Saturday, January 19, 2008

I Had Asthma Before It Was Popular

By Raanan Geberer
Originally appeared in "Currents" section of Hudson Reporter, Hoboken, N.J.

The rate of childhood asthma has risen steadily in the last 20 years. Some people link this to air pollution: others blame global warming.

This should give me some perverse satisfaction, although it really doesn't. I was born with hereditary asthma, and have had it most of my life.

My childhood was filled with syrupy, icky-tasting liquids that my father called "the green," "the yellow" and "the red," eventually replaced by pills. I spent many evenings during my pre-teen years hunched over the vaporizer, breathing in the steam as my mother stood over me. As for allergy injections, don't even ask! I still remember my smiling, elderly allergist pricking my arm with the needle, then joking, "Ouch! That hurts!" as I smarted in pain.

Nowadays, there are special sleep-away camps for kids with asthma. But when I was young, there either weren't any such camps or my parents didn't know about them, so I had to watch jealously as most of my classmates went away to camp. When I was 15, thinking I could do an end-run around my parents, I applied for a job as a waiter in a camp. But when I let the word "asthma" slip, the interviewer said, "We've had to send several staff members home because of asthmatic conditions." Foiled again!

As for sports, forget it! My mother insisted that every time i registered for gym class, I give the teacher a note saying that I could withdraw from physical activity when my asthma acted up. One day in junior high, I told her I was invited to play touch football. She interrogated me until she found out where the game was. She then told me that if I went there, she would stand there to make sure I didn't play.

A few years later, when I told Mom I was applying for a summer kibbutz program in Israel, she angrily made me list every single medicine I had ever taken, as if I were a former felon trying to hide a prison record. Needless to say, I wasn't accepted, although I did get to go on an archaeological dig there many years later.

My asthma began to fade away in my late teens, and I was finally able to persuade my parents to let me go to an out-of-town college -- the college had an infirmary where I could take my injections.

The illness basically disappeared by my early twenties, although I continued to take medicines as needed. I began to do activities that I wouldn't have thought of doing as a child, such as jogging, going on long bike trips, playing paddleball, canoeing and even taking martial arts classes (I now think of this period as a "golden age.")

Then, when I was around 30, I caught a bad strain of the flu. After it went, my asthma came back--in spades. I went to the emergency room many times. I often gasped for air just to walk one block to the pharmacy. At the time, I worked as a copy editor for the now-defunct Hudson Dispatch in New Jersey, and many nights when I left the newsroom, I had so little breath that the trip down the block was like climbing Mount Everest.

After a few months of this, I went to an allergist. She gave me new medicines and weekly injections. When that didn't work, she increased the injections to twice a week. Still, I kept going to the ER, and was admitted to the hospital several times. I tried acupuncture, but that didn't help either.

On top of it all, there was the girlfriend who, after I found it hard to talk one night because I was so short of breath, accused me of having "withdrawn Piscean moods" and ended our relationship.

During this period, I changed jobs twice. When I took a position in Brooklyn, I decided to find a doctor nearby. My new doctor gave me some sort of a test, then discontinued the injections while continuing the medications. I began to get better almost immediately. The visits to the ER became more infrequent, then stopped.

Eventually, I began taking newer medications and began paying attention to my diet. With one or two exceptions, I've been asthma attack-free for about 12 years.

So, to all these new childhood asthma patients that you hear about, good luck. You'll certainly enjoy better care than I did!

