John Delach

One time just before I left Marsh & McLennan, in a fit of pre-retirement candor and rash enthusiasm, I looked my client from XYZ Petroleum in the eye and said, “Do you know that the only organized group out there that has a worse reputation than ‘Big Oil’ are child pedophiles.”

Though admittedly not the brightest thing to say, I stand by that statement except I believe that the airlines have deservedly joined Big Oil as the public’s favorite whipping boy. That certainly holds true for me. I do have two exceptions, Jet Blue and Southwest. Jet Blue is my go-to airline of choice as they offer frequent non-stop flights from New York City to multiple places at reasonable fares on new, clean and well-functioning equipment with excellent crews and good attitudes. My only real criticism is directed at their on line reservation which has become overly complicated.

Southwest is excellent at moving large number of passengers efficiently and economically also on well-functioning equipment with good and sometimes great crews. Bags fly free on both airlines and my one hesitation with Southwest is the need to make connections in Chicago or Baltimore to get to where I really want to go.

That’s it as far as I’m concerned. Traditional airlines, particularly, American – U.S. Air – Air West, Delta – Northwest and United – Continental all suck. Not too long ago, I was chatting with a flight attendant on a United flight about their upcoming merger with Continental. She noted, “I wonder what the new name will be?”

I replied, “I have a great idea for the new name, “Eastern.” The look she gave me let me know she knew what I meant.

Once upon a time it seemed that I lived on Eastern Airlines because they flew to all of the places where I peddled insurance; Richmond, Boston, DC, Miami, Atlanta, Mobile, Houston, San Juan and Bermuda. I was a one of their Executive Travelers and a member of the Ionosphere Club when it mattered. That combination was so powerful that I knew the receptionist at the club in their JFK terminal on a first name basis who always  upgraded me to First Class. In fact, one morning back in the 1980s I arrived for Flight 807, the morning airplane to Bermuda, without my passport or even my driver’s license. Helen, the receptionist, asked, “What are you going to do Mr. Delach?”

“Well, Helen, I do have my company ID that has my photo and we have an office in Bermuda so I think that will work.”

“Okay, good luck.”

Imagine that encounter today. Long story short. It did work with a minimum of fuss both ways; getting past Bermuda Immigration onto the island, and U.S. Customs and Immigration getting off.

But I watched Eastern go down under Frank Borman’s stewardship. In fact we had a running joke to describe how bad things became before Eastern went out of business. “Eastern is run by Frank Borman, but the way it is run you’d think it was being run by Martin Bormann.”

Which brings me to the point of this rant. Back in January I booked a baseball trip with  four buddies that would take us to Atlanta for a Braves game then on to Charlotte and Durham for two AAA games at the respective homes of the Knights and Bulls. We’d fly into Atlanta and drive a rental north and return to our homes from Raleigh Durham. Each of us made our own arrangements but coordinated times as best we could.

I chose two non-stop American Eagles flights. The south bound flight was scheduled to leave LaGuardia at noon and arrive in Hartsfield at 2:25 PM. Or so I thought until I received an e mail message nine days before my scheduled flight. American Airlines, in their infinite wisdom, had cancelled this flight and chose to book me instead on a flight that would leave LaGuardia at 11:20 AM. But guess what – not one to Atlanta! No, no, one going to Chicago. The connecting flight would not arrive at Hartsfield until 5:05 PM!

The message noted: “If the proposed flights are NOT acceptable to you, you (your) reservation can be discussed with one of our specialists.”

After forty-eight minutes on hold, a human being answered my call. I wanted to demand being transferred to another non-stop flight to Atlanta in the same time frame with any additional cost their responsibility, but that would have required a call-back from a supervisor with no guarantees. So I asked for an alternative and the best the rep named, Nancy could do was to offer me a new flight out of LaGuardia that would get me to Hartsfield at 1:07 PM. That was the good news. The bad news: it was a US Air Flight is scheduled to leave LaGuardia  at 8:40 AM going to Atlanta by way of Charlotte.

