Characters: Don Halperin

State Senator Donald Halperin became my closest friend among my fellow legislators. If ever a politician remained entirely immune to the ego inflation common among elected officials, it was Don. Not even a shred, a molecule, of arrogance attached itself to this man.

In 1970, while in his third year at Brooklyn Law School, Don assembled his friends from college, law school, and the Manhattan Beach neighborhood in Brooklyn, where he would live his entire life, and took on a pillar of Brooklyn politics, the long-term incumbent State Senator Willie Rosenblatt, who had served since 1945. Don won, and became the youngest person ever elected to the New York State Senate.

When I took office in 1981, I quickly learned that having Halperin as my own state senator conferred a tremendous advantage. State senators and Assembly members from the same neighborhoods often have occasion to introduce each other’s bills in their respective houses as lead sponsor. In Tales from the Sausage Factory (pages 62-64), I explained how the Assembly passed a tenant protection bill of mine in my very first working day of session, and the bill became law – because Halperin carried it in the Senate.

Only Halperin, among the Senate minority Democrats, regularly won passage for a great many of his bills. In fact, he got more bills passed than many Republicans – an astonishing feat in a legislature where majority parties generally give very short shrift to minority party legislators. What made Halperin so unusual? By the time I arrived, he had already been around for a decade. More important, everyone liked him – and liked him a lot. His total and obvious decency just shone.

His extraordinary sense of humor, no doubt, contributed to his popularity. Back home in Brooklyn, Sunday mornings often found him and me on the same breakfast meetings track: synagogue men’s clubs, Jewish War Veterans Posts, B’nai Brith chapters, civic associations, parent-teacher associations, whatever. We sat together as the treasurer of a small B’nai Brith chapter in a low-income neighborhood took pledges from members, many of them in small multiples of “chai,” the Hebrew word for life, but also, because of the numerical value of Hebrew letters, indicative of the number 18. Most of these pledges were twice chai, three times chai, or chai by itself, but one member pledged “six times chai.” This treasurer did not have an especially quick head for arithmetic, and struggled with the multiplication for a while. Halperin nudged me. “Dan, Dan,” he whispered. “Pledge ‘pi chai.’”

I did not personally observe one of the most famous Halperin stories, but heard about it. At one point Halperin served as the ranking Democratic minority member of the Senate Codes Committee, chaired by the formidable Dale Volker. Dale had been a Buffalo police officer, and later a lawyer. He led the battle for the reinstitution of the death penalty in New York, which he won in 1995 (nominally – the State never executed anyone under that version of the statute).  No one incarnated the “law and order” stance better than Dale. His appearance and demeanor also tended to the strict and forbidding, with a typical police officer’s bristle-cut hair style, erect and military bearing, and a dour countenance.

If you kill someone’s dog, courts in New York have held that you become liable not merely for the economic value of the dog, but for the emotional pain you have caused the owner as well. For a number of years, a fervent cat lover had lobbied Albany legislators to extend such liability to anyone responsible for the death of a pet cat. A compliant legislator introduced the bill, but most other members satirically dubbed it the “flat cat” bill, suggesting the image of a cat that had been run over.

As committee chairs customarily do, Volker would have his Codes Committee staff schedule the bill for a “kill” calendar (pun not intended) near the end of session. Among many such pieces of legislation considered trivial, it would be treated with a motion to “hold” by the chair, and the committee members would unanimously support the motion without debate, thus consigning such a bill to oblivion for at least another year.  Any member of the committee wishing to debate the bill could object to this procedure, but toward the end of session most members had too little spare time to bother.

Volker brought up the flat cat bill, with a motion to hold. Halperin politely objected, and requested debate. By this time, Volker knew Halperin well, and knew something was up. “Okay, Senator,” he allowed, bracing himself for what he knew would be some kind of classic Halperin performance. “What is your objection?” Don began. “I understand that people love their cats, as well as others love their dogs. But this bill actually poses an equal protection problem. After all, people can become very attached to other pets as well – birds, for example. I believe that if we are going to protect a pussy, there is no good reason why we should not also protect a cockatoo.”

Legend has it that Volker made valiant efforts to match Halperin’s straight face, and succeeded for several seconds.

In 1993, Governor Cuomo appointed Halperin as New York State housing commissioner. But with Cuomo’s defeat in the 1994 election, Halperin was out of public office for the first time in his adult life.  The loss had no effect whatsoever on his demeanor. Without vanity or vainglory as a public official, he remained exactly the same out of office. Nor did his transition to the private sector, as a lobbyist in a law firm, diminish his sense of humor.

Some years later, around 2004, I met another good friend from the Legislature, Oliver Koppell, at his law firm at 40^th Street and Park Avenue, and we began walking to a nearby Chinese restaurant. As is our habit, we got deeply involved in a conversation about politics, philosophy, or both well before we even reached the restaurant, so by the time we sat down, we were mostly oblivious to our surroundings. The waiter began setting the table as we sat, placing silverware, napkins, and water glasses in front of us. However, the waiter performed so clumsily that he was almost impossible to ignore. A good ten minutes in, he was still reaching over us to place items on the table, and eventually he was reaching from behind me, with one hand on either side of me, simultaneously placing two items on the table.

At this point, we could not help but notice that he was not Chinese. He also was not wearing a waiter’s uniform. He was Don Halperin.

Life with Don was not only jokes. It was also fun and games. One afternoon, early in my Assembly service, Don asked me to meet him in Coney Island, near but not in our respective districts. At that point I was ready to agree immediately out of respect for my senior colleague from the upper house, assuming we had some matter of importance to go over, perhaps in confidence. Actually, the early 1980s saw tremendous growth in the sophistication and popularity of computer games. Don had brought me to the Coney Island amusement park to try some of the new ones.

