The time: 1965.
The place: Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Somewhere around 1949, the 40,000 strong Jewish community of the Silk City, Paterson, New Jersey (where my maternal great-grandfather ran a textile mill in partnership with noted designer Boris Kroll, and where my paternal grandfather lived between bankruptcies by hustling schmattes at farmer’s markets), which supported Jewish congregations of every denomination and a kosher hospital, while providing inspiration to Allen Ginsberg (whose father and step-mother lived in a building owned by my father), began its exodus across the Passaic River, where it relocated almost intact in the Bergen County borough of Fair Lawn. The Jews of Fair Lawn had crossed a County line, but unlike their neighbors, continued to read the Paterson News and the Morning Call, rather than the far superior and far more relevant Bergen Evening Record.
The setting: Mrs. Scheinfield’s second grade class.
The lesson: Jackie Robinson. The school’s students were all white (though the faculty contained both an African-America and a Hawaiian-born Japanese American) and 80% Jewish (the local burghers, finally in 1964, made the prudential decision to close the school on the High Holy Days), but Mrs. Scheinfled, who displayed a fondness for Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, felt compelled to teach us the story of Jackie Robinson, graphically detailing the scorn he faced as he traveled the country. Like the lesson of Passover that we too were once slaves, the real message was not lost on us.
My problem with the lesson. We were grandchildren of the Silk City across the river and yet, Mrs. Scheinfield, perhaps a daughter of Brooklyn, failed to even give passing mention to Larry Doby, “the Silk City Slugger.”
I spent a considerable portion of my growing years in Paterson, where my father worked as a boy’s wear buyer at Jacobs and The Mart. I was born in the Barnert Hospital (alev ha-sholem) and went to nursery school at the Barnert Remple (since moved to Franklin Lakes), both named for and endowed by the city’s first Jewish mayor. We fed the pigeons in City Hall Park, shopped at Meyer Brothers on Main Street, had deli at Friedman’s and Sunshine’s, dined Italian at Scordato’s and Patsy’s, had generic American food at the Bonfire and the Madison Diner, and ate the locally popular Hot Texas Weiners at dozens of locations.
But I never learned about Paterson’s own Larry Doby, only about Jackie Robinson.
I only learned about Doby’s Paterson connection while visiting my parents in Florida over a decade ago. Flipping the channels, I found Paterson’s Congressman Bill Pascrell, who’d taught at my High School in Paramus, on C-SPAN, speaking in favor of a bill to rename a post office in Paterson after Doby.
My father came in and asked what I was watching; I told him.
My father replied: “Larry Doby was a great basketball player.”
“Dad,” I responded, “Dad, Larry Doby played baseball.”
He gave me a piteous look. “At East Side High School, Larry Doby was a star basketball player.”
This was indeed the case; at Paterson’s East Side High, Larry Doby, with Frank Lautenberg at his side, led the championship hoops team. Baseball was the least of Doby’s three letters.
But, like Lautenberg, Doby was no fool. He seen his opportunities and he took ‘em, and for a young black man in his day, there were then no opportunities to be had in basketball.
But Branch Rickey and Bill Veeck were men of vision, with an eye on both the American Dream and the Almighty Dollar (for aren’t they really one and the same?). Eleven weeks after Jackie Robinson started playing for Rickey’s Dodger’s, Doby started playing for Veeck’s Cleveland Indians.
Larry Doby endured every indignity endured by Jackie Robinson and endured it at the same exact time, with all of the pain Robinson suffered, but precious little of the glory, even it seems in his hometown.
Jackie Robinson has 1,380,000 Google entries, and is the subject of countless book, movies, pop songs (at least 20 listed on the “All Music Guide”) and expressways.
Larry Doby has 62,500 Google entrees. Despite a stellar record on the field (in the Negro and Nippon leagues as well as the Majors) and as a manager, it took until 1998 for Doby to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.
In addition to the Post Office, the one song written in tribute to Larry Dobie was Brownie McGhee’s great proto-rocker “Robbie-Dobie Boogie,” (and you thought he was just a folksinger). And even there, Doby took second billing to the Dodger.
This morning in the Times, Clyde Haberman compared Bill Thompson to Doby, a comparison which undersells both men.
At Doby’s end, it is unfair because Doby was just as much the pioneer as Robinson.
At Thompson’s end, the comparison is unfair because Thompson is a man of considerable accomplishment at the Board of Education and as Comptroller, while David Dinkins’ major pre-Mayoral accomplishment which spurred his campaign was that he was not Ed Koch (admittedly, a considerable virtue).
Of course, this is typical of the way the press has covered this campaign. Thompson’s serious case against the Mayor is ignored, while his campaign is dismissed instead as an effort to rally people of color to a victory they’ve already won and surpassed.
The climax of the campaign says it all. Thompson appears on a radio show where some nutcase caller spews a rant containing a passing anti-Semitic comment, and gets cut off by the host, who goes onto two more callers before turning the mike over to Thompson to answer an actual question, which Thompson answers.
In the City’s pro-Bloomberg press, this becomes an accusation of silence in the face of anti-Semitism.
Bill Thompson? The son of Bill Sr., his Yiddish-speaking father who married a Jewish woman and never misses a lunch with the Lawyer’s Torah Club. Bill Thompson, a man whose every mentor was a Jew.
Have they no shame? Have they no sense of decency, at long last?
Meanwhile, Bloomberg appears at a rally with Fred Newman‘s Jew-bating, child abusing, taxpayer subsidized (thanks to Bloomberg) cult, which he’s previously paid off with, government positions and financing, campaign contributions, “charitable” donations and God only knows what else, and no one in the press can be bothered to give it more than passing notice or explain its significance. To enhance the nausea level, Bloomberg actually joins in a standing ovation for hate-queen Lenora Fulani, who once said that Jews “function as mass murderers of people of color.” No one notices.
The Post called Fulani “controversial,” but never explains why.
Well, no one can accuse the Post of blithely implying that all black people are anti-Semitic.
They only imply that about the ones who are not.