Saturday, October 24, 2009

The Green Thumb

The Green Thumb

Oct. 29, 2009

The Green Thumb

Dear Ed:

I have been reading your articles for many years.

As a matter of fact, when I was young, you were writing about your garden and I suggested you get a guinea pig. You found that quite a hysterical idea when you mentioned it in your column.
Glad you're better and glad I can now read your column in the South Bay's Neighbor.

Lori

Babylon, NY

Wow. That goes back to 1973.

The editor who assigned me to do it was an, "investigative reporter," by self-declaration. And he proved it time after time. If he were investigating you, the only hope against your going to jail was if you gave up somebody higher on the ladder of crooks.

And then, he just might break his word and bury you the next year.

He had been promoted, as many of us seek to do, according to, “The Peter Principal,” to the final step in his hierarchal work life, his level of incompetence.

Thus, the greatest seller in the world seeks to be the boss of the sales force. He or she always has that achievement in mind, “boss of the sales force.”

He is a genius at selling, a marvel to behold, as natural as Calvin Hobbs was in legend. He could sell shoelaces to fish, landing gear to eagles, French fries to Frenchmen.

He would be—well, is destined to be, if he buys into it—a horrible boss of other sales personnel. He simply doesn’t understand what is difficult about selling. He is impatient with a rationale or an explanation of it, as if it were a proven argument against man’s ability to fly. “It doesn’t make sense,” he will say, “look up, see that B-747 with the Al-Italia painted on it. Of course you can fly.”

Boss of the sales force. He is seduced into that ambition by hierarchal superiors who themselves have been seduced to their level of incompetence. They think he can get them out of a jam by whatever characteristics made him a top seller. He can’t.

This one wanted me to, "investigate," whether the statement by then-Secretary-of-Labor Peter Brennan, was correct. Brennan had said that Americans could save money on the rising cost of food by, "...growing victory gardens, like we did during the War."

Of course, Brennan had been promoted to his level of incompetence too.

I had never grown anything, and when I found that you didn't throw seed on the lawn and come back a few weeks later with a salad bowel and dressing, I howled in protest.

“I have roots in my back yard with truckloads of passenger roots, just going along for the ride,” I whined. “I have roots for trees the Northeast never hosted. I have roots under my yard from China, roots asking my roots to sign their passports. My roots have roots.”

Maurice Swift, the new Sunday Suffolk editor, of the new Sunday edition (before April 1972, Newsday appeared only 6 days a week), heard my complaints, and laughed.

Swift never sought to be an editor. It was thrust on him, for a while. He was a, “rewrite,” man who could put together a front page 800-word story from notes gathered from four reporters at a midnight insurrection at the State University of Stony Brook, with the deadline looming and him lighting a pipe.

Now, in the new job, Swift was trying to fill a paper every Sunday, beginning the Tuesday before. He had to go into Garden City with ideas for a paper 5 days in advance. He figured my garden could be a feature he could count on, if he had to write it himself. He told me to write what I had told him, and he then told the Nassau desk that he'd come up with an idea for a feature called, “Green Thumb,” based on the Secretary of Labor's statement.

The investigative-reporter-turned-editor was not happy, but the idea turned out to make him look good, so he went along with it, begrudgingly.

I managed to squeeze 24 Sunday columns out of that idea, including one about not smoking in front of your tomato plants, and another about a late-night TV product called, The Hula Hoe, basically, a hoe with a gaping hole in it.

In one of the columns, Secretary of Labor Peter Brennan visited my house (He only lived in Massapequa.). That was my mother's doing. She wrote Mrs. Brennan and invited them (really, him) to my house to see, “their” victory garden. Mrs. Brennan, who had become a fan of the column, made her husband do it.

"You never ask a man to do that sort of thing;" my mother said, "you ask his wife."

I visited a guy in Stony Brook—Nicolas Christ was his name, a Long Island fisherman who buried fish heads behind his garage—who had tomatoes growing over the top of his garage. I also held a contest for the ugliest vegetable grown on Long Island in 1972. One entry was a tomato with Richard Nixon's nose growing out it. Another entry won my Hula Hoe, as a prize. The over-all winner was from Rosedale, a head of cabbage, being devoured by bugs.

I thought I ended the series when the series ended, and I couldn’t think of any more columns out of my six-by-four-foot piece of backyard. My investigative reported turned editor, though, still wanted what he wanted, and I had to write about whether the cost of labor, time, and materials—including the Hula Hoe—was worth the effort. I honestly don’t remember what I said.

