Photos from men's room at Atlantic City Convention Center.
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Three generations celebrate, October 27, 2004.
The Star-Ledger Archive
COPYRIGHT © The Star-Ledger 2006 Date: 2006/03/19 Sunday Page: 001 Section: PERSPECTIVE Edition: FINAL Size: 1080 words A fan's notes on fatherhood By BRIAN DONOHUE STAR-LEDGER STAFF The doctors have set the due date for my first-born child as April 3 Opening Day for most major-league baseball teams. That tidy symmetry underscores a series of dilemmas that looms ever larger as my wife's pregnancy and spring training proceed in wondrous tandem: What team is my kid going to root for? More important, do I want to foist on my child the illogical mania of fandom that has consumed, perhaps wasted, huge chunks of time and energy throughout three decades of my life? And what is the purpose of rooting, of all this emotional living and dying over the fortunes of a bunch of spoiled, uninterested millionaires? Being a parent of a kid scheduled to start life on Opening Day, no less may force me to face these questions once and for all. Let me start with another baby: me. Shortly after I began eating solid foods, two years after the Mets won the 1969 World Series, my mother strapped beneath my chin a bib that read across the front: "I'm a little baby but a big Mets fan." It was an endearingly fanatical gesture by a woman who is an otherwise rare breed of fan unfailingly loyal, yet perfectly rational and even-tempered. My mother filled our house with the sweet sounds of Bob Murphy's broadcasts of Mets games, even through the misery that marked the team's play through much of the '70s. She took us to games and requested trips to Shea on Mother's Day. To this day, when her team is trounced, she utters things like, "Well, I just enjoy listening," or "They did okay. They did the best they could." For the fan growing up at her feet, she was the perfect role model. And then there was my father. A Red Sox fan. The entire experience verged on unhealthy. There was loud rejoicing and hoots and howls when the Sox won, and a cathartic beating of the living room couch when they blew it. Sometimes, after a tough one, Dad would just lie on the floor groaning, or staring at the ceiling taking deep yogic breaths to try to calm down. Simply listening to a game from our Union Township home was an exercise in obsessive behavior, as we contorted ourselves in various corners of the front porch, holding radio antennas at odd angles to tune in the games broadcast by a Connecticut radio station. On nights when the reception was too lousy, Dad would put on an LP that recounted the Red Sox's 1967 pennant championship, complete with a hokey song set to the tune of "Hallelujah" but whose chorus had been replaced with the words "Caaarl Yastrzemski" the name of the Sox's left fielder. Such is the nature of youth or maybe just a jumpy, Ritalin-starved kid like me that I was somehow sucked in by the louder, less-subtle world of my father's passion. I became a Sox fan. I chose number 8 (Yastrzemski's number) on my Little League uniform and selected the closest college to Fenway Park when it came time to leave home. "I don't know what happened to you," my mother has told me repeatedly over the years. "You looked so cute in that Mets bib." As a Sox fan, I inherited the patented annoying existentialism that came with rooting for a team that never won it all, and always lost in the most dramatic and painful ways imaginable. Each winless autumn, every excruciating defeat would leave me wondering why I wasted the time and energy. It peaked the night of Oct. 17, 2003, as Aaron Boone's 11th-inning home run in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series sailed into the New York night, signaling another colossal Sox collapse at the hands of the Yankees. Moments after the game, I walked out onto my front porch to find my father staring off into the darkness, quietly reciting a list of dates, years in which he had watched his team collapse: "1946. 1967," he said. "1975. 