Baseball Memories
Dear Mr. Cohen, yasher koach on your jubilee year of writing about baseball (“Fifty Years Writing About Baseball,” May 26).
I got a kick out of your Hoot Evers column that appeared in The Jewish Press.
I had a funny incident happen to me in 1962 when I went to the Polo Grounds to see the Mets play Pittsburgh. The Polo Grounds to a 12-year-old was more than huge, it was cavernous! My friend Howie and I decided to walk from one end of the park to the other, so we started in deep right field and finished in deep left. I believe we saw George Weiss, the team president, watching the game on a TV in his office, which faced the left-field stands behind the clubhouse.
The bullpens in the Polo Grounds were in left and right fields. They were on the field, with no fence separating them from the playing field.
The Pirates were not doing so well that night and they had a pitcher warming up – Earl Francis. He was 10 feet away from us as I leaned over the left field wall urging him to “shake my hand, please shake my hand.” After a few pleas, he turned around and, grabbing his crotch, said “Shake this, kid.”
Howie and I laughed all the way back to our seats down the right-field line.
Fifty-one years later I still laugh as I tell that story to my teenage grandsons and remind them that baseball players, like presidents and prime ministers, put on their pants the same way we non-athletes do.
Wishing you another 50 years of writing about baseball!
Stephen M. Flatow
Long Branch, N.J.
Mazel Tov!
On the bar mitzvah of Saul Singer’s grandson Judah (“Mazel Tov, Judah!” June 2):
Your column for this momentous occasion was fitting and amazing in its breadth and variety of items displayed. What an education I get perusing your columns, week after week, in The Jewish Press.
Continued nachas from your family and success in your unique endeavors.
Miriam Fishman
Los Angeles, Calif.
Open House Season?
Real leaders practice what they preach. New York City Mayor Eric Adams wants to pay residents to shelter migrants in their own homes. How many will he put up in Gracie Mansion or his Brooklyn apartment? Will other elected officials, such as Governor Hochul, Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, City Comptroller Lander, Public Advocate Williams, City Council Speaker Adams along with other NYC Congress members, state senators, Assembly members, borough presidents, district attorneys and Council members who support the Big Apple as a sanctuary city open their homes to asylum seekers? New Yorkers who have summer residences in the Hamptons or the Catskills can open their homes as well. Who will be legally liable should an asylum seeker commit a crime while living in your home? Talk is cheap, but actions speak louder!
Larry Penner
Great Neck, N.Y.
The Descent of CUNY Law
Fatima Mohammed’s recent CUNY Law School commencement address was openly seditious, calling on students to “fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism, and Zionism around the world,” till the “empires of destruction” are defeated (Editorial, “Freedom of Speech Implies Responsibility,” June 9). She openly called for the dismantling of the Jewish State by violent means, charging that “Israel continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshipers, murdering the old, the young” and that the state encourages “lynch mobs.”
Appallingly, Fatima’s scurrilous remarks received a standing ovation from fellow graduates, faculty and administrators. Public reaction was predictably highly negative. A group of Inaugural Class of ’86 graduates decried “an unforgivable betrayal of the values upon which the institution was founded,” adding, “Our legacy has been disgraced and we are disgusted by a faculty and administration that have nurtured this toxic intolerant and antisemitic environment.”
Strong support though, did come from the school’s Jewish Law Students Association, whose members, bizarrely including Mohammed, don’t have to be Jewish. Their “statement in support of Fatima” was a predictable pastiche of anti-Israel rancor. It “denounced murder and dispossession committed in our name.” It defended her against a “targeted racist hate campaign,” part of a larger “Zionist organizations harassment campaign against Palestinian and Muslim students.”
The four-decade difference between those two classes couldn’t be starker. CUNY Law School is now lost, wandering in a woke desert. A significant number of its Jewish students have bought into Palestinian narrative lies. Others are demoralized and despondent, servile to the “mixed multitude” that has even infiltrated their own organization. Fighting back are a few brave students and faculty (SAFE CUNY).
The entire Jewish community should have their back.
Richard D. Wilkins
Syracuse, N.Y.
