Milton Parker, the back-of-the-house partner at the Carnegie Deli, passed away yesterday. He was 90. From the New York Times:
According to savethedeli.com, a Web site that celebrates delicatessens nationwide, Mr. Parker’s business card read “Milton Parker, CPM (corned beef and pastrami maven).” Mr. Levine’s card reads “MBD (Married Boss’s Daughter).”
Besides the quality and belly-bulging portions of the Carnegie Deli’s menu items, several other factors brought fame to the restaurant. Dozens of delis dot the streets of the theater district. For years, the Stage Delicatessen — near the Carnegie, on Seventh Avenue — had a superior reputation. But in 1979, Carnegie pastrami was judged better by The New York Times. That touched off what newspaper articles called the Pastrami War. Both establishments fared well, with customers lining up down the block.
“Them?” Mr. Parker said at the time of his rival. “They’re living off our overflow.”
It certainly did not hurt business, five years later, when Mr. Allen’s movie “Broadway Danny Rose” was released, with some scenes shot at the Carnegie.
I flipped through the paper on the subway this morning, my fingers smudged with newsprint. More layoffs, this time the cosmetics industry. Hard times here, more ahead.
I looked up and a short, smartly dressed couple stood in front of me. They were both attractive, well-groomed and pinched-looking, and they spoke softly to each other. It was almost as if they were just mouthing the words. So many couples are loud in New York and they were just the opposite.
I went back to my paper and then looked back up at them. They both had small mouths, and now they were both thinking, looking away from each other, lost in thought, concerned. I thought about how many times I see dogs who look like their owners. It was almost too perfect that these two people would find each other.
They stood about a foot apart and the man reached out and tugged gently on the woman’s handbag. She looked up at him. He held out his hand. She took it and they held onto each other, silently. I thought about Raging Bull, about all the slow-motion, close-up shots of hands, and how expressive hand gestures are (I talk with my hands all the time).
It’s cold outside today and the news is hard. This couple seemed worried, but I couldn’t tell if that was just their natural disposition or something else. At least they have each other.
There is a cute little girl in our building who kitty sits for us when we are out of town. She’s thirteen now, so she’s not such a little girl anymore. But she’s a sweet kid, thoughtful and bright. Her parents are cool too–the old man is a professor. They are in their mid-fifties I’d guess, hip, and know a ton about music. Last year, the mother had a stroke, or at least they initially thought it was a stroke. Turns out she has A.L.S.
At first, her speech was slurred. Now, she can’t talk anymore. Instead, she types into a small laptop computer that speaks for her. But she is deteriorating and there is no telling how long she has to live–two years maybe?
My wife Emily has crohn’s and has become something of an expert at dealing with insurance companies. She has gone downstairs to our neighbhors apartment and spent hours sorting through their insurance complications. It makes her feel good to help, to be of some use, to put her own long, often exasperating experiences to work.
I’ve gone down a few times too but it’s almost too painful to bear. I saw the parents on the subway a few weeks ago and buried my head in my book. They didn’t notice me and they got off a few stops later, far from our usual stop. I felt ashamed, like a coward.
The thought of the husband losing his wife, of the girl losing her mother, is overwhelming. When I see them, I am bright and cheery, but look for a way to make the encounters as brief as possible.
Last Friday night, I went out to dinner with my cousin Donny. He’s my mom’s age so I call him my uncle, even though he’s really a cousin. I met him at his mother’s apartment downtown. She passed away in December and he’s in the process of fixing the place up to be sold.
Donny let me take three books from her collection–a Jimmy Breslin novel; a collection of letters by the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins; and Liebling Abroad, a collection of war and food writing by one of our of most influencial journalists.
I didn’t find any bookmarks in them, but Michael Popek, more commonly known around these parts as “unmoderated,” sent me a link to his terrific blog about the hidden treasures that are left in books: forgottenbookmarks.com. Michael runs a used bookstore so he comes across a lot of interesting momentos.
We’ve mentioned Warner a couple times in this space during the postseason, but the lack of ink he got today after his amazing performance Sunday demands one more statement, and we’ll make it: Kurt Warner is the greatest quarterback in the game and, at his best, better than Peyton Manning, Tom Brady or Brett Favre. His postseason stats alone leave the others in the dust with an 8-3 record, not so gaudy as Brady’s 14-3, but Warner has thrown for as many TDs, 26, in 11 games as Brady has in 17, and Warner has averaged 8.4 yards per throw to Brady’s 6.6.
One of the reasons I enjoy reading Joe Posnanski’s blog is because he relishes talking about sports the way fans do. He takes bar room topics, often in list form, and riffs, with reason and humor and a sense of fun. Who was the best so-and-so, what was the greatest such-and-such. The enthusiasm he shows for this kind of banter is what makes Pos so appealing–and he’s as well-liked a sports writer as I’ve ever met. The sabr-numbers crowd dig him and the mainstream guys like him too.
I was in Pos-mode the other day when I read Chris Ballard’s SI cover story on LeBron James. King James is only 24, a man-child, physical-mental freak of historically great proportions. The guy is twenty someodd pounds shy of 300, for crying out loud. I had no idea he was that big. And he’s so fast. He could play strong safety in the NFL.
