Lessons From “The Russian Five” by Keith Gave

As kids, my friends and I half-skidded, half-staggered across a variety of perilous and uneven ice-covered surfaces: the parking lots, streets, and playgrounds of mid-Michigan. We played something resembling hockey. There weren’t any youth leagues in our town then, so we made our own, complete with goals carved into snowbanks. 

And we impersonated our heroes, the best players from our favorite team: The Edmonton Oilers. 

Edmonton?

Yes, of course. The Oilers were the best, with Wayne Gretzky, Paul Coffey, Jari Kurri, and Grant Fuhr in goal. 

We paid no attention to our state’s team, the Detroit Red Wings, because they were awful, and better known as “The Dead Things” in the mid-1980s. 

“The Russian Five” is about how all of that changed: how the Red Wings built a transcendent and lasting success out of the ashes of the Dead Things era. 

It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t conventional. And it certainly wasn’t linear, with fits and starts, advances and retreats, and adjustments and alterations on the way to title contention and, eventually, Stanley Cup championships. 

Much more than a nostalgia trip, “The Russian Five” is a book about creativity, boldness, and perseverance in the face of criticism and uncertainty. It’s about operating without a road map and pressing on anyway.

In other words, “The Russian Five” is a book about how to build something great. 

Espionage on the ice

The author, Keith Gave, is uniquely qualified to write this book. After all, he had an insider’s view as the Red Wings beat writer for the Detroit Free Press. 

But the beat writer’s job wasn’t Gave’s only advantage. 

Gave previously worked as a Russian linguist for the National Security Agency. And, without crossing ethical lines, he earned an assist by helping the Red Wings get two transformational players out of the Soviet Union. 

Gave was propositioned by Red Wings executive vice president Jim Lites to pass along a message to Sergei Federov and Vladimir Konstantinov:

“You know hockey, you know the league, and you know us,” Lites said. “And as a member of the media, you can get access to those guys when nobody else in the NHL can. All we’re asking for is that you make that first contact for us. We can take it from there - if it’s going to happen - but we can’t do anything without that initial contact.”

While covering games in Helsinki, Finland, Gave was able to slip letters, tucked into media guides, from the Red Wings to the players—even as the KGB watched nearby. It was the opening salvo in what would become a pipeline of talent from the Soviet hockey team to Detroit. 

Lessons learned

The Red Wings management, owner Mike Illitch, executive vice president Jim Lites, and general manager Jim Devellano, desperately wanted to revive the proud franchise, which bottomed out in the 1980s. 

And we can learn from that time--from looking at the bold strategies and actions the Red Wings took--and apply them to our own work and lives today. 

The standard approach wasn’t working 

The Wings were building up, slowly, in the usual hockey fashion: by drafting North American players and adding a free agent here and there.

But the well-worn path wasn’t working, or wasn't working fast enough: 

“But building through the draft is a painfully slow process, and it comes without a guarantee. It takes immense patience and more than a little luck -- borne through years of scouting and stockpiling and developing players who were teenagers barely shaving when they were drafted onto their NHL teams.”

If the Red Wings were going to succeed, the leaders would have take a new, unconventional, and even potentially dangerous path to tap a vast reservoir of previously unavailable talent.

“The quickest way to catch up, Devellano was now convinced after numerous briefings from Smith, was to begin drafting Europeans, especially those groomed behind the Iron Curtain.”

In 1989, the Red Wings selected Sergei Federov in the fourth round of the NHL draft. Using a high pick on a Soviet player just wasn’t done, because there was no precedent for getting a player out of the country and into the NHL. 

Eventually, through defections and trades, the Red Wings would assemble five extremely talented players from the Soviet Union national team, reuniting them in Joe Louis Arena where they would eventually win a cup together, and kick off a enduring run of excellence. Forwards Sergei Fedorov, Igor Larionov and Vyacheslav Kozlov, and defensemen Vladimir Konstantinov and Viacheslav Fetisov ,brought the Stanley Cup back to Detroit.

No one succeeds alone

Bringing the Russian players to Detroit required a lot of help from both inside and outside the Red Wings organization.

Scouts had to implore Devellano to take that first bold step, drafting Federov in the fourth round in 1989. 

Keith Gave delivered the opening communication to Federov and Konstantinov. 

And the Wings needed a man on the inside, someone close to the team that would help convince the players to leave and guide them through their defections:

“There, Lites met a man pushing 50, a Russian ex-pat who had left his country when he was in his 30s. Because he spoke Russian, French, and English, the Soviets used Ponomarev as  their official photographer whenever they are in North America or Western Europe. “I can talk to the guys for you,” he told Lites, who was beginning to feel like he could make the kind of deal that would pay enormous dividends for the Red Wings. 

“As Mike Illitch told me over and over and over, always close,” Lites recalled. “So I sat there and said, ‘Let’s talk. If we do this, you have to work for me. I have to know your loyalties are to us.’ Their handshake deal was followed up with a written contract that said the Detroit hockey club would pay Ponomarev $35,000 for a successful defction of Sergei Fedorov or Vladimir Konstantinov.

‘And Michael, from that day on, was my guy. That’s how all this started.’

Success is always a team effort.

Let talented people flourish

Scotty Bowman is arguably the greatest coach in NHL history. He won nine Stanley Cups between 1972 and 2002, amassing 1,244 wins—more than any NHL coach in history. 

Bowman was tough, demanding, and a control freak. But even he knew when to let talent flourish, such as when he put all five Russian players together on the ice.

As captain Steve Yzerman recalled:

“When (Coach) Scotty (Bowman) put them all together, the five Russians, there was instant chemisry,” he said. “It was unique. It had never been done in the NHL, and for us it was enjoyable, really enjoyable to watch, and obivously it helped us win hockey games.”

Slava Kozlov:

“Our biggest privledge was that the coaches didn’t touch us or try to teach us how to play hockey,” Kozlov said. “We were amongst ourselves and would talk to each other. I was actually shocked by the other guys. I adjusted not to what the coaches were saying but to what the guys were saying. I would do everything that my older partners told me. 

[...]

Kozlov spoke without an ounce of bravado. Conceit, arrogance self-aggrandizement -- whatever you care to call it -- just isn’t in his DNA. Like theothers in the Russian Five unit, he was a “Master of Sport” in the Soviet Union -- and had the medal to prove it. When he said the coaches just let them play their game without getting in the way, he was merely confirming the same truth that Scotty Bowman spoke. 

Strong leaders know when to let those they lead take the forefront--and everyone reaps the rewards. 

Perseverance is critical: the journey is never linear

The Red Wings eventually became extremely successful--in the NHL’s regular season. But the playoffs continued to disappoint:

The Red Wings had begun a new season in the autumn of 1996 with a cloak of despair draped over the team. The fans sensed it, gripped by a malaise that was starting to feel comfortable. No longer were they giddy with hope and expectations. They had grown disillusioned after four straight spring times wrought with profound disappointment. Beyond wary, they were building a barrier around their hearts to keep them from being broken yet again. 

Players, too. Captain Steve Yzerman was beginning to doubt that it was in the cards to have his name engraved on the Stanley Cup. 

But the Red Wings did break through, hammering the Philadelphia Flyers in the 1997 Stanley Cup Finals, and rallying around a statement-making check by Konstantinov on the Flyer’s Dale Hawerchuk:

Hawerchuk, a Hall of Famer, left the ice, didn’t return, and retired after the series. Konstantinov’s hit—a clean check—was a clear declaration that 1997 would be different for the Red Wings, who went on the win the Cup. 

Remember to savor the journey 

Just six days after the Red Wings finally won the cup, tragedy struck. 

Returning from a night out with his teammates, Vladimir Konstantiov and Slava Kozlov were in a horrible limousine accident. 

“There’s been an accident,” he said, explaining that the caller was an officer from teh Oakland County Sheriff’s Department. No one said a word. Instead, they clusgterred aroudn their captain, who stuck a finger in his ear to block teh surrounding noise.

[...]

The Stanley Cup, until that moment the epicenter of their universe, was quickly forgotten. Ignored. Reudced to a gratuitious postscript.

Koslov recovered. Konstantinov survived, but would never play hockey again. Today he lives in Detroit and continues his therapy, more than 20 years later:

Ten months later, on an unseasonably warm March day, “the greatest hockey player in the world” lurches into the living room of his town house in suburban Detroit, grasping a walker. He has returned from a visit to his doctor and is accompanied by one of the nurses who provide round-the-clock assistance. He plops into a chair at a table off the kitchen to play a card game, Uno, with a Russian-speaking nurse. Irina Konstantinov says her husband really likes Uno. “The left frontal lobe,” she starts. “It handles executive functioning, where a person analyzes their own behavior, determines whether it’s right and appropriate. That he doesn’t have. Destroyed. He can’t process idealistic feelings about life, like love of country or happiness that his child is graduating. Everything for him is matter of fact.” 

Photo: Det News

Chasing goals is great. But we have to remember to enjoy the climb as well. We never know what lies ahead. 

Konstantiov’s legacy endures. The Wings became the gold standard in the NHL, winning championships in 1997, 1998, 2002, and 2008. His toughness and perseverance as detailed in “The Russian Five” is something we can all draw inspiration from. 

“The Russian Five” is a fun and valuable read for any hockey fan

At times, Gave’s book reads like a 007 spy thriller, as the Wings schemed and smuggled players out from behind the Iron Curtain. At other times it’s a book about leadership, teamwork, tragedy, and belief in the face of uncertainty.

In any case, it’s much more than a sports book.

The Russian Five is a great retelling of the strategy, struggle, victory, and calamity of the Detroit Red Wings’ climb to greatness. The book’s lessons are applicable to all of us as we half-skid, half-stagger our way across the uneven and slippery surfaces of life. 

---

You can pick up “The Russian Five” by Keith Gave at Amazon.

Detroit: An American Autopsy, by Charlie LeDuff

Writer and reporter Charlie LeDuff moved his family from Los Angeles back to his native Detroit, where he went to work exposing corruption, violence, and incompetence for the Detroit News. 

And wow, was he busy.

“Detroit: An American Autopsy,” published in 2013, chronicles one of the more corrupt periods in Detroit history, during the reign of mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who resigned in disgrace in 2008 before being found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice. 

Charlie is a talented writer who elicits powerful emotions in his readers: anger, disgust, and even despondency. 

But he’s prone to some hyperbole, and seems resigned to declare the city dead—an understandable position, given what he witnessed and wrote about every day. 

Thankfully, the intervening years have proven LeDuff’s proclamation false.

Detroit isn’t dead. 

Yes, it has a long way to go, but justice did prevail in rooting out the corruption of the Kilpatrick regime, and the city continues to make strides. 

LeDuff lays out a compelling case that Detroit’s troubles began in the 1950s:

Detroit actually began its decline in population during the 1950s, precisely the time that Detroit—and the United States—was at its peak. And while Detroit led the nation in per capita income and home ownership, automation and the beginnings of foreign competition were forcing automobile companies like Packard to shutter their doors. That factory closed in 1956 and was left to rot, pulling down the east side, which pulled down the city.

During and after the Great Recession, Detroit was a city dominated by fear, violence, graft, and incompetence. And this is no more evident than in the struggles of the city’s firefighters, up against impossible odds: 

”Arson,” he said. “In this town, arson is off the hook. Thousands of them a year, bro. In Detroit, it’s so ******* poor that fire is cheaper than a movie. A can of gas is three-fifty and a movie is eight bucks, and there aren’t any movie theaters left in Detroit, so fuck it. They burn the empty house next door and they sit on the ******* porch with a forty, and they’re barbecuing and laughing ’cause it’s ******* entertainment. It’s unbelievable. And the old lady living next door, she don’t have insurance, and her house goes up in flames and she’s homeless and another *******block dies.”

[…]

The city, what’s left of it, burns night after night. Nature—in the form of pheasants, hawks, foxes, coyotes and wild dogs—had stepped in to fill the vacuum, reclaiming a little more of the landscape each day.

As arson engulfed the city, Detroit firefighters dealt with substandard equipment, leading to unnecessary danger and death:

As the firemen were snuffing out remnant embers in the attic, someone heard timber snap. And then the roof collapsed. “He was right behind me,” said Hamm, pointing to the spot. “He was right next to me. I don’t know why I’m here.” It took a few minutes to find Harris because his homing alarm failed to sound. It failed because it was defective. Because that passes for normal here. Defective equipment for emergency responders. Harris died not because he was burned or because the timber broke his bones. He died of suffocation, unable to breathe from the weight of the roof. If the alarm had only worked.

City firefighters were the victims of inadequate funding as elected leaders and bureaucrats skimmed dollars off the budget for themselves.

But even by Detroit standards of corruption, Monica Conyers, city council member and wife of late congressman John Conyers, stood out:

The madam city council president found herself denying to me and the rest of the press that her ex-con brother had gotten a no-show city job at her request. She denied, in fact, that he was her brother at all before turning around and admitting that he was in fact her brother.

[…]

Sensing she was near the end of her freedom and her threadbare sanity, I called Conyers on her cell phone to get an interview. No answer. I hung up. My phone rang a few moments later, a return call from the same number. “Monica?” “Who’s this?” the voice answered. “Charlie LeDuff.” A long pregnant pause. “Uhmmmmm . . . my name is Teresa,” the voice stammered. “Monica doesn’t have this number anymore.” “Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I said with a laugh. “Monica, I know it’s you. It’s your voice.” “No, this is Teresa. Sorry.” And then Monica hung up.

[…]

After months of denials, she finally admitted to shaking tens of thousands of dollars and jewelry from people with business before the city council and the pension board on which she served. The feds had it all—Conyers taking envelopes stuffed with cash, Conyers taking money from a businessman’s coat pocket, Conyers walking out on her meals without paying. Among the highlights of the wiretapped conversations played in court: “You’d better get my loot, that’s all I know,” Conyers told her aide-de-camp Sam Riddle at one point.

There are horrific and senseless tales of the worst aspects of humanity in this book. As LeDuff chronicles Detroit’s struggles, he weaves in tales of personal tragedy from his own past in the city.

The book is grim.

And yet even amongst the despair, there are moments of hope and inspiration.

LeDuff shares stories of people doing the best they can in absurdly difficult situations. The firefighters. The police. And citizens of the city, just trying to move forward:

But what you gonna do? You ain’t gonna be reincarnated, so you got to do the best you can with the moment you got. Do the best you can and try to be good. You dig?”

Time has put some distance between the events of the book and the current day, leaving enough space to see that hope remains for Detroit—precisely because of the people trying to do the best they could, and trying to be good. 

---

You can pick up “Detroit, an American Autopsy,” at Amazon.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning, by Jonathan Mahler

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning,” is as ambitious, varied, and entertaining as the city it focuses on. 

The book’s title, taken from a Howard Cosell declaration made on national TV during the World Series (as an abandoned building burned nearby), is pitch-perfect, so to speak. 

New York City was a tumultuous, turbulent, and facinating place—not to mention pretty dangerous—in the 1970s, and no time moreso than 1977, the year which is the focus of the book. Nineteen seventy-seven was a year New York nearly broke down, and later, broke though. 

ESPN liked the book so much it created a mini-series based on the New York Yankees’ ‘77 pennant chase.

The focus here is on so much more than just the Yankees, with a wide net cast to gather together all the components of a city in crisis: 

• Government social policy and budgeting

• The debut of Studio 54

• The emergence of punk rock

• The histories and personalities of Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner, and Reggie Jackson

• Urban planning theory

• Terrorism

• Rampant arson

• The crimes, media manipulation, and eventual capture of serial killer Son of Sam

• The strategy and politics of city zoning

• The gentrification of SoHo

• The blackout riots, looting, and police response to the New York City blackout of July 13, 1977

• The electrical grid strategy of New York City

• The 1977 mayoral race, candidates, and strategies 

• Highway planning

Even that list is incomplete. The book covers a lot of ground.

I won’t summarize the book here—there are too many topics. But I will share some insights from some of the major events within, and below the post you will find my Kindle highlights from the book itself. 

The 1977 New York City Democratic Mayoral Primary

Amidst crime and financial disaster, four candidates, including Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo, Bella Abzug and incumbent mayor Abraham Beame, squared off in a bloody Democratic primary full of sniping, back-biting, and backroom deals.

But as vicious as the race was, I’m struck by the tone and content of Koch’s TV commercials.

Koch was seen as the most confrontational candidate, but these ads are so vanilla they would be ignored today:

Amazingly, Koch won the democratic primary running against the teachers and police unions, and taking a pro-death penalty stance. He sounds very conservative in these ads, which ran during the primary where he was trying to capture only left-leaning voters. 

Koch went on to be mayor New York until the end of 1989. 

George vs Billy vs Reggie

In 1977, Billy Martin was in the first of his four runs as Yankees manager, and many days it looked like he wouldn’t keep his job for the entire season. Martin, as mercurial as any manager who ever led a team, was sandwiched between his combustable and jealous owner, George Steinbrenner, and his preening and insecure superstar—who was new to town—Reggie Jackson.

Together, the three of them barked at each other in the press and in person, and schemed behind each other’s backs.

Famously, Martin and Jackson nearly came to blows in the Boston dugout after Martin pulled Jackson mid-inning following a Jackson flub in right field:

Martin not only kept his job after this incident, but the team rallied. The Yankees came from behind in the standings to overtake the Red Sox in the division and bested Kansas City in the ALCS before beating the Dodgers in the World Series.

The blackout of July 13, 1977

It’s not easy to make one of the world’s largest cities go dark, requiring a potent mix of circumstance and bad decisions:

• A lengthy heatwave, pushing temperatures over 100, while tempers and demands on the power grid climbed right along with it.

• Clean-air regulations pushed power plans well outside the city limits.

• A tenuous feeder system bringing power into the city from those plants with too few lines and little redundancy.

• Some lightning, taking out feeder lines.

• Poorly maintained emergency generators.

• A board operator who froze, failing to disconnect subsections of the city, which would have reduced the overall power draw into the city grid and prevented total failure.

The result was disastrous: the entire city went dark. Every borough.

Mass looting and fires followed in certain areas, particularly in the South Bronx and a subsection of Brooklyn called Bushwick.

As a result, an area of poverty and high unemployment destroyed itself—creating worse poverty and unemployment. Seven years later, the area was still rebuilding, as detailed in this 1984 New York Times article:

A tangible recovery is building in the bombed out heart of the neighborhood around St. Barbara's. It can be traced to construction of what amounts to a small village of public housing units, ordered by Mayor Koch at a cost of $58 million, and to a revival in a private real- estate market that has spilled over from the adjoining neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens.

Little noticed by those outside Bushwick, this insular community has, along with sections of the South Bronx and some other parts of Brooklyn, become an example of a downtrodden community, seemingly at the end of its line, that for all its problems has quietly managed to negotiate an upturn.

[…]

''There has been a definite turnaround and it's going on just all over the place,'' said Elliott Yablon, director of the Bushwick Neighborhood Preservation Office of the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development. ''I think it's own momentum is going to carry it through. If we walked away, the recovery might not be as planned, but it would happen anyway.''

Bushwick’s slow recovery was a microcosm of the entire city’s resurgence.

In 1977, New York seemed to be on the brink of collapse. And while many people thought New York was in its death throes, it was really going through birthing pains.

The restoration—of Bushwick, of law and order, and of the cities finances—snowballed into a renaissance for New York, the tailwinds of which still carry the city forward today.

Just another example that it truly is darkest—pitch black, even—before the dawn.

Photo by Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images

You can buy “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning,” at Amazon.

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Book notes
(Kindle Highlights)

PROLOGUE

When I first embarked on this book four years ago, my intention was to write about the ’77 Yankees against the backdrop of New York during this infamous era of urban blight. As the months passed, though, the city slowly advanced into the foreground, and the two stories became one.

I gradually came to regard ’77 as a transformative moment for the city, a time of decay but of rehabilitation as well. New York was straddling eras.

PART ONE

1.

the thirty-seventh Democratic National Convention. The last two—Chicago ’68 and Miami ’72—had been notoriously rancorous, but this one was guaranteed to be a love fest. The party’s presidential candidate, the genteel Jimmy Carter, had already been anointed, and the city was primping for its close-up. Special repair crews were sent out to patch potholes in midtown, the Transit Authority changed its cleaning schedule to ensure that key stations would be freshly scrubbed for the delegates, and more than a thousand extra patrolmen and close to one hundred extra sanitation men were assigned to special convention duty. With the help of a hastily enacted antiloitering law, the police even managed to round up most of the prostitutes in the vicinity of Madison Square Garden.

2.

The clinical term for it, fiscal crisis, didn’t approach the raw reality. Spiritual crisis was more like it. The worst part was that Beame had seen it coming. As the comptroller to his predecessor, John Lindsay—the equivalent of being lookout on the Titanic, as the columnist Jack Newfield once quipped—Beame knew just how precarious things were.

“The man left us with a budget deficit of $1.5 billion,” snorted Beame, slapping the paper with the back of his hand for effect

By February ’75, Beame was supposed to have gotten rid of twelve thousand of the city’s three hundred thousand employees. A New York Times investigation revealed that only seventeen hundred were gone; the rest had merely been shifted to other budget lines.

Reminders of the city’s decline were already everywhere. In 1972 the Tonight Show had moved from midtown Manhattan to Burbank, California.

As for Beame, the time for tiptoeing was over. He gave thirty-eight thousand city workers, including librarians, garbage collectors, firemen, and cops, the ax. In anticipation of the layoffs, the police union had already distributed WELCOME TO FEAR CITY brochures at Kennedy Airport, Grand Central Station, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal,

Fear City also became Stink City when ten thousand sanitation workers walked off the job to protest the layoffs. The piles rose quickly, and ripe refuse was soon oozing from burst garbage bags and overstuffed trash cans,

Mayor Beame ended 129 years of free tuition at New York’s public colleges, including his alma mater, City College, the fabled gateway to middle-class life.

By the end of his second term Lindsay had become, in the words of one especially memorable magazine headline, AN EXILE IN HIS OWN CITY. Thus did Beame’s moment arrive. There was no seductive rhetoric, no risk of dashed expectations. He was New York’s rebound lover. What’s more, he was a bookkeeper, and New York’s books were in desperate need of attention.

3.

New York had been though hell, but in the summer of ’76 there was reason for hope. It was a feeling more than anything, palpable, if not quantifiable, that the embattled city was on the edge of a new day.

Los Angeles could have The Tonight Show; New York now had Saturday Night,

The counterculture was starting to migrate from San Francisco to New York, a trend evidenced by Rolling Stone’s plan to relocate from Haight-Ashbury to midtown Manhattan in the summer of ’77.

As for Beame, the pained expression that he’d worn for the better part of the last two years was finally giving way to something approaching a smile. “I think we’ve turned the corner and seen the light at the end of tunnel,” the Mighty Mite told reporters in the fall of 1976. By now the city had an election of its own approaching, the ’77 mayoral election.

4.

What Martin lacked in talent he made up for in grit. The same determination that had propelled this juvenile delinquent out of the sandlots of a dirt-poor, fatherless childhood near the docks of Berkeley—his grandmother had floated over from San Francisco with all her household possessions on a raft—drove him to overachieve as a big leaguer.

Martin would have done anything to avoid losing, but winning came at its own cost. In short, his emotional makeup was not equal to the pressure, external or internal, of playing so far above his head.

Martin fought insomnia, hypertension, and what was then known as acute melancholia. His churning stomach kept him from eating for long stretches. What he did eat, he’d often puke back up. Martin tried to cope, popping sleeping pills and drinking bottomless glasses of scotch, but nothing could quite cure the distemper.

They got it. Martin managed the game just as he had played it: personally, emotionally, intensely.

As the wins piled up, the stakes mounted, and the prospect of losing became that much more sickening. Martin, who was always skinny, was now more gaunt than ever. Over the course of the ’76 season, he shed 20 pounds from his six-foot frame, dropping to a mere 154. The crow’s-feet around his eyes, which had first appeared during his playing days, deepened.

The brand-new ballpark was in tatters. Huge chunks of turf were uprooted, every base had been stolen, and the field was littered with garbage, from newspaper shreds to empty bottles of Hiram Walker brandy and Jack Daniel’s. The Yankees had won their first pennant in twelve years.

to make matters worse, he and his second wife, Gretchen, a former airline stewardess and the belle of her sorority at the University of Nebraska, split up shortly after the season ended.

He spent the winter of ’76–’77 alone in the Hasbrouck Heights Sheraton

he was worrying about his teenage daughter from his first marriage, who’d been thrown in jail in Colombia after being accused of trying to smuggle cocaine out of the country in her panty hose.

5.

WHEN news of Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the New York Post first hit the Daily News and The New York Times—the sleepy Post had been scooped on its own sale—on November 20, 1976, the city’s response was a collective “Rupert who?”

The Post’s own founding father, Alexander Hamilton, had himself never been one to underestimate the dark side of human nature, or what he preferred to call its “impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice and of other irregular and violent propensities.”

(Ernest Hemingway had the Post sent to him in Cuba so he wouldn’t miss the offerings of its emotional star columnist, Jimmy Cannon.)

the Post was soon faltering as well. By the middle of the seventies the very notion of an afternoon newspaper seemed antiquated, particularly now that Vietnam and Watergate, which provided daytime copy that seemed too urgent to wait until the following morning to read, were passing into history.

