Sunday, January 9, 2022

Growing Up in the Last Century-- MY FIRST TASTE OF POLITICS: GETTING KICKED OUT OF THE POLLS BY THE ALBANY MACHINE, June 1972

        

Albany's long-time Mayor Erastus Corning with Democratic Party Chairman Dan O'Connell (with hat), circa 1970.

        This story is complicated, so bear with me.

        I was just a 20 year-old college kid when I got my first real bloody nose – figurative and almost very literal – in the political world.  Welcome to Albany, New York, my hometown (scenic aerial photo above), back in the days of the Democratic machine, party boss Daniel P. O’Connell, and mayor-for-life Erastus Corning.

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Growing Up in the Last Century: TEAR-GASSED in WASHINGTON, D.C., May 1970

  
























       I was just 18 years old, a college freshman, on May 4, 1970, when National Guardsmen in Ohio opened fire and killed four student protestors at Kent State University.  Fifty years later, I still remember the looks on peoples’ faces as news of the shootings spread like lightning across my own college campus a thousand miles away at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Grisha Ziv on Trotsky, 1917, translated from original Russian

                                       























 Trotsky, right, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, standing, and Ziv, front, circa 1898.