Tag: history

40 Years Ago: The crooked student government elections

Draped across the McKenna Theater was this massive banner which read: MIKE HIRSCH HAS CULTURE.

voteUnlike in high school, where I was reasonably popular (student government president, drama club, et al), I was rather uninvolved in college; getting married at 19 will do that. I didn’t hang out at the bars and drink; the age of consent was 18 then. I just went to class, and came home, did the grocery shopping and like chores, I would go bowling occasionally with guys I knew, primarily my fellow political science majors.

In the spring of 1974, a bunch of my poli sci acquaintances decided to run as a team with some other folks, who I’ll call the Party and Dance folks. They figured they would capture the beer crowd (the poli sci) and the pot folks (P&D).

But there were eleven slots, but they had only ten folks willing to run. So my buddy/classmate Richie was tasked with recruiting me. I said yes, at least partly out of guilt – I was so disconnected from extracurricular campus life – perhaps with of the idea that participation would look good on the resume.

I was to run for Cultural Chairman (sic). Five areas were in the budget, and the cultural area was to fund the arts activities and the various clubs. I recollected that there was no real competition in any race except for one, and you can guess which one. Draped across the McKenna Theater was this massive banner that read: MIKE HIRSCH HAS CULTURE. I figured I had lost the race. It’s not as though we had debates on the issues; it was a popularity contest, he had name recognition, and I did not.

But the rumor mill was rife with reports of rampant voting irregularities, with some people casting their ballots more than once. Since I was what was likely the only competitive race, I reached out to Michael Hirsch. We met somewhere for coffee or tea. He seemed like a good guy. We agreed that since we didn’t know WHO was rigging the election, that neither of us would challenge the results. As it turned out, everyone on my ticket enjoyed large majorities, except for me, who won narrowly.

Two years later, I became the election commissioner. I hired a townie (non-student) friend of mine named Anne Sergeant to sit at the ballot table. She was instructed to mark their student ID cars in the 37 square on the back. She discovered that several people came back throughout the day to vote again, but she shut them down. And since she wasn’t a student and was unknown to most of them, she couldn’t be talked into letting them vote again.

Several years ago, I thought about this incident and wondered what became of Michael Hirsch. Unfortunately, Mike Hirsch, an advocate for services to people afflicted with AIDS, died of complications of the disease in February 1989. “He was 34 years old and lived in Manhattan.”

The Black Panther on the Daredevil art spread

Perhaps the item appearing in the Daredevil Chronicles was an early iteration of what appeared as the cover of the DD Index

Daredevil.ChroniclesComic book connoisseur Alan David Doane, who used to frequent the comic store known as FantaCo, where I used to work back in the 1980s, asked me this on Twitter recently:

“It took me 32 years to wonder — why is the Black Panther in this pinup? Anyone know?”

He asked me because the picture appeared in a magazine called the Daredevil Chronicles, which FantaCo published in 1982. This was a magazine Mitch Cohn edited, while I was editing the Fantastic Four Chronicles. He also asked Klaus Janson, the inker on the piece over Frank Miller’s pencils, the same question.

Truth is, I had never thought about it. In the Daredevil “family”, Elektra (the woman on the top) and the Black Widow (the woman on the bottom) were featured in that comic. But Black Panther, other than being another costumed Marvel character, was not related to DD at that time.

But around that same period, there was a competing product, the Daredevil Index, published by George Olshevsky, which was, oddly, 9B in the series:
Daredevil index9b
Frank Miller also penciled this piece, although Joe Rubenstein inked it. Perhaps the item appearing in the DD Chronicles was an early iteration of what appeared as the cover of the DD Index, which also featured The Black Panther, as well as Shanna, Black Goliath, Human Fly & Dazzler. I no longer have my DD Index, alas.

I should note, for those unfamiliar, that the Black Panther had nothing to do with the political movement of the same name, and in fact, predated the organization. Rather, it referred to T’Challa, an African king, who first appeared in a Fantastic Four comic book, cover-dated July 1966, but released a few months earlier. It was the then-upcoming version of Olshevsky’s X-Men Index that prompted FantaCo to come out with the X-Men Chronicles the year before.

If someone has a more definitive answer to this question, please feel free to jump in. This is merely my best guess.

The past, education, happy, sad

I don’t like studying anything in depth; I get bored.

paperrockNew York Erratic must be from New Jersey, she asks so many questions:

Are there any events in your life that you feel make good parables that you want to share one day with your daughter?