Earl Wilson was still dutifully filing “It Happened Last Night,” but by the middle of the seventies the column had come to seem quaint, anachronistic. The rest of the media were busy discovering the new celebrity culture: Time Inc. launched People, Andy Warhol launched Interview, the Daily News hired people spotter Liz Smith.

It’s hard not to read something else into the paper’s aimlessness. The trauma of the Lindsay years had eroded the populace’s faith in New York’s civic culture, which the Post had so assiduously nurtured with its expansive, old-fashioned liberalism. By the mid-seventies New York’s predominantly liberal middle class was becoming an increasingly conservative lot. Somewhere along the way the Post had lost its raison d’être, and Rupert Murdoch, who like any self-respecting publishing tycoon yearned to sink roots in New York, had apparently found his.

6.

At a few minutes past midnight Reggie Jackson stepped off the plane and into the bracing East Coast air with a blonde on his arm. The cameras were now rolling. A Grandstand reporter approached his six-foot, 207-pound subject and poked a microphone in his bespectacled face: “Welcome to New York, Reggie!” Jackson looked at the reporter, grinned, and asked, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I once had a long talk with Reggie about his childhood, and I asked him what he had gotten out of living in an upper-middle-class white neighborhood,” recalls Newsday’s Steve Jacobson. “He fiddled around with the question for a while and came up with ‘aspirations.’”

During Jackson’s sophomore year, his only season of varsity ball at ASU, he broke the school’s single-season home run record with fifteen. It doesn’t sound like much now, but at the time it was unheard of, largely because most colleges, including Arizona State, considered baseball a low priority and bought cheap, lightweight bats. He also became the first collegian to hit a ball out of Phoenix Municipal Stadium.

Reggie Jackson was the second player chosen in the 1966 draft. He might well have gone first, his coach at ASU informed him, had the New York Mets not been put off by a line in his scouting report that said he had a white girlfriend.

The following year, 1967, Jackson was bumped up to the A’s AA franchise in Birmingham.

Jackson spent a couple of weeks sleeping on the couch of the apartment of a couple of his white teammates, Joe Rudi and Dave Duncan. Rudi told Jackson that their landlord had threatened to evict them if “the colored” didn’t leave.

six hundred feet is only the estimated length of the one Jackson hit in the ’71 All-Star Game in Detroit.

The ball would have sailed right out of the ballpark if it hadn’t crashed into an electronic transformer on top of the roof in right-center, making the titanic blast only more dramatic; it looked as if sparks were actually going to fly.

“I wasn’t sure the first time I saw him,” Ted Williams said in 1970. “The second time I was amazed. He is the most natural hitter I have ever seen.”

Reggie adhered to a different motto: If you don’t blow your own horn, there won’t be any music. “When you take over a pitch and line it somewhere, it’s like you’ve thought of something and put it with beautiful clarity,” Jackson told a writer for Sports Illustrated, finishing the riff with a line that couldn’t have made SI’s headline writer’s job any easier: “Everyone is helpless and in awe.”

Everywhere they went, people were calling out to Reggie. “I had been there before, but I really hadn’t been there before. It was as if I had seen New York across some crowded room, caught her eye, but never got the chance to talk to her,” Jackson remembered in his 1982 autobiography, co-authored by Mike Lupica. “Now I was talking to her, feeling her. Being seduced by her.”

Reggie Jackson’s new manager, Billy Martin, followed the Steinbrenner-Jackson courtship in the papers with a growing sense of disgust.

But what bothered the fatherless Martin most was all the attention that Steinbrenner had lavished on Jackson. “George was taking Reggie to the ‘21’ Club for lunch all the time, and I was sitting in my hotel room the entire winter and George hadn’t taken me out to lunch even once,” Martin later complained in his autobiography.

7.

ON a cold, snowy night in the waning days of 1976, former New York congresswoman and noted liberal firebrand Bella Abzug summoned her closest confidants to her red-brick town house on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. After stomping the snow out of their boots and stripping off their overcoats, they filed into the parlor, which, with its worn velvet couches and peeling red paint, resembled nothing so much as a Venetian bordello. It was time to discuss Bella’s future. The question was whether she should run for mayor. Private balloting would have revealed a landslide against the notion.

The joke around Congress went that asking Abzug to sponsor a piece of legislation was the best way to ensure its defeat.

The only oppressed minority that Abzug had no sympathy for was her staff. It wasn’t just the twenty-hour days; it was the emotional torture in the form of expletive-streaked abuse.

8.

HAVING already gobbled up one New York journalistic institution, Rupert Murdoch was now hungry for another. His eyes alit on New York magazine.

As 1977 got under way, Rupert Murdoch took control of three major New York journalistic institutions,

9.

All winter the New York papers had been filled with speculation about how Reggie and Munson were going to get along. The forecast called for storms.

10.

IN all of Billy Martin’s years playing for Casey Stengel in the fifties, the Yankees had never put together a winning record in the Grapefruit League. Martin saw the logic inherent in this. The regular season was long enough.

It wasn’t to be. Not only did Steinbrenner expect his manager to win grapefruit games, but he didn’t like his living so far from the ballpark, nor did he approve of his driving to games instead of taking the team bus.

“I ought to fire you right now,” Steinbrenner answered. “I don’t give a shit if you do fire me, but you’re not going to come in here and tell me what to do in front of my players.” The players quickly rallied to Martin’s defense.

The Daily News’s Dick Young speculated that the Yankees’ owner had paid off kids and cabdrivers to yell out to Reggie when he first brought him to New York for lunch at ‘21.’

“If I lead the league in homers and runs batted in and win the M.V.P. award and we win the World Series, they’ll say, ‘He should have done that. Look what they’re paying him,’” Reggie told Murray Chass, the beat man for The New York Times. “If I don’t do it, if I come short of it, if we don’t win, it will be my fault. ‘Steinbrenner fouled up, Jackson’s no good, he hurt the club, he created dissension.’”

Reggie pointed out that the old Bronx Bombers were all white and that their front office was racist and bigoted. “They didn’t want no black superstars,” Reggie snapped, deliberately letting his usually proper grammar lapse for effect. He was hedging his bets: If he didn’t become a hero, at least he could be a martyr.

11.

AMBITION was about the only thing that Edward Irving Koch, the latest entrant into New York’s 1977 mayoral race, had going for him.

Only 6 percent of the city had any idea who Ed Koch was.

The few New Yorkers who did know Ed Koch in the spring of 1977 thought of him as a lumpy liberal from Greenwich Village. A middle child, he’d been born in the Bronx, though his parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland, had started their New York journey in a scabby, peeling tenement on the crowded Lower East Side. Koch’s

Sergeant Koch returned from the war in 1946, a heady time for middle-class New York. Mayor La Guardia’s handiwork was everywhere: prepaid health insurance for all New York residents; twenty-two municipal hospitals; subsidized housing cooperatives; a five-cent subway ride that zigged and zagged across four boroughs. La Guardia spoke endlessly about beautifying New York, about finding new ways to lift the spirit of its citizens. His successor, William O’Dwyer, picked up right where La Guardia left off.

When Koch ran in a local assembly race in 1962, he dubbed his platform “SAD” after its three linchpin issues: sodomy, abortion, and divorce. (He was for making gay sex and abortion legal and for rewriting the state law that considered adultery the only viable grounds for divorce.) Despite an endorsement from Eleanor Roosevelt, Koch got his clock cleaned,

but the following year he ran for district leader against the neighborhood’s longtime Democratic power broker, the man known as the Bishop, Carmine De Sapio.

Koch had won the election by 41 votes.

Koch clambered up onto the platform and cut through the racket. There was no time to celebrate. “This election can be stolen from us,” Koch said. “Every captain must return to the polls right away with an able-bodied man. See that those machines are not tampered with.”

few noticed that as the sixties wore on and the Village’s once-quiet streets became more crowded, Koch began absorbing some of the conservative values of longtime locals. He was evolving in small but portentous ways, as he reconsidered his position on local hot-button issues like the concentration of gay prostitutes on Sixth Avenue and the endless proliferation of noisy coffeehouses.

In 1968, Koch ran for Mayor Lindsay’s old congressional seat in Manhattan’s so-called Silk Stocking district.

Once he was elected, his friends told him to hunker down and become a ten- or twelve-term member of Congress,

Orange highlight | Page: 93

Koch, like Beame and Abzug, aspired to more. He’d dreamed of becoming mayor for years—“I

12.

the ’77 team was going to start five blacks. Center field, where DiMaggio, Mantle, and Murcer had once roamed, was the province of a young man from the Miami ghetto, Mickey Rivers. Second base belonged to rookie Willie Randolph, who had grown up in the Samuel J. Tilden housing project in Brownsville, Brooklyn. And the new right fielder was of course Reggie Jackson.

Reggie had other plans. One of Steinbrenner’s real estate mogul friends set him up with a $1,466 corner apartment on the nineteenth floor at 985 Fifth Avenue, a white-brick building just down the block from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He was the only Yankee who lived in Manhattan,

As of mid-May, Reggie Jackson was hitting .250, with a mere five home runs.

13.

IN the middle of May, New York’s already crowded mayoral race absorbed one final candidate.

But where Mario Cuomo was concerned, most people who knew him were inclined to be charitable.

This, at least, was the picture of tranquillity that prevailed until 1966, when word spread through the community that the high school going up in nearby Lefrak City was going to force the condemnation of sixty-nine houses in Corona. The residents hastily mobilized and hired a thirty-three-year-old lawyer, Mario Cuomo, to help them take on City Hall. Four years and dozens of briefs later, the bulldozers were moving closer to Corona. Cuomo had exhausted his legal options with no visible progress. The whole business might have passed unnoticed into history—another community plowed under by City Hall, another idealistic young lawyer disillusioned along the way—had not a stocky, rumpled caricature of a newspaperman named Jimmy Breslin tumbled into the picture. One Sunday night in November 1970 a friend of Breslin’s persuaded the writer to come along with him to a Corona homeowners’ meeting at the headquarters of the local volunteer ambulance corps.

After the meeting Breslin took this man, Mario Cuomo, out for a cup of coffee.

With Breslin’s help, the so-called Corona Fighting 69 became a cause célèbre. Newspapers as far-flung as the Los Angeles Times editorialized in their defense.

In the end Cuomo decided not to run for mayor in ’73. He made his first bid for elective office a year later, losing the Democratic nomination for the lowly job of lieutenant governor. It was a humiliating defeat for a man with so much political promise.

Fortunately, the new governor, Hugh Carey, recognized that promise and asked Cuomo to be his secretary of state.

In early 1977 Carey came to Cuomo with a new task: running for mayor.

After a few months of hemming and hawing, Cuomo reluctantly agreed.

14.

Sport scheduled the story—REGGIE JACKSON IN NO-MAN’S LAND—for its June issue.

Several years later, when Reggie published his autobiography—in vintage fashion, he dedicated the book to his biggest fan, God—he claimed that the whole conversation at the Banana Boat had been off the record, and that he had been misquoted to boot.

15.

Such was the state of the rivalry, reborn anew for every generation, between the Yanks and the Sox, on the afternoon of May 23, 1977. If a pair of outfielders, Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, had personified the battle in the 1940s and 1950s, the teams’ warring catchers did that day: the tall, even-tempered, urbane Carlton Fisk and the stumpy, grumpy, caustic Thurman Munson. Boston versus New York in a nutshell.

16.

ON the morning of June 16, 1977, the city woke up to the news that the Mets had traded Tom Seaver to the Cincinnati Reds.

The loss of Seaver felt like the loss of hope, not for the Mets, who already were hopeless, but for the city itself. It was more than the man; it was the moment the man represented, that improbable pennant run during the glorious summer of 1969, when John Lindsay owned New York and the city still felt full of possibility.

17.

A 1977 New York City Planning Commission report counted no fewer than 245 pornographic institutions in the city. In 1965 there had been 9.

Mayor Beame, who was old enough to remember when the marquees along West Forty-second Street billed George M. Cohan’s latest musical rather than “live nude girls,” had been vowing to “reverse the blight in this vital center of our city.” But between the loopholes in city and state laws, the dwindling number of city policemen and prosecutors, and the need to avoid violating the civil liberties of his citizens, it had not been easy.

In 1977, Times Square saw the opening of Show World, its biggest sex institution yet. Situated on the corner of Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, the heart of Times Square, Show World was a twenty-two-thousand-square-foot multistory sex arcade complete with video booths, live sex acts, and private rooms where naked women sat behind thin sheets of Plexiglas. Most sex emporiums were dark, mysterious. Show World, which announced its presence with a blinking neon sign, was bright, garish. Some four thousand people passed through its doors each day.

New York’s middle class was absorbing its appreciation for sexual excess not from Park Avenue but from the West Village. Sandwiched between the arrival of AIDS on New York’s shores during the 1976 bicentennial celebrations and the first reported cases of the virus in 1978, 1977 was the last great year of unprotected, nonreproductive sex in the city.

18.

Before entering politics, she worked as an attorney, defending alleged Communists—McCarthy called her one of the most subversive lawyers in the country—and a thirty-six-year-old black man who had been convicted of raping a white woman in Laurel, Mississippi, on whose behalf Abzug appeared in court eight months pregnant. Abzug became an early champion of gay rights during her 1970 congressional race,

Nothing got Abzug hotter than Westway, the city’s plan to rebuild the West Side Highway south of Forty-second Street. The blueprints called for burying the highway in a concrete tube beneath the surface of the Hudson, then extending the deck above out into the river to make room for parks and office and apartment buildings.

Naysayers needed only point to The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s magisterial 1974 biography of Robert Moses, to underscore just how destructive overzealous city planners could be.

She sponsored a clever piece of legislation that would enable cities to swap federal funds earmarked for interstate highways for mass transit money. Instead of getting $1 billion from Washington to build an interstate highway, New York City could opt for $550 million to rehabilitate its subway system, a needy case if ever there were one. Framed as a choice between automobiles and subways, between lining the pockets of real estate developers and improving the lives of workaday New Yorkers, Westway became a perfect foil for Abzug, who saw her beloved city as an overgrown village, a place where the power belonged to the people, not to the men with green eyeshades and pocket protectors who had the nerve to talk about the “greater good.”

19.

ON June 17, 1977, a warm, foggy Friday night at Fenway, Catfish Hunter had the worst outing of the worst season of his career.

All Jimmy Hunter needed was a nickname. Finley settled quickly on Catfish. He’d tell the press that Hunter had been missing one night and that his folks found him down by the stream with one catfish lying beside him and another on his pole. Hunter himself didn’t see what was wrong with “Jim,” but he wasn’t going to argue with the guy who was about to write him a check for seventy-five thousand dollars.

He estimated that he could put the ball within three inches of his catcher’s target 90 percent of the time; others figured his margin of error closer to one or two inches. The key to his control was his repetitive motion. “If you go out

to the mound after he’s pitched a game you’ll see three marks: one where he stands when he’s on the rubber, one where his left foot lands, one where his right foot lands,” his former teammate Doc Medich told J. Anthony Lukas for a 1975 New York Times Magazine profile. “Most players leave the mound all scratched up like a plowed cornfield.”

Hunter struggled in spring training in ’77, his fastball hovering in the low seventies.

Hunter made his June 17 start at Fenway, but he didn’t survive the first inning.

20.

THE fog cleared overnight. Saturday was sunny, hot, and humid. noon the narrow streets surrounding Boston’s cozy bally-ard were choked with people as the temperature climbed toward a hundred degrees.

“Uh-oh,” interrupted Messer’s longtime broadcast partner, Phil Rizzuto. “I’m sorry, Frank, but I think Billy’s calling Paul Blair to replace Jackson, and Jackson doesn’t know it yet. We’re liable to see a little display of temper here … It’s Reggie’s own fault really. On that ball he did not hustle.”

The Fenway crowd caught sight of Blair trotting across the field and let out a roar. Reggie, who was chatting with Fran Healy, his arms draped casually over the green fence of the bullpen, was practically the only guy in the ballpark with no idea what was going on. Healy told Reggie to turn around. Reggie glanced over his shoulder and saw Blair coming toward him. Reggie pointed at himself—You mean me?—in disbelief. Blair nodded. “What the hell is going on?” Reggie asked. Blair shrugged. “You’ve got to ask Billy that.” The NBC cameras followed Reggie off the field and into the dugout. Initially, he looked more puzzled than angry bounding down the dugout steps with his hands spread, palm side up, in an expression of utter confusion. Martin was waiting for him, neck cords bulging, knees bent, arms dangling impatiently at his side. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing out there?” he asked.

Martin started after Reggie. “There they go!” said Garagiola. Ray Negron quickly threw a towel over the lens of the dugout camera, only it was the camera in center field that was recording all the action.

“You don’t like me—you’ve never liked me,” Reggie yelled back at Martin as he made his way down the ramp. “I was livid,” Reggie recalled later, “but I wasn’t going to fight him in the dugout.” He was going to fight him in the locker room. Reggie stripped down to his undershirt and uniform pants, leaving his spikes on so he wouldn’t lose his footing on Fenway’s clubhouse carpeting, and waited for the game to end.

but Healy eventually persuaded Reggie to shower and leave the ballpark before the game ended. Negron came down to the clubhouse to check on Reggie and to ask if he needed a cab back to the hotel. Reggie wanted to walk.

A little later, Newsday’s Steve Jacobson called from the lobby to ask if he could come up. His deadline was approaching, and he didn’t want to file his copy without a quote from Reggie.

“Thank God I’m a Christian. Christ got my mind right. I won’t fight

the man. I’ll do whatever they tell me.” Before long, though, Reggie’s emotions had taken over. “It makes me cry, the way they treat me on this team. I’m a good ballplayer and a good Christian and I’ve got an IQ of 160, but I’m a nigger and I won’t be subservient. The Yankee pinstripes are Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle. They’ve never had a nigger like me before.” The exception was Steinbrenner: “I love that man. He treats me like somebody. The rest of them treat me like dirt.” Reggie dropped down to his knees and began gesticulating wildly, the paranoid preacher who spied the devil’s shadows all around him. “He was talking about how everybody wanted a piece of him and was coming after him and how nobody understood him,” Pepe recalls. On and on he went as Torrez sat silent and the writers scribbled madly. “I’m going to play the best that I can for the rest of the year, help this team win, then get my ass out of here.”

21.

THE image that had been seared on the nation’s consciousness, courtesy of NBC Sports, was now plastered on sports pages across the country: the brawny black slugger, his glasses removed and set aside, standing chest to chest with his scrawny white manager.

Yet the race issue was not so easy to set aside, especially considering that this wasn’t Martin’s first clash with an outspoken black player. When he

arrived in Detroit in 1970, Martin had inherited the outfielder Elliott Maddox, a University of Michigan graduate and convert to Judaism whom Martin dumped as quickly as he could.

“Billy was a racist and an anti-Semite,” Maddox says now. “He had a drinking problem, and he had psychological problems stemming from his childhood.

For the most part, New York was proud of Martin—their working-class hero, their link to a better era—for standing up to the arrogant, overpaid slugger.

The dugout incident at Fenway proved to be something of a turning point for Reggie. Over the years he came to sound very different on the subject of race, speaking eloquently about how his own coming of age had traced the arc of the postwar emergence of his race: “I was colored until I was 14, a Negro until I was 21, and a black man ever since.” He spoke out, forcefully and persuasively, against baseball’s failure to integrate at the executive and managerial level.

22.

Even before he’d had to be restrained from attacking his right fielder on national television, Martin was having problems. His heavily favored team was struggling to stay in the pennant race.

Since the start of the season Steinbrenner had been calling him on a nearly daily basis to share his unsolicited opinion that Reggie Jackson should be batting cleanup, which of course only strengthened Martin’s resolve to hit him fifth or sixth.

There was no reason to expect Martin was going to survive the Fenway crisis. He had met with Reggie and Gabe Paul, the unofficial liaison between Steinbrenner and Martin, first thing in the morning and it had not gone well. Martin’s first mistake was referring to Reggie as “boy,” which an even more sensitive than usual Reggie interpreted as a racial slur. Martin insisted that it was just an expression, but Reggie was not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

23.

IT wasn’t all bad being Reggie Jackson in the summer of 1977; if nothing else, he’d made a new friend, Ralph Destino.

Destino, the chairman of Cartier, was living in a swanky penthouse on Seventy-ninth and Park Avenue, just a couple of blocks away from Reggie.

the Stork carried New York from the dark days of the Depression through its postwar optimism, Maxwell’s, with its stained glass kaleidoscope ceiling, Tiffany lamps, and human buffet of bachelors and bachelorettes, arrived just in time to spirit the city through the swinging sixties and sordid seventies.

Reggie and Destino tried Maxwell’s a couple of times, but once they had to wait for a table they vowed never to return. It was just as well. Maxwell’s may have had swinging singles, but McMullen’s had models.

Rudy Giuliani (then a young prosecutor), Donald Trump, and Cheryl Tiegs all were fixtures at McMullen’s, as was Steinbrenner, but Reggie was the only ballplayer who ate there. “I used to get mostly professional tennis players—Rod Laver, Bjorn Borg, Chris Evert, John McEnroe, Vitas Gerulaitis,” recalls McMullen. “It really was more of a hangout for tennis players. Baseball players tend not to be very sophisticated.”

By 1 a.m. twenty black limousines would be lined up out front on Third Avenue, waiting to transport revelers seamlessly to their next nocturnal playpen, Studio 54.

“We went to Studio 54 like it was part of the evening,” says Destino. “It was so hot then that there would always be a throng on the sidewalk begging, trying to get in, doing anything that they possibly could. But Reggie would walk through that crowd like Moses through the river. The sea would part.”

Reggie was starting to dread the game he loved. He was waking up in the middle of the night and wandering out to his balcony twenty stories above Fifth Avenue, where he’d stare out at the New York City skyline and wonder how he was going to make it through the summer.

What upset him was his failure to understand why. ‘Why are they doing this to me?’”

24.

“NOW is the summer of our discotheques,” wrote night-crawling journalist Anthony Haden-Guest in New York magazine in June 1977. “And every night is party night.”

Studio 54, the discotheque that defined an entire era of nightlife, had opened two months earlier, and Paramount Pictures had just begun filming Saturday Night Fever.

Like any fad that seems to erupt into the national consciousness, this one had been percolating below ground for years: in gay hot spots along the abandoned West Side waterfront, in the vacant sweatshops south of Houston Street, in the dingy recreation rooms of Bronx and Brooklyn housing projects, in the empty ballrooms of aging midtown hotels. If New York’s disco scene had a party zero, it was David Mancuso’s Love Saves the Day bash on Valentine’s Day 1970.

“The whole scene was a response to the sixties,” says Michael Gomes, an early disco devotee who moved to New York from Toronto in 1973. “Instead of changing the world, we wanted to create our own little world.”

The Bronx’s own fledgling dance culture, one that eventually blossomed into hip-hop, was simultaneously gestating. It was less formal than the new wave of discotheques; a DJ might set up his table in a playground, run extension cords into the nearest lamppost, and start playing.

None of the hard-core dance clubs sold alcohol, but there were always plenty of drugs, chiefly acid, amyl nitrate, pot, mescalin, coke, Quaaludes (also known as disco biscuits), and speed.

Carmen d’Alessio

Since coming to New York in 1965, the Peruvian-born d‘Alessio had worked as a translator for the United Nations and logged a stint in public relations for Yves Saint Laurent, but in more recent years she had discovered her true calling, party planning. When Rubell and Schrager first spotted her in the winter of ’76, she was wearing a bikini and dancing on the shoulders of a tall black male model at a Brazilian Carnival theme party she’d organized.

Rubell and Schrager persuaded d‘Alessio to come work for them.

In addition to any celebrity whose address she could beg, borrow, or steal, d’Alessio sent invitations to everyone on the mailing list of the Ford Modeling Agency, Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the Islanders, a group of several thousand gay men who summered on Fire Island. Come opening night, the place was mobbed. “My mother had to be carried in over the crowd,” d’Alessio recalls. Studio 54 took the escapist ethic of the disco scene to its absurd extreme. An

this wasn’t about avoiding reality as much as it was about obliterating it.

“I don’t know if I was in heaven or hell,” Lillian Carter, mother of President Jimmy, reflected on her first visit there. “But it was wonderful.”

New York’s disco DJs were playing to bigger crowds than ever before, yet paradoxically, their power was slipping. Radio stations were now catching on to disco, so the record companies no longer needed to cultivate club DJs.

all the new clubs served booze, which made the dancing sloppy. Michael Gomes, who was now publishing a newsletter for DJs called Mixmaster, referred derisively to the drunk and stoned dancers at Studio 54 as “discodroids.”

If disco music was euphoric, hypnotic, punk rock was assaultive, relentless; if discos like Studio 54 provided an escape from the ugliness of New York, its punk analog, a urine-stained dive on the Bowery called CBGB, embraced and indulged it.

Other protopunk acts including Blondie, Patti Smith, and the Ramones, soon followed. At a time when rock ‘n’ roll connoted suburban stadiums, a rock scene was born on, of all places, the Bowery. “Broken youth stumbling into the home of broken age,” wrote Frank Rose, noting the irony in The Village Voice in the summer of ’76.

