Columns
Rhode Island Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed did excellent work last year in helping reform the state pension system, fending off a financial disaster and bringing the state much-needed positive press. This year, she is admirably looking at improving our disastrous business climate.
But if she wants to signal that Rhode Island is ready to move in a new direction, away from a legacy of special-interest pandering and self-serving corruption that scares off business, she must deal with the festering wound in her own Senate leadership.
Senate Majority Leader Dominic Ruggerio, employed by an arm of the Laborers union, continues to employ Stephen Iannazzi at a whopping salary of $88,112, plus benefits. Mr. Iannazzi is the son of Donald Iannazzi, business manager for Local 1033, the Laborers’ International Union affiliate that employs the senator’s own lawyer son, Charles Ruggerio.
Mr. Ruggerio gave Stephen Iannazzi, then a 25-year-old Rhode Island College dropout, a job that was never posted, and paid him a staggering $50,126 more in taxpayer money than Mr. Iannazzi made in his previous Senate job.
Public outrage over this egregious conflict of interest last year was not enough to persuade Ms. Paiva Weed to rein in Mr. Ruggerio. Evidently, Ms. Paiva Weed hoped...
Reading about last week’s Superior Court battle over health insurance for city retirees in Providence, I could not help but wonder: What is the end game for the public-employee unions?
We have run out of money. Rhode Island confronts a massive deficit; its cities and towns are beginning to go under; its overall taxes are among the highest in America; it has lost a staggering 9,000 jobs since August; and people are fleeing it faster than any state in the union.
How much more can the private sector take? At what point will the host, drained of blood, go into shock and die? What is the end game for union leaders? To simply bankrupt our state and escape to a plush retirement in Florida?
I’m not being facetious. It’s hard to understand how Rhode Island can remain viable if they get their wishes. It’s no longer politics; it’s math.
Consider last week’s proceedings.
Members of the Providence Retired Police & Firefighters Association went to court to try to block the city’s plan to move retirees from free family lifetime Blue Cross coverage to the Medicare system, the one that covers us lesser mortals.
That is part of a desperate struggle by Providence to stay afloat. It...
By EDWARD ACHORN
ScrippsNews
Friday, April 20, 2007
This time of year always brings to mind the valuable lesson I learned at the tender age of 15: If you’re going to play hooky, you might not want to do it in front of thousands of people on opening day.
The Red Sox are the passion play of my life, or at least the tragedy with deeply religious undertones. My addiction to their ups and downs has been unrelenting since 1967, when, at age 10, I fell in love with the Cinderella team everyone remembers.
I’ve been at Fenway Park for moments of truly epic significance: Jim Lonborg’s 1-hitter in the ’67 World Series; Pudge Fisk’s waved-fair home run in the ’75 Series; Carl Yastrzemski’s 3,000 hit. As a fan of the star-crossed Crimson Hose, I have suffered the tortures of the damned, of course. But my shattered heart has always managed to mend itself, magically, in time for spring training. To read more, click here
We keep hearing, in this age of microscopic attention spans and digital addiction, that the printed word is doomed. Someone forgot to tell the 130,000 people who thronged the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the UCLA campus April 24-25.
What I saw at the festival was love in bloom. In Southern California weather — sunny, mid-70s, little humidity, a caressing breeze carrying the scent of blossoming flowers — beaming book lovers crowded around white caravan tents on the grounds. They listened to music, attended panel discussions and stood in line to meet their favorite authors and get their books autographed.
Publisher and writer Dave Eggers set the tone for the weekend’s happiness with a distinctly contrarian analysis of the future of the printed word. “It’s the best time in the history of the printed word to be a publisher or a writer,” he said. “People want to declare the death of the printed word. It’s always our tendency to assume something is dying. It’s a fun thing to do, but it doesn’t always make sense.”
That may be wishful thinking. But he may be right.
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In the archives of the Armed Forces Institutes of Pathology, in Washington, is a remarkable set of 1889 images labeled, “Hands of an ex-professional baseball player.” The photographs of this man’s broken, mangled, disjointed and deformed fingers are powerful testimony to the brutality of major-league baseball as it was once played: barehanded.
They are my favorite pictures in my new book, “Fifty-nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had” (Smithsonian/HarperCollins), because they speak eloquently of a time and place, post-Civil War America, where winning was a serious matter, and people had to be tough and resourceful to survive. That included major-league ballplayers.
None was tougher than Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn, who in 1884 pitched for the Providence Grays of the National League, then baseball’s premier circuit.
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It’s around noon, on a gloriously warm, sunny, late-winter day that sings of the coming baseball season. I am standing on the quiet corner of Messer and Willow streets, in Providence’s West End, while filthy plastic bags and scraps of paper scurry across the intersection in a stiff March breeze.
The occasional customer strolls in and out of an orange-coated grocery on the first floor of a triple-decker, casting puzzled glances at the man biding his time in the black sunglasses and dark business suit. This neighborhood has its share of historic homes, aluminum siding and street gangs.
YOU CAN READ all you want about major-league baseball in the early days. But you get more of a sense of it standing in the outfield at McCoy Stadium on a blistering hot Sunday morning listening to the zip and smack of a hard baseball slapping the bare hands of Gil Faria during his warm-up tosses.
“You get used to it,” he says with a smile.
WHEN I WAS A KID, many Americans still thought Abner Doubleday had invented baseball on a meadow in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839. (That’s why the Baseball Hall of Fame is located there, alongside “Doubleday Field.”)
Doubleday was a Union general who fired the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter, which makes him something of an American hero. But the whole idea that he invented baseball is preposterous. His many letters make no reference to such a role. Nor does his obit in The New York Times. He was attending West Point at the time he was supposedly in Cooperstown, handing down the sacred rules.