He kept in great physical shape. He had swum competitively in high school and college, and still did 75 pushups each night. When he told me this, I tried it one night in Albany, since I always considered myself to be in pretty good shape too. However, not having practiced pushups for a while, for the next week or so my colleagues and constituents, watching me walk around, must have thought I was practicing my impression of Quasimodo.

Sometime in the 1990s Don brought a karate instructor to Albany, and at 7 a.m., once a week, we brushed up on our martial arts skills.

In the physical skill area, Don most impressed me with his continued ability to perform a kazatski dance, in which while remaining in a low squatting position, you alternate kicking each leg out straight, quickly and in time to the Russian music.

Ironically and tragically, Don fell victim to a rare form of cancer, and died at the age of 60. His obituary in the New York Times included a classic Halperin story, resonant with his humor and humility. Writing about his trip to a reunion in Los Angeles of New York transplants there organized by a friend he knew from his Boy Scout troop in Brooklyn, the obituary closed by noting, “Of his journey to the city that stole the Dodgers, Mr. Halperin said, ‘I retaliated by making a long, boring speech.’”

Reactions to changing demographics

The older established residents of the district did not react to the Russian immigrants the same way they reacted to the Chinese. Many of my constituents, often of Russian-Jewish ancestry themselves, regarded these new Russian immigrants as obnoxious and pushy. Indeed, after a lifetime of struggling with corrupt officials, with inadequate supplies of food and merchandise in poorly-stocked stores, or with unfriendly bureaucrats in Moscow or elsewhere, some of these immigrants had developed rather aggressive habits, arguably as a survival mechanism. Ironically, then, my older constituents, ancestrally Russian-Jewish themselves, would plead with me: “Get us more Chinese, not these obnoxious Russians!” The Chinese were “nice,” they explained – polite, not pushy.

I had some trouble with the negative characterization. My constituents had no doubt forgotten that when their grandparents and great-grandparents came to America in the great wave of East European Jewish immigration in the 1880s, the well-established, assimilated German Jews of that era also regarded them as uncouth and obnoxious. The highly-noticeable few generated an image that stuck to them all in that generation and in ours. My grandfather, who was part of the 1880s group, could recite large tracts of Shakespeare by heart – in Yiddish, of course, not English – but was likely more scholarly and gentlemanly than many of the “superior” German Jews that looked down on him.

We do owe those German Jews some debts, however. Jacob Schiff and others like him supported the Settlement Houses and other charities that made life tolerable for many of those impoverished new immigrants. They also created Hebrew Technical Institute, where the children of the new immigrants, “obviously” unsuited for academic work, could learn to work with their hands at trades. Under the leadership of its beloved principal, Dr. Edgar S. Barney, who instilled in his students the spirit behind its motto “hands, heart, and head,” my father and my uncle, who became respectively an interior designer and company owner, and a teacher of the deaf, were proud graduates of Hebrew Tech, later the model for Brooklyn Tech. By 1910 the school had already numbered “the head of the Parks Commission in Newark,” New Jersey, and “mechanics, architects, electrical engineers, factory Superintendents [sic] and owners, teachers, authors, and inventors” among its graduates.  Graduates in Cooper Union, Hebrew Technical Institute Holds Its Commencement Exercises, The New York Times, May 12, 1910.

Yet another demographic change altered the district’s political coloration. Especially in East Midwood, east of Ocean Avenue, and in the further western sections of Midwood west of Coney Island Avenue and north of Kings Highway, as the older constituents died or moved to Florida, very religious Jews purchased their homes. The Orthodox Jews of my childhood did not differ very significantly from other Jews. They kept strictly kosher, while we ate more-or-less “kosher style.” They had separate sections for men and women in their synagogues. The men might wear yarmulkas, or hats, all the time, not just in synagogue – but some of them did not even do that. But these new Orthodox Jews made much more strenuous efforts to separate themselves. Some, like the various sects of Hassidim, wore beards and long coats if they were men, and wigs and long dresses if they were women, with their arms always covered. If they were modern Orthodox, they still took pains to dress “modestly.”  And overwhelmingly, they followed the conservative line in politics. Their preferred newspaper, the Jewish Press, touted a sickening version of right-wing politics, often bordering on racism.

West of Coney Island Avenue and south of Kings Highway came another kind of Orthodox Jewish community, the “Syrians.” I put the term in quotation marks because the community included Jews from other Middle East countries as well, but the Syrians predominated. During the mid-1980s, Representative Stephen Solarz persuaded the Syrian government to let many Jewish women leave, arguing that there were too few marriageable Jewish men in Syria for them. Jerrold Nadler, Steve Solarz: Foreign Affairs Expert, The Jewish Week, October 30, 2010.  The publicity surrounding their immigration to the Ocean Parkway area helped draw more and more Jewish immigrants from the Middle East to that part of the 45^th. By and large, this community vigorously proclaims its Orthodoxy but privately, I have been given to understand, practices a more relaxed version. Although it tends toward political conservatism as well, it had less impact on the voting results in the 45^th because many, if not most of its members have summer homes in Deal, an expensive town on the New Jersey shore, and register to vote from those residences. It exercised significant political impact through campaign contributions, however, since many of its members had tremendous skill at retail business. Members of that community created the “Crazy Eddie” appliance stores and the Duane-Reade drugstore chain, among many other very successful businesses.

