The Kisseloff Collection

Who can kill a general in his bed?
Over throw dictators if they’re Red
Fucking-a, Man
CIA Man

Sometime in the late 1980s, the editors at The New York Post decided to enhance the literary quality of their Sunday paper. As if that wasn’t odd enough, one of the many mysterious choices they made for the section was to hire me to be a kind of New York version of Studs Terkel — Studs Lite, I guess you can say. After a couple of months, the editors came to their senses and got rid of me, but until they showed me the door, I had a terrific time, wandering around with my tape recorder or seeking out by phone people I could tie to an anniversary or current event. Amazingly, there were no restrictions on what I could write, but I guess that when I interviewed a woman about what it was like to have an abortion in the years before Roe v. Wade my fate at the paper was sealed.

A few years before, I had interviewed Tuli Kupferberg for a series of reminiscences I was stitching together for The Bill of Rights Journal. I have to admit, including him was a bitch of a stretch, but I had always loved the Fugs, ever since a friend in high school put one of their albums on his turntable. We just couldn’t believe it: “They put that on a record?” They were a kind of rock version of Mad magazine, totally thumbing their collective noses at everything, and even better, as musicians they were really lousy —  proudly so.

I had a blast talking to him, and soon after I began writing the Post series, I sought an excuse to talk to him. That turned out to be the twentieth anniversary of Woodstock, a pretty flimsy excuse, of course, since the Fugs didn’t play at Woodstock. But, hey, I didn’t give a shit, I was going to visit Tuli again. Come to think of it, I’m sure the interview with Tuli didn’t enhance my stature at the Post either.

No matter. Tuli was a wonderful and warm host. The thing about him though was that underneath all that silliness was the breadth of knowledge of a real historian. His apartment on Sixth Avenue looked like a library, and my guess was he had read most of the books that occupied a high percentage of his floor space. If you read his song lyrics, you’ll see the literary references. The guy knew his stuff.

The scans below of the interview as it appeared in the paper are pretty lousy. I have a tape recording of the interview. I’ll try to post some excerpts in the near future.

After the interview came out, Tuli called to say he liked it, which both pleased and surprised me. We stayed in touch for a while, and over the years he’d occasionally send me something in the mail. Sometimes they’d be little pornographic drawings, just squiggles really of penises and vaginas. I saved some of  it. He also sent more substantial gifts. I had told him “Kill For Peace was one of my favorite Fugs songs, so he ripped out a page from a song book and sent it to me. The lyrics are well-worth reprinting.

Then there was this booklet of songs:

I especially liked this one:

This was the back cover:

Then there was Tuli’s take on the old IWW Songbook:

Here’s one selection:

Monday nothing,
Tuesday nothing, Wednesday and Thursday nothing
Friday for a change, a little more nothing
Saturday once more nothing.

R.I.P., Tuli. You did your work, and you did it well.

After my post on the Strunskys, I received several nice emails from Michael Strunsky whose father English was the brother of Emily and Leonore. Here’s what he had to say:

“In about 1918 George Gershwin was a song plugger at Remick’s, a music publishing house on Tin Pan Alley (28th street, I think).  You remember, the “pluggers” were the first line salesmen whose job it was to get vaudeville performers to include a new song in his (her) act, resulting in sheet music sales.  One night a co-plugger in the next cubicle by the name of Herman Paley invited GG to his family’s house for dinner.  At dinner was Herman’s younger brother Lou Paley, and Lou’s very pretty girlfriend, Emily Strunsky.  The three of them formed a friendship that lasted until George’s death in 1937, and they formed the “partnership” that finally convinced George’s older brother Ira to wed Emily’s younger sister, Leonore (Lee) in 1926.  George played at Emily and Lou’s wedding in 1920 and, a few weeks later, accompanied them to a house in Harlem to test a used Steinway piano (they bought it) which today sits in my living room in San Francisco.”

Michael also attached this ad from a socialist paper:

EAT WHERE

The food is good
The prices moderate
The environment pleasant

Cafeteria
Three Steps Down
19 West Eighth Street

MASCHA STRUNSKY

“PS: Al Hirschfeld  used to come by every morning and paint the day’s menu on the wall for which he was paid a free lunch.

