to die tragically.

I had tickets to see a Broadway show on the Saturday following the assassination. It was probably my first Broadway show. Like the NFL schedule the next day, Broadway went on. In hindsight, both football and theater performances were bad ideas. Even so, with a bunch of my classmates and Mr. Friend, we boarded the bus for Flushing and the IRT subway (actually it was mostly above ground) to Times Square to see “Enter Laughing.”

I now know, this show was an autobiographical sketch from Carl Reiner. Then, who knew who Carl Reiner was? I remember it being funny in an irreverent sort of way, but the day being gray and gloomy in every other sense.

Sunday morning we sat home in our tiny apartment, 5E. I lived in an apartment with only a northern exposure. At no time in the 16 years I lived in this apartment… and decades longer my parents lived there, did we ever see the sun!

The TV in the living room, our only TV, was tuned to CBS. Along with millions of others, I watched Lee Harvey Oswald being shot, live. Being live, coast-to-coast, from that Dallas Police Department Garage was quite a technical achievement 40 years ago. Today, we see the videotape replay as grainy, dated black and white. Back then, it was live and vivid. Grainy black and white was the norm.

I was stunned. We were all stunned. How was this humanly possible? Today’s metal detecting, secure area-ed society was light years away. I had never seen a pistol, but in Texas, they were much more the norm.

Monday was the funeral. I think my dad was home, which was not a scheduled day off from work. Certainly every school was closed and my guess is most businesses too. By this time we had a common grief and stunned disbelief in what had happened. If it is possible, I remember being a 13 year old who was depressed.

The country stopped for the funeral. It struck me then, as it does now, that there are people who actually know how to plan an event like this with the proper protocol and deference to tradition. What a morbid field of expertise.

It was an awful, rainy day in Queens on that Monday. The funeral was long and sad and more than anything else I remember the riderless horse, the muffled drums and the crying. We’ve all seen the photo of John Jr. saluting. I believe that was only seen by still photographers. I don’t think we saw that live.

People think it was live because it’s been published and seen so many times. A similar situation is the film of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, with dust flying and the shadow of the lander on the surface. That too was never seen live on TV, though we did hear the voices of the astronauts and Mission Control.

Five or six years after the funeral I was marching down those same Washington streets, protesting the war in Vietnam. In 1963 there was no thought that you might protest what your government was doing. But after JFK’s assassination, everything changed.

Lyndon Johnson became the president and used the Kennedy aura to pass Civil Rights legislation that began to bring this country out some draconian policies that survived even the Civil War. Johnson also inherited Kennedy’s involvement in Vietnam, which would be his undoing as a president. The war accelerated, halfway around the world.

Before Kennedy’s assassination we were innocent and invulnerable. World War II had taken place without any conflict reaching America’s shores. Korea too was fought far away. The strength of our military, combined with the breadth of the ocean, protected us from harm. But now we found that harm could come from within and that nothing would ever be safe again.

A generation only knows about the assassination through Oliver Stone’s movie. Shame on him. Shame on them. Stone’s powerful use of the medium told America a lie, packaged as the truth.

Forty years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday.

(This entry originally posted November 22, 2003)