No mas, I grabbed it. Otherwise, I foresaw continued frustration and high blood pressure.

I hate flying and I hate the airlines.

The Ridgewood of my youth was a humble, blue collar, working-class neighborhood located on the Brooklyn / Queens border. Originally settled by German immigrants just prior to the start of World War I, their influence remained into mid-Century albeit tempered by later arriving Italian-Americans. Corner saloons, pork stores, bakeries, social clubs, knitting mills and mom and pop shops gave Ridgewood its character. A sleepy community isolated from the frenzy of “the City,” most neighborhood activities revolved around churches, schools and these local stores. Weekday mornings I ran my daily errand before school, first to Edelman’s candy store for the Daily News and Daily Mirror then to Bauer’s Bakery for fresh rolls and crumb buns.

Meat at dinner came from the Emil, the butcher or from the pork store. Vegetables came from Carmine, the green grocer. We had Penesi, the shoemaker and his cousin, Penesi, the barber. Myer’s Delicatessen, Koch’s Drug Store and Schneider’s Funeral Home were all less than a block away on Onderdonk Avenue.

But, as the 1950s progressed, Ridgewood’s future grew dim as people of Color from the South and the Puerto Ricans came to dominate nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick making it seem that it was only a matter of time before “white flight” would add Ridgewood to the list of old neighborhoods left behind by the exodus of people escaping to those new tracts rising in the endless dust from former potato fields in Nassau and Suffolk. Those of us who stayed watched our friends, neighbors and family leave adding sadness to this time of discontent.

Despite this despair and the fires and violence of the 1960s and 70s that consumed swathes of Bed-Sty and Bushwick, Ridgewood hung on remaining true to its blue collar. As the old Germans and Italians died off, their kin stood fast and the neighborhood assimilated a broad spectrum of new residents, a multi-cultural collage of New Yorkers seeking affordable housing. All the while, Ridgewood remained below the radar as Williamsburg, then Bushwick, gentrified.

It seemed the neighborhood was immune to gentrification being too far from Manhattan putting it beyond the range where urban pioneers felt comfortable. But a subway runs through it from Manhattan, the old 14^th Street-Canarsie Line. A long, local, multi-stop, dingy train line, that meanders through Brooklyn backwaters without joy. But, now re-named, the L Line, it was recently voted the cleanest subway in New York. According to its critics, the reinvigorated L has progressed“…from zero to hero.” Ridership has soared as a new army of hipsters wearing their defacto uniforms of “knit caps, skinny jeans and sporting intrepid takes on mustaches”, toddlers in tow with names like August and Apollo are pushing further and further east along the line out of Williamsburg across Bushwick to the very edge of Ridgewood.

Now, according to a report the New York Times, it would appear that unassuming Ridgewood may one day evolve into a trendy “left bank” center where truly starving artists gather to exhibit their creations.

True, at this stage, Ridgewood remains the lesser to the now hip and trendier Bushwick where the Times noted: The new gallerists, most with more hope than cash, are transforming a former gritty manufacturing and warehouse neighborhood into an art scene.

But the grabber in a recent article by Jed Lipinski entitled, Next Stop, Bushwick, published in the Style Section read:

And though technically in Ridgewood, Queens, a more upscale neighborhood to the east, new spaces like Valentine are considered part of the Bushwick gallery boom. Fred Valentine, 60, a painter who was priced out of Williamsburg 14 years ago, founded his gallery last summer by cutting his studio in half and installing some track lighting and a bar.

An accompanying map put Fred’s studio on the corner of Seneca Avenue and Harmon Street in the heart of the old neighborhood, one block from where I grew up. How thrilling! I think Fred’s studio is in an old knitting mill and I hope he included the bar as a tribute to the time when it seemed that almost every corner in Ridgewood offered a saloon to ease the thirst of the local population.

So good luck Fred and your fellow pioneering artists; may culture reign supreme. But then again, if they succeed; I fear, there goes the neighborhood.