I know this doesn’t quite fit the theme of this blog, but I couldn’t resist.

A friend recently sent me a link to a cool blog about old New York. The posts themselves were fascinating enough, but then I saw something in the blog roll that really caught my imagination: a digitized collection of the old Brooklyn Daily Eagle. I clicked the link and saw the search feature and couldn’t resist typing in my own name. This is what came up:

Yup, I apparently descend from an assassin. And, to be honest, there’s something cool about it. Other than my grandfather who fought for the Russians in World War I (and got his ass shot up for it), it’s not like I come from a family of war heroes or cowboys or even Communist labor goons. We weren’t athletes or scholars or spies, although my Dad did once run for office as a way to improve business. He ran for the State Senate in New York as a member of the Liberal Party in 1950. Here’s his flyer, which indicates he was a member of the “Odd Fellows.” I would think that would have been a good enough reason to vote for him, but apparently I was in the minority.  I think he got about fifty votes.

I don’t know anything about Kisseloff the assassin, except according to the story he wasn’t, I gather, a very competent assassin. That sort of fits in with my family’s history. What motivated him? Was it politics? Was it poverty? Was it my great-great grandmother’s lousy blintzes?

I’d like to think he was a hired hit man for the good guys, or that he was kind to his mother or the shtetl idiot. It doesn’t say Kisseloff’s full name. I’m thinking Levi Harvey Kisseloff or Yonatan Shpilkes Kisseloff. I imagine him riding through the Russian steppes with the theme from the Soviet western, “The Gonnifs , The Bad and the Ugly” playing in the background, an outlaw, but a man who still brought home a good report card.

When I showed the article to my friend Bill, he wrote back, saying, “I always knew you were trouble.” Maybe I was. Maybe I am. After all,  murder is in my blood. Yup, I’m trouble. Jeff “Trouble” Kisseloff. Chuck Liddell better watch out. I’m thinking of joining the MMA.

Back in the 1980s, when I was writing my book about New York City, I became probably the 1,578th person to fall in love with Emily Strunsky Paley. Emily was around 90 at the time, so there was no question of my violating a few hundred basic rules of journalism or nature, but more than once I thought wistfully, If only I was sixty years older.

Even then, Emily retained much of the beauty and all of the charm that she was famous for in Greenwich Village in the years after World War I. Everybody in the Village loved Emily, almost as much as they did her father Albert, who was known around the Village as Papa Strunsky, one of the most beloved people ever to live on the island of Manhattan. And here’s the amazing thing to any New Yorker or anyone who ever lived in New York: he was a landlord.

When he died in 1942, the funeral home was packed with former tenants who wept at his death — and not with happiness as would normally be the case when a tenant attends his landlord’s funeral.

Albert  was a socialist, but in a sudden burst of capitalist ambition, he and his brother Hyman made a deal with Columbia University to lease the tenements the college owned on the  block below Washington Square Park. But Papa had neither the head nor the heart for making money off others. He filled the tenements with struggling artists and could hardly ever bring himself to collect rent from them. He carried many of them for years. Emily told me that one day she filled in for his secretary. She pulled out the books and saw that hardly anyone was paying rent, so she wrote them letters, “very nice letters,” she said, asking them to pay what they owed. When her father found out, she said, he went from door to door, telling his tenants, “My daughter is writing letters. Don’t pay any attention.”

Emily said that when Albert wasn’t working he liked to go to Ellis Island, and if he saw an immigrant who was alone, he’d invite him home and let him stay there until he was set. He even moved to a basement apartment in one of his buildings after he gave his own flat to one of his tenants. A lot of talented artists owned their careers to him. Sometimes they repaid him by giving him their painting in lieu of rent. He would just pile their work in his basement. Years later, the family found that some of the art was worth a small fortune.

Her father did try to dispossess a few tenants for nonpayment, Emily remembered. In one instance though, he drove the tenant he had just dispossessed to his new apartment. When they got out of the car and inspected the new place, Albert found it wasn’t to his liking, so they got back into the car “and my father gave him back his old apartment.”

When another case landed in court, the judge lectured the tenant that she had an obligation to pay rent. The tenant started to cry, so Albert pulled out a handkerchief, wiped her face and told her, “Don’t pay any attention to the judge, he’s heartless.”