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Why Commercial Rent Regulation Is Needed

By Raanan Geberer
Originally from Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 2006

The recent news of the closure of the Musicians General Store, the musical-instrument store in Cobble Hill, is saddening–but hardly unique.
In another example, in Manhattan, an entire block of stores on Eighth Avenue north of 14th Street, including the Cajun jazz club, one of the few places to hear 1920s-style jazz in the city, was forced to close down. Don’t forget, also, what happened to the Bottom Line and CBGB’s. And the same thing is happening to many small neighborhood restaurants.
What’s going on here?
Nine times out of ten, the owners of these buildings are kicking out these stores in hopes that a chain store will move in. Many large retail chains, it seems, have no limit on what they are going to spend. For example, where I live, you have a Duane-Reed, a CVS and a Rite-Aid within three blocks of each other. The market clearly isn’t big enough for all three, but there they are. And there is a second Duane-Reed coming five blocks away!
I have nothing against chain stores. For years, chain stores such as the A&P and Woolworth’s co-existed with small "mom-and-pop" stores. In many underdeveloped areas, chain stores have played an important, valuable role in bringing these neighborhoods back to life–for example, look at the Lowe’s in Gowanus.
But in general, however, building owners have let themselves be carried away with dreams of easy money and quick fortunes, not just a reasonable profit. Forest City Ratner, in its Atlantic Terminal and Atlantic Center malls, has allocated space only to chain stores, without any set-aside for local merchants.
Under these circumstances, the idea the "owning your own business" is the ultimate dream for people has turned out to be a cruel joke.
Quite a few years ago, a former City Council member, Stan Michaels, who represented Washington Heights, sponsored a measure to introduce commercial rent regulation in this city. Needless to say, it failed. When I asked his assistant about it a year or so later, I was told that there was no support for it, and that efforts were being concentrated on lowering taxes for commercial buildings so that the owners wouldn’t have to charge such high rents.
Whoever made the last argument doesn’t understand human nature. While there are doubtless some ethical businesspeople, there are as many, or more, who are not. As the influence of traditional ethics, religious faith and civic responsibility wanes, it is increasingly replaced by an attitude of "I’m going to get as much for myself as I can, and to hell with everybody else." That’s why the government must step in as an arbiter among diverse groups (in this case, store-owners and commercial building owners) who would destroy each other otherwise.
This is why the idea of commercial rent regulation should be revived.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Doin' the Census in the Bronx

By Raanan Geberer
Published with the permission of SofTech, publisher of BronxBoard, where it originally appeared in the "Bronx Diary" section