Thirteen years after I left the Assembly seat, what to many was a startling political reversal reflected, in part, these demographics changes. In the special election held on primary day, September 13, 2011 to replace Anthony Weiner, who had resigned his position as the Member of Congress for the 9^th Congressional District in Brooklyn and Queens, the Republican-Conservative candidate, Robert Turner, defeated David Weprin, the Democratic candidate, who also had the support of the Working Families and Independence parties.  In the 45^th Assembly district, Turner won 5916 votes, or just under 70 percent of the total, to Weprin’s 2605 votes. Statement and Return Report for Certification, Special. Assembly 23-27-54-73 Congress 9 09/13/2011 Kings County All Parties and Independent Bodies, page 2, City of New York Board of Elections.

But the transformation had been well underway while I still served. In the next post, I will explain how this change in character affected the politics of the district then.

Changing demographics

As Rouchefoucald said several hundred years ago, the only constant in life is change. Like everything else, the 45^th Assembly District changed. In 1980, it still turned out one of the largest Democratic primary votes of any district in New York, with about 18,000 votes cast in my own race, at the bottom of the ticket. Statewide or national campaigns, higher on the ballot, usually attract much more attention, and more votes. But the decline in participation in the 45^th meant that by the hotly contested 2010 Democratic primary for New York State Attorney General, a race much higher up on the ballot, only 3016 people cast their votes. While I don’t have exact figures for the interim years, the 45^th cast only about 10,000 votes in the Democratic primary for Congress in 1998, and a similar number in the Democratic primary for District Attorney in 1989.

With the decline in their active identification with the Democratic party, voters in the 45^th   Assembly District also starting voting more Republican, as part of a generally more conservative outlook. What accounted for this change?

From 1978 to 1988, more than 200,000 apartments in New York City changed from rentals to cooperatives.  While no precise figures exist, my 1980 campaign staff estimated that at least half of the voters in the district rented their living quarters. The co-op conversion boom must have reduced that fraction, and probably cut it in half, leaving no more than a quarter of the voters as tenants. At least one American study has shown that, ceteris parabis, homeowners, generally, tend to vote more conservatively than tenants.

Changes in ethnic demography more clearly altered the political configuration of the district. Of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews who came to the United States in the 1980s, enough settled in Brighton Beach to earn it, early on, the nickname “Odessa by the Sea.” By the late 1980s it had become predominantly, even overwhelmingly, first-generation Russian-American. Enough Russians moved into Sheepshead Bay and Manhattan Beach to constitute substantial portions of their populations as well. The immigrants, for the most part, felt that they owed a great debt to Ronald Reagan, under whose administration they arrived, for his strong efforts to press the Soviet leadership to permit their exit. Reagan had insisted on conditioning the grant of “most-favored-nation” status to the Soviet Union, an important boon to the Soviets’ international trade status, to its willingness to allow Jews and “refuseniks” to leave. For many such refugees, their hatred of Communism might have driven them in the direction of conservative Republican politics anyway; their loyalty to Reagan reinforced such tendencies.

The 45^th also saw the development of a significant community of newly-arrived Chinese Americans. When I first ran in 1980, I was introduced to Carl Rosenberg, a shoe store proprietor, as the “mayor” of Avenue U. Carl was close to 90 at the time, and in that regard served also as the archetype of the street’s business owners. Frank Sinatra, I heard, still got his semolina bread shipped to him from the bakery across Avenue U from my office on the corner of Homecrest Avenue. Elderly Jews and Italians owned and ran the vast majority of the clothing stores, restaurants, dry cleaners, and the like on Avenue U, but many of them ran their establishments mostly out of habit. Stores were closing, customers were few.  Without the energy of an influx of new immigrants, Avenue U could have become moribund. By 1990, though, the few store signs on the block that were not lettered in Chinese were lettered in Vietnamese or Russian. By then, the wonderful Chinese supermarket just around the corner on my side of Avenue U rivaled anything in Chinatown. I used to have to go to Mott Street to find certain ingredients for my Chinese cooking. Now, they were two minutes from my office door.

Fighting with Constituents

At one point, I was battling Governor Cuomo on one front and Mayor Koch on another. My wife disingenuously asked me if she was under a misapprehension in assuming that politicians were supposed to be especially good at making friends, not enemies.  But I didn’t only antagonize fellow politicians. I sometimes antagonized constituents, too.

I thought that if I regularly pretended to like people I didn’t like, the constant pretense might spill over, so that my affection for people I did like might become less real. Perhaps I was merely rationalizing self-indulgence by allowing myself to vent at annoying people. But I really was worried about becoming less than genuine.

I admired Jimmy Carter’s letter to an obnoxious constituent, drafted for him by Jody Powell, in which he noted that one of the many burdens of elective office was the responsibility of answering “barely legible letters from morons,” and “respectfully” suggested that the correspondent “take two running jumps and go straight to hell.”  Similarly, I liked Liz Holtzman’s standard response to the usual block-lettered nasty missive with lots of exclamation points: “I thought you would want to know that some obvious lunatic has been sending out notes over your signature.”

In those years I thought that enactment of a death penalty statute, drafted to virtually assure that no one would be executed, would help restore the frayed fabric of government legitimacy. Aeschylus’s play The Eumenides warned of the greater dangers societies face when they attempt to “banish the Furies” rather than confining them in a place of honor. While most of my constituents supported my position, many disagreed, often quite articulately. So many disagreed that I drafted a form letter explaining my position. Unfortunately, it included a typographical error misspelling “Aeschylus.” Still, most recipients seemed satisfied that at least I had a reasonable basis for my view. One constituent, however, returned a ferocious response. How dare I cite Aeschylus, a cultivated person, in support of my “simeon-like” views? And, of course, I knew no better but than to misspell his name.

