A sign of the times

A car enters the parking lot of a large supermarket and pulls into a handicap parking spot. Instead of displaying an official handicap placard, the young female driver reaches into the rear seat area and pulls out an old brown paper bag. The bag has writing on it, not neatly printed, but scribbled, as if to show it was written in haste.  Upon closer inspection, the words on the bag are “I am old and I forgot my handicap sticker.  Please don’t give me a ticket.”  After placing the bag on the dashboard, the young woman jumps out of the vehicle and scampers into the supermarket.

N.Y. Daily News fades away

I have  purchased a copy of the N. Y. Daily News for the last time.

I started reading it when I was a child in the 1950s.  My father worked the night shift at a financial printing plant in lower Manhattan and would purchase the early edition on his way home from work sometime after midnight.

When I sat at the kitchen table for breakfast before walking about four blocks to grammar school, the back page would stare me in the face with sports news.  I learned to read the newspaper from back to front.  I enjoyed the sports coverage (especially of the Yankees), the comic strips (long before Peanuts started), the gossip columns and sometimes even the hard news.

My best friend’s father once appeared on the front page when, as a policeman, he captured a burglar, and the News photographer captured the arrest scene.

My father served in World War II and his scrap book contains clippings from the Daily News.

I, too, clipped a number of articles, coupons and comic strips from the paper over the years.

Recently, I noticed that many of the features I liked in the newspaper have disappeared.  I started to only buy the Sunday edition because it still had a number of sections I enjoyed, including the comics, Parade Magazine, weekly TV listings and interesting sports coverage.  It was still a bargain at $1.50.

Then, they raised the price to $2.00, and instead of adding more value, they cut more features.

Now comes the news that they have fired half of their staff.  They claim they want to concentrate on online news. (See the news report at the end of this post.)

I had a further connection to this newspaper.  While attending law school, I worked for a law firm who had offices in the then Daily News Building on 42^nd Street in Manhattan.  The firm even represented the newspaper and I remember being sent into the press room to serve a subpoena on someone representing the labor union. 

But now, with this once great newspaper going down the drain, I do not intend to go down the drain with it.

So, to paraphrase The Beatles, “I heard the news today, oh boy” and it was not good.

Goodbye, old friend.

JULY 23, 2018 / 12:34 PM

Storied tabloid N.Y. Daily News slashes half its news staff

Reuters Staff

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Daily News, the city’s scrappy, 99-year-old tabloid, is laying off half of its editorial staff, as U.S. newspapers continue to struggle with sharply declining advertising revenue and readership, it said on Monday.

The cuts at the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily paper, known for eye-catching front-page headlines and taking on the city’s power players, including real estate developer Donald Trump long before he was elected president, drew criticism from both average readers and politicians who bristled at how the paper covered them.

Owner Tronc Inc said the cuts are intended to make the paper a stronger competitor online.

“We are reducing today the size of the editorial team by approximately 50 percent and refocusing much of our talent on breaking news - especially in the areas of crime, civil justice and public responsibility,” Tronc said in a memo to staff.

The Daily News employed about 85 journalists prior to the announcement, according to rival New York Post, owned by News Corp.

church meets state

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was a famous television personality when I was growing up in the 1950s.  He hosted a weekly show called “Life is Worth Living” from 1952 to 1957.  He died in 1979.

Five days before his death, he executed a will directing his funeral be celebrated at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and that he be buried in Calvary Cemetery in New York, where he had purchased a burial plot.  However, the then Archbishop of New York, Terence Cardinal Cooke, asked Archbishop Sheen’s niece and closest relative for permission to bury her uncle in the crypt at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  She consented and Sheen was laid to rest in a crypt under the church’s high altar.  His remains are still there.

In 2002, 23 years after Archbishop Sheen’s death, a process was started in his boyhood home of Peoria, Illinois to determine whether he should be canonized as a saint,

In 2014, the Diocese of Peoria requested that Archbishop Sheen’s remains be transferred to Peoria because a shrine was being built there.  Additionally, it was pointed out that his parents are buried there; most of his relatives live nearby and he was ordained as a priest there.

Joan Sheen Cunningham, Archbishop Sheen’s niece, now almost 90 year old, who had originally consented to her uncle’s burial at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, moved in state Supreme Court to have her uncle’s remains disinterred and transported to Peoria for re-burial.

The Court granted her petition to move Archbishop Sheen’s remains to Peoria, Illinois.

The Trustees of St. Patrick’s Cathedral appealed to the next highest court.  Five judges of the Appellate Division, First Department heard the appeal and three voted to overrule the lower court so the remains could stay at St. Patrick’s until a hearing could be held to determine Archbishop Sheen’s wishes. Two judges dissented and agreed with the lower court, which allowed the remains to be transferred.

As of now, the matter is pending a further hearing (before the losing party can appeal to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals in Albany).  The remains will remain where they are until a final determination is made.

Interestingly, the majority relied, in part, on an affidavit of Monsignor Hilary Franco, who stated that he worked with Archbishop Sheen and was a close friend.  He wrote that Archbishop Sheen wanted to be buried in New York.  The majority noted a hearing was necessary to look into what the Archbishop’s wishes really were before they could allow a relative to control his remains.

My personal connection:

Monsignor Hilary Franco was the pastor of my parish church for many years and spoke often of Archbishop Sheen in his homilies.  I also dealt with him in my capacity as Town Attorney with regard to parking in fire zones near the church.

I appeared many times as a defense attorney before Judge Rosalyn Richter when she sat in Bronx Criminal Court.  She wrote the majority opinion.

