Thoughts on College Admissions, Manafort, Impeachment, Farm Aid and a Cautionary Tale

The audacious scandal of parents of privilege paying a collective millions of dollars to trick the college selection process into accepting their children into prestigious schools evoked memories of how I and many of my high school classmates chose our institution of higher learning. 

During senior year at Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn my classmates and I met with one of our math teachers, Morris Turetsky, who doubled as the college guidance counselor. Moe, as we called him, was diminutive, balding, cherubic, if such a look can be ascribed to a man who seemed to be in his late sixties or early seventies. He often held index cards below desk level when conducting class, his personal cheat sheets. He spoke in clipped sentences in a street-smart voice. (Years later, after Gilda and I had our children, the rabbi of the synagogue we joined in White Plains was his son, Arnold, a spellbinding orator.)

Like many of my cohorts, I was a first generation American, my parents having emigrated from Poland, my mother in 1921 when she was four, my father at 28 in 1939. Neither attended college. My mother graduated high school. My father probably had no more than a sixth grade education in Poland, though he did earn what may be liberally considered a high school equivalency degree from night school classes in New York.

When meeting individually with Moe, more often than not, his counsel was, “Save your parents’ money. Go to Brooklyn College.” 

At the time, Brooklyn College cost $50 per semester plus books, usually no more than another $50 ($200 for an academic year). BC was a commuter school, so students lived with their parents. By comparison, annual tuition at the University of Pennsylvania cost $1,770 in 1966 with another $1,000 in room and board expenses, $180 for a general fee, $100 for books and $450 in personal expenses. 

Viewed another way, in 2016 inflation adjusted dollars, the cost of attending a full year at Brooklyn College was $1,504; at Penn, $26,303. 

Moe wasn’t wrong. Brooklyn College could save my parents lots of dollars. And at the time, Brooklyn was highly ranked among the nation’s liberal arts colleges. 

His advice did not fall on deaf ears. Of the 110 students in my graduating class, I and 58 others matriculated to Brooklyn College. Another nine enrolled at City University of New York sister colleges. Fourteen chose Ivy League schools; another dozen opted to leave Brooklyn to attend MIT and universities such as Wisconsin, Rochester and Chicago. 

Do I regret not leaving the friendly confines of Brooklyn for the out of town college experience? At times. But it would be hard to regret my years at BC, meeting Gilda and embarking on the career path I took. 

Does Manafort Have Any Regrets? One wonders if Paul Manafort has any regrets now that he has been sentenced to serve seven and a half years for a variety of federal crimes. Keep in mind he cannot appeal his punishment as he pleaded guilty to the crimes and was at the mercy of the two judges who sentenced him in separate courtrooms. 

Mercy was exactly what he was seeking, appearing as he did in a wheelchair both times, a complication of his alleged gout. Gout is often cast as a rich person’s ailment, commonly brought about by indulging in foods such as shrimp, lobster and red meats. 

Doubtful Manafort will enjoy such tasty fare in any federal lockup (assuming he is not pardoned by Trump), but here’s an interesting tidbit from lobster history. An abundance of lobsters in Colonial times caused the crustaceans to be considered a poor man’s food. “The meat was so reviled that indentured servants in one Massachusetts town successfully sued their owners to feed it to them three times a week at most,” according to gizmodo.com. You decide if you believe it or not.

Smoking Gun: Trump has latched onto an assertion by one of Manafort’s judges that his trial had nothing to do with collusion with Russia. Trump is braying, “No collusion,” as justification for ending any investigations into his 2016 campaign and administration, and certainly no reason to consider impeachment.

I’m with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on this one. Without “smoking gun” evidence, impeachment hearings would further divide the country and almost certainly solidify and possibly expand Trump’s base. Without, and maybe even with, a smoking gun the Republican controlled Senate would not convict. 

So we’re stuck with Trump for his full term. But I am all for extensive congressional investigation of Trump’s actions, his campaign, his businesses, his taxes, indeed, anything Trump, as a counter-balance to his authoritarian style of governing. A constant drumbeat of Trump’s duplicitous dealings exposed will undermine his legitimacy.  

Farm Aid: Farmers are said to be among Trump’s most ardent supporters. Yet, they have not been rewarded for their loyalty (another example of Trump’s one-way loyalty street). 

Here’s an article from Bloomberg News outlining Trump’s budget plans for farmers: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-11/trump-to-farmers-love-you-but-still-cutting-your-subsidies.