Eventually, he and his brother lost the buildings because they couldn’t cover the lease. But Papa wasn’t the only saint in the family. His wife ran a restaurant on Eighth Street called Three Steps Down. It was run the same way that Papa operated his apartments. People ordered their food and paid what they wanted. Emily remembered one customer who came every day for years and never paid a nickel.

If ever there was a First Family of Manhattan, it was the Strunsky Family. Emily’s sister Leonore was also gorgeous, but she didn’t have her sister’s warmth. She did have a cool husband though. In the ‘20s, the Strunsky family used to have friends over to their home on Eighth Street for parties on Saturday nights. They owned a piano, and often a guest would sit down and play. Because of the Strunsky girls, those parties attracted quite a few eligible bachelors, among them George and Ira Gershwin, and it was Ira who married Leonore.

Emily Paley, painting by George Gershwin

Emily and Leonore had a younger brother named English. English owned a tomato canning plant in New Jersey. One day, he took Ira on a tour of the place. Ira was impressed, except he pronounced it “toe-mah-toe.”

“Ira,” English told him, “if I said it that way, none of the workers would know what I was talking about.”

Ira replied, “You’re just like Leonore. If I say, “ee-ther, she says “eye-ther.”

I guess you can figure out the rest of the story.

Ira Gershwin, a friend Mabel, George Gershwin, Emily Paley

The family also had a place on the Jersey shore where their friends were always invited. Aside from the Gershwins, there would be S.N. Behrman, Eugene O’Neill, Sholem Asch, and Oscar Levant. It was a charmed life, until the day that Emily remembered George telling her that he kept smelling something burning. It turned out to be the first indication that he was suffering from the brain tumor that would soon kill him. Emily still had his piano in her apartment when I would visit. If I’m not mistaken, it was the piano he used to compose “Rhapsody in Blue.” I liked to tinkle a couple of keys just for the thrill of it.

Strunsky family hotel in Belmar, NJ, 1926; in front: George Gershwin; first row: Marjorie Paley, Morris Strunsky, Elsie Payson, Howard Dietz, Cecilia Hayes, Arthur Caesar, Emily Paley, Phil Charig, Leonore Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, George Backer, Harold Goldman; second row: Cecilia Ager, Mrs. Bela Blau, Mischa Levitski, Henrietta Malkiel Poynter, Jim Englander, Anita Keen; third row: Milton Ager, Lou Paley, Bela Blau, S. N. Behrman, Mrs. Arthur Caesar, English Strunsky, Harold Keyserling, Barney Paley; rear right: Albert "Papa Strunsky."

(Click on photo for larger version)

Emily inherited her father’s saintliness. She eventually married a friend of the Gershwin’s, Lou Paley, but she stayed in touch with her many admirers for the rest of her life. John Huston sent her flowers every year on her birthday. Zero Mostel asked her to be the godmother to his children.

When she died in 1990, the family asked me to assemble a memorial booklet of letters that Emily’s friends had written to her over the years. My favorites were two from George. In one, he wrote, “A beautiful day in June could take lessons from you,” and in the other, written on July 4, 1940, he said, “Patriotic and personal greetings to you who even if I had 963 other sisters-in-law would always be my favorite.”

Then there was this note from Mostel: “Dearest Emily, I have nothing to write you in a letter, but my secretary has nothing to do, so I am writing to you. Love, Zero.”

Emily in her early 80s

The more I got to know Emily the more I came to understand how extrordinary a family the Strunskys were. Her father had two sisters. Rose was a radical journalist who went to Russia to cover the 1905 revolution and had to be bailed out of prison by Teddy Roosevelt. She later wrote one of the most respected biographies of Abraham Lincoln.

Another sister, Anna, was a lover of Jack London and was the only person to collaborate with him on a book (“The Kempton-Wace Letters”). That’s when the family was living in San Francisco. They were there when the earthquake hit. Emily remembered their neighbor in a panic, running naked in the street — that was Enrico Caruso.

