Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right
Page 11
At the end of the interview, Cosby said, “I just hope I’m not in trouble now, man,” which became a headline in the New York Post. I thought his concern was justified given that he’d invoked race and revealed his trial posture. I’m not sure he helped me personally when within hours of the airing of the interview he tweeted me thanks for “integrity, ethics and clarity,” but it was clear that he believed he’d made his points. One month later, a mistrial was declared when the Cosby jury could not agree on the verdict in his case.
AIR-TRAVEL SCREENING
STUPIDITY—TIMES 4
Philadelphia Daily News, Thursday, March 10, 2005
I’M PREPARED TO CROWN A WINNER. Of what, you ask? My competition for best horror story involving airport security screening since 9/11.
In the six months since I published Flying Blind: How Political Correctness Continues to Compromise Airline Safety Post 9/11, I’ve been overwhelmed with anecdotes from all over about the ridiculous nature of passenger screening.
I’ve heard it all. Military folks returning from the front lines (in uniform and with papers) who take a commercial flight only to get searched after being selected for random screening. Or people with pacemakers and documents that say metal detectors might cause a heart hiccup who are nevertheless “wanded” and asked what they’re hiding in their chest!
I’ve heard from eyewitnesses to the full-scale screening of government leaders like Senator Joseph Lieberman and former secretary of defense William Cohen. There’s been the full complement of seniors with walkers and young kids on whom we’ve wasted precious resources.
But none compares to the experience of the Yocum family, from Boothwyn, on October 28, 2002, at the Phoenix airport. Frank and Claire Yocum’s visit to Arizona was due to her quadruple pregnancy. The plan was to deliver at Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix because that’s home to Dr. John P. Elliot, nationally recognized for his delivery of quadruplets.
Claire’s delivery was nine weeks premature. The babies then needed two months in the ICU. Their immune systems were compromised, and they had to be kept germ free. A cold could have killed them. The Yocums were eager to return to Pennsylvania. Their doctors were nervous about the travel. Airplanes, with their recycled air, are not the most sanitary of environments.
After consulting the physicians and American West Airlines, they decided to make the trip on a late-night flight when there would be few other passengers. American West was so sympathetic, it offered to fly the entire family free. So sensitive was the situation that the Yocums had to take CPR training before the hospital would permit the travel.
Photo courtesy of Frank and Claire Yocum.
Frank Yocum, a cop’s son, was meticulous about planning for the journey. The morning of the flight, he actually made a test run so he knew exactly where to go, minimizing the babies’ contact with other people.
On the day of the flight, the nurses and doctors prepared the Yocums for their seven-hour trip. They organized bottles, medicines, and other necessities. (Extremely important because the babies were all on different formulas.)
Each of the babies was on a heart monitor, and the darkness of the night flight was expected to make the necessary maneuvering quite a challenge. The trip from the hospital to the airport was smooth until it came to airport screening.
By now, I’m sure you’ve guessed that the newborn Yocum quads were selected for additional screening! Nineteen Arab look-alikes wreaked havoc on the United States on 9/11, and four newborns from Philadelphia are the ones getting the hairy eyeball.
The babies, wrapped tight in blankets with a net covering their safety seats, were removed from their medical equipment and searched. All of their bags, prepared and organized by the nurses, had to be removed. Worst of all, the screeners woke the sleeping babies. Frank and Claire never again got a handle on the situation and the flight home was chaos. Everything was thrown back into bags to sort out later, which never happened.
Unlike the screeners, the other passengers had common sense. They voluntarily moved to the front of the plane and gave the Yocums about 20 rows to themselves. Says Frank, “I can only imagine what it was like for the other passengers with four crying babies, and heart monitors going off on a five-hour flight.”
A member of Congress recently told me the TSA has backed off the random screening of children. But when I tried to confirm this with the TSA, they reported no change in policy.
TSA says the policy of selecting passengers for secondary screening by the individual air carriers occurs in one of two ways: random selection by the carrier, or selection based on a screening profile that looks for “trends in travel.” Children under 12 who are selected randomly MAY be “de-selected” at the carrier’s discretion and a parent need not be screened in place of the child.
