V 1 N. 12 Dayton, Ohio 1955

                                                                        Dayton, Ohio 1955

                                                                          by George Brose

This story takes place over sixty years ago when a child’s life was ever so much simpler, learning grammar and punctuation, letter writing, hitting a baseball, following a coach’s instructions, honoring a father and mother who lived in the same house, fearing hell fire and damnation from a Baptist pulpit and with any luck discovering sex by the time you got to college.

Our fathers had been to war, but they never confided to us what that meant. In their lives what came before the war was an economic crisis that had battered them for most of their early youth. By 1955 they had survived a post war housing shortage, begun raising their families and in a time of relative prosperity were steadily employed in factories where they had every reason to believe their lives were stable and would remain that way for the rest of their working days. 

I knew only one classmate who was an orphan of war, only a few children whose parents were divorced. I knew no one who was openly gay, yet ‘queer’ and ‘cocksucker’ were commonly used in our pre adolescent speech. I had no idea what those words meant or implied. The parent of one of my classmates was imprisoned during the McCarthy era for falsely signing a non-communist affidavit.  He indeed had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930's and was still a strong union man.  To keep his job in that McCarthy era he was required to sign the affidavit, and when it was proven that he had indeed been a member, he was imprisoned for six years.  The meaning of those words was never explained to us.  Somehow his wife was able to keep the family intact.  The daughter would go to college and earn a doctorate in chemistry from Johns Hopkins and the son would become a watchmaker.  In school we practiced 'ducking and covering'  under our desks if a blinding flash from a nuclear weapon ever occurred. It was the fear of a Russian A-Bomb that far outweighed the promise of burning in Hell if I didn’t believe in Jesus. 

My parents never attended church, but by the time I was five years old, they sent me to Sunday school at the church nearest our house.  It happened to be Baptist.  The first pastor I knew was a fairly liberal guy for a Baptist.  He and his wife lived across the street in an upstairs apartment.   When he left to be the pastor at a church near the Ohio State University campus, we got a hellfire and damnation pastor from the hills of West Virginia as a replacement.  That's when I got to have a healthy fear of God drummed in me.   When I was twelve, I chose to be baptized, because I had a crush on a girl in my Sunday school class who was getting baptized.   The  week after I was baptized, a deacon came to our home and persuaded my parents to make a donation to the church. My father committed to giving a week’s pay to the place. When I was told that God would speak to me, I never heard a voice, so I gradually drifted away from the mundane promises of those men who were to be addressed as ‘Reverend’.  The last straw was when I found myself kneeling on the church steps one night with my basketball team, praying to win a game.  Somehow I did not equate that with doing the Lord's work.   We did win the game however.   I was completely out the door of the church by the time I was sixteen, but the thought had been rolling in my brain for several years. It took some time to overcome the fear of what might be the price of leaving. In the end the price was nil.    A good friend in high school ended up marrying that girl and left his wayward life to become a 'good Baptist'.  

In my own readings I learned something about evolution, and brought up the subject in my fourth grade class. My teacher screamed back at me that Christians don’t believe such nonsense and then sent me into the hall. I endured a year of that woman who was responsible for teaching arithmetic and homeroom each day. On another occasion while looking for fossils which had been mentioned in a general science text, I found a 300 million years old horn coral in an Ordovician streambed.   I brought it in to show and tell. We had a woman of about 60 years of age as a substitute that day. She incorrectly identified it as “an object with which heathens pierced Christians’ hearts”. This was in a public school system. Most of the teachers taught us to think, weigh, and reason, and  they had the most lasting effects on my education.  Miss Whitesell, Miss Shannon, Miss Derrington, Miss Kelbe, Miss Markus,  Miss Green, Miss Slaght, Miss Charch, Mrs. Arnovitz, and Mr. Helmbold,  you all did your job well.  

In the attic of our home were stored several years of National Geographic magazines.  I saw my first bare breasts in an article about the island of Yap in the South Pacific.   The magazines had been passed on to me by an elderly man who had been a patient of my aunt who was his visiting nurse during a lengthy convalescence. His name was Edwin D. Smith, an engineer with the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, OH. He had been a friend of Branch Rickey the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers when they were both young men.  Mr. Smith  told me stories about Mr. Rickey and his bringing Jackie Robinson into the majors, thus integrating the National League. At the age of nine, I didn’t understand the significance of those acts, because I think I had never met a black person face to face. Our city was segregated in a de facto sense and in a de jure sense as well. If you look at Dayton newspapers from those times, in the housing ads, the terms ‘whites only’ or ‘colored only’ are quite common. 