I was 51 when she was born, so there is a lot of my life to draw from. Huge parts of it she doesn’t know, significant events, and I’m not sure exactly when/if to tell her. Maybe if she asks. She DOES know about JEOPARDY!

I remember looking at photos of my mother with some guy she went out with before she dated my father, and initially, it was kind of weird, but hey, that was rather natural. When she would talk about it- I was at least in my 20s by then – and say, “Oh, I could have married” so-and-so, it was rather disconcerting. I mean, I wouldn’t have been me!

My daughter is ALWAYS asking me to tell her stories, and I always struggle to tell her some. I know I’ve not wanted to poison her with some of the racism that I’ve experienced, yet at the same, try to subtly let her know – and some of it she’s figured out on her own – that it’s not all in the past.

I suppose I could tell her about being a conscious objector during the Vietnam war or going to various demonstrations for peace and justice. Not sure I want to tell her how I quit a job without having one to go to, more than once.

Really struggling with this one.

If you could go back in time and talk to yourself at 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50, what would you say?

At 10, I was feeling pretty good about things. Got 100 in the spelling final. I started becoming real friends with the girls in my class. Maybe I’d say that I needed to develop more male friends, because, even to this day, I have a dearth of them. I’ve usually preferred the company of women, and not just in romantic settings. I have some great male friends, but they are in the clear minority.

At 20, I was married to the Okie. I’d tell myself to press her about what was going on with her that would lead to her leaving the next year. Maybe I would have gone to the Philadelphia folk festival (which we couldn’t afford) if it was THAT important to her. (Ah, something the Daughter does not know about yet.)

At 30, I had a good friend die and got my heart broken in a fairly short period of time. I’d tell myself to avoid a certain emotional entanglement the following year, though it felt so good at the moment.

At 40, I had just started my current job the year before. I would have suggested taking a temporary position when it became available because the whole path of my employment could have changed.

At 50, Carol was pregnant with Lydia. Actually, there’s very little I would have said at that point because it’s impossible to understand parenthood without experiencing it.

What do you think you didn’t study enough in high school and college?

In high school, it was French, though I DID put in the effort, I just didn’t GET it, past the first year or so. Wish I had had the chance to have taken it earlier. In college, I’m surprised, in retrospect, that I took exactly one course in music, which I aced, and didn’t participate at all in a choral group, at college, or a church or something.

Did you have to write a thesis for your graduate program?

It was not a thesis as such, but it was a long paper, close to 50 pages. I couldn’t tell you what it was about if you paid me. It was torture when I wrote it.

What’s your favorite subject to study in-depth? What is your least favorite subject?

I don’t like studying anything in-depth; I get bored. I like to know a little about a lot of things. Recently, I HAVE become more expert in START-UP NY (an attempt at an economic stimulus in the state) and NYS sales tax law than anyone ought to be, and still, I have to look up. I suppose I’ve picked up some knowledge of The Beatles and other musical entities of the 1960s and 1970s.

My eyes glaze over when listening to talk about cars; I couldn’t tell you a type of Chevy that doesn’t start with C (Corvette, Corvair).

If you could give one piece of advice to a college student today, what would it be?

Resist learning about job skills that you can go into today; the field could be gone tomorrow. DO learn about all sorts of stuff, and know-how to think, not just regurgitate back the facts. In other words, in spite of the great affection for STEM education in the country these days, and I’m not against it, I still believe in the value of a liberal arts education.
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Do you read the funnies? What’s your favorite internet comic?

I seldom read the comics on the Internet, more as a matter of time. I’ve seen stuff I like online, such as XKCD, but it’s not part of the routine. (Here is a special version of the strip.) I read Pearls Before Swine, Luann, Zits, Doonesbury (when there’s new daily stuff) and Blondie, because it has evolved somewhat. Having said this, I did support the Kickstarter for the movie STRIPPED, about the history of the genre, so I am interested in the topic.

What types of jokes or humor make you laugh the hardest?

It’s language: clever puns, things that evolve from double meanings of words. Can’t give you an example, because, as I have often said, I can’t REMEMBER a joke I’ve heard since the age of about 12, even with fiscal incentive. But the visuals on the page, while not the best examples (but they are the last two on my Facebook feed) at least suggest the genre of humor.

I HATE, BTW, America’s Funniest Home Videos; the bits usually involve physical pain and embarrassment. I was at an urgent care place with Lydia a couple of years ago, and it was on the TV; my loathing was confirmed.

One more question, this from SamuraiFrog:

What makes you cry?

