John Delach

The Game

Well, the self-proclaimed, “Super-Duper, Only in New York City-Super Bowl Experience” is finally over and the weather, security, access, pricing and crowd hype is all said and done. The teams took the field at Met Life Stadium on Sunday evening and the game opened with the Seahawks kicking off to the Broncos for a touchback. On his first offensive play from scrimmage, Peyton Manning began his usual pre-snap ritual by sneaking up to his center, Manny Ramirez, to adjust the formation. Unfortunately, Manny got it wrong and, instead of waiting for Peyton’s Omaha laced fakes and commands, Ramirez decided to snap the football into the space just vacated by his stunned quarterback. Manning watched the ball sail into the end zone with a look on his face that he would wear the rest of the game. The Seahawks scored a safety: Seattle 2 – Broncos 0.

Turn out the lights the party’s over

 they say that all good things must end. 

Fair enough, too early to admit this one was over, but it was over. This was Seattle’s day and the Broncos remained unglued. Even if you were the biggest Bronco aficionado and believed your team could turn it around, you too would have forsaken hope when Percy Harvin ran back the second-half kickoff for a Seahawk’s TD tweaking their lead to 29-0!

The entire verse, please, Mr. Willie Nelson:

Turn out the lights the party’s over

they say that all good things must end.

Let’s call it a night the party’s over

and tomorrow starts the same old thing again. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Final score: 43-8. Ecstasy in Seattle, heartbreak in Denver. Peyton Manning failed to deliver and, despite his records and awards including his 5^th NFL MVP, he will not be proclaimed, “The Best Ever” or, perhaps, even the best of his era. And so it goes.

The Buildup and Hype 

The weather hype began on Wednesday, January 22, when, Lonnie Quinn, a weatherman from New York based, WCBS, set out a prediction to Mike Francesa on his “Miked Uped” afternoon sports talk show on WFAN that a certain computer model predicted a significant snow event would impact the New York metropolitan area sometime within 48 hours of the scheduled kickoff of Super Bowl XLVIII.

That was eleven days prior to the game but by Friday, January 24th, the tom-toms had quieted down. The ten-day forecast included a game-day precipitation probability of 60% with a 49% chance of snow possible but with rather benign temperatures ranging from 35 to 25 degrees. From there on, the forecast improved daily so that by Tuesday, Jan. 28th, the prediction was for partly cloudy skies with a high of 42º and a low of 26. By Friday, it had improved to a high of 50º and for game-time, a balmy 44! Actual temperature at game-time was 47! (But nobody seemed to focus on Monday’s forecast.)

I have a theory why the weather held. Back in the day, when the New York Football Giants financial survival depended on the size of the crowd that bought tickets at the gate on the day of the game, the Giants had extraordinary luck with the weather. So much so that sports writers began to refer to this phenomenon as “Mara weather.” Now that Tim Sr., Jack and Wellington Mara all reside with the Almighty, it would appear that God may have delegated the responsibility for arranging the weather in New Jersey on Ground Hog Day, 2014 to the Mara family.

Ticket prices however, did not sustain the enthusiastic inflated asking prices first offered on the secondary market. I tracked the prices for my section, No. 108, at Met Life Stadium. The opening asking price on Ticketmaster was $4,620 per ticket. By early Super Bowl week, this had dropped to $2,558 (although other optimists were still holding out for $4,058.) On Saturday the high-low range for 108 narrowed to $2,842 to $3641 and by Saturday night, two tickets remained at that discounted asking price, $2,558.

Nine other Giants fans joined me on Thursday, Jan. 30 to explore Super Bowl Boulevard, a.k.a. Broadway. We decide to meet at the north end in Father Duffy Square (46^th Street and Broadway) and travel south to Herald Square (34^th Street) and our ultimate destination, Foley’s NY Bar & Grill for a festive lunch.

My friend, Mike Scott and I met in Penn Station and rode the subway north under this section of Broadway to meet the troops. We noticed an absence of uniformed NYPD on the stations or in the train and when I mentioned this to Mike, he noted, “True, but how many cops are right in front of us that we don’t recognize?”

Above ground, uniforms were everywhere but the NYPD is so used to big events that they appeared relaxed. We did pick up passes but they were only needed to stand on line to wait to see this or that. At best, SB Blvd. deserved a C-. Picture an upscale county fair without the midway, the girls*, the gambling, corn dogs, fried dough and turkey wings. Now transfer it to an urban setting: Broadway. Place a series of booths, playing fields and other obstacles in the center of the street then fill it with people until it starts to become a mob scene. Top it off by saturating the entire length with every type of signs, banners and bunting proclaiming its mega-corporate sponsors particularly Pepsi, Bud Light, GMC and Verizon plus a large dose of NFL and Super Bowl logos and, “wa-la,” as if by magic, you have created “Super Bowl XLVIII Boulevard Engineered by GMC.”…its official name.

(* This is not to say that the City wasn’t flooded with hookers. It just means working SB Blvd. wasn’t a viable venue for their consideration.)

Kick a field goal; the wait is only a half-hour. See the Vince Lombardi Trophy up close; 45 minutes—your photo in front of the 3-D block letters, XLVIII; a mere ten minutes—an autograph from a “B”-list NFL player; an hour. Play areas, green screen photo-opts and other events geared to kids; all for the taking if you are willing to wait.

The sun was our very best friend as the air felt 10 degrees warmer than in the shade. The 60 foot-high, 180 foot-long toboggan was hooky but massive and folks did travel quickly. Strangely though for each of us well-seasoned New Yorkers, every one of us commented that the toboggan was turned 180 degrees from what we had imagined. Every rendition of it in the newspapers gave the impression that it traveled downhill from north to south. We thought it went downtown when actually it goes uptown. Go figure.

