Thursday, April 18, 2002
Baseball and book collecting - a quirky picture
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
A young relative called, from Fenway Park, ecstatic with Spring and the beginning of the baseball season. He had spotted Chuck Knoblauch on the Kansas City Royals’ team, playing left field. It put me in a foul mood. What is it with the Yankees, needing more and more sullen high priced warriors, automatons conditioned to win, win, win. Our favorite players had quirks, personalities, we learned to suffer with them in their miseries and to recognize their rituals. The entire baseball fraternity has been reduced to ten rich and winning teams, the rest of the 30 being relegated to the roles of patsies and dupes, chopped meat for the stats of the mighty . Montreal and Minnesota will close up, no one goes to their games, or cares for such no-win home teams. The Yankees, LA and Atlanta buy up the talent and the rest can go on, developing and losing their players. Some equality, please!.
Want to take kids to the ball game? Bleacher seats are $8, top row is $15 and a family of four will spend $100 to $200 in the grandstand, with souvenirs, hot dogs and sodas, a big occasion. Major league baseball tries to sweeten ir, with special events, a Bat Night, when everyone under the age of 14 gets a free implement, or a Derek Jeter or Jason Giambi Night, with glossy pictures or other souvenirs handed out. Nevertheless, it is not the old time thing. You want to mention parking at the Stadium or Shea, okay, that’s another deterrent.
Clearly, the Great American Pastime has become a TV event. Or, has it? The Yankee Channel Yes has a dispute with Cablevision, about making it a premium channel. Currently the faithful can see some 50 games free on CBS. How many of them will pay $2 a month for the opportunity of viewing the balance of the 162 game schedule? Many. The greed of the sports and TV promoters is unlimited - just think of the hundreds of dollars Knicks fans pay - and the ticket buyers take it unflinchingly. Is it the pleasure of the game, which one can see at a sports bar for the price of a few expensive beers, or is it the prestige of having been there, in person? [Knicks management plays up the prestige, claiming a streak of sold-out games since February 1993, although thousands of seats stay empty during the current season. Even Woody Allen and Spike Lee skip games.] Or, it may just be love. Whatever the reason, a true afficionado pays for his quirky affection, in money, or in effort and ingenuity, to get close to his heroes, as the next story shows.
A friend who is the quintessential Yankee fan, has a subscription for four field-level tickets, close to the home plate. That’s $48 a seat, or $ 228 a game (including clubhouse privileges and waiter service at the seats) or over $8,000 a season of 81 home games. All for the pleasure of seeing few enjoyable events first-hand. How does this honest wage earner manage his quirky pleasure? Well, this is a shared subscription, and the owners have a network of Yankee lover friends, built over a period of years, who well before the season sign up to buy up the tickets for the games our stalwarts cannot attend personally. This is a major planning, apportionment and trading effort, requiring tact and diplomacy, or else the subscribers will be stuck for a substantial monetary loss. In the past the Yankee box office cooperated - the subscribers could send in, say, a dozen or so tickets for games missed, and they would be given an equivalent number of grandstand tickets for games that do not attract droves of paid customers. Our subscribers would then donate the tickets to a boy’s club or church and give some kids the opportunity for a rare pleasure. But no longer, Yankee management as grown tighter, and the fans must take their licks.
This is not to sneer at sports fans, operagoers and theater subscribers go through the same process. We all have to continue with feeding our pleasure requirements, or else the terrorists will win.
Here’s good news for those of us whose pleasure is to collect books. Marvin Mondlin, who has been buying book collections and estates for the Strand Book Store for decades, has written up (with author Ray Meador) his recollections of "Book Row America," the Fourth Avenue antiquarian booksellers, who, until the residential real estate boom below 14th Street put them out of business, could pursue their quirky low-profit trade - or hobby - in a communal environment. Of the two or three dozen establishments, you may remember the last of the large ones to go, Wilfred Pesky’s Schulte’s, now an antiques emporiun, near Grace Church, across from what used to be Biblo and Tannen’s and Sid Solomon’s Paragon. Some of us may also still remember Milt Applebaum’s Arcadia, and Sam Weiser’s (managed by a third-generation, specializing in the occult and still in full swing, up in Maine), who moved over to Broadway in the mid 1950s, as did the Strand..
Marvin’s will be the definitive history of the Book Row, brought up to date with the inclusion of a later generation, Glenn Horowitz, Timothy Johns and Steve Crowley. The mighty Strand, with its eight miles of bookshelves (it must be up to 16, the way they are expanding), is also there, the flagship, with a 3rd generation management moving in. You’ll read stories of the founder, Ben Bass.
