An Opinion
The recent political chatter about “Obamacare” before the Supreme Court of the United States got a great deal of media attention. President Obama added fuel to the fire when he declared, “Ultimately, I am confident the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
For someone who was a law professor those words were absurd. Even if a bill passed unanimously in the house and senate, it could still be overturned – if the law was in violation of the Constitution.
Viewpoint
None of the four developer proposals to “reinvent” the Nassau Veterans Coliseum is shockingly flawed or disturbing.
A couple of the artist’s conceptions seem like real improvements to the look of the arena building, but it’s not clear that making a cooler coliseum is what we should be looking for. Now that we no longer have to focus on what the public can do for the Islanders hockey team, we no longer need to lock ourselves into merely a newer version of what we already have.
Yet we haven’t unleashed the public’s creativity, and we still haven’t measured or reassessed what it is Nassau County needs, wants and expects out of that site and any remaining space around it. The county government seems resigned to give us Islanders Lite. No NHL hockey? We’ll have minor league hockey. Minor league something.
Eye on the Island
Lawrence Quinn, a former Glen Cove resident and the father of New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, is an Irish-American man of a certain age. So I can only imagine the look on his face when playwright Eve Ensler read aloud graphic passages of her best-known work, The Vagina Monologues, at his daughter’s 1999 City Council swearing-in ceremony.
When Ensler was finished, Mr. Quinn, who was sitting onstage during Ensler’s performance, looked at his daughter and said, “You couldn’t just have had the Pledge of Allegiance?”
Revisiting The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping
Written by Mike Barry, Mfbarry@Optonline.Net Friday, 25 January 2013 00:00
Charles Lindbergh won worldwide acclaim in 1927 when he became the first person to fly an airplane non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean, departing from Roosevelt Field and landing the following day in Paris.Less than five years later, Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, tragically endured the dark side of being a global celebrity. Charles Lindbergh, Jr., their 20-month-old son, was kidnapped and later found dead, after being taken from his crib in the family’s Hopewell, New Jersey home.
PBS’s Nova program is broadcasting on Wednesday, Jan. 30 at 9 p.m. Who Killed Lindbergh’s Baby?, a very engaging one-hour documentary. The filmmakers re-examine, with subject matter experts, what were arguably The Crime, and the Trial, of the 20th Century, at least until the mid-1990s, when O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole, and Ronald Goldman.
Bruno Hauptmann, despite protesting his innocence until the end of his life, was in the mid-1930s convicted for his role in the kidnapping and death of the Lindbergh baby. Hauptmann, a German immigrant, was executed and Nova’s experts believe he was involved in the crime, pointing to how one-third of the monies the Lindbergh family paid in ransom for their baby’s safe return were found in Hauptmann’s possession. It begs the question: who had the rest of the money, and is it possible that Hauptmann had accomplices who were never brought to justice?
The Nova investigation brings viewers into the Bronx, where a man of German ancestry named John Knoll, a rumored Hauptmann co-conspirator, resided in the early 1930s. But the most provocative and shocking theory about who was behind the kidnapping comes from Rutgers University’s Lloyd Gardner. The retired history professor believes the perpetrators had a reliable source within the Lindbergh household who was able to tell them when the baby would be most vulnerable.
While the documentary makes no mention of the Lindbergh family’s Long Island ties, it is worth noting that Charles and Anne Lindbergh, after the death of their first-born, eventually had five more children, and lived in the early 1940s in Lloyd Neck, according to Lindbergh, A. Scott Berg’s outstanding 1998 biography. Berg also learned while doing his research that Lindbergh wrote parts of We, his bestselling 1927 memoir, while staying at Falaise in Sands Point. It was then the home of Harry Guggenheim, a major financial backer of the earliest U.S. aviation projects.
I think what Berg’s biography of Lindbergh does best is chronicle how Charles and the former Anne Morrow, an accomplished writer who went on to write a few bestsellers herself, were not only well-positioned at an early age to succeed in life but took full advantage of their good fortune. Lindbergh’s father, an attorney, was a Minnesota Congressman while Morrow’s father, Dwight Morrow, was the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico before winning election to the U.S. Senate from New Jersey.
Yet the Nova program affirms how little of the Lindbergh and Morrow families’ history remains in the public’s collective memory, with most Americans remembering little about them beyond The Spirit of St. Louis and how its pilot’s 20-month-old son met a cruel fate.