The stupidity continues.
AFTERWORD
I’m happy to report that the Yocum quadruplets—and their parents—are doing well. During the 2016–2017 school year, the now-14-year-old Claire, Frank, Jake, and Judy were all honor students in the eighth grade at Garnet Valley Middle School. Their father, Frank, confirmed that all four kids are “very healthy,” which seems like a miracle given their susceptible immune systems as babies. Frank went on to tell me more about each kid, including:
Claire plays field hockey and lacrosse for the school team [but] Judy runs track and cross country. The girls wanted to do separate sports but are inseparable otherwise. Jake is six [feet] tall and is crazy about politics and is Hillary Clinton’s biggest supporter. Frank plays baseball and basketball for the school team and loves sports.
Meanwhile, Claire, the children’s mother, went back to work as a gifted teacher in the Chichester School District less than two years after the children were born. Understandably, Frank is concerned about paying for college.
Jake, Judy, Frank, and Claire in 2016.
Photo courtesy of Frank and Claire Yocum.
POSTCARD FROM GLADWYNE
Philadelphia Daily News, Thursday, July 21, 2005
YOU THINK YOU HAVE ISSUES in the city? Be glad you’re not out here on the Main Line this summer. It’s a jungle.
In case you haven’t heard, Bill and Laura just got news that their lease isn’t being renewed, which means they’re getting the boot by the end of summer from the shack that Laura runs with Doris, unless things change, and that’s unlikely because Connie owns the place, and he’s committed to Maurice so that Maurice can expand his salon into what’s now the kitchen, which has everybody angry. In fact, there’s a website up called savethe lunch.com, where you can find talk of boycotting OMG, and—as if that isn’t enough—when a local reporter went to Connie for comment about throwing out Bill and Laura, he says Connie mumbled something about “home invasion” and brandished a pistol.
It’s enough to make you want to move back to the city.
Bill and Laura Faust own Gladwyne Village Lunch. They have terrific, inexpensive food, basic stuff hard to find out here, where even short-order cooks think of themselves as artistes. Eggs with pork roll. BLTs. Cheesesteaks.
Even SOS in the colder months. Laura won’t make it in the summer, although I’ve never dared ask why. I never got around to asking her anything until the controversy began. That was the beauty of the place. You could go in, eat, and be left alone if you chose.
But now everyone who stops by is conversing. Mostly about Maurice next door. And Connie down the block.
Maurice is Maurice Tannenbaum, the hairstylist to the rich and famous in these parts. He once shaved my head. I’d had a few drinks at the Guard House and finally decided to do it. Maurice obliged. It cost me a C-note. I always say that if Bill Clinton stopped traffic for a haircut out here, no doubt it would be Maurice with the shears in his hands. His salon is called OMG, as in “Oh, My God.” (I couldn’t make this stuff up.)
Needless to say, Maurice is a character. He drives a yellow Hummer six-tenths of a mile to work from the home he shares with his significant other, John, accordi
ng to his website.
He says that when he arrived in Gladywne, Bill Faust was rude to him. In the same post (which began, “Don’t hate me because I am beautiful”), he also said that the gardening rigs and delivery trucks cause the traffic jams on the block, not his clients with their BMWs and Porsches. Which gets to the heart of the controversy.
Maurice’s clients do drive fancy cars. And while I suspect that most of Maurice’s customers eat at Village, I doubt many Village customers reciprocate. Some of the Village customers drive fancy cars, too, but many also command those gardening rigs.
All are equal at Gladwyne Village Lunch. Smack dab in the middle of one of the 50 richest ZIP codes in America are six highly coveted bar stools open to anyone. On them, you can find the fannies of cops, accountants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, grocers, landscapers, retirees, and school kids. Joe is the guy who checks my oil at Gladwyne Texaco. But he is a salt shaker away at breakfast. Think Famous Deli without the politicians.
