O Albany!

 

I will be selling all four of my books (discounted prices!) this Saturday, Sept. 26, at the Albany Book Festival, to be held in the Uptown Campus of the University at Albany (SUNY). I'll be at Table 34 of the Ballroom, on the second floor of the Campus Center. See more about the festival at this link.

I'm the goofy looking guy seen here at home plugging the historical novel published earlier this year,                                                                             The Detective and Dorothy Day.

My previous novel was The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant, and I also wrote two biographies: James Montgomery: Abolitionist Warrior, and General Gordon Granger: The Savior of Chickamauga and the Man Behind "Juneteenth". 

I'm a former journalist who spent many years working in Albany (mostly at the Capitol) and Schenectady, and will be hanging around at my table most of the day, so feel free to stop by and chew the fat. 

We could talk about the fading glory days of Joe Bruno, the last Republican to hold real power in Albany, whom I remember working a packed room of senators, aides, reporters and lobbyists like a great comedian, purportedly telling a shaggy dog story about the difficulties of operating a steamroller on his Brunswick farm -- a reference to Fred Dicker's then recent story in The New York Post about Gov. Eliot Spitzer threatening to roll over Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco like a "f****** steamroller."

Or the Senate leader coming out in the cold evening to speak to a mass rally of correction officers on the Capitol's east side, as they chanted his name, "Bruno, Bruno," like a dark war cry. They must sorely miss him now, in the ruins of the state's prison system.

Or Bruno holding up a big horse-racing deal, causing one of his allies to desert him. This was a little scoop of mine which prompted the great man to receive me, and provided perhaps the favorite political quote and scene of my not-particularly-distinguished career (and which I'm grateful no editor cut for the sake of good taste): 

“[Spitzer] figures people like you are going to get me to sweat,” Bruno said to a reporter, smiling as he headed back to his office. “I’m not sweating,” said the shirtsleeved Senate leader, raising his arms to demonstrate.

Or we can go farther back, and discuss the intricacies of how the Schenectady Metroplex Authority came into existence. 

Or, "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," to the days of Mario Cuomo, mocking our police reporter who was telling him they were calling Schenectady "Baby New York" by scornfully repeating the phrase in his Queens accent -- yet not long afterwards the state led a big law enforcement operation which cleaned up Schenectady and drastically reduced crime there. Cuomo, the great liberal, built a lot of prisons and helped turn around a massive state crime wave, but didn't like to take credit for it. Years before that, in the mid-1980s, he was touring the Troy Shirtmakers factory in Glens Falls, peering suspiciously at my union button, and educating me about arugula (which I challenged him to spell). The factory and the newspaper I worked for are long gone from that East Side neighborhood, which happens to be where Joe Bruno grew up in a cold-water flat on Walnut Street. He and Cuomo were both sons of Italian immigrants. 

 

Or let's go back to the Civil War, which was the key part of my first three books, and even breaks briefly into conversations in the fourth, despite Dorothy Day being a pacifist. We could talk all day about that, or my time with Catholic Worker people from the 1970s on.

See you Saturday, I hope.

9/11 and Dorothy Day

 

I'm backing into this one.

My mother, daughter of Irish immigrants, was from Brooklyn. I lived in Manhattan most of the time from 1974 to 1982, then moved upstate to be a daily newspaper reporter. I love the city.

I got married, and we took my first child, a daughter, down to a Long Island church to be baptized; then at my mother's house she was held in the arms of her great-grandmother, Mary Gaffney.

Also at that celebration was a friend of mine from the city and her husband. It was one of the last times I saw her because we were drifting mostly out of touch, as people do -- except on 9/11 when I called her house. I don't think it was when I was writing the editorial for the 9/12 Schenectady Daily Gazette, but later, when I got home. I called because she worked for Dean Witter, had survived the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and was still employed there.

By 9/11, Dean Witter had become part of Morgan Stanley, and its offices were in the second tower to be hit, between the 43rd and 72nd floors. You may have heard of the company's security chief, Rick Rescorla, one of many true heroes that day. The plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit between the 77th through 84th floors. It made an enormous noise and swayed the building, my friend told me, as she and her colleagues were walking down underneath.

The aforementioned daughter joined the US Army as a private, married a soldier and started a family, retiring after 16 years with two deployments in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. I am in awe of her achievements and honorable service.

Dorothy Day died in 1980, almost 21 years before 9/11. I was thinking about writing a post here about the latest bureaucratic step toward her possible canonization, but lacked enthusiasm. Not that I oppose the process. While Dorothy was famously dismissive about people calling her a saint, in the non-official sense she obviously was one, as a faithful Catholic and transparently good person.

Opinions are -- steering into safe cliché to avoid a more scatological one which comes to mind -- a dime a dozen. My editorial about 9/11 was conventionally hawkish. I wrote a column I liked better, about the hundreds of firemen and cops who died. In 2003, the Gazette downsized me out of the Opinion Department back to the news side of the operation, where objectivity was my goal.

It can be a sketchy business to declare what a dead person would have thought or done about this or that, but I think a couple of uncontroversial statements can be made about a hypothetically living Dorothy in the 21st century, and specifically how she would have responded to 9/11.

She would, like almost everyone else, have grieved for the dead and their families, especially in the city that was her home, and admired the courageous rescuers. She would have done what she could to help -- which would not have involved changing a lifelong habit of declining to vote for presidential candidates. Nor would she have supported any of the wars.

I am still not all the way won over to her pacifism. But observing the history of this century from the Mideast to Ukraine, the case I think she could have made is overwhelming my defenses. Not entirely. When I hear of African Christians being massacred by jihadis, I think they have the right to defend themselves, their families and neighbors. But my increasing instinct, argument, hope and prayer is to avoid war -- including civil war -- and make peace.