Cautionary Tale: Wealth does not protect one from mishaps, including medical mistakes. Ego apparently led to the untimely death of a billionaire diamond trader intent on reversing his undercompensated manhood: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6777961/Billionaire-diamond-trader-65-dies-penis-enlargement-surgery.html

Pneumonia Got Me Down

Missed me? It has been almost a month since my last blog post. So a little update seems more than fitting. 

In case you’re wondering, and I hope care, you might be interested to know I have spent the last two weeks succumbing to and recovering from pneumonia. Without any proof whatsoever I am convinced I was exposed to the illness by tainted equipment an ENT specialist used to explore the recesses of my nasal cavity. Three days later I started to sleep 16 to 18 hours a day, a sure sign something was amiss as I did not cough or sniffle, though I did run a slight temperature. 

The pneumonia could not have come at a more inopportune time. I was leading a group of eight Israeli women on a three-day trip to Washington and Philadelphia as part of Shalom Yisrael’s annual program of support of deserving women from tension spots in Israel. This year’s contingent came from the region adjacent to the border with Lebanon in the shadow of the Golan Heights. 

Last Tuesday I dropped them off at the Museum of African American History in Washington before going to a walk-in clinic. An X-ray confirmed the pneumonia. I finished the 10-day Doxycycline protocol this morning. Now I’m hoping for enough energy to resume softball in a senior citizen (50 and older) league White Plains is inaugurating next Thursday for eight weekly games.  

So, what else is new? Oh, yeah, it’s Nobel prize season, so let’s be upfront right away with our biases:

Barack Obama did not deserve his peace prize, not when he won it as a counterpoint to a regressive and repressive Bush II administration, nor in subsequent years when his eloquence as the leader of the free world camouflaged drone deaths, red line faults, undocumented immigrant deportations, and acts that otherwise would have disqualified his nomination. 

The Swedish academy has a habit, a bad habit, of premature advancement of peaceful achievement. Can an award presented to Yasir Arafat and his Israeli counterparts be considered legitimate? Yes, Yitzhak Rabin died in pursuit of peace. Shimon Peres valiantly tried to achieve peace, but despite living 22 years after receiving the award in 1994, never saw peace implemented. Why? Because Arafat (and his successor) continually rejected peace offers. The trio may have deserved certificates of merit—good first step, now let’s see you sustain the effort—but not a full-fledged-world-watching ceremonial award. That comes after a lifetime, okay years, of peacemaking, not a blip in your highlight reel of death, violence and assault on all things noble and civil. 

Which brings us to Donald Trump. The excitement of a possible breakthrough with North Korea is palpable. However, it is too early to crown any of his and Kim Jung Un’s initiatives as historically peacemaking. 

One book does not make a Nobel prize in literature. One summit meeting does not mean peace is breaking out all over. Will North Korea become less repressive? Will Trump become more tolerant toward the disadvantaged, including refugees and those seeking asylum, and less tolerant of dictators like Putin, Duterte, and Erdogan? 

Better Living Thru Chemistry: Did you see the report earlier this week on the classroom science experiment in a Tennessee high school that went awry and injured 17? (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/05/09/a-classroom-science-experiment-turned-into-a-chemical-fire-injuring-17/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1cefe2960fea)

During my junior year in high school a chemistry laboratory demonstration blew up. It was quite common for our Jewish day school, Yeshivah of Flatbush, to hire retired or near retirement public school teachers to provide quality secular instruction. Mr. Nash had been hired the year before to teach biology. He was a crusty old man with a raspy voice, probably close to my current age of 69, with wisps of hair on an otherwise large, balding head. With no prior experience teaching chemistry Mr. Nash embarked on his new mission with the apparent tactic of staying one textbook chapter ahead of the class. 

The experiment of the day was to observe the reaction when water is mixed with sulfuric acid. You are supposed to add the acid to the water. But Mr. Nash did the reverse. When no discernible reaction occurred, a few students suggested he add more water. 

He did, causing a most violent reaction. The glass beaker containing the sulfuric acid exploded, sending shards across the room. Several students were injured, none seriously. There was lots of smoke and a severely bruised teacher’s ego. 

Remembering a Respected Teacher

If you looked at him during class, every so often you would see him wince. His eyes would squint ever so slightly. A sour crease would envelope his lips. Sometimes he would rub the side of his head with his fingertips. One side of his brow, the right side if I remember correctly, had about a one inch square indentation, as if a chisel had been taken to his skull.

