If you haven’t noticed already, we’ve added a new gimmick to the blog. We’re podcasting past programs of my “High Noon” radio show on WVOX-1460 AM.
Two have already been set up (Look to the right)—interviews with former New York City Mayor Ed Koch and sportswriter Maury Allen on the death of Yankee great Phil Rizzutto. More will be added over time.
Sorry about the commercials, they’re included. You can probably jump over them.
Also: I’m off for the mountains upstate and where I’ll be going ther ewill be no phones, no TV and no Internet access. That means this blog will be on another hiatus for a week or so.
Until then, see ya in the funny pages.

The war between the free weekly newspaper, The Westchestr Guardian, and Yonkers Mayor Phil Amicone is getting more interesting by the minute.

The mayor, or somebody in his administration, ordered the confiscation of as many as 56 Guardian news racks on the grounds that the blue, plastic boxes were obstructing the city’s sidewalks. The paper is suing Amicone in federal court in White Plains.

Now we hear that Gene Smith, a Guardian employee, was given a summons by Yonkers police for the act of putting the papers in the racks. The paper says that Smith was threatened with arrest if he continued to “distribute” the paper. If this is true, Yonkers is looking more and more like East Berlin before the wall was torn down.

Smith is due to appear in Yonkers City Court today at 1 p.m.

Lately I’ve been going crazy over the haphazard system of billing water users in Yonkers.

In my regular print and online column, I’ve tried to explain why rate payers are getting “hosed” with outrageously high bills—that it’s the city’s catching up to what’s actually owed after years and years of only estimating the bills. People who may have been billed, say, $40 or $50 biannually, were suddenly shocked with “actual” bills of several hundred or thousands of dollars.

This is bad enough. But since I started writing about this, I’ve gotten a number of calls and e-mails from people who have reported something that makes this SNAFU even more disturbing.

And that is, if you continually harrangue the city water department about your bill, they will arbitrarily knock a few bucks off the bill, presumably to get you off their backs. For example, a widow on a fixed income told me how upset she was to get a bill for about $480, and after complaining about it to officials they “discounted” her by $40. She had no idea how they arrived at that number and though she still thought her bill was too high, she finally caved in and paid the lower amount.

This throws the whole system into question. What about people who don’t fight the bill. Are they paying too much?

Are municipal rates merely negotiable starting points and who’s making these decisions?

But that’ not all. A lawyer told me that he did a closing for a client who was selling a house in Yonkers. The title report said there was a lien for unpaid water for more than $5,000. He told his client to get a reading and it came to $170! How can there be such a discrepancy?
Worse than that, it turned out the man overpaid his real estate taxes and the city wouldn’t credit him the overpayment but told him to fill out a form and wait to get the money refunded.

This is why the city ought to be audited.

Today’s column was about Steven Tyler, the repitilian front man for the super group Aerosmith, who more than 40 years ago attended Roosevelt High School in Yonkers.

Tyler in those days went by the name Tallarico. He was expelled from Roosevelt for smoking pot.
A number of readers remembered Tyler’s Roosevelt days, among them Larry Feldman.

Feldman recalled that Tyler played the drums in the high school marching band and was frequently late for rehearsals, or just never showed up. The band director angrily told him that he would never amount to anything in life.

After he was kicked out of school, Tyler walked away with the band’s bass drum…a pretty distinctive instrument because it had the school’s Indian mascot painted on its side. He revelaed the theft in the Aerosmith autobiography, “Walk This Way.” The book also recounts how Tyler once walked down Central Park Avenue in Yonkers in the nude. What a kook!

Tallarico-Tyler “was a real chracter and true original,” Feldman said. “Lookig back, I realize how lucky I was to be in that band room with him at Roosevelt.”

Tomorrow’s radio guest on “High Noon” will be Maury Allen, author and former sports writer of the New York Post. We’re going to talk about Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee great who died Tuesday at the age of 89.

Allen covered the Yankees when Rizzuto announced the games for WPIX-TV. Like everybody else, Allen loved the “Scooter” and has great memories of the man.

So tune into tomorrow’s program at on WVOX—1460 on your AM dial. Or listen online by logging onto www.wvox.com.

Need I tell you what time the show begins? Twelve noon, of course.

UPDATE: Here’s the full podcast of the show:

Phil “Scooter” Rizzuto, the Hall of Fame shortstop and long-time broadcaster for the New York Yankees died today at age 89, and this makes me sad. Holy cow.

I loved the Scooter.

But I never saw him play. My memory of him will always be as an announcer—funny, eccentric, happy-go-lucky and an unabashed Yankee cheerleader, a “homer” to be sure, but an endearing one.

Anyone who lived through the Yankees’ bleak years of the late 60s and early 70′, the so-called “Horace Clarke Era,” named after a mediocre second baseman on the team, remembers how Rizzuto always kept the faith. He was always light-spirited even when the team stunk, and if events on the field got even too much for him to stomach, (I’ll never forget his disgust when a journeyman third baseman by the name of Rich McKinney made three errors in one inning) he would just start reading birthday messages or something.

The Scooter drew on all the baseball cliches—”ducks on the pond,” “deuces are wild,” “dog days of August,” etc. but they never seemed tired coming from him. By to mid to late August, he would invariably remark on the mathematical reality of how hard it was at that point for a slumping batter to appreciably lift his batting average.

I don’t know why I remember that. Maybe there was a subtle message about life in general behind it.

He was a little guy, and in the pre-steroid era, Rizzuto always said that baseball was one of the few professional sports a little guy could play and be good at. This was always encouraging to skinny dreamers like me.

