Update 6-7-11

Hi,

I was just telling a student that one of the nice things about being older is that time has slowed down for me again, back to the way it was when I was a kid.  Which is a gentle way of easing into the fact that I just forgot it was Monday and that I had a newsletter to edit.

From Emily Kleinman Schreiber:  On June 2nd, the Alumni Association's last meeting for the school year was at Berto's Italian Restaurant on Rockaway Avenue in Valley Stream.  A great time was had by all who attended.
    And looking to the future:  Booker Gibson Night at the Irish Coffee Pub in Islip will be on Wednesday, July 13th, starting at 6:30.

From Eric Hilton:  That was a nice story about Emily, and I hope her husband is doing well.
    Also, hearing about Joe Argenzio was great, but sad.  As I've mentioned, my wife and I visited Joe when we first discovered he was living at St. Marks Village.  He wasn’t very sure he remembered me from South, but it was a great feeling to see him and to feel like we had made his day a little brighter.  So thanks, Bill Linkner, for the update on Joe, and I hope you and your family are well. 

From Jerry Bittman:  I rarely send messages in to be posted, but after reading Bill Linkner's memo regarding Joe Argenzio, let me state this:  New York baseball fans were lucky to have Willie, Mickey, and the Duke, and South High was lucky to have had Bernie (O'Brien), Joe, and the Link.  There will never be three better Phys. Ed. teachers working under one roof.

From Zelda White Nichols, another short pet poem: 
    Not flesh of my flesh,
    Nor bone of my bone,
    But still miraculously my own.
    Never forget for a single minute;
    You didn’t grow under my heart
    But in it.

From Amy Lieberman:  Wow.  Amazing.  I must be one of "the others" Marc Jonas was thinking about when he sent Rudyard Kipling's poem, "The Power of a Dog."  We put down ours two weeks ago, and, yes, "my heart a dog did tear."

Also, happier news from Amy:  Billy Valentine and the Stuart Elster Trio will again be playing at the Casa Del Mar Hotel in Santa Monica from 7 to 11 PM on three Tuesdays in June, the 14th, the 21st, and the 28th.

And the South High Awards Assembly will be on this Wednesday night, June 8th, starting at 7 PM in South Hall.

[Rich -- Finally, a follow-up to something that arrived in many of our mailboxes almost two months ago:  a supposed note from Andy Dolich, who had reportedly been robbed in London and needed cash to get home.
    Of course, most of us dismissed the e-mail as spam and sympathized with Andy for knowing his address book had been invaded.  I always wonder if someone stumbled onto our class address blog and lifted all the addresses.  And, in forwarding the following article to us, Andy mentioned that some of his close friends considered that the note might actually be from him, which is something I hadn't thought about.]

The article:
Dolich Not Fooled by International Scam

By Dave Newhouse
Oakland Tribune 05/19/2011

EXACTLY 1,398 of Andy Dolich's closest friends or contacts received the same e-mail April 13 that he was in trouble and he desperately needed their help.  They were informed that Dolich was in London, where he had his passport and credit cards stolen, and he was seeking some "quick funds" to fly back home.  To send him the money, which he promised to pay back, he could be reached at his listed e-mail address or at a listed phone number at the "hotel's help desk."

Of course, it was a scam. Dolich deduced that quickly.  But others took the bait.  "I had a friend who was in London," said Dolich, "and who believed this e-mail had come from London, and who tried to find me to say, 'I will help you.'  Two other wealthy friends, not the type to be swayed, were going to send money.  But I'm pretty sure that some people did send money."

I knew it was a scam, too.  Why would he ask me for money?

Dolich's future son-in-law phoned him at 5 AM to inform him that his Google account has been hacked. Messages then started rolling in to Dolich, mostly by Twitter, from concerned people.  He still doesn't know if it was a one-man scheme or a group scheme, even after he investigated the scam.  "People come up with your password -- that's how they get to you," he discovered.  "If you use 'brick' and '1954,' you think, 'Who would look for that?'  But if someone's electronically looking, they can pull that down and access your account.  So the cautionary tale is change your password every once in a while."

For sports fans too young to know, Dolich was the Oakland A's marketing genius behind the clever "Billy Ball" ads of the early 1980s.  Much later, he moved across town to become president of the National Basketball Association's Warriors for nine months.  "Chris Cohan was completely out of his element as an owner in sports, as we can see by the record," Dolich said of the former Warriors owner.  "He didn't really care about his people.  He ran things in his fashion."

Dolich, 64, has had an all-encompassing sports career, employed by eight franchises in six professional sports.  "Going to work for the A's was the greatest thing that ever happened to me in sports," he said.  "Because we took something that had basically melted down -- 306,000 fans in 1979 -- and we then drew 2.9 million (in 1990).  And we had the perfect ownership group in the Bay Area in the Haases.  The absolute best."

Dolich's last Bay Area sports position was as chief operations officer of the San Francisco 49ers.  He was to sell naming rights and suites for a Santa Clara stadium, but lost favor with the team's aspiring boy wonder leader, Jed York,  "Jed is extremely capable," said Dolich, "and wants to return this team to its former glory.  But he has a significant challenge because everything in California has to be privately financed, so they're going to have to come up with about $850 million to build this stadium."

Dolich now has a consulting firm in Los Altos, but he keeps an eye on Oakland.  "I believe very strongly that there is a ballpark-stadium solution in Oakland," he said.  "And I do not believe that there will be a resolution to the current A's ownership's attempt to move the team to San Jose."

Dolich feels the San Francisco Giants have invested heavily in their San Jose minor league operation, and any potential buying out of their territorial rights in the South Bay would be too costly even for the super-wealthy A's ownership.  "I don't think the Victory Court ballpark project is going to work in Jack London Square. The funding isn't there," said Dolich.  "I'd retrofit the Coliseum -- who's to say the 49ers won't go there? -- and build a 38,000-seat site for the A's on the Coliseum site."

The space is there.  BART is there.  The freeway is there.  The parking is there.  The history is there.  What can San Jose offer that's better? 
The South '65 e-mail addresses:  reunionclass65 . blogspot . com

The South '65 photo site:  picasaweb . google . com/SouthHS65 

Please delete any spaces in links before using them.  And remember the latest update is now also posted on Facebook, at Valley Stream South High School Class of 1965 -- Discussions.


Rich