Amnon Haramati was different from all the other Hebrew studies teachers I encountered during my 12 years of parochial school education at Yeshiva Rambam and Yeshivah of Flatbush High School in Brooklyn. Unlike the others, he would not let us address him as Rabbi or Rav Hamarati. It was Mar (mister) Hamarati, though in later years he did acquire the title of rabbi. Unlike the others, his accent was not eastern European. It was Israeli. He was clean shaven. He stood tall. Erect. Defiant in stature and status. He embodied a dignity that commanded respect. No student ever made fun of Amnon Hamarati. You only wanted to secure his recognition for a job well done.

I was pretty good at Judaic studies. But some time during my high school years I began having trouble completing sentences entirely in Hebrew. My mouth could not keep up with my brain. So I would throw in the occasional English word to round out my thoughts. Amnon Haramati was not amused. He would demand I speak slower. In Hebrew. Only in Hebrew.

He was younger in age and temperament than the other Hebrew studies male teachers, just 18 years older than my classmates and me. He had a sense of humor. One of his pet theories was the belief that the Hebrew Bible contained references to everything ever created. We would challenge him to prove it. Show us, we would demand, where the telephone or television were in the Bible. Amused at our simple request, he would cite the revelation at Mount Sinai, God speaking to the people of Israel and appearing before them not in a black and white broadcast but in living color.

His only vulnerability, that occasional wince. There were rumors his skull harbored a metal plate, a souvenir of Israel’s war of independence. I never heard him talk about it not in class at Flatbush nor earlier, during the summers before high school when I saw him at Camp Massad Aleph where he counselored an older age group than mine.

More than 20 years ago, in his short but moving acceptance speech of the 1994 Covenant Award as an outstanding Jewish educator, he related in third person testimony the tale of a soldier so severely wounded in the head during the battle for Jerusalem in 1948 that doctors pronounced him dead, only to be reclassified as barely alive but blind after a nurse heard him moan, only to be told he should not consider pursuing academic studies after another nurse discovered he was not sightless (https://vimeo.com/122476742?ref=em-v-share).

Word came Thursday that Amnon Haramati passed away. He was 86. 

Explosion in the Chemistry Lab

Did you hear about the NYC public high school science teacher who blew up her lab in an experiment gone wrong on Thursday? (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/nyregion/chemistry-lab-fire-injures-2-at-a-manhattan-high-school.html?_r=0)

The excitement brought to mind a similar foul-up during my junior year at Yeshivah of Flatbush High School in Brooklyn. I wasn’t there. The incident happened in one of the other classes of my grade. They were studying the reaction of sulfuric acid with water. 

Now, there is a proper way to mix sulfuric acid and water, and there is a wrong way to mix the two. The proper way is to add the acid to water. Then there’s the other way. As explained by Wikipedia, “Addition of water to concentrated sulfuric acid leads to the dispersal of a sulfuric acid aerosol or worse, an explosion.”

Guess which way the teacher conducted the experiment? 

Yes, and no. At first, Mr. Nash, the chemistry teacher, who, it should be noted, really was a biology teacher pressed into chemistry service at the last minute, did the experiment the right way, adding acid to water. But the intended result, a rise in temperature in the glass beaker, was inconsequential. That’s when Mr. Nash made his monumental mistake. He listened to some of his students egging him on to add some more water to the mixture. 

Not being a true chemistry teacher, Mr. Nash was not acquainted with the consequences of his action. The resulting explosion, with glass shards flying about, injuring several students, taught him and the class a lesson they would not quickly forget. 

The Loss of Innocence

When did you lose your innocence? When did the reality of death intrude into your idyllic concept of life?

For me, and for most of my Yeshivah of Flatbush high school classmates, it happened the summer after we graduated, when we found out Moe Radinsky had died.

We had known Moe for a scant two years, yet the impression he left on us was that of a figure larger than life. Indeed, he was larger than most of us, no less than 200 pounds, a husky 6’2” or so, with thick, dark, wavy hair, and a gap-toothed smile under horn-rimmed black eyeglasses. He entered our lives at the beginning of our junior year, a transplant to Brooklyn from Seattle. Who knew there were Jews in Seattle?

Whether from nervousness or a sense of confidence, he tried to ingratiate himself by cracking puns whenever possible. They were not good puns. But we grew to love, or at least tolerate, them. More to the point, we grew to love Moe.

