Saying Hello to Celebrity

My family wanted to know if I’d be going to the parade up the Canyon of Heroes for the World Champion NY Yankees today. After all, isn’t that the type of thing retirees and those otherwise unemployed get to do without fear of repercussions from taking off from work?

Yes, I guess they’re right. But no, thank you, I won’t be among the millions standing in the chilly autumn air along Broadway, waiting for the fleeting moment when Derek or CC or A-Rod or Hideki rides by and maybe even waves in their direction.

My appreciation for their performance is much more personal, the same as it was when I watched them win. I prefer viewing any of my favorite team’s playoff games by myself, so I can think along with the players and coaches, rant against the lousy, gushy TV commentators, and generally act or act up as I see fit, without fear of embarrassing myself. I don’t need the company of others to cheer along with, or commiserate with if they lose.

Gilda thinks I’m an old fuddy-duddy. Guilty, probably, but I have come to prefer to express my appreciation personally and in a quiet way, even years after a player retires. Sitting in the Los Angeles airport three months ago, I recognized a gentleman who sat down about 30 feet away. I calmly approached Dave Winfield, shook his enormous hand and thanked him for his years as a Yankee. I did the same thing in the St. Louis airport with David Wells the winter following the perfect game he pitched as a Yankee. I shook Joe Torre's hand on a plane down to Florida a few years ago. On the southeast corner of Lexington Avenue and East 55th Street, I said hello to Shelley Duncan last year after he exited a Starbucks. Twice over the last two years at the opposite corner I said hello to Johnny Damon, once when he was with his wife and child.

You’d be surprised how many celebrities walk among us. Over the years, just in the one block radius from my former office on Park Avenue between 55th and 56 Streets, I saw Richard Lewis, Alan King, Dustin Hoffman, Neil Simon, Steve Allen and Audrey Meadows, Ricky Gervais, Jackie Onassis, and Cheryl Tiegs, who I almost followed into a flower store on 55th Street.

I enjoy the excitement of the impromptu encounter, the instant identification of the celebrity and, whenever possible, the quick and quiet expression of appreciation for the work they have done. I never ask for autographs, and most importantly, try not to alert others so the celebrity doesn’t become an object of attention. They’re usually flattered to be recognized, and equally happy not to be exposed.

It will be bedlam downtown today. Not a scene I care to share.

Instant Replay Plus Bases Loaded

Now that the World Series is over with a deserved Yankees victory, let me share with you my ideas for how instant replay can be made part of the game, at least as it applies to the post season. Also, I’ll pass along an idea for better reporting when bases-loaded situations occur:

Instant Replay: As in the last two minutes of each NFL football half, all close plays (but not balls and strikes), would be reviewed by a 7th umpire sitting in a TV booth. He, not the managers, would initiate reviews throughout a game. He would send an electronic signal to the home plate umpire and crew chief that a review is underway. Based on available TV shots, usually ready within a minute, he would make the right call.

Would it lengthen the game? No doubt. But adding only 2-4 minutes of a 210-minute (or longer) game for a few close plays would not be burdensome, especially when you consider that the integrity of the game was at stake and that often it could be accomplished during the same time that a manager is contesting a call.

The argument about affecting the “pace of the game” advanced by Commissioner Bud Selig and others is specious. Teams already delay the flow. During the Yankees-Angels league championship series the Yanks deliberately threw over to first and had mound conferences to give Mariano Rivera time to warm up and enter the game. It was a blatant stall, pointed out by the TV announcers. The umps knew it and were powerless to stop it. Selig couldn’t stop it, either. So let’s not hide behind the “pace of the game” argument.

Technology is available to rapidly and usually unequivocally “call” the game’s most contested and controversial plays. These are not judgment calls (e.g., if Reggie Jackson purposely stuck his hip out to deflect a throw in the base path in the 1978 World Series against the Dodgers). Bang-bang plays that can change the course of a game or series (such as the two blown calls at first base in Game 2 of the Series) can and must be called correctly. Instant replay, when conclusive, can do it without materially lengthening the game.

Bases-loaded reporting: I often hear announcers citing the batter’s experience in past bases-loaded at-bats. Yet no one ever cites the equally important statistic of how pitchers fared when confronted with the bases loaded. (Statistics are used for relievers and inherited runners, but to my knowledge nobody is tracking how pitchers do with the bases loaded.)

Moreover, it might be even more enlightening to reveal how they pitched with the bases jammed with no outs, with 1 out and with 2 outs (same thing could be done for batters) as the pressure to perform clearly changes with the circumstances of how many outs there are.

Remember, if any of these suggestions make their way into baseball, you read it first here.

