Dave Spano, who is waging a rather strange and very, very steep, uphill campaign to unseat his county-exec dad, Andy, told me today that he has had a “peaceful falling out” with his primary supporter—Sam Zherka.

Zherka is the publisher of the Westchester Guardian, a free weekly newspaper he uses to drub politicians he doesn’t like, among whom Andy Spano is one. Earlier this year, Zherka enlisted Dave Spano, the incumbent’s oldest child, to appear in a series of startling cable-TV commercials that called for the abolishment of county government.

The TV spots amounted to a public debut for Dave Spano, who had previously kept such a low profile that a lot of people didn’t even know who he was.

That was for starters. With Zherka’s encouragement, Spano then announced that was going to run against his incumbent dad.

Zherka, who runs a real estate business and owns a New York City topless club, has deep pockets and could’ve helped the semi-prodigal son with the big task of gathering petition signatures to get on the November ballot.

But minutes ago, Spano called to tell me that Zherka was out of the picture. It wasn’t exactly clear why.

“I’m going to continue to seek my signatures with only volunteers,” he said. “And absolutely no money from Sam Zherka or any of those folks. I’m totally disconnected from his paper, but not in any bad way.”

Spano said he “was still going to stay in the game,”  but acknowledged that with Zherka’s help, he’ll have to hustle to get as many as 4,500 signatures before an Aug. 17 deadline.

“It may be late,” he said, “but I’m comfortable with the time frame.”

He said he has virtually no money and needs volunteers. He asked that nyone willing to help to contact him at his e-mail address: blueryder45@yahoo.com.

My guest on “High Noon” today will be Harry Stein, a first-rate writer and novelist from Hastings-on-Hudson who is fearless when it comes to his observations on American culture.

A self-described reformed hippie, Stein has used his sharp pen to poke the ribs of liberals—particularly those of the limousine-riding and eggheaded variety. As a contributing editor for the online City Journal, Stein recently took aim at President Obama and Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates for perpetuating the “discredited and deeply damaging view” that America is “fundamentally racist.”

He was of course referring to the confrontation last weekend between Gates and a white Cambridge cop at Gates’s home.  Stein’s piece suggests that Gates’s behavior shows that he is a “race-baiter.”

This will surely stir some controversy.

Tune in today at 12 noon. That’s “High Noon” at 1460 AM on WVOX. You can also listen in by logging onto www.wvox.com.

Join in the conversation, too. The phone number is 914-636-0110.

Dr. Henry Louis Gates (left), the highly respected Harvard prof may have a fence-mending beer at the White House with the Cambridge. Mass. cop who arrested him in his home last week. Let’s hope it happens.

But there was no reconciliation of that sort in a somewhat similar case involving allegations of racial profiling that happened in New Rochelle 23 years ago. The Gates contretemps reminded me of the New Rochelle incident it because the two players also happened to be a white cop and an affluent black man.

The cop was Arthur Dallas, who was the commissioner of the town of Mamaroneck police department and a controversial figure for a number of reasons, not the least of which wa that he liked to bust down doors and make arrests like he was a TV action hero.

Anyway, one day in 1986 Dallas was cruising through town when he spotted a black man driving a Rolls Royce through town streets and over the border into New Rochelle. Immediately suspicious, he followed the Rolls and called New Rochelle cops when he saw the car pull up in front of a house in the city’s affluent north end..

The man parked the car and went into the house.

Within minutes, Dallas and six uniformed officers had the house surrounded. Their guns were drawn.

Well, you can guess the ending. The “dangerous” man turned out to be the owner of the car and the house. He was a dentist by the name of Dr. William Bowles. (One account has it that the car was actually driven by Bowles’s son, but this predates our electronic archive, so I haven’t had the chance to check this out yet.)

In the end, nobody got hurt, but Dallas was embarrassed and Bowles was outraged.

Bowles ended up suing the town. I tried to reach him today but two listed phone numbers for him were no longer in service.

I left out a couple of personal notes out of today’s column on Walter Cronkite. It was merely a matter of running out of space. So, in the interest of full disclosure…

First of all, Cronkite was indirectly responsible for helping to put food on my family’s table while I was growing up. My father was a TV and screen writer who wrote some scripts for the  Twentieth Century documentary series which was on every Sunday night in the 1950s. The show used black and white newsreel footage to major historic events—stuff like the Berlin Airlift, the bombing of Hiroshima and the fall of the Russian czar. I seem to remember one piece on the Hungarian Revolution.

You get the idea.