A Super Bowl usually overwhelms the host city. Not New York though. That’s a funny thing about Manhattan; it swallows any event, big or small. Go one blocks east to Sixth Avenue or west to Seventh Avenue and you wouldn’t know Super Bowl Blvd. existed.

Wrap-up

Two final notes: all during the lead up to the game, the fans planning to attend were inundated with public service messages extolling them to use mass transit. So how did that work out?

Not well, New Jersey Transit failed to cope with the 25,000 fans who used the railroad to travel to Met Life Stadium. The transfer facility in the Secaucus swamp (A.K.A. Frank R. Lautenberg Rail Station) was a nightmare where fans were trapped for an hour in a connecting corridor in conditions that the NY Times described as, “The air was stale, the heat had become blistering  and the ordeal was going on and on.” The ride home was no bargain either. “As of 11:20 p.m., nearly 90-minutes after the game had ended, about 13,000 people (half the number) had been transported by train from the complex…” and have a nice day.

Lastly, remember Lonnie Quinn’s model? The snow began to fall early Monday morning, heavy-wet snow that stuck like glue. About eight inches fell by the time it stopped around 7 p.m. making post-Super Bowl travel another horrible experience.

Memo to Roger Goodell: Should you ever again consider scheduling the Super Bowl in a cold-weather environment: Forggedabodit!

(Author’s note: I will be off the next two weeks. John D.)

On September 15, 1958, a Central of New Jersey commuter train bound for the railroad’s terminal in Jersey City inexplicably ran three stop lights, broke through an automatic derailer and plunged over an open lift bridge into Newark Bay killing 48 passengers and crew. The two diesel engines pulling the train and the first two cars sank into the bay. The third coach, Car No. 932, first came to rest at an 80 degree angle balanced precariously between the lip of the span and an underwater abutment. The coach clung to this perch for two hours before slipping into the bay becoming the iconic image of the wreck, the photograph of record that documented the crash on the front pages of the next day’s Metropolitan newspapers. All of the morning newspapers from the NY Times and the Herald Tribune down to local New Jersey papers like the Newark Star Ledger, Bergen Record and Asbury Park Press carried the image of this car, half-submerged, hanging off of the bridge support. But the two morning City tabloids, the Daily News and the Daily Mirror splashed it across their front pages making the number, 932 stand out like a message from the gods.

Daily state lotteries didn’t exist in 1958 and most ordinary Joes and Janes played “the numbers.” A dollar was considered a big bet but you could bet as little as a quarter with a local runner, a part-time collector who worked for a bookie. The payoff for the three-number combination was 600 to 1.

Harry Barnhardt worked as a hostler for the Erie Railroad in their Hoboken Yard. A hostler was a railroad man who operated engines within a terminal. Harry shuttled  diesels from shops, round houses and lay-up tracks, hooked ‘em up to coaches and pushed them into the station so they could haul the evening rush hour trains.

Harry was my friend, Mike Scott’s grandfather. Aside from his Erie job, Harry was also a runner for a bookmaker in Jersey City. He collected daily bets from fellow Erie workers and each morning made his rounds tothe bars along Hudson Boulevard and Summit Avenue in north Jersey City. Harry’s railroad workday began at 3 pm making his mornings clear to troll these local bar and grills, pick up the day’s bets and pay off yesterday’s winners. Mike was eight in 1958 and recalled, “On days off from school and during the summer, my brothers, Jimmy, Kevin and my sister, Kathy and I took turns visiting Harry and our grandmother, Rose. Harry would take us out with him on his morning rounds. We’d get a free Coke and Harry would sip a beer while conducting business. Then, it was on to the next gin mill.”

On Wednesday afternoon, two days after the wreck, Harry dropped Grandma Rose off at the Scott’s house for her traditional night with their family. But this time it was different! Instead of distributing her normal allowance of twenty-five cents to Mike and his older brother, Jimmy, grandma handed them each a five dollar bill. “That was simply unheard of!” Mike explained to me. “Not only that, she took all of us out to the Chinese joint, a rare thing indeed.

“Then, even crazier, the next weekend, on Harry’s day off, he took everybody to Mario’s, a bar in Clifton that served up those 1950s’ vintage pizzas with enormous air pockets. Were they any good? Who knew, they were the only and best pizza we ever had. But, what made this special: Harry blew for dinner, something he never did.”

Mike explained, “Years later, when I went into the insurance business, Harry clued me into what happened that day. He explained, ‘People play the same number all the time, birthdays, anniversaries, and so on. But they are also superstitious and when a crash happens and they find the number, it’s played like wild fire. That morning, 932 was played everywhere I went. It was crazy. When I took my sheets in, I said to the guys, ‘This is nuts!’

‘Did you play it Harry?’ they asked me? ‘Hell, yes, I replied. But how can the bookies cover if it hits?”

The answer, according to Mike was an insurance term: reinsurance. When insurance companies find they have accumulated too much of a particular exposure, they lay it off to other insurance companies. “The same thing with a bookmaker,” Mike explained. “When they find a number or a horse being heavily played they find other bookmakers who don’t have this action. The 1958 CNJ wreck was an East Coast event so the bookies went west. Their search began in Pittsburgh, then it continues on to Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, etc, etc. until they managed to layoff enough to survive. In return, they took the western books hot numbers then or later.

“Harry not only hit the number, he was a hero in all those gin mills. Grandma took his $600 payout, but Harry kept all of the tips from his bettors and the action she didn’t know about.

