Plummeting Elevator Sticks in My Mind

For seven years, from 1978 through 1986, I took the express elevator to the 95th floor of the John Hancock building in Chicago. From high above North Michigan Avenue on a clear night one could see for miles the straight as an arrow grid street pattern of the Second City laid out below. It was an exhilarating venue for a cocktail reception sponsored by my magazine, Chain Store Age, during the annual National Housewares Show in January. 

It was an express elevator in that very building (no longer called the John Hancock) that plummeted some 84 floors early Monday morning after two cables broke. Six passengers were traumatized by their near death experience before the elevator came to rest. As it was an express elevator there was no door in the shaft near the 11th floor where the car finally stopped its dramatic descent. 

Normally, when an elevator gets stuck between openings, rescuers align another car next to it, then unscrew the adjacent panels of the two cars to allow passengers to gingerly walk across the void to the safety of the functioning elevator. 

That’s what I had to do when an elevator I was riding in got stuck between the 13th and 14th floors of 425 Park Avenue. 

About 30 years ago, on a rainy work day, I decided not to venture outside to secure my lunch. Instead, as I had done on numerous occasions, I chose to fop my way off as one of the lawyers of Finley Kumble, a large legal firm with multiple floors in the building with a short-order staff cafeteria on the 14th floor. I descended from my sixth floor office to the lobby and entered the elevator bank that would take me to the 14th floor. Sandwich and soda in bag in hand, I re-entered the elevator with two Finley Kumble associates, one man, one woman, no wiser to their fellow traveler’s interloper status.

The doors closed. We started our controlled descent. Suddenly, we stopped. Between floors. No panic. Building security quickly contacted us through the elevator telephone. They’d have us out in no time, they said.

“No time” dragged on for more than half an hour. It was now close to 1 pm. I was hungry. I had my lunch with me, but reasoned if I broke out the goodies I’d be obligated to share with my elevator companions. I’m embarrassed to say I was not in favor of that option, at least not then. Perhaps if hours went by and everyone had expressed hunger pains I’d be more forthcoming with my food. I opted to hold out. 

Almost an hour after our interrupted journey, building security advised the elevator could not be restarted. To extract us from our vertical shell, they would have to line up another elevator next to ours, remove the side panels of both transports and have us walk across the exposed elevator shafts to the working elevator. 

Trepidation, not yet panic, set in. We joked it would be like walking across a log over a stream. Of course, the stream would be about 10 or more stories below. When the technicians entered our car, they cautioned us not to look down, to just walk naturally across the chasm into the adjacent elevator. 

In truth, the distance was probably no wider than two feet, a regular stride, for me, at least. Still, I was sufficiently repentant to believe someone was sending me a message my not-so-legal use of the Finley Kumble cafeteria was not kosher, if you get my drift. I never returned to the Finley Kumble cafeteria.

Returning to the present elevator mishap, extracting the passengers was not as easy. Rescuers had to cut a hole through the concrete wall of the shaft to pull the passengers out.  

Will those six passengers ever again be able to comfortably ride in a high rise elevator? Perhaps. Keep in mind, survivors of airplane crashes fly again. Car crashes don’t stop people from motoring again. Train wrecks don’t keep survivors off the rails. Still, I just wonder …

News of the Day: Seeger, Killing Fields, Snow in Chicago, Clean Desks, State of the Union

As most of you did, I awoke this morning to the news that Pete Seeger died. He was 94. 

I believe the first time I saw Pete Seeger in concert was in the summer, in the late 1950s. Camp Massad Aleph took us to a concert by The Weavers, the folk singing quartet Seeger helped organize. I recall sitting in the covered stands of what appears in my memory to be a racetrack, with The Weavers performing on the turf in front of us. Among the tunes they sang was one of their hits, “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” an Israeli folk song, music to the ears of embryonic Zionists from Massad. It was a song from the days when Israel was young, vibrant and considered by many the paradigm of new socialism, an obvious appeal to the left-leaning Seeger.