My friend Ibby Lang suggested my response.  I respectfully acknowledged our difference on the issue. I then added, “Since you have indicated an interest in spelling, I thought you would want to know that Simeon is a man’s name, while the term you sought was no doubt “simian,” or “ape-like.” Thus, your submission was both ungrammatical and mis-spelled. Please feel free to call on me if I can be of any further assistance.” Needless to say, she did not.

Some years later, I engaged with a constituent in a considerably less literary interaction. I had left the Quentin Road entrance to the Kings Highway stop as the final day of my subway stop series, as described in an earlier post. Two weeks straight of subway stops drained my supplies of energy and of bonhomie. I had started doing subway stops in Liz’s 1970 district leader race, or maybe earlier, and covered stops innumerable times in my Council races, so I had well more than a decade of experience, and I invariably picked up any leaflets that commuters had dropped on the ground. I had at least two reasons: I did not want to leave the impression that I had untidy habits; and I did not want people stepping on pictures of the candidate’s face, especially if the candidate were me.

As I have mentioned, some commuters accept the leaflets; most commuters ignore the subway-stop politician; a few make unkind comments. As always, I had arrived at around 6:30 a.m. Near 8:30 a.m., the very end of my visit, one tough-looking fellow in his mid-twenties ignored me and walked up the stairs toward the elevated tracks, as had so many others. This fellow, however, before disappearing from view, yelled down at me, very sarcastically, “And I suppose you’re going to clean up all those leaflets after you leave!!”

In no mood for this, I replied, “Yes. And I hope you are not one of the pigs that dropped them!” At this he came back down the stairs, yelling “are you calling me a pig?!,” and clearly signaling by the position of his fists that he intended an immediate physical confrontation. I must confess that I was delighted. My nerves were such that I truly looked forward to a fight. I snapped into free-fighting stance, and said with some enthusiasm, “Come on. Come on!”

Astonished, he asked, not unreasonably, “What kind of politician are you?!!” He called over to a police officer, who happened to have just arrived in the station, and asked him to arrest me, but the officer explained that people are allowed to campaign in subway stations. The young fellow departed.

As I cooled down, I began to think about the possible outcomes. He might have beaten me up, which would have been unpleasant. What if I had beaten him up, however? I had a vision of a news photo of the fellow, sporting a cast on his arm and a black eye or broken nose, captioned “Is this how Assemblyman Feldman treats his constituents?”

From that day forward I decided that physically fighting with constituents never qualifies as a good idea. From this realization, I tried to advance to the next level: that screaming at constituents isn’t really a good idea either. But I occasionally violated the second rule.

I had to invoke the first rule to another politician on one occasion, however. Irving Yanoff, an overweight older man who had been a political fixture for decades, regularly campaigned for conservative Democratic candidates on street corners. (Apparently registered at one time as a member of the Liberal Party ,  he received less than 7% of the vote in a three-way Democratic primary against State Senator Marty Solomon in 1980, and about 12 % of the vote as the Liberal Party candidate in the general election against Assembly Member Frank Barbaro in 1970 .)  He came equipped with a naturally loud voice as well as a bullhorn. When Liz faced Alan Hevesi in the 1993 New York City Comptroller primary, I campaigned with her in front of the Brighton Baths, where of course I was popular among the members, introducing her to them and praising her as the Baths emptied for the day. Yanoff stood five feet from her, heckling her vociferously. Probably because of my death penalty vote, Yanoff liked me. Liz said to me, sotto voce, “do something about him!”

I moved next to Irving and chatted with him, leaving Liz to greet the populace in peace. This lasted for about five minutes, when Yanoff returned to the bullhorn, and I returned to introducing Liz. Every so often I’d interrupt him again, and he and I would chat amicably for a while. The pattern kept repeating. But Liz was getting frustrated. Finally, she said to me, with some annoyance, “my brother would have hit him!” Having undergone my earlier epiphany, I explained: “Liz, I’m an elected official. I can’t hit people.”

Doughnuts

To this day I cannot eat doughnuts.

Section 3-400 of New York State’s election law requires the appointment of two Democrats and two Republicans as “inspectors” at the polling place for each election district. The local political party organizations submit lists of candidates for those posts to the local board of elections. In New York City today, those inspectors get paid $200 a day, and if they work both on primary day and on Election Day, and attend a training class, they get an additional $75. . The pay reached this level sometime in the 1990s; it used to be less. But since poll workers have to arrive before 6 a.m. to set up for the voters, and need to stay past 9 p.m. to close the polls, they work a roughly 16-hour day. At one time, these jobs were considered attractive political plums, and in some places they still are, but the State had to raise the pay because in many communities too few members of the political clubs continued to think so.

During the course of the day, these poll workers meet many of their neighbors – the ones that vote, that is. Most likely, the poll workers know many of their neighbors to begin with. They may well have solicited their signatures on nominating petitions, and in other ways played active roles in their neighborhoods. Many of these poll workers take up their same stations at the polls for decades. Thus, to the extent they look favorably on a politician, the politician likely benefits.

In the 45^th Assembly District, and elsewhere, politicians developed the tradition of visiting each polling place, and bringing with them some candy or cookies for the workers. During the course of a long day, the poll workers presumably get hungry.

I thought I’d go a little further. Doughnuts would make a bigger impression, and perhaps help the poll workers remember me from among the various visiting politicians. By my impecunious standards, they cost a lot of money, which I paid personally, not out of campaign funds, which I was hoarding for an actual campaign.