“When Harry told me this story, he stopped, thought about it and said, ‘I went down to Jersey City early the next morning scared that there wouldn’t be a payout. Already, the word was bookies had reneged. As it turned out, those were mostly locals, kids or jerks, without a clue trying to get a piece of the action. The people I worked for were solid and paid off in full.’

‘You know, Mike,’ he told me, ‘Something hit me when I walked out to make my rounds that day.”

“Was it the enormity of it all, the crash?” I asked.

‘No Mike, it wasn’t that the payout came because of a wrecked train. No, I thought to myself, Oh my God, this is the most amount of money I will ever have on me in my entire life.”

Last December, while standing in a Stop and Shop check-out line, I spied the front cover of the latest issue of Sports Illustrated that proclaimed Peyton Manning to be the “Sportsman of the Year.” His face filled the front cover of the magazine with the top of his head cut off giving the illusion that he was bald. This image of Manning shocked me. I realized a fact I had never considered: Peyton Manning was no longer forever young.

Moreover, as I gazed at the face of this 37-year-old warrior, I thought, “Good grief, he looks just like Y. A. Tittle, the Bald Eagle, back in 1962 when I first became a Giants’ season ticket holder. “Good God Almighty, I said out loud, I definitely do not need this shocking reminder of my own mortality!”

Y.A. was a great quarterback beloved when he played for the Giants, but his record was incomplete; he never won the big game.

Manning, too is incomplete. His career and Tom Brady’s are locked in time together as being the two most dominant quarterbacks in the NFL during their era. But going into Sunday’s contest, Manning had only been to two Super Bowls winning one while Brady had been to five, winning three.

Last Sunday, in this the greatest season of his storied career, Peyton Manning showed that he may be the “All American Eagle.” One game to go, Super Bowl XLVIII and he will be deemed, argumentally, the greatest quarterback to ever to play this game. But, winning his second Super Bowl is still paramount to anyone, including me, before bestowing such an honor upon him.

If the Broncos had lost the AFC Championship Game on Sunday, we would be reading that as great a quarterback as Peyton has been for all of the years, despite all of the amazing records he has set and all of the honors bestowed upon him; he could not measure up to the combination of Tom Brady and Bill Belichick in the post-season. Simply put, “He could not win the big game.”

If, Belichick, the coach, and, Brady, the quarterback, had been victorious in Denver on Sunday and were now leading the Patriots to New Jersey for an unprecedented sixth Super Bowl appearance, the football world would have been prepared to proclaim, Tom Brady: “King,” the best of his era. Likewise, the scribes, pundits and all the radio and television personalities would have been floating the idea that Coach Belichick was as good as or better than Vince Lombardi.

As for Peyton Manning, he would have been cast into a personal state of limbo as the other guy: great, but not when it mattered.

And yet, when it mattered as it did on Sunday, Manning threw for 400 yards and led his team to scores on all of their drives except the first which ended in a punt and the last which ended with the Broncos running out the clock. A brilliant performance.

The local Long Island newspaper, Newsday, boldly proclaimed their  sports headline on Sunday: “Manning vs. Brady: One for the Ages.”

Overstated, perhaps, but this was a contest between the two best and most dominate quarterbacks of this era. Personally, my head was with the Pats, but my heart was with the Broncos. Both of their head coaches, Belichick and John Fox were defensive coordinators in the Giants’ organization, we have family who are huge Patriot fans and that Denver chap’s brother, Eli, is our starting quarterback. But, Brady already has won enough pelts to guarantee his legacy; Manning needed this one badly.

If you cut me, I bleed Giants’ blue, which ordinarily makes me a NFC guy. But not this Super Bowl. Sorry, Colin Kaepernick and Russell Wilson, the young stud quarterbacks in the NFC. No offense to these two exciting players who could very well own the next era of the NFL quarterbacks. My reasoning has nothing to do with them.

Their teams played a hell of a contest on Sunday. Kaepernick led his 49ers into Seattle’s Thunderdome without intimidation and fought the good fight to the end. Wilson took a licking, kept on ticking and prevailed thanks to an interception following a tip bya big mouth named Sherman.

Although their clash on Sunday’s NFC Championship Game was the second game played in prime time, I think we can all agree that it was the under-card to the main event despite the League’s decision to schedule it as the late semi-prime time game. Real prime time belonged to the afternoon AFC Championship match up.

And now, can Peyton Manning fulfill his destiny, or will the upstart kid, their obnoxious coach, a talented team and a tough defense say no to that? Or will Mother Nature rule the day declaring that all bets are off?

Stay tuned.

(Two weeks remain to see how this plays out. Next week I will report to you on my experience touring Super Bowl Boulevard (a.k.a. Broadway) and I promise to be there regardless of the weather. My last Super Bowl posting will review the damages after the tents have come down and the circus has left town.)

Two puppies arrived at our house on a Wednesday that also happened to be Mary Ann’s and my forty-third wedding anniversary, Veteran’s Day, November 11, 2010. Mary Ann had engineered the purchase through a breeders’ network based in Florida. The two Golden Retriever pups had been bred in Missouri and had been delivered by truck with the unlikely name, PetEx Express. The driver and his helper found us through a series of events, but here they were being handed over to Mary Ann and our daughter-in-law, Jodie.

Both gals lifted the pups into the air to determine their sex. We were taking delivery of the male; the female was Jodie’s birthday gift. Right sex determined, the grand kids moved in as part of this exciting morning. Both families had already named them, Max and Ruby after the story-book and cartoon rabbit brother and sister. Ruby went off to Fairfield, CT with three kids, ages 11, 9 and 5 and a sister Golden, Barely, seven-years old. Max stayed in Port Washington with two sexagenarians.