Music: The Barber Adagio I have almost a dozen versions of. Lenten music in general. But a great final movement of a classical piece will do it too, especially with organ power chord endings. I’ve mentioned some sad songs, associated with romance, in the past. Music evokes some very specific memories. Sometimes, songs, songs I associate with my former church in Albany make me very sad. Know what song used to make me weepy? Captain Jack by Billy Joel.
Movies: the first one was West Side Story when Maria yells “Don’t you touch him!” over the dead Tony, but there have been several since. An occasional television show will do this as well, but it’s been a while, mostly because I’m not watching much TV.
Other people being sad: I remember when Bobby Kennedy died and people were all sad. I wasn’t, but their tears became mine because THEY were hurting. That Kickstarter/Veronica Mars thing that you experienced made me sad for you, almost to tears, and surprisingly angry.
My melancholia: More now than in quite a while. Sometimes, even in the midst of a crowd, I can feel quite alone. And I cry and/or I get angry.
My daughter in pain, my wife in pain: the worst pain I ever saw my wife endure was after some surgery involving her jaw. MUCH worse than childbirth.

You can still Ask Roger Anything.

The Belgian Congo and Yugoslavia

One of my co-workers came up to me and asked how many of the five former Yugoslav republics I could name; I remembered four.

During the Vietnam war, it was widely reported – I don’t remember if it was apocryphal or true – that most Americans could not find Vietnam on a map. Likewise, today’s students might be challenged to find Afghanistan or Iraq on the globe.

By contrast, I was a bit of a cartology fanatic when I was a child. My paternal grandfather, who lived upstairs, would give me maps from his National Geographic, which I would study at length. I still have some of them in the attic, BTW.

Unfortunately for my recall, the world kept changing. French West Africa and British East Africa became a slew of independent countries. What was once Belgian Congo became Zaire, but is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sometimes referred to as Congo-Kinshasa; this not to be confused with the neighboring Republic of the Congo, also referred to as Congo-Brazzaville, which used to be under French control.

Later, Germany merged. Czechoslovakia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and the USSR broke up; fortunately, the former two only broke into a pair of countries each. But Yugoslavia… One of my co-workers came up to me and asked how many of the five former Yugoslav republics I could name; I remembered four. Then I looked it up and there are SIX:

Bosnia and Herzegovina
Croatia (which I forgot)
Macedonia (which I remembered because the Greeks got all bent out of shape)
Montenegro (which I remembered from WWI)
Serbia (which has two autonomous regions, Vojvodina – which I had never heard of; and Kosovo, which I had)
Slovenia (not be confused with Slovakia, part of former Czechoslovakia; I forgot it)

It SHOULD be easy to remember: BCMMSS

Now the former Soviet Union is tougher, and I have developed a bizarre way to remember, roughly from northwest to southeast:

Baltic states-ELL
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania

Eastern Europe-BUM
Belarus
Ukraine
Moldova

Southern Caucasus, Russia-RAGA
Russia
Armenia
Georgia
Azerbaijan

Central Asia-KKUTT
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyzstan
Uzbekistan
Tajikistan
Turkmenistan

ELL-BUM-RAGA-KKUTT? Well, it worked for me; sounds like a musical selection.

World, stop changing. I’m kidding; change is inevitable.

K is for Killing

The current debate over gun violence likely will not be ended so easily.

 

My church, First Presbyterian Church in Albany, NY, is celebrating its 250th anniversary this year. The church donated some artifacts to the Albany Institute of History & Art, itself founded in 1791. The Institute has an exhibit, ongoing through April 17, showing some of the church history over the years.

Some of the church members included John Jay, eventually the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury; and Aaron Burr, third Vice-President of United States, and the first NOT to go on to become President.

After Burr killed Hamilton in a duel in 1804, the pastor Eliphalet Nott delivered a jeremiad against dueling. As it was a particularly long and significant sermon, it was published by the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany. (I listened to the re-enacted speech a few years ago.) Eliphalet Nott had the remarkable effect of, almost singlehandedly, effectively ending what had been considered an “honorable” way for gentlemen to settle their differences.

The current debate over gun violence likely will not be ended so easily. The solutions seem to be fewer guns on one side, more guns on the other. The latter group clings to the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution: “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The notion of a militia, to me, seems to be a state-run National Guard.

In any case, here’s a list of murders with firearms (most recent) by country. And here are twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States. Nothing here, I suspect, will change anyone’s mind about the next steps to take. No Eliphalet Nott sermon will save the day anymore.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

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