1970 Teenage New York Politics Pics

The recent sordid episode involving the soon-to-be-ex-governor of New York (yeah, it's disgusting even to someone whose alleged involvement with Brooklyn hookers the New York Post once detailed) has an upside: the new Democratic governor will be a stand-up guy, David Paterson. I worked for David's father Basil Paterson when I was a teenager in 1970. Basil was then a state senator from Harlem (as his son would be) running for lieutenant governor on a Democratic ticket headed by former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg. Here are two photos of him at a rally at the Junction, the intersection of Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues, just a few blocks from Brooklyn College.


In the first picture, Basil is being introduced by Adam Walinsky, our candidate for attorney general, for whom I'd worked the previous year when he was directing the New York office of the Vietnam Moratorium, a very successful nationwide strike and series of rallies for peace on October 15, 1969. The moratorium HQ on lower Fifth Avenue, near my family's pants factory/showroom, was also where I met a girl named Peggy Kerry, whose brother John, then stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was the pilot who flew Adam to Moratorium rallies all over New York State that day.

Later Adam became more conservative and achieved notoriety as the foremost opponent to a gay civil rights bill in New York City. In 1977, some friends I knew from the Gay Activist Alliance told me they were planning a “zap” of Adam’s house in the wealthy suburb of Scarsdale. The Scarsdale “zap” became an important event in New York City gay history, “the night they raided Walinsky’s.” They said Adam’s wife was so upset she pressured him into not talking about gay rights again.

Adam eventually became New York Commissioner of Investigation and lobbied for the Police Corps, a proposal that finally passed Congress in the Clinton administration.

Meanwhile, Basil Paterson later became New York's first African American deputy mayor (under Ed Koch) as well as Secretary of State in Albany. He also was the first black vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee after that less-than-successful 1970 campaign.

Here's a shot I took of our gubernatorial candidate Arthur Goldberg at the world-famous Nathan's in Coney Island:

He was a terrible candidate, actually. He had incredible credentials, having served as President Kennedy's Labor Secretary and President Johnson's UN Ambassador as well as on the Supreme Court, but it was his first time running for office, and Goldberg seemed uncomfortable politicking.

Here Goldberg is at my friend Mark's synagogue near Brooklyn College:

I had been supporting another candidate in the Democratic primary for governor: Howard Samuels, always called "an upstate industrialist" in the papers (he invented Baggies, the original zip-loc plastic bag). Here is Howard Samuels campaigning along Blake Avenue in Brownsville, where my family lived when they came to this country from eastern Europe over a century ago. My great-great-grandparents owned a nearby candy store in the 1920s and 1930s.

Even in 1970, there were still a few pushcarts left in Brownsville, once the most densely populated neighborhood in the world and home of the world's first children's library and Margaret Sanger's first family planning clinic (a bigot, she really wanted birth control among the Jews and Negroes who lived in the neighborhood):

Samuels later became head of OTB, the Off-Track Betting parlors that Mayor Bloomberg is now shutting down. Nicknamed "Howie the Horse," he tried again for governor but lost the 1974 primary to Rep. Hugh Carey from Park Slope, Brooklyn (I used to see him walking his dog at night -- you'd think someone who was not just the governor but a widower raising 14 kids could get someone else to do that), who served two terms as the state's chief executive and is still spry in his 90s.

At the 1972 Democratic national convention in Miami Beach, I was in the Diplomat Hotel on a pay phone to my grandma when I heard Howard Samuels say, "It's Eagleton!" -- meaning that our presidential nominee George McGovern had chosen Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton as his candidate for vice president. Later, of course, Eagleton was dropped from the ticket when it was revealed he'd had shock treatments for depression. Kind of stupid from today's more enlightened point of view, I guess.

Although 1970 was a great year for Democrats nationally, our gubernatorial ticket lost to Nelson Rockefeller, the Republican governor then running for his fourth term. Here's a pic of Rocky I took at Prospect Park on April 25, 1970, the first Earth Day observance. Concern about the environment was pretty new then, and Gov. Rockefeller actually made the statement, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the pollution."

Pollution, not green, was the buzzword then. Leaving the park, I was startled when Gov. Rockefeller was coming up behind me riding a bicycle. (A few years later I was almost run down in Central Park by a bike-riding Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had to yell, "Look out!" to me as she rode by with little John on his bike.)

Rockefeller resigned in the middle of his fourth term and was appointed vice president by Gerald Ford once Ford took over when the disgraced Richard Nixon resigned in 1974. Rocky was dropped from Ford's 1976 ticket in favor of the more conservative Bob Dole, though the vice-president, in campaigning for the Ford-Dole ticket, made headlines by raising his middle finger to a group of hecklers.

The millionaire former governor later made a nice exit from this world during an assignation with a woman not his wife. And though he was one of the richest men in America, apparently he didn't have to pay anything except his life!

The guy who really got me my start in politics was the great Paul O'Dwyer, an Irish immigrant lawyer, fighter for rights, and younger brother of a rather crooked mayor from 1940s New York who ended up fleeing to Mexico. Paul was a New York City Councilman from Manhattan when I was 14 in 1965 and wanted to help his campaign for mayor. He lost the primary but helped introduce me to a bunch of people in Democratic politics in New York.