For me the mixing point began when my parents bought me a membership to the YMCA. The classes at the Y were still very segregated, because there was a YMCA branch in West Dayton where ‘Negroes’ were mainly confined. But in  the YMCA summer camps, whites and blacks came in contact. The first black person I ever talked to was a 10 year old boy named Claude Jones. If I made even a brief friendship at camp it was with Claude. I  asked him about playing together when we got home from camp. Where could I find him? He told me the address on Germantown Street and that he would most likely be playing in his front yard if I came that way. I never thought of asking him to come to my house. I could have easily travelled by bus to go to his home. Unfortunately our friendship at camp did not go beyond our camp experience. I probably got re-involved with my friends as soon as I got home. I was not at that time an adventurous kid in terms of relationships. But in those days a ten year old had a huge radius in which to play without supervision by his parents. I could go downtown on the bus, if I asked permission. In fact to go to the Y on Saturday mornings did not require permission. I was shooed out of the house. We knew the city bus drivers by name.  My favorite was Mac McClanahan.  When the Y gym classes and swimming were done by noon, I usually stayed downtown, had lunch at Morty's 5 Cents Hamburgers,  and went to a movie, double feature, and got back in time for supper. Once and only once, my companion of the day, Billy Strader, and I stayed down to see ‘Blackbeard the Pirate’ a second time and neglected to call our parents to inform them. By 8:00PM our Dads were downtown looking for us. That kept us at home for a few weekends, but it was more for not reporting in than our parents’ fear of molesters and kidnappers.

By the time I got a bicycle the radius had expanded even more.  We could pedal out to the countryside, build fires along streams, look for arrowheads, go fishing.  It was almost like living in the country.  It developed a sense of adventure.   The unwritten rule was be home by supper time, which at my house was early,  4:30PM.  The upside was it left many hours to play after supper.  

My friends and I did a lot of things I'm not particularly proud of, but it was how we learned right from wrong.  How we learned anything without social media is not a mystery.  We could go to the library and read the encyclopedia.  My parents even bought me a World Book Encyclopedia when I was about 12 years old and we were starting to do research papers.  By the time I stopped going to the YMCA on Saturdays,  the city library became almost a social center and a place to meet kids from other parts of town.  The index card catalogue was our Google Docs in those times.  If our library didn't have a particular book we could order it from an out of town library that had the book.  It wasn't instantaneous but it was still effective.  The grading of those papers must have been excruciating for teachers as they were all handwritten.  That's why learning to have legible handwriting was so important.

This is far from everything I want to say.  I've barely touched on sport and said nothing about sex, nothing about death, but I'll leave that for another story.    I leave you with a fun little song by Randy Newman  and sung by Harry Nilsson called "Dayton, Ohio 1903" a bit before the time I've tried to describe, but it let's you downshift into a slower more thoughtful era.  See the link below:

Dayton, Ohio 1903

COMMENTS

Hi George,  I really enjoy reading your posts.  This one is very different from my youth, where the small number of students, about 30 for all 6 elementary grades had 2 teachers, one being replaced in the last year or two of my time.  We did not know about human sex until high school, in spite of the obvious animal sex around us.  And the attraction of girls was their appearance and friendliness did not result in anything.  There was no YMCA.  We would swim in farm ponds or sometimes streams if the water got warm enough.  Swimming meant moving in the water, keeping ones face above the water.

Finally, the one comment in the story warned you about the hell to come.  Don’t worry.  We will be dead by that time!

Thanks for including me in your mailing list.  Harvey,  Yellow Springs, OH

George

How similar our lives were!!  I’ve tried to write memoirs of the era, but haven’t done as good a job as you have. Thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed it.

George-what a beautifully written story about growing up in the 1950s. Please take the time, when time is available, to let us share the next chapter of your life. Thanks for keeping me on your list!  Darryl T

Dave C.   Muncie, IN

George,  

How the hell did Mrs. Arnovitz get mixed up with that crowd?  Must have been recruiting for the Communists. 

Dave H.  Boston, MA

George,

If I had a nickel for every guy who got baptized because a girl he liked was also getting baptised, I'd have a nickel.