Diversity in Retailing

I read yesterday that Eric Watson, vice president of Talent Acquisition and The Office of Diversity of Food Lion LLC, one of the largest supermarket operators in the country, received the first-ever Diversity Champion Award from The Diversity Forum, a non-profit organization that promotes diversity and inclusion in business ( http://www.chainstoreage.com/story.aspx?id=121175&menuid=445).

Good for him. I bring this to your attention because I had the honor of including Eric as a featured speaker in April 2006 at the first, and regrettably only, Retailing in an Age of Diversity Conference co-produced by Chain Store Age and DiversityInc. As I editorialized at the time, the conference proved to be one of the most satisfying and proudest moments of my time covering the retail industry. But it also was one of the most disappointing and frustrating days.

Though some-90 executives attended, they came almost exclusively from the largest retailers, companies such as Wal-Mart, The Home Depot, Ace Hardware, J.C. Penney, Staples, Target, Kohl’s, and Nordstrom. Hardly any retailer with less than a billion dollars in sales found it important enough to send at least one representative to hear information and strategies to help diversify their organizations. I was distressed at their lack of interest.

The audience that day was a true rainbow coalition. But it was not representative of what I witnessed during 32 years of attending conferences. At most forums and tradeshows, the number of Black, Hispanic and Asian participants was woefully lacking, especially when one considers that the percentage of employees from those groups within the retail industry is significant. Over the years, more women did show up at industry events, but their numbers at industry conferences, too, failed to measure up to their roughly 50% employment rate in retailing.

I have no acceptable explanation why minorities are not more universally represented among the most visible ranks of executives of retail companies and their suppliers. I just know that three decades of observing conference attendees left me as color conscious in 2009 as I was in 1977 when I began covering the retail industry.

The Concourse Was Grand

Name a great city and you probably can think of a great avenue. In London it might be Oxford Street, in Rome the Via Veneto. Chicago has North Michigan Avenue, Paris the Champs-Élysées. New York City is blessed with thoroughfares of distinction in its boroughs—Queens Boulevard in Queens, Ocean Parkway and Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue and Riverside Drive in Manhattan. In the Bronx, the Grand Concourse dominated the architecture of the city’s northernmost borough.

As noted in a NY Times article on Monday, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/arts/design/02concourse.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=grand%20concourse&st=cse, there are “grand visions for a faded Bronx boulevard.”

Though the Concourse has become more hospitable over the last decade, anyone who witnessed its grandeur from the 1920’s through the early 1960s would lament the loss of its stately and noble past.

Perhaps a family story would put the once-proud stature of the Grand Concourse in perspective:

In 1921 when she was three years old, my mother came to New York from Poland, her family being one of the last to enter before the United States imposed immigration quotas. They settled in the Bronx. Her father was a jeweler, and though his wife always regretted leaving the parquet floors of their home in Ludg, he earned enough by the time my mother was in high school to move the family to an apartment on the Grand Concourse.

Several months later my mother ran into a boyfriend who had suddenly and mysteriously stopped dating her. She asked him, why?

“Sylvia,” he is said to have told her, “by moving to the Grand Concourse you moved above my station in life.”

Standing By, Helpless

I never learned to swim. I’ve learned to live with that deficiency, that failure to be able to fully enjoy water sports with family and friends. But I’ve always wondered what would happen if I saw someone drowning in deep water, too far out to reach with a pole or some other life-saving device. I couldn’t jump in to save them. I’d be tormented by the prospect of just having to stand there, helpless.

Three more editorial staffers at my former publication lost their jobs today. It hurts beyond description not being able to help. There’s nothing I can, or could, do. But that doesn’t soften the blow, dry the tears, shake me out of the miasma of depression.

Job reductions throughout journalism no longer surprise. Large and small publishing enterprises keep hacking away at the one resource that made them great—their people.

One long-term and one hopefully short-term problem stripped the publishing industry. An unforgiving economy doesn’t want to invest in capital spending. It refuses to invest in more employment, so consumer spending remains sluggish, keeping advertisers at bay, forcing publications to cut back. Soon, hopefully soon, the economy will right itself. We may not return to previous spending levels, but times will be more robust than now.

It is the second problem that is more vexing.

The Internet has been seen as an information blessing. True. Information is more readily available than ever before. It has opened up communication and information to all quadrants of the world.

But the Internet is a curse for all but a relative few information-providers. Thousands of hard-working (and probably thousands who didn’t work so hard) journalists, advertising salespeople, production associates, and support personnel have lost their jobs because of the free-flow of information. “Making money on the Web” is an oxymoron for most publishers. It drains resources. Those remaining, employed journalists must dilute their work, contributing to print, online, audio and even video reports. More often than not, they are working for reduced wages.