Memories get made here. Parents with their kids. Kids who return with their kids. Bill and Laura have run it for about a decade of its 60 years. The building was the first post office for Gladwyne’s predecessor, Merion Square, back in the Civil War era.
Which is why it will be a crime if it closes. I’ve asked Maurice to reconsider. No way. He intends to open OMGorgeous, a tiny day spa, just what the area doesn’t need.
Maurice also told me that Connie Barker, who owns the shack and the block on which it stands, would just find somebody else.
When Richard Ilgenfritz of the Main Line Times went to Barker to find out if this was true, he said Barker pulled out a pistol, although he made it clear that Barker didn’t point it at him.
I believe Ilgenfritz. He’s an ex-Marine and has seen guns before. Barker is another local character. Which is all the more reason that the place should stay open. We characters need a clubhouse.
Six stools. I’m picturing Maurice. Another for his partner, John. Laura and Bill. One for Connie. And one for yours truly. Maybe I’m dreaming.
AFTERWORD
Gladwyne Village Lunch ended up moving less than half a block up to 951 Youngsford Road into what had previously been the Merion Square Coiffure. About a month after this column ran, I took a copy I’d had framed and presented it to Laura as a bit of a housewarming gift, thinking that she would hang it in the new location. When she didn’t do so after a few weeks, I asked why. She said she was so angry about what had happened to the old spot that she refused to post a visual reminder in the new luncheonette. Bill and Laura decided to retire in 2011 and move to Florida after 18 years of owning and operating Gladwyne Village Lunch. They sold the restaurant to one of their patrons, the Gladwyne resident Sam Stanford, who renamed the spot the Gladwyne Lunch Box. Sam subsequently sold it to Theo Gerike, who remains the owner, and I’m still a customer. I recommend the tuna “scoop” salad for lunch.
GOOD WITH A PEN,
AS WELL AS A FOOTBALL
Philadelphia Daily News, Thursday, August 11, 2005
IT WAS 30 YEARS AGO, but I remember it like it was yesterday.
I rode my yellow, banana-seat bicycle, the one with the monkey handlebars, the three blocks from my house to the Artic Market, in Doylestown. It was a Saturday, and an important day in the neighborhood. A new Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver was coming to town, and those of us who imitated our favorite Eagles when we played Nerf football on Mercer Avenue were excited to meet him.
I remember our awe when he walked in the same door we’d usually enter with our folks and shopping carts. He was a giant. There was 6 feet, 8 inches of him. But he wasn’t intimidating, not even to young kids half his size. He had a disarming smile, and a gentle nature. He was gracious. And he was accommodating. He seemed to understand and appreciate that it was a very big deal for my friends and me to have the chance to shake his hand and ask him to sign his picture.
His name was Harold Carmichael.
There were a handful of us neighborhood kids who showed up that day to get his autograph and be present for a grand-prize drawing. As luck would have it, No. 17 pulled my name out of a hat, and I won a pair of tickets to an Eagles preseason game at Veterans Stadium. I remember being thrilled and a little embarrassed, but very anxious to share the news with my parents. When I didn’t have a dime to call home from the pay phone outside, the big guy himself reached into his pocket and gave me one.
I guess that’s why I never stopped cheering for Harold Carmichael. On and off the field, he was what little kids thought pro football players were made of.
I was thinking about my encounter with Harold Carmichael this past Monday, when reading about the kids with their fathers who showed up last Sunday at Lehigh expecting that Terrell Owens would sign autographs as per the Eagles player-signing schedule. To me, it’s inexcusable that T.O. stood them up.
Off the field, T.O. is no Harold Carmichael.
Up until this point I haven’t had a rooting interest for, or against, T.O. in his attempt to breach his contract with the Birds. He says he’s worth more than the negotiated amount he is to receive in an agreement which still has wet ink. I keep wondering if that means he’s willing to refund the Eagles if he underperforms? We all know the answer to that one.
