Ballroom Fiasco—Agents Looking the Wrong Way

Donald Trump, his acting attorney general Todd Blanche, and sycophantic Trumpsters in Congress and beyond are asserting that the proposed 90,000 square foot ballroom Trump wants to build as an extension to the White House is justified by the Saturday evening assassination attempt at the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. They argue the ballroom would provide impenetrable protection from any attack. 

That reasoning suggests a president would never venture outside White House grounds as no other venue could be as secure. He or she would be as separated from the populace as potentates are in despotic regimes. 

Ridiculous! Safety can be assured, though never guaranteed, by ramping up appropriate safeguards based on each location a president visits and proper training of Secret Service agents. 

Did anyone else notice in the video of the incident that in the moments before the assailant ran past their checkpoint in the Hilton the agents appeared to be relaxed, not looking in the direction from which he was coming? The key agent at the checkpoint was looking toward the ballroom entrance, not the area from which an attacker might come! Here’s the video: https://youtu.be/BqZCCZL7jl8

Secret Service lapses are becoming routine for Trump. In Butler, PA, during a campaign event in 2024, his protection failed to secure a rooftop with a direct line of fire to the podium where he was speaking. The would-be assassin was killed only after he fired several rounds. 

Recently a car rammed through barriers at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach retreat. 

Political violence has become a mainstay of life in America. Appropriate dollars should be spent to safeguard politicians, especially a president, but they should not be ensconced in a cocoon, separated from the public they serve. 

Conversation Starters of a Would-Be King to a Real King

Ahead of King Charles III of the United Kingdom and Queen Camilla’s state visit to America April 27-30, I’ve been wondering in what manner or fashion will Donald Trump embarrass himself and our country. 

Here are malapro-Trumpisms our fearful leader might toss at Charles:

“How’s your brother? You know, Jeffrey Epstein never introduced me to him.”

Or, “Was it worth waiting so many years to become king?”

Or, “You know, Camilla is aging well.”

Or, “You know, America saved you guys in two world wars. The least your government should have done in return is support our battle with Iran.”

Or, “You’re an environmentalist who believes in global warming, right?  I’m not and don’t.”

Or, “I really think you should talk those obstinate Canadians into taking my offer to become our 51st state. We could show them how to win Olympic and Paralympics hockey gold. Even our women beat those Canucks.”

Or, “You know, I’m a little like your predecessor Charles II. He was in exile 11 years before returning home to be king. I was in exile only four years before returning to the throne, er, I mean the Oval Office. Much better than the beheading of his father Charles I for treason.”  

Or, “Lots of people in America say I act like a king. As one king to another, what do you think? Did I overdo it with all the gold embellishments?”

Or, “As king, do they make you take cognitive tests?” 

None of those embarrassing questions would be surprising to me given Donald Trump’s penchant for voicing the inappropriate. 

Walking Wounded Update

 Doctor told me this morning the right side of my left foot has a hairline fracture. Left side of foot has strained ligaments. Six weeks before I might be able to pickleball again. Ugh. 

Walking Wounded, Another Pickleball Casualty

Well, Tuesday I became another walking wounded pickleball player. I lost my balance chasing a dink, stepped on the ball with my left foot and tumbled in a parachutist tuck and roll, consciously, successfully, telling myself to avoid banging my head on the hard surface. 

I scrapped my left elbow and left knee. Bloodied but bandaged up, I resumed play for another hour or so. But once off the court, adrenaline waning, my left ankle swelled. 

Sadly, perhaps fortunately, between Gilda’s and my prior experiences we had three ankle boots in our basement to choose from until I could have an orthopedic specialist see me for a professional diagnosis, evaluation and protocol of treatment. I’ll see him Thursday morning. 

I had already planned to miss my regular Thursday pickleball game. We have Broadway theater tickets to see “Becky Shaw.”  My next scheduled game is Tuesday. I doubt I will be cleared to play. 

Orthopedic specialists are said to be doing land office business tending to pickleball injuries, mostly to the elderly. I generally make it a rule not to backpedal for lobs or rush in for dinks, two main actions foreshadowing injuries. 

My exuberance overcame my caution.  

I’m hoping I just sprained the ankle with no ligament damage. At 77, my body takes longer to repair itself.  

Bingo Time in Brooklyn

“CBS News Sunday Morning” is one of Gilda’s and my favorite telecasts. Last week it aired a piece on the continued interest among adults playing bingo for cash prizes. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a link: https://share.google/Jzp0rE2IXV9Zneg2T

I bring this gaming note to your attention because years ago, more than half a century ago, actually, closer to 57 years ago, I was an active participant in a successful weekly bingo game run by my parents’ synagogue, Congregation Pri Eitz Chaim Ocean Avenue Jewish Center, in Brooklyn.