The Book Row people were storybook characters There was the autocratic Walter Goldwater of Academy, often away playing tennis or keeping a benevolent eye over for the incunabula at the Widener library, up in Cambridge, while his man French took care or the shop. Bill French was a major expert in his own right, in African and African-American poetry and literature. On the other side of the coin, think of the Wawrovics brothers, Louis and Ernie (I knew the latter, in his basement shop on 14th Street and 1st Ave), the suitcase auction kings, who, after the packrat Collier brothers died in 1947, acquired their houseful of papers on 128th Street. There’s a quirky novelty play, "The Dazzle,"by Richard Greenberg, about the recluse Langley and Homer Colliers, at the Roundabout’s Gramercy on 23rd Street.
The Mondlin & Meador book is still in search of a publisher. If you are quirky enough to get behind it, get in touch with their venerable literary agents, Lescher & Lescher, Ltd., in the heart of the old Book Row, and a lot of book lovers will be indebted to you. Not quite as many of them as there are baseball fans; on the other hand, they will have to pay less for their lasting pleasure than the ball game enthusiast pays for a single seat in back of the dugout in Yankee Stadium.
Wally, afeared of the fate of the Collier brothers, is currently. digging his way out of an accumulation of old newspapers, ready for recycling (papers, that is). Anything to stop watching the news.
A young relative called, from Fenway Park, ecstatic with Spring and the beginning of the baseball season. He had spotted Chuck Knoblauch on the Kansas City Royals’ team, playing left field. It put me in a foul mood. What is it with the Yankees, needing more and more sullen high priced warriors, automatons conditioned to win, win, win. Our favorite players had quirks, personalities, we learned to suffer with them in their miseries and to recognize their rituals. The entire baseball fraternity has been reduced to ten rich and winning teams, the rest of the 30 being relegated to the roles of patsies and dupes, chopped meat for the stats of the mighty . Montreal and Minnesota will close up, no one goes to their games, or cares for such no-win home teams. The Yankees, LA and Atlanta buy up the talent and the rest can go on, developing and losing their players. Some equality, please!.
Want to take kids to the ball game? Bleacher seats are $8, top row is $15 and a family of four will spend $100 to $200 in the grandstand, with souvenirs, hot dogs and sodas, a big occasion. Major league baseball tries to sweeten ir, with special events, a Bat Night, when everyone under the age of 14 gets a free implement, or a Derek Jeter or Jason Giambi Night, with glossy pictures or other souvenirs handed out. Nevertheless, it is not the old time thing. You want to mention parking at the Stadium or Shea, okay, that’s another deterrent.
Clearly, the Great American Pastime has become a TV event. Or, has it? The Yankee Channel Yes has a dispute with Cablevision, about making it a premium channel. Currently the faithful can see some 50 games free on CBS. How many of them will pay $2 a month for the opportunity of viewing the balance of the 162 game schedule? Many. The greed of the sports and TV promoters is unlimited - just think of the hundreds of dollars Knicks fans pay - and the ticket buyers take it unflinchingly. Is it the pleasure of the game, which one can see at a sports bar for the price of a few expensive beers, or is it the prestige of having been there, in person? [Knicks management plays up the prestige, claiming a streak of sold-out games since February 1993, although thousands of seats stay empty during the current season. Even Woody Allen and Spike Lee skip games.] Or, it may just be love. Whatever the reason, a true afficionado pays for his quirky affection, in money, or in effort and ingenuity, to get close to his heroes, as the next story shows.
A friend who is the quintessential Yankee fan, has a subscription for four field-level tickets, close to the home plate. That’s $48 a seat, or $ 228 a game (including clubhouse privileges and waiter service at the seats) or over $8,000 a season of 81 home games. All for the pleasure of seeing few enjoyable events first-hand. How does this honest wage earner manage his quirky pleasure? Well, this is a shared subscription, and the owners have a network of Yankee lover friends, built over a period of years, who well before the season sign up to buy up the tickets for the games our stalwarts cannot attend personally. This is a major planning, apportionment and trading effort, requiring tact and diplomacy, or else the subscribers will be stuck for a substantial monetary loss. In the past the Yankee box office cooperated - the subscribers could send in, say, a dozen or so tickets for games missed, and they would be given an equivalent number of grandstand tickets for games that do not attract droves of paid customers. Our subscribers would then donate the tickets to a boy’s club or church and give some kids the opportunity for a rare pleasure. But no longer, Yankee management as grown tighter, and the fans must take their licks.
