History Lessons by Dan Lynn Watt

Author:Dan Lynn Watt [Watt, Dan Lynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781543429855
Publisher: Xlibris US
Published: 2017-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

Eighteen-year-old Abe Rosenthal holding baby Danny, less than six months old.

(Brighton Beach, 1940)

When I was a little boy, everyone in the Rosenthal clan adored and admired Uncle Abe. He was the youngest, the only male with five older sisters. In his twenties he was already a reporter for the New York Times. He did not attend my cousin’s birthday parties, so I only saw him when he came specifically to see me. Once he took me to the Museum of Natural History, once to a game at Yankee Stadium.

When I was ten, we spent a day at the United Nations where he was a Times reporter. We took a subway, the Long Island Railroad, and a cab to reach the UN’s temporary headquarters at Lake Success. The building had been converted from a factory, he told me, where the Sperry Corporation used to make gyroscopes for navigation. I owned a toy gyroscope that I wound up with a string. But I couldn’t imagine how it could be used to steer a ship or fly a plane.

Abe led me behind the scenes. A UN committee was in session in one of the smaller conference rooms. I put on headphones; and by twisting a dial, I could listen to what the speaker was saying in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, or Russian. In an empty hall, he showed me where the delegates sat, where translators sat in soundproof booths.

We entered the Delegates’ Lounge where the public was not allowed. He introduced me to several diplomats. He knew it would mean a lot to me to meet the Soviet ambassador, so he arranged it. I could see that he was comfortable with these powerful, important people and that he was important himself. I came away awed.

I already knew he was important. My family read the New York Times every day. His byline, A. M. Rosenthal, appeared once or twice a week on the front page, reporting about the UN. I tried to read each story, but at age ten they did not hold my attention.

I saw Uncle Abe exactly once during the next ten years, and it occurred because of my initiative, not his. My ninth-grade class was touring the new UN Headquarters on 42nd Street. On impulse, I paged him from the lobby. He seemed excited to see me and walked me through the delegates’ lounge into the reporters’ workroom, a large open space where a couple dozen men and a few women worked at desks with phones and typewriters. On his desk stood a picture of his wife, Ann, and baby son, both of whom I had never met. He promised an invitation to meet them soon. Then he had to get back to work and walked me out.

The invitation never came. As Margie explained, Abe and my Rosenthal relatives were afraid to have anything to do with us because of the anti-communist witch hunt. It might destroy Abe’s career at the Times if he were known to have communist relatives. One

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