Electioneering within the polling place, however, violates the law, which I would not do. So, only when my name was NOT on the ballot, I would make my rounds. To the best of my recollection, I began my personal doughnut-delivery tradition on primary day 1982, and continued it on primary day in 1984, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, and 1996. Since I always had a Republican challenger, I could not deliver my doughnuts on Election Day in even-numbered years. Not being in the habit – and perhaps feeling that once a year was enough – I skipped Election Day in the 1993 and 1997 mayoral years too. I had to skip the 1989 mayoral year primary too, because that year I ran in the primary for the Democratic nomination for Brooklyn District Attorney.

My district, like most Assembly districts, had about 100 election districts. With four inspectors for each, this required 400 doughnuts. I would order them from the kosher Dunkin’ Doughnuts on Avenue M, since some of our inspectors kept kosher, pick them up at 5 a.m. on primary day morning, stack the boxes in the back of my Dodge Aries K-car, and drive to polling place delivering them all day. The poll workers liked them. My car stank of doughnuts for weeks thereafter.

(I couldn’t do the doughnut run in 1988 because I had a primary challenge that year, so my name was on the ballot. Harry Smoler had served as the Assembly Member from the 41^st A.D. just to my east from 1979 through 1982. The 1982 reapportionment dismembered his district, merging the largest chunk of it with Helene Weinstein’s district, which had been based in East Flatbush, but giving me such neighborhoods as Gerritsen Beach and Marine Park, as well as additional sections of Sheepshead Bay. He lost primary races against Helene in 1982 [Howard Graubard pointed out that my earlier version of this post had incorrect dates for Harry's primary against Helene] and against me in 1988, getting less than a quarter of the vote.)

Public servant

Elected officials almost always call themselves “public servants.” That doesn’t truly describe the role of a president, a U.S. senator, a governor, or most statewide office-holders. In many ways they are really public masters, not public servants.

As the Assembly Member from the 45^th District, I knew I was a public servant. For one thing, I lived in the servants’ quarters.

As noted earlier, I had moved to my aunt and uncle’s house on Falmouth Street in Manhattan Beach in 1977, after my father sold our family house in Belle Harbor. They had paying tenants on the second floor, but I lived in the attic crawl space on the third floor. Given its triangular shape, there weren’t many places I could stand up straight, but I didn’t mind, especially since they did not charge me any rent. However after I won the primary and was assured of election, they gently informed me that as an elected official, I really had to get my own place to live.

At that time New York State paid its Assembly members $27,500 a year, slightly less than the $30,000 a year to which my salary had risen while working for Schumer. Although theoretically a part-time job, the 45^th Assembly District had grown accustomed to full-time service from my predecessors Solarz and Schumer, with the Assembly Member available in his neighborhood office during the day and at community meetings every night and weekend, unless in Albany for legislative business, and would resent any lesser degree of service. Therefore, that salary represented the extent of my income, except for the three or four thousand dollars I might be paid each year for adjunct teaching at L.I.U. or N.Y.U.

So I had to budget very tightly. I looked for the cheapest apartment I could find. I found it on the sixth floor, the top floor, of 50 Shore Boulevard, a building more-or-less at the intersection of three of the neighborhoods I represented: Manhattan Beach, Brighton Beach, and Sheepshead Bay. While my apartment stood literally across the street from the water of Sheepshead Bay itself, a nice location, it was so tiny that you might walk in without noticing you had just passed through the kitchen. Other than a small bathroom, the room you entered was all there was, and it was not large. Cater cornered across the street were the houses of Manhattan Beach, the wealthiest part of my district. But very few of my constituents in any part of the district lived in quarters cheaper or smaller than mine.

[Thanks to Adrienne Knoll, this edition corrects the date of this story from 1983 to 1984, and notes that Bay News reported it.] During the winter of my fourth year in the Assembly, my ceiling started to leak. I told Bill Collins, our building superintendent. He explained that in a top-floor apartment, like mine, deterioration in the roof caused the problem, but the roof was under repair, so the problem would soon disappear. In the next couple of months, it got worse. Bill then informed me that the management and the roofers were in dispute, which would have to be resolved before work could continue.

By April, I had to place buckets under the leak. I also stopped paying my rent, in protest. The Assembly Speaker and Senate Majority Leader schedule the closing day of session for sometime in June, but that rarely happens. By mid- or late June, the effort to close often requires daily sessions, sometimes including weekends. That year, session kept me away from my apartment for at least a week. We finished on the last weekend in June. It had been a rainy week. Probably from getting too little rest, I had a bad cold. I got a lift home from a colleague – Joe Ferris, if remember correctly – and reached my apartment door  at about 1 in the morning, lonely, sick, cold, wet, and depressed. The first thing I saw on my floor was a pile of rent bills, stuffed under the door. The second thing I saw on the floor was 24 square feet of ceiling. Broken rafters hung halfway down from the roof. Wet plaster dust covered my bed and floor. I was not happy.

But I kept my composure in one important respect. I didn’t touch a thing, except to clear off the bed enough to go to sleep. The next morning I called the New York Post and Daily News. The next day’s Post had a vertical wide-angle lens shot, the full length of the page, of the floor covered with rubble, me sitting disconsolately on my bed, and the rafters hanging from the ceiling. The News had a smaller picture, but good enough. And of course the Bay News, the wonderful local weekly that always gave my doings excellent coverage, had the story as well.

On Wednesday, July 4, I stood in front of the Brighton Baths, greeting the normal July 4^th number of entering members – several thousand. Approximately two out of three said, “Oh, Mr. Feldman, we saw your picture in the newspaper! I’m so sorry about what happened to you.” If I had ever needed to show my solidarity with my fellow tenants in the district, this did it.