Lori, thanks for the memory.


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Friday, October 16, 2009

Tom (The Bear) Taylor

Tom (The Bear) Taylor



October 22, 2009


Tom (TheBear) Taylor


In September 1964, he was a transfer student at Marist College from two semesters at The University of Connecticut.

I was a transfer student to Marist with one semester from Belmont Abbey College, North Carolina. Nice place, Belmont, but North Carolina in 1963 tried to kill me. Really.

I was crossing the bridge over I-85 one fine day, my freshman beanie folded in my belt (I read the rules; no where did it say we had to wear the beanies on our heads), when a late ‘40’s or early ‘50’s Pontiac came ‘round the cloverleaf and pulled parallel to me, on the railroad bridge over the Interstate.

A young man got out, yelled, “Hey, yank!” and fired one, maybe two shots—the one, given that nobody was available but me, was sufficient—and catapulted me into a flat-out run back to Belmont Abbey.

An English Benedictine brother listened to my breathless tale and asked me if I had taken down the car’s license plate number. I stopped breathing and looked at him. He shrugged and said, “Son, do you how many cars they got around here look exactly like that?”

At Poughkeepsie, we transfer students wound up together in the luggage rooms of Leo Hall, which we called, “The Pit.” I think he and I, apparent opposites, shared the same sense of humor.

His name was—is— Tom Taylor. “The Bear.”

He was from Bethel, Conn. (the approved abbreviation in those days). He had gone to UCONN on a football scholarship, pledged for TKE, and quit in disgust over the Animal House atmosphere, when Animal House wasn’t even a script, yet.

We were both 18 years old, days apart in fact. We both took 18 credits a semester and picked up required courses at schools closer to home in the summer, I, so I could graduate with my class; he, so he could graduate a year ahead of time and get busy.

In 1966, he and his close friend, Bobby Finn, and several other business major/football enthusiasts, founded the Marist College Football Club as a private company.
They got permission to use Marist’s name. They hired a coach, Larry Levine, and played in a small league of all-new football clubs that included St. John’s University (which had dropped football as a school sport years before, after a player died on-field), St. Peter’s, Manhattan College, Iona, Sienna, and Seton Hall University.

I was Marist’s equipment manager. I shudder to recall that I actually issued a high school football helmet (painted by a local auto painter and purloined along with much other equipment from a defunct, Mid-Hudson, Catholic High School) to protect the likes of the head of Mike Botty, a returned USMC Vietnam veteran with two steel plates inside his otherwise unprotected head, which, being a Marine, he used as a weapon.

Botty’s head survived. I think Botty is now—if he hasn’t retired—the PR guy for the NY area U.S. Postal Service.

After 1966, Finn and Taylor bought a Poughkeepsie nightclub called Willie’s and did extraordinarily well with it. I joined John Casserly and his friends in befriending a group there called, “The Pigeons,” who were coming out with a recording, but not under the name, “The Pigeons,” but under a stupid name, a crackpot name, a no-count, forgettable name, from which I tried desperately to dissuade them: “Vanilla Fudge.”

Finn also started his insurance business, which has served him well, too.

Taylor went to work for Modern Printing, in Norwalk, which was owned by his father and two partners. Tom had worked summers there since elementary school in every capacity.

When he started with Modern, 85 per cent of the company’s business was printing the mail-order texts for a company called Famous Artists/Famous Writers Schools. Tom immediately went to work diversifying the business, buying new, “web,” presses and selling contracts to the likes of the Hilton Chain and other big companies that had begun to rely heavily on direct marketing (junk mail).

When, “Famous,” went bankrupt, five or six (or eleven, who knows) years later, their printing needs comprised only 15 per cent of Modern’s business. Tom had saved the company.

Eventually, he bought out all three partners. Also eventually, every time you or I opened a Newsweek or a Time Magazine and cursed at the postcards that fell into your lap, Modern had printed them.

Tom hired a president for the company, (which he sold a decade later) and started an industrial-commercial-MR residential development business that now puts him in the position of owning industrial parks, condominiums and...well, he told me at the last President’s gala that he’d sold off his construction company.

(Yeah. Me, too. I got rid of my construction company.).

In his spare time, Tom also beat Las Vegas at blackjack, I mean, beat ‘em, and wrote an $88 per copy book about how to do it, and quit. He also beat alcoholism, I think before the 1970’s had ended.

And he also did what I said he would do. From the age of 18, he wanted to be rich, and a high school football coach.