The Talking Heads, another one of the most popular bands at CBGB, wasn’t doing much better. Their 1977 album, Talking Heads ’77, barely broke 100. Touring the country that summer in the wake of its release, the band found itself playing mostly at pizza parlors.

25.

WITH Bella Abzug and Mario Cuomo now in the race, David Garth adjusted the odds for his candidate, Ed Koch, from twenty to one to forty to one.

Reflecting on the ’77 campaign years later, Garth opted for a different metaphor: “Koch … was never the flashy guy who went out for the long pass. He was the Bronko Nagurski of politics, three yards and a cloud of dust.”

Not only was Koch funny-looking and not especially charming, but he lived in Greenwich Village, had no girlfriend, and had never been married.

Garth’s plan was to keep the focus on the issues, to somehow make a virtue of his candidate’s lack of charm. Koch was unknown, but at least he wasn’t disliked. It was no secret that New York was on the ropes. For the purposes of political narrative anyway, it was easy to put the starry-eyed Lindsay and the special interest–beholden Beame as the one-two punch that landed it there. The result was the made-for-TV tagline: “After eight years of charisma and four years of the clubhouse, why not try competence?”

26.

IN the early summer of 1977, as the mayoral candidates started jockeying in earnest to present themselves as the answer to the city’s problems, New Yorkers were already creatively exploiting the very neglect that the politicians were decrying. Just as the gay community had colonized the abandoned West Side piers and graffiti writers were transforming unguarded subway cars into art installations, painters, sculptors, and entrepreneurs were repurposing empty factories and sweatshops in the area below Houston Street.

Rockefeller, the head of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association, envisioned SoHo as a gateway to Wall Street, complete with office buildings, luxury apartment towers, even a sports stadium.

The derelict lofts of SoHo were also becoming popular among avant-garde jazz musicians

a formidable antiexpressway lobby was materializing, led by author–cum–neighborhood superheroine Jane Jacobs and a loose-knit coalition of Greenwich Village activists that included an ambitious young politician named Ed Koch, all of whom considered the expressway a threat to an indigenous New York neighborhood.

in 1969 the expressway plan was finally scotched.

To a city already casting about for ways to shore up its eroding tax base, SoHo’s artistic community was looking more and more like an economic boon.

the neighborhood was officially declared a landmark district, ensuring that it would forever remain out of harm’s way.

For years people had been calling SoHo the new Montparnasse. The twenty-six-hundred-square-foot Dean & DeLuca would be its fromagerie, patisserie, and boulangerie all rolled into one.

In later years the proud pioneers who had settled—or resettled anyway—this urban frontier would point darkly to the day, identifying it as the tipping point, the moment when their beloved neighborhood made the irreversible transition from scruffy artists’ colony to theme park for the taste-fetishizing upwardly mobile.

these buildings that had once stood as ghostly reminders of the disappearance of manufacturing from New York were now being transformed into monuments to the city’s resilience, powerfully evoking the past even as they hinted at a postindustrial future.

PART TWO

27.

WILLIAM Jurith left for work in the early afternoon of Wednesday, July 13. He was supposed to have the day off, but when a colleague told him that he needed to take care of some personal business, Jurith, who was putting his son through law school, volunteered to pick up his colleague’s four-to-midnight shift.

Jurith was a system operator for Consolidated Edison. He had no training as an engineer,

the company served all five boroughs and most of Westchester County, a total of nine million people.

The city’s stringent clean-air regulations made it prohibitively expensive to depend on local generators that were required to burn costly low-sulfur oil rather than cheaper alternatives like coal. So Con Ed built plants outside the city and bought power from neighboring states rather than make it. Most of that power came from the north—from

Power failures, or at least the fear of them, had been a rite of summer in New York since 1965.

The system’s first major test of ’77 was now on its way. A blanket of hot, muggy weather was descending on the city like a giant steam iron.

Unlike gas, electricity can’t be stored; it has to be used as it is generated. So as a day got hotter, the system operator had to anticipate the growing demand for power and find the most efficient ways to meet it. That meant bringing up generation with the help of gas turbines and special reserve generators known as peaking units, as well as contracting to buy additional power on the spot market. On July 13 demand peaked at 7,264 megawatts at 4 p.m.,

At 8:37 p.m., Jurith looked up

Two circuit breakers had tripped in Westchester County, and a pair of high-voltage transmission lines had opened.

A horn blared. Jurith glanced at the mimic board. A needle was falling like the pressure gauge on a deflating tire—nine hundred megawatts, eight hundred megawatts, seven hundred megawatts—all the way to zero. It was Indian Point, his “nukie.”

Either the mimic board was malfunctioning, or something was very, very wrong. Jurith punched a button on his communication console and was patched right through to Westchester’s district operator. “Yeah, Bill,” Westchester confirmed, “it looks like we lost the entire south bus [Buchanan], including Unit 3 [Indian Point] … The station operator tells me he saw lightning.”

The breakers were supposed to open the affected lines and isolate the problem until the fault dissipated. The fault did dissipate in less than a second, but the circuit breakers never reclosed to allow the flow of power to resume.

with three transmission lines out of service, the remaining lines were going to be shouldering a much bigger energy burden than they were built to handle.

At 8:40 p.m. a high-pitched alarm sounded on Jurith’s desktop monitor. A key feeder connecting the Con Ed system to New England was exceeding its limit by a hundred megawatts. If the line wasn’t deloaded right away, it was going to fry.

28.

Studying the big board, Kennedy could see no alternative. Con Ed was going to have to unplug some customers. He called Jurith.

At 8:59 Kennedy called him again. This time he was a little more insistent: “Bill, I hate to bother you, but you better shed about 400 megawatts of load or you’re going to lose everything down there.” “I’m trying to,” Jurith answered. “You’re trying to?” Kennedy asked incredulously. “All you have to do is hit the button to shed it and then we’ll worry about it afterwards—but you got to do something …” “Yeah, right,” Jurith answered. “Yeah, fine.” Jurith still refused to activate the load-shedding panel. He may have resented the fact that Kennedy, who wasn’t really his boss, was telling him what to do. He may have been clinging desperately to the hope that those three last feeders could support the system long enough for another solution to emerge. Probably he just couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Jurith’s job was to keep people’s lights on, not to shut them off. “We got the impression that he was disintegrating,” recalls Carolyn Brancato,

At 9:08, Jurith’s boss, Charles Durkin, called in.

Jurith didn’t notify Durkin that the power pool had been urging him to shed load for more than ten minutes. Instead, he told Durkin about his plans for Feeder 80. “Where’s the power going to go if you cut it out?” Durkin replied. “You can’t cut it out.” While Jurith was on the phone with Durkin, Kennedy called again on the green phone, a special dedicated hotline for emergency use only. Jurith’s deputy, John Cockerham, answered. “Tell Bill to go into voltage reduction immediately down there,”

At 9:19, Feeder 80 drooped into a tree. Circuit breakers were tripped, and the line opened. Con Ed had lost its only connection to the north.

Kennedy made his final call to the Con Ed control room at 9:27. Cockerham picked up. “I’m going to tell you one more time …”

No more than thirty megawatts were shed. Something had obviously gone wrong. In all likelihood, Jurith failed to operate the load-dumping equipment properly.

The Con Ed system was now officially islanded, cut off from all external power sources. It shifted much of its load to its biggest in-city generator, Big Allis, a thousand-megawatt steam unit in Queens. Like a circular saw fighting a losing battle with an oversize piece of wood, Big Allis’s turbines ground to a halt.

Seconds later the generator automatically shut itself down. The city’s nine remaining generators buckled instantaneously under the increased load.

Ten thousand traffic lights blinked off. Subway trains froze between stations. Elevators, water pumps, air conditioners—everything sputtered to a halt. All five boroughs and most of Westchester County were suddenly without power.

29.

OFFICER Wilton Sekzer, a broad, mustachioed man, about five feet ten, with jowly cheeks and rheumy hazel eyes, was in the living room of his apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, when the lights went out. On the way into the kitchen to check his fuse box, he peeked out the window. The whole block was dark. Sekzer ran up three flights and swung open the metal door to his roof. The whole neighborhood was dark.

Sekzer had been sent to the Eighty-third Precinct from Emergency Services in the summer of ’75, when the city’s fiscal crisis forced the Police Department to lay off five thousand officers.

Down five thousand men at a time of soaring crime, the city’s depleted precincts were going to need all the beat cops the department could muster.

The Eighty-third Precinct was not exactly a desirable assignment in 1977. The prior year it had confronted more criminal activity than any other precinct in central Brooklyn. Many truck drivers insisted on police escorts when making deliveries in the neighborhood.

It didn’t help that the fiscal crisis had virtually eliminated Police Department support staff. It took anywhere from ten to fourteen hours for a cop to process a single perp.

Rookies were taught a few important lessons when they reported for duty at the Eight-Three. Don’t walk too close to the buildings (someone might drop a brick on you). Don’t let neighborhood kids wear your hat (lice). Always check the earpiece on call boxes before using it (dog shit).

30.

nothing could have prepared them for what greeted them on Broadway. Thousands of people were already out on the street; thousands more were pouring in from every direction. “If they had turned on the lights,” one cop remembers, “it would have looked like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.”

According to one police report, the looting had started at 9:40 p.m., only minutes after the onset of darkness. Marauding bands were sawing open padlocks. They were taking crowbars to steel shutters, prying them open like tennis-ball-can tops or simply jimmying them up with hydraulic jacks

The most expensive shops were hit first: jewelry, electronics, and furniture stores. A teenager attached a chain to the bumper of a stolen truck and tore off the gates of a luxury item shop called Time Credit. He pitched a garbage pail through the window and filled the truck with TVs, air conditioners, and a rack of watches.

For the cops, there was no time for paperwork. All the stolen merchandise was piled up in the property room in the back of the station house. Polaroids were snapped of the cop with his perp. Time and place of arrest were scribbled on the backs. The prisoner was stuffed into a holding cell, and the arresting officer headed back out into the mayhem.

Bullets, as well as bricks and bottles, were raining down from rooftops.

For some reason, though, the Eight-Three received no backup from any of the city’s quieter precincts.

31.

MAYOR Beame had just started in on a campaign reelection speech to a standing room only crowd of five hundred at the Traditional Synagogue in Co-op City when the lights went out.

The mayor climbed into his Chrysler and was spirited down to Gracie Mansion, where a candlelight strategy session was already in progress.

When he returned to police headquarters at a little after 5 a.m., Beame held another press conference in which he called on religious leaders to get into patrol cars and calm their communities. One of those who did, a priest in the Bronx, had his altar stolen while he was gone.

Police Commissioner Codd had ordered all officers to report for duty immediately, only instead of insisting that everyone try to find a way to get to his command, Codd told them to report to the nearest precincts.

This proved to be an enormous mistake. Ever since the 1962 repeal of the Lyons Law, which had required all cops to live in the city, police officers had been moving to the

suburbs in droves. Most of those who continued to reside in the city lived in Queens or on Staten Island, so in the early hours of the blackout, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of idle cops hanging around quiet precincts.

Morale in the department had been on the skids ever since the ’75 layoffs.

as the looting peaked between midnight and 4 a.m., some ten thousand cops, 40 percent of the force who were neither on vacation nor on sick leave, had yet to check in.

32.

THE looting was by no means citywide. In some of the tonier areas of Manhattan, restaurants moved tables outside to escape the heat. Several stretches of First Avenue on the Upper East Side might have been mistaken for streets in Paris, were it not for the angled cars, headlights on, that made it possible for diners to identify what they were eating.

To this day the blackout looting of 1977 remains the only civil disturbance in the history of New York City to encompass all five boroughs simultaneously.

The Bronx was hit even harder than Manhattan. By 11 p.m., the showroom windows of a Pontiac dealership on Jerome Avenue had been smashed, and fifty of the fifty-five new cars parked inside driven off into the black night.

473 stores in the Bronx were damaged; 961 looters were arrested.

Still, the character of the chaos in Bushwick was unique. “The crowds on Broadway in Bushwick seemed to possess a special kind of hysteria as the evening wore on,”

It was a spirit born of the poverty and desperation of ghetto life. Yet what was so remarkable about Bushwick was that it had been a sturdy middle-class enclave just a decade earlier. The speed of its decline was dizzying.

33.

IN Bushwick the arrests peaked at about 1:30 a.m. By then there were two shifts’ worth of cops—4 p.m. to midnight and midnight to 8 a.m.—out on the streets.

“You just wanted to stop the riot, so you beat up the looters with ax handles and nightsticks,” recalls Robert Knightly, a bearded, mild-mannered veteran of the Eight-Three who is now a defense attorney for Legal Aid.

34.

More than twenty fires were still burning along Broadway come Thursday morning, ten hours after the blackout had begun. The stifling heat was made more oppressive by the blanket of black smoke that hung heavy over the neighborhood.

“what was most upsetting was that you worked in this precinct. You worked with these people, you had taken care of them, and yet here they were, burning their own stores down.

35.

BROADWAY separates Bushwick from Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was once a middle-class enclave too, a neighborhood of stickball, brownstones, and postwar optimism. As the fifties wore on, though, more and more of Bed-Stuy’s working-class white families migrated to the suburbs.

In 1965 the Department of Housing and Urban Development called Bed-Stuy “the heart of the largest ghetto in America.”

Bushwick was less dependent on the dying navy yard for jobs than much of the borough.

Some of Bushwick’s working class pulled up stakes, in most cases pushing east into Long Island. Others dug in their heels.

Even those all too aware of Bushwick’s woes couldn’t have predicted what was coming next. When a house near St. Martin’s burned down in 1969, neighbors expressed their condolences to the owner. Nobody thought arson. “We felt sorry for him,” says St. Martin. “Insurance or no insurance, you didn’t burn your own house down and put other people at risk. It was unthinkable. It just didn’t happen.”

1972, Bushwick’s two ladder companies, 124 and 112, went on more then six thousand runs, the unofficial benchmark of a severe social crisis.

The fires were set by landlords who were tired of trying to evict delinquent tenants.

They were set by vandals who intended to return for the plumbing systems, which were easier to extract and sell once the firemen had knocked down the walls. They were set by idle kids who wandered the streets aimlessly after school.

Most of Bushwick’s buildings had been built for German immigrants before 1910. More than half of them were made of wood and designed with air shafts over their stairwells. They burned like furnaces.

As Jim Sleeper wrote in The Closest of Strangers, his trenchant 1990 book about liberalism and race in New York, “By the mid-1970s, Bushwick was … a prison of traumatized welfare recipients reeling in rage and despair.” In the darkness of July 13, 1977, that rage and despair found an outlet.

36.

IN the days after the blackout a damp, acrid smell permeated Bushwick. Fire-damaged buildings sloughed off large chunks of debris. Broken pipes burped brown water onto sidewalks. In the litter-strewn streets, people filled shopping carts with abandoned packages of meat.

During a few successive roll calls, sergeants asked if anyone had used his gun that night. No one wanted to deal with the paperwork that accompanied every shot fired, not to mention the elaborate examinations and reenactments mandated by the Weapons Discharge Review Board.

William Bracey, the commanding officer for North Brooklyn, came through the Eight-Three to offer his commendation for a job well done, and without firing a single shot.

“It is here, in the dirt and the smells and the heat,” wrote Jimmy Breslin, “that New York must struggle to keep a crucial part of its city from falling apart.” Martin

For the Eight-Three, the bad summer got worse. In late August one of precinct’s most beloved cops, a black officer named Joseph Taylor, Jr., the father of a three-year-old daughter, was killed in the line of duty.

37.

NEW York’s long night of looting was followed by another hot day, with temperatures climbing into the high nineties. The power still wasn’t back.

Here and there a building burned for no apparent reason.

High-density areas were the first priority, creating a perverse situation: The depleted slums were among the last to get their power back.

The Daily News borrowed several generator-powered klieg lights from the crew of Superman, which was being filmed in the lobby of its building (the huge globe made it the picture-perfect newspaper lobby) and managed to publish a late edition.

But it was the local news broadcasts that really brought the story home, the searing images of tenements in flames, of twisted metal and broken glass, of shirtless young men strutting brazenly down crowded streets, pushing shopping carts filled with TV sets, or balancing new couches on their backs like seesaws.

The conservative social critic Midge Decter likened the sensation to “having been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one’s house and seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away.”

It was the largest mass arrest in the city’s history, yet it had barely dented the momentum of the looting. As

All 3,776 prisoners had finally been arraigned. But the reckoning with the damage, both physical and psychic, had only just begun.

38.

Union Carbide was in the process of moving its corporate headquarters out of New York City—not, as a company spokesman later pointed out, merely because of the crime and high cost of living but because of its “changing ethnic mix, which makes some people uncomfortable, and the graffiti on the subways, the dirt on the streets, and a lot of other things.”

Between 1973 and 1976 the city had lost 340,000 jobs. How many more were sure to follow now?

As a candidate Carter had criticized President Ford for having “no urban policy.” To date, Carter’s own urban policy had been one of studied indifference. Most noteworthy had been his failure to make good on, or even acknowledge, his campaign pledge to assume the city’s welfare costs, which were currently exceeding its education budget. (Even Mayor Beame had written off the president. “Jimmy Carter still loves me,” the mayor joked at the annual follies put on by the City Hall press corps. “The last time I met with him, he told me he had a whole list of items to help the city. But he left the list in his other sweater.”)

39.

BACK up off the canvas, if still a little woozy, in the weeks after the blackout New York found itself groping to understand the nature of the beating it had just endured.

comparison. “In ghastly contrast to 1965, when a spirit of unity and common sacrifice brightened every section in the darkened city,” the New York Post editorialized on July 16, “New York was transformed into a series of seething battlegrounds.”

Either the looters were heirs to the urban rioters of the sixties, members of what one columnist termed “the most significant class uprising in this decade,” or they were hoodlums.

black and Hispanic teenage unemployment was hovering at 70 and 80 percent respectively,

At its best, the backlash took the shape of an enlightened awareness that it was possible—no, imperative—to feel the pressing need to do something about New York’s hurting neighborhoods, to find ways to create full-time long-term jobs and

promote urban renewal from the ground up, without excusing the looters from taking responsibility for their actions.

40.

FROM the start some of the most unequivocal denunciations of the looters had come from the black community, where one difference between the disturbances of the 1960s and the blackout looting seemed especially apparent. In the sixties rioters had spared merchants with the foresight to mount “Soul Brother” signs in their windows. During the looting of ’77 not only were black- and minority-owned businesses not spared, but they bore the brunt of the destruction.

“Buy black” had been the mantra during the struggle for civil rights in the fifties and sixties. Now local church leaders and politicians were urging the community not to buy black if the merchant in question was hawking stolen goods.

“we must forthrightly and adamantly condemn it.” Manhattan borough president and mayoral candidate Percy Sutton shared this view.

Sutton already knew he was finished. The blackout looting was not racially motivated, yet the vast majority of those arrested were black. The white backlash would be impossible for any black candidate to overcome.

There had been seventy-five felonies committed every hour in New York in 1976, making it the worst crime year in the city’s history.

In the wake of the blackout Sutton’s frustration at his inability to bridge New York’s racial gap turned to anger. His mayoral dreams deflated, his faith in the integrationist ideal dented, he accused the white press of ignoring his campaign:

At the end of 1977 a bitter Sutton resigned “forever” from public life, saying simply, “I no longer want anything from the city.”

PART THREE

41.

TO Osborn Elliott, whose job as New York’s deputy mayor for economic development was to attract business to the city, the real disaster wasn’t the blackout looting. It was the New York Post’s coverage of it.

Murdoch was an active presence in the newsroom, writing and rewriting headlines, peering over reporters’ shoulders, even answering telephones.

Mayor Beame denounced the paper’s arriviste publisher, calling Murdoch an “Australian carpetbagger” who “came here to line his pockets by peddling fiction in the guise of news.” The Post, the mayor continued, “was making Hustler magazine look like the Harvard [Law] Review.”

less. The Post’s July 15 blackout special exceeded the paper’s usual Friday sales by seventy-five thousand. It was safe to say that the city was on the brink of its first newspaper war since the fifties.

the mighty Yankees were running third behind the streaky Red Sox and an overachieving Baltimore Orioles team that started no fewer than five rookies.

By now Martin, never a fan of the free press—“if writers knew any goddamn thing, they would be managers,” he once said—was getting more fed up than usual with the media. In Martin’s day the papers didn’t use quotes that made the team look bad. What’s more, ball clubs were covered through their managers. Between his bigfooted owner and loudmouthed players, even those who were only trying to help, Martin never had a clue to what was going to be in the papers, especially when it came to the scandal-mongering Post.

Steinbrenner produced a list of seven qualifications, which the newspapermen promptly named “the Seven Commandments,” that he expected Martin to meet if he wanted to hang on to his job. Two stood out: “Is he emotionally equipped to lead the men under him?” and “Is he honorable?”

there comes a time when even the fans wake up.” The only thing that New York’s fans were waking up to was a deep and abiding hatred of George Steinbrenner. After all, who was a man found guilty of making illegal donations to the Nixon campaign, a man whose company was being investigated by the Justice Department for fraudulent billing practices, to tell Billy Martin about honor?

42.

For the past twelve months a serial killer, New York’s first since the 1930s, had been preying on young women (chiefly brunettes) in the outer boroughs (chiefly Queens). Since July 29, 1976, when he first attacked two young women on a residential street in a working-class Italian neighborhood in the North Bronx, the so-called Son of Sam had killed five and injured six.

March 10, reporters packed into the 112th Precinct station house in Forest Hills for a news conference. With Mayor Beame standing beside him, Police Commissioner Codd made the announcement: The bullets that killed Voskerichian, Freund, and Lauria and that wounded DiMasi, Lomino, and Denaro all had been issued from the same .44-caliber revolver. “Be careful,” Codd warned, “especially the young women.” In the weeks that followed, the side streets of Forest Hills were deserted by dusk.

on April 17, the .44-caliber killer returned to the North Bronx. The victims were parked in a Mercury Montego on a dark service road off the Hutchinson River Parkway. When the detectives pulled their bodies out of the car, an envelope addressed to Captain Borrelli fell to the ground. Inside was a four-page letter, handwritten in slanted block letters. The NYPD refused to make its contents public, but the Daily News learned enough for a front-page story the following day: KILLER TO COPS: “I’LL DO IT AGAIN.”

The ensuing psychological profiles—the killer is a paranoid schizophrenic, a loner who lives in a cheap furnished room, who feels rejected by women and may even consider himself possessed—didn’t help investigators much, but when leaked to the press, they immediately enhanced the suspect’s aura of mystery and stoked the city’s sense of fear.

in early June the .44-caliber killer decided to communicate with the city again.

It was Jimmy Breslin’s secretary at the Daily News, Ann Marie Caggiano, who first noticed something strange about the letter—namely,

The front page of the News hinted at its contents for days—NEW NOTE: CAN’T STOP KILLING; .44 KILLER: I AM NOT ASLEEP; COPS: .44 KILLER IS TAUNTING US—all the while promising that the paper’s star columnist would answer the letter on Sunday, June 5. When he did, Breslin urged the killer to turn himself in, “to me, if he trusts me.”

In early July, Mayor Beame added more men to the Omega force. The city had only a thousand detectives, down from three thousand before the fiscal crisis, but the pressure to catch the killer was intensifying. Omega now had fifty detectives working the case,

It was easily the largest manhunt in New York history.

On the morning of Wednesday, August 3, as Stacy Moskowitz was being eulogized in a crowded chapel on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, bombs planted by

the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN exploded in two midtown Manhattan office buildings. An additional wave of bomb threats quickly followed, and a hundred thousand people were evacuated from more than a dozen buildings.

“For those who have lived through this mad week in New York there is a shared sense of outrage and impotence,” the Times editorialized on Friday, August 5. “Is New York City, after all, a failed ultraurban experiment in which people eventually crack, social order eventually collapses, and reason ultimately yields to despair?”

In recent weeks discotheques in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx had been reporting an 80 to 90 percent drop in business and were, according to a story on the front page of Billboard magazine in early August, “teetering on the brink of financial disaster.”

The Enchanted Garden, which had been averaging a thousand people a night only a couple of months earlier, was now logging barely over a hundred.

43.

One mid-July evening in Kansas City, after hustling into the right field corner to retrieve a Hal McRae line drive, Reggie bobbled the ball like a Little Leaguer as McRae raced around the bases for an inside-the-park home run. When Reggie returned to the dugout at the end of the inning, Sparky Lyle told him to get his head out of his ass. “He was speaking for the whole team, and we were both fully aware of that,” Reggie reflected later.

In New York, Reggie had been signing autographs after the All-Star Game when a thirteen-year-old kid called him a motherfucker. Reggie chased the kid across the parking lot. Moments later the kid was on the asphalt. Criminal harassment charges were filed.

Come August 5, he was hitting .291 with eighteen home runs, ten stolen bases, and fifty-eight RBIs,

The Yankees, for their part, were in the tank. After pulling within one game of the Red Sox and Orioles at the end of July, they had proceeded to lose four of their next six.

44.

THE first real break in the Son of Sam case came a couple of hours before sunrise on August 1, the morning after the attack on Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante,

“You got me,” said Berkowitz. “Who are you?” Falotico asked, his heart pounding. “You know met.” “I don’t.” “I’m the Son of Sam.”

45.

