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sons (anD Mostly DauGHters) of tHe Blue anD WHite
nents, created a broad enough base for me to win. (The speeches were prescreened, and candidates were forced to follow their script. Once I was in office, I would speak at assemblies, virtually every two weeks, and there was no prescreening; I got in the habit of speaking virtually extem- poraneously and managing to elicit a lot of laughs anyway. From those days on, and maybe from as early as the seventh grade, large audiences didn’t intimidate me. In fact, they energized me.)
I can still recall the image of Steve Shapiro, who was then the Election Commissioner, walking briskly into Wolfie’s, a hamburger hangout near Brooklyn College where I was having an “E” (a regular burger and fries) and a Coke, looking toward me, nodding his head very affirmatively, and smilingly and rapidly signaling that I had won. My victory was sweeter for the fact that Linda won as well. We gave a joint victory party that was mobbed by hundreds of kids, mostly, I suspect, because of Linda.
At my inauguration, which my parents attended, I gave another, semi-serious speech, mostly winging it, but the part that my father would always remind me of—lovingly, I think—was when the time came for me to administer the oath of office to all of the other officers and com- missioners, who were seated behind me on the stage. The oath contained the ridiculous promise to act “unselfishingly”—not “unselfishly” or “selflessly” but a jaw-breaking and probably nonexistent “unselfishingly.” I would like to think that the fact that I was focusing on my prospective utterance of that silliness distracted me and that I was not paying as much attention as I should have when I said, “At this time, I would like the commissioners and officers-elect to rise and keep on rising. . . .” Dad would always say that he could not get out of his mind the picture of thirty levitating and ultimately disappearing public servants-to-be.
When it came time to fill out the portion of my Amherst applica- tion that asked for an enumeration of extracurricular activities, my service as the Mayor of the City of Midwood, about which a bit more later, was duly entered. I was accepted to Amherst College, about which much more later, in great measure, I think, because I had served in that capacity.
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