Retired policeman, detective, chief investigator for the Manhattan district attorney
(1944– )
I guess somewhat to my detriment and certainly not to my benefit I was mesmerized by basketball. Playing it. Watching it. I wasn’t a very good player. A mediocre player in retrospect, but at the time I thought I was terrific. Basketball was everything to me. I even got to play with some very accomplished, very good players from time to time.
I played in my backyard, Bronx Park. Sam Borod and my friend Stan Golden, who passed on a few years ago, we’d be on the courts shoveling the snow off with a few others. It didn’t matter how much it snowed. It didn’t matter how cold it was. We’d even get brooms to clean off the courts, along with the shovels, and play there all weekend. Be there early morning until dark. We also played with Stanley and Leon Myers, a couple of young black men, African Americans, or we would have called them “Negro boys” back then. Stanley and Leon played ball in the park with us all the time. We never thought anything much of it, that they were black, I mean. I guess we had our social boundaries, but I wasn’t too aware of those things at the time.
Even though I went to Bronx High School of Science, I didn’t go to college right after graduation. I had thoughts about my future, but they weren’t very clear. When I was seventeen, before I graduated, I told my mother that I’d like to join the Marine Corps. Her response was very clear. Over my dead body! I did eventually join the marines, but not until I was twenty. The Jewish family tradition was definitely not to go into the marines. It was a struggle to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. It took a while. Eventually, after the marines, I became a policeman and then a detective.
All the things that happened in the ensuing years, like the turmoil of the civil rights movement, were foreign to me. I mean, it didn’t make sense to me because I had direct contact with African Americans and it never occurred to me that there was discrimination against them. I was in my late teens or early twenties when I started to get it, but it took a while. I was inured—not inured—Iwas blind to how badly other people could behave.
The Myers brothers, from my basketball days, we didn’t stay close friends, but probably in 1967 or ’68, which was, of course, in the throes of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam protests, I was on the police force. I was walking the foot post on a street called Wilkins Avenue near Boston Road. I had one or two years in the department, and who do I see walking down the road? It’s Leon Myers. And I hadn’t seen him in several years, not since we were younger fellas. I was really happy to see him. Leon was a distinctive guy. He was very tall and had thick eyeglasses. He probably would’ve been more accomplished in basketball if he didn’t have such bad vision. I think he went on to work in the post office.
So I’m in uniform. I’m alone at the time because in those days you had a beat by yourself. I saw him and said, “Leon, it’s Andy.” And he says, “Oh God, they’re taking anyone in the police department now, huh?” He had a good sense of humor. We laughed and chatted for a few minutes, and then he said, “Well, I gotta be going because this doesn’t look so good for me to be talking to you in this neighborhood.”
I kinda felt bad about that. I felt that way then, and I even feel that way now, so many years later. I’ve thought about it a lot through the years, and actually it was that racial divide that got to me. At the time, there was no thought of my being on any side, other than the one that I was on, which was being a policeman. But I look back on that sometimes with regret and I say to myself that maybe I was on the wrong side. I missed an opportunity in history. If I had it to do over again, I don’t know. Maybe I would’ve been a freedom marcher.