when you could get up close and personal

      When I was a kid in the Bronx, it was not unusual for me to see New York Yankee stars like Moose Skowron and Gil McDougald—in suits and ties—attending Sunday mass at our church, Saint Angela Merici, a short walk from the stadium, when the Yanks were in town.

      New York is like that: supersized and ready to surprise. As E.B. White once famously said, “it is not Spokane multiplied by sixty or Detroit multiplied by four.”

      New York is New York. So, it should not surprise that, thinking back on my four years at City College of New York, I encountered any number of surprising personalities—some rightfully called superstars—hanging out or making an appearance on its Harlem campus, and all without entourages, handlers or bodyguards. It was a very different world then, a world where you could get up close and personal with names you saw in the newspaper.

      Recently, I thought of the old tune “Daily News / Daily Blues” about the rightwing wet dream that the New York Daily News had been in its archconservative bad old days of the ‘50s and ‘60s when it called for “bring[ing] ]back the Hot Squat” (the death penalty) and had no use for liberals of any kind: “Civil Rights leaders are a pain in the neck; Can’t hold a candle to Chiang Kai Skek…”

      I thought the tune had been written and sung by then-famed folksinger Phil Ochs. I was wrong—it was by Tom Paxton. But it turns out Neil Offen and I did meet Phil in the City College bookstore years ago. He was sitting on a stool in the bookstore, playing the guitar, for what reason I don’t recall.

      Phil, who died by suicide way too young at age 35, will be remembered for some of the best anti-Vietnam war protest songs ever written. The two I loved best were “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” and the bitingly hilarious “Draft Dodger Rag”:

Sarge, I'm only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen
And I always carry a purse
I got eyes like a bat and my feet are flat
And my asthma's getting worse…"

      Then there was superstar Judy Garland’s superstar daughter Liza Minelli belting out show tunes during an anti-tuition rally in City’s ornate great hall.

      This was a huge deal in the mid-1960s: Facing a financial crisis, CCNY and the rest of the City University schools had voted to end the more than 100-year-old tradition of free tuition that let thousands of poorer kids (myself among them) get a first-rate college education for next to nothing. Long story short: Liza was wonderful, but there was no bucking the inevitable. (For the record: annual tuition today at what often is called “the proletarian Harvard” is around $7,300; tuition at the other Harvard is north of $92,000—per year.)

      To those of us of a certain age—and older—one of the cinema’s greatest gangsters was Edward G. Robinson, who starred in the 1931 film ‘Little Caesar.’ As cultured as his film characters were thuggish, Robinson was a CCNY alum and one time appeared on campus in the ‘60s to adoring crowds. He could not have been more gracious or accessible. I headlined the piece in the college paper we ran on his appearance “A Mellow Caesar Returns.”

      But perhaps the weirdest encounter I ever had with a celebrity at City College was when I happened upon Tiny Tim in the North Campus cafeteria.

      Tiny Tim, born Herbert Khaury, was a native New Yorker with a ukelele and a falsetto voice that he parlayed into unusual fame that saw him perform on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in, as well as the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. He was best known for singing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” but the morning I happened upon him, he was sitting at a crowded table in the CCNY cafeteria, seemingly just delighted to be the center of attention.

      The ukelele, if I remember, was nowhere in sight, or if it was, Herbert Khaury was too busy talking to be tiptoeing.

Frank Van Riper is a Washington-based documentary and fine art photographer, author and journalist who is proud and happy to have been born and raised in New York City.