Laurel R.  Courtenay, BC

"You need a financial advisor.   Jesus saves,  Moses invests."   lGeorge

V 1 N. 11 Gettin' Along With Aimé Beaubien

 

Many years ago I wrote this essay about a friend of my wife Marie's family in Northwest Quebec.  I was an outsider, a city boy from the US, emigrated to the far north country 400 miles above Montreal and Toronto. Winters could see temperatures of -40F.  The plastic steering wheel of your car could break off in that cold.  You had to have an engine block heater plugged in at night on your car, or the engine would not turn over in the morning. In the summer, the black flies would feast on you in the day and the mosquitoes at night.   Few people spoke English,  but one I clearly recall who did was an old trapper, named Amie Beaubien.   Aimé  meant 'loved' in French.   Aimé was a great raconteur of folk history and a dispenser of bush savvy to me.  He was a person who had endured a very hard life like many of the prospectors and miners loggers, and farmers.  They built something from nothing, using only hand axes, common sense, endurance, and strong family ties.  This is what I remember about Aimé Beaubien.

 

Aimé Beaubien was sitting hobbled in a wheelchair when I visited him in his nursing home last summer (1981). His blue-grey eyes still gleamed as they had ten years before when he was busy cutting wood at his trapping camp.  He was in his mid-seventies then. He measured about five feet six, and still had a lot of muscle in that aged old body.  Bare chested, black flies crawling  on his grizzled back. The lines in the skin told of seventy years living and working in the northern Ontario and Quebec bush. There were blood streaks running down his back where the black flies were able to penetrate that toughened hide. "You just got to imagine they’re not there, if ya wanna get along out here." I don’t think the word ‘survival’ could be found in Aimé’s vocabulary, but ‘gettin’ along’ was definitely in the realm of his phrasing.

Aimé was born near the turn of the century in Sudbury, Ontario. He is Franco-Ontarian, meaning he is of French Quebec origin but lived in Ontario.  He speaks English as well as French, but cannot read or write either language. Don’t ask him his phone number, he won’t be able to tell you or even dial it. But ask him how to operate a diamond drill for a mining company, how to trap beaver, set charges of dynamite, or take a moose out of season under the nose of the game warden, and Aimé can put you through a grad school commando course on ‘gettin’ along’. "You get a cut and no doctor around, you put some spruce gum on the wound and sew it up yourself. Pretend it don’t hurt and it won’t".  He had financial wisdom as well.  "As long as I have a thousand dollars in the bank, I'm okay."

In the early 1920’s Aimé and some of his buddies walked the three hundred miles from Sudbury into Northwest Quebec where gold and copper mines were opening.    They could have taken a train part way, but they didn’t have the money.  Apparently he hadn't yet developed financial savoie faire.  He had a team of horses then and often contracted hauling jobs with merchants until one day the horses went through the ice on a river in early spring. He lost a second team another time in a sadder, crueler way. He was working in winter with a drilling company, and they hauled a rig over a frozen lake. Not arriving at their destination before nightfall, they pitched camp on the lake even though slush had formed on the surface. The men slept on cots, slush beneath them, but most of the horses’ feet froze while standing in the slush overnight. "We had to shoot those poor animals next morning", Aimé lamented. "They were as crippled as I am now."

Aimé had plenty of close calls in the winter. He was once with his brother when he stepped on thin ice and went through. Fortunately his brother fished him out. "Then he kicked me in the backside every time I slowed down, just to keep me moving. Had a long way back to the cabin that time before I could get warm."

Another time he wasn’t so lucky about getting back to camp. He was hunting in winter when he and a friend both shot moose. They decided to camp on the spot and carry the meat back the next morning. They gutted the beasts, put pine boughs in the gaping abdomens and crawled inside to spend the night.

Well, Aime forgot some of his hard won bush knowledge and when confronted with rigor mortis (that of the moose) and freezing weather in those  carcasses, he and his partner soon realized they could not get out of the moose bellies.  They were stuck.  Fortunately his buddy was able to reach his hunting knife strapped on his belt and managed to free himself and then Aime. Talk about a rough Caesarean delivery.

On another sortie into the bush in winter, Aime sought out a trapper’s cabin to spend the night.  No one left a cabin in the bush locked just for that reason, or they were likely to find a broken door when they came out to the cabin the following Spring.  Anyway, Aime used someone’s camp to stay warm one night and built a fire in the stove and warmed up the room, had his supper, and went to bed.   In the middle of the night he suddenly found that a frozen cadaver that had been sequestered in the rafters had thawed and  fallen on top of him in the bunk.  Talk about a ‘dark and stormy night’ story for his repertoire.  Turns out that a guy had died a few weeks before and the RCMP had investigated, and since it would be too hard to haul the body into town until Spring, they stashed it in the rafters.  That led to Aime Beaubien’s surprise visitor. 

