Golden vs. Trump

August 30, 1906, 120 years ago: George Goldberg is born in Brooklyn, and grows up in Manhattan and The Bronx. As a teenager, my grandfather would walk to the construction site of the original Yankee Stadium and watch.

Later, saw Babe Ruth play there, and then also Lou Gehrig. When he couldn't afford the price of a ticket, he could stand on the platform of the 161st Street station of what's now the Number 4 train and watch the game for a nickel, then the fare on the New York Subway.

His first great-grandchildren would be born a shade over a century later, yet he had more in common with people born 500 years earlier. In his youth, hardly anybody had a telephone or an automobile, and the airplane was a new invention. Even in the City, a lot of people got around by horseback. The Subway itself was less than 2 years old when he was born. The Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges had been built, but the Manhattan and Queensboro Bridges were still under construction. The only way to get across the Hudson River was by boat. Movies were black & white, and silent, and going to one was not a common occurrence. Radio was still being developed, and television was just an idea.

Most people had never seen the President of the United States (Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson) except in photographs, and most people had never heard his voice. Monarchies that had seemed to last forever, and were expected to continue to do so, fell. Civil rights wasn't even a dream for most people who needed them -- including for children of Jewish immigrants like himself and his siblings. There were no antibiotics, and the slightest infection could kill you -- indeed, the Spanish Flu epidemic at the end of World War I killed twice as many people as the war itself did.

In 1924, he led Theodore Roosevelt High School, on Fordham Road in The Bronx, to the New York City basketball championship. He was the tallest player on the team. He was 5-foot-8. There wasn't much of a foul lane, and there was still a center jump after every basket. Nobody had yet thought of a shot clock. Basketball was dominated by New Yorkers and Chicagoans, mostly Irish and Jews.

In civilian life, he was a photographer, a taxi driver, and later an all-around handyman. He was a pacifist, and believed that organized religion, even his own, was the cause of too much suffering in the world.

Nevertheless, when World War II came, even though he was already too old to be drafted, he recognized the Nazi threat, and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was actually in Casablanca, in what was then the French colony of Morocco, when the film of that title premiered on Thanksgiving Day 1942. He saw no combat, though, serving as a clerk and a stenographer.

At one point, while serving in Morocco, he saw a very tall French general talking to two subordinates, and took his picture. We have no way of knowing if he knew who it was at the time, but it turned out to be Charles de Gaulle. Had he tried to take a similar picture today, he would not have gotten away with it. He rose to the rank of Staff Sergeant.

Upon his discharge, he got married, and, not wanting his wife to deal with the anti-Semitism he dealt with, changed his name to George Golden. A year later, they became parents; 22 years after that, grandparents.

And yet, in spite of a lot of mistakes (ranging in scale from familial to international), people like him, most of whose names will never be known to most of us, every bit as much as those whose names we did know, who commanded them in the armed forces of the world in the 1940s, and then led the nations they raised families, into, left a much better world than they inherited. My Grandpa would never have called himself a hero, but what he and the other men and women in service to freedom did can never be forgotten.

I often say he "invented the Internet." What I mean by that is, he would have the Yankees on TV, the Brooklyn Dodgers on a radio in the same room, and the New York Giants on the radio in the bathroom, so he always knew all 3 teams' scores, as fast as was then humanly possible, without having to change a station on any device. He never used a computer, but my mother is sure that, if he'd grown up with them, he would have loved them.

He survived the Great Depression, World War II, anti-Semitism, McCarthyism, living in New York in general, and driving a cab there. He survived living with my grandmother and raising my mother, neither of which was easy. The one thing he couldn't survive was smoking. Because it sapped his strength, he never saw the renovated Yankee Stadium in person, only on television.

He made me a Yankee Fan, and of all the people in my family, I'm easily more like him than anyone else. He lived until 1984, having told me everything he could about baseball. It never occurred to me, at the time, to ask him about anything else. But most WWII veterans didn't like talking about their service, especially the rougher parts of it. He saw so much, and I heard so little of it, until my mother started telling me stories she'd heard him tell.

Grandpa would be happy to know that, on the 120th Anniversary of his birth, the Yankees had taken 3 out of 4 from the Boston Red Sox. He would not be happy to know that it was in a new Yankee Stadium, not the one he saw being built. He certainly would not be happy to know about Donald Trump. He probably never even heard the man's name. Although Grandma, who was from one neighborhood away in Queens, lived long enough to know what a fraud he was.

Grandpa would have said he fought men like that, and certainly never voted for one. He would want us to stand up to him at every opportunity.