Back in Albany the next week, Assembly Speaker Mel Miller joked, “Well, either you are completely honest, or you’re the cheapest s.o.b. in politics.”

Graduation speeches and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Citizenship Award

Chuck Schumer had taught me that most constituents never attend any community or civic meetings. They may drive to work, or work at home, so you might not see them at subway stops either. They may never show up at any other public gathering, but they attend their child’s graduation from school. Therefore, if they see you and hear you speak at that graduation, they may well feel kindly toward you.

Including public and religious elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools, I could attend more than three dozen graduations in my district each year. Several obstacles stood in my way. I had to get invited. Schools held graduation ceremonies in late June, when negotiations on all legislation had to come to a close, so legislators like myself were under the greatest pressure to win such legislative victories as we could manage, usually requiring our presence in Albany. Also, we generally went into session at least five days a week at that time of year, and those sessions often went late at night. Finally, schools did not always bother to schedule their graduations at different times, so many overlapped or were simultaneous.

Of my political colleagues who made the graduation rounds, most gave awards – the Senator Markowitz award, the Borough President’s award, and so forth. I had won the John F. Kennedy Memorial Citizenship Award when I graduated from high school. Still a Kennedy loyalist, and not comfortable with the idea of putting my own name on an award, I decided to ask each bank in my district to underwrite enough savings bonds for me to present one to each student selected by his or her school to be the recipient of that year’s JFK Memorial Citizenship Award. My staff member, Naomi Broadwin, who herself had been the president of the Parents’ Association in P.S. 197, one of our public elementary schools, succeeded in recruiting the banks, so that elementary school winners would get $25 bonds, middle school winners $50 bonds, and high school winners (we only had a few high schools) $100 bonds. With the incentive of another award with which to recognize deserving students, all the schools eventually offered me invitations to speak.

Naomi also had the challenging task of scheduling me. Scheduling the graduation speeches proved especially challenging, but she did it. Sometimes session would end at midnight, but Naomi would have me on a seven a.m. flight out of Albany airport, arriving at JFK at eight. She would pick me up at the airport, and drive me to each of four or five schools in a morning. By eleven a.m. we would have finished, and she’d get me back to the airport for a noon return flight to Albany.

It was not easy to find something different and entertaining to say to the graduates, sandwiched, as I usually was, between other elected officials making their graduation speeches. Most of those officials were city council members, who only had to commute from Manhattan, or Democratic state senators, for whom attendance at session, in those years, was usually far less pressing, since they were in the minority. Schumer, of course, continued to speak at an amazing number of graduations when he was in Congress. Even as a U.S. Senator he hits graduations quite a bit, although in that role he gets to address college graduations with tremendous audiences.

One such day in my second or third year, I sat next to José Serrano on one of my return plane trips to Albany. Joe chaired the Consumer Affairs committee in the Assembly at that time. He later chaired Education, and after that got elected to Congress. He volunteered the anecdote he habitually used at the graduations in his Bronx district, which he said he had inherited from Stanley Simon, who had been a Bronx Borough President. It went like this:

The fellow’s mother shook him awake. “Get up! You’re late! You have to get to school!” Sleepily, he complained: “I don’t want to go to school! The teachers hate me. The kids throw spitballs at me. Give me three reasons why I have to go!” She answered, “Number one, you’re late. Number two, you’re forty-three years old. Number three, you’re the principal.”

I now had my standard joke, which I used most of the time for the next decade and a half, switching to some inferior alternative only when I could see that the real principals and teachers could not stand to hear it another year in a row.

The schedule I had to keep in those graduation weeks, though, was brutal. And in those days the Mohawk and Allegheny flights each way sometimes shook us passengers like a milkshake, broiled us, or just plain nauseated us. One year I decided that so long as I was torturing myself anyway – pounding away every day at my committee chairs and the Assembly staff and the Senate to get my legislation through, finishing session so late I couldn’t get to bed until midnight or one a.m., getting up at five to make seven a.m. flights each morning – I might as well do my subway stops too. Perhaps I found a five a.m. flight, or a 10 p.m. flight at night if session ended early enough, but somehow I added to my schedule, managing to be at my subway entrances from 6:30 to 8:30 each morning, before starting my graduation rounds. After a week or so of this, I was making my way to my seat in the Chamber at about one in the afternoon, a little late, having come straight from the airport. Helene Weinstein, who represented the district just due east of mine but who attended graduations only on a more reasonable schedule, occupied the seat just to my right at this time. She took one look at me and said with serious concern, “You should check into a hospital.”

I thanked her for caring, but assured her that I felt better than I looked, although I suppose that wasn’t saying very much. Anyway, I survived.

[Thank you to Erica Sherman,  who corrected a mis-statement, and to Jerry Skurnik, who spotted a somewhat misleading statement, in an earlier version of this post.]

My hostile relationship with Mario Cuomo started in 1987 when Cuomo used the no-show job scandal with Assemblywoman Gerdi Lipschutz, noted in a previous post, as the basis for a relentless attack on the ethics of the Legislature. Virtually daily, for weeks, he lambasted the Legislature, called for the establishment of an investigating commission, which, as then constituted, was designed only to attack and smear. The major daily newspapers’ editorial pages, supporting Cuomo, essentially proclaimed as dishonest any legislator who opposed it. Adam Nagourney, then of the Daily News, went to each legislator with the question, “if the bill establishing the commission came to the floor today, would you support it or oppose it?” I responded that I would support it if it were clear that the commission’s mandate would be expanded to include the executive branch as well. I suggested inquiries into any possible relationship between the Governor’s position on Westway and contributions from the construction industry, the award of managing positions in public authority bond syndications and contributions from major investment banking firms, and the like. Nagourney, of course, printed my response.