Anyway, Cronkite was the host and narrator of the show. (This was before the days of his anchoring the CBS Evening News.) It was sponsored by Prudential Insurance and the opening credits included a photo of the Rock of Gibraltar and very portentous theme music. My father commandeered the television set every Sunday to watch Cronkite, who with his booming, authoritative voice seemed to be as imposing and unassailable as the great rock itself.

To little kids, Cronkite, with his slicked back hair and mustache, resembled another Walter who was on every Sunday night—Walt Disney.

My father also wrote for the “You Are There” series which used modern news techniques to dramatize “breaking stories” like the Boston Massacre.

My other personal connection involves Cronkite’s wife, Betsy. Afer World War II, my father-in-law worked with her at Hallmark Cards in St. Joseph, Mo. where Cronkite was born in 1916.

My mother-in-law was also a Missourian. And she always pronounced it “Mizzura,” When questioned, she would reply, “That’s the way Walter Cronkite says it.”

And that was good enough for her.

No, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t do the trick. Slavery is evidently alive and well.

The news is regularly filled with stories of people being coerced into slavery. They are domestic servants, farm and factory laborers, street beggers and prostitutes.

They all have something in common besides the obvious fact that they receive little or no remuneration for working around the clock, seven days a week. Often, they don’t get fed. Many are beaten, threatened and sexually abused.

And most are so frightened, confused and disoriented that they don’t even attempt to escape their masters.

Unlike the slaves of the old South who toiled openly in the fields and whose bondage was protected by law, today’s slaves are mostly invisibile to an apathetic public.

There are people being exploited as slaves in Westchester and other suburban enclaves, but we just don’t see them. Take the case of Joseph Yannai, a 65-year-old restaurant guide owner who was arrested last month for allegedly making a slave out of a 21-year-old Hungarian woman he hired as a personal assistant.

The woman’s alleged victimization followed a familiar pattern. She simply didn’t know what she was getting into when she was “hired.” Quickly, she discovered that her communication with the outside world would be severely limited. She was paid nothing and had no access to transportation.

Yannai was accused of using threats to coerce into giving him sexual favors.

Sadly, none of this is much of a surprise to Ron Soodalter, who, along with Kevin Bales, co-authored “The Slave Next Door,” a book (University of California Press) that examines human trafficking and slavery in modern America. It’s an eye-opener.

Soodalter will be my guest on my “High Noon” radio program, Thursday at 12 noon. That’s 1460 AM and wvox.com.

Bill “Boss” Ryan needs to go back to grammar school. Either that, or he needs to hire yet another staff specialist to clean up his syntax.

The chairman of the Westchester County recently issued a statement celebrating Gov. David Paterson’s announcement about a $500,000 affordable housing grant.

Not to be picky, but that first sentence (in bold) had us scratching our heads. It suggests that the chairman of the board is, himself, the affordable housing in question.

“As Chairman of the County Board, affordable housing for working families and seniors has been a priority. These housing rehabilitation grants from the state will ensure that low-income individuals, seniors and people with disabilities will not be locked out of the American dream of living in a home of their own.”

The “As chairman” beginning to the press release is boilerplate pol speak and a little pompous. It reminds me of the mayor of Munchkin Land who summons his mighty authority by declaring, “As mayor of this city…”

The Boss can keep that beginning. But here’s a suggested change which I present free of charge.

“As Chairman of the County Board, I’ve always made affordable housing for working families and seniors a priority.”“

Luxury hotels in the suburbs are part of a bland, transient world of the rich, who come and go and are mostly unseen.

Because these hotels sprouted up in the post-war expansion years when big businesses fled the cities to set up sprawling corporate parks along the interstates, they haven’t been around long enough to have a history. They do provide the stuff of legend, of myth. They have no eccentricity.

They are dull.

Westchester County has more than 30 hotels offering more than 5,580 rooms—and until last weekend’s  gruesome death of Ben Novack at the Rye Town Hilton, not one of them, to my knowledge, has been the scene of a murder. The proprietors might not appreciate this now, but Novack’s unfortunate demise, may give the hotel some character.

Novack’s notoriety as the high-flying “Prince of the Fontainbleu” gives this particular case just the right amount of tabloid-style interest to last forever. It’s the stuff of one of those theatrical “Murder Mystery Weekends” that are popular with bed-and-breakfast tourists. That Novack claimed in divorce papers seven years ago that his wife tried to bump him off then, only thickens this plot.

Older and more famous hotels around the world have actually cashed in on the bizarre, tabloid-style happenings in their establishments. Indeed, with time, a hotel murder can be a marketing tool.

