Francesco's Is a Part My NY Rangers' History

 One of my almost weekly rituals during the first decade and a half of the 21st century was going to Francesco’s Restaurant in White Plains after Wednesday night indoor tennis season with three of my friends. A local institution  for about half a century, Francesco’s was the type of neighborhood bar and restaurant inhabited by locals in fictional and nonfictional settings. The Italian food and pizza was not fancy. It was just good. Really good. 

Francesco’s will close at the end of the month. Its namesake owner and cook is 80. His children who worked in the establishment will not keep it open. 

I wouldn’t say I was a Francesco’s regular. After I stopped playing tennis about eight years ago I probably ate there no more than half a dozen times. 

But Francesco’s always will retain a special place in my  heart and memory. Not for the food or the camaraderie with friends.  

Rather, it was for an unplanned event during the summer of 1994 as I was driving home past Francesco’s on Mamaroneck Avenue. Back then Francesco’s enjoyed a clientele that included several players and staff of the New York Rangers. 

Spring 1994 was a magical time for the Rangers. A drought of 40 years since the team’s last Stanley Cup championship ended with a nail-biting seventh game 3-2 victory over the Vancouver Canucks. 

Captain Mark Messier hoisted the cup above his head as he skated around Madison Square Garden, the first of many Rangers to share that honor. 

But the hockey tradition of sharing the cup does not end on the ice. It is customary that each player and key organization member has the privilege of caring for the silver cup for a day, a privilege that permits them to take the symbol of excellence wherever and to whomever they choose. 

On that sunny spring afternoon, an assistant trainer for the Rangers brought the cup to his regular watering hole—Francesco’s.  

I was not inside Francesco’s that afternoon. But as I was about to drive by I spotted a young man trying to stuff a 37-pound, three-foot round piece of silver into the back seat of his sedan. I immediately recognized what I was witnessing. I slammed on the brakes, double parked and raced over to touch the cup. 

I was not alone. From next door to Francesco’s women wearing protective smocks with curlers in their hair scurried out of a beauty parlor to get their hands on the trophy. 

It was an exhilarating moment. 

A few years later I had a more sedate encounter with Lord Stanley’s memento. The National Hockey League sponsored a public viewing of the cup in Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall. 

I was awed by its stature but nowhere near as thrilled as I had been that magical moment 30 years ago.  

Tonight, the Stanley Cup will be raised overhead once more. The deciding seventh game between the Florida Panthers and the Edmonton Oilers will be played in Sunrise, Fla. The Oilers last won the Stanley Cup in 1990. The Panthers have never won the league title since the team joined the NHL in the 1993-94 season. 

Memories of a lifetime will be made tonight. 

Deja Vu June 21-22 : Surviving 1972's Agnes

I’m alive today because my future bride refused to spend the night in a basement motel room. 

In this time of extreme weather—forecasts for today and tomorrow call for frequent downpours that “will be severe, may hit suddenly and could trigger flash flooding”—it is calming, even reassuring, to reflect on a past encounter with the strength of Mother Nature. Fifty-two years ago to this very day, Gilda and I endured on again, off again torrential rain, the leading edge of Hurricane Agnes which turned into what at the time was considered to have caused the worst flooding in U.S. history.

While scouring Mid-Atlantic states for a reporter’s job in 1972, Gilda joined me June 21 for Pennsylvania stops at newspapers in Pottstown, Pottsville and what I had planned for Harrisburg. 

Riding in and out of drenching downpours so thick that sometimes we had to park the car under an overpass as we couldn’t see out the windshield, only to be followed by sunny skies, we plied on, heading towards Harrisburg. 

The overwhelming aroma of chocolate presaged our arrival in Hershey in late afternoon. At the Hershey Inn the price of a room was way too high for a not yet employed reporter. Everywhere else we looked, however, had no vacancies. 

We were about to swallow our pride and budget and go back to the Hershey Inn when we came across a motel built like an old Victorian home. It had a room, in the basement, down a steep driveway. Though she was currently renting a street level apartment in Brooklyn, Gilda had no desire to spend the night underground, so we pushed on, fortuitously discovering the newly opened Milton Motel sitting on a slight bluff less than half a mile away. We took a room, ate dinner at a nearby restaurant, went to bed and slept right through as Hurricane Agnes devastated Eastern Pennsylvania in the early morning hours of June 22, 1972.

On both sides of the Milton Motel roads were impassable beyond half a mile, we discovered. They remained that way for more than a day. We weren’t too inconvenienced. As the motel still had power, we watched some TV. We played cards. And we had our choice of restaurants, a fast food hamburger joint to the right of the motel, a fried chicken place to the left. 

Only one thing kept us from fully enjoying the experience. Within our arc of comfort lay the Victorian-style motel, now submerged in water up to the second floor! Not being a swimmer, I shuttered to think what I would have done if water had gushed into our basement room.

“Agnes was the costliest hurricane to hit the United States at the time, causing an estimated $2.1 billion in damage and killing 128 people across eight states. The name Agnes was retired in 1973 due to the storm's significant effects,” media reported. 

I consider myself and Gilda fortunate not to have been among the casualties. 

Father's Day Reflections on a Private Man

 My father was a self-made man. A successful businessman on two continents. A community leader. A private man. 

My siblings and I can fill in lots of Kopel Forseter’s history for those first three attributes. But too much of his personal history from the first 28 years of his life in Europe remains cloaked in his privacy. 