The next morning I got the only phone call from Mario Cuomo I ever received. I heard the Governor of the State of New York virtually ranting and raving on the telephone. Among other comments, he claimed that he had never attacked the Legislature. On my desk was that morning’s newspapers, quoting him as doing just that. But I could not get a word in edgewise. Finally, he screamed, “You’re going to learn what frustration means!” and hung up. While I did not tell this story to the press, I did tell it to several – hundred – other people. So the next day the story of the phone call appeared in the papers. [Sources for this story can be found in Tales from the Sausage Factory on page 338.]

Cuomo took his revenge in 1989, when I ran to become Brooklyn’s District Attorney to succeed Liz, who ran and won that year to become New York City Comptroller. My campaign had issued advertising criticizing my chief opponent, Joe Hynes, for his presidency of the Breezy Point cooperative, an organization notorious in my youth for excluding not only from home ownership, but even from visits, non-Irish Catholics from anywhere, including my childhood neighborhood, Belle Harbor, only about two miles away on the same Rockaway peninsula. By the time I ran Breezy included a few Italian-American families, and perhaps a handful of intermarried Jews or Latinos, but certainly no blacks. Cuomo used what he called my “scurrilous” attack on Hynes as his excuse for breaking his rule against endorsements in Democratic primaries.  Not only did Cuomo endorse Joe Hynes (and, I believe, as I will explain in a future blog, indirectly encourage the Appellate Division to keep a third candidate on the ballot to split my support, in violation of law), but after I lost, he publicly blamed me for a different leaflet distributed by my campaign, although I had known nothing about it.

Lambda Independent Democrats, a gay Democratic club in Brooklyn, had endorsed Hynes over me in the race. Although no other campaign leaflet went out without my prior review and approval, in the final days of the campaign someone arranged for a leaflet saying “Gay Democrats Support Joe Hynes. Who Do You Support?” to be distributed only in Borough Park, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood where, presumably, homophobia could be exploited most effectively. A few weeks after my defeat, the press reported that at Cuomo’s urging, I was under investigation by the State Commission on Public Integrity for this leaflet.   The Commission resulted from the earlier campaign Cuomo had launched against the Legislature, but under the leadership of the reasonable John Feerick, at that time Dean of Fordham Law School, operated in a fairer and far less biased manner than Cuomo would apparently have preferred. Thus, nothing would come of this “investigation.”

I had consistently supported gay rights despite fairly fierce opposition from segments of my own constituency. Defeated and in debt, I was so beaten down at the time that I could not muster the will to respond. To my lasting regret, I failed to say what I should have: “I am sure that Mario Cuomo knew no more about the ‘Vote for Cuomo, not the Homo’ signs in his 1977 mayoral race against Ed Koch than I knew about the leaflet in my race. But he’s hardly in a position to criticize.”   In fact, I am by no means sure that Cuomo knew no more about that piece than I knew about the piece my campaign put out.

This story has a coda. The following January, Cuomo invited the Democratic members of the Assembly to the Mansion for an informal dinner, obviously in an attempt to improve his relationships. In the center of the room stood a glass case, containing a conciliatory letter to Cuomo from Anthony Genovese, with whom he had had some friction, accompanied by two bottles of wine Genovese had sent Cuomo. The display seemed a tasteless demonstration of Cuomo’s exercise of dominance over Genovese.

After refreshments, Cuomo made some brief remarks about his plans for the upcoming session, and then asked if any of the fifty or so legislators present had any questions. I did not raise my hand, but he called on me anyway. A slight titter went around the room, the audience being aware of the bad blood between us. I said to the group, “Well, you know I have always been one of the Governor’s favorites.” This got a bigger laugh. Then Cuomo said, “You always have been one of my favorites, except of course for a brief period a few months ago.” More chuckles. So I replied, “Well, I guess that means I have to send you a bottle of wine.” Uproar. We left it at that.

Koch and Cuomo

I had nothing against Mario Cuomo when he ran for Governor in 1982, but in the course of my work for Schumer I had gotten to know Ed Koch to some extent, and I liked him. When Schumer and I had in 1978 – quite justifiably – publicly criticized Blanche Bernstein, who had been running the City’s Human Resources Administration, Koch called us into a private meeting, and told us she was his “favorite” commissioner.  When we argued that our responsibility required us to expose City government mismanagement wherever we found it, and that he had quite enjoyed the results the previous year when he was running against incumbent mayor Abe Beame and the press had often headlined our exposures of failings of the Beame administration, Koch joked, in his trademark speech pattern, “but those were the baaaaaaad guys!” Previously, during that campaign, at his request and with him standing next to me I had called my friend Liz Holtzman to ask her to endorse him (she didn’t). Shortly after he took office, with my friends Ibby Lang and Gary Deane we put together what was in effect a road map for the Koch administration, pointing out all the crooks in various positions in the City’s poverty programs, which he used for a while to good effect.   So when Koch announced for Governor, I endorsed him.

After Cuomo won, he gave an inspiring inaugural address to the Legislature on New Year’s Day 1983. His famous keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in July 1984, “A Tale of Two Cities,” essentially recapitulated the earlier inaugural address.  When I heard the inaugural, I thought, “this will be a great governor.”