(Impossible. I know, I know. You think I don’t I know this.).

Since they were mutually exclusive goals, he first got rich, then handed himself over for $1 a year to a local high school, and coached them from the very bottom of the state rankings to state champions, at least twice.

Then, he moved over to the small, private Canterbury School, where he and Alice (high school sweethearts, married over 40 years, now) built a house they live in on campus.

By that time, Tom taught a few courses on business and the Vietnam War, and maybe one or two other subjects, and brought that school’s football team from statistical nonexistence—I mean, non-existence—to, first, Connecticut State Champions, then, the All New England championship.

The opponent coach for that final All-N.E. game made the mistake of answering a TV reporter’s on-air question about how he thought the game would go. He said, “Well, all I can say is, this is a long way to drive for a trophy.”

Oops.

I’m meeting him at end of this month at Marist, where he’s now in his first (or second—(I misplaced a year; can’t find it.) year coaching and recruiting and teaching and inspiring kids, and I hear they’re considering making a big deal of me, because I can talk through a stroke.

Hell, I wrote one of Tom’s lit. papers.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Engineers Laughing

October 14, 2009


Engineers Laughing

By Ed Lowe

I was to speak at the Crest Hollow Country Club, in Woodbury. That’s all I remembered.


It was maybe the 50th or the 70th time. The Crest Hollow Country Club was the largest room on Long Island. I hadn’t any idea to whom I was addressing my…address…or what I would say, but I knew I was speaking at the Crest Hollow, and that was good enough for me.


A couple of times during those decades, I had shown up at the Smithtown Sheraton when I was supposed to be at The Garden City Hotel, or at the Marc Pierre on Route 110, when I should have been at the Salisbury Restaurant in Eisenhower Park (which had changed its name to the Carlton on the Park, just to drive me crazy).


So, my being sure of the location this time probably staved off the eventual stroke by a day or

two, at least.


Just as an aside, you should see the looks on the faces of the Marc of Dimes committee, who last heard that the speaker was seen asking the befuddled owners of the Captain Bill’s Restaurant in Bay Shore where are all the Golden Apple Award Education winners.


The education award winners are selected by the committee of the March of Dimes, who then hold a dinner, to whom the speaker is supposed to present the golden apples before making his speech.


He at long last enters the room at the Hilton Huntington just in the nick of time.
Actually, it is quite rewarding, like rescuing somebody from certain, imminent death.


I found out on arriving at the Crest Hollow that I was addressing 500 retired engineers from Grumman Aviation Corp., or whatever corporate name it was then called—they knew who they had worked for—and it was one of the very few times I was left speechless.


I’d addressed dentists, medical associations, bar associations, the joint meeting of associations of sheet metal and air conditioning contractors of New York and Boston, and all kinds of what I thought was the hardest group ever—accountants.


But I realized I had nothing for engineers.


Somebody took the microphone and told 500 engineers that they were in for a real treat.
What could I tell engineers?


Introduced, I approached the stage.All engineers knew more than I did, and if they didn’t know it, another engineer could tell them faster than I could.


They wouldn’t laugh at anything, because they didn’t laugh at anything at all. Laughter presupposes a problem. Engineers break down a problem to its component parts, solve it, and pooft, no problem.


First step.


Where did I get that, anyway? I don’t know any engineers.


Second step.


Michael Graziano. Holy smoke.


Third step. Saved.


“Thank you. I want tell you a story that came to me on that step, there, the second step, kid you not.


“It happened somewhere between 1970 and 1973, and the details of it are filling up my brain as if it happened yesterday.


“Bill Burns was running for re-election to the Assembly. He would win. He was a Republican from Amityville. He was Amityville mayor before becoming Assemblyman, and the district at the time voted 2 to 1 Republican.


I don’t remember who the Democrat candidate was or the Conservative, but I had to interview all four of them and write an election story.


On the northwest corner of West John Street and Newark Avenue, in Lindenhurst, lived a gentleman named Michael Graziano. He was running as the Liberal Party candidate. I phoned him, and later showed up at his house.


He was big man with a little mustache, which made me chuckle, because I was a comparatively little man with a big mustache.


To ease his mind, I told him that I had relatives all over Lindenhurst, and I had taught junior high school there, too.


I then blew all that away by telling him I was from Amityville, and that my father was the Lieutenant of the police department in Amityville, and my father drove trucks now and then for Burns Truck Sales.


I suppose the reason I didn’t tell him my grandmother’s maiden name was Burns was that there was no relation, but I might as well have.