In 1968, running against the war, he stunned everyone by winning the Democratic nomination to oppose Sen. Jacob Javits, a liberal Republican. Paul lost, and in 1970 he ran again in the Senate primary. Here he is at a peace rally that year in Brooklyn Heights, on Hicks and Montague Streets by the promenade with its spectacular views of the skyline:

Although Paul never lost his brogue, he did lose a lot of elections before serving as New York City Council President, a citywide office then second to the mayoralty, in the late 1970s. At his O'Dwyer and Bernstien law offices in the city (where his son Brian now presides), he let me take the ashes of the great writer Dorothy Parker ("men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses") out of his filing cabinet.

It's a long story how Parker ended up there, but the moral is: never make a meanie like playwright Lillian Hellman executrix of your estate. Thankfully, Parker's remains are now ensconced in more suitable digs, in a dignified place of honor at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore, where I paid my respects in June 1996.

The winning 1970 Democratic Senate primary candidate was Rep. Dick Ottinger of Westchester, in whose campaign I also worked that year. City University of New York, after the Kent State/invasion of Cambodia protests that had shut it down along with nearly every other college in May 1970 (you can see my photos of the Brooklyn College strike here), gave us students two weeks off in late October and early November to campaign for peace candidates.

Here's Ottinger campaigning along Kings Highway, now pretty much a Russian enclave, in Brooklyn. Note the cigarette in his hand!

My friend Mark and I were assigned one day to drive the candidate's wealthy, imperious mother all over Brooklyn to various rallies. Since she was bankrolling her congressman son's campaign, our codename for her was "Moneybags." She was not a barrel of fun.

Liberals and peace activists in New York in 1970 were split between Ottinger and incumbent Republican Sen. Charles Goodell, who'd been appointed after Robert Kennedy's assassination and who became a champion of the antiwar movement in Congress. This split allowed the election of Conservative Party candidate James Buckley, brother of Bill, whose campaign appealed to the hardhat silent majority.

As far as I know, Buckley was the first candidate to use the American flag so conspicuously in all his campaign materials. His slogan, "Isn't it about time we had a Senator?," appealed to those alientated by us dirty Commie fag hippies. Buckley served one term and in 1976 was defeated by Pat Moynihan; he went on to become a respected federal judge in Connecticut.

Here are a couple of pictures from August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women's suffrage. It was a historic day and it opens Gail Collins' recent magisterial history of the American women's movement.

Here's fiery Manhattan Congresswoman Bella Abzug, well known for her floppy hats and her fighting liberalism:

Abzug would never win her primaries for mayor or senator but remained in Congress for a number of years. Next to Speaker Tip O'Neill, she was probably the most well-known member of the House. In the pic above, she's talking to New York City Consumer Affairs Commissioner Elinor Guggenheimer (who the previous year had finished fifth in the primary for city council president, managing to beat only Norman Mailer's ticket-mate, the incomparable writer Jimmy Breslin).

Here's Guggenheimer talking to the press in City Hall Park at the start of the rally. New York Mayor John Lindsay (for whom I'd worked the previous year, in his unsuccessful June Republican primary and for his winning general election campaign as candidate of the Liberal Party) refused to grant a permit for a march up Fifth Avenue at first, and there was a standoff that later got resolved.

To Guggenheimer's right in the photo you may recognize Betty Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique, in which she discussed "the problem with no name" that American women faced, really launched second-wave feminism in this country.

I've worked in a lot of losing campaigns for Congress, most of them for candidates who should have won. Here's another candidate I did canvassing for amid the projects of Williamsburg and Bushwick, a young guy named Pete Eikenberry, running aginst very hawkish, very conservative Rep. John Rooney, a longtime machine pol who represented much of northern Brooklyn.

Here Eikenberrry is campaigning in Brooklyn Heights. It was really hot that day, I recall.

It took a long time before we unlodged Rep. Rooney. I actually did work for another Rooney opponent, a liberal minister named Richard John Neuhaus, who later morphed into one of the intellectual powerhouses of the religious right as a conservative Catholic priest.

In Brooklyn in those days, as now, Democrats rule. But back then we we were split between "reformers" and "regulars" and organized into clubs. At one point I belonged to several Democratic reformer clubs, including the Walt Whitman Independent Democrats. (Whitman, of course, had been the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle.) The "independent" clubs were reform, not with the organization of then-boss Meade Esposito.

Here's one more 1970 political pic, of State Senator Leroy Bowser, with the Park Slope Independent Democratic Club, speaking at the same antiwar rally in Brooklyn Heights as I showed in the pictures of Pete Eikenberry and Paul O'Dwyer.

I'm not sure whatever happened to the good state senator. I am glad to know that another good former state senator, and the son of one, will be New York State's chief executive come Monday. Good luck, Gov. Paterson!


So I leave 1970 and my teens for 2008 and my senior years. I know I'm as bad a photographer as I am a political opponent for Jeff Flake, but you can't say I don't have experience in politics.

Here's the kid behind the camera circa '70, if you're interested.

What's a future Gator doing wearing a University of Miami t-shirt? Obviously I had a misspent youth.

Although all my 1970 campaign work may have been for losing candidates, there was always a next time.