Separating the puppies reminded me of an old Budweiser commercial where two Dalmatian pups arrive and the pick goes to the fire house. That lucky pup stuck out its tongue at it’s sibling as they departed not knowing that its mate was heading for the Bud’s Clydesdales’ wagon. At the end of the commercial, they pass on a road. The shunned pup is sitting on the wagon seat with the teamster driving the Clydesdales. The chosen pup sits in the open cab of the fire engine. The shunned pup sticks out its tongue at its sibling; touché! 

Max is our sixth Golden Retriever. The first was Harry. Then came Fred, Bubba, Jumbo and Maggie. Harry was our first and a grand dog. Knowing what I now know about Max, his disposition, attitude, temperament, etc. Harry would have been a great name for this Missouri dog. Failing that, I would have pushed for Truman because he is a “Show me dog.”

Max was our first pup in a long time. We acquired Maggie in 1999 when she was ten-months old and already a certified Looney Tune. Anyone who knows us and knew Maggie will certify that she was f—ing nuts.

Folks we know looked at Mary Ann and me in a way that clearly showed their thoughts: “The two of you are either dumb or crazy.” I too had real doubts about what we had done. A puppy with all that brings. The biting, destruction, housebreaking, sleepless nights and other unpleasant happenings and events. WHAT HAVE WE DONE?

Admittedly, we had some bad moments, but this new pup was special. He gave us a pass on one of the fundamental problems, crying through the night. Not Max. He took to his crate (cage) for naps during the day and to sleep without fuss and remained quiet until we woke him up. And those are magical words: “Until we woke him.” He’s remained contented until he heard action. Then he’d whine, but when we opened the door, he usually reacted by first looking at us, stretched, got up, stretched again and so began his day.

Also importantly, almost from the beginning, the floor of the crate would be dry even after eight hours. Max was clean even for Goldens who by nature house break themselves quickly. His only early accidents usually happened when he was excited and these stopped after a few months. Max also proved to be very trainable. He’d cooperate for love but he’ll do almost anything for food.

The biting lasted more than a year, never vicious, he just had the need to use those teeth. Unfortunately, this meant that play sessions deteriorated into bloody sessions especially for Mary Ann whose thin-skinned arms and hands soon made her look like a serial knife fighter. Mary Ann’s ultimate defense was to cut the toes off of athletic socks and fashion them into shields to minimize the damage to her skin.

Max grew rapidly almost before our eyes and quickly became known in the neighborhood as the dog who carried sticks around in his mouth the size of small trees. A fine-looking dog, one gal remarked to me one day: “Wow, is that dog good-looking. Why he’s the Robert Redford of Golden Retrievers.”

Now a young adult of three he would be a pleasure if not for his need to steal. And steal he does, clothes, shoes, towels, throw rugs, mats, pillows and even blankets and bed spreads. The only good news about his stealing regimen is he considers it to be retrieving and he brings the items to us with his plume tail high in the air proud of his prowess.

On the whole, this adventure has gone well, but, if sometime in the future, hopefully way down the road, we even consider a puppy again; please shoot us.

Any rationale sports fan who is capable of being objective must realize that scheduling a Super Bowl game outdoors in the New Jersey Meadowlands at night in February brings with it the high probability that the game will be played in awful conditions. And with tickets having a face value of $1,000 each or more and re-sale prices in amounts two and three times face,  many of those who attend the game will think of themselves not as hearty pioneers, winter soldiers or trend setters; no, I expect the terms of dupe, dope, sucker or fool will be closer to the truth.

But undeterred, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the Super Bowl XLVIII Host Committee kicked off their 2014 campaign as far back as 2011 with a full-page ad in local newspapers featuring their logo showing the George Washington Bridge with a large NY and a NJ separated by a snowflake. The ad copy read as follows:

A SUPER BOWL SO HISTORIC

IT TAKES TWO STATES TO HOST IT.

In February 2014, New York and New Jersey will host the very first outdoor cold-weather

Super Bowl at MetLife Stadium. It’s football like it was meant to be played-

In the open, exposed to whatever winter throws our way.

Chutzpah unlimited. Reminds me of Razzle Dazzle from Chicago:

Give ‘em the old hocus pocus

Bead and feather ‘em

How can they see with sequins in their eyes?

What if your hinges all are rusting?

What if, in fact, you’re just disgusting?

RAZZLE, DAZZLE ‘EM

AND THEY’LL NEVER CATCH WISE!

The elephant in the room that the NFL is doing its best to ignore is the Nor’easter, that peculiar atmospheric condition that happens each winter. I’m no meteorologist but I can read a weather map.

It begins when the Jet Stream aligns itself so that it leaves the Pacific Ocean to the north around the U.S. – Canadian border. It plows east into Idaho, but makes a right, diving down into Wyoming though Colorado heading south barreling into New Mexico before entering West Texas where it takes a left turning in an easterly direction. This spells trouble for the Northeast as the warm side of the Jet Stream stirs up all that moisture from the Gulf of Mexico.

The Stream goes into overdrive, a non-stop express, pushing all of the accumulated moisture East-Northeast following the coast along the Carolinas heading our way. Unless there is enough blow from the Mid-west to take it out to sea that Nor’easter will dump a lot of what was once warm, salt water on East Rutherford, New Jersey. And it need not be snow to ruin the football game.

The 2014 NFL regular season ended on Sunday, December 29^th providing a preview of what may be expected on Groundhog Day, February 2, 2014, coincidentally, Super Bowl XLVIII Sunday. If you, by some remote chance, happened to watch any part of the contest between the Washington Redskins and the New York Giants played at Met Life Stadium that day you saw a game played in a Nor’easter.

