Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

by Michael A Smerconish

  In spring 2002, my wife Karen and I began researching the career of my father, Dr. Henry J. Heimlich of Cincinnati, famous for the “Heimlich maneuver” choking rescue method. To our astonishment, we inadvertently uncovered a wide-ranging, unseen 50-year history of fraud.

  Peter Heimlich expresses serious doubt about whether his father invented the life-saving technique that bears his name and similarly questions the veracity of the doctor’s other supposed accomplishments, including the invention of the Heimlich chest drain valve. Where Dr. Heimlich claimed to have performed the world’s first total organ replacement (on a dog) in 1955, Peter points out that the surgery had already been done dozens of times on humans by a Romanian surgeon. But Peter believes his father’s “most bizarre” medical claim is “malariotherapy,” which Peter’s website describes as “a quack cure for AIDS, cancer, and Lyme disease that consists of infecting patients with malaria.” He also notes that though the American Red Cross once adopted the Heimlich maneuver as a lifesaving technique for a choking victim in place of back slaps, the organization has since, quietly, returned to favoring the latter. And while the American Heart Association continues to recommend the Heimlich maneuver, they now do so without using his name, referring to it instead as “abdominal thrusts.”

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, referring to the focus of my column—the story of Dr. Heimlich’s performing the maneuver for the first time at age 96 and saving the life of a neighbor in a retirement home—Peter notes that his father claimed to have done so in 2001 at Cincinnati’s Banker’s Club restaurant. Indeed, research verifies that Dr. Heimlich told the BBC in 2003 that he had used the maneuver on an 80-year-old man who was choking in a restaurant.

  Peter Heimlich is far from being his father’s only critic, but it astounds me how much effort Peter has put into disparaging his dad. After all, regardless of whether the doctor invented the Heimlich maneuver, he certainly popularized it. And by Dr. Heimlich’s estimates, it has saved tens of thousands of lives.

  Dr. Heimlich passed away on December 17, 2016, at age 96. I was interested to see how major newspapers like the New York Times and Cincinnati Enquirer (Dr. Heimlich’s hometown newspaper) would treat the controversies raised by Peter in Dr. Heimlich’s obituary. Both gave ample coverage.

  THE RIGHT SPOT FOR THE RIZZO STATUE?

  RIGHT WHERE IT IS

  Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, August 21, 2016

  A WINTER SNOWSTORM hammered Philadelphia on February 23, 1987. I’m not normally a horoscope person, but for some reason I saved my Pisces directive that day: “You’ll have reason to celebrate. . . . The boss recognizes your value.” I’d like to think that was true. It was my first day working for Frank L. Rizzo.

  Due to the weather, I was the only staffer who made it to work. For me it was easy. I lived in a small studio on Rittenhouse Square and needed only to walk three blocks to 1528 Walnut Street. Either Anthony or Joe who managed the building let me into Suite 2020, where I sat in the outer area reserved for visitors to the former mayor. Despite the snow, the telephone that ended in “1987” started ringing. And I remember the first call that I answered.

  It was a woman from the Northeast whose block was debilitated by the weather. She wanted her street plowed and she was calling Rizzo. It mattered not that he hadn’t been in City Hall for seven years.

  That first day was typical at the campaign office. For the next nine months, I was constantly at his side. My business card said “Political Director,” but my role was often that of body man, especially when he crisscrossed the city at night making campaign appearances in his run for mayor. That meant attending to the candidate’s personal needs and also serving as a buffer in his public encounters.

  If there was one constant every night, it was that people would seek his assistance. Potholes, broken streetlights, trash-strewn lots. Jobs—always people asked for work. Abandoned automobiles, lack of police patrol, missing dogs. Yes, lost pets.

  You name it, people asked for his help. They’d make verbal requests that I’d notate or they would stick handwritten notes in one of his enormous hands that spelled out their problem and included a telephone number. Rizzo would pass the notes to me for safekeeping, and I’d return them to him the following day in the office. He would seek to match the need with friends he still had at all levels of city government. No matter the nature of the problem, he always tried to help.