A t the age of twenty-one, I graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton. I was still unsure about what I wanted to do with my life. I was trying to make up my mind between journalism (which I eventually chose), city planning and high-school teaching. So, like many of my peers during the laid-back 1970s, I decided to "take a year off," basically living at home in Co-op City, working at an "ordinary" job and maybe doing a little traveling before finally making a decision and going to graduate school for my master's.
The problem was, even getting an ordinary job, without any real job skills, was tough. For whatever reason, I didn't want to go back to either of my previous short-term employers, R&J Records, a record wholesaler on Sherman Avenue in Inwood, or the Record Hunter, the famed record store on Fifth Avenue. I tried driving a yellow cab out of a garage on Jerome Avenue near Yankee Stadium, but I found it so stressful that I soon quit. For a while, I worked part-time doing title searches in the Bronx County Courthouse for a real-estate company, but that came to an end after two months. Then, my friend Angelo told me that the Census was hiring, and told me how to apply.
Few people knew, and probably still don't, that the census doesn't only come to life every ten years. During the "off years" it does surveys for every federal agency under the sun. The survey I would be doing was for the Justice Department and called the National Crime Survey. Families were chosen at random to be interviewed for the purpose of seeing whether the rates of specific crimes were going up or down.
I applied, was accepted, and was told I would work on a team in the Northeast Bronx, near where I lived. But first, I had a to attend a one-week training session in Lower Manhattan. Our tours with the Census Bureau would be only six weeks, but, we were assured, the bureau did one survey after another and was always hiring. "If you're good," one head honcho addressed us, "You can become a crew chief!" Definitely something to consider.
After the training session, I was assigned to a team that would operate around the Allerton Avenue area - the same area where Angelo and several of my high school friends used to live. I was overjoyed, and although I had never lived there myself, I knew those streets inside-out, so the job would be easy. The first day, our whole group, about twenty of us, met at the diner on the north side of Pelham Parkway and White Plains Road for a little orientation with our new crew chief, Nick, a young, well-dressed Greek-American guy who'd previously worked as a painting contractor.
We got our list of interviewees and our interview questions, and it was off to the races. I was a little annoyed that the policy of this survey was to not notify people in advance that we were coming, but on the whole, people were cooperative, especially after I displayed a big badge that identified me as a federal employee. The only exception was one woman on Gun Hill Road who slammed the door on me for reasons unknown. A few people politely refused to answer the questions, like three young Fordham University coeds who shared an apartment on Cruger Avenue, but those I could tolerate.
A lot of the bureau's rules were a pain. For example, if only one member of the family was home, you had to put the answer down as a "partial," and then come back the next day, or the day afterward, to speak to the wife or husband. After a while, I learned to just ask, "Does your wife feel the same way you do?"
Also, the question "During the last year, were you ever robbed, raped, assaulted, physically attacked..." could be inflammatory, so eventually I just asked, "in the last year, have any crimes been committed against you?" and let them do the talking.
The job did have its pleasant features. Often, I took a break to sit down at Al's Luncheonette on Allerton, listening to the war stories of the colorful Russian immigrant owner, or I sifted through the old records and books at Lianna's antique store, further to the east.
One time, I interviewed an elderly, very well-spoken doctor on Williamsbridge Road who talked about the neighborhood and how stable it was. "Of course, there was one building on the street that had, shall we say, that bad element, but of course, that building just burned down." He winked his eye, implying that he had something to do with it.
Another time, I was so taken with a young lady I interviewed on Holland Avenue that the day after I interviewed her for the Census, I called her and asked her for a date. She was the daughter of a State Senator, no less, whose office was on Pelham Parkway North, right next to the diner. Completely unprofessional behavior, perhaps, but at twenty-one, pursuit of the opposite sex overrode everything and anything. She wasn't interested.
Once a week, we all got together at the diner, handed Nick our paperwork, then got a new list of people to interview. Nick tried to start a contest among us by announcing who had the most completed interviews for the week, something I didn't appreciate. I usually came in second or third, but one very jovial and outgoing man - Mr. Del Giudice - always came in with the highest totals. Del Giudice, who was born in the old country, spoke Italian, and since at least half of the Allerton Avenue area was still Italian-American, he apparently was a hit.
"It's those stories he tells," Nick related to us, cheerfully.
After the sixth week, we met in the diner one last time. Nick congratulated us and then said, "You might not have noticed that Mr. Del Giudice isn’t here." He was right, although I hadn't noticed it until he mentioned it.
Well, it seemed that Nick's opinions of him had cooled a little bit. "His totals were a little too high, so we decided to re-interview some of the people he said he interviewed. He made all his interviews up, and we're prosecuting him. Oh, by the way, Ron?"
"Yes?"
"We checked up on a few of yours, too, but you're OK!" I breathed a sigh of relief. Apparently Nick didn't know - or care - about my "partials."
"What about more surveys? How do we apply?"
Nick breathed heavily. “They just announced that they're cutting back on the number of surveys they're doing. I don't know when the next one is. I’m gonna go back to contracting for a while. I wish you guys the best."
A week or two later, I took a trip over to the trusty Lehman College job board (supposedly for Lehman students only, but no one was checking). Soon, I was working as a "permit clerk" for a plumbing company on Webster Avenue. I had to go down to the Buildings Department every day and try to get permits for the jobs they were doing. That job, too, was a quite a trip, as they said in the '70s, but that's a story for another day.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Googling the Dead