Along with Kobe Bryant, James is the greatest player in the game and he’s only getting better. So I thought, when we talk about the greatest basketball players in the post-Jordan Era, it’s got to be Shaq, who you can’t really compare with Jordan because of the position; Kobe, who has won three titles and is certainly great, but not at Jordan’s level, especially off the court in terms of mainstream popularity and influence; and James.
Of course the league has been filled with other iconic players since Jordan level, including Allen Iverson, Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett, but not ones whose appeal crossed over to a wider audience. They are just hall of famers in the game. Nobody has reached the level Jordan attained. Jordan followed the greatestness of Magic and Bird seemlessly and he brought it to a crescendo that was peerless.
I thought about guys on that level—Jordan and Tiger Woods, Babe Ruth—as I read an old GQ article by the novelist William Kennedy. In 1956, Kennedy was a kid reporter working for the Albany-Times Union when he interviewed Louis Armstrong, who was in town for a gig. Kennedy went up to his hotel room and talked with him for an hour and a half. He wrote a short nothing piece on it for the paper but saved his notes.
My awe and reverence for Louis continued to grow through the ensuing years, and somewhere in the late 1970s I conducted an after-dinner poll as to who was the most valuable person who had ever lived, and Satchmo won, with five votes. William Faulkner got four, Michangelo three, Beethoven, Muhammad Ali and Tolstoy two each, and Dostoyevsky and Busby Berkeley one each.
…He was a giant in his youth: the first major soloist in jazz, the man to whom every last jazz, swing, modern jazz and rock musician after hism has been and is indebted, some via the grand-larceny route. Music has changed radically since the seminal days of jazz, but Satchmo’s achievement has not been diminished. No one has superseded him in jazz eminence the way Crosby superseded Jolson and Sinatra superseded Crosby and the Beatles superseded Elvis, and I will never know who or what really superseded the Beatles.
Who else, in sports, in the arts, in popular culture, is on this level?
Question: One of my favorite parts of the book is David Cone winding George Steinbrenner up and making him crazy just to get a laugh. That wasn’t something you could imagine a player doing back in the Bronx Zoo days. How influential was Cone on those teams?
Verducci: We all have known how important Cone was to the success of the Yankees. But in reporting the book I gained an even greater appreciation for his role. He was the de facto captain before Derek Jeter. At every turn — whether it was keeping David Wells in check, counseling Chuck Knoblauch on his playoff gaffe against the Indians, stepping up during the key 1998 clubhouse meeting, knowing how to push the buttons of everybody from George Steinbrenner to Paul O’Neill — Cone was the single most influential player in that clubhouse. I was fascinated when Mussina talked so often about how much those teams missed Cone — and Mussina didn’t even play with Cone. But Cone was so important to those teams that Mussina understood it just by his absence. In fact, I view and structured Cone and Mussina as parallel characters in the book. Each emerges as a voice of the distinct micro-eras within the era: when the Yankees won and when they didn’t. Each has a profound ability to see beyond himself and understand team dynamics and the human condition. They also have the ability to smartly share such observations. That Mussina moved into Cone’s locker and place in the rotation immediately upon Cone leaving the Yankees only reinforces the sort of shared role they have in the book. I like to think of it as Cone and Mussina playing the Greek chorus — only not together, but Cone taking you through 2000, then leaving the stage and handing the role over to Mussina.
Books have always held an important place in my life. Not just reading them but owning them. I wouldn’t call my father an intellectual but I would call him bookish. My grandfather had a library and so did my dad. So do my aunts and uncles.
After my old man died, my brother and sister and I were faced with the daunting task of what to do with his library. My syblings took a few books but weren’t really interested in them. I felt a great responsibility to make sure that they would have a good home, even if most of them were donated to the local library.
It’s tempting to look at someone’s library as autobiography. You could certainly tell something about my old man by what books he had–he loved mystery novels, for example. On the other hand, he just didn’t throw things, especially books, away. So there were books that he had gotten as gifts that said nothing about him or his taste. It just said that he didn’t believe in tossing them away. And there were others that I knew he hadn’t cracked open in more than thirty years.
Still, his library still gave him comfort and a definition of sorts. I ended up taking just a few dozen for myself, most of them for sentimental reasons–his first edition copies of “The Boys of Summer” and “No Cheering in the Press Box,” Leo Rosten’s “Joys of Yiddish.” His books, which I had memorized and adored for so many years had actually become a burden.
But if someone’s library paints a misleading or limited portrait, there is still room for autobiography. Because there are little reminders inside the books for us to discover…
Last night, I was in bed and I picked up my dad’s copy of E.B. White’s book of essays. The book has been on my night table for a year and every time I try to get into it, I just can’t. I feel as if I am supposed to adore White considering how much I like clean, vigorous writing. So I decided to give it another go when a postcard fell out from the middle of the book.
It was a board of elections registration card from 1983 addressed to the first woman my dad dated seriously after my mom kicked him out of the house. I hadn’t thought about Kaye in a long time but lying in bed, a flood of memories came back to me.