THE convoy of police vehicles arrived at Centre Street at around one the following morning. The plaza was already choked with reporters, camera crews, and cops. Roone Arledge, the head of ABC News, was on the scene, personally directing his network’s coverage with a walkie-talkie.

Mayor Beame, who had been awakened in Gracie Mansion minutes after the arrest, was waiting upstairs for Berkowitz to enter the building. When he did, the mayor rushed down to congratulate the arresting officer. Mistaking Berkowitz for a detective, Beame moved toward the killer and tried to shake his manacled hands. “The photo op from hell,” as the mayor’s press secretary, Sid Frigand, later described it.

A portrait of Berkowitz quickly came into focus. He had been adopted and raised by a childless Jewish couple, Nathan and Pearl, in the Bronx. He

graduated from high school and logged one year at Bronx Community College, as well as several months as an auxiliary police officer, before joining the army, where he learned to handle an M-16 rifle and experimented with hallucinogens.

After a stint with an infantry division in South Korea, Berkowitz finished out his tour in Fort Knox. While he was stationed in Kentucky, he attended a church with an army buddy and became a fervent Baptist overnight.

SAM SLEEPS.

But with those two words, the Post had done much more. In an essay a few years later in Harper’s magazine, Ron Rosenbaum captured the headline’s tabloid genius: “How do we know that any of us ordinary citizens—looking just as ordinary on the surface as Sam there—might not be harboring a Sam sleeping within us. SAM SLEEPS might be the single most grim and poetic summation of the horror of the whole case.”

Not since the days of Hearst, Pulitzer, and the Daily Mirror had New York’s newspapers pandered so shamelessly to the city’s id. Yet in his own hamfisted, irresponsible way, Murdoch deserved at least a little credit for reminding New Yorkers that reading the newspaper, like living in the city, was an emotional experience.

46.

“There is naked fear here,” wrote Evans and Novak on August 4, “that the looters may reassert their impunity some ordinary evening at sunset without waiting for a power blackout.”

Koch was doing more than simply exploiting New York’s bloodlust. Much as the city’s beloved baseball team and its cherished tabloid, he was changing colors with New York’s temper like a mood ring. Koch’s metamorphosis had been under way for more than a decade. In August ’77, even

his campaign manager, David Garth, was a little surprised by how far he’d come. “I felt as though I had made the same mistake as the rest of the city,” Garth recalls, “which was mark him down as a Greenwich Village liberal when in fact he was more conservative than that.”

Championing capital punishment, pummeling the unions, decrying government waste: This was not your typical liberal rhetoric.

Koch’s steady drumbeat of clever commercials, produced in Garth’s state-of-the-art three-monitor studio—“Mayor Beame is asking for four more years to finish the job. Finish the job? Hasn’t he done enough?”—coupled with the eighteen-hour days campaigning in a Winnebago blaring “N.Y.C.,” the hit song from the Broadway musical Annie, were having their intended effect. Koch could feel himself gaining momentum.

Then Koch got his biggest break yet.

The Post, Murdoch told Koch, was going to endorse him. In the event, the paper did much more than that, playing the editorial on its front page and generating enough pro-Koch copy in the ensuing weeks to prompt fifty Post reporters and editors to sign a petition complaining about their tabloid’s biased coverage.

47.

Having taken his rightful place in the lineup, Reggie was flourishing.

Reggie showed off his once-feared arm, cutting down Bobby Bonds, one of the fastest men in baseball, when he tried to score the go-ahead run

The Yankees were winning, and more often than not with a maximum of theatrics.

Guidry did some mop-up work during the first few weeks of the season. On April 29, with the Yankees set to host the Mariners at the stadium, Martin found himself in a bind. His scheduled starter, Mike Torrez, whom the Yankees had just acquired for Dock Ellis, had not yet reported to New York. Martin’s only rested starters, Catfish Hunter and Don Gullett, both were hurt. An hour before game time Torrez was scratched. Guidry would be starting for the first time since the Carolina League, circa 1973.

He went on to pitch a 3–0 shutout.

The more Guidry threw the slider, the more it came to resemble Lyle’s, only harder. By the middle of August, Guidry was leading the team in strikeouts, and his ERA was just a shade above 3.00. He was still unknown, untested, so no one dared say it out loud, but the way the left-hander dispensed with hitters—hypnotizing them with heat and then bringing them to with that hard, tumbling slider thrown from the identical arm angle—was reminiscent of Sandy Koufax’s fastball-curve one-two.

The Yankees returned to New York early the next morning. They were fourteen of their last sixteen,

and twenty-three and nine since the All-Star break. With a little help from the suddenly slumping Red Sox, they led the American League East by a half game.

48.

ON August 24, two weeks before the Democratic primary, the results from the most recent New York Times / Channel 2 News survey put Abzug and Beame in a dead heat, with both Cuomo and Koch within striking distance.

As July gave way to August, Abzug’s popularity was ebbing. That one of the candidates gaining ground on her was Ed Koch made her all the more spiteful.

Abzug and Koch were enemies of long standing.

Their feud had begun in 1968, when

Koch refused to march in an anti-Vietnam protest organized by a group Abzug chaired, not because he was in favor of the war but because he believed the group was a Communist front.

49.

IN 1860 an Illinois lawyer and Republican presidential candidate named Abraham Lincoln gave his first speech in New York—his soon-to-be-famous “Right Makes Might” address—in the Great Hall at Cooper Union College. Some fifty years later, in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, thousands of immigrant workers gathered in the same room for the rally that launched one of the most important uprisings in the history of the labor movement. And on August 30, 1977, an event far less memorable yet still irresistibly symbolic took place within these hallowed halls. In the waning moments of a debate for the upcoming mayoral primary, an evening punctuated by frequent intervals of hooting and jeering, a chubby, balding man rose from his seat and hurled an apple pie at Mayor Beame.

The press was merciless. “To hear His Honor tell it, he was nothing but an innocent bystander, a detached observer,” the Daily News sputtered in an August 19 editorial headlined SIMPLY INCREDIBLE. “This, remember, comes from a man who won election in 1973 by convincing voters that he knew municipal finances from A to Z, could put more cops on the street, improve services and balance the books … With that attitude at the top, it’s a wonder New York didn’t wind up being auctioned off at a sheriff’s sale.”

Everyone

knew that averting bankruptcy had come at a terrible cost, self-rule. Had the state not intervened in 1975, transferring the management of the city’s financial affairs from City Hall to the Emergency Financial Control Board, a group that comprised more nonelected businessmen (three) than city officials (two), New York would surely have fallen into receivership.

the SEC report focused almost exclusively on a narrow five-month window, from the fall of ‘74 through the spring of ’75. “It [the fiscal crisis] wasn’t anything that occurred during that period,” Beame later reflected, accurately, if defensively. “It was the result of moves which had been made in years gone by … The city had a big heart, bigger than its pocketbook.”

50.

ALL summer Mario Cuomo had been denying that he was Governor Carey’s Mario-nette, an apparatchik dispatched from Albany to help the statehouse tighten its grip on City Hall.

Cuomo had absorbed his own story: the smart, tough, proud kid from the outer boroughs who owed his success to intelligence and fearlessness, not to the benefits of entitlement.

Rafshoon soon had some complaints of his own, chiefly that his candidate “kind of looked down on politics.” (A few years earlier, when he was first toying with the idea of running for mayor, Cuomo had penned a poem for his family called “Politics.” It began: “Politics, an incredible game, A lusting for power, money and fame. The rules are bizarre, the logic convoluted—Intentions inconstant, invariably polluted.”)

There was an intense competition for Cuomo’s ear that reflected the paradox at the candidate’s core: His conservative, outer borough instincts were perpetually at war with his loftier liberal ideals. “He thought the liberal ideals were more admirable—he aspired to them—but by instinct and impulse he was not a liberal,” recalls Cuomo’s pollster, Robert Sullivan.

Cuomo managed to keep his temper in check for most of the summer, save for one hot night in August, when Mike Long, an ex-marine and vocal street-corner conservative, accosted him after a speech at a high school in Brooklyn. When Long called Cuomo a liar, the candidate lunged at him, pushing him through the swinging doors at the back of the auditorium. They continued to shove and grab at one another in the hallway outside, and were about to start trading punches when the police broke it up.

Daily News, the paper that first urged Cuomo to enter the race, had abandoned him, endorsing Koch instead.

As the campaign entered its final week, the polls showed Cuomo, Koch, Abzug, and Beame running in a virtual dead heat. A runoff was now a near certainty.

51.

Koch was busy campaigning with his own sidekick, one enlisted to protect a very different soft spot. Bess Myerson, who was out of town for much of August, had been summoned back to New York for the final push. During the waning days of the campaign the two were inseparable.

With the exception of Bella Abzug, Myerson was the city’s most public woman, a former commissioner of consumer affairs who might well have been elected to the Senate in 1974 had her bid not been derailed by an eighteen-month bout with ovarian cancer.

52.

On Thursday, September 8, a mild, partly cloudy day, a record number of New York City Democrats turned out to nominate their candidate or at least narrow the field to two.

“I gave this city every ounce of my strength and my fullest devotion during its most trying years of crisis,” Beame told his dwindling band of supporters. “I’ve not let this city down.” Moments later the usually stoic mayor began to cry. His wife, Mary, hugged him, allowing Beame to collect himself, and he pressed on.

Ed Koch handed a bouquet of red roses to Myerson—“the most important person of the campaign”—and celebrated his narrow first-place victory.

second-place finisher Mario Cuomo squinted into the harsh glare of the TV lights and looked ahead to the September 19 runoff.

53.

ED Koch and Mario Cuomo had landed in first and second place in the September 8 primary, but they had managed to capture just 39 percent of the votes between them. The remaining 61 percent was now up for grabs, setting off a furious ten-day scramble for support

Cuomo’s indignation carried over into that night’s Channel 13 debate. He promptly went on the offensive, assailing Manhattan for turning its back on the outer boroughs and chiding Koch for supporting the death penalty. “I went into that debate feisty and as near to angry as I ever get, and it showed,” Cuomo remembers. “I was impolite. I was extremely tough on Koch. I did an awful job.”

54.

THE same night the Yankees and Red Sox were locked in their own standoff in the second of three high-stakes games at the stadium. Only ten days earlier the Yanks had opened their lead on the Sox to four and a half.

the streaking Sox, who had won ten of their last eleven, to pull within one and a half games before boarding their charter plane for New York.

Writing a month later in The New Yorker, Roger Angell invested the Boston series with two-pronged significance. It was the moment the Yankees won their pennant and the moment he stopped feeling comfortable bringing his wife and son to the Bronx ballyard. During the third game a group of fans in the upper deck showered their fellow spectators with beer, hurled darts and bottles onto the field, and engaged in a near riot with the stadium police. “There was nothing fresh or surprising about this,” Angell remarked; “it happened all the time this summer at Yankee Stadium.”

55.

Political candidates had once worried about alienating municipal labor bosses, but the fiscal crisis had inverted the equation. In agreeing to help save the city from bankruptcy by steering billions of pension fund dollars into New York–backed securities, the civil servant unions had become the city’s largest creditor.

Again and again Cuomo refused to participate in the sort of deal making that had long been part of the city’s political culture. It was true that New York’s five county leaders, once the kingmakers of the city’s electoral process, weren’t the men they used to be. There were fewer municipal jobs and contracts to parcel out, and the changing racial and ethnic mix of their respective boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, in particular—was eroding their once-unchallenged authority.

56.

EMBARKING on his run for governor in the spring of 1982, Mario Cuomo would blame all of the perceived problems with his candidacy on the dark days he had endured in September 1977.

I understand the theory that he didn’t want to win, but I don’t buy it,” says Sullivan—and by what happened next: Cuomo ran in the general election as the candidate of the Liberal Party.

Cuomo ran a superb campaign, the notable exception being his handling of the innuendos of Koch’s homosexuality. (Cuomo’s failure to prevent outer-borough field operatives from investigating the rumors and from posting the infamous handbills reading VOTE FOR CUOMO NOT THE HOMO may have been forgivable; his suggestion in one debate that Koch supported the right of gay school teachers to “proselytize” was definitely not.)

Come the November general election, Cuomo managed to capture more than 38 percent of the vote, pummeling the Republican candidate, giving Koch a scare, and salvaging his nascent political career.

in 1982, when Coumo resurfaced as a gubernatorial long shot, he got the better of Koch in a statewide rematch.

57.

THIS was Koch’s moment, though. Pete Hamill filed his postrunoff column in late September from Bushwick. More than two months had passed since New York’s long night of looting, and the damage had been absorbed into this bleak landscape. A steady drizzle added to the gloomy scene—the charred, gutted buildings; the abandoned cars that had long since been stripped bare. “This is the city that Ed Koch will have to cure,” Hamill wrote, “a city abandoned, a city unrepresented, a city cynical, the ruined and broken city.”

He eventually was haunted by the ghosts of the ’77 campaign. In the late eighties, three of his commissioners, Esposito cronies all, were convicted for corruption, and Bess Myerson unraveled, publicly, in a bribery scandal the tabs gleefully dubbed “the Bess Mess.”

But first, Koch—along with the rest of New York’s emerging titans: Reggie, Steinbrenner, and Murdoch—would lead the city into a new era.

They were flawed, farsighted, self-made men who intuitively understood the city’s desire for drama and conflict because they shared it. They were not idealists but egomaniacs.

between 1977 and 1985, the private sector created more jobs in the city than in the fifties and sixties combined.

a new Ed Koch, one that Garth had intentionally suppressed for fear that

it might alienate voters, quickly came into focus. This was Ed Koch the irrepressible, wisecracking cabbie, the city’s mascot as much as its mayor.

As for Bushwick, its recovery was slow, halting, to this day incomplete, yet inexorable.

The play-offs would be a rematch of ’76: the Yankees versus the Royals.

Martin declined to talk about his opponents for fear of saying something that might help them. But he was more than happy to talk about everything else, including what he called the turning point of the season, standing up to Reggie in the dugout at Fenway. And his boss. If the Yankees went on to win the World Series, Martin told the writers gathered in his office, and Steinbrenner didn’t

both sweeten and extend his three-year, three-hundred-thousand-dollar contract, he was going to have to think seriously about asking for permission to talk to other clubs.

the fans stood and cheered themselves hoarse. “This is in recognition of Billy telling off his boss,” Dick Young wrote in the Daily News, “by 55,000 people who dream of telling off the boss.”

59.

He was a couple of months late, but the president, in town to address the United Nations, had finally decided to pay a surprise visit to one of New York’s worst ghettos, a neighborhood that had been ignored by most of the borough’s blackout looters. By July 1977 there was virtually nothing there to steal.

By the time of Carter’s visit local community development groups with mottoes like “Don’t move. Improve,” had already begun to form. They beat back the city’s wrecking crews, rebuilt battered buildings, and fought for the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, a federal law requiring banks to provide loans in low-income neighborhoods.

61.

Healy, who’d been to the plate sixty-seven times all season, wasn’t expecting to be told to be ready to play. He wasn’t. Martin had an even more surprising request: “I’m sitting Reggie tonight, and I want you to tell him.” “I’m not telling him, you tell him,” an incredulous Healy replied. “You’re the manager.” “I don’t want to tell him.” “Why don’t you have one of the coaches tell him?” Healy asked. “They don’t want to tell him.”

The three-million-dollar slugger wasn’t hitting for “spit” (as the papers wrote it), and he was butchering balls in the outfield. “If I played him and he dropped a ball that cost us the game, I wouldn’t forgive myself for the rest of my life,” Martin said.

Reggie was in the grip of a one-for-fourteen postseason swoon,

As the newspapermen stalked Reggie, hoping for a more honest comment, another bomb was ticking away. The Yankees’ leadoff hitter, Mickey Rivers, was holed up in the trainer’s room refusing to get dressed. He’d been having problems with his wife all year. Earlier in the season she’d reportedly chased him from their apartment in New Jersey up to the stadium and then repeatedly smashed into his car until a parking lot attendant intervened.

Now she had racked up a huge shopping bill in their Kansas City hotel, and the front office was refusing to advance Rivers the money to cover it.

They won it in the ninth.

62.

THE Yankees’ charter touched down at Newark Airport

Martin was the first to disembark. He descended the ramp, which was swarming with drunk fans, to chants of “We love Billy!” Martin’s stature, never in doubt, was now more exalted than ever.

63.

WHEN the Dodgers still played in Flatbush, the Bums provided the color and the Bombers provided the class. These days the two teams had taken the shape of their respective cities: the friendly, easygoing Dodgers and the tired, neurotic Yankees.

64.

GAME two was humbling for the Yankees—Catfish Hunter, pitching on thirty-two days’ rest but still shaky, was torched—and humiliating for the city.

About an hour before the first pitch, a fire started in Public School 3, an abandoned elementary school a few blocks west of the ballpark. By the time ABC began its broadcast at 8 p.m., orange flames were licking toward the sky.

“There it is, ladies and gentlemen,” announced Howard Cosell, who later misidentified the building as an apartment complex, “the Bronx is burning.”

By the late innings the fire had grown to five alarms, and Yankees’ fans were getting restless. Play was stopped repeatedly while stadium police chased fans across the field. Rolls of toilet paper, whiskey bottles, and firecrackers rained down on the field. The residents of the upper deck dumped beer on the owners of the box seats below. A cop was assaulted when he asked several fans to lower a banner that was obstructing the view of those behind them. One fan pulled down his pants and hung from the scoreboard. Another tossed a smoke bomb from the stands that beclouded the outfield in an electric green haze. New York’s nationally televised degradation was still not complete. During the final out of the game, a fan pegged Dodgers’ rightfielder Reggie Smith in the head with a hard rubber ball.

Reggie, hitless on the night and three for twenty-two in the postseason, was less supportive when a reporter asked him about it: “How could the son of a bitch have pitched him?”

65.

magazine story. The new issue of Time, which contained a story headlined NICE GUYS ALWAYS FINISH … ?, greeted the Yankees on their return to New York on the cold, rainy morning of Monday, October 17. In a single page of text the magazine had Steinbrenner saying that several Yankees had pleaded with him to fire Martin; Martin saying that if Steinbrenner fired him, he’d never live it down with the fans (“a little Dago like me fixed his ass”); and Reggie saying he would refuse to play another year for Martin. To most of America and all New York none of this came as any surprise. By now everyone just wanted to see how this bizarre drama would end.

66.

IN the days that followed, some said it had to end like this, but watching Reggie Jackson’s game six performance now, it seems like an odd conclusion to this long season of tension and torment, not anticlimactic, but somehow unbaseball-like.

Reggie simply strides to the plate three consecutive times against three different pitchers and, before the commentators can even properly set the scene, strokes the first pitch he sees into the seats.

For this one night the all-too-human Reggie Jackson glowed with superhuman greatness.

up a pair of fingers, mouthing the word two. In the home half of the eighth, a standing ovation greeted Reggie as he walked toward the plate. The din continued as he smoothed the dirt in the batter’s box with his spikes. Then, for a split second, after Reggie reached down for Charlie Hough’s diving knuckleball, a good pitch, the crowd fell silent—“choking on its own disbelief,” as The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell would write. This time Reggie knew. He stood and watched as the ball sailed toward dead center, touching down about halfway up the stadium’s blacked-out bleachers, some 475 feet from where it had collided with his bat. As Reggie glided around first, Dodgers’ first baseman Steve Garvey applauded softly into his glove.

Reggie’s last home run put the Yankees on top 8–3. The Yankees’ first World Series in fifteen years was almost won, and the Bronx ballyard was ready to explode.

67.

ONLY Babe Ruth had hit three home runs in a single World Series game (twice, in fact), but never in consecutive at bats, let alone on three pitches.

As for Reggie, he didn’t see why he should be limited to one interpretation. In the dozens of interviews he gave in the ensuing weeks, his game six performance became a triumph of the Lord (“God allowed me to do that”), a humanitarian gesture (“I’ll tell you what I was thinking … I did this for all of us. Take it. Enjoy it. And let’s do it again”), and, naturally, an emphatic telegram from the once-embattled superstar to his enemies, real and imagined: “Those home runs delivered a simple message: Let me up now—I’m no longer gonna be held down.”

A few hours before the first pitch, Martin had been given a thirty-five-thousand-dollar bonus, a Lincoln Continental, and the assurance that he’d have his job in 1978. Now he’d won his first World Series as a manager. But he still couldn’t enjoy himself. He was exhausted, and the party was too crowded. Martin flung his scotch to the floor and repaired to a quiet bar nearby.

Reggie eventually showed, pulling his blue Volkswagen up onto the sidewalk on Third Avenue. At around 2 a.m., Governor Carey arrived with a small entourage. The two parties merged and proceeded to drink champagne and eat cheeseburgers into the morning. Sometime after 3 a.m. Carey summoned two state troopers to guard Reggie’s car and assured Jim McMullen that the rules that govern after-hours drinking had been suspended for the night.

Review and highlights: 700 Sundays, by Billy Crystal

700 Sundays is not the book I anticipated.

It’s written by Billy Crystal, so it’s hilarious, right?

Crystal sprinkles humor into his autobiography. But the book is—while not altogether dark—colored with sadness.

The book’s title comes from the number of Sundays Crystal had with his father, Jack, before Jack died suddenly of heart attack, in a bowling alley. Bill Crystal was 15. Jack was 56.

Jack Crystal lived a unique and interesting life, running a small record store, producing jazz records on the family label (“Commodore”) and running concerts for some of the greatest jazz musicians of the 50s and 60s:

So when I was a kid growing up, my father was now managing the Commodore Music Shop and he had become the authority on jazz and jazz records in the city. And this little store—it was only nine feet wide—was now the center of jazz not only in New York City but in the world, because that little mail order business was now third worldwide behind Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, just selling Commodore and other jazz records.

Commodore’s roster included Billie Holliday, who recorded “Strange Fruit” on the label, which Time Magazine later called the song of the century:

But her most important song was one called “Strange Fruit,” which was very controversial because it was about lynching black people down South. Nobody wanted to hear this song. When Billie introduced the song at the Café Society, nobody wanted to be reminded about what was happening in our America of 1939, and nobody would record “Strange Fruit.” Even her great producer at Columbia Records, John Hammond, wouldn’t touch it. She was frustrated, so she turned to her friend, my Uncle Milt. And he told me years later she sang it for him the first time a cappella. Can you imagine that? That aching voice and that aching lyric. “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root, black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze. Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees . . .” He told me, “Billy, I cried like a baby. And I said to her, ‘Lady Day, listen, I don’t care if we sell one record. People must hear this song. They’ve got to hear this song. We’ve got to get this made somehow.’” So they worked out a special arrangement with Vocalian Records, and Billie Holiday, a great black jazz artist, and my Jewish Uncle Milt together recorded “Strange Fruit” a song about lynching down South, the song that Time magazine in December of 1999 would call the song of the century. I’m so proud to say it’s on the family label, the Commodore.

As musical tastes changed, Jack watched his record business fade. His store was swamped by the emerging wave of large record chains taking over the industry.

Jack’s life would never be the same. Neither would Billy’s. And too soon, his father, lost, unsure of his next steps in life, was gone.

Crystal writes about “The Otherness” the weight one carries around after the loss of a loved one. He was sixteen, and real life had had its way with him far too soon:

I called it the “otherness” because that’s how I felt. I wasn’t here. I wasn’t there. I was in an other place. A place where you look, but you don’t really see, a place where you hear but you don’t really listen. It was “the otherness” of it all.

He struggled. His mom struggled.

Eventually, with the support of extended family—particularly his Uncle Milt, who became a powerful record producer—Crystal found his way to comedy, something he always knew he wanted to do even as a kid.

You won’t read tales from the sets of “Soap” or “Saturday Night Live” here. Crystal’s book isn’t about fame and fortune.

It’s about family, and change, and loss. And it’s a great read.

---

Highlights from “700 Sundays”

CHAPTER 1

the gray-on-gray Plymouth Belvedere was outside, gleaming under the streetlight, as best a gray-on-gray Plymouth Belvedere can. We were having the time of our lives. In other words, a perfect time for something to go wrong.

Big John Ormento was one of the local Mafiosos in Long Beach.

he came roaring up Park Avenue, swerved and slammed into the back of the Belvedere, which then slammed into the back of the car in front of it, reducing our new car to a 1957 gray-on-gray Plymouth Belv! The crash was tremendous.

Ormento ran to his car and took off.

Ten minutes later, Officer Miller was questioning my father. “Did you see who did this, Mr. Crystal?” Dad never hesitated. “No, we heard the crash, and by the time we got out here, they were gone.”

The twisted piece of metal sat in front of our house, at 549 East Park in Long Beach, Long Island.

It was a wonderful place to live.

Big John Ormento was in the doorway.

“I talked to my ‘friends’ and they told me you didn’t tell the cops nothing. So I want to make it up to yous.”

“What I’m trying to say is this, Mr. Crystal. I want to buy you a new car, any car you want, the car of your choice.”

Two weeks later, the car came back. Well, Big John knew a lot about bodywork because the car looked great,

That was my dad. He worked so hard for us all the time. He held down two jobs, including weekend nights. The only day we really had alone with him was Sunday.

I couldn’t wait for Sundays. He died suddenly when I was fifteen. I once calculated that I had roughly 700 Sundays. That’s it. 700 Sundays.

