Oh, did I not want to post this one. It’s not the content, it’s the fact that this is the last picture in the “Dubin at Work” series. What a pleasure it has been to share Harry and Ron Dubin’s amazing creativity. What a gift they’ve left us with. If you are new to this series of color photos of old New York, click here for the first post and story. Click on the tag to the right for the rest of the pictures. I have two treats to accompany the post. The first is a copy of Harry’s notes that were included with the photos when they were put on exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. Click on the page to enlarge it.
This morning, I spoke to Ron Dubin on the phone. To hear what he had to say about the series, click here.
So here’s the last one. Think of it as Harry waving goodbye. So long, Harry, we’ll miss you.
With President Obama favoring nuclear power, extraordinary rendition, the Patriot Act, abortion-rights curbs, and continued war in Iraq and Afghanistan, his opposition to gay rights and his backing of a healthcare reform bill that redefines the word reform to mean the maintaining of the status quo, I officially begin my protest campaign.
My grandfather wasn’t a great guy (in fact, he was a lousy one) but he was a great baseball fan. He often took my mother and aunt to Ebbets Field, and when the great ballpark was torn down he retrieved one of the bricks. It now sits on my bookshelf.
He was also one of those people who liked to score games, and as it turned out, he also liked to save the occasional scorecard. My Aunt lives in Florida, and a few years ago she sent me a package with a bunch of scorecards from the 1940s. I didn’t look too carefully at them before I put them away in a binder for safekeeping. Then a few weeks ago, I thought it would be nice to do a baseball-related post for opening day, so I pulled out those old scorecards.
That’s when I had one of those moments that a collector has once or twice in a lifetime — if he’s lucky. As I sorted through the small pile, I noticed that on the cover of one of the 1947 scorecards my grandfather had scribbled “Opening Day.”
Now, if you were a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, or if you just know a few things about baseball history, you know what happened on opening day, 1947. Do you? I’ll stop typing for a moment to let you guess.
Let’s see a show of hands.
That’s right. Opening day 1947 marked the historic day that Jackie Robinson made his Major League debut. It may have been the most important baseball game ever played, and here I was with the scorecard from that game in my hands.
Below are scans from the front and back covers and the inside pages. The scorecard itself is at this moment at Lelands.com, getting ready for auction. There’s a good chance it will cover our moving expenses this summer. My grandfather wasn’t an especially nice person, but from the grave he did me a solid. Knowing him as I did though, I’m sure if he was alive and had realized what I had, he would have grabbed it out of my hands in a second and taken off with it. Fortunately, he’d also be 102 now, so I could probably catch up to his walker and overpower him.
Here are the scans, and as always they’re clickable.
Back when I was a wee lad, my parents had a series of three phonograph records that were done by Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly. They were all called “I Can Hear it Now” and consisted of recordings of historical events narrated by Murrow. I listened to them so often that I had them memorized. You heard the announcer broadcast the crash of the Hindenberg, King Edward ceding his throne and Churchill’s “Now is the hour ” speech.
I just about wore out the grooves on the records and the tracks were soon burned into my brain. I can still hear Clem McCarthy announcing Joe Louis’s first round massacre of Max Schmeling, and can do a perfect gravelly voiced imitation of Babe Ruth’s farewell (“You know how bad my voice sounds, but it feels just as bad.” and Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech, complete with echo.
One of the tracks on Volume 2 was about the McCarthy Era, and told the story of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers confronting each other before the House Un-American Activities Committee. “One of these men is the greatest liar America has ever known, ” Murrow declared.
Who?” I wondered, hooked. I looked up the case in the World Book encyclopedia and read all about it. That’s when I learned that Richard Nixon was involved. In my family, Richard Nixon was kind of the equivalent of the Pharoah in terms of sheer eviltude, so when I learned that Nixon was behind Chambers’ testimony, I got my first real notion about who might have been lying.
I hail from a long line of Nixon haters. In fact, I still remember getting on line with my mother to vote in the 1960 election at Prospect Avenue Elementary School, across the street from our house. It was a long line, and I was a very fidgety five year old. The man in front of us probably took pity on my mother, and I remember he turned to me to try an engage me in conversation. “So, who are you voting for, Sonny,” he asked?
“Kennedy,” I said proudly. “We hate Nixon.”
“Shh,” my mom said. “We have a secret ballot.”
OK, I thought, but I had been under the impression that everyone hated Richard Nixon. Who knew otherwise? As it turned out, my mother was probably less concerned about our constitutional rights than she was about getting attacked. In East Meadow, the town where I grew up, Eleanor Roosevelt was banned from speaking at our high school on the grounds that she was a Communist, so was Pete Seeger ( he was one, of course, not that that should have made any difference). In East Meadow, pedophile priests had free rein, but lefty sympathizers were sent packing. Years later when I thought I’d write a book about the town, I interviewed an African-American man who had his house firebombed because he was living with a white woman. I could go on, but suffice to say the clearest picture I can paint of our town was this: we had a serial killer living on our street (Joel Rifkin), and he was probably a better human being than three quarters of the jocks I went to school with.