By Raanan Geberer
Originally Published in "Smith" Magazine

Like most computer-literate Americans, I find that one of my main activities on the web is looking up (or “Googling”) people I used to know. But when, a few years ago, I Googled one of my old girlfriends, Karen Dollinger, and found an obituary, I was devastated, even though we had never been “in love” per se.
Karen and I met through an ad I placed in the Village Voice back in the late '80s. Karen was a psychiatrist, very impressive to me, and I really got a kick out of the fact that she would consider me, who had a history of childhood emotional problems, suitable material to go out with. She was very heavy, about 250 pounds, and for that reason, men had avoided her for most of her life. But since I’m really attracted to large women, her body was an incredible turn-on. I couldn’t get enough of her, with her gigantic legs, ass and breasts, and sometimes we’d have sex several times in a day.
I would play little verbal games with her:“Karen, could you look at the clock and tell me what time it is?”“Eleven o’clock. Why?”“What do you think we’ll be saying to each other at midnight?”“Oh, please fuck me!”“And what do you think we’ll be saying at one o’clock?”“Oh, PLEASE, fuck me!”
Karen and I had a strange relationship — we spent weekends together, but during the week, it seemed like we hardly knew each other. We had gone to the same state university, but outside of music and films, we didn’t really share each other’s interests. She was really into horses, having ridden from childhood, and owned at least one, which she kept at a friend’s farm upstate (I always suspected she was trying to hide the fact that she came from a fairly wealthy background; for example, she had owned a BMW in college, but claimed she’d gotten the money from an accident settlement).
She shared none of my consuming interest in politics — she never watched the evening news or read the newspaper, and once asked me, “Who’s Al Sharpton?” Although we were both Jewish, it also shocked me that she was so non-religious, she treated even Yom Kippur like it was just another day (she described her family, who I never met, as being “extremely white-bread”). Although I’m far from being Orthodox, I have strong religious and spiritual beliefs, and her total indifference threw me for a loop (at least if she’d told me she was a militant atheist, at least that would have been SOMETHING!)
Still, I respected her intelligence, and I liked her lack of pretense and the fact that we had really intense conversations. I might have turned her off a few times by yelling enthusiastically, in bed, about her “big ass” — to me saying this was merely an intensely sexual turn-on, but to her it was probably a reminder of the insults she’d gotten throughout her life.
Then, there was the matter of my asthma, which was pretty serious back then and which made me cough and wheeze constantly. She thought it was psychosomatic and advised me to return to therapy. She would have been better off telling me to go to a good pulmonary specialist, like the one who finally helped me a few years later.
The relationship lasted about nine months — we both sort of understood, from the very beginning, that it was basically temporary, and that at some point we’d move on to other partners. Still, I assumed that we’d always be friends, and I was shocked when she decided to cut off all contact with me (my leftist friend Bert later said this was proof of how “conventional” she was, since, “middle class-type women, unlike artistic and intellectual types, rarely have stay in touch with their ex-boyfriends”). About a year later, another friend, Dan Dinnerstein, answered a personal ad that she herself had placed, and I was relieved when she dropped him after two dates.
The obit said that she lived up in Putnam County and was married with two children. It didn’t give the cause of death — I wondered whether she had killed herself, since she always used to talk about how depressed she was. She might also have died of a heart attack. She herself had predicted this, since her mother had also died of one in her forties.
At any rate, here’s a shout out to Karen, I wasn’t in love with you, I'm still not in love with you, but I DO feel love for you.
And I hope we’ll meet n the next world.

Why the Brits Hate Israel

By Raanan Geberer

As we speak, British commentators (Alexander Cockburn, Tony Judt, Christopher Hitchens) are all agog in a frenzy, not only criticizing Israel, which is their right, but presenting its mere existence, and that of the Zionist movement, as a former of injustice, with a vituperation more worthy of a pro wrestling villain than of serious students of world affairs.

Also, British academics have been in the forefront of the movement to boycott cooperation with Israeli universities – a move that is somewhat odd, since Israeli academics have been among the most strident critics of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. When an Israeli professor visiting Britain told one of the Brits that the Israeli-Arab conflict (or, if you will, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) was not one-sided, the British professor said, “Yes, it’s very one-sided.” Apparently that gentleman has never heard of suicide bombers. And apparently most of these critics have never heard of the substantial human rights violations found in Syria, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries—it’s only Israeli human rights violations that concern them.

To understand WHY the so many of the British hate Israel, we must go back into history. Specifically, we must go back to a part of history that’s basically been forgotten and many younger people are not even aware of – the British mandate over Palestine.