I realized the mistake and said quickly there was an Amityville cop named Graziano, which sounded so lame that I didn’t wait, but just asked Graziano what he did for a living.


“I’m an engineer,” he said.


“Really,” I said. “In that case, can I ask you a really dumb question before we start. I mean, really dumb.”


“Shoot.”


“Well, I have never met an engineer. I mean, I know they’re smart, and I know they don’t wear that railroad engineer’s hat, and I know they make a lot of money, like a doctor, but I don’t know what an engineer does.”


“Well, an engineer is basically a problem solver. A manufacturer has a problem with a product—let’s say, it doesn’t work well when it’s heated, and that’s when it’s most valuable—he gives the problem to the engineering department, and they apply the old scientific method. They create the problem in a lab, attack it with few choice solutions, select one, and give it back to the manufacturer, case closed, hopefully.”


“Wow. Where do you work?”


“Well, I’m an engineer. I’m out of work.”


That was true. I knew that. Damn.


“Oh. Sorry. Where did you work when you did work?”


“My last job was at Grumman. I worked on the LEM. Heard of that?”


“I…the LEM…the Lunar Excursion Module?”


“Yep.”


“Wow. I feel like I’m interviewing a movie star. What was your…I don’t know…problem?”


Graziano knew that he had talked himself into a spot, and he knew where this was going. I didn’t.


“Well,” he stammered, “Travel in space presents some problems that you don’t encounter otherwise. Like, well, in an atmosphere without gravity, you have to consider, for instance, the proper and clean disposition of solid human waste…”


There was a pause. It got longer. Finally, I said, “So, you have to first create the problem…”


Some of the 500 Grumman engineers were laughing.


“Right. I had to create the problem…”


“And you therefore had to make…”


“So, I had to make…well, with gluclose…”


More engineers laughing.


“You had to make, uh, sh…”


“A shitmaker. I was a shitmaker.” He laughed.


Again, a pause. Then I started to laugh. I said, “You know you’re going to loose this race…”


“Yes.”


“And you’re the only one qualified to do exactly what the job calls for…”


“I didn’t, but yes, in manner of speaking…”


“And you know I can’t write this…”


“Well, I didn’t think of that, but, yes...”


Laughter. I mean, laughter.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

October 7, 2009


Engineers Laughing

By Ed Lowe

I was to speak at the Crest Hollow Country Club, in Woodbury. That’s all I remembered.
It was maybe the 50th or the 70th time. The Crest Hollow Country Club was the largest room on Long Island. I hadn’t any idea to whom I was addressing my…address…or what I would say, but I knew I was speaking at the Crest Hollow, and that was good enough for me.

A couple of times during those decades, I had shown up at the Smithtown Sheraton when I was supposed to be at The Garden City Hotel, or at the Marc Pierre on Route 110, when I should have been at the Salisbury Restaurant in Eisenhower Park (which had changed its name to the Carlton on the Park, just to drive me crazy).

So, my being sure of the location this time probably staved off the eventual stroke by a day or two, at least.

Just as an aside, you should see the looks on the faces of the Marc of Dimes committee, who last heard that the speaker was seen asking the befuddled owners of the Captain Bill’s Restaurant in Bay Shore where are all the Golden Apple Award Education winners.

The education award winners are selected by the committee of the March of Dimes, who then hold a dinner, to whom the speaker is supposed to present the golden apples before making his speech.

He at long last enters the room at the Hilton Huntington just in the nick of time.

Actually, it is quite rewarding, like rescuing somebody from certain, imminent death.
I found out on arriving at the Crest Hollow that I was addressing 500 retired engineers from

Grumman Aviation Corp., or whatever corporate name it was then called—they knew who they had worked for—and it was one of the very few times I was left speechless.

I’d addressed dentists, medical associations, bar associations, the joint meeting of associations of sheet metal and air conditioning contractors of New York and Boston, and all kinds of what I thought was the hardest group ever—accountants.

But I realized I had nothing for engineers.

Somebody took the microphone and told 500 engineers that they were in for a real treat.
What could I tell engineers?

Introduced, I approached the stage.All engineers knew more than I did, and if they didn’t know it, another engineer could tell them faster than I could.

They wouldn’t laugh at anything, because they didn’t laugh at anything at all. Laughter presupposes a problem. Engineers break down a problem to its component parts, solve it, and pooft, no problem.

First step.

Where did I get that, anyway? I don’t know any engineers.

Second step.

Michael Graziano. Holy smoke.

Third step. Saved.