A few weeks later, he presented his budget proposals to the Legislature. While Mario faced legitimate pressure to impose drastic cuts, major targets of those cuts were the constituencies with the least political power, like the developmentally disabled and emotionally disturbed. Nowhere to be found was the “compassion” that seemed so central an element of his inaugural address. Mario gave great speeches. But as time went on, the disconnect between what he said and what he did became ever more apparent.

He did have some great lines. As a member of his audience on one occasion, he brought to my attention the great Peanuts cartoon where Schultz had Lucy, trying to console Charlie after losing yet another baseball game, say “Don’t feel bad, Charlie Brown, win some, lose some,” to which he responds, “Gee, wouldn’t that be great.”   In another speech, he reminded us that our grandparents or great-grandparents in Europe came over to the United States having been told that the streets were paved with gold. They discovered three things, he said: the streets weren’t paved with gold, they weren’t paved, and they had to pave them. (This wasn’t original with Mario either: see David A. Fryxell, Coming to America, Geneology.com.) In a third speech, he acknowledged that most people associated his background and interests with labor. (Although his previous work as an attorney provided little if any evidence for such assumptions, his chief political support in his first gubernatorial campaign did come from labor.) But, he asserted, he had family background in business, as well. His family had lost its business during the Great Depression. “A stockbroker jumped out of a window and landed on my father’s pushcart,” he joked.  I thought that line originated with Mario, but Jerry Skurnik told me he heard it long before Cuomo became an elected official

Mario cultivated the impression of himself as a cerebral governor. Students of his tenure would be hard-pressed, however, to find any accomplishment that resulted from his supposedly impressive intellect. In contrast, New York clearly benefited from the intellectual powers of Hugh Carey, who never made any great fuss about how brilliant he was.

We must not forget Mario Cuomo’s 1987 announcement of the “decade of the child.” When skeptics claim that its achievements were extremely modest, I counter that Andrew did quite well.

Hugh Carey: A Fond Memory

I served in the Assembly for the final two years of Hugh Carey’s term, all three of Mario Cuomo’s terms, and George Pataki’s first term (of three).

Although I overlapped Carey the least, his vivid personality left a strong impression. Fink, with his own powerful intellect, let us know that he greatly admired Carey’s handling of New York City’s 1975 fiscal crisis. Without Carey’s intelligence and strong character, we learned, New York City might well have gone bankrupt, with very bad consequences. By 1981, though, when I arrived in Albany, Carey appeared bored. Under those circumstances, he died his hair orange, offered to drink a glass of PCBs, and married a woman who had been divorced three times previously.

His occasionally bizarre behavior reflected only one aspect of a genuinely warm and charming personality, notwithstanding his occasional digs at the Legislature. In those years, following an annual tradition, the Governor hosted an end-of-session formal ball for the Legislature at the Governor’s Mansion. (After continuing the tradition for a year or two, Mario Cuomo abandoned it. It was not suited to his personality.) Spouses and significant others would join legislators in Albany for the day, repairing to the Mansion in the evening. Usually, the Speaker of the Assembly extended “courtesies of the floor” to such guests, meaning that the sergeant-at-arms (in my day and to the present, the beloved Wayne Jackson) would permit them to enter the Chamber itself, and even to chat quietly with their affiliated legislator.

Sometime in the 1970s, Louis de Salvio, who had represented the Lower East Side of Manhattan for thirty years, presided over the Assembly as Speaker pro tem, or pro tempore; that is, in the absence of the actual Speaker (which is most of the time, as the Speaker usually works out of the office he occupies just behind and to the left of the podium, if you are facing it). DeSalvio, apparently, was not among the more polished members of the Assembly. The duties of the Speaker pro tem include maintaining order, by orders enforced through the sergeant-at-arms. In those days few women served as members of the Assembly, and many members kept spouses at home in their districts while sustaining ongoing relationships with different people in Albany.

On an ordinary legislative day, when the buzz of conversation among members, visitors, and staff grows deafening, the Speaker pro tem will order the sergeant-at-arms to “clear the floor” of all except legislators. On this day, de Salvio found it necessary to do the same. However, a legislator protested: “Mr. Speaker,” he argued, “many of those on the floor today are wives of legislators.” “Okay,” came the official ruling of the Speaker: “wives can stay. Girlfriends must leave.”

No such development took place in 1982. After session, I went back to my office in the Legislative Office Building, where I changed into the formal clothes I had left there and picked up my girlfriend (I was single then!), and walked with her the few blocks to the Mansion.

At the end of a delightful evening of dining, dancing, and drinking, about twenty of us legislators, with our dates, stood around the piano, which Carey played quite well. By this date, both Houses of the Legislature had passed Oliver Koppell’s landmark “bottle bill,” requiring refundable deposits on soda bottles, ultimately resulting in much cleaner streets, a vast increase in recycling, and a source of income for many poor and homeless people. However, both Houses had also passed Roger Robach’s fake bottle bill, introduced by him at the urging of the bottling industry, who fiercely opposed Oliver’s effort. Roger’s bill, incompatible with Oliver’s, would actually have blocked bottle return. Both Oliver and Roger joined the small crowd around Carey. Carey, with the Legislature having placed both bills before him and thus having passed the decision entirely to him, made an announcement. Looking at Oliver and Roger, he said, “I’m going to make my decision based on which one of you sings the ‘New York, New York’ song better. (You know – Sinatra made it famous with his 1979 recording: “Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today; I want to be a part of it: New York, New York,” etcetera. ).

First Oliver sang, surprisingly well. Then Roger sang, not as well, but not bad. Carey said, “Ah, you both stink,” and gave his own rendition, accompanying himself on the piano. By the way, he did a superb job.” Great round of applause. A few days later, he signed Oliver’s bill.