Meadowlark Lemon RIP

Before the National Basketball Association was on TV 24 hours a day, there were the Harlem Globetrotters television specials and even a Saturday morning cartoon which featured their voices. The Globetrotters were funny and very athletic. They inspired us to go outside and try to do the moves they did. Though it only took a minute of trying to realize these guys were athletes and had practice long and hard to master the techniques they performed on TV and in person around the world.

Meadowlark Lemon was their leader in those days. He was famous for half court hook shoots and for making the lives of his opponents miserable, with his large hands, hugely long arms, and comic persona which everyone had to at least smile at. His opponents really had no chance and nobody cared it was scripted like Professional Wrestling.

According to the Internet:

"Lemon played 24 seasons and by his own estimate more than 16,000 games with the Globetrotters, the touring exhibition basketball team known for its slick ball-handling, practical jokes, red-white-and-blue uniforms and multiyear winning streaks against overmatched opponents."

As a viewer and fan of the Globetrotter art form, it has taken the passing of one of their leaders to cause me to reflect upon the tremendous service they did for society. Do youngsters today even know how he is and how much we looked forward to seeing him on our small TV screens? In an age when we were still coming to grips with segregation of blacks and whites, Meadowlark Lemon broke down barriers and made it okay to laugh at a team of hapless white guys being outplayed by all sorts of means in basketball by a talented group of Ambassadors of Good Will. That was the message and the moral of their story, repeated thousands upon thousands of times. It's as important today and in the future as it ever was when Meadowlark was preaching its gospel.

Beatles Are Streaming!

Whatever you believe, the fact that the Beatles are now streaming on Spotify is a good thing.

Apologies to Taylor Swift, but she is 100% wrong about withholding her so-called music from Spotify. It was all a public relations stunt and the last gasp of the 20th Century music moguls to keep their customers buying overpriced CDs. I much prefer to rent all the music in the world for $9.99 a month to paying $15.95 of a CD of a single artist.

Hello, this is basic math.

Books Read in our Youth

 The books we read in our youth contain the fables, metaphors, and lessons we carry with us the rest of our lives. At this point in my life to go back and investigate the likes of Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives me great satisfaction, as it does for many I presume.

The same cannot be said of newspapers. I don't know when they became a seemingly guilty pleasure, but they are now. Maybe when they became $3.00 on the newsstand and the old newspaper boxes were sent to warehouses and converted to other uses. I still read the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal and even have them delivered to my apartment building. The Times, "The Gray Lady", remains a link to my youth and a source of opinions and news from around the world for me.

Here's the opening paragraph of a 1951 Life article entitled "The Gray Lady Reaches 100":

The Old Gray Lady will celebrate her 100th birthday this Sept. 18. The "lady" is a newspaper -- the New York Times -- regarded by many in the world at large (and all within its own world) as the world's greatest. And newsmen generally hail it as "old" and "gray" by way of acknowledging its traditional special marks: starch conservatism and circumspection.

I support the term circumspect but not starch conservatism. I am wary of the risks that some politicians would like to take with our society's safety net and I am firmly in support of government being the mechanism to regulate the greedy, educate our children, build our roads, and provide for the common defense. These ideas cannot be produced and maintained by any private entity. The more people sit back and rail against the poor, malnourished, and ill-educated who are rapidly becoming a majority, the more I find solace in firebrands like John Steinbeck.

 I can also take comfort from reading Fitzgerald who is mostly remembered for the elegance of Gatsby but who was really critiquing a time similar to our own today. The huge parties and the vast income disparity can be seen on today's Long Island just as clearly as Fitzgerald described it so eloquently. He may have been an actor taking part in these outrageous events, especially when he came into money for The Great Gatsby. Though this takes nothing away from what he was writing about and the heartfelt reflection it contains.

July Weather on Christmas Day

Today is Christmas. I can never recall a temperature prediction quite like the one we are receiving: highs in the 70s. Today I will be in Ridgewood to visit relatives and I will be wearing shorts. In honor of the weather here is a Vintage Bergen County photo of Graydon Pool taken in the early 1960s. It is Graydon the way I remember it: filled with people, and much less manicured than today's pool. Graydon was a place to go for hours at a time, in an age when mothers stayed at home, and there wasn't air conditioning in every house and a pool on every block in town. We went to Graydon to escape the heat and see how other people had fun in the water.

Ridgewood (NJ) High School Alumni Association

James Stroker Retirement After 35 Years in Ridgewood Public Schools

It nice to remember that I was in Ridgewood Public Schools and James Stroker was around. Forty years have gone by and while I was away Jimmy Stroker was doing what he had always done: teach life lessons through sports.

I remember him well as an athlete and as an umpire doing the Summer Recreation Softball season. He called a good game, usually alone, but always in command of the diamond, never out of position, or made an errant call. I would have known if he had missed one as I stood in front him pitching, while he called balls and strikes and made the final decisions on all the bases. He was completely impartial and at the same time had a nice smile and demeanor. It was a job for the summer and one he executed with the utmost professionalism.

Yes, life was simpler in those days on the baseball diamonds that are no longer in town. The old dusty ball fields with patches of grass and swamps of mud in the outfield after a good rain have long ago been supplanted by well-cared for fields. In some cases, artificial turf has been installed and no rock strewn infields remain. All we have, as usual, are the memories, and as we grow older a reasonable certainty that our past ways of playing were just as good as that which passes on these new fields. The difference now being we won't have James Stroker on the field as much, and we might not have the opportunity to learn something about life by just watching him doing his job.

RHS Distinguished Alumni Award 2016

The Ridgewood High School Alumni Association is currently accepting nominations for this year's Distinguished Alumni event. The event will take place on Thursday, March 10th, 2016. The deadline for nominations is January 23rd, 2016.

Please submit all nominations via the website (RHSalumniassociation.org) under the Contact Us section. Please make sure to include the full name of the graduate, year of graduation and a brief write up detailing the person's distinguished achievements. Any questions or inquiries can be sent directly to info@rhsalumniassociation.org.