One other story of bushwackiness.   Aime once was recruited to help a friend move his cabin across a lake during the winter.  The prep work was done in the Fall with a ramp built to slide it down to the lake shore once the water was frozen and thick enough to hold the weight.  How do you know when it is thick enough?  Do you consult engineering manuals, lake currents, wind velocities or just spit on your finger and hold it up in the wind?  Well, late into winter when the lads thought conditions were good,  they got the team of horses out of their shed and rigged them up to pull that cabin to a better location where a new foundation of logs had been built.  When they would get to the shore they would rig ‘come alongs’  and winches to pull it up on shore.  Halfway across the lake, to their chagrin, they found that their calculations about ice thickness and lake currents were a bit off.  Hell, this was a mistake any well educated engineer from the University of Toronto  could have made.   Their route to the new site was blocked by cracking ice.  What to do?   They changed course and pulled the house to the nearest shoreline  which looked like low ground only to realize it was a swamp.   But that was their only option.  That cabin remained in the swamp until it crumbled of natural causes. 

Aime’s own lakefront property was on a low outcrop of the Canadian shield on Lac Duprat a few miles north of Rouyn-Noranda near the old Waite Mine.  To walk that last two miles into the site, you would think that you would need a four-wheel drive pickup with a winch on the front end in case you got stuck.  Not Aime.  He drove a two door Ford Mavrick with low clearance in and out of there.  ‘You just got to go slow.  You’ll make it.”  was Aime’s advice and he was right. 

Another piece of Aime’s wisdom passed on to me was,  “Don’t ever get in a fair fight.  If you want to get along up here,  make sure you don’t give the other guy a chance.  And be ready to use both feet as well as your fists.”  Fortunately I never had to put that advice to good use.

I  remember Aime’s last days.  He was dying in the hospital in Rouyn-Noranda.  We went to visit him and he still had a bit of a twinkle in his eye.  We all knew he was dying as did Aimé .  My wife Marie asked him if there was anything she could get him, any last meal he would like.  “Yes” he replied.  “If I could just have a nice bowl of soupe de la queue de castor.  Beaver tail soup was a woodsman’s delicacy.   Well, we weren’t as bush savvy as Aimé, but Marie went home and cooked up a strong chicken broth and brought it to him.   Aimé took a few sips and died that evening.  I don’t know if the cause of death was listed as old age or Marie’s cooking.  But the gift of comforting people in their last days, hours, and minutes eventually led  Marie from the profession of teaching to the profession of chaplaincy and end of life care and counseling.   Thank you, Monsieur Aimé Beaubien.

Below, the drawings are not really Aime but they are a good visual of those times.

COMMENTS:    

George

I would have lasted a week at most.

I remember your taking us fishing and then across some body of water for a fancy dinner.

Then, on the way back to Pittsfield, the car lost an axle or something like that. Fortunately for us it happened in Montréal. Lynda had an aunt (with 2 kids about our age) who took us in for the night. Isn't every Québecoise equipped with relatives in Montréal?  Bob

Bob

  

Aime would have taken some barbed wire and wrapped it around the axle and reinforced with some moose sinew,  and you would still be driving that car.

George

V 1 N. 10 1989 The Year That Changed The World

 

Biden and Trump

 

1989 Where Were They?

 

 

            I picked up a free give away book in the library recently (my favorite book source).  The library discards allow me to read at my pace without worrying about renewing or paying some minimal fine.  The book I’m into now is   “The Year That Changed The World, The Untold Story Behind The Fall of the Berlin Wall", by Michael Myer.  Myer was bureau chief  for Newsweek in 1989 assigned to cover Germany, Central Europe, and the Balkans from 1988 to 1992.  He was able to travel quite freely though Eastern Europe and interview leaders and  the up and comers of the day.  He gives us a great eyewitness account of the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe in that period, how quickly it came starting in Poland and Hungary under the watchful eye of Mikael Gorbachev then head of the Soviet Union and the misconception of what was happening on the part of a new regime in Washington under George H.W. Bush whose team had just taken over in January, 1989.  That misconception was portrayed by the Bush administration on advice from Dick Cheney to upgrade nuclear weapons in Europe at a time when the Soviets were in a lot of economic difficulty and looking for a better way to deal with the West in non military ways.  Once Bush caught on, Cheney was kicked to the sidelines in the new administration.  Of course he would make a comeback in Bush Junior’s gang. 