To put it briefly, after the British Army took Palestine from the Turks during World War I, the then-new League of Nations awarded Britain a “mandate” to govern Palestine. At the time, there were already severe tensions between two opposing nationalist movements – the Zionist movement and the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement. Britain had made conflicting pledges to both sides during World War I.

What the British should have done, and could have done, is to act as an honest broker, to try to reconcile the differences between the two groups and to help them come to an agreement. After all, there was lots of empty land in Palestine—and still is. But instead, Britain decided to play its little “divide and conquer” game, pitting groups against each other so as to strengthen its own hold on the country. This had worked in Ireland (well, up to a point) and in India—now it was Palestine’s turn.

First, British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel (ironically, a Jew) appointed extremist Amin al-Husseini as “grand mufti” of Jerusalem, when he could easily have appointed a more moderate candidate. Then, in 1929, after armed Arab gangs slaughtered scores of innocent Jews in Hebron and Safed, Britain didn’t vigorously hunt down those who incited the riots and bring them to justice. Instead, it decided that the whole thing had been provoked by Jewish immigration, and tried to limit it.

Even after World War II, when thousands of Jewish concentration camp survivors in the DP camps of Europe were clamoring to go to Palestine (and it is true, many did want to go to the U.S. instead), Britain refused to compromise. It wouldn’t even admit the 100,000 immigrants that the international community wanted. Instead, it basically imposed martial law on the country, setting up roadblocks, jailing people at random, and so on.

Unfortunately for the British, the Jews didn’t roll over like the ghetto Jews of medieval Europe. They organized, they demonstrated, they went on strike, and sometimes they committed acts of violence, the best known of which was the bombing of the King David Hotel. For several years, the country was in the midst of a virtual civil war between the British and the Jewish community. The Arabs were basically bystanders, and the Zionist movement, unfortunately, took the short-sighted and unrealistic position that Arab opposition to Zionism was artificially created by British imperialism.

At any rate, to put it crudely, we, the Jewish people, kicked Britain’s collective ass, and Great Britain finally threw in the towel and decided to quit Palestine, leaving the Arab-Israeli struggle in its wake. There is plenty of blame to go around for the continuation of the conflict – Israel for denying basic human rights to Arabs in the “territories”; the Arabs for educating their children to hate Israel from an early age; the former Soviet Union for arming the Arab states to the teeth and encouraging them to keep the hostilities going; the United States for not being willing to publicly criticize Israel when criticism is due.

But the British never owned up to their share of the blame. They never forgave Israel for daring to stand up to their mighty empire. While this resentment may have been driven underground for awhile, it was there in the background, in the nation’s collective unconscious, to use Jung’s term. And today it has surfaced again, in the writings of Cockburn, Hitchens, Judt, et. al.

