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05:24 - Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005
true story
True story: Back in 1996, for various reasons mainly having to do with impecuniosity, I was forced to commute into New York City via Hoboken. One unusually raw October morning, stepping off the train, I couldn't help but notice a well-dressed balding man in his forties escorting a four-year-old girl trough the station and to the PATH train. The girl was beaming and full of energy, wearing her finest Laura Ashley dress and holding her daddy's hand as they went to work together. It was a sweet little spectacle, made even sweeter by my return trip from town, wherein I saw the same father-and-daughter team. This time, the chattering girl I had seen that very same morning was fast asleep on her father's shoulder. He stepped gingerly onto his train and carefully laid her across a two-seater and stood up for the duration of his trip, so that she might continue to nap.

And that would have been that, had police not, once week later, discovered an oil drum left on the side of Route 46 in Mount Olive, New Jersey, that contained the body parts of an adult male and a small child. The bodies had been dismembered and doused in lye and hydrochloric acid, so they were fairly decomposed by the time of discovery, making identification almost impossible. Fortunately for the police, a small swatch of a Laura Ashley dress had somehow avoided destruction. As it turned out, I was not the only person in the train station that day to have noticed the father taking his daughter to work; at least seven people who had seen the two came forward and specifically mentioned the little girl's pretty dress.

After a brief investigation it transpired that the father was some sort of crooked C.P.A., who maintained an office in Manhattan but did the majority of his work for the Terzarima crime family of Manalapan, New Jersey. On the evening of their disappearance, he had apparently driven by the home of Al "The Fireman" Lighieri, a low-level boss in the family, to drop off some documents. Unfortunately for the accountant and his daughter, at the very moment he drove up Ligheri was busy torturing a member of the rival Boccacio family with an electric cattle prod and a tire iron. Lighieri, panicked that the accountant might implicate him in this activity were he ever charged for it, made quick work of both the hapless number cruncher and his adorable daughter. Had he chosen a better hiding place for the bodies than a major highway in a populated area of the state, it is likely that they would never have been found.

The arrest and prosecution of Lighieri seemed set to grip the attention of the tri-state area for weeks, with nonstop radio, newspaper and television coverage a near certainty. However, on October 26th in the Bronx, 56,375 people watched the New York Yankees defeat the Atlanta Braves for their first World Series title in seventeen years. In the midst of the celebrations, parades and everything else that occurred surrounding the victory, the case of the accountant and his daughter faded in the public consciousness. Lighieri cut a deal with prosecutors to turn evidence against higher-ups in his family in an unrelated drug case and was put under witness protection and relocated, some say to Arizona, without ever being tried. The little girl was buried alongside her father at Greenwood Cemetery in Boonton, New Jersey. Her widowed mother still appears there every day to place a flower on their grave.

On this day in 1954, actress Marilyn Monroe and Yankees slugger Joe DiMaggio were divorced.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT BORN:
October 27, 1858

Theodore Roosevelt, the future 26th president of the United States, is born in New York City. A dynamic and energetic politician, Theodore Roosevelt is credited with creating the modern presidency.

As a young Republican, he held a number of political posts in New York in the 1880s and 1890s, and was a leader of reform Republicans in the state. Appointed assistant secretary to the U.S. Navy in 1897, he vehemently advocated war with Spain. When the Spanish-American War began in 1898, he helped Col. Leonard Wood organize and lead the "Rough Riders," a volunteer cavalry that became famous for its contribution to the United States victory at the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba. The publicity-minded Roosevelt rode his military fame to the New York governor's seat in 1898 and to the U.S. vice presidency in 1900.

In 1901, President William McKinley was assassinated, and Roosevelt, at 43 years old, became the youngest president ever to assume the office. He stamped the presidency with a vitality that delighted most Americans and was elected to a second term in 1904. Abroad, Roosevelt was an expansionist who asserted his executive powers to defend U.S. interests. At home, he sought to balance the interests of farmers, workers, and the business class. He insisted on a strong navy, encouraged the independence of Panama and the construction of the Panama Canal, promoted the regulation of trusts and monopolies, and set aside land for America's first national parks and monuments. In 1906, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation of the negotiations that ended the Russo-Japanese War.

In 1912, three years after finishing his second term, Roosevelt ran for president again as the candidate of the new Progressive Party, which was made up reform-minded Republicans dissatisfied with the Republican Party leadership. Challenging President, President William Howard Taft, he campaigned on his "Square Deal" platform of social reform. In November, the divided Republican Party was defeated by Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

In the last few years of his life, Roosevelt became a vocal advocate of the U.S. entrance into World War I and even sought to win a commission to lead a U.S. Army division in Europe. President Wilson declined, and after the war Roosevelt opposed Senate ratification of Wilson's League of Nations. On January 6, 1919, Roosevelt died at Sagamore Hill, his estate overlooking New York's Long Island Sound. The tropical diseases he contracted during his many travels had likely caught up with him. He was 60 years old.



QUOTE OF THE DAY:
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
- AJ Liebling
WORD OF THE DAY:
mawkish MOCK-ish, adjective:
1. Sickly or excessively sentimental.
2. Insipid in taste; nauseous; disgusting.

The movie's attempts to connect these out-of-body experiences with the '60s ethos of consciousness expansion are so forced that the transcendent, feel-good leaps of faith with which the story culminates seem mawkish and unearned.
--Stephen Holden, " 'Eden': Out of Step at a Prep School as a New Age Dawns." New York Times, April 3, 1998

Philadelphia Inquirer dismissed it as "a terrible play, a hopeless jumble of juvenile humor and mawkish sentimentality."
--Peter Applebome, "Blasphemy? Again? Somebody's Praying for a Hit." New York Times, October 18, 1998

Joe DiMaggio, who died this year to often mawkish eulogies and overwrought sociology, was an ancestor of the current four: driven, selfish, unidimensional in his playing days.
--Robert Lipsyte, "Time for Sports Heroes to Start Acting in a Heroic Way." New York Times, August 22, 1999

CAT OF THE DAY:

COMIX:

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