He had hilarious fears and phobias. Lightning, for example. Whenever there was a thunderstorm at the stadium, Rizzuto would duck for cover.
Grudges, too—Scooter never forgot a guy who spiked him at second base. But he was never malicious about i either. He always funny and self-effacing when he brought up the likes of such lifelong bete noires as Eddie Stanky and Enos Slaughter.

He could be unintentionally hilarious, maybe even insensitive at times. But he never meant to hurt anyone.

When Jose Feliciano got up to sing the National Anthem before a game, the Scooter announced, “Jose Feliciano, blind folk singer. Doesn’t let it affect him, though.”

Or when one of the Popes died, he said, “Tough break about the Pope. Hope it doesn’t put a damper on today’s Yankee game.”

Ah Scooter. There’s no lightning up there in Baseball Heaven.

I recently made a prediction that Westchester District Attorney Janet DiFiore would soon leave the Republican Party and become a Democrat.

Well, that hasn’t happened yet, but I urge all political junkies to stay tuned.
The Democrats are the ruling party in this county, but it wasn’t always that way. From a political standpoint, Westchester was once synonymous with bedrcok Republicanism.

I was reminded of this fact recently when I came upon a short, somewhat humorous piece in an out-of-print collection of anecdotes. This particular anecdote was true and was apparently told and re-told by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who loved it.

According to Roosevelt, there was a commuter from Westchester—”a Republican stronghold”—who, every time he came to his train station would hand the newsboy 25 cents for a copy of the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune. He would quickly scan the front page of the paper and then hand it back to the kid before rushing for his train.

He did this over and over again. Every day, he would buy the paper, look only at Page One and then hand it back.

Finally one day, the boy asked him why he only looked at the front page. And the customer answered, “I’m interested in the obituaries.”

Puzzled, the kid said, “But they’re on Page 24 and you never look at them.”
To which the man replied, “Boy, the son of a bitch I’m interested in will be on Page One.”

Bill O’Shaughnessy, the impresario behind Whitney Radio WVOX-AM and WVIP-FM), is given to flights of fancy. Here’s an extreme example—a letter he would like Barack Obama to write to Caroline Giuliani, the teenage daughter of Rudy Giuliani.
Caroline became the latest version of an “Obama Girl” by telling the world on her My Space page that she supported the handsome senator from Illinois for president rather than her father.

O’Shaughnessy is a Rudy Man.
The following is the full text of his fantasy letter:

“DEAR CAROLINE GIULIANI:

“I was so pleased to hear reports of your enthusiasm for my candidacy … and I want you to know — if they are accurate – that I’m tremendously flattered and grateful.

“But on reflection, I would respectfully urge you to put your support squarely behind your father in his own quest for the Republican nomination.

“I’m indeed fortunate that so many young people have rallied to our cause, but in your special case, I hope you won’t mind if I tell you of my own personal feeling that your energy and confidence really should properly go to your Dad.

“As the father of two somewhat younger daughters, (Malia is eight and Sasha is six!) I think I’m only trying to say, however inartfully, that although your support would mean a great deal to me, it would mean a lot more to your Father.

“He is a great man. And I’m sure he loves you.

“Yours,

Barack Obama”

I was driving in my car yesterday at around 6 p.m. and turned on the FAN, the all-sports radio talk show just in time to hear “Phil from Westchester,” (No, it wasn’t me) give some guff to the linguistically-challenged host, Chris “Mad Dog” Russo. I should say Phil TRIED to give Russo guff because he was cut off in mid-guff, which is usually the case with callers who, using logic and common sense, are about to score argumentative points against the aforesaid host.
Phil was apparently reacting to Russo’s criticism of a 29-year-old Yankee fan by the name of Walter Kowalczyk, who caught Alex Rodriguez’s 500th homerun ball last weekend.
Kowalczyk reportedly is willing to sell the cherished ball to A-Rod at the right price. Some speculate he could get up to $150,000 for it.
Russo said Kowalczyk ought to just give the ball to A-Rod, suggesting that to do otherwise would be a demonstration of greed. Giving the ball to Rodriguez, the “dawg” continued, would allow A-Rod to in turn, donate it to The Hall of Fame where “we can all see it.”
“Is it always about the money?” Russo lamented.
What a crock.

First of all, I don’t give a damn about ever seeing the ball. It’s not a big deal. Second, Russo knows as well as anyone that it is “about the money” especially when the subject is A-Rod, a man who makes $25 million a year and is about to renegotiate his contract to make even more millions.
A-Rod is the richest and arguably greediest athelete on the planet—he can afford to throw a few bucks ot a poor working shlub like Kowalczyk.

I have it on good authority that Westchester DA Janet DiFiore, the last Republican “star” in the county, will soon announce that she is leaving the GOP to become a Democrat.
Insiders tell me DiFiore will follow the exit strategy already employed this summer by Yonkers Assemblyman Mike Spano, who has long seen the writing on the wall: Moderate Republican candidates are outnumbered in Westchester and in New York state and are held hostage by third party crackpots who run the Indepedence and Conservative parties.
DiFiore can probably always win as a Republican—she’ll get plenty of cross-over votes from Democrats—but from a purely strategic point of view, it’s understandable that she would extricate herself from the corrupt power brokers, who “sell” third party endorsements.
The shame is that Westchester is now virtually a one-party county—and gee, don’t you feel great that the Democrats are running everything?
It’s not clear when DiFiore will jump ship, but I’d say this is a good week to do it. It’s the slowest news week of the year. People are on vacation. No one is paying attention.
Don’t be surprised if she makes the announcement on Friday at 5 p.m., just when we’re all thinking about that first beer!