Anna eventually married William English Walling, a leading progressive intellectual. They had a daughter also named Anna. She married a writer many years her senior named Norman Matson. Matson had been John Reed’s (“Ten Days That Shook the World”) roommate in the Village. Anna told me a story once about how one day when Norman and John were sharing their cold water flat, they saw an old bathtub sitting on the street. They dragged it home and set it down in their kitchen and eagerly began drawing water for a bath. The problem was they had no hot water. That’s when Reed — who had one of the great journalistic minds in history — had the bright idea of putting a bunch of candles under the tub to heat the water. He didn’t count on the candles scorching his butt when he climbed into the tub.

After Matson died, Anna married the New Yorker writer Philip Hamburger and was as lovely in her 80s as Emily had been, so was her sister Rosamund, a renowned beauty in her day who married an Albanian prince. Another relative was Simeon Strunsky, who wrote charming editorial pieces for the Times. My favorite relative though was Emily’s cousin Max, an orthopedic surgeon who was also an inventor. Out of sympathy for the working class, he invented a vacuum that both washed and dried floors. Another brother, Morris, in his mid-50s, volunteered for the Merchant Marines during World War II, and managed to survive the legendarily treacherous Murmansk Run, the supply channel to the Soviet Union that went along the Arctic.

Then there was Albert’s mother, who I guess is the point of all this. She was born in 1848 in Babinitz, a small shtetl 400 miles from Moscow. She had ten children. Six survived to adulthood, a pretty good percentage back then. The family immigrated to the United States in 1886.

In the 1930s, although she had never written anything in her life other than letters, she took it upon herself to ease the family’s financial burden by writing and publishing her autobiography. Anna remembered coming home from school and seeing her grandmother sitting at the kitchen table, “writing in beautiful mysterious Yiddish script on yellow paper.”

It never was published, but the manuscript was translated by a few family members and passed around among them. Sometime after my book, “You Must Remember This,” was published, I thought about writing a biography of the Strunsky family. Emily went into her closet and pulled out the manuscript. As I had been with all the Strunskys, I was completely charmed by these Aleichem-like stories from the old country, when she was a girl and a young woman. I also couldn’t help but think that the pages I was holding were bringing back to life a world that my own ancestors had occupied. I’ll post more of her stories over time, but here are a few to give you a taste.

I never met Robert Herbert Sanders, but I know a little bit about him. He was born in 1909 and graduated from West Point in 1934. His father-in-law also attended West Point and was, apparently, the first Irish-American to do so. He fought in the Spanish-American war and became a brigadier general.

After graduation, Robert married and had three children. The family was stationed at Pearl Harbor when the base was attacked on December 7, 1941. My guess is their son Robert, Jr., who was then only four months old, is the youngest survivor of that attack.

Eventually, Robert Sr. was sent overseas, and he found himself on the front lines in Europe in charge of what must have been a bunch of scared kids and that he performed with honor. I also know from his letters home that he missed his wife and children terribly. Then in the dark of night of February 24, 1945, he was walking through a trench on his way to check on a forward platoon when he stepped on a mine, and his brief life was over.

Memorial Day honors the sacrifices of people like Robert Sanders, as we should, but look more closely and you realize that when a single soldier is killed a lot of things die with him. Lieutenant-Colonel Sanders’s  death shattered a young family. His widow’s grief lasted long after she took the gold star down from her window. In fact, though she lived well into her 90s, she never recovered from it, and I’m sure that in countless ways his three children, now in their 60s and 70s, continue to be affected by their mother’s continual sadness and the premature loss of their father.

In turn, while raising their own families, their lives and their choices must have been influenced by their grief and their fears and as a result their children are who they are partly because of what happened that night in February 1945.

I know it’s true, because Robert Herbert Sanders was my wife’s grandfather, a man she obviously never knew. Who knows how her life would have been different had he survived the war?  (I know my grandchildren will have it drummed into their heads that Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were innocent and that a life without rooting for the Mets is a life not worth living).

I do know her father (who served in Vietnam) is about the best grandfather I’ve ever seen. I’m sure one reason for that is his growing up without a father. I also know that he doesn’t like surprises and finds a certain amount of security in planning things out in advance. My wife is the same way. Doubtless any family that has experienced the knock on the door feels similarly.

In that sense, Robert H. Sanders’ death more than 65 years ago continues to reverberate today. I suppose it will continue to do so until the memories of him and of those directly affected by him, just peter out over time like fading ripples in water that had been set in motion as powerful waves.