Remember Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”? There was one room in the big creepy hotel where no one was allowed to enter:

Room 237.

Re

The mysterious Rye Town Hilton homicide was the third murder case in Rye Brook’s brief history. I remember the first one, which was in 1988.

At the time, I was an editor working out of Gannett’s Sound Shore bureau in New Rochelle. We got a telephone call from a local funeral home. The undertaker had an obituary for a 79-year-old woman and they wanted it printed in the next day’s paper. They said the woman died “after a short illness.”

Uh, it wasn’t exactly so.

It turned out she was bludgeoned to death by her landlord, who wanted her out of her apartment. I seem to recall that the obit ran as if she had peacefully died in her sleep.

Somebody lied, either the cops or the funeral home…or both.  I never did get to the bottom of it, but I do know that the police chief at the time was hard to deal with.

Rye Brook was a new municipality, too, carved out of Rye Town in 1982, so maybe there was an element of inexperience at work. In any event, and for whatever reason, they wanted the woman’s death out of the public eye.

Not so with the case of Ben Novack, Jr., the son of the founder of Miami’s famed Foutainbleau Hotel, who was found dead in his hotel room over the weeked. The Hilton was turned into a crime scene. A couple next door to Novack’s room was told to leave. And a press conference was held.

What a difference in sophistication from 21 years ago.

My wife told me I was nuts when I recently suggested to her that grossly overweight people ought to be taxed as a means to curb the epidemic of obesity in America.

Every year, before the April 15 tax deadline every American would have to report to a federal weigh-in station where inspectors would record the weight and body/mass index of every adult citizen. A tax of, say, $10, would then be levied on every pound in excess of the official “acceptable” weight.

I admit it was an insensitive and even cruel idea. But it was born out of frustration. Everyone agrees that the obesity problem is serving to bankrupt the health care system, but it seems that few solutions take into account personal responsibility.

Instead, we hear of things like state “soda taxes” and calorie-count menus that unfairly affect everyone—consumers and businesses alike. My idea was merely meant to apply an incentive to those who have the great need for a push…and a penalty tax would undoubtedly change bad behavior, i.e. eating too much fattening food. Money talks.

But I realize that an obesity tax would probably create more problems than it would solve. Individual medical issues alone render the idea stupid, either as serious policy or satire.

Nevertheless, I think I’m on to something when it comes to tying financial incentives to the goal of a thinner, healthier America.

So here’s another proposal. Let’s totally revamp physical education in the schools. I say gym classes be fully restored to three-day-a-week programs that are geared to total fitness.

Gym teachers will be forced to spend more time on the physical development of ALL students rather than concentrating their efforts only on the superior varsity athletes.

I suspect that over the last several years, gym teachers have strayed from the mission of providing a tough, but healthy curriculum of physical education. It seems that in too many high schools, there has arisen a phenomenon of the cult hero coach whose main goal is to build super teams that win division titles and make headlines.

This is all well and good, but it loses sight of one important thing,. Their job is not to become imitation Big Ten coaches and cult heroes; their job is to  educate.

I propose that gym classes be turned into brief, boot camp sessions—with running and calisthenics. Fitness tests would be administered on a yearly basis and grades would be assigned.

Those tests would be just as important in assessing the performance of a school as reading and math tests.

And here’s where the monetary incentive idea comes in. Everybody complains how school superintendents are overpaid and laden with perks. Right? Well, under my war on obesity,  a significant portion of superintendents’ pay would be tied to how well they succeed at getting their students in shape.

The measurement of that success would be the fitness test scores.

Somewhat overlooked in the coverage of Gov. David Paterson’s selection of Richard Ravitch to the number two post of lieutenant governor is the fact that Ravitch was the architect of the controversial bailout plan for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority—and that a big part of the plan was a payroll tax for the 12-county region.

Hardly anyone in county government anywhere was in favor of the payroll tax which affects businesses, nonprofits, schools, and local governments. Even Westchester County Executive Andy Spano was against it. The state Legislature approved the tax in May to help close the MTA’s $2.3 billion budget gap.

Fares also went up in a compromise deal. Last month, Metro-North fares rose 10 percent.

But the payroll tax—34 cents for every $100 in payroll is a killer because it means that property taxes will go up as a result.

Just how bad is the payroll tax? Rockland County Executive Scott Vanderhoef minced no words the other day when he said: “This is the worst piece of legislation I have ever seen out of Albany.”

Thank you, Dick.