If you had made mention of The Sharing Economy (TSE) to me about a month ago or asked me a question about it, I would have first tried to tune you out or, failing this approach, I would have replied with a rude remark to shut you up.

Not today, thanks to being blindsided by this very same TSE. It began innocently enough during a telephone conversation with my daughter, Beth, who just happened to mention something called Uber taxis that serve her Brooklyn neighborhood. “Dad, they are great. I contact them using an app. on my IPhone. I select an available car based on location of the car and the driver’s rating. I know almost to the minute when it will arrive, how much it will cost and I pay for my ride using the same app. It’s all in real time.”

Yes, I couldn’t help but notice that some of you raised your eyebrows when you read the word “Uber.” Well, although I cannot say this with absolute certainty, I believe Uber is not a Neo-Nazi organization.

But I digress. “Uber is a venture-funded startup and Transportation Network Company based in San Francisco, California that makes a mobile application that connects passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire and ridesharing services. The company arranges pickups in dozens of cities around the world.” So says Wikipedia.

So what! I agree, but here’s the thing; Uber started on August 1, 2009 with $200,000 in seed money. The founders received another $1.25 million on October 5, 2010. After that they raised capital through several offerings so that by last year the company was valued at $3.8 billion. That’s right: 3.8 billion with “B” dollars. Blindsided in deed. If that isn’t enough, Uber is not alone. There are two embryonic competing services, Sidecar and Lyft; I kid you not.

But wait, wait, “You aint seen nothing yet.” You know what Hyatt and Wyndham are, but do you know who Airbnb is? Hint: they are in similar businesses. Hyatt and Wyndham are established mega-hotel chains whereas Airbnb (air: b-n-b) is another tech startup (circa 2009) that finds rooms here, there and everywhere in places owned by ordinary people where travelers may crash. Hyatt’s current market capitalization is $8.4 billion. Wyndham’s is $9.3 billion. Airbnb, on the other hand is at $9.6 billion and it is in advanced negotiations to increase that amount by another $400 million to a cool $10 billion! Too late, like a crazy Golden Retriever undercutting our legs, here we go again:  blindsided.

And being blindsided is awful. One moment you’re standing there safely both feet securely on the ground and the next thing you know your legs have been cut out from underneath, your ass is higher than your head and gravity is about to intervene. It hurts and you feel stupid.

The financial analyses swear that this is not the dot-com craze all over again. Of course not. This time as noted in the NY Times, Jim Ellis, a lecturer at Stanford’s business school notes: “…the companies now enjoying the limelight are a far cry from those that rose and fell during the dot-com bubble. Many start-ups now have business models that can lead to sustained revenue and profits.”

The models or plans are based on a concept called “collaborative consumption.” What could be simpler than that?

Here are a few of them:

Snapgoods – for lending or borrowing high-end household goods such as cameras, kitchenware or musical instruments.

Dogvacay – Hosts who will board your pooch while the family goes bye, bye.

Relayrides – Borrow a car from your neighbors for an hour or a day.

TaskRabbit – Hire day workers for various jobs or tasks.

Liquid – Bike rentals from neighbors. (Formerly known as Spinlister.)

Fon – Wi-fi band sharing with neighbors and friends.

Postmark and Neighborgoods – Buy and sell used clothes.
No doubt, excellent business models all. No dot-com repetitions here. This time they rely on collaborative consumption, that’s their plan.

You do know what Mike Tyson had to say about the plans boxers used to fight him? “The first time I tagged them good, their plan ended.”

That drink I wrote about before; I think it’s overdue. But watch out for crazy Golden Retrievers lying in wait intent to blindside us on the way to the saloon.

During the first two years of World War II Great Britain lost so many cargo ships that this island nation was forced to recognize a dreadful possibility; she would be starved out of the war unless she quickly acquired replacement ships. New ships had to be constructed rapidly, be simple to operate by the rawest of crews and be easily replaced. Only America had the resources to build them and the Roosevelt administration, in its “short of war” policy, consented. The Maritime Administration, Marad, adopted the British design, but modified and standardized it to produce a new freighter, officially the EC2-S-C1, but better known as “Liberty Ship.”