Seeger’s career fell into a trough during that time and well into the 1960s because of his political views. Obituaries have noted it was mostly on college campuses that he was able to secure concert gigs. So it wasn’t a surprise when he appeared at my school, Brooklyn College, in March 1969. As an editor of one of the college newspapers, I had pretty good seats to many of the top folk and rock singers of the time who appeared on the stage of Walt Whitman Auditorium, including Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Ponies, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Joni Mitchell. I sat close enough to be able to see the writing on Seeger’s five-string banjo—“This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”

Some of the obituaries called Seeger a troubadour, what the dictionary defines as “somebody who sings while strolling around an area such as a restaurant.” I sincerely doubt Seeger tiptoed around tables. But he did canvass our country, indeed the world, gathering folk songs for his repertoire. Among the songs he wrote or co-wrote are “”Kisses Sweeter than Wine,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” and “If I had a Hammer.” He was the creative spirit behind “We Shall Overcome,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” and “Wimoweh”. 

Interestingly, when CBS Radio broadcast his death this morning it played a snippet of Seeger singing “This Land Is Your Land.” He did not write that song. Woody Guthrie did.

Past Perfect: I was brought back to my past by several other stories in the news these last few days. Tuesday, The NY Times carried an article on the extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe by bullets in killing fields rather than gas chambers in Nazi death camps (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/world/europe/a-light-on-a-vast-toll-of-jews-killed-away-from-the-death-camps.html?_r=0). 

I’ve mentioned before how my father’s family in Ottynia, in what is now western Ukraine, were killed. Here’s how it was described in the history of the society of immigrants from Ottynia: 

“We learned from correspondence with Ottynia survivors that the Jewish inhabitants of Ottynia were taken in two groups by trucks towards Tolmitch where a mass grave had been prepared and our people were shot and buried there.” 

Snow Job: Reports out of Chicago say the cold and snow are the worst in 31 years. 

January is when The National Housewares Show has been held in Chicago. The show was a leading source of advertising for my magazine and its sister publications. Each publication would send about six editorial and sales staffers to cover the show and sell ad schedules. 

Getting to Chicago after one of the Windy City’s legendary snowstorms is nearly impossible. Flights are cancelled. Trains don’t run. Forget taking a bus. 

In 1979, a blizzard struck just before the start of the Housewares Show. None of our associates could get to Chicago. Even our Chicago-based salesmen could not drive to McCormick Place, site of the exposition. 

While corporate officers in New York anguished over the lost opportunity, one determined vice president, David Q. Mahler, demonstrated that where there’s a will there’s a way. From his home in Levittown, Long Island, he traveled down to Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, DC, to board a plane to Japan. Why? Because he knew that flight had a stopover in Chicago and like the postal carriers of old, “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” would stay the airline from canceling its international schedule. David deplaned in Chicago, only to find almost no one else in attendance at the show. It was a glorious trek, ultimately one without financial reward.

Speaking of financial reward, the debate over raising minimum wages for restaurant employees (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/business/proposal-to-raise-tip-wages-resisted.html?_r=0) recalls a similar battle in 1977 when I worked on Nation’s Restaurant News. As I wrote before, I won a company writing award for debunking the restaurant industry’s argument that higher wages would be harmful. 

Cleaning Up: Ten days ago, in a Times article on Michael Bloomberg’s return to his company after 12 years as mayor of New York City, the third from last paragraph reported managers in the Washington office of Bloomberg News “recommended that staff members clean up their desks so as not to catch the notice of the famously neat former mayor.” 

The owner of the publishing company I worked for also failed to appreciate the disheveled desk of an editor was a badge of respect. Accordingly, during one of my trips away from the office he ordered my desk to be cleaned up. One admin assistant dutifully stacked all of my papers, without throwing any away. When I returned, I exploded, screaming that I couldn’t find any of my notes. I told Barbara I would fire her if she touched my papers again. I was all bluster. A short while later I promoted her, made her a copy editor. One of the best staffing decisions I ever made.

State of the Union: President Obama gives the annual State of the Union speech tonight. I’ve not read any pre-speech commentary, but he no doubt will say the state of our union is strong. I, personally, concur, as far as Gilda’s and my state of the union—today is our 41st anniversary. 

Chicagoland Express

Spent the last two days in Chicagoland at a retail industry conference in a hotel near O’Hare Airport. During my heyday travel years, I’d fly in and out of O’Hare six times or more a year. I enjoyed Chicago’s controlled bustle. It always seemed more manageable than New York, though the ride between the airport and downtown was never predictable. No matter what time of day you were just as likely to swiftly and bumpily speed down the John F. Kennedy Expressway as you were to crawl along because of congestion or road work. A cabbie once told me Chicago had two seasons—winter and construction.

