During the McCarthy period, a local grocer in Syracuse, New York took on the big powerful television networks and the Constitution of the United States and won. His name was Laurence A. Johnson, and his method was a simple one: he told the major ad agencies (which in those days controlled television programming) that if they hired talent that he decided (using the blacklister’s bible, Red Channels, as a guide) was a communist, he would post a notice on the shelves of his stores that the makers of that product sponsored a television program that hired “subversives.”
He never actually did that, mostly because if he had, no one would have given a shit, he would have been unmasked as a fraud and any power he had would have evaporated, but the threat was enough to force those pillars of Jello (actually, one of the first companies to fire artists off its shows) at the networks to cave.
When I wrote my television book, I went to see Frank Stanton who had been the president of CBS at that time. Sitting across from his desk, I asked him, “You, who had a reputation as a master pollster, why didn’t you at least test to see if Johnson had a following?”
Stanton almost literally turned purple in fury. “I had no choice! We would have lost all of our advertisers. I had to save the company. What would you have done?”
“The right thing,” I said.
He then sputtered something that I can’t remember, turned a few more interesting colors and threw me out of his office. The interview was over.
Imagine my surprise a few years later when I read in the newspaper that Stanton was being given a lifetime civil liberties award. Now, Frank Stanton did a lot of terrific things during his tenure at CBS, but this was the man who ran the blacklist; the man who fired those employees who didn’t sign a loyalty oath. I called the Times Arts and Leisure section and suggested there was a story to be written about this, and they agreed.
One of the first people I spoke to was Sig Mickelson, who had once been head of CBS News. He told me that Stanton literally handed him a list and said, “No one on this list gets hired.” What’s more, the list was still in existence, Mickelson said. It sat among his papers at the University of Texas. Here it is, the CBS blacklist:
I did a few more interviews, and then it was time to see Stanton again, who was by then 91 years old. Maybe he never got around to reading the interview we did for The Box, which was a good thing, and because I was writing for The Times, he even invited me to lunch. Clearly, instead of screaming at me, he was going to charm me, but he gave me the same line: he had no choice, blah, blah, blah. At least this time he didn’t try to toss me out of the restaurant, although he did have a friend of his at Channel 13 try to pressure me not to write the story.
I then went to see Allan Sloane, who was then living in a small Connecticut house and breathing from an air tank. He was in Red Channels.
Sloane had been a terrific writer, but thanks to Stanton, he couldn’t get hired to drive an ice cream truck. I was writing the story. It came out on May 30, 1999. I heard that Stanton checked himself into the hospital that day. I’m a cold guy. I had no sympathy for him, and now his actions were part of the newspaper of record. Of course, it would have been nice if they had been part of the newspaper of record fifty years before.
Here’s the story.
And here’s a copy of the CBS loyalty oath. It’s blank, so feel free to print it out, fill it in and send it on to CBS, or just change the word “Communist” to “terrorist” and mail it to your company’s CEO or the FBI.
I’m heading off for Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow but in case you need some milk for your meal, I thought I’d connect you with Harry, who clearly in his fine slacks and brown loafers, operates an executive service:
Click on the image to enlarge so much that you are basically inserting yourself into the scene.
I spent a year in Israel from 1972 to 1973. After six months, I was qualified to have my own room (but not a bathroom) in a wooden structure that had five of these rabbit warrens, all the size of a prison cell and only slightly less depressing. In one corner of my room was a small bed with a lumpy mattress that had just been vacated by a French volunteer who kept a running tally of her conquests on the wall above her pillow. As if a dark, dank room wasn’t depressing enough, I had to be reminded every night when I crawled into bed and glanced at those figures on the wall that I wasn’t getting any practice with my addition.
But then I got a radio, which in my spartan existence was a great luxury. This was a kibbutz that had two televisions for 750 people. The Israelis were fascinated by TV, especially American TV. Ironsides was the kibbutzniks’ favorite show. The other favorite was “Family Affair.” I remember a huge crowd in downtown Tel Aviv went crashing through a storefront window because little Buffy was inside on a publicity tour. One night we were watching the 1972 Olympics (before the tragedy) when one of the members tried to turn off the TV so the kibbutz could hold its regular meeting. He was nearly lynched. They weren’t going to miss their weekly dose of Perry Mason rolling around in his wheelchair.