I had my season ticket for this game and decided to attend this affair with my Port Washington buddies, weather permitting. In fact, I even agreed to drive. And the early forecast was great; sunny with temperatures in the mid-40s. As the week went on, it only became better and by Thursday morning the predicted high for Sunday had soared to 50 degrees. But on Thursday night I heard the first ominous prediction that a Nor’easter was forming off of Texas that would strike the Metropolitan area on Sunday morning. By Friday, the prediction was solid and I texted my buddies declaring a Force Majeure that would prevent me from attending after all. (Having a season ticket in excess of 50 years gives me the right to declare a Force Majeure when I deem it appropriate.)

Good call, the rains arrived promptly at 10 am and didn’t end until 6 pm. The Giants won the game 20 to 6 in what was a war of attrition. Granted these are not Super Bowl caliber teams, but a storm like this would raise havoc with the quality of play for any team, its players and would provide the ticket holders with an experience of utter misery similar to what soldiers experienced at Stalingrad, the Bulge or North Korea. The only exceptions were the fortunate few with luxury box tickets, club seat lounges or the resourceful who say, “The hell with it,” and watch the event on HDTV’s from the bars inside Met Life Stadium.

I’m not even talking snow. THE NFL says they can move the game to Saturday night or Monday night in the face of a blizzard. I say good luck with that!

But that’s just me, still beating that old dead horse that the NFL just cares about television and the fans be damned. Yeah, I’m sure it will all be fine. No polar vortex or “snowmaggedon.”

Then again, for those of you who are curious or don’t recall 1969, may I suggest that you Google: “Lindsay snowstorm.”

My late, great friend, Richard Byrd Sullivan, never had a problem telling it like he saw it. We regularly rode home together on the Long Island Railroad’s Port Washington branch. Occasionally, we’d enjoy libations procured from those Pennsylvania Station bartenders who tended their portable carts on the boarding platforms. Sully would command: “Dewar’s, rocks, in a small cup.” My rejoinder: “Make that two.”

Sully didn’t mince words, never accepted grey as an answer and never suffered fools, charlatans, or b.s. artists. He wasn’t always right, but he was always certain. One night leafing through his evening NY Post, he saw this photo of Wellington Mara, then the owner and boss of the New York Football Giants. He studied Mara’s piercing eyes, his square chin and mischievous grin that seemed to say: “Go ahead, try me.”

Sully hit the page with the back of his hand and commanded of me; “Delach, that man was a gyrene!”

“Richard B.” I questioned, “What in hell is a gyrene?”

“J.D., you dumb sh–, a Marine, a Marine! That’s what we swabbies called them.”

“Well, you dumb swabbie, Mara was f—ing Navy just like you.”

“Delach, I don’t believe you. Look at that face; that’s the face of a gyrene.”

I knew to argue further was fruitless and, anyway, to go by appearances, Sully was right, Mara looked like a Marine.

I thought about that as I read the newspaper on November 22, 2013. Among the cascade of articles about John F. Kennedy’s death that day 50 years ago, one in the NY Times profiled the Marines assigned to Arlington the day of the President was murdered. These Marines were ordered to duty once word of his death became known, they met our slain leader’s body at the White House on Friday night, took him into the East Room, stood guard, then escorted him to the Capital. They carried the casket up to the Rotunda, again stood guard during the viewing, returned the President down those steep, almost seemingly endless Capital steps, set his casket upon the horse-drawn caisson, escorted him to Arlington and delivered him to his grave.

They were young eager Americans and the Times’ story profiled four of their experiences that day, their military service, what they did on leaving the service and who they are today. The profile included recent photos of each of them, all now in their 70s.

John Cunningham, “I was an accidental participant at a turning point in history.” Mr. Cunningham served in Nam became disillusioned with the war and voted for George McGovern in 1972.

Lamont Pittman, “It stopped them from sending me to Viet Nam. Racial prejudice saved my life.” Mr. Pittman, the only black Marine in the honor guard, believes that the Marines were so impressed by his professionalism in his service at Arlington that they did not replace him with another black Marine during his tour of duty.

Bill Lee, “You leave no footprints. No one is watching you, but you are part of history.” Lieutenant Lee led the silent drill platoon during the President’s funeral. To this day, his troops still hold him in awe. Mr. Pittman reflected about serving under Mr. Lee, “He was a father figure for us, a stern disciplinarian who talked a lot about what being a man was about. I was comforted by him.”

Tom Cheeks, “We were kids totally focused on doing our duty as well we could.” Then 20, today, a retired insurance executive, he reflected about how quiet it was as they escorted the caisson along Pennsylvania Avenue. “And then a woman yelled out Kennedy’s name. A shiver went through me and I thought, ‘That’s the President of the United States inside there.”

Powerful recollections but it was the photos the Times carried of these old men that drew me in most of all. Sullivan’s long-ago comments about Mara rushed back. Each man had the same features, squared shoulders back, chins out, hands in front either clasped together or in their front pockets, thumbs out, short hair, square jaws, steely eyes; no doubt, gyrenes:

Semper Fi!

Authors note: Set out at the end of this post is a remarkably clear photograph taken during a game between the New York Football Giants and the Detroit Lions in 1962. It was shot from the closed end of Yankee Stadium looking out toward the outfield bleachers. The colors are so vivid that the photographer must have used Kodachrome film. My son recently discovered this photo on an obscure internet site. With my daughter’s help, we uploaded it to this post making this endeavour a family undertaking.

In 1962, at the age of eighteen, I purchased a season ticket paying for it in cash. The cost was $35.50, $5.00 dollars a game times seven home games plus a fifty cents service charge. I purchased this ticket in person at the Giants’ office then located at 10 Columbus Circle from a woman behind a barred window that resembled a teller’s cage in a bank.