  Here’s something else that might surprise: If someone called the City Hall switchboard after he left office and asked for Rizzo, the operators would connect the caller to his house in Chestnut Hill. I know. I not only reached him that way; I also sat at his kitchen table on Crefeld Street and watched him accept those redirected calls.

  Which is why I’ve always seen the Municipal Services Building as the ideal home for his statue. It’s the building that houses so many who are responsible for the delivery of city services. The added attraction for the location was that Rizzo’s first mayoral office was in the MSB, and that vantage provides a vista for his likeness to look fondly across the street toward City Hall. Some originally believed the police Roundhouse to be a natural, but I disagreed. While for some his public persona will always be that of the patrolman who rose through the police ranks and became mayor, the Frank Rizzo I knew was 16 years removed from the department, and with the city’s turbulent past behind it, his primary focus was on the unglamorous task of meeting basic needs.

  A few months ago, I heaped praise upon Rizzo, a play by Bruce Graham then running at Theatre Exile in Old City. It was based on the book Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America by Sal Paolantonio. I noted just one criticism: “Missing, for me, in the play were sufficient illustrations of what made him tick, what gave the man big enough to wear a size 52 ‘long’ suit his greatest personal satisfaction—helping people and improving the city he loved.”

  The effort to remove the Rizzo statue from its current home is part of a national attempt to rewrite history, especially on matters of race. This has been particularly true on college campuses. When some sought the removal of Harvard Law School’s seal because it was tied to a slaveholding family that endowed the school’s first professor, the university president, a Civil War scholar, said something that applies to many of these debates.

  “I feel quite strongly that we should not be trying to erase our history of names,” Drew G. Faust told the Crimson. “I think we’re all going to be facing these questions, and the case that I would make is . . . about the importance of sustaining our history, not erasing it.”

  She’s right to argue that it’s better to understand this type of symbolism in context, rather than change memorials in a manner that seeks to alter historical legacy.

  There’s been no new revelation, no new finding regarding the Rizzo record since the statue was erected in 1998. If new information had come to light about the man or his actions, this might be a reasonable debate. At least when they removed the Joe Paterno statue outside of Beaver Stadium in Happy Valley, it was as a result of former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s concluding that the longtime coach probably knew about Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children.

  In contrast, rather than argue new facts, the petition that promotes the removal of the Rizzo statue offers a diatribe of specious generalizations about a man not here to defend himself. (“Rizzo was an unrepentant racist who stopped at nothing to torture and hold Philadelphia’s African American community as his personal hostages.”) Plus, this contrived dispute is much larger than the biggest man on Philadelphia’s political scene in the 20th century and could set a dangerous precedent. Consider that the petition makes clear that removing Rizzo’s statue is but a first step, and that even war heroes must be replaced:

  The black community would rather see representations of the great contributions made by African Americans and other people of color to this city’s development. These statues should be erected in place of the constant representations of Christopher Columbus, war heroes, Frank Rizzo, and others
who have held communities of color in subjugation.

  Moving Frank Rizzo isn’t appropriate. Better that he continue to stand where he is, and that his legacy be subject to civil debate rather than an erasure of history.

  AFTERWORD

  The statue controversy evidenced the never-ending debate over Rizzo’s legacy. Another reminder came in the play I mention in this column. At Sal Paolantonio’s invitation, I attended a performance one night at Theatre Exile in Old City. I wrote about the evening—28 years to the day after Rizzo lost his rematch with W. Wilson Goode (a campaign for which I worked)—in another Sunday Inquirer column published November 8, 2015. I noted that the night had a reunion feel. People were gathered to watch the play and to engage in a postshow debate about Rizzo. The Pulitzer Prize winner Buzz Bissinger was there (Rizzo had attributed his 1987 loss to Bissinger’s hard-hitting coverage of his record with regard to policing). I sat with my friend Larry Ceisler, now a public affairs executive, who had a role in Mayor Goode’s ’87 campaign similar to the one I had played for Rizzo.