She was roughly my dad’s age and had a bob of silver hair and wore big glasses. She had long, thin fingers and smoked More cigarettes, slim and brown. Kaye lived on 81st street just down the block from my grandparent’s apartment. She had some money though I don’t remember what she did for a living. Was she in publishing?
What I do recall is that she was sweet and gentle with us. She gave me a frank talk about sex one day, described what an orgasm was. She wasn’t provocative or clinical, but somewhere inbetween, and she left me feeling that an orgasm would be a terrific thing to have. On a shelf in her bedroom was an over-sized video cassette box for “The Devil in Ms. Jones.” I was a snoop in those days but for some reason I never had the nerve, or perhaps the opportunity, to sneak a look at it.
Kaye also had “Young Frankenstein” and my brother, sister and I watched that over and over. I remember watching Eddie Murphy’s “Delirious” there often too. But our greatest discovery at her place was George Carlin’s record “FM/AM.” I’ll always remember Kaye for turning us on to him.
For a brief time, my dad lived with her, and almost certainly took advantage of her, at least financially. But he was still battling the bottle and I don’t think they lasted more than a year-and-a-half before she kicked him out and ended it.
I was twelve when they dated. At that time I wanted nothing more in life than the chance to go see “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” the famous midnight movie. I had the soundtrack, both from the film and the play. But my mom wasn’t about to let me go out in the middle of the night to watch transvestites sing. I was nothing if not persistant. I pleaded, carried on. Eventually, Kaye agreed to take me and my friend Mike to see it one Saturday night. I don’t remember why, if it was a secret from my mom or what.
We saw it at the old New Yorker theater on 88th street and Broadway. There was no floor show but they did show two animated shorts:
Bambi vs. Godzilla
and Lenny Bruce’s Thank You Mask Man.
Then, the moment we had been waiting for. Mike and I were not disappointed. Kaye was horrified. She wanted to leave after twenty minutes but we weren’t having it and to her credit she put up with us and the movie and we stayed for the entire show.
I never saw her again after she split with dad. The old man said that she had gotten into “Dyanetics” and was a kook. But I’ll always remember her as a nice lady who introduced us to some adult pleasures with enthusiasm and sensitivity.
And I’ve got her voting registration card to prove it.
Unlike many of my contemporaries, I did not grow up reading Bill James. I wasn’t familiar with James’ Baseball Abstracts until my cousin gave me his collection in 2002, but in many ways, Bill James is the Internet–the outsider, the guy writing in his basement, intellectually curious, irreverent, superior, caustic and funny. The guy who doesn’t have to actually face the athletes, who really doesn’t have any interest in talking to them.
There have been other writers who played a big part in influencing the current generation of baseball writers–from Tom Boswell and Peter Gammons to James’ protogee Rob Neyer and Bill Simmons.
But for me, the early role model was Roger Angell because he was a writer and a fan. Here is Angell discussing his first baseball assignment for the New Yorker in the spring of 1962 (from a wonderful interview conducted by Jared Haynes “They Look Easy, But They’re Hard,” originally published in Writing on the Edge in 1993):
I was in my forties–I was forty-one–and I knew enough to know that I didn’t know a great deal about baseball, even though I was a true-blue fan. I’d followed baseball all my life. But I was wary of talking to players; I felt nervous about that.
…And also, although it was not a conscious plan, I wrote about myself, because I was a fan. It set a pattern for me. I am a fan, I refer to myself as a fan, and I report about my feelings as a fan, and nobody else, to my knowledge, does that. It’s not great thing, but those old restrictions on reporting seemed to say that you can’t put yourself in the piece and you can’t betray emotion. It’s funny, because most of the beat writers are just as much fans as the rest of us, or more so. If you sat up there and didn’t care about baseball in some personal way, it would be a deadly assingment, I think, year after year.
Angell is an editor first and a writer second. So who influenced his approach to writing about baseball?
A great model for me was Red Smith, who was a model for almost every sportswriter. The great thing about Red Smith was that he sounded like himself. His attitude about sports was always clear. He felt himself enormously lucky to be there in the pressbox. He was not in favor of glorifying the players too much–Godding up the players, in Stanley Woodward’s phrase. But was Red Smith in every line. You knew what he had read and what his influences were.
I don’t try to be a literate sportswriter; I try to be myself. It’s as simple as that. Everybody’s got to find what their voice is. You’ve got to end up sounding like yourself if you’re going to write in a way that’s going to reward you when you’re done. If you end up sounding like somebody else, you’re not going to be any good. You won’t get anywhere. Readers are smart. They will pick up whether the tone is genuine or not. Tone is the ultimate thing writers have to think about. You could write on a given subject–a ball game or a national crisis or a family crisis–in twenty or thirty different ways. You only have to pick what you want people to make of this.
Words to live by. Angell has often said that writing and baseball may look easy but they are both extremely hard. I try to never forget this because neither gets easier with practice. I can’t get away from the reality with writing because I do it regularly, but it’s more tempting to lose track of how hard it is to play the game.
I’ll always be grateful to Angell for making this clear. And for setting a wonderful example of the writer as fan.
