Years ago, when the world at least appeared to move at a slower pace before and after the holidays, my longtime buddy Michael Gentile would say, “Well, boss, you know the new year doesn’t really start until January 20th. My birthday!” That was true in 1987, when Michael, working for Larry Flynt’s Hustler in Los Angeles, turned 30, and when I called with felicitations he repeated his jocular adage. Soon, he’ll be 69 and we’ll agree that his words still hold, though different rules apply. I’m not sure anything can top the description of his boss Larry, in a wheelchair, seen through a glass window lapping up the juices of this or that model, and it was fresh gossip. Now, the word “felch” was included in front-page stories about Olivia Nuzzi and Bobby Jr., unthinkable in ’87. In the early-1980s, Michael defined the word for our City Paper colleague Phyllis Orrick and me, in a whisper at Baltimore’s Club Charles, and we busted our guts. Far more revealing than hitting the john and seeing four people waiting to snort two lines of coke.
I’m not applying myself, ignoring Trump’s crazy (until it isn’t) idea of buying Greenland, Minnesota Madness or the chatter that Cuba will soon go the way of Venezuela. I hope so: as a kid my mom told me stories of a week-long trip to Havana with gal pals in mid-1940, a sort of hen party since she was getting married that November. She spoke of the grand, and affordable, hotels, the casinos and exotic cuisine (at least for a Bronx-reared young woman on her first overseas trip) and it sounded wonderful. And who knows, perhaps by the time this story is posted, the Bad Men who rule Iran will flee, and the country will return to a Shah-like regime (the CIA-installed dictator wasn’t a bargain, with his SAVAK brutes on the loose) when it was a more secular country, and fit for American companies. My brother Jeff’s in-laws lived there for a couple of years in the early-1970s, and raved about it.
I’m looking at the accompanying photo of my Uncle Pete (21), my dad (24) and one of their friends, none of them affluent, in a typical New York City pose. Last Thursday, I dropped by the Roland Park haberdasher Eddie Jacobs’ storefront to pick up two new pairs of corduroys, and felt like a slob, at least compared to my father and uncle. I’m not a slob by any means, but have acceded, grudgingly, to the Casual Everyday Dress of this era. That means polo shirt, cardigan and cords in the winter; polo shirt and chinos in the spring and summer. I can’t remember the last time I bought a suit—I have a dozen or so in the closet for those rare occasions, mostly wakes and weddings—and though my checkbook is fatter because of it, I do look back with fondness to the Morning in America days when those with professional jobs dressed up every day for work, or suffered the consequences.
Then again, it was a time when I had to fire a advertising executive at New York Press for dropping trou one evening before a female associate. It sucked: he was a crackerjack salesman, but even in those pre-#MeToo days, this was a sacking offense. I wasn’t entirely altruistic—though I couldn’t contemplate such behavior—since doing nothing would result in a can’t-win lawsuit. (In 1969, in ninth grade at Simpson Jr. High in Huntington, one day the gossip—notes passed in class—was in overdrive when it was learned that a guy whipped it out, full hard-on, in a stairwell, ostensibly to impress a girl he hoped to win over. If there was any possible romance for this schnook, that was scratched, but he wasn’t suspended, just ostracized for the rest of the year by friends of the fetching cheerleader, and maybe that was worse. Never heard a word about him again, as he was shunned in the halls and the de facto smoking lounge between buildings.)
Take a look at the clues to figure out the year my dad and uncle are pictured: All persons born in Puerto Rico are declared U.S. citizens; the Parker 51 fountain pen is first sold; the Grand Coulee Dam begins to generate electricity; Woody Guthrie records the Columbia River Ballads; “America Runs on Bulova Time”; Walt Disney’s Dumbo is released, as is You’ll Never Get Rich; Romania declares war on the U.S.; the Boston Bruins win their third Stanley Cup, the last until 1970; Richie Havens is born and Jelly Roll Morton dies; The Antioch Review is founded; C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Dorothy B Hughes’ The Bamboo Blonde and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations are published; Leonard Bacon wins the Poetry Pulitzer; and Alex Lomax discovers Muddy Waters and Son House.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023