So anyway, one day I came back to my room, all muddy from a day spent irrigating our chickpea field (which was blown up in the ’73 war), and there waiting for me on a table beside my bed was a big old wooden radio from the 1930s. I turned it on, and I remember the first song I heard on it was “Me and Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul, courtesy of Dewey Hughes and his daily top ten on Voice of America. I was in heaven. For the rest of my time on the kibbutz, that radio, and the company of one Shari Jacobson, kept me sane.
Now it’s a year later, and I’m a freshman in college. There’s an auction on campus to raise money for something or other, and one of the items on the block is a big old Philco floor-model radio from the 1930s. Of course, I had to have it, and fortunately my bid of $10 let me take it home. That in turn set off some kind of mad compulsive disorder because within six months, I had an apartment full of big old radios. The best thing about them though was when they didn’t work, I’d take them down to a local TV repairman named Harry Smith to work on together. Harry was then 80. He could remember when the idea that the sound of a voice could be sent through the air was dismissed as pretty silly.
Harry, whose shop was pretty quiet, would growl when he saw me come through the door with my latest find. Still, despite his protests that he was much too busy to teach me radio repair, it was obvious when we’d we’d roll up our sleeves and pull the guts out of an old Atwater Kent, that he was enjoying it as much as I was. A few years after I graduated, I drove by the shop, hoping his old station wagon would still be parked in the rear, but the place was boarded up and the lot was empty. That was a sad day for me.
But it was during this time I also learned that radio was in my blood, (type-a-m), so to speak. Yup, open a vein and I bleed solder. Open a hole in my cranium, and you’ll find a #40 rectifier tube. It turned out that my grandfather, whose name was Lou Resnick, was in the radio business before the war. Those who know the history of New York, know that the World Trade Center was built over Cortlandt Street, which from 1930 to 1970 was known as Radio Row. Cortlandt Steet was the place to go if you were in the market for radios, parts or other electronic products. I didn’t know that my grandfather had a store there until after I started bringing radios home and my mother told me. I knew he had been in the electronics business. In fact, when I was a kid, he owned a tube factory, and my brother and I used to love to spend the day in the factory shoving little radio tubes into their boxes. (If anyone out there has a Best-Test or Triad tube, please let me know, as those were his.)
When I wrote my book on television, The Box, I interviewed a few people who sold TVs on Radio Row. They remembered my grandfather, and like me, didn’t care much for him. He wasn’t a very nice fellow. His favorite past time when we were kids was to tease us until we cried. Then he would call us names for bawling. I was probably five at the time. But if that was the worst thing he did, it might have been okay, but there worse — much worse. He did, however, teach me to play a mean game of gin rummy though, and I guess without my knowing it, he instilled in me a fascination for old-time broadcasting. Still, we really never had much to say to each other until I started to bring home radios and suddenly instead of arguing about Vietnam, we could communicate civilly over something we had in common. I’d like to say things got warm and fuzzy after that, but they didn’t. He was still who he was. When he died, I shrugged my shoulders during a shiva call and confessed to my aunt, “You know, I just didn’t like the guy very much,” and she said, “I’m so glad you said that, I couldn’t stand him either. Let’s get out of here.” And we did.
Anyway, it was fascinating to talk to the people who worked down on Cortlandt Street who remembered the business only slightly less fondly than they did my grandfather. Two of them were Bob Elliott and Jerry Fishman. Here are a couple of quick stories:
“Jerry Fishman: There were maybe fifty stores. People came from all over to get the best deals, no matter what it was. If It was for a goddamned nickel battery, he was lookin’ to pay four cents.
“Most of the people who operated on Cortlandt Street were mom and pop shopkeepers without much capital. If that store cost a hundred dollars a day, no matter what, that hundred dollars had to come in. The most important thing was to make the nut. If you had to take a five-dollar bill or a ten-dollar bill for something you did it. The hundred dollars had to come. that was the way the whole street operated.
“The door was always open, no matter how cold it was, because people liked to walk into an open doorway. And no matter how cold it was outside, you had to stand outside along the window and when somebody approached you had to start talking to him and entice him into the store and try to sell him something.