The first liberty, Patrick Henry, was laid down on April 30, 1941, launched on September 27^th and finished on December 30^th.  FDR personally christened this ship one of fourteen launched that day. Patrick Henry took 150 days to fabricate from first steel to launch with a total building time of 244 days. Building time dropped dramatically to an average of 42 days as prefabricating techniques improved and, one ship, Robert E. Peary, went from first steel to launch in 4 days, 15 ½ hours.

In all 2,711 Liberty Ships were built in 18 shipyards. Almost all U.S. Flag Liberties were named after dead Americans. The famous included Presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt but also James Buchanan and even Jefferson Davis. John Hancock was among signers of the Declaration of Independence so honored, but so were the less notable; William Hooper, Francis Lewis, Josiah Bartlett and Button Gwinnett.

Other patriots abound; Thaddeus Kosciuszko, Nathan Hale, Betsey Ross, Samuel Adams, Israel Putnam, John Paul Jones, Molly Pitcher, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine and Paul Revere. Names familiar from our Civil War; Julia Ward Howe, Matthew B. Brady, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Fredrick Douglass, Joshua Chamberlain, Barbara Frietchie, George A. Custer, Harriet Tubman, Jubal Early, Stephen A. Douglas, Winfield Scott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Longstreet and Philip H. Sheridan. (Alas, SS John W. Brown didn’t bear the fiery abolitionist’s name; John W. was an early 20^th Century labor leader.)

Men and women adventurers and explorers included Davy Crockett, Wyatt Earp, Ponce De Leon, James (Wild Bill) Hickok, Amelia Earhart, Geronimo, Daniel Boone, Annie Oakley, Amerigo Vespucci, Kit Carson, Pocahontas, William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

Those of letters were represented; Mary Austin, Charles Carroll, Edgar Allen Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London, Anne Hutchinson, Zane Grey, Washington Irving, Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, Emma Lazarus, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Ring Lardner, Joyce Kilmer, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Cullen Bryant.

Song, dance, stage and sports; Abner Doubleday, P.T. Barnum, John L. Sullivan, Edwin Booth, Lou Gehrig, John Philip Sousa, Carol Lombard, Will Rogers, John Ringling, George M. Cohan, Christy Matteson, George Gershwin, Knute Rockne and George Gipp.

Inventors, industrialists, household names; Alexander Graham Bell, George Eastman, Samuel Colt, Richard Gatling, James Bowie, Edison, Morse, Robert Fulton, George Pullman, R.J. Reynolds, W. R. Grace, Goodyear, DuPont, John Deere, Glenn Curtiss and Wilbur Wright.

Architects, engineers, doctors, scientists, jurists; Mayo Brothers, George Washington Carver, Sanford White, George Goethals, Johns Hopkins and Booker T. Washington. Publishers, attorneys and politicians: Adolph S. Ochs, Edward Everett, Wendell Wilkie, Horace Greeley, Clarence Darrow, William Gorgas, John Marshall, James G. Blaine and Louis Brandeis.

Names local to New York; Al Smith, Samuel J. Tilden, Franklin K. Lane, C.W. Post, Floyd Bennett, William Floyd, Jacob Riis, and Peter Cooper.

The forgettable and forgotten; Uriah Rose (Arkansas politician founded the Rose Law Firm: see Hillary R. Clinton), Billy Sunday (evangelist), Sun Yat Sen (first president of the Rep. of China), Nachman Syrkin (Zionist), Andreas Honcharenko (no record found except her ship), Virginia Dare (first white person born in America), Albino Perez (Mexican politician, governor of New Mexico, assassinated one month in office), Archibald Mansfield (Reverend Mansfield led Seaman’s Church Institute), Sewell Seam (Appalachian coal mining developer), Hinton Helper (North Carolina, opposed slavery for curious reasons before the war; a white supremacist after the war.)