 

            What is especially intriguing to me in reading this book is realizing how much I had forgotten and what the world seems to have forgotten about events of thirty-five years ago.  We get so focused on  current events we forget what brought us to our modern concepts of politics and international relations.  When you think of 1989 of course the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square come quickly into focus.  But the depth of field of that focus in reality is very shallow.   Yet we watched TV or read the papers probably everyday that year.  Our memories are faint and selective as to what affected each of us, and for the most part we went on living our lives, doing our jobs, paying our bills, and looking forward to our next vacation, or watching our children grow. 

 

            As Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war......etc.”  Today do we remember why we are engaged in this great uncivil dislike for each other?  Where did it come from?  Who are the real protagonists?   What side should I be on? 

 

Let’s look at a couple of things Michael Myer talks about in this book written in 2009 about events that were already thirty years in the past when he wrote it.  

 

            Remember the Solidarity movement that started with workers in the Lenin shipyard in  Gdansk, Poland led by Lech Walesa?  It was put down by the Polish Communist regime under Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski recognizable by his sunglasses and ‘ramrod stiff bearing’ Myer recounts.  Martial law was declared in  December, 1981.   Walesa was imprisoned and won the Nobel Prize for his efforts in 1983.  Yet by June, 1989 the times had changed and Walesa and Solidarity were running in open elections against the Communists.    At the same time a reversal of fortune was under way in Hungary under another new up and comer Miklos Nemeth.  Hungary decided they would no longer need an electric fence and watch towers along their border with Austria.  It was a subtle invite to East Germans who came in droves to Hungary in the summer to continue their vacations  and cross into the west via the Austro-Hungarian border and on into  West Germany.  It was causing Erich Honnecker the head of the regime in East Germany to have conniption fits.  Everyone was looking over their shoulders to see what Gorbachev would do.  At first reluctant and threatening, Gorby quickly gave in and did nothing; he let it happen.

 

Myer relates on page 61.  Others in the (US) administration were no less wary.  Never mind that, in April, George Kennan, dean of American Sovietologists and the original author of America’s bedrock strategy of containment, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Soviet Union no longer posd a threat.  Never mind that Margaret Thatcher declared the Cold War to be over, James Baker would suggest that “Gorbachev’s strategy was premised on splitting the alliance and undercutting us in Western Europe.’  Hardliners in the Defense Department, led by Cheney and a phalanx of aides who would become famous in a later Bush administration –among them Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby – argued against more moderate State Department officials who saw the changes gathering force in the East bloc as an opportunity for closer engagement.  Cheney was especially virulent in his suspicions, all but calling Gorbachev an imposter and a fraud.  .....giving too much credence to  Gorbachev’s “new thinking”he told CNN in late April, exposed the United States to the risk, indeed the likelihood, that he would fail and be replaced by someone “far more hostile” to the United States.  

 

            Boy was Cheney right on that last statement looking at today’s world and knowing that the wall coming down in 1989 was indeed the catalyst to Putin’s career.  ‘Puty’ at the time was an intel officer in the KGB office in East Berlin.  GB

 

 

June 4, 1989  What Happened on that day?

 

            If you asked me I would say, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, because I was in Beijing with my family at the time.   But there was more.  It was the day of that first free election in Poland between the Communists and Solidarity and others.  And there was another event long forgotten.  Can you remember that one?   Here is Myer’s description from Page 83

 

     The carnival that was the Polish election should have been a spectacle that commanded world attention, especially in America.  Here was democracy, bursting forth with tremendous vitality in a communist nation that was a linchpin of the Soviet bloc.  America had championed Solidarity for more than a decade.  Lech Walesa was a household name.  How was it, then that these dramatic events failed to spark a realization that change was on the march in Eastern Europe, that the Cold War was profoundly and quickly changing?

 

            The answer was Tiananmen Square.  The massacre of demonstrating students in China – with its dramatic TV footage of rumbling tanks, riot police firing tear gas,  screams, shots and bodies in the streets – occurred on the same day as the Polish election.  June 4 also brought news of the death, at eighty-nine, of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, the father of the Iranian Revolution.  The imagery from China, coupled with the fanatical turmoil of Khomeini’s funeral, thrust Poland’s political transformation to the background of the news.  “After that,” one Bush aide later told me, “it was almost impossible to focus on anything else.  It was Tiananmen, Tiananmen, Tiananmen.  And then Iran.  Eastern Europe?  Yes, it was on the radar.  But not really.”