What we know of his youth until age 16 in his birth town of Ottynia, a shtetl in Galicia in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, is sketchy. Depending on the consequences of war, Ottynia changed hands. When he was born in 1911 or 1912 (records of his birth year are obscure), Kopel Fuersetzer entered the Austro-Hungarian empire. After World War I, the Ukrainian National Republic and subsequently Poland acquired Ottynia. At the outbreak of World War II, the Soviet Union seized the town, only to be supplanted by Nazi Germany in 1941. After the Soviets regained control by war’s end, Ottynia became part of present day Ukraine. 

Before 1939, the Dniester River town of Ottynia counted some 1,000 Jews among its 4,000 inhabitants. Few remained alive after the war. Of Kopel’s immediate family, only a younger brother, Willy, survived. 

(Circa 1936, l to r, Kopel, mother Lina, brother Max, father Moses, brother Willy)

We assume Kopel grew up in a middle class household. His father, Moses, after whom I am named, sold livestock. Kopel often said he received just a sixth grade education in Ottynia, often slogging the apocryphal uphill path (both ways!) to school and back. Yet, he had an agile mind, excelled in math and history, and, had he been born here, could have become a successful lawyer. 

My brother, sister and I know little about his life in Ottynia, about relations between Jews and gentiles, about family holiday traditions. He never talked about such matters, even when Bernie and I interviewed him and Willy when they were in their 70’s. 

Kopel left Ottynia when he was 16. From southeastern Poland he went northwest, to Danzig (now Gdansk) on the Baltic Sea. He became a traveling salesman at various times selling dry goods and stationery on the installment plan to keep him in constant contact with customers. 

He related few details about his 12 years in Danzig, his address, about how he and his friends socialized, how he met Dora, his first love who emigrated to Australia with her parents when he went to America in early 1939, descriptions of his voyage that entailed disembarking near London and traveling to Liverpool to board a ship to New York, and, most tellingly, nothing about antisemitism in the so-called Free City of Danzig which from 1933 on was governed by Nazis. As related by Wikipedia, “In 1938 … an official policy of repression against Jews; Jewish businesses were seized and handed over to Gentile Danzigers, Jews were forbidden to attend theaters, cinemas, public baths and swimming pools, or stay in hotels within the city, and, with the approval of the city’s senate, barred from the medical, legal and notary professions.”

Kopel left Danzig barely two months after the city experienced its version of Kristallnacht on November 12-14, 1938.  

Kopel never expressed any interest in returning to Danzig or Ottynia, nor was he interested in applying for reparations. 

His reticence to talk about life in Ottynia and Danzig was paradoxical considering he was a great story-teller, captivating business associates and family with life-lessons culled from his Old World experiences. Among the only stories I recall is his years’-long disdain while in Danzig for potatoes, given that spuds were often the only food his mother served during winter. It was only after a waitress in Danzig implored him to try the house specialty potatoes that he resumed their consumption. Meat, chicken, or fish with potatoes. With bread. That was his diet. No vegetables.

I inhabit many of his traits, some good, some not so. I snore loudly. I dream a lot. I love watching Westerns. I don’t like it when people tell me what to do. I like to be in charge. Like my father, I enjoyed minimal staff turnover.

Like members of the Greatest Generation who kept silent about their military service during World War II (Kopel served for eight months in the army before receiving a medical discharge in August 1943), my father kept to himself so many details of the life his children would have loved to know. 

Father’s Day is just not as complete as I, we, would have liked.  

Musings on Cheesecake, Wedding Attire, AI Broadcasts

Shavuot, the Jewish festival celebrated seven weeks plus one day following Passover, the traditional time God is said to have presented the Ten Commandments and Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai, began Tuesday night. It’s been customary, at least among Ashkenazi Jews, to commemorate the holiday by eating dairy products, most pleasurably, cheesecake.

As to why, I refer you to an article in The Forward (https://forward.com/culture/548302/why-we-eat-cheese-on-shavuot-jewish-recipe-for-cheesecake/). 

If you’ve opened the link you might have noticed the headline referred to “how to make a killer cheesecake.” 

 “Killer cheesecake?” I wonder, was it merely referring to how tasty a recipe for cheesecake was, or did it allude to the deadly-artery-clogging implications of eating too much cheesecake? 

Just kidding, of course, but I wonder if the headline writer was aware of the double entendre? 

Cool Wedding Dressing: Apparently, suggesting— strongly suggesting—to guests what they should wear to one’s wedding is a trend of increasing intensity, as evidenced by this New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/style/wedding-dress-codes-mood-board.html?smid=url-share).

Gilda’s comment when she forwarded the article to me was, “Some people need to get a life!” No argument there, but I must acknowledge that the wedding of our son Dan to Allison half a month shy of 18 years ago, was an early harbinger of nuptial styling.

For their July 2 wedding on the outdoor grounds of Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown, NY, Dan and Allison ordained that suits, sports jackets and especially ties were more than optional—they were to be left home. Anyone daring to wear a tie might go home with it shorn in two. Even Allison’s dad and I walked down the aisle sans cravat.

Perhaps the most jubilant attendees during the wedding which took place in 95 degrees temperature and near 95% humidity, were the catering staff. Their uniform that day was dark pants and a black T-shirt. 

Artificial Intelligence? I think my cable company (Optimum, in case you’re wondering) is transmitting AI broadcasts. That’s my explanation as to why the voice often does not sync up with the lips on too many shows I watch, especially newscasts.