At eighteen, I was over-the-top in my anticipation to begin seeing my new-found heroes in person, but the schedule delayed my quest. The New York Yankees, the prime team in Yankee Stadium, as expected, made it to the World Series where they beat the San Francisco Giants, The Football Giants were relegated to road warriors for the first four games of that season, opening with a loss to  the Cleveland Browns. They made up this loss beating the Eagles, Steelers and Cardinals prior to playing their first home game in Yankee Stadium. On that delightful autumn afternoon, October 14, 1962, my brand new team of record let me down by losing my very first home opener to the Pittsburgh Steelers, 20-17.

The Lions were next and came into this game with a record of 4 and 1 having beaten the Steelers, 49ers, Colts and Rams but having lost to their rivals, the Greenbay Packers, 9-7. 

Back then, the Giants home games had a scheduled starting time of 2:05 pm that was in deference to the then existing New York blue laws that prohibited the sale of alcohol including beer before 1 pm on Sundays. This allowed Harry M Stevens, the stadium’s concessionaire, an hour and change lead time prior to kickoff to sell his frothy beverages to the sell-out crowd. The game that day was played on a drop-dead beautiful autumnal afternoon captured in this photograph by the delightful views of the bleacher crowd basking in the mild October weather. It is mostly male and white as it would be today, but it reflected the dress standards of the time. While a good number of these men are in shirtsleeves, they wear what we would call today, business shirts. And every shirt is the same color; white.

Others have on jackets, some wear ties and some, hats too. But, not baseball caps; they sport head coverings that we used to call fedoras.

Those were magnificent times to be a Giants fan and have the privilege  to have a ticket admitting you to Yankee Stadium to see the likes of Y.A.Tittle, Del Shofner, Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, Andy Robustelli and Roosevelt Grier. I was a City kid without a car or a driver’s license who rode the subways to the game. My journey began in Ridgewood, Queens to Union Square where I transferred to the IRT Jerome Avenue train on the Lexington Avenue Line, (today the Number 4 train.)

Attending the games was a gift. Those train rides were exciting. VIPs rode the rails. I saw Jim Farley, the former Postmaster General and power broker board the train at 86th Street several times wearing his tweeds and carrying his walking stick. What a thrill to be in the company of a swell like Mr. Farley!

Nothing was greater than the thrill to be on that train when it broke free from the subway tunnel just south of the stadium and brilliant light flooded the cars as the train emerged into the noon time glare as the train turned north onto River Avenue. We caught an all too brief glimpse of the field as the train sped past the stadium before easing into the 161st Street station. The crowd stampeded out onto the platform, descended onto River Avenue and into the atmosphere of stale beer, cigar smoke, hot dogs, peanuts and the anticipation of the game. 

The photograph resurrects memories of that day. Look at people sitting on the field. The band: wearing scarlet uniforms sits behind the end zone in left field, to the right, under the Coca-Cola sign, fans sit on folding chairs in front of the Yankees’ monuments in center field. This was where the Giants arranged for people in wheelchairs to watch the game. Most of the people in folding chairs were their companions and this was 1962, long before ADA!

Above that same Coca-Cola sign, others watch from the IRT elevated station. This prized perch was by invitation only exclusively offered on a “who you knew” basis from some unknown Transit supervisor. 

The photograph captures an ordinary pass play. Y.A. Tittle (14), the Giants quarterback is setting up to throw what could be a screen pass to his halfback, Joe Morrison (40) who is moving to Tittle’s left. Ahead of Morrison, tackle, Rosey Brown (79) zones in on Lions’ outside linebacker, Wayne Walker (55). Behind them, middle linebacker, Joe Schmidt (56) is tracking Morrison but tackle, Roger Brown (76) seems to be holding back. Defensive end, Sam Williams (88) is charging Tittle unimpeded up the middle having gotten by Giants guard, Darrell Dess (62) while Giants halfback, Phil King (24) and tackle, Jack Stroud (66) double-team an unidentified Lions player, probably Alex Karras (71). Giants tight end, Joe Walton (80) is peeling off to the right on his pass route under the watchful eye of corner back, Dick Lebeau (44) while Lions  outside linebacker, Carl Brettschneider (57) makes his rush from the Tittle’s blind side having beaten Giants guard, Greg Larson (53). 

A marvelous photograph, the colors so vivid that they shock the senses, and yet, only a photograph of an ordinary play taken on a sunny afternoon at the big ballpark in The Bronx. Brilliant!

 For those of you keeping score: the Giants won 17-14 giving the Lions their second defeat of the season. 

Despite gaining revenge on the Packers later on Thanksgiving by smothering them 26-14, that was the only loss Green Bay would endure in 1962 finishing 13-1. The Lions finished second in the West with an 11-3 record losing the last game of the season in Chicago, 3-0. 

The Giants didn’t lose another game that season winning the NFL Eastern Division with a record of 12-2, but we lost to the Packers in the NFL Championship Game, 16-10 in a frigid and wind-swept Yankee Stadium on December 30^th.    

World View is a new “space tourism company,” already part of group called Inspiration Mars that proposes launching two people into space in 2018 to enjoy a flyby of that Red Planet. But World View’s primary ambition is considerably closer to home. They propose to lift up to six people at a time plus a crew of two 18.5 miles above the earth in a capsule tethered to a large balloon. Here’s how the New York Times described the concept:

“This is a very gentle flight that will last for hours aloft,” said Jane Poynter, World View’s chief executive. She said the cabin would be about the size of that of a private jet, and would have a “superbly comfortable, luxurious interior where you can get up and stand upright and move around and go back to the bar and get a drink.”