Typical of our cloistered upbringing in the 1950s and 1960s, of the 110 students in our graduating year of 1966, only 19 chose a college outside New York City’s borders, and most of those were Ivy League schools. Moe, on the other hand, enrolled at the University of Chicago, the subject of a NY Times article in Saturday’s sports section. Once a powerhouse of college football, the University of Chicago abandoned the sport in 1939. A club football team sprouted up in the late 1950s (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/sports/ncaafootball/at-the-university-of-chicago-football-and-higher-education-mix.html?_r=1&hpw).

A devout fan of the University of Washington Huskies, Moe joined U of C’s club football team. There is no known record of his prowess on the gridiron, but as was related to me during the summer of 1967, he was playing with his young nephew one day when the child kicked him in the shin. Since the pain did not ebb after a few days he sought medical attention. Tests revealed he had bone cancer. He died a few months later.

Teenagers, for that is what we all were at the time, believe they are invincible. Moe’s death shattered that mirage. The Vietnam War raged half a planet away. But that war barely touched us beyond the pictures on the nightly news. We were all draft-deferred. We were safe. Our 2S draft classifications sheltered us from danger.

When the largest oak in the forest tumbles, tremors must run through all the other trees. So it was for many of us. Though grandparents and other relatives had passed away in most of our families, our collective consciousness about mortality and man’s finite existence had not really been challenged. Moe’s sudden passing so far away from all of us brought our innocence to an end.

A Moment to Remember

If ever there was a class and teacher high school sophomores at Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn chose to ignore and make fun of, it was the art class of Shirley Franzblau. No longer awed by being in secondary school, savvy in our knowledge of the ways and means of our private high school, we barely could contain our indifference to the silver-haired Miss Franzblau’s subject and tutelage.

But it is her class that stands out in memory more than any other. It was in her classroom, shortly after 2 on a Friday afternoon 47 years ago today, that the intercom speaker came to life to tell all about the death of a president.

November 22, 1963. I was 14. Like most of my contemporaries, I had finally achieved more than a modicum of political awareness. JFK’s inaugural address was the first I ever heard. His cabinet was the first whose members I could fully name. Similarly, I could identify the nine Supreme Court justices. A year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, images of ambassador Adlai Stevenson showing the United Nations, and through television, the world, photos of the Soviet deployments in Cuba were still fresh in my memory bank. So, too, were the press conferences John Kennedy held.

As I remember it, our class came to absolute silence. I don’t recall anyone weeping. Just stunned silence. Miss Franzblau told us there would be early dismissal. I went home to join, for the next three days, a nation watching history unfold and be changed forever.

I’ve visited the Texas School Book Depository Building in Dallas overlooking the grassy knoll. The sixth floor from where Lee Harvey Oswald fired those fateful shots has been turned into a museum. I choose to believe there was just one shooter, though I don’t discount Oswald may have been part of a more elaborate conspiracy.

I remember nothing else about Shirley Franzblau’s classes. Just one moment in an otherwise forgettable class.

Remembering An Icon

I woke up Sunday morning to the news another part of my youth had passed away.

Lonny Benamy was an iconic figure at Camp Columbia and Kfar Masada, two eight week sleep-away camps in upstate New York where I spent my teenage years. Lonny died Sunday morning after a four year bout with cancer.

I first met Lonny in 1962. I was 13, Lonny 18. He was the nature counselor, but to the urbanized (read that, sheltered) Jewish boys and girls of Brooklyn and Queens who mostly populated summer camp, he was the the flesh and blood image of Ari Ben Canaan of Exodus. Or more precisely, he was our Paul Newman, with wavy brown hair, piercing eyes, bronzed suntan and khaki shorts rolled up high on the thigh like any good Sabra would wear. He drove the camp’s red Jeep. He wasn’t afraid to play with snakes. He had a devilish grin, not too dissimilar from that of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Naturally, he also wielded a big hunting knife.

As I matriculated from camper to waiter and counselor with off-site days-off privileges, I aspired like everyone else to be chosen for one of the five passenger seats in Lonny’s 1956 Buick. As one of his fellow Saturday afternoon volleyball enthusiasts, I was fortunate to secure a coveted spot most of the time when our six days off coincided. Those excursions were among the most memorable days of the summer.