It was during my father’s glory days at the shul where he was president for several years that every Thursday night the noise level in the gymnasium would build to ear-piercing extremes. Excitement would grip all those present. Moans would go up after every call. Shrieks of, “Just one more,” would reverberate against the cement walls.

No, a basketball game was not being played (I can’t remember any athletic contest ever happening in the gym). Rather, the sweaty anticipation and exhilaration emanated from the hundreds gathered for the weekly bingo game.

Bingo was a major fundraising endeavor for the OAJC back then, with my parents in charge, mom in the back room watching over the money, dad working the floor, making sure sufficient tables and chairs were set up in rows to accommodate the hundreds of players drawn to the game. They even enlisted me, first as a bingo card salesman and then as a game caller.

With $1,000 in prizes ($500 for the final jackpot game), OAJC bingo drew players from miles around. They were a quirky lot. Mostly middle-aged women, they would engage in good luck rituals. Before the first game, some would run a lighted match under their game cards. Others would scratch their behinds to coax out desired numbers from the air machine that popped out the numbered ping pong balls. Several played a dozen or more cards by sight and memory—no chips over the numbers of the hard-backed board cards they brought from home or no dab of colored ink on the paper game sheets bought that night and spread before them.

Calling the games was the most fun. I’d sit on a platform at one end of the hall, under one of the two electronic scoreboards that lit up each called number. Next to me would be another volunteer. He’d hand me the balls when they were pushed out of the machine. I’d announce the number, wait a second or two and announce it again. Especially as the jackpot game progressed, tension in the hall would become palpable. Fifty-seven years ago, $500 was a more considerable sum than it is today.

I-22, G-53, O-69, N-37. As the cards filled up, with no number producing the cry of “Bingo,” excitement would build. Despite the microphone, players would shout they couldn’t hear the numbers over the kibbitzing from nearby players. It was time for the one decorum-producing remedy you could do but once a night. “The next number,” I’d intone, “is, B-Quiet.” For a moment, players would rustle through their cards, looking under the B column for the number. Then they’d chuckle at their gullibility, settle back down and, when finally, a winner was selected, lament they were just one call away from winning the grand prize. 

Living with an Uncommon Last Name

Not surprisingly, Forseter is not among the most common family names in America. For s list of those names compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, click here: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026/2020-census-names-data.html

Forseter is an Americanized, some might say Anglicized, version of my father’s Old World surname, Fuersetzer (Fürsetzer). The transition was not straight line. 

When my parents married, Sylvia Gerson wed Kopel Fuersetzer September 6, 1942. He carried that name into the U.S. Army on December 1, 1942. His specialty was as a machine gunner but never served in combat. He received a medical honorable discharge August 4, 1943. 

Back in my mother’s arms, Kopel was induced to Americanize the family name. Frost was chosen. Two entities ensued. He started a company, Frostex (Frost Textiles), and produced their first heir, my brother Bernie whose February 24, 1945, birth certificate registered him as Bernard Frost. 

Kopel was not too happy with the Frost name as it disassociated him from his heritage, especially after it became known that all of his family back in Ottynia, Poland, had been killed in the Holocaust (he did not yet know one of his brothers, Willy, was the sole survivor). 

So he returned to his original family name with a slight twist. It became Forsetzer. It was Forsetzer when my sister Lee showed up January 25, 1947. Again, Sylvia’s input had him drop the “z.” I was born a Forseter March 6, 1949.

When Uncle Willy arrived several years after the war, he adopted the Forseter name as well. 

Growing up, my siblings and I would say that the only Forseters in America were the five members of our immediate family and the three of Uncle Willy’s. 

In the early 1980s Mike Bailenson joined Chain Store Age’s New York office from Chicago. He told me he went to school in St. Louis with an Elliot Forseter. Can’t be, I responded. People often mistake our surname for Forester, like the Subaru car, or Old Forester bourbon, I suggested. No doubt Elliot spelled his surname differently, I said. 

Naturally, an argument ensued. We wagered 10 bucks on who was right. To settle the matter, I trekked down to our fifth floor office to look in a St. Louis phonebook used by our directory division. Sure enough, Elliot Forseter was listed there in black and white. After forking over the $10, I called my father to ask who was this guy, Elliot Forseter. “Oh, that’s Allen’s son,” he said. “Allen!?!,” I screamed into the phone. “Who are these people? Where did they come from? Why hadn’t we heard about them before?”