CHAPTER 2

Now you can’t pick the family that you’re born into. That’s just the roll of the dice. It’s just luck. But if I could pick these people, I would pick them over and over again because they were lunatics. Fun lunatics. What a crazy group of people, and great characters too. It was like the Star Wars bar, but everybody had accents.

One man was responsible, and he unknowingly changed my life. It was my Uncle Milt Gabler.

CHAPTER 3

For years and years, my grandfather had this little music store on 42nd Street between Lexington and Third that he called the Commodore Music Shop.

during the summer months, he rented this little cottage on the ocean, a place called Silver Beach in Whitestone,

Under those summer moons, my mom fell in love with dancing, and my Uncle Milt fell in love with the music, with the hot jazz.

one day, with the music in his mind, he takes one of the speakers from one of the radios, puts it over the front door transom of the Commodore Music Shop and dials it into the local jazz station

“Pop, listen. We can sell jazz records. Everybody’s coming in and wanting these jazz records, Pop. We should sell jazz records.” “Milt, why do I want to get involved with that crap for?” “We could make a couple of bucks.” “Okay. I’m in.”

they start licensing the master recordings of out-of-print records from some of the local record companies in town, and they start reissuing these out-of-print records with just a plain, white label that said “Commodore” on them. And these reissued jazz records started selling really well.

Milt starts going to Harlem and meeting all the great musicians in town from New Orleans, Kansas City and Chicago, all of these great original jazz giants, who play the same music but with different styles. And he gets another idea.

I want to produce my own records. Why are we making money for everybody else with these reissues for? I want to make my own jazz records, Pop. I can do it.”

the Commodore jazz label is born, the first independently owned jazz label in the world, and the records do great.

He decides to sell the discs by mail, so he starts something called “The United Hot Record Club of America.” He invented the mail order business in the record industry.

my father was now managing the Commodore Music Shop and he had become the authority on jazz and jazz records in the city. And this little store—it was only nine feet wide—was now the center of jazz not only in New York City but in the world, because that little mail order business was now third worldwide behind Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward,

Dad put on concerts wherever he could, Rye Playland, an amusement park, on aircraft carriers for the Navy, even Carnegie Hall,

One of Dad’s regulars, Conrad Janis, who is still a great trombone player, told me that Dad was the “Branch Rickey” of jazz.

It meant my dad was one of the first producers to integrate bands, to play black players with white players.

he had to do was emcee the show.

When I used to host the Grammy Awards, I would think that somehow I was channeling him, because I was doing the same thing he did decades before

Of all the great people who were recording for my uncle and being produced in concert by my dad, Billie Holiday was by far the greatest.

I was so blessed to be in her presence

But her most important song was one called “Strange Fruit,” which was very controversial because it was about lynching black people down South.

nobody would record “Strange Fruit.”

So they worked out a special arrangement with Vocalian Records, and Billie Holiday, a great black jazz artist, and my Jewish Uncle Milt together recorded “Strange Fruit” a song about lynching down South, the song that Time magazine in December of 1999 would call the song of the century. I’m so proud to say it’s on the family label, the Commodore.

CHAPTER 4

Heroes don’t have to be public figures of any kind. Heroes are right in your family. There’s amazing stories in all of our families, you just have to ask, “And then what happened?”

CHAPTER 5

May 30, 1956. Dad takes us to our first game at Yankee Stadium.

Dad took out his eight-millimeter camera to take movies so that we would never forget. But how could you? How green the grass was, the beautiful infield, the bases sitting out there like huge marshmallows, the Washington Senators in their flannel uniforms warming up on one side, and the Yankees taking batting practice on the field. The first time I heard the crack of the bat. It was so glorious.

That’s all I wanted to be . . . a Yankee. Then on Sundays, Dad would take us out to the Long Beach High School baseball field to teach me how to hit the curveball, which he had mastered.

Wait on it. Watch it break, and hit it to right.

Remember that program Mantle signed in 1956? Well in 1977, I was on Soap, playing the first openly homosexual character in a network show, and ABC had me appear on every talk show. I called it the “I’m not really gay tour.” Mickey was a guest on the Dinah Shore show, and I brought the program, and he signed it again, 21 years later. We became good friends,

When Mickey died, I thought my childhood had finally come to an end.

CHAPTER 6

They were very affectionate with each other. Always holding hands in front of us, a kiss on the cheek, arm around each other. It was always nice to feel that your parents were still in love.

on Saturday nights in the Catskills, the comedian is the king. I had never seen a comic in person before.

I have this epiphany. I say to myself, I could never play baseball like Mickey Mantle ever, but this I could do. I memorized his act instantly.

The next weekend, all the relatives were coming over

I took the comic’s act that I’d just seen, and I changed it just a little bit to suit my crowd.

Oh, my God. I ran to my room. The laughter went right into my soul. Oh, it felt so good. Destiny had come to me.

“Pop, listen. I want to be a comedian. Is that crazy? I loved it. I just loved it. I want to be a comedian.” “Billy, it’s not crazy because I think you can be one, and I’m going to help you.”

CHAPTER 7

That’s how you really start. You want to make your folks laugh.

At the end of Long Beach, in a place called Lido Beach, about two miles or so from my house, was a Nike missile base. Every day at noon the air raid alarms would go off and the Nike missiles would rise up and point to the sky.

flatbed trucks with new missiles on them would pass us.

Uncle Milt always made sure to take the time to tell me something that would inspire me. He never discouraged me. Never said, “It’s a tough business. Have something to fall back on.” He always made me feel that I could be funny anyplace, not just the living room.

If you want to be a performer, great, but try to do a lot of things. Not just one thing. Watch Sammy Davis, Jr.”

I watched Sammy every chance I got, never once thinking that someday I not only would become his opening act, but that I would also become Sammy Davis, Jr.

The stories he would tell were priceless. He was mesmerizing. Listening to his history and firsthand accounts of the biggest stars in the business was simply sensational . . . that’s how I developed my impression of him. I couldn’t help but absorb him, and many a night I would leave his dressing room with his sound, his inflections, his “thing,” man, ringing in my head.

CHAPTER 8

October 15, 1963.

My parents came into the kitchen to say goodbye. They were on their way out to their Tuesday night bowling league at Long Beach Bowl. They loved bowling with their friends. They had so much fun doing it. And frankly, this was pretty much the only fun that they were having now because times had changed for us, and not for the better.

The Commodore Music Shop had closed a few years earlier. It couldn’t keep up with the discount record places that were springing up

And the bands that I loved, were replaced now by the Duprees, the Earls, the Shirelles and the Beach Boys.

My dad now was fifty-four years old, and he was scared. With Joel and Rip away at college, he was out of a job. Oh, he did the sessions on Friday and Saturday nights, but he gave most of that money to the musicians to keep them going. Dad was also closing down the Commodore label, working out of the pressing plant in Yonkers. It was so sad to see him struggle this way. Nobody wanted to hear this music anymore.

Dad was exhausted, and sad. Jazz was his best friend, and it was dying, and he knew he couldn’t save it.

Don’t you understand what’s happening here? I don’t know how I’m going to be able to send Joel and Rip anymore. You’re going to have to get some sort of scholarship or something.” He continued, the intensity in his voice growing. “Look at you moping around. This is all because of that goddamn girl, isn’t it?” I snapped, “What the hell do you know?” It flew out of my mouth. I never spoke to him like that.

I felt awful. Oh, why did I say that? I ran after him to apologize, but they were in the car and gone before I could get there. I came back to the kitchen thinking, okay, calm down, they’ll be home around 11:30, quarter to twelve. I’ll apologize then,

I was startled by the sound of the front door opening, and I looked at the clock, and it was 11:30, just like always, and I could hear Mom coming down the hallway

The door flew open. The light blinded me, further confusing me, and she was on me in a second. “Billy, Billy, Daddy’s gone. Daddy’s gone. Daddy’s gone.”

Dad had a heart attack at the bowling alley and he didn’t make it. They tried to save him, and they couldn’t.

It was as if someone had handed me a boulder, a huge boulder that I would have to carry

around for the rest of my life.

Uncle Milt was great that night. He took charge, taking care of his sister, helping her make all the funeral arrangements.

CHAPTER 9

The next day the strangest thing happened. The car wouldn’t start. The gray-on-gray Plymouth Belvedere refused to go. He had driven this car a hundred miles a day every day for all the years that he had it. He took perfect care of it. It never failed him until this day. It knew that he was gone, and it refused to go without him—it just stood in the driveway with the hood up.

The last thing my dad did on earth was make the four, seven, ten. It’s a tough spare to make, and he was so happy. “Whoa, Helen. Look at that. What a day . . .” And he dropped dead, just like that.

CHAPTER 10

Then after everybody’s gone, you’re left with it. You’re left with the shit of it, the size of it, this opponent in your life, this hole in your heart that you can’t possibly repair fast enough. And the first thing that happens to you is you get angry. You get so mad that this has happened to you at this point in your life, you want answers. I was so furious I could storm right into God’s office.

But then I developed something else. The best way I can describe it is by what I called it. I called it the “otherness” because that’s how I felt. I wasn’t here. I wasn’t there. I was in an other place. A place where you look, but you don’t really see, a place where you hear but you don’t really listen. It was “the otherness” of it all.

Basketball tryouts. The sign was posted in the hallway. I wanted to be on the varsity basketball team.

It was probably too soon for me because the first day of tryouts, somebody threw me the ball, and it bounced right past me. I just couldn’t see it. I would dribble the ball off my foot because I was in some other place. The otherness was blinding me.

After the third day of this, the coach, Gene Farry, called me into his office after practice, I thought to cut me. Instead, he asked me something that nobody had asked me since October 15. “Bill, are you okay? How’s everything at home?”

I stared at him, unable to speak. Suddenly, tears welled up in my eyes. I just exploded . . . the words, making their way out of my heart . . .

Coach Farry, only twenty-four at the time, smiled at me, and said, “Take all the time you need, I’ll be out here.” He put me on the team. That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.

CHAPTER 11

Mom had “a plan.” She started taking the train in from Long Beach into Manhattan round-trip every day. An hour each way, a tough commute for anybody. But when you’re fifty and you’ve got that boulder to carry around, it’s a little tougher. Her plan was simple. She began to study at a secretarial school, to learn shorthand, typing and dictation so she could get a job as a secretary.

she got a job, not just as a secretary, which would have been fine. She got a job as an office manager in Mineola, Long Island, at a Nassau County psychiatric clinic,

I graduated high school, and soon I would go away to college. Mom had put aside $2,500 so I could go. That may not seem like a lot to you, but she was only making $7,500 a year.

I got down to Huntington, West Virginia, and the first day of school was a total disaster. They cancel the freshman baseball program because of a funding problem. This was years before freshmen could play varsity, so that was it, there would be no baseball for me. Suddenly, I’m simply a Jew in West Virginia.

one day I got a package in the mail, which totally confused me because it was the only package I got all year that didn’t have a salami in it. It was from California: Hollywood, California. I didn’t know anyone in California. I’d never been to California. The furthest west I’d ever been was Eighth Avenue at the old Madison Square Garden. I opened it up and it was a book from Sammy Davis, Jr., who I had never met. Uncle Milt had been

recording him. He did Sammy’s first gold record, “Hey There” from The Pajama Game. A note from Uncle Milt was attached to the front of the book. It said he had written to Sammy about me. He told Sammy that he thought that I had something, but that I also had “the otherness.” He signed it as he signed all his letters to me, “Keep thrillin’ me, Uncle Milt.” I opened it up, and Sammy had signed the book to me. I could hear his voice as I read: “To Billy, you can do it, too. The best, Sammy Davis, Jr.”

I came home for the summer of l966, and got a job as a counselor in a day camp at the Malibu Beach Club in Lido Beach. One day after work, I was on the beach with my good friend Steve Kohut, and this really cute girl in a bikini with a fantastic walk goes by, and I said, “Who’s that?” “That’s Janice Goldfinger,” Steve said. “She just moved here.” I said, “I’m going to marry her.”

Four years after I told Steve Kohut, “I’m going to marry that girl,” I did. After Janice and I got married in 1970,

CHAPTER 12

The last story would start on Halloween night of 2001. Once again, the entire country had the otherness. Our family was still reeling from the loss of Uncle Milt in late July, and Uncle Berns was having a very difficult time.

But on this Halloween night, the ghosts and goblins were just kids on the street as I passed them on my way to Game Four of the World Series.

my cell phone went off. It was my brother Joel. “Billy, listen. We have a big problem. Mom had a stroke.” “What?”

These strokes are nasty characters. They’re mean. It’s a mean illness. A little bit of progress like that, and then many steps back. Some days you’d have a smile on your face, and the stroke would know it, and it would

slap your other cheek. It’s a mean, cunning, nasty illness.

She didn’t know me as her son. These strokes are like bank robbers. They break into your vaults and steal the things that you treasure most, the things that are most valuable to you, your memories. They steal your life. But then she rallied, like I knew she would.

I went into great detail how the show worked

for me, where the laughs had flowed, and she just simply stopped me and said, “Billy, dear, were you happy?” “Yeah, Mom, I was.” “Well, darling, isn’t that really all there is?”

And that’s the last time we spoke. The next day the bank robbers broke in again. This time they stole her.

She rests next to Dad, and even in my sorrow, I found some comfort in the fact that they were together again, in their same bed positions, quiet and peaceful, just like I saw them every morning of those 700 Sundays.

I don’t know why I thought it would be easier this time. I was fifteen the first time. Fifty-three the second. The tears taste the same. The boulder is just as big, just as heavy, the otherness just as enshrouding.

We sold the house. We had to. Without her in it, it really didn’t make much sense to keep it. Somebody else owns it now, but it doesn’t belong to them . . . because I can close my eyes and go there anytime I want.

700 Sundays is not a lot of time for a kid to have with his dad, but it was enough time to get gifts. Gifts that I keep unwrapping and sharing with my kids. Gifts of love, laughter, family, good food, Jews and jazz, brisket and bourbon, curveballs in the snow, Mickey Mantle, Bill Cosby, Sid Caesar, Uncle Berns

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You can pick up “700 Sundays” at Amazon.

Review and Notes: The Power of Favor, by Joel Osteen

The Power of Favor Review

If you’ve read one Joel Osteen book, I’m pretty sure you’ve read every Joel Osteen book. 

That’s my impression, anyway, after reading “The Power of Favor.”

Osteen, the minister of Lakewood Church in Houston, oversees a vast evangelical empire, including a large television network and numerous best-selling books.

Osteen has been criticized for preaching the “prosperity gospel”— — the message that following God will, in simple terms, make you wealthy and fabulous if you just follow him. 

The Power of Favor has its faults. It’s overly simplistic. It’s repetitive. It focuses too heavily on using God as a fulcrum for ease and material wealth.

Certain passages are cringeworthy:

Going to the mall, say, “Lord, thank You that Your favor will help me find what I need.” The favor of God will help you get the best deals.

And yet, the book isn’t completely without merit.

Osteen hammers home a helpful mindset: that God is for us, and we can only be our best selves and accomplish our greatest goals through and for Him. 

He reminds us that God is our source—not our paycheck or business—and that we should seek him and give thanks in all things.

If you’re looking for a dose of hope and a reminder that God is for you, and life can suddenly change for the better, then there are worse things to read The Power of Favor. 

However, if you are looking for better better balance and peace in a God-centered life, I recommend John Mark Comer’s “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.”

The Power of Favor: Chapter-by-chapter highlights

CHAPTER ONE The Power of Favor

What God has in your future you can’t accomplish on your own. There are places He’s going to take you that you can’t get to by yourself.

God has put something on you that gives you an advantage, something that will open doors that you can’t open, something that will make you stand out in the crowd. It’s called “favor.” Favor will cause good breaks to come to you. Favor will take you from the background to the foreground. Favor will give you preferential treatment, things you don’t deserve.

God told Noah to build an ark, a 450-foot-long boat. Noah wasn’t a builder. That wasn’t his profession. It seemed impossible, but God will never ask you to do something and not give you the favor to do it.

You keep honoring God, believing and expecting. The favor on your life will cause the right people to show up.

Having favor doesn’t mean you won’t have challenges, but favor is what’s going to keep the challenges from defeating you, and sometimes God will put you in a situation so He can show you His favor.

God is going to do some things that bring you into prominence, into new levels of influence and credibility. People can debate what you say, but they can’t debate what they see.

What God can do for you in one moment will put you fifty years down the road. That’s the power of God endorsing you.

One thing I’ve learned is that you can’t keep a favored man down. You can’t keep a favored woman down. You may have some obstacles, situations that are unfair. That doesn’t mean you don’t have favor. Challenges come to us all, but favor is why you’re not going to stay down. Favor is why you’re going to rise back to the top.

Joseph spent thirteen years in the background, being overlooked and mistreated. There were plenty of lonely nights. He didn’t get bitter. He kept doing the right thing.

Much as with a bow and arrow, the more the enemy tries to pull you back, the more you’re going to go forward.

God is not going to just deliver you, not going to just bring you out, He’s going to endorse you. He’s going to put you in a position of prominence where people can see you honored, respected, and admired.

God has some of these destiny moments already lined up for you. You can’t see them now. If He showed you, you’d think, There’s no way.

When God does it, it catapults you ahead, and it’s not going to take a long time. Yes, you have to be faithful. Joseph was in difficult places for thirteen years, but it only took him an hour to get out.

What would happen if we’d get up each day and say, “Father, thank You for endorsing me today. Let people see that I am Your child”?

Favor Is Given to Fulfill Your Purpose

When God endorses you, it will cause you to stand out.

Favor is given to fulfill your purpose. It’s to advance His kingdom. When your dreams are tied to helping others, to making the world a better place, to lifting the fallen, then you will come into some of those “that day” moments when God will shine more on you than you’ve ever imagined. When God can trust you, He will take you from obscurity to notoriety.

I believe and declare you are coming into a new level of prominence, a new level of influence, a new level of income.

CHAPTER TWO Declare Favor

there is a connection between speaking favor and receiving favor.

Every day you should declare, “I have the favor of God. Favor is on my family. Favor is on my health. Favor is on my business. Favor is on my finances.” When you speak something out, you give it the right to come to pass. When you face difficult situations, instead of being discouraged, thinking, Why did this happen? you need to declare, “The favor of God is turning this around. Favor is bringing healing, freedom, vindication, and victory into my life.”

Speak favor over your finances. “Father, thank You that Your favor is bringing me clients. Thank You that Your favor is causing me to stand out. Thank You that what I touch will prosper and succeed.” The Scripture says, “Jesus increased in favor with God and with people.” You can increase in favor. The more you thank God for it, the more you declare it, the more favor you’re going to see.

“Father, thank You that Your favor is endorsing me. Thank You that Your favor is bringing me into prominence. Thank You that Your favor is taking me to new levels.” That’s not just being positive. That’s releasing your faith for the favor of God.

“Father, thank You that my children have favor with their teachers, favor with other students, favor that causes them to excel.” David did this. He said, “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.” In one Bible translation, the word goodness is favor. David was saying, “Surely favor follows me all my life.”

Nehemiah didn’t stop there. He said, “One more thing, King. I don’t have any supplies to rebuild the wall. I don’t have any money. I need a letter from you that tells the people who own the lumber mills and the stone quarries to give me the materials I need.” When you know you have favor, you’ll have a boldness, a confidence to ask big, to expect advantages. Again the king said yes.

In Nehemiah 2, he said, “The king granted me these requests because the gracious hand of God was upon me.”

“Lord, I recognize this was Your goodness. Thank You for favoring me. Thank You for making things happen that I couldn’t make happen.”

When you face situations that seem impossible, don’t talk about how big the problem is. Do as Nehemiah did and start declaring, “The gracious hand of God is on my life.”

The Scripture says, “If you will acknowledge God in all your ways, He will crown your efforts with success.”

The prophet Zechariah said, “Ask for rain in the time of rain.” In the Scripture, rain represents favor.

Every time you declare favor, you’re asking for the rain. That’s what allows God to show out in your life.

Instead of being discouraged, thinking, Look how big these obstacles are, my attitude was, Look how big my God is. Father, thank You that Your favor is bringing the right people, people who will get behind the vision. Thank You that Your favor is making a way where I don’t see a way.

The apostle Peter says, “Hope to the end, for the divine favor that is coming.”

I finally had to interrupt him and say, “We’ve talked long enough about the problems. Let’s start talking about the solution. Let’s start talking about what God can do. Let’s talk about the fact that favor is on the way.” We prayed together. Then I said, “There’s something you have to do. Every morning, you need to declare, ‘I have the favor of God. Favor is bringing me new clients. Favor is turning my business around.’ Then all through the day, under your breath, keep thanking God for that favor.” I saw him several months later. He was like a new person, beaming with joy. He told how, at his lowest moment, when he thought he was done, a company that he had never worked for contacted him and asked him to make a presentation. They chose him over several major firms. He said, “With this one new client, I will have more income than from all my other clients combined.” He was on pace to have a record year.

What you’re facing may seem impossible. Don’t talk about the problem. Talk about the solution.

When you face challenges, don’t get discouraged. Speak favor over them. Look at your bank account and speak favor to it. “I will lend and not borrow. What I touch will prosper and succeed.” Speak favor over your health. “This sickness is not the end.

I want to make a declaration of favor over you. If you let this take root in your spirit, I believe chains that have held you back are going to be broken, and you’re going to be released into a new level of your destiny. I declare that right now the favor of God is on your life in a new way. I declare favor over your family, favor over your marriage, favor over your finances. I declare favor at work, favor with your boss, favor with your colleagues, favor with your clients. I declare favor is opening new doors of opportunity, bringing promotion, increase, and abundance, causing the right people to be drawn to you. I declare favor over your health, strength, energy, wholeness. You are free from sickness, chronic pain, depression, and addictions. I speak favor over every force that’s trying to stop you, and I declare that mountain is becoming a molehill. As with Nehemiah, God’s favor is going to accelerate it. Things are going to happen sooner than you think. I declare the favor of God is going to catapult you to a new level. You’re going to take new ground, set new standards, and reach the fullness of your destiny.

CHAPTER THREE Favor Connections

Find some favor connections, people who are going places, people who are at a higher level, people who have what you’re dreaming about.

When God puts you with a group of eagles, don’t have a chicken mentality. Don’t start talking about how you’ve never seen anything like that, how that could never happen for you. Let it take root inside. Breathe it in. Get used to it. That’s where God is taking you.

When you recognize the favor on a person’s life, and you respect that favor by connecting with it, by honoring them and learning from them, that favor will come back to you.

When we see people who are more successful, more talented, more blessed than us, it’s easy to get jealous, try to compete, discredit them, talk about what they’re doing wrong and how they’re not talented. “They’re just lucky.” Here’s a key: If you can’t celebrate other people’s success, you will never get to where they are.

If you’re only sowing into your level, then your level is all that’s going to come back. You need to sow into where you want to go. Swallow your pride and sow honor into that supervisor at work. Sow respect into that colleague who’s really talented. They’re not in your life by accident. God put them there as a favor connection. As you connect to them, new doors will open for you.

The favor on their life is an indication of what God is about to do in yours.

In the Scripture, when they poured oil on the head of Aaron, the high priest, it flowed down to the rest of his body. This is symbolic. Oil represents favor, and when you’re connected to people with favor, the more blessed they are, the more blessed you’ll be.

the enemy works overtime to try to get us jealous of one another, competing and trying to pull one another down. He wants us to get stuck where we are.

Look around, find the people whom God is blessing, and connect with them. Don’t be intimidated or jealous. If you honor, respect, and sow into them, that favor will come back to you.

Who you’re connected to is extremely important. There are blessings that belong to you that are attached to the people God has placed in your life, and if you’re not seeing any fish, you need to evaluate who you’re connected to.

CHAPTER FOUR Distinctive Favor

The Most High God has set you apart. He could have chosen anyone, but He handpicked you, called you out, and said, “That’s one of Mine.” Right now, His face is shining down on you.

The Scripture says, “For houses you didn’t build, for vineyards you didn’t plant.” It’s not because of who you are; it’s because of Whose you are.

Your job is not your source. God is your source. The economy doesn’t determine whether or not you’re blessed; God does. He has already marked you for favor. He’s already put this distinction on your life. Dare to pray bold prayers. Believe for unusual favor. Take the limits off God. You’ve been set apart.

customers, but it’s as if new customers are always finding me.” Psalm 37 says, “Even in famine, the righteous will have more than enough.”

As long as you stay close to God, as long as you keep Him first place, you are connected to a supply line that will never run dry.

He tried for many years to build a new church sanctuary, but every time he tried to move forward, he felt an unrest, knowing it wasn’t the right time. In 1986, Houston was in one of the deepest recessions our city had ever seen.

My father had just been released from the hospital after having open-heart surgery. It was a few weeks before Christmas. It seemed like the worst time to start any project, especially the worst time to try to raise funds. Deep down he could hear God telling him to do it right then.

He heard God whisper, “Son, I want you to do it now so people will know it’s Me and not anybody else.”

You might not have the perfect job, people might not be treating you right, and you might not be getting the credit you deserve. That’s okay, because you’re not working unto people, you’re working unto God.

God strategically orchestrates our steps, how He doesn’t always take us in sequence from A to B to C. Sometimes He’ll take you two steps ahead, one step back, and then five steps forward. The key is to trust Him in those times when it feels like you’re going in the wrong direction.

