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, and 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, prompting 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.