But now I feel different. T.O. crosses the line when he disrespects fathers and sons—kids like I was three decades ago at the Artic Market—who make the drive to the Lehigh Valley with an expectation of getting his autograph at a designated place and an appointed time. Frankly, he’s not worthy of their admiration. Instead, he’s everything bad that sports have become. He’s a big, spoiled, petulant pain in the ass. And I can’t understand why everyone is this town is so afraid to say so.
Yes, he can catch. So could Harold.
And Harold could sign autographs, too.
AFTERWORD
This reflection on the positive value of celebrity reminds me of another column I wrote, in 2003, for the Daily News. I recounted a night spent in Camden, New Jersey, in the company of two disparately famous characters: Pete Rose and Ted Nugent. I had been invited to Campbell’s Field, the beautiful home of the Riversharks, to introduce Pete Rose to thousands of fans there to watch his No. 14 being retired in a minor league ballpark. The greatest baseball player of our time didn’t know my role as we mingled at a pregame event. And what a sight he was. His close-cropped Moe haircut was an unnatural shade of orange. He wore a pair of sweats that would make a South Philly gangster proud. Gold chain with alligator clips suspending a pair of eyeglasses. You get the picture. My buddy Paul Lauricella had a great line: “Pete Rose now looks like what you’d get if James Caan and Pete Rose had a baby. What would ever lead you to conclude he had a gambling problem?”
Unfortunately, Pete was really an ass. He refused to sign anything other than the paid-for pictures he was peddling, including the baseball I’d carried to the game: a onetime foul ball I’d snagged one-handed (while balancing a beer in the other) in that same stadium. He changed his tune only when we met again under the concourse and he saw me with a microphone in my hand and realized my role just before we walked onto the field.
A few minutes later, and a couple blocks away, I stood backstage with Motor City Madman Ted Nugent. Quite a contrast. Hair down to his butt, guitar in his hand, guns on his mind. Nugent was thrilled to put his pen to my copy of Kill It and Grill It, which you could call his recipe for life. I wrote in the column that Nugent was “much more the embodiment of the American Dream than Rose.”
The rocker owes his place to hard work, and he didn’t screw up along the way. Rose’s legacy may have been born in America’s pastime, but he no longer conjures up visions of hot dogs and apple pie. Nugent, on the other hand, has distinguished himself by being an unabashed flag-waver who is stone-cold sober in an industry of antagonists and miscreants.
Years later I become disgusted with Nugent’s vitriol (“subhuman mongrel”) directed at President Barack Obama, but that night in Camden, he was the better man.
A REAL AMERICAN HERO
Philadelphia Daily News, Thursday, September 15, 2005
JOSE MELENDEZ-PEREZ, one of the great unsung heroes of 9/11, felt a roomful of Brotherly Love last week. Arguably, it’s Melendez we can thank for the fact that Flight 93 never completed its mission of striking a symbol of democracy in Washington and instead crashed into a field in western Pennsylvania.
Melendez was feted at a luncheon in his honor sponsored by my radio station, the Big Talker 1210, at the Union League.
A confab of conservative Republicans? Not exactly.
Particularly when Representative Bob Brady, head of the city Democrats, stood up to present Melendez with a flag he flew in his honor over the Capitol and thank Melendez for saving his life.
Still, no amount of recognition could ever fully thank Melendez for what he did while performing his job back on August 4, 2001.
It was Melendez, an immigration inspector, who stopped Mohamed al Kahtani when he tried to enter the United States at Orlando International Airport. Kahtani was a Saudi national who was directed to Melendez because he had incorrectly filled out a customs declaration. Kahtani claimed not to speak English. Melendez put Kahtani into his computer, and it came up negative. His documents seemed genuine. A check of his possessions was unremarkable.
But Melendez still didn’t let him pass. Why? “My job requires me to know the difference between legitimate travelers to the U.S. and those who are not,” he told the 9/11 Commission. “This included potential terrorists.”
Keep in mind—this is a month before 9/11.
Through my INS training and military experience, my first impression of the subject was that he was a young male, well groomed, with short hair, trimmed mustache, black long-sleeve shirt, black trousers, black shoes. He was about 5 foot 6 and in impeccable shape, with large shoulders and thin waist.