“Thank you. I want tell you a story that came to me on that step, there, the second step, kid you not.

“It happened somewhere between 1970 and 1973, and the details of it are filling up my brain as if it happened yesterday.

“Bill Burns was running for re-election to the Assembly. He would win. He was a Republican from Amityville. He was Amityville mayor before becoming Assemblyman, and the district at the time voted 2 to 1 Republican.

I don’t remember who the Democrat candidate was or the Conservative, but I had to interview all four of them and write an election story.

On the northwest corner of West John Street and Newark Avenue, in Lindenhurst, lived a gentleman named Michael Graziano. He was running as the Liberal Party candidate. I phoned him, and later showed up at his house.

He was big man with a little mustache, which made me chuckle, because I was a comparatively little man with a big mustache.

To ease his mind, I told him that I had relatives all over Lindenhurst, and I had taught junior high school there, too.

I then blew all that away by telling him I was from Amityville, and that my father was the Lieutenant of the police department in Amityville, and my father drove trucks now and then for Burns Truck Sales.

I suppose the reason I didn’t tell him my grandmother’s maiden name was Burns was that there was no relation, but I might as well have.

I realized the mistake and said quickly there was an Amityville cop named Graziano, which sounded so lame that I didn’t wait, but just asked Graziano what he did for a living.

“I’m an engineer,” he said.

“Really,” I said. “In that case, can I ask you a really dumb question before we start. I mean, really dumb.”

“Shoot.”

“Well, I have never met an engineer. I mean, I know they’re smart, and I know they don’t wear that railroad engineer’s hat, and I know they make a lot of money, like a doctor, but I don’t know what an engineer does.”

“Well, an engineer is basically a problem solver. A manufacturer has a problem with a product—let’s say, it doesn’t work well when it’s heated, and that’s when it’s most valuable—he gives the problem to the engineering department, and they apply the old scientific method. They create the problem in a lab, attack it with few choice solutions, select one, and give it back to the manufacturer, case closed, hopefully.”

“Wow. Where do you work?”

“Well, I’m an engineer. I’m out of work.”

That was true. I knew that. Damn.

“Oh. Sorry. Where did you work when you did work?”

“My last job was at Grumman. I worked on the LEM. Heard of that?”

“I…the LEM…the Lunar Excursion Module?”

“Yep.”

“Wow. I feel like I’m interviewing a movie star. What was your…I don’t know…problem?”

Graziano knew that he had talked himself into a spot, and he knew where this was going. I didn’t.

“Well,” he stammered, “Travel in space presents some problems that you don’t encounter otherwise. Like, well, in an atmosphere without gravity, you have to consider, for instance, the proper and clean disposition of solid human waste…”

There was a pause. It got longer. Finally, I said, “So, you have to first create the problem…”
Some of the 500 Grumman engineers were laughing.

“Right. I had to create the problem…”

“And you therefore had to make…”

“So, I had to make…well, with gluclose…”

More engineers laughing.

“You had to make, uh, sh…”

“A shitmaker. I was a shitmaker.” He laughed.

Again, a pause. Then I started to laugh. I said, “You know you’re going to loose this race…”

“Yes.”

“And you’re the only one qualified to do exactly what the job calls for…”

“I didn’t, but yes, in manner of speaking…”

“And you know I can’t write this…”

“Well, I didn’t think of that, but, yes...”

Laughter. I mean, laughter.

Monday, October 5, 2009

SueB and Phil

Oct. 07, 2009

SueB and Phil


It is October 2009.

I am alive, which still strikes me as unusual, and both my daughters, T.C. and Colleen, are with me at Abel Conklin’s restaurant.

The, “girls,” (they are 41 and 40—yes, Irish twins—) are taking me out to lunch, and, in Huntington, which almost is more unusual than the fact that I am alive, because they are South Shore girls and never visit the North Shore. (I am an exception, because of my job, wherein Long Island became my entire pencil, as it were.).

I look across the room, and SueB is our server.

Colleen will like that, because she waited tables at Abel’s for a year or so and went to a few parties at SueB’s and Bear’s on the bay in Lindenhurst. TC will like it, too, when she hears my introduction of SueB and the story.

How do I begin to explain the complicated connections.

“I want to tell you a story,” I start, in full anticipation of the unspoken, “Oh, brother’s,” I am to either get or imagine I get, both because I deserve them as well as because every father gets them, anyway, whether he deserves them or not.