I don’t know where it will end. For three of my former associates, it ended today.

Valley of Remembrance

The “Living In” feature of Sunday’s NY Times Real Estate section profiled Oxford, Conn., a small town noted to be 87 miles northeast of Manhattan (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/realestate/01living.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=oxford,%20conn.&st=cse) . I would venture to say most of you have never been to Oxford, but for Gilda and me it was the backyard of our first two years of marriage which began in 1973.

We lived in the neighboring town of Seymour, one of the two communities I covered for a year for The New Haven Register. Derby, the other part of my beat, along with Ansonia and Shelton, the latter which I covered my second year at The Register, comprised the Lower Naugatuck Valley. In many ways, these communities were prototypical mill towns that had seen better days decades earlier. The first time I drove through Derby I thought I was riding through Dresden after the War.

Connecticut has a reputation as being affluent, erudite, fall-foliage cheery, men and women clad in turtlenecks topped by tweed or corduroy sports jackets, with or without suede patches at the elbow. In other words, a perfect Lands’ End- or Talbots-type state. In truth, many communities live up to that Nutmeg State picture. And then there’s the Valley.

When we lived there, the Valley had yet to undergo gentrification. It was the expectation, indeed the fervent desire, of most families that their teenage boys directly join their fathers after high school on the assembly line at the brass, copper and rubber mills strung along the winding Naugatuck and nearby Housatonic Rivers. This desired fate persisted even after many of the mills closed down or reduced their workloads and became hulking shells of what they once were.

There was an ingrained distrust of outsiders in the Valley. But the Valley’s location made it a desirable nesting ground. The towns were perfectly situated bedroom communities for professionals commuting to New Haven, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Danbury and even New York. Subdivisions sectioned off farm land. But worse than these single family tracts, as far as long-time local residents were concerned, were the multi-unit family developments springing up. Apartment houses or townhouse projects were anathema. They bred “transients,” people who would tax municipal services without replenishing tax coffers. Condominium was a dreaded word.

My first day on the job as a paid reporter reflected this parochial attitude. Don, my bureau chief, grew up in the Valley. He took a jaundiced view of a condominium development going up in Derby. It was way behind schedule, he believed, which to him meant the builder was hiding something, perhaps a lack of funds that would leave Derby with a blighted, half-finished project on a main artery. He told me to check it out. I found the builder at a different project, a subdivision going up in Oxford. To my novitiate questioning, his responses seemed plausible and genuine.

When I returned to the newsroom in New Haven and told Don I didn’t think there was a story there, he exploded. Don was a stocky, cigar-chomping, crew-cut wearing, no nonsense Scandinavian. He picked up my Royal (non-electric) typewriter and threw it to the ground. For a second I thought he’d transport me out the third floor window. Everyone in the newsroom came to a standstill.

After a few heart-stopping moments, we mutually agreed I would do more research. By the end of the week I put together a weak story implying local dissatisfaction with the pace of construction. The project eventually did get completed. Never again did Don ever raise his voice to me. He taught me how to be a reporter in real life, not a diploma holding “journalist.” I came to learn to respect and love Don as a boss and mentor. And friend. For many years I considered him the best boss I ever had.

Knocking for Trees, Not Candy

I don’t remember celebrating Halloween when I was growing up. Never went Trick-or-Treating.

Last night kids everywhere asked for candy, though just one girl came by our home (maybe it was the misty weather that kept them away). I can’t recall the last time a Trick-or-Treater asked for money for UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund that was heavily promoted as a Halloween charity when I was young.

Even though I never went Trick-or-Treating, I did have the “pleasure” of knocking on strange doors asking for donations.

Growing up in Brooklyn, I went to a private Hebrew school. Each year we’d be required to raise money for the Jewish National Fund. The JNF planted trees in Israel. To incentivize us to bring in donations, prizes were distributed to the best producers at the end of the money drive. Our teachers would keep score of how much we’d raise. For each dollar brought in, we’d receive a leaf that was pasted on the outline of a tree. The more leaves you amassed, the better prize you received when the charity drive concluded (the best prize, to me, was a balsa wood airplane with a metal clip front you could fly).

One measure of how far we’ve regressed as a society is the thought that as an under-10 year-old I was permitted, nay, encouraged, to wander by myself around blocks of apartment houses and single-family attached homes, knock on strange doors and ask for money for a cause that two-thirds of my Jewish, Italian and Irish neighbors had no interest in supporting. Even the one-third who might be considered sympathetic more often than not stiffed me.

It was tough trying to earn your wings back then. But, at least, there was little concern expressed about the dangers that no doubt lurked behind strange, closed doors.