These and other names of ships can be explained by a fund raising provision that any group that raised two million dollars in war bonds could nominate a name for a ship.

Far more Liberty Ships survived the war than had been anticipated as the tide for the Battle of the Atlantic turned in favor of the Allies by the later part of 1943. After V.J. Day, almost 1,000 U.S. Flag Liberties, declared surplus, became the backbone of international merchant fleets replacing the ships they lost during the war. They remained a mainstay well into the 1960s until the container ship revolution finally sent them to the breakers. There they where joined by their U.S. Flag sisters who had spent almost all of the years after the war resting and rusting tied up side-by-side in reserve fleets located in American bays and rivers. Deemed old and obsolete, they too were towed to scrap yards.

But two survived to carry on, the aforementioned, John W. Brown, based in Baltimore (named for the labor leader) and the Jeremiah O’Brien based in San Francisco. The O’Brien carries the name of a native of Maine who commanded the sloop, Unity that captured the HMS Margaretta at the Battle of Machias, ME, the first naval battle of the Revolutionary War. Both Liberties remain operational and make several short voyages in protected bays each season. May they live long and prosper.

When do you admit that you are a roller coaster junkie? For me, it was the summer of 1983 when I engineered a “supposed adventure” for three extended family groups to drive in convoy style down Interstate 91 to Agawam, Massachusetts to visit Riverside Amusement Park. Riverside was a sleepy rural park that had been re-invigorated that summer with the opening of a new, world-class wooden coaster, the Riverside Cyclone. The owners wanted to replicate the famous Coney Island coaster, but space constraints had reduced its footprint. Still, I had read rave reviews about this coaster. It was one of the first of a new generation of wooden roller coasters to open at a time when older units were still being abandoned, left and right. The Riverside Coaster was the resurrection of lost coasters I loved; Rye Beach’s Airplane Coaster, Palisades’ Cyclone and Coney Island’s Bob Sled, Tornado and Thunderbolt.

We drove down from our rented vacation cottages on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River near Brattleboro, Vermont in three cars. On arrival at Riverside, we discovered that the roller coaster section didn’t open for over an hour. As the appointed time drew near, I made my way with my children, nieces and nephews as close to the starting point as we could get and, when the gate opened, I took off like a shot. Family lore has it that I knocked down several old ladies and children in my successful bid to be on one of the first trains out. Balderdash! No old ladies were involved in that stampede and, if a couple or three kids went down; well, survival of the fittest is my defense and I stand by it.

My children already knew my zeal for coasters. On a previous Delach family outing to Bush Gardens I convinced our daughter, Beth, to accompany me on a steel coaster. Beth, then a pre-teen, was just building up her coaster “sea-legs”. So to help her along, I told her to put out her hand, palm up and I started putting money in her hand. I answered her questioning look with, “Let me know when you have enough so we can wait to ride on the first car or the last car.”

What triggered these recollections was a recent story in the New York newspapers that ground had been broken for a new steel roller coaster in Coney Island on the site of the old Thunderbolt. Scheduled to be open by Memorial Day, this $10 million, 2,233 foot-long Italian-built beauty promises to take riders straight up 115 feet, drop them straight down speeding them at 55 miles per hour through a 100-foot loop, a zero-gravity roll with dives, hills and a corkscrew; all within two minutes at $10 a ride.

Hotcha, sign me up.

My only previous experience with a 90-degree lift and drop came last summer at Universal Studios in Orlando. It was one of eight coasters that I rode with adult children, in-laws and grandchildren in several visits to Universal and Disney. That trip was a successful test of my year and a half old hip replacement. With the exception of one or two coasters that required contortions that I can no longer even consider attempting, every ride was successful. We rode great coasters; The Hulk, Dueling Dragons, Space Mountain, Expedition Everest, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and Rock’N’Roller Coaster.