(I, of course, secretly know I do not, and by the time I finish, they are going to be amazed not only at the story, but at their part in it, which essentially makes it somehow their story, too. That is my fantasy, anyway, and that is why I am telling it.).

Back in 1973, I begin (cementing the notion that this is going to be a long, arduous, give-me-some-toothpick-to-keep-my-eyelids-open tale), I went fishing (Oh, God!) with five guys from Buddy Toomey’s Pearl Grey Fishing Station and Tavern on the Crick, in Amityville, including Buddy Toomey.

We went, of course, to Montauk.

I would love to say that I went lots of times to Montauk, but if the Speaker of the Assembly of State of New York, Perry B. Duryea, didn’t have a lobster business there, or if the Congressman Otis Pike didn’t make occasional political speeches there, I might remember a small boy’s family trip to the lighthouse, once, and then only vaguely. Otherwise, no fishing trips to Montauk, not much to Freeport or Captree, not much fishing trips at all. I don’t need proof to establish I’m an Islander.

In fact, I remember telling Buddy that I don’t fish, really, and Craig Starke, the clammer, that I really ought to give my seat to somebody more deserving, but Craig Starke said that the more deserving person had backed out; in fact, two of them backed out, and that was how we both got on board.

So, we met at some ungodly hour and drove from Amityville to a Greek Restaurant at Montauk called Salivar’s and loaded our gear on a boat called the, “Dawn,” where we met the Captain, Bob Tuma, and his mate, Phil Lewis, and we set out in the ocean to catch some striped bass, which we most assuredly did. I reeled in so many 20-30 lb. striped bass I tried to hide whenever my turn came up in the fight chair.

“Is this fun!” I finally bellowed, my arms screaming in pain, “Are we having fun yet? Get me back to work!”

It became an annual event, and I became a fan of, especially, the mate, Phil Lewis, who got his own boat, The, “Adios,” a year or two later, when the Drug Enforcement Administration sold it to him in Florida at auction.

Lewis, a quiet, Brooklyn-raised, shaved-head, gold earring (one), monster-fisher, electronic whiz-kid brought me back to his Montauk house a couple of times for dinner with Dina (of the Salivar’s family), and a session of classical tunes on his acoustic guitar, or a showing of his latest watercolors of fishermen, and I felt about as special and as privileged as you could be. While the other customers were customers, I was a guest, once the boat was in.

In later years—well, I’d taught junior high school English, in ’67 and ’68, where I became close to Ron Polacci, who married Lindenhurst art teacher Irene Georgiados, whose sister, Nota, was married to a restaurateur, Tom Violagas, and the four of them founded the Wine Gallery Restaurants in Forest Hills, East Meadow and Massapequa.

That’s a handful of divorces ago.

In East Meadow, once, Tom Violagas asked me if I ever took my daughters fishing, because he had paid for a, “six pack,” fishing trip—six paid guests plus a mate and a captain—and he only had himself and his two sons, and it seemed a waste to not use the other three.

I said, “Where?” He said his cousin Dina’s husband was a captain out at Montauk...
“Whoa…Dina? Dina of Salivar’s? Phil Lewis?”

“Why, yes.”

Well, not only did we go, but Colleen caught her first fish ever—a 185 lb. blue shark—TC (a veteran, having flounder fished with her fourth grade class out of Amityville) caught a 65-lb. blue shark (both of them were cut away), and I got to hang out on the bridge with Capt. Phil Lewis.

“I don’t get it,” Colleen interrupted. “Where’s SueB?”

Well, first of all, SueB is a former married nickname. It really is Sue D’Aleo, though when I was first introduced to her I said, “Suzie,” which I never do, although I learned years later that “Suzie” was her older brother’s name for her, a special name that only he used.

His name was Phil Lewis, and her name, SueB’s maiden name, was Caponigri. He went from Erasmus High School, she, Holy Cross, both in Brooklyn. He was born on 03/3/33. He was 14 years old when she born.

And I found that out here, at Abel Conklin’s, 10 years ago, when somebody mentioned fishing and somebody else pointed out that the funeral for SueB’s brother, which was supposed to consist of one boat, the, “Adios,” sprinkling ashes over a favorite spot for striped bass, drew an ad hoc parade of some 54 mourning boats bearing customers, friends, relatives and strangers, the largest water-borne funeral procession Montauk had ever seen.

“Wait,” I said. ‘The Adios?’ “Did you say the, ‘Adios?’ I went fishing on the ‘Adios.’ My daughters went fishing with me on the, ‘Adios.’ Oh, my God, SueB!”