As usual, I’m veering off-track here, so let me steer back to the road. As I grew up and began to read newspapers, I continued to take note of the Hiss case whenever the occasional tidbit about it appeared. When I was in college, there was a story that Hiss had been one of the first people to take advantage of the recently passed Freedom of Information Act to obtain his FBI file. That intrigued me. Now, I hated my classes in college, and here I was reading this story when the proverbial lightbulb went off inside me head. I approached one of my history professors with a proposition. Instead of spending my time cutting class or daydreaming in back of the room, I suggested that I spend a semester reading all the books and newspaper/magazine coverage on the Hiss case, and then I would write a paper offering my verdict. Much to my surprise, he accepted.
About two hours into my research, it was clear to me that Hiss had been railroaded. Four hours into my research, I decided to do something about: I was going to write Hiss a letter, volunteering to work for him that summer reading or organizing his FBI files. Talk about chutzpah. It took a while to get his address. When I saw that he had filed papers to be reinstated to the Massachusetts bar, I figured that his address would be in the legal papers, so I drove to Boston in a snowstorm to see if I could find it among the documents he had filed. I was right. It was listed, so I sat down and penned him a note.
A week later, this arrived in my mailbox:
(The pages below are clickable)
Hell yes, I was interested! A few weeks later I met him in New York, but as it turned out, instead of a summer job, I wangled a deal with the history job to work for him the next January in New York City for a full semester’s credit. I stayed on after graduation. Based on the some 40,000 pages we received, we were able to prove that the FBI had and hid exculpatory information about Alger, so we prepared a brief to overturn the guilty verdict, and I actually wrote portions of it. Because all of the judges who handled the suit were appointed by Richard Nixon, the case went nowhere, although the brief was published as a book called “In Re Alger Hiss.” And it even had my name in it.
Eventually, I went to work as a newspaper reporter, but I never stopped following the case and did occasional research jobs for Alger over the years. He died in 1996. Three years later, his son and I established a Web site on the case. One of the articles I wrote for the site has some personal reminiscences of Alger. It can be found here (there is some repetition of this post in there). For the last five years, I’ve been writing a book one the case. I suspect it will be finished in three years (I’m a slow writer).
For years, my passion for the case was the subject of great teasing by my friends. If I went out on a date (which I did only occasionally), the questions the next day weren’t the usual, “Was she nice?” or “Was she cute?” it was rather, “How does she feel about the Hiss Case?” They knew the wrong response would doom any potential for a relationship.
Luckily for my wife, she had the right answer. Or, luckily for me.
I don’t know what Harry is actually pretending to do in this shot. Is he squeezing a very small cantaloupe, or is he just bragging to his assistant, ‘Look, Melvin, I can palm a grapefruit.”
I do know he’s behind the wheel of his own delivery truck, and what a great truck it is. Check out where they put the rearview mirror in those days.
The photo, as always, is clickable.
This is one of my favorite pictures from the early days of television. Ray Forrest was assigned to cover the 1940 GOP Convention in Philadelphia. The convention was being broadcast back to New York over one of the first television networks, which was run by a very long wire and scotch tape, powered by a tag team of mice running around a wire wheel.
Ray, being NBC’s (actually WNBT)’s first and only announcer got the anchor job, which meant he was also station’s sole reporter, host and, as you can see, pollster/number cruncher. Here he is at the station’s very high-tech tote board. Click on the photo to enlarge it.
A while ago, I posted an entry on Frank Stanton and the blacklist. It’s here in case you missed it. One of the links on the post was to a pdf of the actual loyalty oath accompanied by list of unacceptable organizations. The list, however, was cut off about mid-point. I’ve since found a more complete copy, so as a public service, in case you either want to blacklist yourself or a friend, I’m including the complete list below in case it includes an organization that you or your friend belongs to. Remember, informing on yourself or on others is the American way.
Do telegrams even exist anymore?
Well, if they do and you need a form, here’s one. I have a bunch of them and use them as note pads. If you click on each side, it’ll make it larger enough to send the images to Kinkos so they can make cool pads out of them for you too.
This does remind me of one of my favorite jokes. A guy gets a job as a messenger for a singing telegram company, and it’s his first day. His boss hands him a message and tells him to deliver it to a woman across town. He gets to her house and knocks on the door.
“Yes?” she asks.
“I have a telegram for you, but it’s a singing telegram.”
“Well, sing it.”
“I better not.”
“Listen young man, if you want to keep your job, you better sing it.”