Robert H. Sanders was just one of some 292,000 American deaths on the battlefield in World War II. But to one family, he might as well have been all of them.

What follows are a few pages from a scrapbook of his life (the texts are clickable):

High school graduate, 1926:

West Point: 1934:

His last letter home, written less than two weeks before his death (later retyped):

The telegram recopied by his widow:

The West Point flag at half mast

His grave in Holland:

Being the father he never had (my wife in the rear):

Repeating history:

Back in the years before people started sending white powder through the mail (and I’m not talking about coke addicts), Alger Hiss used to get regular hate mail, all of which he opened with great amusement. As a WASP who enjoyed his yiddishisms, he was especially fond of those letters that accused him of being an evil Jew. He even had a regular hate correspondent, some guy who used to write so often that he became almost like family. It reminded me of a great Kurt Vonnegut story set in Hyannisport during the Kennedy administration where the retired, arch-conservative Admiral who lived in the compound across the way from the Kennedys hated them so much, he erected a huge, illuminated portrait of Barry Goldwater atop his house. Then one night when he failed to light it (I can’t remember why), there was a knock on his door. It was JFK himself, asking the Admiral if he could turn it back on, since it was the only way he could find his way home along the dark road.

Much the same way, if Alger’s special hater had stopped writing him, we would have been equally disappointed. In fact, I could see Alger writing him a note, making sure he was ok.

Anyway, I wish I had saved his letters, they were that wonderful, but I did save a few others. Here is one of my favorites. Pay special attention to the note on the envelope. (Click on images to enlarge them, and if you want to see the program that inspired such an outpouring of love, click here.)

Sometimes, I’m sure that along with the historical memorabilia that seems to occupy every free inch of our house, there are also ghosts that haunt the place, just to taunt me. That can’t be, right?

Forty years ago today, four students at Kent State University — Allison Krause, Jeff Miller, Sandy Scheuer and  William Schroeder — were murdered by agents of the US government. It was maybe the signature event of my generation in terms of demonstrating how far the government would go to stifle dissent. None of the students were armed, and none presented even the  remotest threat to the National Guardsmen on campus. Yet, no soldier was ever prosecuted for the crime.

A few days after the killings, protesters at my high school in East Meadow, New York, were set upon by right-wing students shouting anti-Semitic slogans. It was no Kent State, but it was an indication that the roots of Kent State were deeply embedded in our soil. When African-American Congressmen are spat upon by tea party members in Washington DC, we are reminded yet again that the poison continues to spread.

In 2007, I wrote a book called “Generation on Fire” in response to Kent State, but primarily as a tribute to the remarkable courage and rebellious spirit that sparked so many of the great changes that came out of the 1960s,  The last chapter was devoted to the memory of Allison Krause, as told by her boyfriend, Barry Levine, and her mother Doris while I cried into my tape recorder. Here is a pdf of the chapter. Feel free to pass it around. I posted a few more pictures on the book’s Web site here.

It’s been forty years but I’m still very pissed off about Kent State and Richard Fucking Nixon and the cowards who fired those deadly bullets but who still get to drink their beers and sun their big bellies in their backyards while four kids who had been looking forward to long, happy lives, are instead in the ground, their families still devastated

We don’t know who you are, but you do. I hope that every moment of contentment you’ve had since that afternoon has been offset by misery and guilt. I wonder whether some time today you’ll pause to think with regret about the lives you destroyed. But I doubt it. After all, they shoot students, don’t they?

A few days ago I was watching the most recent GEICO commercial, when I laughed out loud. It’s the one where the tough-sounding actor asks, “Does switching to GEICO really save on car insurance? Is Ed ‘Too Tall’ Jones really too tall?”

I laughed because that really was my former good buddy Ed on the scale.

It’s not a bad story.

When I was in journalism school, I wrote a long article on Gleason’s Gym, the last of the city’s old-time boxing gyms. I hung out there for months and got to know the fighters and trainers for whom it was a second home.  Even with the haze of cheap cigar smoke that permeated the place, I loved listening to the veteran trainers trade war stories about Benny Leonard and Rocky Marciano or just sitting around shooting the shit with boxers who were as a group the nicest athletes I ever met. All that nastiness dissipated as soon as they stepped outside the ropes.