Sunday, January 6, 2008

How to Make the MTA More Representative

By Raanan Geberer
First Published in Brooklyn Daily Eagle

The dust has settled by now, and the subway and bus fare hike is a reality. Politicians and the media are raging, pointing out that the transit agency actually has posted surpluses recently and given its executives huge bonuses. They demand that something be done to “roll back the fare hike.” But when in the history of the metropolitan area has a fare hike ever been rolled back?
Perhaps we should look at the MTA to understand why these problems exist.
Many people feel it was a big mistake to take the subways and buses out of the direct control of the city and put them under the authority of an independent agency. But Long Island and Westchester commuters have interests that are very similar to those of city transit riders. And, in my opinion, this is a good thing, because consolidation between the three main components of the MTA (New York City Transit, Long Island Railroad and MetroNorth) will help develop a unified transit system that will benefit everybody.
Instead, let us look at the nature of the MTA board. As the MTA’s own literature says, “Members are nominated by the governor, with four recommended by New York City’s mayor and one each by the county executives of Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Dutchess, Orange, Rockland and Putnam Counties. The board also has six rotating non-voting seats held by representatives of organized labor and the Permanent Citizens Advisory Council, which serves as a voice for users of MTA and commuter facilities. All board members are confirmed by the New York State Senate.”
First of all, I say, let’s decrease the governor’s role. Sitting in Albany, the governor can’t be expected to be a big-time expert on transit in the metropolitan area. And while having the state Senate vote on appointees seems democratic, it really isn’t — why should someone from Syracuse have a voice on what is done with the “A” train? I say, put the MTA under the direct control of the municipalities and counties that are directly affected.
And while we’re at it, why not give each borough of New York City an additional, separate vote — something that Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz has long advocated? After all, Brooklyn probably has a large a population as Rockland or Orange counties.
Now, to the makeup of the board. Glancing through the biographies of the board members, I see only a few people who have any direct experience of being involved with mass transit — the representative of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Council and one person who once ran a trucking firm. The great majority are people with experience in the financial markets, such as the Office of Management and Budget, Shearson Lehman and Goldman Sachs — in other words, “bean counters.”
Of course, when dealing with a public agency that has large budgets, the presence of such financial watchdogs are necessary. But why so many? If I had my way, at least half of the appointees would have to be people with direct experience in mass transit — whether planners, engineers, Transport Workers Union leaders, managers, representatives of private bus companies, and so forth. Why not put professional transit planners on the board, for example?
One final note on the representatives of organized labor: While this writer in general is a supporter of unions, the only union that should be represented here is the Transport Workers Union, the union that deals directly with transportation. Why someone from, say, the Building Trades Council should be on the MTA board doesn’t make much sense to me. Most likely, he’s there as some kind of political reward for something.
Instead, why not put a representative of the city’s community boards on the MTA board? At least they’ll be closer to the concerns of the average New Yorker.
At any rate, these are some of my thoughts about the MTA.

Friday, January 4, 2008

The PIano

By Raanan Geberer

Published in 2009 on the "Mr. Beller's Neighborhood" web site.

The old upright piano, with its legend “Spector, New York City,” was in the living room from my earliest recollection until the day my father died. He must have brought it sometime in the early ‘50s, after he and Mom came back from a failed attempt to establish themselves in Israel, after Mom’s asthma got so bad that a doctor advised them to leave the country.

Mom’s asthma didn’t get much better in New York, however, and my father, increasingly, took to the piano and his other hobby, stamp collecting, to escape both his family and his troubled work life – in the early days, he was always changing jobs, by necessity. Dad would spend hours playing Brahms, Schumann, Clementi, Chopin. At the end, he would always start playing an old Russian folk song called “Two Guitars” and stare wistfully into space. It’s my belief that this was a song that he used to play, during his childhood, as a duet with his violin-playing brother, who died an untimely death in the late ’40s.

When I was eight years old or so, Dad started teaching me to play the piano. At first, I really enjoyed it. But it soon became clear to me that I had no say in what I played – I’d have to play what he wanted me to play. And if I played something incorrectly or made an insufficient effort, he’d yell: “You idiot! Wrong! WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!”

By the time I was 12, I told Dad I didn’t want to take lessons anymore, although I never stopped playing, on and off. Dad tried to teach my brother too, but my brother, more restless and angry and less tolerant of our parents, only lasted six months or so with Dad as a teacher. Over the years, my brother would pick up several different instruments – the cello, the saxophone, the bass, the guitar – but not the piano.

Anyway, that same year, when I was 12, the Beatles came to America. I would often go to the piano and try to play the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, Motown. This drove my father nuts. “That’s not music! THAT’S JUST BANGING!” he’d say. He’d take to locking the piano with a key he had, just so that I wouldn’t play it when he was in the house. And the worst of it was that my father definitely didn’t believe in the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” There was only one TV in the house, and it, too, was in the living room. Many was the time that I’d have to wait what seemed like an eternity until my father finished practicing piano for the night, until I could watch one of my favorite TV programs. It’s probably thanks to him that I never really grew to like classical music (Bach and Handel excepted).

