College Journalism?

My stories were apparently first-rate since I was given the opportunity to write my own column in my second semester on the paper. I now had a forum from which to opine on any subject that struck my fancy, or at least those that didn’t upset the faculty advisor, Mr. Wolfson. There was quite a battle going on that year for the presidency of the student council. The outcome of these elections was generally decided by a small percentage of the votes cast and therefore the opinions expressed in the school paper weighed heavily in the balance. One candidate, Peter Lesser, was really leaning on the editorial board and the columnists to gain their approval. He told me he had political ambitions and connections which he would use to help me in the real world if I endorsed him in my column.

Peter was a tall fellow with fairly short black hair which he combed straight to one side. If he had a mustache his haircut might have been reminiscent of Hitler. His face was highlighted by his bushy black eyebrows, and a thin, hawk-like nose which pointed straight ahead like a one-way traffic sign. When he spoke, Peter always seemed to me to be talking out of the side of his mouth. It was funny because he was doing this literally and figuratively at the same time. He was always running after money and power. His brother had married some girl from Chicago whose parents owned half the city. He used to say they had so much money they couldn’t count it. Anyway, he figured he could use his brother’s good fortune to further his political goals. One of these was to become governor of New York by the year 2000. However, Mario Cuomo has nothing to fear, since Peter has long since vanished from the New York area.

One thing which came out of my relationship with Peter was my getting involved in several political campaigns in 1966. Peter and I worked together to help get Roy Goodman elected to the State Senate in the Silk Stocking District. He indicated that by working in the political arena, we might get advance notice when any Army Reserve lists were opened up in the New York area. This would presumably enable us to avoid duty in Vietnam and at the same time get credit for having served our country. (I guess Dan Quayle was thinking along the same lines.) In any case, Roy Goodman was a good man, and I never regretted working for him. The other campaign was a little more dicey. We went out to try to elect a Black republican, Eugene MacIntosh, to the state assembly. The district included most of north Harlem and Washington Heights. He was running against a Jewish democrat who was strictly a ‘Tammany Hall’ type of politician. I remember gathering up a bunch of friends from school, convincing them that Harlemites would be better off with a Black republican than a Jewish political hack and organizing them into a group we called ‘Students for MacIntosh.’ We spent many a night walking the streets of Harlem, talking to voters and imploring them to vote for Mr. MacIntosh. One of our brighter ideas was to make a stencil that read “MacIntosh for Assembly” and paint the letters into crosswalks with Dayglo paint. We figured that people always look down as they step off a curb and therefore they couldn’t miss seeing his name. After all, name recognition was touted as the battle that wins these kinds of wars. Apparently we were right in half our assumptions. Everybody who crossed the street read the signs but the reaction was decidedly anti-MacIntosh. These were the days before graffiti was in vogue and MacIntosh received about two hundred angry phone calls complaining that we had defaced the streets. This may have been the first organized graffiti spraying in New York City history but obviously that milestone went unappreciated at the time. Shortly, we were sent out with cans of black paint to eliminate the stencilled messages. Frankly, the bright colors that we had used went a long way towards sprucing up an otherwise dirty and dreary locale, but I guess the residents had other ideas. Ultimately, it didn’t matter anyway since MacIntosh was a Lindsay republican and Harlemites were traditionally democratic voters. I think Eugene got about 20 percent of the vote.

I did finally endorse Peter, but it was because his opponent was both a real jerk and a TMF member, not because he tried to bribe me. In fact, he won the school election by a slim margin when his girlfriend, a student at the nursing division, managed to stuff the ballot box on his behalf and at his behest. Peter is now a District Attorney in Dallas and recently ran for mayor. I understand he went to Texas after failing the New York Bar exam three times. New York’s loss is Texas’ gain. Hooray for politics.

Bronx Community College

Bronx Community College, unlike Stuyvesant High School, was a co-educational institution. In simple terms, this meant there were people of the female persuasion in my immediate proximity. I felt like a kid in a candy store (a feeling with which I was quite familiar).

Also, I found interests in extra-curricular activities, like the college newspaper and literary magazine. I soon became a reporter for the Spectator. The paper was put together in a room in the basement known as the Pub. This room, which was no wider than fifteen feet and certainly no longer than twenty, had five desks, seven file cabinets and a closet which was converted into a dark room. Within the walls of these close quarters was assembled the weirdest combination of intellectual misfits I think I ever met.

Neil Lichtman, whose father we were encouraged to believe worked for the CIA, was the managing editor. Neil, secretive but quite eloquent, had us convinced that the world revolved around concentric conspiracies. Byrne B, whose appearance resembled that of a Jewish Lee Harvey Oswald, was the news editor. The last I heard of Byrne, he had graduated and taken off for Flint, Michigan, where he had a job selling new Cadillacs and then working for MCI. Bob Mc, all three hundred pounds of him, was the photo chief. Also in the running for the obesity title were three or four others whose names escape me but without whom, the Pub office wouldn’t have had the same aura. Vivian Something (who is probably now glad that I could never remember her last name) was clearly in the lead as office slut. Skinny, she was not. Her legs were like highway pillars, and the roadway they supported was often traveled. Irene F was the warm innocent motherly type, whose every written sentence came out like a confession extracted under duress. There were a few normal types there, like Joan C and Ann D, but they were the exceptions. Me? I was probably the weirdest one of all but nobody realized this because I was great at hiding my true feelings.

The guys at school, regardless of their politics, intelligence level, type of weirdness or lack of same, all had one thing in common. They possessed the much sought after 2-S draft status. The conflict (it was, after all, a conflict, not a war) in Vietnam Of course, there were groups at school that absolutely supported the effort in Southeast Asia. Among these were the TMF Club. The TMF was purported to stand for Truth, Morality, and Freedom, but in one of my more aggressive moments, I told everyone who would listen that they were really the Tough Mother Fuckers. This pissed them off mightily. They managed to chase me for a few blocks but I escaped easily. They were very Tough Mother Fuckers, but not very Fast Mother Fuckers. I wasn’t very tough, but I wasn’t very slow either. was heating up in 1965 and not too many of us were anxious to join the fray.