But Rip Ride Rocket was something else. From day one, my two oldest grandsons, Drew and Matt, raved about this coaster as did the Orlando Sentinel which proclaimed it the most exciting in the city. The line was long but moved quickly because this coaster is zoned into separate blocks which allow multiple trains to operate at the same time. If something goes wrong on one train, every other one stops within the zone it is located.

The ride had precautions I had never seen before, maximum height lines.  Located at the beginning of the maze and just before boarding, my 6’6” son and son-in-law, Mike and Tom, had to clear both to ride. They cleared the first one by about a half-inch, but when they passed under a second bar, this time the clearance was no more than a quarter of an inch. Their look of concern was too much so I said, “C’mon guys. You know for insurance purposes, they set that second bar lower than necessary. You’ll be fine; but then again, I’m not the one who may be decapitated!”

An attendant did confirm that they were within the height maximum, but she did admonish them: “Don’t put your hands up.”

They each rode with one of the boys so I was left to ride solo with a teenage boy. The coaster has a feature that allows each rider to program speakers on either side of them to play a rock tune of their choosing. This was a non-starter for me as I had removed my glasses before we entered the line but I watched my companion do his thing. What happened next was sobering. The restraint on this ride is a bar that comes down from the side. The boy brought his down so it rested with a console right in the center. Due to my size, mine stopped at an angle, the console off center. I looked at an attendant who gave me a thumb’s up, but a voice inside my brain gave me a warning in an eastern European accent: “Not good, not good at all!”

Too late, next thing I knew we were going straight up vertically that produced a terrible feeling that I was sliding out the back of the car. Then we went over the top and started straight down; Oh my God, the rest of the ride was a blur, a very fast blur. Wow, the boys and the Sentinel were right and I didn’t go home in a box.

But a note of caution: Beth was disappointed she missed riding the Rip Ride Rocket and returned to it with Drew only to find it was out of action. Someone had tripped or fell during loading or unloading and the ride shut down. Remember those zones? People were stuck at places all along the coaster including the top of the tower supporting the vertical lift. They had to be led down a series of stair ladders to the ground and the ride didn’t re-open for three days. “Not good, not good at all!”

The methods used to name public places has evolved over the years from the traditional approach of tagging it with an appropriate name that identifies it as the Empire State building, United Nations and Pentagon, or where it is located like the Brooklyn Bridge, Pennsylvania Turnpike and Panama Canal. Honoring individuals has always been an exception, the George Washington Bridge, Hoover Dam and the Eisenhower Locks.

But times have changed. Takes sports edifices, today, overwhelmingly, the process is how much money can you get for the naming rights. Stadiums and ball parks are the most obvious, Met Life Stadium, FedEx Field, Citi Field and AT&T Stadium are simple examples. But then it can become more complex if the old name was considered iconic. Take Denver’s appropriately named, Mile High Stadium. When it was replaced by a newer version, it morphed into Sports Authority Field at Mile High (whatever that means) or the Superdome; which, as if by magic, became the Mercedes-Benz Superdome after it was re-built following Katrina.

The more venerable playing fields have held onto their traditional names; FenwayPark, Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium and Wrigley Field although the latter must include an * as it was originally named after the chewing gum family. Others change names quickly and frequently like CandlestickPark, also known as MonsterPark and 3 Com Park. Another, the Miami Dolphins home, currently named, Sun Life Stadium, but a.k.a. Land Shark, Dolphin, Pro Player and originally, Joe Robbie Stadium.

Public places have become a problem as we are just not building enough new highways, bridges, tunnels and airports to fulfill the desire to put someone’s name on them. Gone are the days when Robert Moses could take a plate load of things to bear his name, Robert Moses Niagara Hydroelectric Power Station and the Moses – Saunders Power Dam, Robert Moses State Parks (two of them) and Robert Moses Causeway. No, if we want to plaster a person’s name on anything but a high school, the old name must either come off or be amended to incorporate the VIP. The Triborough Bridge became the Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Bridge, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (already a mouthful,) the Hugh Carey-Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, National Airport, Ronald Reagan-National Airport and the Queensboro Bridge, the Ed Koch-Queensboro Street Bridge. (Of course, nobody calls it that. It’s the Ed-Koch-59^th Street Bridge.)