I moved out of the house, then moved back, then moved out again, then moved back again, then moved out for good, but the piano was always there. The unsteady piano bench, with its wobbly legs, finally went the way of all wood, but the piano itself remained. In the early days he’d call piano tuners periodically, but when he got older, especially after my mother died, he let things go, and the piano’s sound became tinny. Still, he practiced every day.

Finally, in 2004, he died. One day, while going to Dad’s Co-op City apartment to clean up, I met a young pre-adolescent girl and her mother in the hallway. I told them Dad had died. “I knew it,” the girl said. “I haven’t hearing him playing his piano for a long time. I used to hear him every day! I knew all his songs!” I was a little thrown off – I don’t know if you can call a Bach fugue a “song” – but it soon occurred to me that he hand’t changed these “songs” in 35 years. Once, a friend had tried to give him some new sheet music – I remember “Mussogursky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” was one of them – and Dad tried to make a go of it, but he soon fell back on the tried and true. The pieces he played regularly were likely the same ones he’d played back in the East Bronx, during his childhood in the 1930s.

My brother’s son Joseph, a rock musician in his 20s, wanted the piano. He had, my brother told me, written many of his own songs on this piano. Joseph really loved my father and visited him all the time. Dad probably acted differently with his grandson than he had with his own children. At any rate, the movers soon came, and the piano was wheeled away after 25 or so years in Marble Hill and 35 years in Co-op City, gone to Queens and a new life.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Memories of Life at the Hudson Dispatch

By Raanan Geberer
Originally Published in the "Current" section of the "Hudson Reporter"

Until the early '90s, there was not one but two daily newspapers in Hudson County - the Jersey Journal and the now-defunct Hudson Dispatch, which published in Union City. The Dispatch, with its trademark logo of a rooster and slogan, "First Thing in the Morning," was a fixture in the area for more than 100 years. I worked on the night copy desk on the Dispatch during the mid-1980s, and here are some of my memories: (Editor's note: the author changed the names to protect the innocent!)

The Dispatch's main office was on Bergenline Avenue, but I was hardly ever there. Because we co-published with the Paterson News, we copy editors worked in Paterson. The Dispatch's copy desk mainly consisted of young men in their 20s and early 30s; the News' copy desk mainly consisted of young women around the same age.

Still, there were no romances that I remember, possibly because the night editor of the News was a tough, no-nonsense broad who regularly sent memos to her staff pointing out the errors they had made the night before. There were quite a few interesting people on the Dispatch copy desk. Take Tim M., who may have been a copy editor but his main passion was sports, which he would talk about for hours. When any of the reporters submitted a sports story, he would grab it and claim editing rights. He sometimes came to work in a full New Jersey Devils uniform.

Then, there was Ed L. Ed's father was an old-time beatnik who used to read the East Village Other and knew people like Tuli Kupferberg and Allen Ginsberg. Ed himself was an aficionado of '40s and '50s blues and R&B singers. Many were the times that, while editing copy, Ed would be singing songs like Hank Ballard's "Annie had a baby, she can't work no more..." Once, a new, very preppy female copy editor asked Ed whether he knew the name of "that famous black singer, you know who I mean, he's always into liberal causes..." She meant Harry Belafonte, but Ed kept me in stitches, asking her, "Who do you mean? Big Joe Turner? Howling Wolf? Bullmoose Jackson? T-Bone Walker?" naming every old-time blues singer he could think of.

The guy who actually routed the stories onto the pages after we edited them was Joe T., who, at the age of 38 or so, seemed old to us. Joe, one of the few people on the desk who had actually grown up in Hudson County, also served in the National Guard and would take weeks off at a time. He walked with a limp as the result of an old Vietnam injury, but he was a hard-boiled, no-nonsense SOB. Once, an angry reporter called him on the phone and asked him why he had cut his lead into two sentences. "Because it's too long, that's why!" Joe growled. "Then take my name off it!" the reporter said. "Fine," Joe said and then slammed down the phone.