Even after I graduated, I would take the subway down there to visit the friends I had made. One day in the summer of 1979, I heard derisive talk that six foot, nine-inch Ed “Too Tall Jones,” a starting defensive end for the Dallas Cowboys who had been the first pick of the 1974 draft, was giving football up for boxing. No one thought he could make it. Boxing was just too tough a sport they said, even compared to pro football.

A couple of days later I was running around the bridle path that circles the Central Park reservoir when I saw a TV truck up ahead, with a camera focused on a very tall African-American man as he was jogging along. He wasn’t going very quickly, so I caught up to him in a second or two and called out, “Who are you?”

“Ed Jones,” he said, peering down at me. “They’re doing a story on me, he said pointing to the cameras that had the ABC network logo on their side. I trailed behind a while. After a few minutes the camera crew went off and Ed continued on alone, ignoring the stares from the other runners, who, I’m sure had never seen a jogger that big in their lives and never would again.

I caught up to him again and asked him how his training was going. I mentioned that I had heard talk about him at the gym (but didn’t say that gave him no chance of succeeding). He was curious about Gleason’s (he trained at the Times Square Gym) and about who was working out there. We talked boxing as we ran. I was surprised at how knowledgeable — and friendly — he was.

We did a few more laps, and he was done. It turned out he lived around the corner from me on 77th Street, and he invited me up to his place for some Gatorade. I can’t remember what he said about boxing, except that it was always his first love, and he had hired Dave Wolf, a journalist, as a manager (Dave had written a terrific biography of the basketball player Connie Hawkins) and a respected trainer, Murphy Griffith — Emile’s uncle — to train him. They were two serious guys and wouldn’t have bothered with Ed had he not been as well.

When I got up to leave, Ed said he liked to run in the afternoon, and if I wanted to do, he’d be glad to meet me the next day. Frankly, as a runner Ed was a little slow for me, but, hell, it was Too Tall Jones and he seemed like any newcomer to the city who didn’t know anyone, so I thought, why not.

Over the next weeks, we ran together almost every day. The usual routine was three or four laps around the bridle path (maybe more) and then we’d do sprints on the path outside the reservoir.

Oh, those wind sprints.  I still hurt from them. We ran between two lampposts that were spaced maybe fifty or sixty yards apart. After each sprint, we’d rest maybe five seconds before we went back the other way. Murphy told Ed he needed to do ten of them. After two, I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

Still, for the first three or four, I’d easily beat him, and my chest would swell with pride when he’d say something like, “You can really bring it.” This was a guy who ran with Bob Hayes. But then with a wink he’d invariably say something like, “I think I’m going to push you on the next one.”

So on the next one, I was really determined. If he was going to run extra hard, so would I. And, I told myself, I was a pretty fast runner. Even Ed agreed. My trick was to say “go,” and then take off to give myself a little chance. Ten yards, I had him. Twenty yards, I was even further ahead, thirty he was toast. But then something would happen. It would be like that smoke thing on “Lost,” because it was the sound that hit, the sound of someone whooshing right be. By the time I hit thirty five yards Ed was done. I never saw anyone so fast in my life. Then he’d laugh, let me beat him a couple of more times before burying me again.

One day, as I headed into Ed’s building, there was a kid in a red hooded sweatshirt, literally sitting in the bushes. “Are you going up to Ed’s apartment?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I answered, “who are you?”

“I’m Boom Boom Mancini,” he said, shaking my hand. “I also train with Murphy. He said we should all do our roadwork together.” So for a while, Ray, who at that time had had just a couple of professional fights as a lightweightj, joined us on our runs. Ray was a real contrast to Ed, and not only in terms of size. He talked a mile a minute, about Youngstown where he came from, his father (who had been an excellent lightweight fighter, also named Boom Boom, but who never got to fight for the championship. Ray’s whole career was dedicated to winning the title his father never achieved), his training, everything. Ed looked upon him with great amusement, but telling me privately that Ray was a terrific non-stop fighter in training, and he was sure that Ray would win the lightweight crown one day.

Ray wasn’t a bad distance runner, but he couldn’t keep up with us on the sprints, and as a result, he didn’t like doing them. He also preferred to run in the morning and over time he joined us less often.