CHAPTER FIVE God Is Your Source

It’s easy to look to people as our source or to look to our job as our source. Yes, God uses people, He uses jobs, and He uses contracts, but they are not the Source. They are simply a resource that the Source uses. If you’re seeing things other than God as your source, the problem is that if something happens to them, you’ll think, What am I going to do? The source has been cut off. No, the Source is just fine. God is still on the throne.

When Peter didn’t have money to pay his taxes, Jesus told him to go to the lake and catch a fish. The first fish he caught had a gold coin in it,

God was showing us how He can use different resources.

God has another fish.

When a door closes, when you have a setback, you have to remind yourself that the resource is not what’s blessing you; it’s the Source.

All through the day you should say, “Lord, I recognize You’re the Source of my life. Yes, this job gives me a paycheck, but You’re the Source of the income. This company gave me a job, but You’re the Source of this favor.”

The woman finally said, “Elisha, I do have one thing in my house, but really it’s nothing, just a small jar of olive oil.” She thought, Why should I even mention that? I have a huge debt, and all I have is something that’s worth a few dollars. Don’t discount the small thing that you have—the small opportunities, the small income, the small gifts. It may seem too small, but God knows how to multiply.

The Scripture says, “When you have faith the size of a mustard seed, which is one of the smallest seeds, you can say to this mountain ‘move,’ and it will move.”

God saw her being obedient, doing what she could. When you’re in difficult times, don’t sit around in self-pity. Do something where God can see your faith. Make plans to get well, make plans to come out of that trouble, make plans for God to show out in your life.

Have you taken any steps to show God that you’re ready to see His favor?

What God asks us to do, many times, is more about the obedience than the actual thing we’re doing. It’s a test. If you obey, you’ll see God’s favor.

a man named Naaman was a captain in the enemy’s army but he had leprosy. When he came to Elisha for help, Elisha told him to wash in the Jordan River seven times and he would be healed. Naaman was offended and came up with all these excuses about why he didn’t want to do it: “The water is dirty. We have better rivers back home.” He almost talked himself out of it, but finally he did as Elisha had instructed. When he came up out of the water the seventh time, his skin was perfectly normal. The healing wasn’t in the water, it was in the obedience.

receive this into your spirit: Healing is flowing, strength is flowing, restoration is flowing, freedom is flowing.

Isaiah said, “God knows where the hidden riches are found.” You know why? He’s the One who put them there. He’s the Source, the Creator, the Most High God. Nothing may be flowing now, but the Source knows where all the treasures are. He knows how to have you at the right place at the right time.

Go to the Source and say, “God, I can’t do this on my own. I’m asking You to turn this child around, bring this dream to pass, free me from this addiction, help me have this baby.” The Scripture says, “Call on the name of the Lord and He will answer you.”

God is saying, “Come to Me, ask Me for help, call on My Name, acknowledge Me every day as your source.” Peter worked all night trying to catch fish while Jesus was sitting on the shore with a fish dinner waiting for him. What you’re believing for, God has already prepared.

CHAPTER SIX A Public Display

God is going to do something in public. He’s going to show out to where you not only see His power, but people around you see His power.

God said to the Israelites in Exodus, “I will perform wonders never done before. All the people around you will see the awesome power I display through you.”

When you do as David did and pray, “God, make a show of Your favor,” that’s when God will make things happen that not only amaze you but amaze the people around you.

When you believe that God wants to show out in your life and you have the boldness to ask, God will display awesome power through you and other people will notice.

He’s going to display power through you so people around you will know He is God.

CHAPTER SEVEN Favor in the Storm

When we think of favor, we think of something good happening. We received a promotion. We met someone special. The medical report turned around. We know that’s the favor of God. But when we face difficulties—things aren’t going our way, we’re still taking the medical treatment, our finances haven’t turned around, or the promotion didn’t go through—it doesn’t seem as though we have favor. We have all these obstacles, but having favor doesn’t mean you won’t have challenges. Favor is what’s keeping those challenges from defeating you.

you have favor in the storm, favor taking the treatment, favor dealing with an addiction. The Scripture says that God’s favor surrounds you. It doesn’t come and go. It’s with you in the good times and in the tough times.

When we’re in the middle of a difficulty, sometimes we don’t recognize that we have favor.

stay in peace. You have favor in the storm. God is pushing back forces of darkness for you.

you could see behind the scenes, you would see Him pushing back the opposition. You would see Him making your crooked places straight, lining up the right people to help you.

You may not like the difficulty. It may not seem fair, but you’re going to come out of that storm free from things that would have held you back your whole life.

God told the Israelites, “The enemies you see today, you will see no more.” God is saying that to you.

Don’t be intimidated by the financial setback. Not having enough, lack, and struggle are not your destiny. You keep honoring God, being your best. You will come to a point where you see that no more.

You have favor in the famine. God will cause you to succeed in the middle of the trouble.

Isaac didn’t have to leave to get out of the famine and go somewhere else to be blessed. He had favor in the famine. God can increase you in spite of what’s going on around you.

“Father, thank You that I have favor in the famine. Thank You that You’re opening doors no man can shut, causing me to stand out, bringing opportunity. Thank You that whatever I touch will prosper and succeed.”

God is not limited by the conditions. He’s limited by our thinking. Why don’t you take the limits off Him?

Quit thinking of all the reasons why you can’t be blessed or accomplish your dreams,

You dared to take the step of faith. You dared to pray, to stretch, to plant, to believe. Now you’re seeing increase and favor. Don’t be surprised when the Philistines show up. The naysayers are not happy when they see you rising higher. They’ll find fault, criticize, and try to bait you into conflict. Just run your race.

In Chapter Two, I stated that a man named Zerubbabel was rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. It had been destroyed years earlier, and the king had issued a decree to have it rebuilt.

the king ordered that work on the temple be stopped, and it came to a standstill for seventeen years.

Then the king issued a new decree especially directed at the opposition that said, “Do not hinder these people. Let them rebuild the temple. Not only that, but I decree that you are to help them. You are to use my funds to pay the full construction cost, and you are to take them food and supplies every day.” They meant it for harm. God turned it for good.

You don’t know what God is up to. Months after Job went into adversity, he not only came out, but he came out with twice what he had before. What looks as if it’s going to keep you from your destiny is rather going to launch you into a new level of your destiny. Those obstacles are not going to stop you. They’re going to promote you.

Problems are about to turn around. Unexpected blessings are coming your way, with breakthroughs, vindication, promotion, and healing.

CHAPTER EIGHT Your Set Time for Favor

there are set times God has already ordained to show out in your life.

After years of things being routine, average, you came into a season of growth, a season of increase, a season of blessing. What was that? A set time of favor.

The Psalms speak about how God’s favor surrounds us like a shield. It doesn’t come and go. Favor is always with us, but there are set times when God’s favor will show out.

all through the day, especially in the tough times, say, “Lord, thank You that it’s my set time for favor. Thank You that You’re helping me do what I could not do on my own.”

In Psalm 102, the psalmist was having an incredibly difficult time and began to pray. He went into great detail to list all his troubles.

says in verse twelve, “But You, O Lord, are still on the throne. For You will arise and have mercy on Zion, for the time to favor her, yes, the set time, has come.”

Now you have to let this seed take root inside. All through the week have this expectancy and say, “Lord, thank You that it’s my set time for favor, that You’re giving me power to do what I could not do before. Lord, thank You that You’re causing me to stand out, drawing the right people to me, that Your blessings and favor are overtaking me.” “Well, Joel, I believe maybe one day that will happen for me.” No, I’m asking you to come over into the now. Today is your set time for favor—

My father had a sister named Mary, and for years she struggled with a condition that caused her to have violent convulsions and terrible headaches.

while he was praying he heard God say this distinct phrase to him, not out loud but right down in his spirit: “The hour of Mary’s deliverance has come.” He heard what God said in Psalm 102: “The set time for Mary’s healing is here.”

He went over to Mary’s bed, and after he prayed for her, he said forcefully, “Mary, I want you to get up out of this bed.” All of a sudden, Mary sat straight up. She had not walked in months, but at that moment she

She was totally healed. This was a moment of favor.

You may not see it yet, but here’s the whole key: You have to walk by faith and not by sight.

CHAPTER NINE The God Who Crosses His Arms

God has unexpected favor for you. He’s going to do things that you didn’t deserve.

what God put in your heart, He’s not only still going to bring to pass, but it’s going to turn out better than you thought.

As Jacob did with Manasseh and Ephraim, God is adopting you in spite of what you did or didn’t do.

The Scripture says, “You’re going to come into houses that you didn’t build and vineyards that you didn’t plant.” Your past is not going to limit you.

Don’t waste your valuable time with people who won’t celebrate the blessing that God put on your life. Don’t apologize for it. Don’t try to downplay it. You didn’t choose it. God chose you.

I’m giving you what you don’t deserve. I’m taking you to a new level.”

God loves to choose people whom others say are not qualified.

In the Scripture, Gideon said, “God, I can’t lead the people of Israel against the Midianites. I come from the poorest family. I’m the least one in my father’s house.” God said, “Gideon, I know you’re not qualified, and I know you’re not next in line, but I’m going to cross My arms. I’m going to take you from the background to the foreground.

When Samson was being held in prison by the Philistines, he could have said, “God, I don’t deserve Your goodness. You gave me supernatural strength, and I blew it. I kept giving in to temptation. Now I’m blind, bound, grinding at the mill, and it’s all my own fault.” God said, “Samson, I knew every mistake you would ever make, and My mercy is bigger than anything you’ve done wrong. Yes, you should die defeated, feeling like a failure, but take heart. I’m going to cross My arms.” God blessed Samson with supernatural strength one more time, and he defeated more enemies in his death than he did during his whole lifetime.

The Scripture says, “Is the arm of the Lord too short to deliver you?” Do you think that somehow God’s arm can’t reach you, that you’re too far back, that you’ve made too many mistakes, missed too many opportunities, and have too big of a problem? Can I tell you that God’s arm is not too short to deliver you, to heal you, to provide for you, to free you, to vindicate you?

In the book of Luke, the angel said, “Mary, the Lord has decided to bless you.” There are some blessings that come from being faithful and doing the right thing when it’s hard. But there are times, as with Mary, as with Ephraim, when God has simply decided to bless you. You didn’t do anything to earn it.

People may rule you out, they may tell you it’s never going to work out, but God has the final say. He knows how to take you from the background to the foreground. When He decides to bless you, things are going to happen that you didn’t see coming.

CHAPTER TEN Just One Good Break

Do you know how we got the Compaq Center? Just one phone call. That’s how it all started.

A friend whom I hadn’t spoken to in a couple years called and said, “Joel, I have an idea for you. Let’s go to lunch.” The next day at lunch he told me that the Rockets basketball team was moving out of the Compaq Center and that Lakewood should try to purchase it from the city. When I heard that, something came alive inside. I knew we were supposed to pursue

When I got back from lunch, I called the mayor.

He said, “Joel, I think Lakewood having the Compaq Center would be great for the City of Houston.”

I’ve learned you don’t need everyone to be for you. You just need the right people to be for you. It

Those years when you were not being noticed, not seeing good breaks, not having much influence, those were proving years. You were showing God you could be trusted. You were doing the right thing when the wrong thing was happening, being your best when you weren’t seeing growth, and going to work with a good attitude even though nobody was giving you credit.

If you keep passing the test, the Scripture says, “Your due season is coming.”

Now quit worrying about who’s not for you. “Why won’t these people give me credit? Joel, I’d be further along if my coworkers would quit leaving me out.” Can I tell you that your coworkers can’t hold you back? Other people cannot keep you from your destiny.

Don’t Want What’s Not Supposed to Be Yours

When it’s your time, Samuel will show up. David’s father tried to convince Samuel to anoint one of his other seven sons. He thought David was too small, too young, too inexperienced. But no matter how hard he tried, Samuel wouldn’t do it. God was showing us that what has your name on it won’t go to anyone else.

Sometimes God will close a door that we can’t open, but there are times when, if we’re really stubborn and it’s not going to stop our destiny, God will let us have it our way. In this case, we obtained the business, but it wasn’t what I thought. It was a constant headache, it never really got off the ground, and it drained our time, energy, and resources.

we all have unfair things happen, but God wouldn’t allow it if He wasn’t going to somehow use it for our good. I also talked about how God can vindicate us better than we can vindicate ourselves.

You are just one good break away from God catapulting you to a new level.

This month, your whole world could change for the better. Now do your part. Pitch your tent in the land of hope. Give God something to work with. That’s not just being positive. That’s your faith being released.

You were not created to live in dysfunction, with addictions, and to be constantly struggling.

CHAPTER ELEVEN By This Time Next Year

Don’t believe the lies that it’s permanent.

One touch of His favor will put you into overflow. When you read this, it can sound too good to be true.

Just because you don’t see a way doesn’t mean God doesn’t have a way. It’s because He’s going to do it out of the ordinary; it will be unusual, you won’t see it coming.

For dreams that look as though they’ll take a lifetime to accomplish, get ready. It’s going to happen sooner than you think. Things are about to fall into place.

Some of these things you may not be able to see yet. It seems too far out, so unlikely, but our God is so great that it doesn’t mean it’s going to keep Him from doing it.

God has some of these “by this time next year” moments lined up for you where you’re going to look back and say, “Wow! I never dreamed I’d have this position, never dreamed my children would be doing this great, never dreamed I could build that orphanage.” Get ready for God to show out in your life.

You may be in one of these unfair situations that seem as though it’s never going to turn around. God is saying, “By this time next year, it’s going to change. By this time next year, you’re going to be vindicated, promoted, in a position of honor.” Why are you worrying? Why are you losing sleep? God is still on the throne. He hasn’t forgotten about you. Your time is coming. This looks like a stumbling block that you can’t get past. The truth is, it’s a stepping-stone that’s about to take you to a new level of your destiny.

God knows how to accelerate things.

CHAPTER TWELVE Commanded to Be Blessed

When we honor God with our lives and do our best to keep Him first place, the Scripture says God will command His blessing to come on us.

when God commands, there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. It’s going to happen.

Because he’s honoring God, there is a commanded blessing on his life.

When you understand you have this commanded blessing, you won’t be upset because someone’s talking about you. You won’t be worried about your finances or discouraged because of a setback. You know every force that’s trying to stop you is powerless to change the blessing God put on your life.

When the enemy tells you all the reasons why you’re not going to get well, not get out of debt, not overcome the challenge, instead of agreeing with him, do as Balaam did and start speaking victory—speak health, speak favor, speak abundance.

The commanded blessing will override every person who’s tried to stop you. The commanded blessing will make up for what you didn’t get. It will cause people to go out of their way to be good to you. It will put you at the right place at the right time. People may have tried to push you down, but God is about to lift you up. They may try to keep you from your purpose, but they are powerless to change the blessing on your life.

The Scripture says, “When you obey, God’s blessings will chase you down and overtake you.” I’ve seen this in my own life. Most of the big breaks, the major events, came to me. I didn’t go after them. I was just honoring God, being my best, and they came after me.

Here’s the key: You don’t have to go after the blessing; go after God. Honor Him with your life, and the blessing will follow. God will command things to find you.

If you recall the previously told story of Ruth and Boaz, you see the commanded blessing in full display.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Exceeded Expectations

sometimes what we have in mind is not God’s best. We think ordinary; God thinks extraordinary. We think, Let me have enough to get by; God thinks abundance.

We’re asking for the possible when God wants to do the impossible.

The apostle Paul said in Ephesians 3 that God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all we can ask or think.

God has some of these “I never dreamed” blessings in store for you. You may not see how it can happen.

One touch of His favor will catapult you where you could not go on your own. As Peter told the crippled man, I’m telling you to rise up and walk. It’s your time to be free. It’s your time to break bondages. It’s

God is so merciful. Even when we don’t have the faith, even when we think we’ve reached our limits, God says, “That’s okay. I’m going to show you favor in spite of that.”

God is about to show up and do something unusual, something that you haven’t seen. He’s going to exceed your expectation.

The Compaq Center wasn’t my idea. It was God exceeding our expectations. I grew up with season tickets, watching the Houston Rockets play basketball in that auditorium. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that one day we would own this facility, and if you ever think that God can’t exceed expectations, just give Lakewood a visit some time and look around.

Give God something to work with. Dare to say, “Lord, thank You that You’re going to exceed my expectations. Thank You that You’re going to take me where I could not go on my own.”

He’s going to pay you back for what you’ve been through. Our attitude should be, Lord, thank You that You’re going to visit me again. Thank You that You’re going to do more than I ask. Thank You for exceeding my expectations.

You may have obstacles in your path and challenges coming against you today

You’re asking God to turn it around. Stay encouraged. God is not only going to bring you out, He’s going to have some spoils there. There is going to be some plunder. He’s going to bring you out better than you were before. He’s going to exceed your expectations.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN It’s on the Way

What you’re believing for, the promises you’re standing on, the dreams you’ve been praying about, they’re already en route.

You don’t have to figure it out. Our job is to believe. Our job is to go out each day with expectancy and say, “God, I may not see a way, but I know You have a way. I believe my breakthrough is on the way.

You have the most powerful force in the universe breathing in your direction.

What God promised you is still going to come to pass. It’s not too late. You haven’t missed too many opportunities. If it had happened sooner, it wouldn’t have been the right time. Now is the time. Start believing again.

He’s saying new beginnings are on the way—new friendships, new opportunities.

The problem you’re facing is not too big for our God.

Why don’t you get up each day and say, “Father, thank You that abundance is coming my way. Thank You that I’ll lend and not borrow.

too many people have given up on what God put in their heart.

what you think is dead is not really dead. That seed is still alive.

Jesus looked into the tomb at Lazarus and called out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!” Lazarus woke up. He’d been dead for four days, but he came out of the tomb and went on to live for many more years. I believe that things you’ve given up on, things that you think are dead, like Lazarus, they’re about to wake up.

What you’ve given up on is not dead; it’s just asleep. That business you wanted to start, that book you wanted to write, that addiction you’ve been trying to break—every thought tells you, “It’s too late. You’re too old. It’s never going to happen.” No, get ready. God’s about to wake it up.

say this respectfully, but sometimes religion will try to talk you out of God’s best. It will tell you, “In the sweet by-and-by you can live a victorious life, but down here you just have to suffer through it, just endure. Don’t expect too much.” If Jesus were here, He would marvel at that unbelief.

Don’t let another person talk you out of what God put in your heart. Believe big, dream big, and pray big.

God is longing to be good to you. He wants to make you an example of His goodness so that everywhere you go, you don’t even have to say anything—your life is a testimony.

God’s favor is on the way. Abundance is on the way!

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Living Favor-Minded

God is saying to you what He said to Abraham: “I’m going to assist you. I’m going to provide you with advantages. I’m going to cause you to receive preferential treatment.” “Well, Joel, this never happens for me. I must not have this favor.” No, you have it, but the reason many people don’t experience it is that they’re not releasing their faith in this area. They’re not expecting good breaks. They don’t expect preferential treatment. They have an underdog mentality.

You have the favor of God. I’m not talking about being arrogant and thinking that we’re better than somebody else. I’m talking about living with boldness—not because of who we are but because of Whose we are. You are a child of the Most High God.

If you were born into the Kennedy family or Bill Gates’ family, you’re going to be treated differently. You’re going to expect favor that other people may not expect. The good news today is, you have been born into the right family. You come from a royal bloodline. Your Father owns it all. You need to hold your head high and start expecting to stand out in the crowd. Start expecting good breaks, divine connections, and opportunities to come your way.

Why don’t you start carrying yourself like you’re a child of the King? Why don’t you start expecting some advantages, some good breaks, even some preferential treatment?

start declaring, “I have the favor of God. People are drawn to me. People want to be good to me. People go out of their way to be nice.” That’s not just being positive; that’s releasing your faith. If you’re going to see an abundant increase of God’s favors, you can’t have a limited, short-end-of-the-stick, underdog mentality.

“Lord, thank You for Your favor.”

God knows how to give you an advantage. He knows how to put you at the right place at the right time.

You can’t reach your highest potential on your own. You need God’s favor. You need Him to assist you, to provide you with advantages, to cause you to have preferential treatment. Don’t be passive and think, If God wants to bless me, He’ll bless me. If He wants to give me a good break, He is God, and He can give me a good break. God is moved by our faith. When you expect it and declare it, that’s when the Creator of the universe can show up and do amazing things.

Psalm 5 says that God’s favor surrounds us like a shield.

The more aware you are of this favor, the more conscious you are that God wants to assist you, the more you’ll see His hand at work.

When something good happens, recognize that it’s the favor of God and then learn to thank Him for it. At the office, all of a sudden you have a good idea. It comes out of nowhere. “Lord, thank You for Your favor.”

What would happen if we would get up each day and pray this simple prayer from Genesis 12:2? “God, thank You today for an abundant increase of Your favor. Lord, thank You in advance for assisting me, for providing me with advantages, for causing me to have preferential treatment.” That’s how you will step into the fullness of your destiny.

If you develop this habit of living favor-minded, I believe and declare that God is going to assist you, provide you with advantages, and cause you to have preferential treatment. You need to get ready. You’re going to see an abundant increase of favor.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Heavy with Favor

the prophet Isaiah took it a step further. He said, “Arise and shine, for the glory of the Lord is upon you.” That word glory in the original language implies God’s favor is heavy upon you.

when you realize you are heavy with favor, it takes on a whole new meaning. You won’t go around intimidated or insecure. You’ll put your shoulders back, hold your head high. When you know you have heavy favor, you’ll pray bold prayers. You’ll believe for the extraordinary.

I wonder how much further we would go, how many dreams we would see come to pass, if we really believed we are heavy with favor. Are you praying these bold prayers, expecting God to show out in your life?

Would you dare do as Joshua did and ask God to do something out of the ordinary, to bring your dreams to pass even though they look so far out, as though they’re not practical?

When you live with this expectancy, you’ll see God do things that are out of the ordinary.

the Scripture says, “You have not because you ask not.” How many things are we not seeing God do, not because He won’t do it but because we’re not asking?

when I walked into the jewelry store and met Victoria for the first time, she was one of those things I had not seen, heard, or imagined. God supersized what I was dreaming about. It took heavy favor to get her, let me tell you.

The apostle Paul said, “In the ages to come we would see the surpassing greatness of God’s favor.” We are living in the day Paul talked about, when we will see far-and-beyond favor. If you get your hopes up, start expecting it, praying bold prayers, believing for the extraordinary, when you arise, God will cause you to shine. He will show up and supersize what you’re dreaming about.

Now don’t you dare go around weak, afraid, and intimidated. You are so powerful. You are full of the anointing. You are heavy with favor. When the enemy looks at you, just as with Elisha, he thinks, I have to send a whole army to try to stop him. He may do his best, but his best will never be enough. When you’re heavy with favor, you cannot be defeated.

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Purchase “The Power of Favor”.

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Making Franchising Work: A Research Summary

This post summarizes the research findings found in Making Franchising Work: A Framework Based on a Systematic Review. 

Introduction

The research team from the Institute of Health Policy and Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, included Karlijn J. Nijmeijer, Isabelle N. Fabbricotti1 and Robbert Huijsman. The team reviewed a large selection of franchise research:

There is a large and fragmented literature that examines the nature of franchising. This paper aims to collect all the empirical evidence on the factors that make franchising work and to integrate this evidence in a framework. 

Franchising: Definition and background

• Franchising consists of a contractual arrangement between two firms: the franchisor and the franchisee. In this arrangement, the franchisee buys the right to market goods or services under the franchisor’s brand name. 

• Franchise failure rates are high: 50-85%

• There is significant variation in the strategic and operational success of franchises. 

• At least some of the variations result from factors within franchise systems. 

Research goal

This paper has a double aim:

• Collect all the empirical evidence on the structural and process-related factors that influence the outcomes achieved within franchise systems for franchisors, franchisees and customers, and second, to

• Bring this evidence together in an integrative framework. To this end, we have conducted a systematic review, which gives practitioners an integrative insight into why some franchises succeed, while others are less successful. 

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Research methods

The studies included investigated the relationship between the outcomes of franchising and franchise design or processes. 

Data collection 

• Outcomes are defined as the results of an activity, plan or process within franchise systems. All types of outcomes were included, for example financial performance, survival, growth and satisfaction.

• Design comprises all the structural and procedural aspects of the franchise arrangement.

• Processes refer to actors’ behavior and interaction with each other. 

Data analysis 

• First, we analyzed each study on the investigated design or process factors, operationalization of each factor, types of outcomes, operationalization of each outcome, theoretical perspective, country, industry, methodology and actor perspective (franchisor, franchisee and customer).

• As a second step, we clustered the factors that referred to similar design or process elements. To accomplish this clustering, we relied on the definition of franchising as described in the introduction. This approach resulted in two major factor clusters: ‘contract’ and ‘business format’.

• We also determined clusters by searching in studies for aspects that are central in major franchise disciplines. From an economic/organizational perspective, the major factor ‘ownership structure’ was established.

• From a social perspective, the focus of studies is on the individual behavior of the franchisor and franchisee and on their interaction (relationship).

• This perspective led us to establish the fourth major cluster, ‘behavior and interaction’.

