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Codger column: Summer dreams

BEVERLEA WALZ PHOTO Jules Feiffer (left) prior to a Q&A with Robert Lipsyte at the Shelter Island Public Library’s annual Book and Author Luncheon June 10 at The Pridwin.
BEVERLEA WALZ PHOTO Jules Feiffer (left) prior to a Q&A with Codger at the Shelter Island Public Library’s annual Book and Author Luncheon June 10 at The Pridwin.

With a flailing government in Washington, a furtive puppet in our congressional district and at least three first-time candidates announced for the upcoming Shelter Island elections, Codger tunes in a time when chaos seemed daunting but not overwhelming, when the barbarians were at the gates, not yet inside.

He’s nostalgic for the summer of 1977 when the Bronx was burning, the power grid faltering, there was riotous looting and a serial killer roamed the streets of the city. A lesser age of anxiety.

Perhaps Codger was more optimistic then because he was 40 years younger and knew everything, including what to do. Instead of merely thinking about visiting Lee Zeldin, Codger was one of dozens of tabloid street reporters hunting for the murderer known as Son of Sam, whose taunting letters to the police and the press revealed an unmoored mind. They were an earlier version of overnight tweets.

The country was not in great shape then either, still reeling from a ruinous war and mendacious politicians. The president and vice-president had been forced to resign. New York City was in particular financial and psychic shock. The appointee president, Gerald Ford, had refused to bail out the city, leading to the famous Daily News headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” evoked by the paper’s recent headline, “Trump to World: Drop Dead,” after the president pulled out of the Paris climate accords, following the lead of those role models Syria and Nicaragua.

On the night of July 13, 1977, Codger was having dinner with friends on the Upper West Side when the restaurant lights flickered off. Waiters brought candles. By dessert, there were crashing noises and screams up the street where a mob was ripping down the metal overhead doors of an electronics store and helping themselves to TV sets.

Codger and his friends spent the night driving around the dark, apocalyptic city. On one block, families would be carrying food through the broken windows of supermarkets (a day later, Bronx friends of Codger’s explained that they had only looted stores that had been cheating them for years). Yet on other blocks, teams of young men and women were directing traffic with flashlights. They were creating order out of anarchy.

The Son of Sam was caught on August 10 after killing six and wounding seven. He was a 24-year-old postal worker named David Berkowitz.

Codger was disappointed when he met Berkowitz two months later. The monster was a pudgy, sweet-faced young man whose eerie calm was terrifying. Codger had been smuggled into the Kings County Hospital’s locked psychiatric facility in a white doctor’s jacket to interview Berkowitz for a book.

The conversation was tense until Berkowitz noticed that Codger was gripping his pen so the point was aimed at Berkowitz’s throat. The killer asked the scribe if he was nervous. When Codger admitted that he was, Berkowitz smiled and said that he liked Codger and would be happy to cooperate on a book.

The book never happened. The city repaired itself. There was money from Washington. A Shelter Islander, Governor Hugh Carey, was a key player in the city’s recovery. And in 1978, slouching in from Queens with his Dad’s dough, a 32-year-old Donald Trump became a beneficiary of a reviving Manhattan.

By the time Codger first interviewed Trump in the mid-1980s, his giant ego and his aggressive foreign policy seemed to reveal the real estate developer as merely an entertaining, harmless oaf. He didn’t look like a monster, either.

So here we are. Sometimes, Codger thinks we’ll get through this summer, too, sometimes he wonders why this feels like it could be the end of the world. We have had bad presidents, scary relations with Russia and a divided country before — the Civil War, Vietnam? — and things didn’t totally fall apart.

Remembering the past always helps. Last Friday night, Codger visited Sylvester Manor Educational Farm for a wonderful new exhibit on “Women of the Manor,” from Grissell Brinley, who married Nathaniel Sylvester and died in 1687, to Alice Hench Ray, who married Andrew Fiske and died in 2006. Imagine what they lived through, including that Civil War.

Now it’s our turn. Codger thinks that working on affordable housing, ticks, helicopter noise and water problems, local issues we can do something about, is a positive step. As the election campaigns bloom on the Island, extreme vetting of the candidates is a duty.

There was talk of the future last Saturday at  the Pridwin, during the annual library lunch. One of the Island’s newest settlers, 88-year-old  Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize and Oscar-winning cartoonist, talked about his “dark despair” during Vietnam and his hope now.

He sees the rising energy of everyday people who will take the country back from the forces trying to control and misrule us.

March on!