Because Ed and I were neighbors and he was new to the city, we’d occasionally get a bite to eat together. For a couple of reasons, he was especially taken with a place on Columbus called Tickers. One, it had an all-you-can eat Sunday brunch (I can still see the fear on the owners’ faces when he’d approach the front door). Even more so, though, was the really attractive and normal-sized waitress that Ed wanted to ask out, but was too shy about it (He complained that people were always fixing him up with tall women), so he would just go back repeatedly, leaving her bigger and bigger tips until one day he finally got the courage up to write his phone number on the back of the bill. I have no idea if she ever called him.

Ed was a Southern guy from Tennessee, and the city was a bit of a mystery to him, and it wasn’t just the women. He loved music but it frustrated him that the city had no blues clubs (“Why do people think that because I’m black that I’d be a jazz fan?”), and  it also pissed him off when people would ask him, “How’s the weather up there?” He was too much of a gentleman ever to take my advice about that, which was to spit down on them and say, “It’s raining.”

I also think he really missed his teammates. Boxing is a pretty lonely sport, and the only times he’d see his friends was when they’d come out for his fights. He was also being ridiculed regularly for what he was trying to — unfairly, I thought. Ed trained hard to learn a sport that outside of a few amateur bouts years before he barely had any background in. Nor was he looking for a big payday. In fact, he gave up a lucrative, guaranteed contract to try a sport that could kill him. It was months in the gym before he had his first fight, and while he didn’t lose it, he got hammered pretty hard. But while people laughed at him, he just went back to the gym and worked, determined to make it.

As it turned out, he never lost a fight, but it was also clear that he wasn’t going to win a championship. One day over lunch he confided that he was thinking of quitting. “I’ll tell you something I haven’t even told Murph,” he said quietly. “In my last year of college I hurt my shoulder, but I knew might be drafted first so I didn’t say anything. It’s bothered me ever since, and I can’t throw a punch right.”

It was true. A columnist said when Ed tried to throw an overhand left he looked  like he was tossing tinsel on a Christmas tree. I think he also missed being part of a team. There just isn’t a lot of companionship in boxing.

A few weeks later he did quit. He re-signed with the Cowboys and moved back to Dallas. The columnists all said, “I told you so,” but Ed got a bad rap. It took a lot of courage not only to give up the sport he loved but also to stand in the ring against someone who not only wanted to take his head off but was also perfectly capable of doing so. I’m sure none of the people who ridiculed him never had the guts to try something like that themselves. Years later when Michael Jordan quit the Bulls to try his hand at baseball, I instinctively understood and respected why he was doing it. He was also scorned. People are said to be stupid to leave so much money on the table to pursue something they love, but  the fact is, it’s those who toil with no passion at what they do, who are the real victims, especially those who have a choice.

Anyway, at some point after Ed left, I got a call from Ray, would I want to run with him? Sure, I said, except Ray liked to run in the morning, and I worked all kinds of late hours. Still, what the hell, I was training for a marathon and needed the push, so whenever Ray was in town, the phone would ring around six in the morning.

“Jeff?” a gruff voice would ask.

“Yeah, Ray,” I’d say with the same kind of sleepy rumble, “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

We’d meet in the park and run five or six miles around the main loop. While I slept on my feet, Ray would talk, of course, and I’d listen to his whirlwind conversation, a vocal style that matched his boxing technique.

One day, he brought along his roommate, Randy Stephens, who was as quiet as Ray was chatty. Randy was also out of Youngstown and was boxing as a cruiserweight. I liked Randy a lot, a gentle, sweet guy but also tough in the ring. One morning after we finished, we were standing in front of their apartment building, and I started joking with Randy about my own non-existent boxing style. Ray just shook his head in friendly disgust, but Randy decided to give me a pointer. “Hold your hands this way,” he said, moving my arms so they protected both my head and body. “There, that’s better. Now, you can defend yourself.” He then tapped me on the stomach with the same energy he probably used to flick a piece of lint off shirt, except it caused me to double over in pain while trying to catch my breath. That was the end of my pretend boxing career.

