When The GOP Ruled
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- August
- 14
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.”
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 12:48 pm by Phil Reisman.
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Phil Reisman is a veteran journalist and native of Westchester County. He began his career in 1977 as the head copy boy of a startup New York City newspaper that quickly went belly up. Reisman was not to blame for the newspaper's failure, or so he claims.