  The play featured a scene in which a 1987 Rizzo campaign ad was filmed. In the ad, Rizzo stood in a trash-strewn Kensington lot and attempted a rebrand with a self-deprecating quip, followed by a gesture toward the debris and the concluding line: “How long do you think I’d put up with this?” What the play didn’t portray about the ad is something I witnessed live during its actual filming. Rizzo’s campaign manager, Martin Weinberg, had decided not to show Rizzo the script until he was on the set, knowing he’d have difficulty getting Rizzo to say the self-deprecating line, “When I was mayor, . . . I said some things I shouldn’t have said.” And Weinberg was right: Rizzo refused. So the two negotiated while an expensive film crew waited. Finally, Weinberg prevailed, but only after Rizzo told him, “So you’ll know, Weinberg, I meant every fucking thing I ever said.” Then he looked into the camera and nailed the line.

  It’s one of my favorite stories, among many, from my time spent with the man. At Theatre Exile, many audience members had their own Rizzo stories, and some were eager to share. And while all were complimentary toward the play we’d just witnessed, the debate about Rizzo’s influence on the city divided the audience as much as it separated Philadelphia when he was alive.

  The Rizzo debate usually boils down to one question: Did Rizzo maintain the city’s stability as police commissioner and mayor amid a turbulent time, keeping order while other large towns devolved, or did his brute force and bombast hinder its forward progress? But the real question may be whether that question can even be answered. There has always been a temptation for many to see Rizzo as an all-or-nothing proposition. Supporter or opponent? Friend or foe? Guardian or antagonist? His approach did not elicit common ground. Maybe that’s a reflection of the way the black wards and white wards so cleanly divided when Rizzo’s name led the ballot. But neither version of the man is the one I remember.

  To ride with him in the campaign car for a full year as a 25-year-old law student and campaign aide was to be provided a backseat view of the real Frank Rizzo. As we crisscrossed the city nightly, no subject was off limits. He had a story for every intersection. A bust made. A pothole filled or a streetlight repaired. Or often a joke that came to mind. Up close, he was nuanced, complicated, and sometimes contradictory—but never dull. Rizzo’s gone, but the stories will last forever.

  CIVILITY WINS IF

  “COMMENTS” UNPLUGGED

  Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, August 28, 2016

  TUESDAY WAS the final day that comments could be posted on news stories at NPR.org. The decision was announced one week prior by ombudsman and public editor Elizabeth Jensen, who quoted NPR’s managing editor for digital news, Scott Montgomery: “We’ve reached the point where we’ve realized that there are other, better ways to achieve the same kind of community discussion around the issues we raise in our journalism.”

  Not surprisingly, the decision didn’t sit well with many of those who posted 3,375 comments to the announcement. Among them was someone who self-identified as “Abbi Baily”: “This is the only place I’ve found where it is (was) possible to have an intelligent, fun conversation about politics, science, history or philosophy, where a professor of said subject is at your virtual elbow to recommend further reading or correct bad grammar.”

  That was just one of 32,200 comments Abbi Baily had posted at NPR.org. And it drew a response from The Original DB, whose image is that of a chimp. The reply represented the 4,530th time The Original DB posted a comment. And it drew a reaction from Running Dog, who had 9,987 comments to his credit.

  The three evidenced something else reported by NPR’s Jensen. She wrote that in July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments, but that those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, which translates to just 0.06 percent of all users. Moreover, NPR determined that for the months of June and July, just 4,300 users posted about 145 comments apiece—or 67 percent of all comments for those two months!

  At least many of the NPR comments were civil compared with what I’ve seen elsewhere. Take, for example, those who posted comments to Chris Cillizza’s The Fix blog at the Washington Post, which is where I first read the news about NPR. Cillizza opined: “This is terrific news. And, all other major media organizations should follow NPR’s lead.” His view drew a caustic response.