The entire experience will last about six hours including a two-hour ascent beneath the balloon, two additional hours drifting along in the heavens and a two-hour descent after jettisoning the balloon as the capsule glides back to Mother Earth under an inflated parasail.

The article noted that 18.5 miles is technically not space as real space starts at the 62-mile altitude. So the participants will not be actual astronauts. World View doesn’t believe this will be a turn-off, but, at $75,000 a pop, it doesn’t seem that a certificate signed by the pilot saying:

This is to certify that Mr/Ms___________ ascended to ________miles, or________feet above the planet Earth on ___ of _________, 20__                                                                                    

will be of much value especially once a couple of hundred people make the journey and start displaying like certificates.

Also, five or six hours is a long time to peer out a tiny window at basically the same scenery watching as it shrinks in size while the surrounding sky becomes darker and darker. Sounds a bit boring, even after a drink or two.

Now, please, do not think that I am ridiculing Ms. Poynter or her gang at World View. Not at all; this is a terrific concept, it’s just that their market focus is just a bit off. They need creativity; less Cape Kennedy and more Las Vegas, less NASA and more Carnival Cruises, less Neil Armstrong and more Steve Wynn. Move the entire operation out to the Mexican desert and re-name it: The Sky High Vegas Party Club.

And what a club. “You may belong to the ‘Mile High Club’ but how about the ‘20 Mile High Club?” (Not to worry, a little exaggeration goes a long way!) Not just booze, but gambling and girls, Girls and GIRLS. Now doesn’t that make $75,000 a throw considerably more reasonable and if the gambling takes off (pun intended) the price can come down to an economical $49,999.

I picture theme rides. True this will be mainly marketed to guys in view of Vegas being a haven for bachelor parties and conventions but also cater to couples, ladies only and the entire L.G. B. TG.TS. market.

Why the MexicanDesert? To escape the long reach of Uncle Sam. It seems that even 18- miles up is not beyond the jurisdiction of the F.A.A. and you know what that means, the T.S.A. and all of their rules, prohibitions, pat downs and body searches. Yuck!

So, it’s adios Estados Unidos and viva Mexico. At first participants will be flown from Vegas to the base in the Mexican desert, but as more and more people see the base, there will be a great opportunity to build a new resort near the launch site. And it won’t take long to grow in popularity as theses crazy kids come to realize how “joyful” the resort can be:

Up, up and away in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…   

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is easily the busiest travel day of the year and all manner of public transportation must cope with the tremendous volume of passengers all trying to return home for this national holiday. The Long Island Railroad is no exception as travelers laden with gifts and luggage compete for room with the rush hour commuters heading home for their holiday. Even adding additional trains during the evening rush cannot compensate for the multitudes who fill the coaches to over-capacity, jamming the aisles making ticket collection; impossible. The evening of November 22, 1950 was such as passengers scrambled to make their trains and head home.

Two packed trains, No. 780, the 6:09 to Hempstead and No. 174, the 6:13 to Babylon both left Penn Station on time, sped under the East River and emerged at Sunnyside, Queens where the operators controlling Harold Interlocking Tower aligned the switches so that both train sets could enter Track 2, the eastbound express track on the main line for the 7 ½ mile run to Jamaica.

Nearing Richmond Hill, 1.23 miles from Jamaica, Motorman William Murphy, the driver of the Hempstead train first slowed down to comply with a signal then brought his train to a halt. Once the train in front of him moved, the signal changed to “proceed with caution”.  Murphy tried to release his brakes to no avail. He passed word back to the brakeman riding in the last car to exit the rear of the train and proceed down the track a sufficient distance to protect it from any following train while Murphy and the train’s conductor checked the air brake valves on each car. The brakeman’s duties included taking on the role of a flagman to protect the train with a lantern, flares and torpedoes (devices which would be set off on the tracks by an approaching train), Bertram Biggam, No. 780’s brakeman and the youngest of the crew didn’t have the chance to cover the needed distance of at least one half-mile behind the stalled tlrain to be effective.

For at that moment, Babylon bound Train No. 174 was closing fast. Motorman Benjamin Pokorny had already followed procedures and had stopped at a signal that indicated that No. 780 was in the block ahead of him. Once stopped, that signal automatically gave him permission to proceed to the next signal at a restricted 15-miles per hour. As the train passed the KewGardens station, Pokorny had an excellent view of a signal in the distance. That signal changed from Restricting to Approach, but that clearance was for the next block and was meant for the Hempstead train, not Pokorny’s train. Pokorny mistakenly assumed that 780 had cleared the block and accelerated the speed of his train to 35-miles per hour.

Brakeman Biggam told investigators that as he was about to alight from the rear car, he saw the headlight of another train approaching from a distance of about 1,000 feet, but did not take further action. “I saw the big headlight of another train. It seemed to be coming awfully fast along the straightaway. I said to myself, ‘My God, is that train on our track?’ Then I thought: ‘No that can’t be…’ and then I heard his emergency brakes go on.”

It was 6:29 pm.

Motorman Pokorny was probably the first to die as the lead car he was piloting, No. 1523, plowed into the last car, No. 1516, of the Hempstead train. Car No. 1523 telescoped into 1516 deflecting the body of that coach above its own roof separating the body from its underframe, effectively splitting 1516 into two pieces, top to bottom. As 1523 continued to slice through the stopped car, it became a killing machine cutting through the bottom of 1516 destroying its interior and slaughtering almost many of the passengers riding there.

The carnage was horrendous. Happy Howard, a Long Island Press reporter described the scene that followed:

Father Ned’s lips moved gently as he repeated the prayer of extreme unction. “Help me father,” the woman said, “Help me.” Her eyes filled with tears repeated the plea…but she remained calm. Only when the excruciating pain ripped through her body did her face distort into a grimace. “Help me,” she said again and her voice trailed off into a whisper. Her eyes closed, and she lay quiet in the sleep of the dead. 