Ray was traveling a lot, so when he was on the road, Randy and I would run together, and then when Ray was back, it would be either the two of us or three of us. By far the most memorable run was before Ray’s big fight with Alexis Arguello. This was Ray’s first title shot. The fight was going to be held in Atlantic City, and Arguello was also training in New York. Ray and Arguello had terrific respect for each other, and neither was interested in engaging in any of the phony hostility that usually was a part of the build-up to big fights. Although they would soon try to destroy each other in the ring, they genuinely liked each other. The point was driven home to me during this one run one morning in the park about a week before their fight. It was already warm, and a thick mist enveloped us as we ran down the West Side drive. Suddenly out of the fog, coming right at us was Arguello on his morning run. Well, I thought, this was going to be interesting.

“Alex,” Ray shouted toward him. Arguello recognized Ray immediately and stopped in his tracks to reached out for him. For a few seconds they embraced warmly, before Ray said to him, “Good luck, my friend.”

“You too,” Arguello said. They meant it.

The next week I was sitting in the front row where I heard one of the most sickening sounds I could ever imagine. It was of a tremendous left hook, thudding against Ray’s face in the thirteenth round. Ray’s knees buckled. Blood flew everywhere, including all over my notebook. A few minutes later, the fight was over, and the two of them embraced, again with obvious fondness for each other.

Ray and I ran together a few times after the Arguello fight, although I remember becoming irritated with him when he made some negative comments about the press that I, as a member of said press, took personally. With Dave guiding him, Ray had played the press perfectly, but if you’re going to put your story out there, you don’t have the right to control it. Ray didn’t quite understand that. He was also a religious person, and I didn’t quite understand his willingness to fight in South Africa. But by then, he was a big celebrity and certainly didn’t have to answer to me, and if I recall correctly his training had shifted to Las Vegas or someplace out West. He did eventually win the title and with Dave guiding him, retired with his earnings in tact. I still enjoyed my runs with Randy and was delighted when he won the cruiserweight championship.

About ten years ago, I was wandering on the Third Street mall in Santa Monica with a friend when Ray came walking toward us. I stopped him to chat and he seemed genuinely happy to reminisce until his wife pulled him away. Before we parted, he said Randy was doing well in retirement. It was good to see Ray again. Those were good days and he didn’t seem to be the worse for wear after all those wars in the ring.

Ed and I spoke a couple of times after he left the city but I never saw him again. Ed had always talked about being an r&b promoter when he retired. I also remember an odd conversation with him, in which he mentioned his fear of going bald. He said he would shave his head if he lost his hair, so I wasn’t surprised that in the GEICO commercial he has a clean pate.

Back in 1980, I wrote a story about him for the newspaper where I was working as a sportswriter. They didn’t want to send a photographer into the city to shoot his picture, so they asked me to do. After they used the print, I asked Ed to sign it. Somewhere among my clutter, I still have the notebook with Ray’s dried DNA on the pages. I did manage to dig out the photo of Ed though.

When I was kid, my favorite show on TV was Superman. I was convinced, of course, that there really was a Superman someplace. I was also convinced that one day I would marry Lois Lane.

I also thought that one day I might become a reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper and fight never-ending battles for truth, justice and the American way. Well, that almost happened, although my never-ending battle has been for truth, justice and the American way in the Alger Hiss case.

What I also remember as a kid, were the never-ending discussions about the show: which was the best episode; where did he store his costume when he was Clark Kent; where did he store his suit when he was Superman? How come there was never anyone in the alley when he changed outfits? How come the window was always open when he jumped through it?

There were also lots of arguments about how George Reeves died.  Those in the know said he really did think he was Superman, and one day he jumped out of a window and fell to his death.

The truth was that on June 16, 1959, police in Brentwood, California found him upstairs in his home, dead of a gunshot wound to the head. The only real question was whether it was suicide or murder. Police at first called it a suicide, but there were indications that he was murdered. His death was the subject of a book called Hollywood Kryptonite and a pretty good Ben Affleck film, Hollywoodland.

Anyway, back to reality. A few years ago Inspector Henderson asked me to go to LA to find Lefty Louis who was committing a number of anti-American crimes for the syndicate and bring him to justice. While we were out there,  my wife Lois and I stopped by Reeves’s home to pay homage to our dead friend. Here I am disguised as mild-mannered reporter Jeff Kisseloff.