Riding with Lonny on the narrow, winding upstate roadways was an adventure. You never knew when he might suddenly swerve. If his eagle eyes caught sight of a woodchuck, he’d do his darndest to run it over. Perhaps that’s what they taught him about farm pest control at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. In his pre-seat belt car, it was everyone’s not so silent prayer that woodchucks stay invisible when Lonny drove by.

It was with Lonny I first went to the track, Monticello Raceway. After a day bumming around town, perhaps visiting other Jewish camps to drop in on friends, we’d get to the racetrack parking lot shortly before the 8 pm post-time. As we were still dressed in shorts, we’d jump out of the car and change into pants as fast as we could. There were no inhibitions when Lonny was around. There also was no guarantee I’d make it inside the harness racing track, as I was just 16 that first time. But with Lonny running interference, I made it through the gate. Making it back to camp by the midnight curfew was another form of racing. We’d stay at the track till nearly 11. The ride back to Elizaville was about an hour, mostly with no other cars on the road, and thankfully, with no woodchucks crossing our path.

In August, once Saratoga Racetrack opened, we’d go north, first to Lake George for some motorboating, then back down to Saratoga for the afternoon races. For Saratoga we had to bring along some decent clothing, as the meal at night invariably was at Tradewinds, a white tablecloth restaurant on Route 9 sitting by itself at the southern entrance to downtown Saratoga Springs. Fortunately, the trips to Saratoga came after Parents Visiting Day, so our wallets bulged with tip money. I’ve been back to Saratoga many times in the last 10 years. Tradewinds has long since closed. Its location is surrounded now by other restaurants and a Hilton Garden Inn hotel. I’ve eaten at the restaurant that took over the Tradewinds’ spot. The food is not as good.

As I sat at Lonny’s funeral service on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, across the street from Yeshivah of Flatbush founded by Lonny’s uncle, Joel Braverman (Lonny was a biology teacher and the head of discipline for the high school—my alma mater—now located a few blocks away on Avenue J and East 16th St.), I reflected on another friend’s passing, another alumnus of Camp Columbia and Kfar Masada. Michael Lauchheimer died 20 years ago, Oct 4, 1990. Like my relationship with Lonny, it started out as camper and counselor. I was one of Michael’s counselors. When we met again some 10 years later, my daughter and his older son were in the same class at Solomon Schechter. We were now equals and became close friends. Like Lonny, Michael died during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. One of the most joyful of holidays has become tinged again with sadness.

A Tall Basketball Story

John Wooden died Friday. He was 99. Wooden was the legendary coach of the UCLA basketball team. His teams won seven consecutive NCAA national championships, 10 in 12 years. He was called the Wizard of Westwood, Westwood being the section of Los Angeles UCLA calls home.

He was a great coach, made more unstoppable by the procession of great high school players who chose his college program. Dominant among them all was Lew Alcindor, later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In the mid-1960s, Alcindor played for Power Memorial High School in Manhattan. All of his games drew frenzied crowds. Everyone wanted to watch the seven-footer play. Power Memorial had a hard time finding quality scrimmage opponents, an even harder time finding neutral courts that wouldn’t turn every practice into a media event.

Enter Bernie Kirsner, coach of the Yeshivah of Flatbush Falcons, but more importantly, for this story at least, also coach of the Erasmus High School Dutchmen, a basketball powerhouse in its own right, city champions in 1965 and second in 1966. Kirsner had a keen eye for talent. It was he who cut short my basketball career, not even granting me a spot on Flatbush’s junior varsity squad. He saw right away I couldn’t dribble and drive to the basket. In all truthfulness, my jump shot wasn’t too dependable back then, either.

Kirsner arranged for Power Memorial to play Erasmus on an undisclosed date on a neutral court—the gym of Yeshivah of Flatbush. The afternoon of the game only Flatbush students could gain entry into the gym. My classmates even shared the locker room with Alcindor as he dressed for the game. They said he was “really big,” in more ways than one, if you get what I mean. They said the game was great fun to watch, really competitive.

They said a lot more, but as you’ve probably noticed by now, I keep deferring to what my friends said rather than giving my own version of the event. That’s because I wasn’t there—I cut school that day. Wasn’t sick. Just cut school. Who knew that I would choose to cut school the one day I could have watched Lew Alcindor up close and for free?

Years later, Gilda and I watched the now Abdul-Jabbar play the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. After the game we saw him walking on Seventh Avenue. Gilda remarked how tall he was (7’2”), that she could probably walk through his legs without hitting her head. Recalling what my friends said some 10 years earlier, I suggested that probably couldn’t happen.