  “Petronius_Jones” said: “It’s hard to blame Cillizza for hating comments sections. As a lazy facile writer, all of his pieces attract negative and personal comments.”

  “Dr_Cheese_Souffle” offered: “Chris Cillizza is a tool for suppressing free speech everywhere.”

  And “Nickotime” said: “If I wrote Cillizza’s garbage I’d want comments gone, too.”

  These comments proved something Cillizza told me when we discussed NPR’s move: “It’s the loudest, often most obnoxious person in the room with the most time to dedicate so they will always outlast you unless you are willing to stay online and fight with them 22 hours a day.”

  Cillizza bristled at the argument that he is advocating the stifling of free speech, and said that role is actually played by those who take over news sites and don’t allow room for a casual observer, who would be afraid to jump in during the level of routine vitriol.

  He’s right.

  It’s been years since I read any of the comments appended to my own column. When I did so long ago, I found them to be largely angry, uncivil, and unresponsive to the merits of whatever I was arguing, and not worthy of a response, especially when commenters hide behind pseudonyms. I’ve always suspected what NPR confirmed—that comment boards are dominated by a tiny sample of the readers at large who don’t represent anyone but themselves.

  Please don’t misunderstand. I welcome debate, which I prove for 15 hours every week while hosting a nationwide radio program. My studio’s nine toll-free telephone lines are usually full with callers of every political stripe from all across the country who are interested in discussing issues of the day.

  Here’s a secret: If you want to butt the line, just tell my screener you disagree with my position. She will alert me, increasing the odds that I will speak to you sooner than later. She knows I look for disagreement, but with a caveat: It has to be civil discourse. Not sanitized, just reasonable. I don’t name-call, and I expect my audience to behave likewise. Thankfully, my SiriusXM callers comply. I have no recollection of when I last needed to hang up on a caller who was abusive. I know it hasn’t happened during this contentious campaign, which says a lot.

  While the Internet has made our lives exponentially easier, the use of technology is not without its drawbacks. One liability is the beer muscles some grow when given the opportunity to express themselves anonymously. Just like the drunk who has an inflated measure of his power at closing time, many bloggers adopt a tone and say things online that they would never offer if their faces were seen and identities known.

  I know, because when not typing out a column on a computer, or sitting i
n front of a radio microphone or television camera, my day-to-day life is filled with plenty of encounters with newspaper readers, radio listeners, and television viewers who seek to engage me on news headlines or opinions I have expressed. To a person, those with whom I have spoken while pumping gas, grocery shopping, or at a back-to-school night are courteous and engaging. Do they always agree with me? Of course not. Nor do those with whom I share a Thanksgiving table.

  Our political dialogue is far too coarse. Nasty, anonymous comments are a significant part of a much bigger problem, but one aspect we can easily control. Let’s unplug them.

  AFTERWORD

  Within 24 hours, there were 332 comments appended to this column. I read none of them.

  YEAH, YEAH, YEAH:

  LARRY KANE, FAB HISTORIAN

  Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, September 4, 2016

  RON HOWARD’S new Beatles movie, Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years, is being advertised with a trailer that begins with a familiar voice saying: “This is the greatest phenomenon in the century thus far.”

  That 1964 assessment came from a 21-year-old radio reporter at Miami’s top-40 WFUN. Fifty-two years later, Philadelphians will instantly recognize the unmistakable voice of a young Larry Kane. The legendary local newsman has a significant on-screen presence in the movie due to his unique, front-row seat to the Beatles’ invasion of America.

  “The reason this film is so unprecedented, and so unique, is that it takes you there,” Kane told me last week. “Ron Howard assembled never-before-seen footage. I got chills feeling like I was back in ’64.”

  That year, Kane was a cub reporter with a business card that said “news director.” When it was announced that the Beatles would play an unprecedented 35 concerts in 25 American cities during their maiden U.S. tour, Kane sent a letter to band manager Brian Epstein on a letterhead that listed his own top-40 station, and six others that catered to African American audiences.