Father Ned, assistant pastor of Holy Cross Roman Catholic Church, Maspeth, finished his prayer and moved on, crawling on his knees through the shattered Long Island Railroad coach. 

A few feet away he came to a man, his body grotesquely twisted and immobile under tons of raw steel. His moans were pierced with sharp cries of pain. He screamed. He cried like a small child…and screamed again. 

The priest had crawled through the jagged glass of a broken window to get to wreck victims. Father Ned was one of a dozen priests who responded to an emergency call by Fire Chief Peter Lofus of Flushing to give spiritual comfort to those for whom there was no other aid.

Seventy-eight souls died that night. Miraculously, brakeman Biggam did not. Having re-boarded the doomed last car of Train 780 he remembered, “That big blinding headlight came flying at us…and that’s all I remember. I woke up on the floor buried in people and seats and wreckage.”

An off-duty policeman, Patrick Fitzgibbons, who lived near the tracks on Cuthbert Place in KewGardens, made the first report on his home telephone as soon as he heard the horrific sound of crashing steel. In the short time that it took emergency workers to respond, they arrived to find a forest of ladders already erected by the neighborhood residents who had climbed the embankment and were doing all in their power to aid the victims. Fortunately, power to the third rails had been turned off so there were no instances of good Samaritans being electrocuted.

Harold Rosenberg, 34, who was riding in the last car of the Hempstead train recalled the moments after the crash: “People were lying all about, screaming in pain. Others beat frantically at doors and windows, which were jammed shut. Seconds later, neighbors from across the way arrived at the scene with ladders and jimmied open the doors and started to take out the injured.”

Response was rapid and comprehensive. When ambulances ran short, station wagons and taxi cabs were requisitioned to take the injured to area hospitals while thousands of people responded to calls for blood donations. EMS and railroad workers erected flood lights as welders cut twisted steel to remove mangled bodies. The two telescoped smoking cars remained locked together for almost five hours until the remaining cars of the two trains could be removed and two of the railroad’s wrecking cranes could be positioned at either end of the wreck. Finally the last car of the Hempstead train was lifted away revealing the remaining bodies wedged into the debris that was Car No. 1516.

The Interstate Commerce Commission officially determined the cause of the train wreck to be the dead motorman’s disregard of a Go Slow signal, but outrage descended on the state and especially the LIRR’s parent, the Pennsylvania Railroad. Enough was enough in the post-war history of mismanagement and accidents on the Pennsylvania’s stepchild. The railroad agreed to undertake a comprehensive improvement program that included installing Automatic Speed Control devices (ASC) on all mainline tracks designed to prevent this type of accident from occurring again.

I was six-years old when the LIRR’s Thanksgiving Eve wreck happened, but I remember the photographs of the carnage as if it just happened this Thanksgiving. I also carry with me my mother’s admonition about what not to do when riding the Long Island Railroad. Her order was: “Never ride in the front car or the back car.” To this day, I do not!

None other than The New York Times has decreed that the Boston Red Sox have inherited the baseball planet now and for the next eighty-seven years. On November 3, 2013, Sports Sunday proclaimed this irrefutable truth in a first page story under the headline: In Baseball’s Time Machine, 21^st Century Belongs to the Red Sox.

Their reporter, David Walderstein, waxed eloquently on this theme. He began with a discussion of all of those dark, dreary years from 1919 onward as he traced the futility of hope that once burdened the Beantown faithful until 2004 that magical year when… “Boston finally defeated the Yankees head-to-head, then won its first World Series in 86 years. That title seemed to lift the Red Sox from the burden and pressure of decades of futility…Then it started to flow. Another arrived in 2007, and now 2013.”

Mr. Walderstein further noted this new-found success “…is hard for many Yankee supporters to accept, and perhaps many regard as a usurpation of their birthright.” Why he even invoked the late Boss writing, “Certainly, George Steinbrenner would not have stood for it…”

Mr. Walderstein doesn’t make light of the Yankees’ past success; their 26 championships from 1923 to 2000, but like the Delta Airline commercial that notes the aerial achievements of Orville Wright, Amelia Earhart and Neil Armstrong, the narrator then concludes with the statement: …and with that, we sweep them into the dust bin of history ( or something like that.)

Oh dear, oh dear, all of that history and accomplishment; gone, kaput, adios. But Walderstein is not content to base his case just on the present. No, no, he focuses on the future, the Yankees’ aging team, A-Rod, Jeter, C.C. and notes “…there is some discontent that the Yankees have not been able to draft and develop a reliable flow of young players who can contribute…”

In contrast he reports, “John Henry, the Red Sox owner, seemed to have his organization’s ability to keep good young players coming…”

What a contrast, the Yankees suck while the Sox seem to walk on water.

Case closed! Ole Davey Walderstein has condemned the Yankees to a dismal fate casting them into the same Baseball Circle of Hell where the Sox were forced to dwell for most of the 20^th Century.

He does note in this piece in three places that these same Red Sox also  began the 20^th Century as if it were their century. That they won the World Series five times in 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916 and 1918. But each time he raises this statistic, he makes light of it and moves on.

Still, I can’t help but think: What if Mr. Walderstein wrote about baseball for the Times one hundred years ago? By the autumn of 1918 he would have been completely over-the-top following the Red Sox fifth championship in that young century deeming the remainder of the 20^th Century to belong to these Sox.

Of course, he would have predicted this before the owner sold that chap named Ruth to the Yankees. Gee, I wonder what possibly could happen to the Red Sox this time.