“Ok, if you insist…..[sings jauntily] Boom, boom, bah, boom, bah, boom, your sister Rose is dead.”
Probably would have been better had I told it in person. Anyway, here are the forms. The back actually makes for interesting reading.
For some reason, side a is a bit cut off on the right. Click on it to see the full image.
Bugsy Siegel didn’t look like a bug. In his day, a slang word for crazy was “bugs.” Bugs Bunny was pretty crazy too, but a different kind of crazy. Crazy Eddie was crazy, but he didn’t kill anyone. He just sold a lot of electronic products so cheaply he went out of business (although that’s pretty crazy). Bugsy Siegel’s crowd consisted of a lot of gangsters, guys who killed with impunity and sometimes just for the fun of it. It’s a scary thought that even by their standards Bugsy was off his rocker.
If you go to Las Vegas and have a good time playing the slots, you can thank Bugsy for that. In the 1940s, he built the Flamingo Hotel, the first of the Las Vegas palaces. He did it with mob money though, and those guys demanded a rather high return on their investments. When they didn’t appear to be getting it from Bugsy, they became unhappy. In those days, mobsters expressed their disappointment with someone by putting a bullet in their head. That’s precisely what happened to Bugsy on June 20, 1947 while he was sitting by the picture window of a friend’s living room in Beverly Hills when a bullet shattered the glass, entered his brain and blew out his eye, killing him instantly, of course. You can see it all reenacted by Warren Beatty in his bio of Bugsy called, appropriately enough, “Bugsy.”
I have a small connection to this, albeit a very tenuous one. Years later when Francis Coppola made the “The Godfather,” he had a great scene where the Las Vegas boss Mo Green gets shot in the eye. That came from the Siegel assassination. The actor who shot Mo Green was a fellow named Lenny Del Genio. Now, when I was in journalism school and was writing my masters thesis on boxing, I got to know Lenny. He had been a great lightweight fighter and had long since retired by then. Now, he was an entertainer and also had extra parts in movies. At boxing dinners, you could often find him strumming his guitar in the corner and was invariably the nicest guy in the room. He always laughed when I would compliment him on his marksmanship.
A few years later when I was writing “You Must Remember This,” I interviewed Lenny a couple of times to record his memories of growing up in East Harlem in the 1920s. One day while we were sitting in his living room, he told me one of my favorite stories in the book. It was about the big Italian families in his neighborhood and their penchant for the cousins all having the same names because they were either named for a close relative or a saint. Want to hear it? Ok, I’ll let Lenny tell it:
My uncle played the violin, his name was Nick D’Amico, the same as my other uncles. They were all named after grandfather. They were also musicians, and they played at nice hotels like the Plaza. One night, they were driving home with their violin cases in the car and the police stopped them for some infraction. Five of them were in there. The cop asked my uncle for his license.
The cop says, “Nick D’Amico, huh.”
And looked at the other four gentlemen, and he says to one of them, “By the way, what’s your name?”
“Nick D’Amico.”
“What do you do for a livin’?”
“I’m a violinist.”
And he went on to the other man. And the same thing happened. His name was Nick D’Amico and he was a violinist also. Now, the policeman is getting a little bit annoyed. He goes to number three, number four — all the same answer. When he got to the fifth guy, he says, “If you tell me that your name is Nick D’Amico and that you’re a violinist, you’re all goin’ to jail.”
He did, so he took them all down to the station. When they got there, the cop says, “I want to call your father and get to the bottom of this. “What’s his name?”
It was another Nick D’Amico!
So the cop says, “All of ya get outta here!” They all laughed, and they took out their violins and played for them.
I loved Lenny. While we were chatting, his wife told me that Lenny knew the lyrics to all the Mills Brothers songs. I have a thing for the Mills Brothers, so I asked him if he wouldn’t mind playing “Paper Doll” for me. He did so readily. My tapes are now in the hands of the New York Public Library, and sitting in their dusty storage room is a recording of Lenny and me singing “Paper Doll” together. Those few minutes of tape recorded one of the great pleasures of my life. To this day I can never listen to the Mills Brothers without thinking of Lenny and the two of us harmonizing in his home.
Anyway, here’s me in front of the picture window where the Bug got squashed.
At first glance this might seem like a pedestrian entry in the series, but I think it paints a vivid picture of Upper East Side life back then, maybe elsewhere as well. In those days a customer had a very personal relationship with the grocer who knew all his/her customers’ food preferences. My guess is here the woman is placing her order which will be delivered some time that afternoon. It might be the weekly groceries or the food needed for a dinner party that night. That was the way it was done for decades up through the 1950s when supermarkets began to make inroads and quickly dominated the business. I’m sure the jacket and bowtie Harry is wearing are his own. The photo below is clickable, and for those new to this amazing series, click on the Harry Dubin tag for the previous photos and the original stories about Harry.
