Mayerson: ‘Needling Nettie’
Or ‘I’ve Got Her Under My Spell’

I like Nettie Mayerson.

We’ve been friends for more than 20 years. But we’ve had this problem throughout most of our relationship.

As a matter of fact, it was exactly twenty-years-ago that our problem began.

Let me tell you the story.

Nettie — what kind of name is that anyway? — was a Democratic District Leader from Flushing since 1972. She shared her leadership zone and powerful Stevenson Democratic Club with her co-leader, political giant of the 70’s, Donald Manes.

She had a good job as executive director of the New York State Crime Victims Board, but Nettie wanted to be an elected official.

The year was 1981 and Nettie wanted to run for Assembly. You see, the incumbent Assembly member, David Cohen was not from the Stevenson Club and Nettie was tired of waiting. But Donald, her co-leader, was county Dem-king-and-queen maker and told Nettie it wasn’t her time.

Several years earlier, her friend (and my friend) Gary Ackerman decided not to wait for the party blessing and go out and take a seat by challenging the party in a primary. I managed that campaign for Gary. So when Nettie said she was going to challenge the incumbent and the Democratic County Organization, Nettie and Gary looked to me. And way back in 1981, I managed Nettie Mayerson’s successful first run for elective office.

It was a classic campaign story. We had the better organization, the better team, the better candidate and – of course – the better campaign manger. We marched door-to-door through Pomonok, Elechester and Aguillar with Nettie; we mailed; we worked the street; we worked the union; we just outworked them. That my friends, is the true secret of winning at politics — and just about everything else.

Mayerson's present campaign button as we envision it.

Hard work and money are the secrets to getting elected. I don’t remember all the financial details, but I’m certain we were outspent. However I wrote literature and coming from the newspaper business and a recent previous campaign, knew ways to cut costs and get the job done efficiently and cost-effectively. I did quite a bit myself.

I even designed the campaign button.

That’s really where our problem began.

Sadly, I couldn’t find any of those  1981 collector items in my small but precious button collection — perhaps Nettie staged a late-night raid. I’ll check with Ackerman, Nettie or Alan Gershuny — they’re probably the only three crazy enough to save a twenty-year-old Nettie pin. If anyone out there has one — Marsha, Melanie, Jedd, David — please let me know.

Well, like most campaigns, the candidate gets final sign-off on finished proofs before they get printed. Often, when Nettie was busy being the candidate, her husband Ronnie gave the sign-off.

Ronnie got the button sign-off. Ronnie saw the button proof. Ronnie signed off on the button. The button was printed. Nettie was not happy.

It seems that Nettie and Ronnie believe there is an  “H” somewhere in Mayerson. They still insist it is “Mayersohn.” The “Mayerson” button we printed 20-years-ago and Ronnie proofed, disagreed.

Now elections are not won or lost over buttons or a single letter or spelling...but, relationships could be. To this very day, Ronnie still denies the story. His version is that he saw a proof with an “H” and we took it out after he left. Nettie just blamed me and refused to pay for the buttons — which she used. Well, I’m not sure she didn’t pay, but the story works better when I have something to complain about. So, for this story, she stiffed me.

Now, I’m not going to even respond to Ronnie’s suggestion that it was right when he saw it and we changed it thereafter.

Well, this was the story way back in 1981 and Nettie and I never really resolved our differences. We’re friends; we kid each other, but those Mayersons just refuse to accept responsibility for their error.

And so, the friendly fight has been going on for 20 years. Whenever Nettie’s name appears in the paper in a non-hard-news story, it is spelled incorrectly. On the TribPix page or in my column, don’t expect to see an “h” and if you do, expect to see another creative use of the alphabet. In real hard news stories, our journalistic ethic occasionally gets the best of our 20-year-old effort of needling Nettie.

She too participates in our little name game. When Nettie thought she was going to face a Primary challenge — she probably doesn’t remember what a real election is like — rather than gearing up for the challenge, she and her finance chairman Shimmy Pelman, became creative. They designed posters and T-shirts borrowing several of my creative spellings of Nettie’s last name and added a tag line: “ANY WAY YOU SPELL IT … SHE IS STILL THE BEST!!!”

Well, the fight shall continue. This participant wants the Mayerson clan to either change the spelling of their last name or accept the responsibility for approving the alleged misspelling. And if you should see her, or better yet write to her, there is no “h” in Mayerson. And Nettie, there is the matter of the bill: 1000 buttons at 1970 prices — that’s about $185 plus taxes, plus interest, plus penalty. At IRS rates, an “H” will cost about a $1,000.