Right now the new bridge being built across the Hudson River to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge appears up for grabs. Some pundits are petitioning that it be named after Pete Seeger in recognition of his work in cleaning up the Hudson River. A couple of problems with that. Ole Pete, despite his many talents, was a member of the Communist Party and a life-long apologist for the Workers’ Paradise. Also, the existing bridge already has been christened with a politician’s name. It is the Malcolm Wilson-Tappan Zee Bridge (named after Nelson Rockefeller’s long time lieutenant governor who became governor when Rocky became Gerald Ford’s VP. Alas Malcolm only lasted a year losing to the same Hugh Carey of tunnel fame.) But most importantly, if the new bridge is to receive a new name, it’s my bet that Andy Cuomo will name it after papa Mario.

This all becomes complicated and a bit silly. Fortunately, at least the City of New York has tempered the madness by declaring that it will no longer change the official names of highways, byways and tertiary streets. Instead, if there is a good reason to honor someone, their name will be added as a ceremonial name and the appropriate sign added to the street pole. I believe they learned their lesson following the ill-fated agreement to re-name Sixth Avenue, Avenue of the Americas. The best part of this system is that if the honoree’s persona and name recognition fades into oblivion over time, few will challenge replacing it with a new ceremonial moniker. Certainly, that is a better idea then having to live with Major Deegan whoever he was.

Before we close the book on the 2013 season I’d like to give a shout out,

to players past and present whose nicknames set them apart.

Here’s to the friends, foes, heroes, fools, villains and sad sacks.

Here’s to Spatz Moore, Crazy Legs Hirsh and Night Train Lane,

Concrete Chuck Bednarik, Iron Mike Ditka and Mean Joe Greene.

To Too Tall Jones, Broadway Joe, Deacon Jones, the Kansas Comet and Sweetness,

Big Ben, the Bus, the Tank, PAT, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Here’s to the Galloping Ghost, Prime Time and the Touchdown Maker,

Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, the Refrigerator, the Freezer and the Kitchen.

To Y.A., T.O., R.C., J.D., O.J., C.C., J.P.P., D.D.T., L.T. R.G.3, and T.D.

Fatso, Pork Chop, Pudge, Big Daddy, Dump Truck, and the Pillsbury Throwboy.

Here’s to Bullet Bob, the Blonde Bomber, Burner, Big Game and Bambi,

the Golden Boy, the Gunslinger, the Hammer and the Throwin Samoan.

To Dr. Death, Diesel, He Hate Me, Mad Duck and Mad Stork,

Matty Ice, Little Joe, RevisIsland, the Sheriff, Tom Terrific, and Easy E.

Here’s to Megatron, Hotel, House, Mercury, Lights Out and Long Gone,

Mongo, Moose, the Inconvenient Truth, Playmaker and the Nigerian Nightmare.

To the Gravedigger, the Assassin, Hacksaw, and the Minister of Defense,

White Shoes, Rocket, Red Rifle, Uptown, Anytime and the A-Train.

Here’s to Thunder and Lightning, the Crunch Bunch, Hogs and Posse,

Steel Curtain, Purple People Eaters, the Smurfs and Well Dressed Amani Toomer.

To Bad Moon, Wildman, the Tasmanian Devil and Smash and Bash,

Flash 80, Joe Cool, Ocho Cinco, Snake and Touchdown Tommy McDonald.

Great handles, a toast to all, how dull the game would be without you.

Last Saturday I celebrated a major birthday turning the page and joining the ranks of family and friends already septuagenarians. The occasion reminded me of the birthday greeting I received from my cousin, Bill, ten-years ago when I first opened my previous chapter as a sexagenarian: “Just think, John, if you had died yesterday, at age 59, people would have  said: ‘How awful, he was so young.’ Now they’ll say: ‘So it goes, ah, he lived a full life.”