“Bob Elliott: The salesmen had a lousy habit. If they thought a customer was chiseling them, when he was walking out of the store, they used to spit on the back of his jacket, so if he went in the next store he would be marked. That was called ‘marking the noodge.’
“Jerry Fishman: Or throw snot on him. I heard of that. I never did it.”
***
There was another sales technique I accidentally learned about. When I was in junior high school, for some reason my we were handed a box of 16mm films that my grandfather owned. My mother was excited, because my grandfather took a lot of home movies, so it was a big deal when when finally found a projector and set it up one evening. My father loaded the first reel and we sat to watch with great anticipation, except what came up on the screen was a young woman without any clothes on, smoking a cigarette, and when she nodded to the camera and planted the cigarette in an orifice through which no woman can inhale, this is the conversation that immediately ensued:
Me: “Dad, that doesn’t look like grandma.”
Dad: “You two, get out of here, now!”
I learned while researching The Box (unintentional double entendre) that these films were used by the storeowners to entertain the company reps. Good old Grandpa. I still have those films by the way. Maybe one day, I’ll hold a Lou Resnick Memorial Fuck-Film Festival.
I also still have a few wonderful old radios. There’s a shot of one posted below. Here’s another: an Atwater Kent Model 30, one of the radios I worked on with Harry. It’s an early electric set from the mid-1920s. Still works, too.
A few years ago, I opened up my mailbox to find an Antique Radio Classified Catalogue. The catalogue always has an article or two in the front. This one had a piece about Cortlandt Street, but what nearly brought me to tears was one of the photos that accompanied the article. Here it is. On the upper right is the only visual evidence I’ve ever seen of my grandfather’s former prominence during a time and on a street that was so vibrant that those who were there thought it would last forever. Of course nothing does. Especially in New York which buries its history like a dog does a bone.
Click on the photo to transport yourself back 60 years in time.
I love the realism that Harry went for here. Notice the bandana and pipe, but I doubt too many stonemasons did their work in fine, brown hand-sewn leather loafers. (For the background information on this series, click down a few posts). If you click on the photo, you’ll see a larger — actually much larger — image, suitable from framing.
I came home from a friend’s house late that afternoon on November 18, 1966 (we were watching an episode of “Superman”) when my wicked Aunt greeted me at the door with a look of malevolent glee on her face. “Your hero just quit,” she taunted me, obviously hoping to see this 11-year-old baseball fanatic burst into tears. When I found out she was referring to Sandy Koufax, I didn’t disappoint her.
How could it be possible? I knew he had a bad elbow, but he had just gone 27-9 for a Dodger team with one of the most anemic lineups in baseball and still led them to a pennant. He was invincible. Plus, it was a personal betrayal, not only to me, but to every Jewish kid on Long Island who had ever been called an anti-semitic name (basically, every one of us). He was our defender, our Bar Koccba (ok, things didn’t turn out so good for him either). Over the next few days, I carefully clipped every article I could find about Sandy from the newspapers my Dad brought home and lovingly preserved them in my official Sandy Koufax scrapbook that I was sure I would get to present to him one day, much to his undying gratitude.
Believe it or not, I still have that scrapbook, still lovingly preserved — Sandy, if you read this, drop me a line with your address and I’ll send it to you. You’ll thank me, I’m sure. Here’s the cover, which I made myself with the help of my DYMO label maker.
And here is that tear-stained bulletin from November 18, 1966:
Click on the story to read it.
Yes, detritus is everywhere in my office, even between my ears. So I heard this story back in 1972, but I was reminded of it recently during my weekly run with Norman Goluskin who is reading Kai Bird and Marty Sherwin’s terrific biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer; this after he devoured a biography of Albert Einstein. Some runners have all the brains.
Anyway, it was during our chat about Oppenheimer that 1972 flashed before my eyes, and I was suddenly back preparing irrigation pipes for our wheat field on Kibbutz Sarid. Somehow, the conversation got around to Yogi Berra (who, by the way, I have seen naked — talk about the kinds of horror sights in your life that you never forget), and my friend Barry, who was working on the pipes with me, told this story: It seemed back in the late 1940s or early 1950s Yogi Berra and Albert Einstein both happened to be invited to one of those gala Washington D.C. parties. The photographers there thought it would be fun to get the two together for a little conversation and photo op, so they took Berra over to Einstein without telling him who he was. They let the two converse for a while. Then pictures were taken. A few minutes later when the photographers got Berra alone, one of them asked him, “So, Yogi, what did you think of the old man?”
