As I walked into the office for the first time, Seymour ("Sy") Hirsh was sitting at his desk, front and center, with a clear view of everyone walking in. He was welcoming, with a booming baritone voice, and without a touch of New York accent. It was difficult for me to read his facial expressions because he wore a carefully trimmed beard and mustache. But his eyes were clear and sympathetic; watching them made me understand his ever-generous intent.
By the time I met Sy, he was not quite 40, a gangly bachelor with good social repartee whose greeting held the promise of greater follow-through than "hail fellow, well met."
The first thing every morning, he would start symphonic music playing at a shallow volume in the background. The music set the stage for the day to come.
"What would you like me to do?" I would ask, putting on my best face and asserting myself unaccustomedly. "We need more leaflets," I remember him saying, followed by an explanation like, "before this afternoon so that we can announce our presence to the neighborhood." Or, on some occasions, he would tell me to "call more volunteers." "Use the telephone on the other desk and this index box of volunteer contact cards; call them and ask them to make a volunteer appointment." By then, I was dating; the telephone was a familiar tool; making small talk with strange adolescents and young adult volunteers was not difficult for me. But, reaching many wrong or unanswered telephones was disappointing, and the ubiquity of telephone answering machines had not appeared in 1968. I remember frequent frustration and the need for "pep talks" from Sy to keep marching, spreading the word, and making known the new office and its mission in the Fresh Meadows neighborhood.
The Fresh Meadows neighborhood was solidly white, middle-class, and Jewish. It was the kind of place Sy and I had come from, but then again, it wasn't. A generation apart in age, each of us had grown up in blue-collar homes in less advantaged neighborhoods. Sy had not prospered in school as I had. And he attended before the tracking system toward commercial degrees for the non-academically oriented was dismantled. I am not sure that he graduated high school at the end of WWII with an academic diploma, which did not seem to matter to him. He wanted a career in the theatre, perhaps in art, but it was not to be. He was drawn to politics out of optimism about what could be achieved given "the right stuff."
I was 14 years old during the late spring and early summer of 1968. That fateful year changed my life and the lives of most other Americans. It was the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. In New York City, we watched them on television, defying Gil Scott Heron's later observation that "the revolution will not be televised." The revolution was clearly televised in 1968. That fateful year was one of violence and convulsions, from the garbage strike that put MLK in jail to the NY teacher's union walk-outs to the assassinations, the Paris student protest, and the siege of Chicago. Mailer couldn't help himself without writing about it; I could not help myself without living it.
I don't remember how it happened or when I first heard it, but he used to call me "baby." It was an affectionate label that stuck between us.
I didn't resist it because we used many odd words as memes in those days. One politician, Adam Clayton Powell, ended nearly every sentence with the word "baby." Powell's famous slogan was 'Keep the faith, baby,'; but it wore thin once he was caught with his hands in the cookie jar in Bimini.
After a time and many office visits later, it became clearer that our idealism was a shared value. We both thought the world would be a better place without the war, and we saw no reason for it. McNamara appeared to be a liar to both of us in the business of killing for profit. We could not understand how such a duplicitous figure could become a leader.
For both of us, it seemed like the wound of MLK's killing was still sore, an unexpected echo of Lincoln's assassination a hundred years before. Why do good men die? I wondered out loud with Sy. There were no answers. Just the hope that it wouldn't happen again; the belief that if we worked hard enough to make the world a better place, there would be a just reward. I sensed we both felt the quiet internal gnashing of teeth while reading the newspapers or watching the nightly news ending with a grim body count.
The leaflets changed over time, from a simple picture of the candidate and a few "catchphrases" to elaborate policy statements. They were crafted at 17 E 17th Street, which served as the headquarters of the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee and the campaign headquarters. Sy knew Sarah Kovner, one of the principals there, but the office was headed by David Dellinger, who would become one of the Chicago Eight, later the Chicago Seven, when Bobby Seale was severed from the trial in the next year. Sy and I discussed the comings and goings in the Manhattan office, where he picked up the leaflets before bringing them to Queens.