 

 

 

 

            July 19, 2024

 

            In light of current events which I find disturbing in their own right, I asked what some of the main players today were doing in 1989.   Let’s take a look.  I googled Donald Trump and 1989 and the following article from The New York Times came up.  Here are some excerpts.  Basically Trump is being called out for an ad he placed in four NYC newspapers calling for the death penalty to be brought back after the conviction of five teenagers in the rape of a Central Park jogger.  The boys were later acquitted, but when asked about it in 2019, Trump refused to acknowledge his mistake.  The rest of this is probably a bit long but I thought I would add it for the benefit of those who wish to do the reading.  One interesting quote in the second  article about Biden is that he was soliciting advice from his son Hunter even back then. Hunter must have been a teenager or early twenties.  So soon we forget.   Oh yes and how about Victor Orban of Hungary?  What was he up to?   G.B.

 

 

 

               Victor Orban, then...................................... and now

 

Meanwhile back at the ranch in good old Budapest, things were getting hot in the goulash.  The new Hungarian leaders hoping to revive their nation after the 1956 intervention by the Soviet Union that resulted in the death of Imre Nagy, had set up a memorial service to honor Nagy and his associates who were summarily executed in 1956.  Myer explains and turns on another lightbulb.

 

Page 87  from “The Year that Changed the World”  Michael Myer

  So it was on June 16 (1989) that Nemeth and Pozsgay stood beside the caskets, shoulder to shoulder with families of the victims and leaders of the political opposition that they helped create.  Nemeth would later confide that he had been deeply worried for their safety. 
I got quite interesting phone calls, some threteninng my life,” he subsequely told an interviewer..  “ ‘If you go there , we will kill you.’ “  Neither man spoke, that was for the organizers, who one by one called for tolerance and democracy.  The crowd applauded politely.  Then the last speaker , a young  man, just twenty-six years old , stepped forward.    Guess Who?   He was Victor Orban, the charismatic, wild-haired and outspoken leader of Fidesz, the League of Young Democrats, the new political party of Hungary’s youth.  Enough of allusive symbolism.  He said directly what everyone else was merely thinking.  “In the sixth casket we bury communism!”  he shouted.  “If we have learned anything over the past four decades, it is that communism and democracy do not mix!”.....”We must see to it that the ruling party can never use force against us again.”    

 

Victor Orban today that bastion of suppression and Russian ass kissing.  My MY.  GB

 

 

 

 

Trump Will Not Apologize for Calling for Death Penalty Over Central Park Five

By Jan Ransom, NYT

“You have people on both sides of that,” the president said when asked about the wrongly convicted defendants.

Hey, that sounds like what he said after the Charlottesville riots.  GB

•               

President Trump refused on Tuesday to apologize for his harsh comments in 1989 about the Central Park Five, the men who as teenagers were wrongly convicted of a rape in New York City.

“Mr. President, will you apologize to the Central Park Five? They’ve been exonerated, there have been videos and movies shown about the case, and you came out with a full-page ad saying that they should die, that they should have the death penalty. Do you — ” “Why do you bring that question up now? It’s an interesting time to bring it up. You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt. If you look at Linda Fairstein and if you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city should never have settled that case. So we’ll leave it at that.”

00:00

0:3

“I want to hate these murderers and I always will,” Mr. Trump wrote in the May 1989 ad. “I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”

He wrote in all caps: “Bring back the death penalty and bring back our police!”

Image

 

At the time, Mr. Trump was an up-and-coming real estate developer, but the advertisements attracted widespread attention.

The five teenagers were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to prison for gang-raping and nearly killing Ms. Meili.

They said the police had coerced them into confessing to a crime they did not commit. Their convictions were vacated in 2002, and the city paid $41 million in 2014 to settle their civil rights lawsuit.

Barry Scheck, a founder of the nonprofit Innocence Project who was part of a team of lawyers who worked with prosecutors to reinvestigate the Central Park Five case, called Mr. Trump’s response disturbing.

“It’s shocking and deeply troubling that after all of these years, he would not have recognized that by calling for the reinstitution of the death penalty, it contributed to an atmosphere that deprived these men of a fair trial,” Mr. Scheck said.

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said in a statement on Tuesday that the men “were wrongfully convicted and what happened to them was an injustice.”

A Netflix mini-series, “When They See Us,” which premiered this month, renewed focus on the case and generated public outrage.

Much of that outrage targeted Ms. Fairstein, the former prosecutor. She has resigned from a number of prominent boards, including that of Vassar College, her alma mater.

The lead prosecutor on the 1989 case, Elizabeth Lederer, resigned this month as a lecturer at Columbia Law School.

The Netflix series is a dramatized account based on the experiences of the men — Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray and Yusef Salaam — who spent years in prison before being cleared of the charges.

