bigger than being back in the great metropolis. For me, it was a homecoming: New York University in the Greenwich Village of my birth. I was stunned by the envy of my New York-born NYU classmates who couldn’t imagine suburban life being less than ideal and an out-of-town college being a privilege anyone would give up. They couldn’t comprehend negative reports of suburban life and couldn’t fathom my transfer from a highly regarded upstate campus school to NYU. As the saying goes: one has to leave home or the city to fully appreciate it. They had never left the city. The city offered me the limitless opportunity to tackle the activities and issues that interested me.
Democratic politics and the early civil rights movement had already captured my interest while I was in high school in Westport and years younger than voting age (then twenty-one). I remember walking around town in 1956 in my Adlai Stevenson straw hat handing out buttons and literature. Westport was staunchly Republican, but I didn’t realize how my political activity would anger many of my father’s customers. Some threatened to take their business elsewhere. I’ve always admired his response. He didn’t discourage me one bit but asked that I not put a bumper sticker on the car that he sometimes parked in front of the store. He also did not object to my letter to the editor of the Westport paper in the late 1950s applauding the students sitting in at lunch counters down South. That paper criticized the sit-ins in editorials.
My interests found new outlets when I returned to New York. While at NYU, I joined Students for Kennedy (even though I was still too young to vote) and participated in founding meetings of Students for Democratic Society. It was an exciting time. Any student could jump into city politics. The Reform wing of the Democratic Party was in the midst of overthrowing the old-line city machine. For the 1960 election, I served as a poll watcher. That was a joke. I was so intimidated when “dead” people voted—people who came claiming to be someone who was dead, a favorite political-machine ploy—I didn’t have the guts to challenge their vote.
Later, I did two student internships with elected officials from the West Side district where I lived: Assemblyman Albert Blumenthal, who would later become a champion of abortion law reform, and State Senator Manfred Ohrenstein, who would later become an articulate opponent of Westway, the four-mile highway along the Hudson River that would become one of the biggest city controversies of my lifetime.
I headed the student club council and joined the campus civil rights groups. I did not have the nerve to join other students on bus rides to the southern sit-ins, but I did jump into the student wing of city Democratic politics, particularly organizing student volunteers for the close races around Manhattan. Emblazened in my memory is climbing the stairs and knocking on doors in East Harlem tenements in 1961 with activist-writers Jack Newfield and Paul DuBruhl to campaign for Carlos Rios, running for city council against Democratic machine candidate John Merli. Rios won by a small margin.
After NYU, when I joined the New York Post as a copy girl, I had to cease all political involvement but continued to hang out with some of the friends I had made while active in citywide politics, including Jack Newfield, who was then an occasional freelancer for the Village Voice and eventual staff writer. We spent many a Friday afternoon sitting in Voice editor Dan Wolf’s office with other regular Friday “drop-ins.” The Voice had been founded in 1956 by Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer as an alternative weekly focusing on the arts, especially the off-Broadway scene. It evolved into the center of outsider arts and politics, while covering a lot of issues not well covered, if at all, in the mainstream press.
I mostly listened as big news events were debated among regular visitors. Michael Harrington
Democratic politics and the early civil rights movement had already captured my interest while I was in high school in Westport and years younger than voting age (then twenty-one). I remember walking around town in 1956 in my Adlai Stevenson straw hat handing out buttons and literature. Westport was staunchly Republican, but I didn’t realize how my political activity would anger many of my father’s customers. Some threatened to take their business elsewhere. I’ve always admired his response. He didn’t discourage me one bit but asked that I not put a bumper sticker on the car that he sometimes parked in front of the store. He also did not object to my letter to the editor of the Westport paper in the late 1950s applauding the students sitting in at lunch counters down South. That paper criticized the sit-ins in editorials.
My interests found new outlets when I returned to New York. While at NYU, I joined Students for Kennedy (even though I was still too young to vote) and participated in founding meetings of Students for Democratic Society. It was an exciting time. Any student could jump into city politics. The Reform wing of the Democratic Party was in the midst of overthrowing the old-line city machine. For the 1960 election, I served as a poll watcher. That was a joke. I was so intimidated when “dead” people voted—people who came claiming to be someone who was dead, a favorite political-machine ploy—I didn’t have the guts to challenge their vote.
Later, I did two student internships with elected officials from the West Side district where I lived: Assemblyman Albert Blumenthal, who would later become a champion of abortion law reform, and State Senator Manfred Ohrenstein, who would later become an articulate opponent of Westway, the four-mile highway along the Hudson River that would become one of the biggest city controversies of my lifetime.
I headed the student club council and joined the campus civil rights groups. I did not have the nerve to join other students on bus rides to the southern sit-ins, but I did jump into the student wing of city Democratic politics, particularly organizing student volunteers for the close races around Manhattan. Emblazened in my memory is climbing the stairs and knocking on doors in East Harlem tenements in 1961 with activist-writers Jack Newfield and Paul DuBruhl to campaign for Carlos Rios, running for city council against Democratic machine candidate John Merli. Rios won by a small margin.
After NYU, when I joined the New York Post as a copy girl, I had to cease all political involvement but continued to hang out with some of the friends I had made while active in citywide politics, including Jack Newfield, who was then an occasional freelancer for the Village Voice and eventual staff writer. We spent many a Friday afternoon sitting in Voice editor Dan Wolf’s office with other regular Friday “drop-ins.” The Voice had been founded in 1956 by Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer as an alternative weekly focusing on the arts, especially the off-Broadway scene. It evolved into the center of outsider arts and politics, while covering a lot of issues not well covered, if at all, in the mainstream press.
I mostly listened as big news events were debated among regular visitors. Michael Harrington
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