Guest Columnist: Henry Stern
Can One Smart Kid Teach a Million ?

By HENRY J. STERN

Back when I was a kid, the first day of school always brought a certain excitement.  A new teacher, some new classmates, the nip of September in the air, and the end of hanging around the house and beating up your siblings.  Also, on opening day, you didn’t owe any homework assignments, book reports, or lab experiments.  Figuratively as well as literally, you started school with a clean slate.

This year we have a brand-new Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein.  He has a 1940’s name: post-Joseph but pre-Jason.  He went to a neighborhood high school – William Cullen Bryant in Queens – not an elite school like Science, Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech.  Forty years ago, you could do that.  From there it was Columbia College, magna, Harvard Law School, magna and law review editor; a distinguished career in public service and private practice, including a clerkship for the wise and moderate Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell.  Everything Klein has done professionally has been top-drawer.  And now he is about to take a job which, with the exception of Frank Macchiarola, has diminished everyone who has held it – if not in their own eyes, then in the eyes of the public.

He begins with certain advantages:  first, he is an ally and not an adversary of the Mayor.  Second, he is unhampered by obligations to unions, businesses, contractors, lobbyists, activists, pacifists, political clubs and jobseekers.  Third, he is clearly a man of intellect and character, who left the White House counsel’s office alive, and with his reputation intact.  He leaves Bertelsmann almost simultaneously with his dismissed employer.

The job he undertakes here is enormously difficult.  He will be challenged by the interest groups which permeate the huge educational establishment.  They seek ever-greater nourishment from over twelve billion dollars that are spent annually on education.   Klein will also have to deal with his own Fresh Kills — a mountain of waste, often carefully shielded by procedures, regulations, standards and traditions, not to mention collective bargaining agreements and codicils, which, it will be alleged in political courtrooms, have ossified into laws so powerful they would bind Gulliver, possibly even Hercules.

But assuming he defeats or contains these formidable obstacles, it is not-all-that apparent what he can or should do to teach children reading, writing and arithmetic, which once were the goals of public education.  Scholars, including deconstructionists, have different views on how – and in what languages or dialects – children should be taught. They complain, and if they don’t like the result, they litigate... on and on and on.

Education has been an individual process, coming from the teacher-student relationship.  Assuming that Klein is brilliant enough to figure out what to do, and to get rid of the land mines in his way, he will have to find, or retrain, the thousands of qualified teachers who will be necessary to carry out this vision.  The task is daunting.

Henry Stern was NYC Parks commissioner for fifteen years and a City councilmember for nine years. He is now founder and director of NYCivic, a good government group and can be reached at: starquest.nycivic.org.

Slide Rules and Thirteen-Year-Olds

It was Saturday night, 1:45 a.m. and we were on the way back from the Bat Mitzvah of Alexandra Kohn. In the morning Alex had chanted from the Torah with precision and the depth and richness of melody rarely heard from a thirteen-year-old. Her folks – our friends – Vicki and Mike, a Flushing attorney, deserved to be very proud of their little girl.

The celebration at the Garden City Hotel was on an equivalent level. But it was late when I started driving Lil, Allison and her two friends home.

At that hour of the night (or morning) Allison and her friends could be expected to be quiet or asleep. But the excitement of the day kept the discussion going.

I’m not sure how it led there — though Allison insists I began the group exchanging mathematics puns — but to sum it up, the product of the session, led me, somehow to “slide rule.” As I uttered it, I asked Mikki, Allison and Lisa (the neighborhood math guru) if they knew what it was.

Lisa replied she thinks her dad has one but she never saw it.

For those much younger than me or scared of math, a slide rule is: a device consisting of two logarithmically scaled rules mounted to slide along each other so that multiplication, division, and more complex computations are reduced to the mechanical equivalent of addition or subtraction.

The relevance isn’t too staggering, but it made Lil and me realize that some things we were brought up with have just been “technologied” into oblivion. Other than collectible sites and eBay, slide rules are a thing of the past.

What else that was part of the lives of children of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and before is now obsolete and unknown to our children?

If you thought 45s or perhaps vinyl albums, you’re on the right track; dial phones and possibly, someday, film?

Got thoughts? Email them to me.

And Alex, congrats; you were super!

Not4Publication.com by Dom Nunziato

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Michael Schenkler can be reached at: MSchenkler@queenspress.com