My father didn’t really have a good explanation as to why he didn’t stay in touch with his St. Louis relatives, or for those in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area that used a Fursetzer spelling, or a Forseter cousin who had lived in Queens but died in the mid 1950s. Since I traveled the nation quite a bit back then, I was determined to meet Elliot next time I was in St. Louis. Only trouble was, I rarely visited St. Louis. 

Several years later, in 1986, en route to Las Vegas, I had a one hour layover in St. Louis, too short a time to leave the airport but time enough to contact Elliot by phone. He wasn’t home. As I explained who I was to his wife, I could visualize her looking into the phone and saying, “Yeah, right.” I told her I’d follow up with a letter. On the plane ride to Las Vegas I long-handed a legal-sized, seven-page letter detailing our family history. Elliot checked with his uncle, Isadore Forsetzer, in Florida before replying. Elliot, too, had no idea he had any Forseter relatives, as his parents had divorced 26 years earlier when he was 13 and his father moved to Los Angeles (by weird coincidence, to a home around the corner from my sister, which she never knew). He enclosed a picture of himself and his family. He could have passed as one of my father’s sons. 

A few years later I actually visited Elliot and his family, as well as my cousins in Minnesota. We all said we would stay in touch. That was decades ago. I have not stayed in touch. Sadly, I inherited my father’s anti-social gene when it comes to distant family relations. Maybe it was a universal Fürsetzer gene. My cousins haven’t stayed in touch, either. 

Remembering My Uncle on Yom Hashoah

Today, April 14, is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, for the six million Jews killed during World War II simply because they were Jewish. To my knowledge, all but one of my father’s and mother’s immediate families in Poland at the start of World War II were slaughtered by Nazis and their Ukrainian henchmen. The only survivor was my father’s brother, Willy, 24-years-old at the start of the war.

Uncle Willy’s wartime experience had all the suspense and plot twists of a Hollywood movie. Unlike my father who moved from Ottynia, a shtetl in Galicia, the southeastern part of Poland, to Danzig, and from there to New York, in January 1939, Willy returned from Danzig to their small town where he married and had a son. At the outbreak of the war, the Soviet Union took control of the area under the Polish Partition agreement secretly negotiated with Nazi Germany. Today, Ottynia is part of Ukraine.

In June 1941 Germany invaded Russian territory, quickly occupying the Galicia region. Mass executions of Jews began. Willy survived the first mass killings as he happened to be away from the village that day. He would sneak back into town to see his mother until it was no longer possible to do so before she too was murdered with the rest of the known Jewish residents in October. 

For the next two years he hid out in barns and fields as German soldiers and their Ukrainian sympathizers searched for the few who had managed to escape. His existence depended on an ability to stay one step ahead of the Nazis and to find Polish peasants willing to risk their lives to shield Jews. 

His existence resembled scenes from a war movie. Moving from one hiding place to another. Staying stone silent inside a hidden chamber of a potato bin as a soldier banged his rifle butt on the side listening for a hollow sound. Jumping into an open cesspool when German troops came to the barn he was hiding in. Finally, joining up with partisans to fight, eventually being liberated by the advancing Russian army which conscripted him and sent him to Siberia for basic training where he ate grass to survive for lack of food. 

When it was time to go to the front Willy was saved by a peculiar Russian military custom. When his unit was ready to be sent to the Western Front to fight the Germans, they mustered at the base. The commandant asked if any soldier had reason not to be sent to the battle lines. Willy and several other Jewish soldiers stepped forward. They told the officer they did not fear the Germans. What they feared was getting shot in the back by their fellow soldiers, many of whom were anti-Semitic Ukraines. The commandant kept them in Siberia. Willy always suspected he was sympathetic because secretly he might have been Jewish.

Could be. According to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, “About 500,000 Jewish soldiers fought in the Red Army during World War II. Some 120,000 were killed in combat and in the line of duty; the Germans murdered 80,000 as prisoners of war. More than 160,000, at all levels of command, earned citations, with over 150 designated “Heroes of the Soviet Union”— the highest honor awarded to soldiers in the Red Army” (https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/combat-resistance/jewish-soldiers.html).

After the war ended, Willy reconnected with my father. He was able to emigrate to Cuba. On a visit to New York he met and married Ethel. They had one child, Max. Willy opened a dry goods store on First Avenue between 10th and 11th Streets in Manhattan. Most of his customers were immigrants, many from Eastern and Central Europe. English was barely spoken in the store, but Uncle Willy was always able to communicate with them, in their languages.