Yogi said, “He was ok, but when it comes to baseball, he ain’t no Einstein.”
And here’s another of Harry Dubin, the original Zelig, at his latest job:
Click on the image to see the full-sized picture.
Here are two more shots. If you haven’t seen these before, scroll down a few posts to get the background on these amazing pictures. I’ve also rescanned the first two to restore them to their proper glory.
Click on the picture to see the full-size image.
Click on the photo for the full-size image.
In this week’s issue of The Nation, there’s an article about E.L. Doctorow’s new novel that seeks to explain the Collyer Brothers‘ story. You might know the name. Homer and Langley Collyer lived in a mansion in Harlem until 1947 when they were found dead inside, among tons of crap they had hoarded over the years. In fact, that’s how I first heard of them, because when I was growing up and my mother decided my room was too messy, she’d say something like, “It looks like the Collyer Brothers’ place in here.”
When the Collyer Brothers story broke, CBS television news was still pretty much a fledgling operation. One of its pre-war pioneers, Rudy Bretz, was then working as a cameraman for the division, and they sent him uptown to get some pictures of the place. Someone then took a picture of Rudy inside the mansion. Here’s the shot:
When I was researching my television book, I came across a series of articles in The New Yorker, profiling a local grocer named Harry Dubin. What was so unusual about Dubin that in 1947 made him worthy of a ten-page article in The New Yorker? He owned a television set, and the article was all about the author spending an extended period with Dubin and his family as they enjoyed this new electronic miracle. It was a marvelous story, typical of the magazine, puckishly fun, insightful and slightly condescending. I’ve uploaded a copy here. [It's a long file, so it may take a minute to download - well worth it though].
After I read the piece in 1993, it occurred to me that Dubin was young enough in 1947 to still be alive, so with fingers crossed I looked up his name in the phone book, and lo and behold, he was still living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I picked up the phone and called him. He laughed when I told him I had just read The New Yorker article and was charmed by it, and when I explained to him what I was up to, he eagerly agreed to be interviewed again.
A few days later, he greeted me warmly at the door to his apartment and led me into his living room. As I set up my tape recorder, he asked me if I had a copy of the article. I said I did He then asked if he could read it over to refresh his memory before I turned the machine on. Since this wasn’t a quiz, I gladly pulled the article out of my backpack and handed it to him.
“While I read this, you might enjoy taking a look at that,” he said, pointing to a small photo album, embossed with the words “Dubin at Work.”
I picked up the album and opened it, and my eyes nearly jumped out of my head. Inside were some 30 color photographs taken in and around the city in the 1940s. I had never seen such vibrant photos of the city in those years. In fact, I had never seen any color photos of the city in those years, yet here they were. It was such an interesting collection. Each of the pictures depicted a man in uniform intently doing his job, whether it was a street sweeper, gas station attendant or hansom cab driver. When I looked at them twice, I realized something, all of them were Harry!
Needless to say, while our subsequent interview was wonderful, the album left me speechless in delight. These were the most evocative photographs of old New York I had ever seen. Harry explained that all of them were taken by his son Ronald, who was then a teenager, after Harry managed to convince each worker to change clothes with him in an alley and let Harry do his job for a few minutes so the picture could be taken.
Eventually, Harry let me make copies of the album and I brought it to the attention of Jan Seidler Ramirez, an archivist at the Museum of the City of New York in the hope that she might be interested in adding them to the museum’s collection. Well, not only did she jump at them, the photos became a special exhibit at the museum in 1996.
I wrote a short piece about the photos and their provenance for American Heritage. Here’s the article, and here are two of the photos. I’ll keep adding more over the next few weeks, but these two will give you an idea of Harry’s brilliance while affording a view of old New York that you probably never thought still existed. I certainly didn’t.
Click on the photo to see the full-sized image.
Click on the photo for the full-sized image.