This is not to sneer at sports fans, operagoers and theater subscribers go through the same process. We all have to continue with feeding our pleasure requirements, or else the terrorists will win.
Here’s good news for those of us whose pleasure is to collect books. Marvin Mondlin, who has been buying book collections and estates for the Strand Book Store for decades, has written up (with author Ray Meador) his recollections of "Book Row America," the Fourth Avenue antiquarian booksellers, who, until the residential real estate boom below 14th Street put them out of business, could pursue their quirky low-profit trade - or hobby - in a communal environment. Of the two or three dozen establishments, you may remember the last of the large ones to go, Wilfred Pesky’s Schulte’s, now an antiques emporiun, near Grace Church, across from what used to be Biblo and Tannen’s and Sid Solomon’s Paragon. Some of us may also still remember Milt Applebaum’s Arcadia, and Sam Weiser’s (managed by a third-generation, specializing in the occult and still in full swing, up in Maine), who moved over to Broadway in the mid 1950s, as did the Strand..
Marvin’s will be the definitive history of the Book Row, brought up to date with the inclusion of a later generation, Glenn Horowitz, Timothy Johns and Steve Crowley. The mighty Strand, with its eight miles of bookshelves (it must be up to 16, the way they are expanding), is also there, the flagship, with a 3rd generation management moving in. You’ll read stories of the founder, Ben Bass.
The Book Row people were storybook characters There was the autocratic Walter Goldwater of Academy, often away playing tennis or keeping a benevolent eye over for the incunabula at the Widener library, up in Cambridge, while his man French took care or the shop. Bill French was a major expert in his own right, in African and African-American poetry and literature. On the other side of the coin, think of the Wawrovics brothers, Louis and Ernie (I knew the latter, in his basement shop on 14th Street and 1st Ave), the suitcase auction kings, who, after the packrat Collier brothers died in 1947, acquired their houseful of papers on 128th Street. There’s a quirky novelty play, "The Dazzle,"by Richard Greenberg, about the recluse Langley and Homer Colliers, at the Roundabout’s Gramercy on 23rd Street.
The Mondlin & Meador book is still in search of a publisher. If you are quirky enough to get behind it, get in touch with their venerable literary agents, Lescher & Lescher, Ltd., in the heart of the old Book Row, and a lot of book lovers will be indebted to you. Not quite as many of them as there are baseball fans; on the other hand, they will have to pay less for their lasting pleasure than the ball game enthusiast pays for a single seat in back of the dugout in Yankee Stadium.
Wally, afeared of the fate of the Collier brothers, is currently. digging his way out of an accumulation of old newspapers, ready for recycling (papers, that is). Anything to stop watching the news.
Wednesday, April 10, 2002
Lucky American thinks Springtime thoughts, away from the horrors
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
You know that Spring is here when you start finding copies of the Hampton's "Dan's Papers" in East Midtown stores. This chatty fat weekly, mostly written by Dan Rattiner himself, has 22 pages (pipe that, Corcoran and NY Times) of real estate for rent or sale ads. If you are so minded, you can rent an apartment this side of Montauk Point for upwards of $18,000 for the season, a nothing room for $6K and a house for $30K minimum, ranging to about 115K if you want a modest pool, tennis court and a Jacuzzi and stuff. An acre of land costs around $300K ($500k with water frontage) if you are not too particular.
I read these figures with wonderment, since in South Florida you can buy similar properties, not too shabby, for the price of a Hampton's rental. A little problem, if you are looking at a $35K Fla two-bedroom condo - it will be in a community founded 25 years ago by New Yorkers, and your pleasant next-door neighbors that you made friends with may not be with you that much longer. In fact, the price is so low because of too many estate sales. An enterprising friend who moved into such a condo colony in West Palm has actively searched around and located same age neighbors, to bond with, to go walking together and to learn the art of golf. He has founded his own neighborhood. Establishing a friendship with an ancient can lead to a heartbreak.