I didn’t have to contend with the latter this trip. But I did get caught on my way home by the bane of most summer travelers—delays from late afternoon thunderstorms. Chicago was crystal clear, but somewhere down the line storms had disrupted service so that our outgoing plane to La Guardia had not even landed at O’Hare by our scheduled departure time. Instead of returning to New York around 9:30 pm, my best prediction was closer to midnight, if I was lucky. This part of business travel I surely have not missed since my retirement from magazine publishing.

I also haven’t missed the temptation of conference dessert platters. The petits fours seem so delectable. They’re hard to resist, even for someone who has to watch his sugar intake. But they’re soooo appealing. From past experience I know looks are deceiving, yet I wonder if this is the hotel pastry chef who finally understands cardboard is not an essential ingredient of a Napoleon. So I sample a few morsels, secure in the thought none of my fellow conference attendees will squeal to Gilda about my indiscretion. By the time she reads this blog, I’ll have gone back on the dessert wagon and assumed full deniability mode.

Postscript: I was wrong. I did wind up getting screwed by congestion. Seems when I wrote this blog sitting in the Chicago airport around 7 pm, my fellow passengers and I were under the impression the thunderstorms we saw on the weather maps and reports on our smartphones caused the delay. Not so, it turns out. I was enlightened to the real reason as I deplaned around 11:30 pm at La Guardia. When I asked one of the pilots where the thunderstorms were that delayed us, she blithely related the airline always intended us to arrive two hours late, even if our plane had been waiting at O’Hare on time. Air traffic flow, or more precisely, too much air traffic into and out of La Guardia, made a late arrival in New York standard operating procedure. So much for truth in scheduling! Congestion! Argh!!!!

Postscript 2: Slight correction to my Wednesday post on Target, Chick-fil-A and same-sex marriage. The Matt Bai article from the Sunday NY Times magazine appeared July 22. I had written July 17 because when I looked it up on The Times Web site, the article carried a dateline of July 17, when it was first posted to the Internet. I never bothered to check what day of the week July 17 fell on. Another example of how it’s hard to trust anything you read these days and fact-checking is a lost art. 

The Real Mass Murderers Among Us

Safe to say, Afro-Americans have suffered more discrimination in our society than any other population segment. Yet, other than Colin Ferguson, the Long Island Railroad shooter who killed six commuters and wounded 19 others in 1993, I’m hard-pressed to recall any other instance over the last several decades when an Afro-American vented his frustrations and executed a mass shooting and murder as perpetrated last week by James Holmes, another white man, in Aurora, Colo., or in Columbine, Colo., or at Virginia Tech, or in Tucson, Ariz., or just last week ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where, thankfully, none of the 17 people shot in a bar died (okay, technically, the Virginia Tech shooter was Asian, but hardly a member of a discriminated race).

Through their gangs, blacks have the unfortunate habit of shooting and often killing their own, both gang members and innocents, often children unlucky to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Those are serial events, not the singular violence shooters like Holmes trigger. You’d think if anyone could be justified in taking it out on society it would be an Afro-American, or maybe an Hispanic-American. Thankfully, they don’t.

I don’t mean to belittle the tragedy in Aurora, but the real tragedy of America is that gang-related murders evoke little more than hand-wringing and not enough resolve to alter the conditions that are killing hope in minority neighborhoods. In Chicago, for example, 272 have been killed this year through June 30, mostly from gang-related incidents. That’s up 36% from a year ago. 

Since the mass assault in the movie theater in Aurora we’ve been trying to analyze the alleged shooter, determine his motive, flesh out his psyche, somehow try to figure out what would drive an individual to do such an extreme act against society. Perhaps it would be more worthwhile to figure out why whole groups of men have abandoned social mores. Let’s figure out how to stop their discriminate and indiscriminate shooting rampages.

We’ll never stop random acts of mass murder, no more than we can eradicate random acts of terrorism. But we must work to stop what has become “institutionalized” murder by gangs, even if it’s against other gang members. We don’t tolerate Mafia wars. We shouldn’t tolerate minority wars. We cannot allow neighborhoods of our cities to degenerate into semblances of drug-cartel controlled Mexico where the value of a life has lost its true meaning. 