I would come to know 17 E 17th Street two years later, after the shootings at Kent State, but to me, in May 1968, that office was only a legend.
I woke up one morning in late June, turned on the Heathkit radio I'd built, and was shocked to hear that Robert F., Bobby Kennedy, had been shot and killed after the California Primary. I remember informing my hypnopompic mother, whose reflexive diatribe "…this is a sick, sick country…" still resonates with me more than 50 years later. The office was closed for a time. When it opened, the opportunity to process what had happened was suppressed. Sy and I channeled our energy into invigorated protest anticipating the convention slated to take place in Chicago in August. Everyone I knew thought the Chicago location was a bad idea, but often choices are made that we have to learn to live with. At least, that is how Sy rationalized it to me. The older male volunteers in the office, those a risk of immediate conscription, planned to protest a "rigged" convention in Chicago and anticipated that there would be violence. I kept quiet and listened.
Sy did not have a car. During our conversations, I learned about his upbringing in a working-class Jewish home, his deliberations over College, his attendance at a technical school in New York, and his job as a videotape technician. "What do you do in your job?" I asked. He promised to show me someday… and he did, many years later, at ABC television. There we became so immersed in a conversation that Sy failed to cut a commercial into a daytime game show in a timely way. This resulted in metropolitan area-wide "Technical Difficulties" post for over a minute. I was fearful that the incident would get Sy fired, but it didn't.
There was banter between Sy and me as I folded leaflets, between phone calls, and after campaign meetings. The basis of the banter was a philosophic debate about what kind of world this is, what kind of world it could be, and how to internally strive to make it so. I had begun meeting Quaker adolescents in Flushing; during Junior High School it seemed I met more and more kids who had been brought up in the Ethical Culture Society. In fact, around this time, not so long after Bar Mitzvah, I began going to NEYO (National Ethical Youth Organization) meetings in the same church in Jamaica that my Boy Scout Troop met in. That Church was special also: It was the First Presbyterian Church, not far from where Sy lived in a medium-rise apartment building on the same street as Jamaica Hospital. The First Church had a large African-American population among parishioners, which it still does. I learned to respect our similarities and our differences.
As my relationship with Sy proceeded, it became clearer that he often compromised his political positions. Although he understood the student demands for full withdrawal from Vietnam, he suggested that the students protesting a Columbia could be "going too far" and alienating their sympathizers. I clashed with him over these "moderate" views. We discussed the difference between being "co-opted" and "compromising." I would have neither. From his vantage point, as an adult in the real economic world, each of those was a viable way of living. So, we did not see eye-to-eye on many things. I was the wide-eyed optimist. Sy was much more pragmatic, much more willing to capitulate to power than I was.
But, on racial equality, Sy taught me an important lesson: One that I have not forgotten until this day. In a break from leaflet folding and reflecting on the MLK, Jr. assassination and the violence-inducing effect it had on my Junior High School, I asked whether Sy "ever felt prejudice?". He answered that "…you have to fight it, every day…". I have never forgotten that remark or its message and am actively engaged in fighting my own bias daily.
The siege of Chicago segued into the Teacher's strike in September, and I spent less time with Sy. I was active in the "New Democratic Coalition," but George McGovern did not command my imagination in the same way that Eugene McCarthy had. Besides, I needed to attend tutorials through the fall at the home of a family friend, a math teacher, and out of work because of the machinations of Albert Shanker, the UFT President, and the NYC Mayor. I had a daily opportunity to solve polynomials and turn off as much thought as possible about the politics of the future.
By November, Nixon's election was assured and my participation in politics would wait a year, until the first moratorium, to enliven again. My relationship with Sy waxed and waned, but I never forgot the lessons he taught me that spring, summer, and fall.
Bert Gold, Falmouth, MA, September 2022