I also appeared before Judge Troy Webber in Bronx Supreme Court.  She joined in the dissent. 

My iPhone 6

My iPhone 6 has been to almost as many places as I have.  Since April, 2015, it has traveled to Puerto Rico, through the Panama Canal, to Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, California, Bermuda, St. Maartin, Haiti, Key West and Havana, Cuba.  Most of its journey was as a passenger in my right front pants pocket, but it came out occasionally to snap a picture or two (ok, exactly 6,592 pictures and 453 videos).

It’s been used more as a camera than a phone.  Screen shots from the internet have taken the place of handwritten notes.  I’ve played 1,744games of Words With Friends, winning 38% of the time (hey, I have some very tough competition) and there were 7 ties.

I play music on my iPhone and watch TV and YouTube clips.

I keep track of my banking and pay bills electronically.

I even track the number of steps I take.

My iPhone does not require food, sleep or shelter – just a few jolts of electricity every so often.

Quite frankly, it has replaced the dog as man’s best friend.  Now, if only it could cook, clean and sleep with me, I might not need,,,,

The year was 1959

The year was 1959.

I was 11 years old.

My parents, younger sister and I had come to Florida from New York by car for our yearly summer vacation.  After a stay at the beach in the Clearwater-St. Petersburg area, my father, the only one with a driver’s license, drove us to Key West, the southernmost city in the continental United States.  Until 1938 you could not get there by car, but now, 21 years after the only road into the city from the mainland was built, we drove the 125 miles from Miami to Key West.  My father, who dreamed big – we drove 3,000 miles to see Disneyland three years earlier, just one year after it opened – wanted to take a hopper plane 90 miles south of Key West to Havana, Cuba.  I don’t know why he wanted to do that.  He had lived in Paris after fighting the Germans in World War II only 13 years earlier, but did not seem to me to be a world traveler – we traveled mostly from New York to Florida during my childhood (the only exception being California trips in 1956 and 1963).

But in 1958, a rebel named Fidel Castro, along with his buddy, Ernesto Che Guevera, fought a dictator named Batista in Cuba and on January 1, 1959 took over country in the Cuban Revolution. Castro was a Communist and it was deemed too dangerous for us to fly to Cuba.  Afterall, who vacations in a war zone?

So on August 9, 2017, 58 years later, at age 69, and as the only surviving member of my childhood family, I fulfilled my father’s dream to set foot on Cuba soil.

The circle of life, indeed,

The irony is that in 2017, I saw what my father would have seen in 1959.  Not much is newer than that. 

My trip to Havana

I’d like to say I visited Cuba, but it was really just Havana for a few hours on two consecutive weekdays in August, 2017.  Nights were spent on the cruise ship that brought me to the island.  Saying I visited Cuba is like saying I visited the United States but only saw Washington, D.C. 

The Havana I saw was a study in contrasts.  From a five star hotel built in 1930 to run down and crumbling buildings, at least on the outside.  Cuba is a Communist country and as such, the government runs and controls everything.  Even the cigar stores are controlled by the government, although I was approached by locals wanting to sell me cigars on the black market.  Fortunately, I am not a smoker.

Since Castro took control of the country on January 1, 1959, things seem to have been going downhill.  I was in Havana on a Wednesday and Thursday in August and although I saw scaffolding on a few buildings, I saw no workers.  Indeed, it seems people don’t have to work because the government supports them.  I met one woman from Tampa,Florida, who told me her cousin was a doctor in Cuba and earned just $17 a month.  That’s just $2 more than I tipped the taxi driver who drove me through the city in a 1955 Buick.  These old cars are kept running, not by mechanics, but as they say, by “magicians” using Russian car parts.  They are passed down within the family and very few other Cubans own cars.

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Cows are nearly non-existent, so there is no beef.  The meat they eat is chicken and pork.  For a port city in the Caribbean, I saw no small boats – they are banned for fear they will be used to escape to Miami.  I saw no grocery stores, no fast food restaurants, no movie theaters, and no banks.  These things are not necessary when people have no money.  I did see one church, which charged an admission to tourists since the government wasn’t supporting them.

There were two forms of currency, one for the locals and one for the tourists.  Americans are charged a 13% tax both when purchasing Cuban money and when exchanging it back for dollars, for a total of 26%.

The people seemed friendly enough, but I got the impression they have no idea what the outside world looks like.  Police and soldiers are everywhere and you are not allowed to take pictures of them.  One elderly woman  begged me for a ballpoint pen I was using,  It was a Bic, worth about ten cents, but to her, it was the world and she thanked me profusely when I gave it to her.

The bottom line is that if you are wealthy, you can do fine (ambassadors live in mansions), but if you are poor, you don’t know what you are missing.  Castro had banned Christmas until one of the three Popes who visited the island convinced him to allow it and now it is a national holiday.  But the everyday life of the average citizen of Havana seemed to consist of waking up, standing or sitting around and going to sleep.

The rest of the island may have beautiful beaches or other amenities but I did not leave Havana, which seemed stuck in 1959 and is taking its sweet time moving into 1960.

Survivor

I keep in touch with some of the people I attended grade school with through the magic of Facebook.  What strikes me is this – we all began at the same starting point, give or take a few months, but we will each be exiting the human race at a different age.  Some of my fellow classmates have already finished their journey and are six feet under or inhabiting a vase on a mantel.  I feel as if I am in a reality show called Survivor.  Who will be the last classmate voted off the planet?

Moral: Treasure each day while you can.