Getting back to James Holmes, did anyone else look at his picture and think he resembled the devil incarnate, what with his lips turned up into a smirk, pointy ears, arched eyebrows and two wisps of hair on each side of his head looking for all accounts like horns? Click on this link to see a picture of Holmes. Make up your own mind: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1118502.1342871848!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/james-holmes.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/james-holmes-aurora-shooting-suspect-med-school-dropout-loner-neighbors-article-1.1118501&h=491&w=635&sz=30&tbnid=ISjZJ4mf-HKI4M:&tbnh=92&tbnw=119&prev=/search%3Fq%3Djames%2Bholmes%2Bpictures%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=james+holmes+pictures&usg=__LG6xslFseV5rCVNdS1W0W4GxJ-Q=&docid=C6KP7QA6-EN9NM&sa=X&ei=hKQNUNqnH4m40QGviNDIAw&ved=0CFoQ9QEwAw&dur=547

A Bite Out of the Big Apple?

Word is spreading that Wal-Mart is looking for sites in New York City. The usual suspects—unions, social activists, politicians, all looking to score points with their constituencies and small business owners—are lining up to block the world’s largest retailer from planting a toehold in any of the five boroughs.

It’s a classic fight that has transpired across the country, most notably in Chicago where Wal-Mart has one store and is angling to place another within the city limits. It has scores of them ringing the Windy City.

It’s also a classic tale of elitism. Of out and out snobbery. I’ve said it publicly so I might as well put it in print—there is no difference between the operating practices of Wal-Mart and Target, or most other large scale retailers, with the notable exception of Costco. Only size differentiates them, Wal-Mart being several multiples larger than any other retailer. They pay low wages. They limit medical benefits. They employ far greater women and minorities in their stores compared to the percentage of women and minorities in positions of management, both at store and headquarters levels. Their sizes virtually assure that some managers are bigots or poor adherents to corporate policy, so the inevitable discrimination occurs in hiring and promotion. Because it is the largest company, Wal-Mart is the target (pun intended) of legal challenges. Back in the 1970s, when Sears was top dog, it bore the brunt of most discrimination lawsuits. Such is the burden of being number one. (Full disclosure: my wife has a modest holding of Wal-Mart stock.)

Target is among the largest U.S. corporations, with revenues exceeding $65 billion. Yet Target enjoys a warm and fuzzy reputation with shoppers, particularly the power elite. They lovingly, disarmingly call it “Tar-Zhay” and feel comfortable inside its stores. Their snobbery makes their skin crawl when inside a Wal-Mart.

The impact a Target or Wal-Mart has on a market can be equally devastating. Or exhilarating, depending on your point of view. There’s no doubt any small business that offers the same merchandise but at higher prices runs the risk of being closed down. It’s equally true that many retailers thrive in the shadow of one of the big box stores.

In downtown White Plains, NY, Target and Wal-Mart compete across the street from each other. On any given day, Wal-Mart has considerably more traffic, strong evidence that even in upscale Westchester County there is a solid customer base for a store that promises, and often delivers, savings on life’s necessities.

The current brouhaha over Wal-Mart was first reported in Crain’s New York Business earlier this week. Wal-Mart was said to be a possible tenant in the Gateway II project in the Jamaica Bay area of Brooklyn, a mostly working class neighborhood. Here’s Crain’s original reporting, though I can tell you with certainty that it parallels events and comments throughout the country over the last 20 or more years:

“’We don't like how they treat workers as it relates to salaries and benefits, and we're not going to have them in our community,” says City Councilman Charles Barron, D-Brooklyn. “They will have the fight of their lives.”

“United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1500 is planning a protest in the next week and is already arguing that Related's (the developer) earlier traffic study presented to gain land-use approval did not take into account a Walmart being situated in Gateway II. The union is planning to send canvassers out to the neighborhood to drum up opposition to a potential Walmart.

“’Walmart was never, ever mentioned once through the entire land-use process,” says Pat Purcell, assistant to the president of UFCW Local 1500. “The area cannot sustain a Walmart, a Target and a BJs. In this area, it's a job killer; it's just the wrong use.”’

Twice before Wal-Mart abandoned projects in Queens and Staten Island. I can’t forecast what will happen at Gateway II. But I can predict that unless more large-scale food retailers open more stores in the inner city featuring wide assortments at competitive prices, Wal-Mart will eventually take a big bite out of the Big Apple.