More signs of Spring are the early flowering trees in our streets and parks. Now may be a good time to visit our four parks, the treasures of the T&V country. The small white-flowered tree you see blooming in East Side streets, the blossoms a little greenish in color, is a Callery pear. NYC is rich, we have nearly 500,000 street trees, one-tenth of them in Manhattan, and being replenished. The Parks people started a Greenstreets Project in 1996, to plant on barren traffic islands, concrete triangles and such, with 1,765 in place to date. Do not expect to see new Norway maples and London lindens, the trees that constitute some 40 percent of the current inventory. The Norway is the prey of the notorious Asian longhorn beetle, a creature that arrived as part of packing materials for import goods, and has invaded American trees here and in Chicago. Victims must be destroyed. The linden is also prone to get sickly. Fortunately. there are still plenty of ginkgo (pie-slice leaves) and honey locust ( orderly pinnate leaves, like feathers). Cherries and magnolias are in flower too, and the white scholar or Japanese pagoda tree will bloom soon. And 1.5 million new daffodils are opening up, as we speak. I should write a song. [Ed.: Actually, someone, a W. Wordsworth, did write one, about ten thousand of them. He reported seeing them while wandering lonely as a cloud.]
Also, a Spring report from Collegiate School, my late life love affair, after Friends Seminary. We went to the annual parent's get-together, met the new principal Kerry Brennan and said hello to Elaine Genkins the math wizard, the Rev. Tod Houghtlin, retired admissions officer Jim Jacobs and his successor Joanne Heyman (had a long chat with husband Adam), Upper School head John Beall, and the legendary Bruce Breimer, the college placement officer who in 33 years has sent literally a thousand boys to Ivy League schools, or equivalent (my estimate). That is out of an annual graduating class of 46 or so. He can do it because the school is good, the kids are good, his judgment is good and the colleges trust him. The only thing I don't quite trust is the school's claim of a founding date of 1628. It is a tad early. But history, as I find it recorded on cocktail napkins, can be kind of wishful. Floreat, and many more years to the oldest US school!
Lucked out to surf into "Singin' in the Rain," the 1952 musical, on TV, just as Donald O'Connor started his "Make 'em Laugh" extravaganza number, hoofing, rolling on the floor, running up the side of a wall, tossing a somersault, and then doing it all over again, without the aid of special effects. Then, Gene Kelly, badly fallen in love with 19-year old Debbie Reynolds, kicking rain puddles while screaming out his adoration for her until calmed down by the glance of a a passing-by cop. Such innocence, they don't come like that any more, in the age of psychodrama, stupid-drama and horror-drama. And sweet Debbie and the sultry-nice Cyd Charisse, with legs that never stop, charming the audiences in their own individual ways, nearly beyond the endurable.
Producer Arthur Freed thought he'd just slap together a thing of the songs he and his Afro-Hispanic composer associate Nacio Herb Brown had written over some 20 years, and they created a miracle (some tunes, such as "Moses Supposes," the tongue-twister, were new).. Sophisticated Pauline Kael came out of her tower to name it "just about the best Hollywood musical ever." It was the climax of several careers, including Jean Hagen's (d.1977 at 54 ), who played, with gusto, the bad guy, a squeaky-voiced silent movie seductress who could not make the transition to sound ("You'd think I was stupid or something"). And the cutting-edge technology went to the limit when the studio hired an airplane engine to blow Cyd's 50-foot scarf skyward in the closing number. Coincidentally, this Spring MGM is issuing a 50th anniversary enhanced CD and DVD edition of "Singin'," their flagship treasure.
.
Best street music in NYC. Walking along Broad Street, past the New York Stock Exchange after closing hours, you can hear a black saxophone man play a Desmond-style "Take Five" and "These Things Remind Me of You," the sounds reverberating in the quiet promenade. (There is another player on Mount Carmel, Haifa, near the Nof Hotel, with a similar repertory - but that memory dates back to better days, two years ago.}.
Wally thanks Sibyl the charming Forest Ranger, and the Parks web page. An e-mail from Dr Paranoia: "Good thing you got away from thinking about the horrors. Now, eat some comfort food, mash potatoes and pasta, and stay away from hamburgers. Yech, details of potential dangers to follow. " Spare us.
You know that Spring is here when you start finding copies of the Hampton's "Dan's Papers" in East Midtown stores. This chatty fat weekly, mostly written by Dan Rattiner himself, has 22 pages (pipe that, Corcoran and NY Times) of real estate for rent or sale ads. If you are so minded, you can rent an apartment this side of Montauk Point for upwards of $18,000 for the season, a nothing room for $6K and a house for $30K minimum, ranging to about 115K if you want a modest pool, tennis court and a Jacuzzi and stuff. An acre of land costs around $300K ($500k with water frontage) if you are not too particular.
I read these figures with wonderment, since in South Florida you can buy similar properties, not too shabby, for the price of a Hampton's rental. A little problem, if you are looking at a $35K Fla two-bedroom condo - it will be in a community founded 25 years ago by New Yorkers, and your pleasant next-door neighbors that you made friends with may not be with you that much longer. In fact, the price is so low because of too many estate sales. An enterprising friend who moved into such a condo colony in West Palm has actively searched around and located same age neighbors, to bond with, to go walking together and to learn the art of golf. He has founded his own neighborhood. Establishing a friendship with an ancient can lead to a heartbreak.