1986. My God. It'll never end. It'll never end." I called my brother the next day. "How are the boys?" I said, referring to his two Sox-fan sons. I asked the question as if there had been a death in the family. Those poor kids, I thought. Why are we doing this to them? It was a question my father and his brothers had asked themselves many times as they raised a dozen cousins unified by a Sox obsession. There is an old dugout cliché, delivered to disheartened Little Leaguers for generations, that says a person learns more from losing than they do from winning. It's probably true. But I never understood the point of rooting until my team won it all. A year after the Boone home run, the Sox had embarrassed the Yankees in the ALCS and trounced the Cardinals in the first three games of the World Series. And there we were, my father and I, watching as Cardinals shortstop Edgar Renteria grounded to the pitcher for the last out of Game 4. The Sox had done it. I lost control, inexplicably running from room to room in the old house, touching random objects like a person with some disorder, the beds upstairs in our childhood bedrooms, the dining-room table, screaming at the top of my lungs, "They did it, they did it," maybe so the furniture and floorboards would hear. I got back to the den to find tears streaming down my father's face. I cried, too. We hugged and jumped up and down in each other's arms, my mother and my wife (a Queens girl who once sold hot dogs at Shea Stadium) joining in. As we stopped for a breath, my father told me about a small note he had included with the papers in his will. It read, simply, "Have a beer for me when the Red Sox win the World Series." "Dammit, I can get rid of that now," he said. I ran to the fridge and grabbed two cold ones. We clinked our bottles together and drank that beer, and a few more after that, together. And I realized, at that moment, that all this rooting had nothing to do with baseball. It's simply about sharing moments, sharing emotions something most people, especially fathers and sons, don't do too well. And now that we had won, even all the bad moments, all the horrible painful ones crying in his arms as a 7-year-old kid shattered by Buck Dent's home run in the 1978 playoff loss or the long ride home from our cousins' house the night the Sox blew the 1986 World Series had became great ones. Now, there's a baby on the way. Due on Opening Day. A baseball fan, I hope. And with any luck, and a decent amount of screaming, a Red Sox fan. Like his or her father. NOTES: Brian Donohue is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger. 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The Star-Ledger Archive
COPYRIGHT © The Star-Ledger 2002 Date: 2002/11/25 Monday Page: 001 Section: NEWS Edition: FINAL Size: 1072 words Immigrants living in suburbs pedal a gantlet to get to work By BRIAN DONOHUE STAR-LEDGER STAFF In the early mornings, Mexican laborers ride mountain bikes through the rain to construction sites in the new developments of Morris County. After closing time, Salvadoran restaurant workers cycle home from the businesses along Route 202 in Hunterdon County. On the shoulder of Route 1, Guatemalan immigrants pedal second-hand 10-speeds en route to jobs at motels and carwashes. Along New Jersey's busy suburban roadways, they are an increasingly common sight these days. Thousands of newly arrived immigrants, who are either unable to afford a car or prohibited from obtaining a license because of their illegal status, have taken to the roads on bicycle. Motorists, who have owned the roads for decades, are often surprised to see them. "I've almost hit a couple of them down on Broad Street," said Donna Smolucha of Raritan Township. "It's just that they don't have the money, the resources. It really makes you realize how lucky the rest of us are." The influx is the result of a combination of a marked shift in immigration patterns, economics and state licensing laws. For decades, most new immigrants settled in cities, not suburbs. They lived in places where jobs, schools and stores could be reached by foot, bus or train. That pattern has changed dramatically, as large numbers of immigrants have found work and settled in the state's smaller towns and suburbs - a landscape literally built, in many cases, with the automobile in mind. "There is no transportation. It's a little dangerous, but what else am I going to do?" Jose Gonzalez said after stopping his rusty 10-speed along Route 46 in Parsippany one afternoon last week. The 36-year-old Mexican laborer lives in Pine Brook, a place where a simple errand requires a trip out onto the highway. Last week, he was riding home from a hardware store, where he had a copy of his apartment key made. "They cut in front of you, cut you off, they never use their turn signals," he said, looking out over five lanes of Route 46 traffic roaring by. "They have no idea we're here." Some of the bikers lack the legal status required to obtain a driver's license. Others, who are here legally, simply lack the money for a car and insurance. "I make seven dollars an hour," said Flemington resident Jose Ruiz, a 26-year old Guatemalan immigrant who cycles along Route 202 to and