• The last cluster of factors, ‘age and size’, was determined by themati- cally analyzing the common themes of all factors that could not be grouped within one of the other four clusters.

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The state of empirical research 

• A small majority of the studies investigated outcomes at the franchisee level (n = 74).

• Outcomes at the customer level were rarely investigated (n = 2).

• Outcomes at the franchisee level were the dominant focus in studies on the business format (35 of 49 studies) and behavioral and inter- action aspects (47 of 58 studies), whereas outcomes at the franchisor level received the most attention in studies of ownership structure (28 of 34 studies).

• Financial performance (n = 21), survival (n = 20) and growth (n = 12) were the most frequently investigated outcome types at the franchisor level.

• Satisfaction (n = 43) and financial performance (n = 27) were most frequently considered in studies that investigated outcomes for franchisees. 

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Results: a framework of factors related to outcomes of franchising 

The analysis uncovered five areas that positively or negatively affecting franchising success:

• Ownership structure

• Business format

• Contract design

• Behavior and interaction

• Size and age  

A: The influence of ownership structure 

Outcomes are related to four choices regarding ownership structure (see Block A in Figure 2):

• Whether both the franchisor and franchisees or only the franchisees own units (plural form vs pure franchise)

• The proportion of units owned by franchisees

• Whether each franchisee owns one or more units (single-unit vs multi-unit ownership);

• Whether the responsibility for the daily operations of the unit is delegated to a unit manager or not (passive vs active ownership)

Plural forms are more managerially effective because innovation, uniformity and economic efficiency are more attainable.

Company-owned units facilitate the dissemination of innovation and help to increase uniformity, because they can be used as pilot sites that persuade franchisees to adopt new practices and as training sites for new franchisees. 

Plural form outperforms pure franchise with regard to franchisor survival.

Franchisors have higher financial outcomes and survival rates if they increase their franchise proportion:

(1) if their units are widely dis- persed in different geographical markets (Hsu and Jang 2009; Sorenson and Sørensen 2001; Vazquez 2007),

(2) if they have started their operations in a strict legal environment (Shane and Foo 1999), or

(3) if they were one of the first entering franchise firms on their market and are currently relatively mature 

• Franchisors perform better financially if they align their franchise proportion with their financial and marketing strategies (Srinivasan 2006) and do not use franchising as a strategy to gather resources.

• If franchisors have highly valuable resources (Barthelemy 2008; Vazquez 2007) or tacit business practices that cannot be specified in the operations manual (Barthelemy 2008), they obtain better financial and survival outcomes if they reduce their franchise pro- portion.

• Franchisors should increase the proportion if local knowledge is important in applying the busi- ness format on unit level 

Single-unit vs multi-unit ownership 

• For franchisees, owning multiple units is more advantageous than owning only one. This results in better survival rates (Bates 1998) and lower production costs because production experience is more easily transferred between units belonging to the same owner (Darr et al. 1995).

• For franchisors, the results of multi-unit franchising are more equivocal. It lowers the chances of survival for new franchisors (Shane 1998), but increases them for larger franchisors (Shane 2001). 

• multi-unit franchisees make the system more effective by facilitating system-wide adaptation because franchisors have to persuade fewer franchisees to implement changes. However, these franchisees are slightly less effective in terms of local responsiveness (Bradach 1995). 

Passive vs active ownership

• For franchisees in older and larger US restaurant chains, passive ownership is disadvantageous for their survival chances (Michael and Combs 2008). 

• Shane (1998) found lower survival in systems that adopt passive ownership, Vazquez (2009) showed that such ownership is only negative in systems in which the operations manual is not specific and local knowledge is highly important. 

B: The influence of the business format 

Besides ownership structure, the business format appears the second influencing factor. 

Studies show that the outcomes of franchises are determined by:

• the brand name,

• the format facilitators directed at support, and

• the format facilitators directed at control. 

Brand name

• All studies on the brand name (n = 10) reported the positive effects of a strong recognizable brand name, 

• For franchisors, the brand name is positively related to profits, sales, growth and sur- vival (Gillis and Combs 2009; Inma and Debowski 2006; Shane and Spell 1998). For franchisees, it has a positive impact on satisfaction, success and survival. 

Support

The studies on the influence of the support provided to franchisees (n = 49) considered the role of the provision and the extent of the support, the type of support, and the quality and importance of the support. 

• Studies always show positive effects on franchisee satisfaction, financial performance and survival 

• However, franchisees’ valuation of the support provision generally decreases over time (Grünhagen and Dorsch 2003; Tuunanen and Hyrsky 2001).

• The extent of the support provided also contributes to positive outcomes for franchisees.

• Franchisees are more satisfied and perform better financially if they are offered a large amount of support 

In contrast, offering extensive support is not directly beneficial for the franchisor.

The type of support provided to franchisees matters more for franchisors than for franchisees.

All studies on franchisee satisfaction found positive effects, irrespective of the type of support studied. Training (Hunt 1973; Lusch 1977; Merrilees and Frazer 2006). All the following support types improved satisfaction:

• Franchisor representatives (Lusch 1977)

• Assistance in seeking suitable locations

• Product development

• A ready-made concept

Marketing and brand support were also found to have a positive effect on satisfaction in various industries (Hing 1996; Lusch 1977; Merrilees and Frazer 2006), although high- performing franchisees value these support types more than lower performers. 

Financial assistance was found to have no impact on financial performance (Churchill and Hunt 1973), whereas training was found to have a positive effect on both financial performance (Michael and Combs 2008; Minguela-Rata et al. 2010) and survival. 

Studies on the franchisor level show more mixed results 

Shane (2001) found positive effects of training, communication services and assistance to franchisees in seeking suitable locations. However, Grünhagen et al. (2008), who studied the relation- ship between multiple support types and the closing or conversion of outlets, found no effect of any support type in the US 

The influence of instrumental support on satisfaction is stronger if the quality of that support is high (Yavas and Habib 1987). Interestingly, different franchisees within the same system can attach differ- ent quality and importance levels to the same support, resulting in different satisfaction levels 

Control

Fifteen studies considered the influence of format facilitators directed at control. These studies considered the role of initial control, standardized operating instructions and (de)centralized decision-making. 

Six studies indicated that the use of disclosure information and assessment methods to initially select franchisees with the right attitudes and expec- tations ultimately leads to greater franchisee satisfac- tion but not to more system growth. 

Five studies showed that greater use of standard- ized operating instructions for franchisees has no negative effects on franchisee outcomes but has mixed effects on franchisor outcomes. 

franchisor requirements regarding the use of specific practices and procedures positively contribute to financial performance.

Kidwell et al. (2007) found that this positive effect occurred because the use of instructions curbed free-riding behavior among franchisees. Free-riding means ‘cutting costs by lowering product or service quality’ while profiting from the brand reputation of the franchisor 

Significant investment in developing standardized operating routines enhanced performance in pure franchises, but reduced performance in plural form chain.s 

Five studies considered the impact of the extent of decentralized decision-making. At the franchisor level, centralized services decreased the exit chances of large systems: the larger the system, the larger the effect (Shane 2001). However, at the franchisee level, decentralization of decision-making yields better outcomes. Irrespective of operationalization, indus- try and country, it is related to more perceived com- petitive advantage (Baucus et al. 1996), satisfaction (Baucus et al. 1996; Schul et al. 1985; Tuunanen and Hyrsky 2001), and a better financial performance as a result of less free-riding behavior 

C: The influence of contract design 

The design of the contract is the third factor that influences outcomes. Besides provisions about format facilitators, six other contract elements were investigated: initial payments, ongoing payments, contract length, exclusive territories, tying and fairness. 

Level of initial payments.

• At the franchisee level, three studies found the level of initial payments to be positively related to income (Churchill and Hunt 1973) and survival (Bates 1995b; Frazer and Winzar 2005). Other studies reported negative and neutral relationships 

• Higher levels of cash investment are positively related to the survival of new and large franchisors (Shane 1998, 2001), whereas most studies found that the level of total investment/start-up costs had no effect 

• Initial payments also seem to have mixed effects on growth, as negative, neutral and positive relationships were identified in various studies 

Level of ongoing payments

• Higher levels of ongoing payments rarely have a positive effect at the franchisee level. On the contrary, predominantly negative relationships have been found with survival (Michael and Combs 2008), financial performance (Frew and Jud 1986) and satisfaction if the franchisees perceive the pay- ments as too high 

• At the franchisor level, the majority of studies showed that the magnitude of ongoing payments has no effect on survival chances 

Length, tying, exclusive territories and fairness of contract 

Contract length appears to be unimportant to achieving positive outcomes.

D: The influence of behavior and interaction

• Several studies showed the importance of a good working relationship by investigating the following relationship characteristics: closeness of the relationship, commitment, trust, communication/ information exchange, dependence, conflict and opportunistic behavior

• Franchisor–franchisee relationships with higher levels of trust predominantly yield superior performance. 

• From the franchisee perspective, a high level of trust only has a significant positive effect at the beginning of the relationship, and not in the long term (Bordonaba-Juste and Polo-Redondo 2008a). At the franchisor level, trust only has a posi- tive effect on financial performance in plural form chains, and not in pure franchises

• high-quality, frequent communication and information exchange between franchisors and franchisees reduce the probability of negative franchisee exit (Frazer and Winzar 2005).

• Moreover, it has a positive effect on franchisee satisfaction, intention to remain, success and perceived competitive position across countries and industries and regardless of the methodology used

• these relationship characteristics are closely related, which suggests that the development of one characteristic can be stimulated by another.

E: The influence of size and age 

• The size of an existing chain when it starts franchising affects neither franchisor survival nor growth 

• The size of franchisee firms also appears to be relevant, at least to their survival and financial per- formance. Their survival chances are higher if they own a larger number of outlets 

• Age of system and franchisee firm. No harmful effect was found for franchisors if they waited longer before starting franchising in an existing chain. 

• As systems age, the outcomes for franchisors are affected, but it is not exactly clear how. None of the outcomes becomes unequivocally more positive. 

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Discussion and conclusion 

• Franchisors and franchisees should work on the development of a recognizable brand name and a high-quality working relationship

• Franchisors should:

• provide site selection assistance and exclusive territories to franchisees, but they should not tie supplies.

• offer high-quality instrumental support, use substantial tools to select potential franchisees

• decentralize decision-making

• provide fair and clear contracts

• use support services and communication rather than contractual threats to influence franchisee behavior. 

• The provision of a large number of support services also benefits franchisees. However, this does not benefit franchisors. 

• Outcomes in franchising are dependent on the compatibility and cohesion of different system design elements, the behavior of and relationship between actors in the system, and the context 

• The diversity and complexity of the franchising literature make it difficult to develop a single, overarching framework of the success factors involved. 

The Living Great Lakes, by Jerry Dennis

“This lake without sails, this shore which does not yet show any trace of the passage of man, this eternal forest which borders it; all that, I assure you, is not grand in poetry only; it’s the most extraordinary spectacle that I have seen in my life.”

—Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (1831)

Jerry Dennis is a Michigan native and author living in Traverse City, Michigan. He is a prolific and talented writer who, in “The Living Great Lakes,” brings to life the awe, expansiveness, and turbulent nature of the Great Lakes. 

It’s hard to appreciate the Great Lakes, one of our planet’s most impressive and important natural resources, without seeing them firsthand. 

In various conversations throughout the years, for example, I’ve had numerous people express surprise that you cannot see across, say, Lake Michigan, while standing on the shore. 

The Great Lakes aren’t truly appreciated for their scope and power. 

Neither is the danger. The lake bottoms are littered with the remains of ships with crews who challenged the lakes, and lost everything. Some were simply swept under in the powerful storms that arise quickly, from seemingly nowhere.

Dennis takes us on his journey through the lakes—and beyond—from Chicago all the way out to the Atlantic. Along the way, he shares the history and science behind the Great Lakes, while also illustrating why is it so important to protect them.

And while we are getting better at keeping the lakes clean (it’s been a long time since Lake Erie caught fire …) pollutants and invasive species still threaten the Great Lakes’ natural balance. 

Dennis sails with different vessels to complete his journey through the lakes. First, he boards a sailboat for the Chicago-to-Mackinac Sailboat Race, blending in with a private crew trying to grab its first victory. But sailing the lakes is a unique challenge:

We were in open water now, exposed to the biggest waves. They were typical of the Great Lakes—not rollers, but steep, short-period wind waves. Freshwater is less dense than salt water, so lake waves rise quicker and run faster and can be harder for a boat to negotiate than the long rollers of saltwater seas.

Dennis brings the lakes to life with his writing:

From the Gauntlet that morning we watched the sun rise slowly, an orange glow in the whiteness, as the fog disintegrated a droplet at a time.

Following the race, Dennis boards the Malabar, a cement-hulled schooner sporting two sixty-foot masts. We sail with him through trials--on the water and amongst the crew--learning about the history and perils of Superior, Huron, Erie, Ontario, and the Erie Canal, before traveling down the Hudson and out to sea. 

The Great Lakes are underappreciated and misunderstood. Their ecological, historical, and meteorological impacts are far larger than people who haven’t spend time around them can appreciate. In The Living Great Lakes, Dennis takes us on an interesting and enlightening journey, and it’s time well spent on the high (freshwater) seas.   

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The Library Book, by Susan Orlean

Disclaimer: I don’t really know how to summarize “The Library Book.” 

Ostensibly, this book is about the devastating fire at the Los Angeles Central Library in 1986. But the book covers so much more.

“The Library Book” is like a fire, winding around corners, heading down unexpected paths, and lighting up nooks and crannies we didn’t know existed.

And like an all-consuming fire, the book achieves its goals:

• Sharing the history and cultural importance of libraries. 

• Explaining how libraries operate, serve communities, and innovate services.

• Illustrating how libraries both reflect and help shape the communities they serve. 

Instead of summarizing the book, I’ll share some interesting ideas from it, and hopefully you’ll want to read it yourself to fill in the rest (and you should).

The Author: Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean is a terrific writer. She knows how to find the interesting thread in almost anything, and then bring it vivdly to life.  

Why Orlean wrote The Library Book:

I grew up in libraries, or so it seems. My mother and I would take regular trips to the branch library near my house at least twice a week, and those trips were enchanted. The very air in the library seemed charged with possibility and imagination; books seem to have their own almost human vitality.

But over time, I had become more of a book buyer than a book borrower, and I had begun to forget how magical libraries are. I never stopped loving libraries, but they receded in my mind, and seemed like a piece of my past.

And then I started taking my own son to the library, and I was reminded instantly and vividly of how much libraries had meant to me, how formative they were to my love of reading and writing, and how much they mean to us as a culture. The next thing I knew, I was investigating the largest library fire in the history of the United States. The life and times and near-death experience of the Los Angeles Public Library was a story that felt urgent to tell, and gave me a chance to pay tribute to these marvelous places that have been such an essential part of my life.

Key Ideas from The Library Book

Orlean’s writing about fire is … on fire

Orlean is really talented. Here’s a snippet of how she describes the library fire: 

The fire flashed through Fiction, consuming as it traveled. It reached for the cookbooks. The cookbooks roasted. The fire scrambled to the sixth tier and then to the seventh. Every book in its path bloomed with flame. At the seventh tier, the fire banged into the concrete ceiling, doubled back, and mushroomed down again to the sixth tier. It poked around, looking for more air and fuel. Pages and book jackets and microfilm and magazines crumpled and vanished. On the sixth tier, flames crowded against the walls of the stacks, then decided to move laterally. The fire burned through sixth-tier shelves and then nosed around until it found the catwalk that connected the northeast stacks to the northwest stacks. It erupted into the catwalk and hurried along until it reached the patent collection stored in the northwest stacks. It gripped the blocky patent gazettes. They were so thick that they resisted, but the heat gathered until at last the gazettes smoked, flared, crackled, and dematerialized. Wind gusts filled the vacuum made by the fire. Hot air saturated the walls. The floor began to fracture. A spiderweb of hot cracks appeared. Ceiling beams spalled, sending chips of concrete shooting in every direction. The temperature reached 900 degrees, and the stacks’ steel shelves brightened from gray to white, as if illuminated from within. Soon, glistening and nearly molten, they glowed cherry red. Then they twisted and slumped, pitching their books into the fire.

Ridiculously good. 

Fire investigations aren’t as conclusive as we are led to believe 

Orlean explores the discipline of fire investigation, and finds it lacking. Turns out it’s really hard to read the tea leaves when the tea leaves have been turned to ash and scattered. 

Some years ago, I read a story in The New Yorker that got under my skin. “Trial by Fire,” by David Grann, was about a case in Texas in which a man named Todd Willingham was convicted of setting a fire in 1991 that killed his three children. The key evidence against Willingham was patterns left by the moving fire—what arson investigators call “burn marks”—in the family’s house. A long-standing belief among arson people is that fires burn hottest where they originate. The charring on the house’s wooden floors was darkest and deepest under the children’s beds. There was nothing under the children’s beds that could have started a fire spontaneously, so investigators believed that someone had set the fire intentionally. The only person in the house that night besides the children was Willingham, who claimed he had been asleep at the time the fire began and that he had done everything possible to save his children. Eventually, Willingham was convicted, largely because the burn marks were interpreted as proof that the fire started under the beds. He was sentenced to death. After losing all of his appeals, he was executed in 2004.

Struck by Willingham’s insistence on his innocence, a prominent scientist and fire investigator named Dr. Gerald Hurst had been asked by Willingham’s family to reexamine the case shortly before the date of execution. Hurst began by trying to determine whether the fire truly was arson. Hurst believed that the analysis of where the fire started was wrong. Despite the heavy burn marks under the children’s beds, he didn’t believe the fire had started there. He inspected the house again. When forensic science was applied to all of the evidence, it showed that the accelerant on the front porch was probably from a can of lighter fluid used to start a small charcoal grill that had been knocked over by firefighters entering the house. A faulty space heater or wiring had probably started the fire inside the house. Flames had raced down the hall into the children’s bedroom. The extreme burn marks under their beds indicated only that the fire had settled there for a while. Hurst’s analysis was too late to change the outcome for Willingham, but it succeeded in raising great concern about the reliability of what we assume about fire. 

As long ago as 1977, forensic scientists warned that the principles of arson investigation were mostly myth.

On the concept of negative corpus in fire investigations: 

In the case of a fire, negative corpus means that if accidental sources are eliminated, the fire is deemed arson, even when there is no affirmative proof that it was arson. If there is no evidence of how the fire was started, it is assumed that the source of ignition was a lighter or matchbook that was then removed from the scene. It’s like finding a dead body, ruling out the obvious causes of death like a heart attack or stroke, and then declaring it murder even though there is no positive proof that it is murder. This ignores the possibility that the death was caused by something natural that hasn’t been detected. 

Legal scholars and forensic scientists have challenged negative corpus for years.

You’ll never think of librarians the same way again

Some very colorful personalities led and transformed the LA library. 

John Littlefield: 1873

The first city librarian of Los Angeles was a dour asthmatic named John Littlefield. He hated the crowded space more than anyone, and he tore out of the reading room whenever he could to hide in his office and smoke a medicinal compound of jimsonweed to soothe his lungs. According to one of the library’s early annual reports, Littlefield’s smoking was unpopular with library patrons. “As [Littlefield] coughed and wheezed and gurgled and smoked,” the report states, “the abominable fumes of the burning [jimsonweed] permeated the whole establishment and nearly choked everybody in it.” Littlefield, in general, seemed burdened, regretful, and tormented. Any time he was called out of his office, he muttered, “Well, if I must, I suppose I must,” which was followed by a loud groan.

Mary Foy: 1880

Mary Foy was only eighteen years old when she was hired to replace Connolly.

[…]

Women were not yet allowed to have their own library cards and were permitted only in the Ladies’ Room. No library in the country had a female head librarian, and only a quarter of all American library employees were women. The feminization of librarianship was still a decade away.

Mary Foy probably would have continued as city librarian for years, but when the mayor who had appointed her left office in 1884, the library board voted to remove her. The reason cited was that Foy’s father was doing well enough financially that he could now afford to take care of her; it was presumed that she no longer needed a job.

Tessa Kelso 1889

People referred to her as “unconventional.” She was so brilliant and forceful that she persuaded the board to hire her even though she had no relevant job experience except that she once covered a library convention for her newspaper. Kelso thought the library was stodgy and needed to modernize. She abolished the membership fee. In no time, the number of cardholders rose from a little more than one hundred people to twenty thousand. She moved most of the books onto open shelves and allowed children over twelve years old to use the library if they had an average of ninety on their school exams. She set up “delivery stations,” an early version of branch libraries, in outlying areas where immigrants were settling.

[…]

she hoped the library could expand and begin loaning more than books; she pictured a storeroom of tennis racquets, footballs, “indoor games, magic lanterns, and the whole paraphernalia of healthy, wholesome amusement that is . . . out of the reach of the average boy and girl.” She believed a library could be more than a repository of books; she felt it should be “the entertainment and educational center of the city.” This ambition never came to pass during her tenure, but it anticipated by almost a hundred years the modern notion of what a library can be.

Mary Jones 1900

She recruited African American librarians for branches in neighborhoods with large black populations and encouraged them to build a collection of books about “the Negro experience.” The library thrived. It was circulating about four hundred thousand books annually when Jones took over. By 1904, that number had almost doubled.

[…]

Despite her success, she was asked to resign:

the head of the board, a lawyer named Isidore Dockweiler, turned to Jones and asked her to resign. As Jones sat dumbfounded, Dockweiler explained that the board believed it would be in everyone’s best interest to have a man run the library.

Charles Lummis 1905

Charles Lummis had arrived in Los Angeles in 1885, when the Los Angeles Times offered him a position on its staff. At the time, Lummis was a newspaper reporter in Ohio. He accepted the offer and packed his belongings. Then he decided that he would walk from Ohio to California.

[...]

Before leaving Ohio, he convinced a local newspaper to publish his travel diary, which he would write in the form of a weekly letter. His first column was titled, extravagantly, “LUMMIS’ LEGS: How They Measure the Distance Between Cincinnati and Los Angeles. Sixty-three Miles Already Traversed and Only Three Thousand One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Yet to Walk.”

[...]

the Los Angeles Times editorial board argued he was unfit for the job because he had “never set foot in a library school, wore eccentric corduroy suits and was known to drink and swear on occasion.” At that point, Lummis’s personal life was in tatters. He had conducted dozens of extramarital affairs. His partners were rumored to include Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker, one of the wealthiest women in California; Kate Wiggin, author of the novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm; several of his secretaries; evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson; and the teenage daughter of Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who first summoned him to Los Angeles.

Lummis may have been named head librarian, but Mary Jones would not go quietly:

Mary Jones did not agree that she should be removed from the library, and she particularly objected to the idea that she should yield her position simply because she was not a man. She ignored the library board’s request and came to work the next day. She told her staff that they should proceed as if it were an ordinary day, and that she didn’t wish to discuss the matter any further.

[...]

For the time being, the Los Angeles Public Library was run by a fired head librarian who refused to leave, and a fired board of commissioners who refused to yield. The Great Library War could have continued indefinitely, since Mary Jones made it clear that she had no plans to surrender, but Mayor McAleer became so exasperated that he asked the city attorney to see if there was a legal remedy. This was sixty years before federal law prohibited job discrimination based on gender. A few days later, the city attorney announced his decision, saying that the city librarian served at will, and therefore the board had the legal right to fire her for any reason at all, including the fact that she was a woman. Jones and her supporters were outraged and continued to protest, but it became clear that the city attorney’s ruling would not be shaken loose. At last, Jones turned in her keys and left Los Angeles for good, accepting a job as the head of the library at Bryn Mawr, a women’s college in Pennsylvania.

[...]

From the beginning, there were complaints that Lummis disappeared from the library for days at a time. He did go fishing frequently, and he spent time attending to his other projects—his books, the Southwest Museum, his continued attention to Native American issues—but much of the time he was gone from the library, he was working at El Alisal, where he sometimes spent fourteen or fifteen hours a day attending to library business. It suited him to work from home. Though he was an unconventional executive, he was passionate about the job, and much of what he did for the library made it the institution it is today.

Lummis made many other changes at the library, labeling “junk science” books as such, starting an autographed book collection, developing a marketing campaign to increase library usage among lower-income and minority residents, 

But his tumultuous personal life continued: 

When he started his job at the library, his personal life was in turmoil, and the scene at El Alisal was a circus. El Alisal was a small, rough house; Lummis and his wife and their children and the daughter he conceived in college lived there, along with a family of troubadours and an endless stream of partygoers who came and went on no particular schedule. In 1907, one of the troubadours murdered one of Lummis’s housekeepers. Still, the parties continued, as many as two or three a week, one blurring into the other, with some guests who never bothered to leave. One day in 1909, Lummis’s wife, Eve, came across the diaries in which he detailed close to fifty extramarital affairs. Outraged, Eve left El Alisal and moved to San Francisco with two of their children,

Lummis was the first library blogger:

Lummis’s annual written reports to the library board were not the usual tallying and tedium; they were anecdotal and discursive, full of pronouncements on the state of libraries and the city and life, and often included long, elaborate descriptions of other city libraries he visited around the United States. He took great pleasure in writing the reports. He divided them into sections with titles like “The Battle of the Shelves” and “Beans When the Bag Is Open” and “What Are We Here For?” The reports sometimes ran longer than 120 pages. To head librarians around the country, Lummis’s reports became legendary, and they often requested copies so they could read and then pass them around to their staff. Because of the reports, Lummis was perhaps the best-known librarian in the United States.