This time around, instead being surprised by a humorous message or one profound, or silly, serious or even loving, the one that grabbed me came from a machine. Mary Ann and I spent ten-days in Florida in the week leading up to my birthday, the last three on Sanibel Island. By a very human act, I had diminished our available cash half-way into our trip by leaving a chunk in a hotel safe in Orlando when we checked out. (Fortunately, Mary Ann’s call to the Hilton retrieved the lost billfold and its contents, but the money would not reach us until we arrived back in Port Washington.)

The morning after we arrived in Sanibel, I said to Mary Ann, “I’m fairly certain that there is a Wells Fargo bank on the island where I can get cash from my account without incurring a fee. Let’s go there on our way to lunch.”

So I pulled the rental Jeep up to this ATM, inserted my debit card and entered my pin. The usual menu appeared – I chose; GET CASH – Enter the Amount – I chose; $200 – Receipt? – I chose; No… But wait, before the cash was dispensed the ATM flashed on its screen: Happy Birthday John!

JESUS H. “JUMP UP AND DOWN” CHRIST, THE F****** ATM was telling me to have a happy birthday. AN ATM WAS TELLING ME TO HAVE A HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

I repeat (emphasis added): AN ATM WAS TELLING ME TO HAVE A HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

“Mary Ann, look, look at the ATM.”

She did, shook her head and replied, “Talk about Big Brother.”

Inside I knew that this was just another technological assault on the old people and as a newly minted septuagenarian, I object to the velocity in the growth of our electronic age. Fellow travelers, we are screwed. They just throw this stuff at us without care, concern or condolences. Take the development that just broke last week; Mark Zuckerberg, (29), the man who brought the world, Facebook, bought out WhatsApp from the relatively two older men who founded it, Brian Acton, (42) and Jan Koum, (38). The deal was for lots of stock and options in Facebook that on the bottom end will yield these two gentlemen and their minions a minimum of $16 billion and at the top end, $19 billion!

A week ago, I had no idea who WhatsApp was and what they do but, if something is worth nineteen billion semolians, I wanted to find out more. I think I have this right so here goes: Simply put, WhatsApp is the largest of a number of new providers that enable their subscribers to communicate text messages almost for free over the internet regardless of the type of device either party is using (ex. Android, iPhone, etc.) thereby bypassing telephone providers and their per-text charges.

Here is how the New York Times explained it: “This means that someone who sent 5,000 messages over WhatsApp, a not unreasonable (monthly) number for some overactive teenagers, would pay about a penny in data fees. If 5,000 (SMS)* texts were sent at AT&T’s nonplan rate of 20 cents a message, the sender would be out $1,000 which is 100,000 times WhatsApp’s price.”

I hope you are still with me on this and that, so far, it makes sense. WhatsApp has 450 million users and is growing. But read on, this is where we go off of the rails; again the NY Times: “It is still unclear whether WhatsApp can make a lot of money providing very cheap texts. Today, the app is free to use for a year, after which it charges a user $1 a year.”

In addition the folks at WhatsApp pride themselves on not collecting a lot of data about the users nor do they accept ads and have pledged to remain ad free. So, unless I am missing something that is staring me in the face, this means that aside from the buck a user they get, WhatsApp has no revenue. So I ask: “How in hell can a company with this limited revenue be worth $16 to $19 billion dollars?

It is times like this that I really, really feel not just old, worse, much worse than just feeling old. I feel, lost, out of it and vulnerable to this brave new electronic world. Forget trying to understand Bitcoin and frankly I still don’t get hashtag. By the way, when did the pound sign become hashtag? I had to look it up in Wikipedia just to see how to spell hashtag correctly!

#Oh what’s the hell, let’s get a drink.

*SMS: The thing in your phone that allows you to send text messages through the same system that sends your mobile telephone calls.

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.”