Only one editor was older than Joe - Mike O'Leary, who was almost 70. Mike had many monk-like traits - for example, he had a germ phobia. Whenever he touched a doorknob or someone shook his hand, he would wash his hands about 10 times and then shake them into the air because he didn't trust the cleanliness of the paper towels. His parsimony was legendary - although he reputedly had accounts in a dozen banks, he only owned two pairs of pants and three shirts, each of which he wore for a week at a time.

His politics were ultra-right wing - he objected to the Martin Luther King holiday and defended Joe McCarthy. When I challenged him, he told me, "Look, I know you're Jewish and you're an OK guy, but you're too young to remember Jewish Communism." I tried to explain to him that even in its heyday, around 1936 or so, "Jewish Communism" only represented a minority of the Jewish community, but that didn't seem to register with him. Mike definitely seemed to have a thing about Jews. "Years ago, when I was workin' as an insurance agent, I found myself on Kings Highway in Brooklyn," he recounted, "but those Jewish neighborhoods didn't have any bars! I had to settle for one of those egg cream joints!"

Still, everyone respected Mike. He was meticulous when it came to grammar and spelling. Most of us, myself included, were only working as copy editors because jobs in journalism were scarce and we would rather have been reporters or "regular" editors. But Mike was a copy editor's copy editor.

Occasionally, the publisher, Louis J., would come in. Louis, a young guy not much older than most of us, was tall, thin, immaculately dressed, and handsome. Although he was born into the wealthy family that owned the paper, he had insisted on starting out as a reporter and working his way up. He was the recipient of many awards, including one from the Police Athletic League for coaching a softball team.

But, I soon learned, he wasn't always impartial. A supermarket in Hudson County went on strike. This supermarket was one of our biggest advertisers. Louis, who normally didn't interfere with the news people, insisted on seeing every story about the strike.
When the final vote was on the table, he personally wrote the headline: "It's Up to the Strikers Now," implying that the whole thing was basically the union's fault. Most of us on the desk were at least liberal, and a few were still influenced by the radical politics of the then-recent '60s and '70s. We resented Louis for doing this, but we went along with it because we had to. The next day, the strike was settled.

Louis seemed to have everything - until the day we came in and learned that he had been found dead in his car the night before. The rumor was that it was a love-triangle kind of thing. More than one of us thought of Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "Richard Cory."

Prophetic phrasing

In addition to editing reporters' local stories, we worked on wire stories. Our main criteria for editing wire copy seemed to be stressing any local angle and bringing it to the top. "Hey, if the World Trade Center blew up and 100 people died," one guy joked, "our headline would be, 'Two New Jersey residents die in World Trade Center!'" This was in 1985. Years later, I wondered, if the paper had lasted until the real 9/11 tragedy, whether we would have covered it in the same narrow-minded way.

No, all wasn't fun and games at the Dispatch, at least not for me. Within a few weeks after I had started there, I began to resent the 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. schedule because it didn't allow me much time for a social life. Worse, you didn't always get the same days off every week, at least not during your first year or so. We worked in a fairly dangerous neighborhood and there were no good restaurants around, so I had few alternatives to the vending machine with its chicken patties and "microwave pancakes."

The schedule threw my system off and may have contributed to my making constant mistakes, some of which moved the chief editor to put me on probation more than once. I began looking for another job, and almost two years after I started at the Dispatch, I found one, on a trade magazine in New York City.

The staff threw a goodbye party for me at the Hoboken Clam House, one of Frank Sinatra's old hangouts. The Clam House isn't there anymore, and neither is Sinatra. Interestingly, Al O'Leary used to tell me that one or two members of the Hoboken Four, the group Frank sang with as a teenager, were still living in the mile-square city in obscurity during the '80s.

I'll leave you with a headline I once wrote for a story about the way a snowstorm affected one of the smaller Hudson municipalities. I thought it was the best headline I ever wrote, but the chief editor felt otherwise, so it was never published. Here it is: "Little Guttenberg Fights the Big Snowstorm."

Hudson Dispatch, rest in peace.