The district attorney’s office determined that the attack on Ms. Meili was an assault committed by a man named Matias Reyes, who surfaced in 2002 and confessed to the crime, an admission confirmed by DNA evidence.

He had been accused of raping, maiming and murdering on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Ms. Meili was the second woman he raped and beat in the park that week.

The five boys were elsewhere in the park at the time, an investigation by the district attorney’s office found in 2002.

Jan Ransom is a reporter covering New York City. Before joining The Times in 2017, she covered law enforcement and crime for The Boston Globe. She is a native New Yorker. More about Jan Ransom

 

 

 

Hmm.  What does this say about our boy’s willingness to admit he might have rushed to judgment, that he might have made a mistake?

 

 

Biden in 1987-88

Now let’s look at what Joe Biden was up to back in 1988.

 

From Time Magazine   

BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN

UPDATED: AUGUST 2, 2019 1:20 PM EDT | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: JULY 30, 2019 4:05 PM EDT

 

“Then, as now in fact, Biden is not as fast on his feet as a successful candidate usually is,” argues Laurence I. Barrett, a former TIME national political correspondent who profiled Biden during his three-month-long presidential bid in the run-up to the 1988 election.

Biden had been on presidential watch-lists for years by that point. When he was elected to the Senate in 1972, he was already seen as White House material. TIME’s walk-up of Election Day that year noted the extraordinary enthusiasm surrounding his Senate campaign, pointing out that he would be old enough to run for president in 1976, if only by 61 days.

He mulled the idea in the years that followed. By the time he did declare his candidacy for the presidency, on June 9, 1987, he had been in the Senate for more than a decade, though his age — now seen by some as a weakness — was still one of his strengths. 

His age?   Oh, yes that was 1988, he was only 44 then.   GB

“What people don’t remember today about Biden in the 1980s is that he was considered by quite a few people as a bright new hope, different from other Democrats,” says Barrett.

 

President Ronald Reagan had won two presidential elections, and the Democratic field faced a pretty wide-open race. The seven major contenders were nicknamed the Seven Dwarfs. (Biden joked they should be called the seven deadly sins, saying after Gary Hart backed out amid a scandal over an affair that, “We’ve got an opening for lust.”) The lack of a front runner seemed like a great opportunity for Biden.

“The Democrats had taken two shellackings at the hands of Reagan, and there was this thought, not really based on a lot of facts, that the Democrats were too soft, too feminine, too much into interest politics, and Biden was seen by his own people as an antidote to that — good looking and athletic — who would come across as stronger,” Barrett says.

Not that the candidate was without his drawbacks: “Biden’s mouth is both his greatest asset and his greatest liability,” Barrett wrote shortly after Biden announced his candidacy. That analysis would prove enduringly prescient.

The then-44-year-old Senator was great at giving inspiring speeches and people were attracted to his youthful energy, but he could also come off like a “hothead,” as he did in his “angry” questioning of Secretary of State George Shultz when the Senate heard testimony about South Africa in 1986. His position in the Senate offered him a chance to show his skill. In particular, as Biden chaired the Judiciary Committee, he hoped to gained more national attention during the uproar over polarizing conservative Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Biden, in charge of the confirmation hearings, oversaw what was seen as potentially “the culminating ideological showdown of the Reagan era,” as TIME put it back then. “For Chairman Biden, the hearings could provide a spark for his presidential campaign by giving him a chance to show his mettle in front of a national television audience.”

But Biden didn’t get a chance to shine during the Bork hearings in the way he had hoped.

A few days before they began, video surfaced that spliced together footage of U.K. Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock giving a speech and Biden clearly quoting Kinnock at the Iowa State Fair without attribution. More examples of misattribution came to light, and the plagiarism scandal became more memorable than his leadership during the Bork confirmation hearing. His mouth — or rather, what he failed to say — got him in trouble again.

Here’s how TIME described why the fallout was so intense:

[T]he Biden brouhaha illustrates the six deadly requirements for a crippling political scandal.

1) A Pre-Existing Subtext. “The basic rap against Biden,” explains Democratic Pollster Geoff Garin, “is that he’s a candidate of style, not substance.”

2) An Awkward Revelation. The Kinnock kleptomania was particularly damaging to Biden since it underscored the prior concerns that he was a shallow vessel for other people’s ideas.

3) A Maladroit Response. Top Aide Tom Donilon claimed that Biden failed to credit Kinnock because “he didn’t know what he was saying. He was on autopilot.”