Lummis was asked to leave in 1910, and he was never the same. 

The book covers so much more.

The Library Book packs a massive scope into its 336 pages. Some other key topics include:

• A typical day in the life of the head librarian and library staff

• The life story of Harry Peak, a chronic liar and drifter, who was arrested as the prime arson suspect but was never indicted. 

• The changing role of the library as technology and society changes 

• The constant challenge of providing safe and open access while dealing with homelessness 

If books and libraries matter to you—and you just like descriptive and vivid storytelling, then go check out—pun intended—The Library Book.

Book Review: Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron, by Alexander Freed

“This is what the Empire looks like, now: fewer planet-killing superweapons, more murderous fanatics.”

Author: Alexander Freed 

Freed is a veteran science fiction and fantasy writer who is no stranger to the Star Wars universe, having written Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company (the novel accompanying the Battlefront video game) and the novel adaption of Rogue One. He’s also written for numerous Star Wars video games and comics. 

Setting and timing 

Alphabet Squadron takes place shortly after the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi. The galaxy is free of the Emperor’s reign of terror--but not all of the galaxy. 

Pockets of Imperial resistance and control remain. Portions of the military continue to serve the idea of the Empire, carrying on the fight against the emerging Republic. 

The book takes us to numerous planets and outer-space settings as Alphabet Squadron attempts to locate—and eradicate—the remains of the Empire.

Plot 

As the Rebels move on from the victory celebration at Endor, a complex new problem emerges: now what?

Gone are the days of tactical strikes and disruption. Now, as the Rebellion tries to morph from chaotic force for change into a stable, lasting governance, it must root out the remaining pockets of Imperial resistance to bring about a uniform and lasting peace. 

Key to tamping down the Imperial remnants is the destruction of the Imperial 204th, a competent and deadly Tie Fighter squadron that has carried out planet-wide destruction 

And so Alphabet Squadron, a diverse group of fighter pilots led by Imperial defector Yrica Quell, is formed. We are taken along as the team learns to work together through a series of missions which increase in danger and complexity, culminating with a direct engagement with the 204th.  

Key Themes 

Teamwork

The members of Alphabet Squadron come from wildly different backgrounds and perspectives, and led by Quill, who is reticent to get her hands dirty with the team, choosing instead to lead from an icy distance. 

The strain of battle is only made worse when it must be waged with relative strangers, and while we see cohesiveness improve throughout the book, Alphabet Squadron remains unfinished as a team as the story ends. But they’re getting there. 

Redemption 

Quell particpated in atrocities as an Imperial pilot, taking part in a directive called Operation Cinder, a genocidal directive delivered by the Emperor, via technology, after his death. Quell has the opportunity to atone for her actions as the story unfolds.

Moral ambiguity 

As we have seen with the new canon, good and evil aren't so black and white:

Freed doesn’t mistake war’s fuzzy grey areas for equality of viewpoints. Sure, we see the motivations that drive Imperial pilots and officers on display — but they still partake in genocidal acts, as a misplaced sense of fighting for the less-wrong side, or because they live in a world where their worldview is heavily shaped by Imperial censors and media. And while the Rebellion is less organized and efficient, they’re still fighting against a fascist ruler

Imperials-vs-Rebellion isn’t a clear story of good vs evil. Some remaining members of the Imperial forces stay because there is no where else to go, and they fear being killed by citizens as reprisal for the Empire’s actions, or by Rebel Forces as part of policing and clean up actions.  

Key characters 

• Alphabet Squadron is led by Imperial defector Yrica Quell, who never feels worthy of her position, but ultimately finds her place--and some sense of redemption--in her new role in the Alliance. 

• Wyl Lark is a young A-Wing pilot.

• Nath Tensent is an older pilot, and the war has left him bitter.

• Chass na Chadic is straight up out for blood. Flies a B-Wing.

• The mysterious and silent Kairos flies a U-Wing.

• Caern Adan, a Balosar, is a New Republic intellegence agent, who, out of a desire to eradicate the 204th, creates the idea for an elite team which became Alphabet Squadron.  

Freed creates a couple of extremely creative and creepy droids.

• IT-O is a reconfigured Imperial torture droid, who now serves as a floating Freud, counciling and correcting Yrica and Caern. 

• The Emperor's Messenger is a red-cloaked and faceless floating droid designed to communicate the Emperor’s will. Yet, after giving the Operation Cinder command following the Emperor’s death, it shares no further messages. It only floats and observes. It’s a mystery, and I hope we see more of it. 

Sum it All Up 

The Dark

The book struggles with pacing early on, as character backgrounds and relationships are put into place. Eventually, Alphabet Squadron finds its rhythm, moving between battles and character interactions and developments smoothly: 

As IT-O says: 

“Building a rapport requires time. Without a rapport, I can be of little use to my patient or to you.”

The Light 

The book itself has a difficult mission. Alphabet Squadron kicks off a new trilogy, and must drive fan interest without leaning on popular characters from the films or TV shows.

At first, the book struggles, like an X-Wing breaking away from a planet’s gravity well. But eventually it takes flight, and the ending leaves you ready for the series’ second installment, Shadow Fall, which arrives in the spring of 2020.

Recommendation 

A good read for the Star Wars fan looking for cool space battles and more stories from the post-Empire (and The Mandalorian) timeframe. 

A good—not great—start to what should be a fun and important trilogy in the book universe.

Book Summary: The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer

“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.”

1 Thessalonians 4v11.

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The Author: John Mark Comer 

John Mark Comer is Portland, Oregon-based pastor at Bridgetown Church.

In addition to The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, he has written numerous other books, including:

• God Has a Name

• My Name is Hope: Anxiety, depression, and life after melancholy 

• Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human

• Loveology: God. Love. Marriage. Sex. And the Never-Ending Story of Male and Female

Social profiles:

• Twitter

• Instagram
  

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Book overview 

“The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry” meets at the intersection of faith and minimalism, arguing that our consumer-driven, rat-race culture leaves us stressed, sad, and separated from God. 

Comer implores us to make space for God--literally and figuratively--by slowing down, spending time with God, and creating space on our shelves and in our brains by rejecting the messaging, clutter, and harried pace that comes with the endless accumulation of “more.”

Implementing a practice of simplicity is easier in some instances that others. Truly observing the Sabbath, for example, means turning off the phone and the TV and spending one day a week on being present, grateful, and narrowing our focus down to what truly matters to us. 

That’s hard to do. 

This book lays out why our culture leaves us distracted, distressed, and discombobulated, and shares the answers from the bible. 

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Summary of Key Ideas

Part one: The problem 

Hurry: the great enemy of spiritual life 

Comer meets with John Ortberg, a California-based pastor and writer, who shares a story about Dallas Williard, who was a philosopher and spiritual leader at USC: 

But behind the scenes [Ortberg] felt like he was getting sucked into the vortex of megachurch insanity. 

I could relate. 

So he calls up Willard and asks, “What do I need to do to become the me I want to be?”

There’s a long silence on the other end of the line… According to John, “With Willard there’s always a long silence on the other end of the line. 

Then: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” 

[...]

Then he asks, “Okay, what else?” 

Another long silence… Willard: “There is nothing else. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

Evil in the form of distraction 

We think of evil as violent and hateful acts, and that’s true. 

But evil can be far more cunning and subversive.

Today, you’re far more likely to run into the enemy in the form of an alert on your phone while you’re reading your Bible or a multiday Netflix binge or a full-on dopamine addiction to Instagram or a Saturday morning at the office or another soccer game on a Sunday or commitment after commitment after commitment in a life of speed.

Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul.

Distraction separates us from ourselves, each other, our destinies, and God. 

Hurry and love are incompatible. All my worst moments as a father, a husband, and a pastor, even as a human being, are when I’m in a hurry

All the spiritual masters from inside and outside the Jesus tradition agree on this one (as do secular psychologists, mindfulness experts, etc.): if there’s a secret to happiness, it’s simple—presence to the moment. The more present we are to the now, the more joy we tap into.

To restate: love, joy, and peace are at the heart of all Jesus is trying to grow in the soil of your life. And all three are incompatible with hurry.

As Ortberg has said,

For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.

A brief history of speed 

Starting with sundial and then the clock, man created the artificiality of time. We abandoned our natural rhythms in the name of mechanical efficiency.  

When the sun set our rhythms of work and rest, it did so under the control of God; but the clock is under the control of the employer, a far more demanding master.

Rather than becoming more efficient with time, as we measured it, we filled it with more. 

A century ago the less you worked, the more status you had. Now it’s flipped: the more you sit around and relax, the less status you have.

The Internet is destroying our ability to contemplate

A recent study found that the average iPhone user touches his or her phone 2,617 times a day.

just being in the same room as our phones (even if they are turned off) “will reduce someone’s working memory and problem-solving skills.”

right now everything is being intentionally designed for distraction and addiction. Because that’s where the money is.

As Tony Schwartz said in his opinion piece for the New York Times: 

Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life. By that definition, nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet.

The big question: 

What is all this distraction, addiction, and pace of life doing to our souls?

The ten symptoms of “hurry sickness”

1. Irritability—You get mad, frustrated, or just annoyed way too easily.

2. Hypersensitivity—All it takes is a minor comment to hurt your feelings, a grumpy email to set you off, or a little turn of events to throw you into an emotional funk and ruin your day.

3. Restlessness—When you actually do try to slow down and rest, you can’t relax.

4. Workaholism (or just nonstop activity)—You just don’t know when to stop. Or worse, you can’t stop.

5. Emotional numbness—You just don’t have the capacity to feel another’s pain.

6. Out-of-order priorities—You feel disconnected from your identity and calling.

7. Lack of care for your body—You don’t have time for the basics:

8. Escapist behaviors—When we’re too tired to do what’s actually life giving for our souls, we each turn to our distraction of choice: overeating, overdrinking, binge-watching Netflix, browsing social media, surfing the web, looking at porn—name your preferred cultural narcotic.

9. Slippage of spiritual disciplines—If you’re anything like me, when you get overbusy, the things that are truly life giving for your soul are the first to go rather than your first go to—such as a quiet time in the morning, Scripture, prayer, Sabbath, worship on Sunday, a meal with your community, and so on.

10. Isolation—You feel disconnected from God, others, and your own soul.

We must own and direct our attention in a world that wants the opposite.

Hurry kills relationships, joy, gratitude, and wisdom. 

We must consciously own and direct our attention in a culture doing everything it can to keep us from just that:

The poet Mary Oliver, not a Christian but a lifelong spiritual seeker, wrote something similar: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”11 Worship and joy start with the capacity to turn our minds’ attention toward the God who is always with us in the now.

God is still here, but we are not. 

God is omnipresent—there is no place God is not. And no time he isn’t present either. Our awareness of God is the problem, and it’s acute.

In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to.

Part two: The solution 

Here’s my point: the solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.

Our limitations 

Our culture screams at us to “fix” our limitations. Our performance reviews highlight where we need to improve. We try to shore up our weaknesses. And will personal improvement is fine, and important, we are designed with limitaitons we need to learn to accept. 

One of the key tasks of our apprenticeship to Jesus is living into both our potential and our limitations.

The limitations include, but are not, well, limited, to these: 

1.Our bodies. As I said, unlike Luke Skywalker, we can be in only one place at a time.

2.Our minds. We can only “know in part,”6 as Paul once said, and the problem is, we don’t know what we don’t know.

3.Our giftings. On a similar note as above, I will simply never have the giftings of many of the people I most look up to. Comparison just eats away at our joy, doesn’t it?

4.Our personalities and emotional wiring. We have only so much capacity. I’m an introvert. I’m actually deeply relational, but my relational plate is small. I’m also melancholy by nature. I hate to admit it, but some people have a lot more capacity than I do.

5.Our families of origin. None of us start with a blank slate.

6. Our socioeconomic origins. America is built around the myth of a classless society.

7. Our education and careers.

8. Our seasons of life and their responsibilities—like going to college or raising a young child or caring for dying parents. In some seasons we just have very little extra time to give away.

9. Our eighty or so years of life, if we’re that blessed.

10. God’s call on our lives. I hesitate to say this because it would be easy to misinterpret, but there are limits to God’s call on each of us. I think of Peter’s envy of John’s call over his own less-pleasant assignment of an upside-down crucifixion. Jesus had to lovingly reprimand Peter: “What is that to you? You must follow me.” Many of us need to hear those same words and find freedom in them.

This statement is profound, because our culture believes all achivement and self-actualizaiton comes in striving. In reality it comes in knowing our limits, so we can put our best selves and gifts forward:

All I’m saying is limitations aren’t all bad. They are where we find God’s will for our lives.

Comparison is poison:

Few things erode our joy, ramp up our stress, and damage our self-believe like comparison. 

We all waste time. All of us. And that can be ok, as long we are making conscious decisions. We need recreation, too. 

Long before Thoreau went off into the woods, Paul said: Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.17

The secret of the easy yoke

like every rabbi in his day, Jesus had two things. First, he had a yoke. Not a literal yoke; he was a teacher, not a farmer. A yoke was a common idiom in the first century for a rabbi’s way of reading the Torah. 

But it was also more: it was his set of teachings on how to be human.

But imagine two oxen yoked together to pull a cart or plow a field. A yoke is how you shoulder a load.

To be one of Jesus’ talmidim is to apprentice under Jesus. Put simply, it’s to organize your life around three basic goals: 

1.Be with Jesus. 

2.Become like Jesus.

3.Do what he would do if he were you.

From Matthew 11:

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

We are being invited to stop trying to shoulder everything ourselves--to use brute force and speed to control outcomes we cannot control anyway. 

We have help available. 

Dallas Willard wrote this about Matthew 11:

In this truth lies the secret of the easy yoke: the secret involves living as [Jesus] lived in the entirety of his life—adopting his overall life-style…. Our mistake is to think that following Jesus consists in loving our enemies, going the “second mile,” turning the other cheek, suffering patiently and hopefully—while living the rest of our lives just as everyone else around us does…. It’s a strategy bound to fail.

We hear about his easy yoke and soul-deep rest and think, Gosh, yes, heck yes. I need that. But then we’re not willing to adopt his lifestyle. But in Jesus’ case it is worth the cost. In fact, you get back far more than you give up. There’s a cross, yes, a death, but it’s followed by an empty tomb, a new portal to life. Because in the way of Jesus, death is always followed by resurrection.

We accept God in our lives, we say we want the lifestyle, but we don’t take the steps. 

Jesus’s invitation is to take up his yoke—to travel through life at his side, learning from him how to shoulder the weight of life with ease.

As Comer says:

An easy life isn’t an option; an easy yoke is.

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Intermission: Wait, what are the spiritual disciplines again? 

The spiritual disciplines are actually all habits of your mind and your body. 

A discipline is any activity I can do by direct effort that will eventually enable me to do that which, currently, I cannot do by direct effort.

But Jesus never commands you to wake up in the morning and have a quiet time, read your Bible, live in community, practice Sabbath, give your money to the poor, or any of the core practices from his way. He just does these practices and then says, “Follow me.”

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Part three: Four practices for unhurrying your life 

Number One: Silence and solitude, or the “Eremos” 

Because of technology, we no longer have the ability, the will, or appreciate the value of, being in silence. 

We now have access to infinity through our new cyborgesque selves, which is great, but we’ve also lost something crucial. All those little moments of boredom were potential portals to prayer. Little moments throughout our days to wake up to the reality of God all around us. To wake up to our own souls. To draw our minds’ attention (and, with it, devotion) back to God; to come off the hurry drug and come home to awareness.

There are numerous instances of Jesus going off in solitude, whether in the morning to pray, or into the wilderness.

The wilderness isn’t the place of weakness; it’s the place of strength. “Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness” because it was there, and only there, that Jesus was at the height of his spiritual powers. It was only after a month and a half of prayer and fasting in the quiet place that he had the capacity to take on the devil himself and walk away unscathed. That’s why, over and over again, you see Jesus come back to the eremos.

The eremos: the “quiet place” where we reconnect to God. 

In Luke’s gospel in particular, you can chart Jesus’ life along two axis points: the busier and more in demand and famous Jesus became, and the more he withdrew to his quiet place to pray.

Silence has two dimensions: external and internal. 

External is self-explanatory.

Internal is our internal chatter--and we may use external noise to drown out the internal. 

Solitude is not isolation--it is how we open up to God. Isolation is what we crave when we neglent solitude--the conditions necessary to nourish our souls. 

When we do not create space—eromos—for silence and solitude:

We feel distant from God

We fill distant from ourselves, our identities, and our callings. 

We feel underlying anxiety 

We become exhausted

We turn to our escapes of choice

Weaken our resistance to temptation

Experience emotional unhealth 

“Mindfulness” is silence for a secular society

We must create space. We must make room for eremos:

Here’s to tomorrow morning, six o’clock. Coffee. The chair by the window, the window by the tree. Time to breathe. A psalm and story from the Gospels. Hearing the Father’s voice. Pouring out my own. Or just sitting, resting. Maybe I’ll hear a word from God that will alter my destiny; maybe I’ll just process my anger over something that’s bothering me. Maybe I’ll feel my mind settle like untouched water; maybe my mind will ricochet from thought to thought, and never come to rest. If so, that’s fine. I’ll be back, same time tomorrow. Starting my day in the quiet place.

Number Two: Sabbath

Earthly desire is never satisfied; it is the human condition to seek and want more. 

We must put earthly desires below God--it is the only way for the soul to rest. 

Sabbath means “to stop.”

The Sabbath is to a spirit of restfulness what a soccer practice is to a match or band practice is to a show. It’s how we practice, how we prepare our minds and bodies for the moments that matter most.

If you’re new to the Sabbath, a question to give shape to your practice is this: What could I do for twenty-four hours that would fill my soul with a deep, throbbing joy? That would make me spontaneously combust with wonder, awe, gratitude, and praise?

Sabbath commands in the bible:

1. Sabbath as rest and worship. 

   1. Not the same as a day off, with errands and activities. 

   2. But resting and worship--anything to index your heart toward grateful recognition of God’s reality and goodness.

2. Sabbath as resistance. 

   1. Sabbath, as the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann so famously said, is “an act of resistance.”It’s an act of rebellion against Pharaoh and his empire. An insurgency and insurrection against the “isms” of the Western world—globalism, capitalism, materialism, all of which sound nice but quickly make slaves of the rich and the poor.

   2. The Sabbath is like a guerrilla warfare tactic. If you want to break free from the oppressive yoke of Egypt’s taskmaster and its restless, relentless lust for more, just take a day each week and stick it to the man. Don’t buy. Don’t sell. Don’t shop. Don’t surf the web. Don’t read a magazine:

One of the surprising things I learned when I began to practice Sabbath is that to really enjoy the seventh day, you have to slow down the other six days.

Number Three: Simplicity

The worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. 

If you’re not on board with Jesus’ view of money, it could be that you, like many Christians in the West (myself included until quite recently and with frequent relapses), don’t actually believe the gospel of the kingdom—the good news that the life you’ve always wanted is fully available to you right where you are through Jesus. Through him you have access to the Father’s loving presence. Nothing—not your income level or stage of life or health or relational status—nothing is standing between you and the “life that is truly life.”

Jesus’ teachings on wealth run counter to American society, where achievement and accumulation are the way to happiness. 

But let me say what you all know: the carrot dangling in front of our noses is attached to a stick.

It hasn’t always been this way, even in America. Yes, our nation is a social experiment built around the pursuit of happiness. But it wasn’t until quite recently that we redefined happiness as making lots of money and owning lots of stuff.

In 1927 one journalist observed this about America: A change has come over our democracy. It is called consumptionism. The American citizen’s first importance to his country is now no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.10

Rampant materialism isn’t making us happy. 

So what to do? Go back to a hole in the backyard as our toilet? Give up running water? Burn our debit cards? No, that wouldn’t fix the problem. Because the problem isn’t stuff. It’s that (1) we put no limit on stuff due to our insatiable human desire for more. And (2) we think we need all sorts of things to be happy when, in actuality, we need very few.

Dr. Angus Deaton,

No matter where you live, your emotional well-being is as good as it’s going to get at $75,000…and money’s not going to make it any better beyond that point. It’s like you hit some sort of ceiling, and you can’t get emotional well-being much higher just by having more money.

Everything we buy costs you not only money but time. 

In reality Jesus’ moral teachings aren’t arbitrary at all. They are laws, yes. But moral laws are no different from scientific laws like E = mc2 or gravity.26 They are statements about how the world actually works. And if you ignore them, not only do you rupture relationship with God, but you also go against the grain of the universe he created.

We cannot serve both God and money. 

You simply can’t live the freedom way of Jesus and get sucked into the overconsumption that is normal in our society. The two are mutually exclusive. You have to pick. And if you’re on the fence about it, as I was for years, the next line from Jesus was the clincher for me: Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life.

We worry about what we worship. If you worship money, it will eat you alive.

Comer uses simplicity minimalism interchangeably: 

Minimalism—more recently, this is what a number of bloggers and writers have been calling a secularized version of the ancient practice, updated for the wealthy Western world. I like it.

Minimalism isn’t:

• Modern design with clean lines

• Poverty

• About organizing your stuff 

What if you had only what you needed, and there wasn’t anything to organize? There’s an idea worth chasing down.

Minimalism is, according to Joshua Becker:

The intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from them.

And, 

“Simplicity is an inward reality that can be seen in an outward lifestyle”38 of “choosing to leverage time, money, talents and possessions toward what matters most.”

As Saint Francis de Sales, bishop of Geneva, once said, “In everything, love simplicity.”

Minimalism is about decluttering our lives, not just our stuff. 

How do we define clutter?

• Anything that does not add value to my life.

• Anything that does not “spark joy.”

• Too much stuff in too small a space,…anything that we no longer used or loved, and…anything that led to a feeling of disorganization.

How do we practice greater simplicity?

1. Before you buy something, ask yourself, What is the true cost of this item?

2. Before you buy, ask yourself, By buying this, am I oppressing the poor or harming the earth?

3. Never impulse buy 

4. When you do buy, opt for fewer, better things.

5. When you can, share.

6. Get into the habit of giving things away.

7. Live by a budget.

8. Learn to enjoy things without owning them.

9. Cultivate a deep appreciation for creation.

10. Cultivate a deep appreciation for the simple pleasures

11. Recognize advertising for what it is—propaganda. Call out the lie.

12. Lead a cheerful, happy revolt against the spirit of materialism.

Number Four: Slowing

we achieve inner peace when our schedules are aligned with our values. To translate to our apprenticeships to Jesus: if our values are life with Jesus and a growing in maturity toward love, joy, and peace, then our schedules and the set of practices that make up our days and weeks, which together essentially constitute our rules of life, are the ways we achieve inner peace.

The basic idea behind the practice of slowing is this: slow down your body, slow down your life.

Twenty ideas for slowing down your overall pace of life:

1. Drive the speed limit.

2. Get into the slow lane.

3. Come to a full stop at stop signs.

4. Don’t text and drive.

5. Show up ten minutes early for an appointment, sans phone.

6. Get in the longest checkout line at the grocery store. It gives me a few minutes to come off the drug of speed. To pray. To take an inventory of my emotional and spiritual vitals.

7. Turn your smartphone into a dumbphone. Take email off your phone. Take all social media off your phone, transfer it to a desktop, and schedule set times to check it each day or, ideally, each week. Disable your web browser. Delete every single app you don’t need or that doesn’t make your life seriously easier.

8. Finally, set your phone to grayscale mode.

9. Get a flip phone.

10. Parent your phone ; put it to bed before you and make it sleep in.

Keep your phone off until after your morning quiet time. Let prayer set your emotional equilibrium and Scripture set your view of the world. Begin your day in the spirit of God’s presence and the truth of his Scriptures.

11. Set times for email. Remember : the more email you do, the more email you do.

12. Set a time and a time limit for social media (or just get off it ).

13. Kill your TV.

14. Single - task.

15. Walk slower. One of the best ways to slow down your overall pace of life is to literally slow down your body. Force yourself to move through the world at a relaxed pace.

16. Take a regular day alone for silence and solitude. I take a full day once a month to be alone.

17. Take up journaling.

18. Experiment with mindfulness and meditation.

I take a few minutes and just focus on my breathing. Very basic. I  watch my breath go in and out. Then I start to imagine myself breathing in the Holy Spirit and breathing out all the agitation of the day.

19. If you can, take long vacations.

20. Cook your own food. And eat in.

Epilogue: A quiet life

I’ve reorganized my life around three very simple goals : Slow down. Simplify my life around the practices of Jesus. Live from a center of abiding.

Abiding is the metaphor I keep coming back to. I want so badly to live from a deep place of love, joy, and peace.

It isn’t simplicity : it’s freedom and focus on what matters most.

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity …. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity ( which means being concerned with Him ) or with the Present … or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

What if the day, what if time itself isn’t a scarce resource to seize but a gift to receive with grateful joy?

“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.”

1 Thessalonians 4v11.

That’s the goal, the end, the vision of success : a quiet life. Of all the adjectives on offer, Paul opts for quiet. Not loud. Not important. Not even impactful. Just quiet.

Try to keep your soul always in peace and quiet.

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