More signs of Spring are the early flowering trees in our streets and parks. Now may be a good time to visit our four parks, the treasures of the T&V country. The small white-flowered tree you see blooming in East Side streets, the blossoms a little greenish in color, is a Callery pear. NYC is rich, we have nearly 500,000 street trees, one-tenth of them in Manhattan, and being replenished. The Parks people started a Greenstreets Project in 1996, to plant on barren traffic islands, concrete triangles and such, with 1,765 in place to date. Do not expect to see new Norway maples and London lindens, the trees that constitute some 40 percent of the current inventory. The Norway is the prey of the notorious Asian longhorn beetle, a creature that arrived as part of packing materials for import goods, and has invaded American trees here and in Chicago. Victims must be destroyed. The linden is also prone to get sickly. Fortunately. there are still plenty of ginkgo (pie-slice leaves) and honey locust ( orderly pinnate leaves, like feathers). Cherries and magnolias are in flower too, and the white scholar or Japanese pagoda tree will bloom soon. And 1.5 million new daffodils are opening up, as we speak. I should write a song. [Ed.: Actually, someone, a W. Wordsworth, did write one, about ten thousand of them. He reported seeing them while wandering lonely as a cloud.]
Also, a Spring report from Collegiate School, my late life love affair, after Friends Seminary. We went to the annual parent's get-together, met the new principal Kerry Brennan and said hello to Elaine Genkins the math wizard, the Rev. Tod Houghtlin, retired admissions officer Jim Jacobs and his successor Joanne Heyman (had a long chat with husband Adam), Upper School head John Beall, and the legendary Bruce Breimer, the college placement officer who in 33 years has sent literally a thousand boys to Ivy League schools, or equivalent (my estimate). That is out of an annual graduating class of 46 or so. He can do it because the school is good, the kids are good, his judgment is good and the colleges trust him. The only thing I don't quite trust is the school's claim of a founding date of 1628. It is a tad early. But history, as I find it recorded on cocktail napkins, can be kind of wishful. Floreat, and many more years to the oldest US school!
Lucked out to surf into "Singin' in the Rain," the 1952 musical, on TV, just as Donald O'Connor started his "Make 'em Laugh" extravaganza number, hoofing, rolling on the floor, running up the side of a wall, tossing a somersault, and then doing it all over again, without the aid of special effects. Then, Gene Kelly, badly fallen in love with 19-year old Debbie Reynolds, kicking rain puddles while screaming out his adoration for her until calmed down by the glance of a a passing-by cop. Such innocence, they don't come like that any more, in the age of psychodrama, stupid-drama and horror-drama. And sweet Debbie and the sultry-nice Cyd Charisse, with legs that never stop, charming the audiences in their own individual ways, nearly beyond the endurable.
Producer Arthur Freed thought he'd just slap together a thing of the songs he and his Afro-Hispanic composer associate Nacio Herb Brown had written over some 20 years, and they created a miracle (some tunes, such as "Moses Supposes," the tongue-twister, were new).. Sophisticated Pauline Kael came out of her tower to name it "just about the best Hollywood musical ever." It was the climax of several careers, including Jean Hagen's (d.1977 at 54 ), who played, with gusto, the bad guy, a squeaky-voiced silent movie seductress who could not make the transition to sound ("You'd think I was stupid or something"). And the cutting-edge technology went to the limit when the studio hired an airplane engine to blow Cyd's 50-foot scarf skyward in the closing number. Coincidentally, this Spring MGM is issuing a 50th anniversary enhanced CD and DVD edition of "Singin'," their flagship treasure.
.
Best street music in NYC. Walking along Broad Street, past the New York Stock Exchange after closing hours, you can hear a black saxophone man play a Desmond-style "Take Five" and "These Things Remind Me of You," the sounds reverberating in the quiet promenade. (There is another player on Mount Carmel, Haifa, near the Nof Hotel, with a similar repertory - but that memory dates back to better days, two years ago.}.
Wally thanks Sibyl the charming Forest Ranger, and the Parks web page. An e-mail from Dr Paranoia: "Good thing you got away from thinking about the horrors. Now, eat some comfort food, mash potatoes and pasta, and stay away from hamburgers. Yech, details of potential dangers to follow. " Spare us.