from his job as a restaurant kitchen worker at Jake's American Cafe. "This is all I can afford." There are an estimated 8 million illegal immigrants in the United States, with about 135,000 in New Jersey, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Immigrant advocates have called for a change in the rules that would allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver's licenses, saying they need them to get to work. Before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, campaigns by highway safety organizations, immigrants' rights advocates, labor, law enforcement and religious organizations were gaining momentum in more than a dozen states. But after the terrorist attacks, New Jersey and several other states tightened foreigners' access to driver's licenses. Efforts to license undocumented immigrants have largely stalled. On a sunny Thursday morning last month, Manuel Tejada and Miguel Soldad, both Mexican immigrants, pedaled along their daily route from Orange to Montclair to jobs paving driveways and sidewalks. As they reached a curve on Orange Avenue, they were struck from behind by a van driven by James Stewart of Irvington. The driver told police he was stricken with chest pains and let go of the wheel. Tejada was found dead, lying on a curbside pile of bricks. Soldad spent two weeks in a coma with a ruptured spleen. The Essex County Prosecutor's Office is considering charges against Stewart. On the advice of his attorney, Soldad declined go into detail about the accident. "We were just going to work," he said, lying in bed in a cramped Orange apartment he shares with his wife and four other relatives. "I didn't see anything." Neither of the men was wearing helmets. Joung Kim, owner of Kim's bicycle shop in a New Brunswick neighborhood heavily populated with Mexicans, said she struggles to convey the importance of safety precautions to new arrivals. "I tell everyone, you need a lock, lights and a helmet. Everybody buys a lock, 50 percent buy lights and nobody buys helmets," she said. Citing a lack of awareness among many immigrants of the dangers of cycling, the Brain Injury Association of New Jersey last year launched its first bilingual campaign to promote helmet use, with plans to spread the message on roadside billboards this year. For some who know the difficulty of negotiating busy roads by bike, the sight of someone pedaling to work along a busy roadway brings back memories of the hard life left behind. For three years after arriving from Ethiopia in the late 1980s, Mesfin Hagos worked the night shift, first at Crown Fried Chicken, then at Wendy's on West Market Street in Newark. At 2 a.m. each night, through summer heat and blinding snowstorms, he pedaled his 10-speed "piece of junk" 45 minutes to his home in Orange, too worried about muggers to stop and wipe his nose. Now, Hagos works as an auto mechanic at a Summit Exxon and is a legal permanent resident, having been granted political asylum from his war-torn homeland. In his Orange apartment, he keeps a $1,500 Italian-made DeBernardi racing bike. He never uses it. "I use my car," he said. "I keep my golf clubs in the trunk." Last week, Hagos, 29, was driving along Route 22 in Union Township when he saw a darkened figure pedaling along the median. It brought back memories. "Man, that was a rough time," he said. "Those guys are suffering." Not every biker sees it that way. "I stay on the shoulder and I don't have any problem, except the cold," said Julio Reyes a Mexican immigrant who rides his BMX bike to work at a Route 202 restaurant. "These roads are better than the ones in Mexico." ____________________________________________________________________________ _________________ Brian Donohue covers immigra tion issues. He may be reached at bdonohue@starledger.com or (973)392-1543. PHOTO CAPTION: 1. On a commute to his restaurant job, Jose Ruiz of Flemington pedals along the shoulder of busy Route 202. The number of foreign laborers cycling along New Jersey roadways has increased as more immigrants settle in suburban communities. CREDIT: 1. FRANK H. CONLON/THE STAR-LEDGER Etc. BOX: "I make seven dollars an hour. This is all I can afford."JOSE RUIZ, A 26-YEAR OLD GUATEMALAN IMMIGRANT CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail may contain information that is privileged, confidential or otherwise protected from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail, purge it and do not disseminate or copy it.Comments [0]
Halloween party appearances, photo shoots, seances,
witches gatherings. Payment accepted in cash or beer.
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