4) The Press Piles On. Once textual fidelity became an issue, reporters found earlier cases in which Biden had failed to give proper citation to Humphrey and Robert Kennedy. By themselves these transgressions would not have been worth noting.

5) The Discovery of Youthful Folly. During his first months at Syracuse University Law School, in 1965, Biden failed a course because he wrote a paper that used five pages from a published law-review article without quotation marks or a proper footnote. Since Biden was allowed to make up the course, the revelation was front-page news only because it kept the copycat contretemps alive.

6) An Overwrought Press Conference. With a rambling and disjointed opening statement, Biden failed to reap the benefits of public confession, even though he called himself “stupid” and his actions “a mistake.” Part of the problem is that he contradicted himself by also insisting that it was “ludicrous” to attribute every political idea.

The “final blow” for the campaign came when Newsweek unearthed C-SPAN footage of Biden rattling off his academic accomplishments, including saying that he graduated in the top half of his law school, when in fact, he ranked 76th out of 85.  My highlights GB

Biden announced he was dropping out of the race on Sept. 24, 1987. (To make things even, Biden later jokingly gave Kinnock some of his speeches to use “with or without attribution” during a January 1988 trip to Europe.) About twenty years later, in his 2008 memoir Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, he wrote that the plagiarism scandal was his own fault. “When I stopped trying to explain to everybody and thought it through, the blame fell totally on me,” he wrote. “Maybe the reporters traveling with me had seen me credit Kinnock over and over, but it was Joe Biden who forgot to credit Kinnock at the State Fair debate.”   At least he is admitting some fault. GB

Barrett helped break the news that the Kinnock attack video had come from the campaign of one of Biden’s main opponents, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Paul Tully, a top aide to Dukakis, denied, on the record, that the video had come from the campaign, and Barrett says Tully expressed disbelief that the story would run anyway when they saw each other in Iowa. “I told you we were doing this story,” Barrett recalls telling Tully. “He looked at me as if I had done something awful.” Dukakis at first denied the story when the magazine hit newsstands, but hours later took back his denial. It was a particular embarrassment for the man known as the “straight arrow” candidate because of his “positive campaigning” tactics. Two of his aides stepped down: John Sasso, who leaked the video, and Tully, for lying to TIME.

The public was equally outraged.

Letters to the editor published in TIME offer a glimpse at the public reaction, finding neither Biden nor Dukakis to be honest or trustworthy. “Biden lied in situations in which it was not necessary or relevant,” wrote a Los Angeles reader. “I am alarmed that neither candidate viewed these acts as immoral and representative of his character.” Another reader was alarmed about a year later when Dukakis rehired Sasso after his campaign started to “tank,” literally — a goofy photo of him posing in a military tank was turned into an ad that painted Dukakis as not taking national security issues seriously enough. When the election rolled around, Republican George H.W. Bush won. “Dukakis might have been spared some of [his] mistakes had Sasso been at his elbow,” Barrett recalls many thinking.

Biden’s short-lived 1988 campaign would end up having long-lasting effect on future political campaigns and political journalism, with Walter Shapiro arguing in a December 1987 TIME essay that it had helped turn political reporters into “character cops” who trade in “paparazzi politics and pop psychology.”

And for Biden, there was a silver lining to being driven out of the race: It saved his life. In February of 1988, he had a headache that turned out to be a brain aneurysm. He had surgery, and he had to have surgery again in the spring when a second smaller aneurysm formed. “There is no doubt — the doctors have no doubt — that had I remained in the race, I’d be dead,” he told TIME later that fall, at his first event since the aneurysms. He also joked that “The good news is that I can do anything I did before. The bad news is that I can’t do anything better.”

When he’d had announced his candidacy back in 1987, TIME reported that he had asked his then-teenage son Hunter if he should run. “You should,” Hunter said. “If you don’t do it now, I couldn’t see you doing it some other time.”  My highlights.  GB

Hunter Biden, of course, was wrong.

Biden ran for the Democratic nomination again in 2008. He didn’t secure the nomination, but went on to serve as Vice President of the United States under Barack Obama. In his eight years in the office, he built up a foreign policy portfolio that included the Paris climate agreement and Iran nuclear deal. Now he hopes his policy portfolios and his high poll numbers, not his past runs for the White House, will define his candidacy.

“The huge difference between now and 1988 is that Biden has much more of a cause now,” says Barrett. “In ’88 he couldn’t really formulate why he was running. He didn’t have an ideological cause the way Reagan had a cause. Now we know why he’s running. He thinks he’s the guy who can defeat Trump.”

This is the way the system works.  GB