Andrew cuomo has questions to answer and reasoning to provide as he decides whether to sign into law legislation amending ny pml sec 109. The amendment leaves an uncostitutional law unconstitutional.
The law also remains vague, indefinite and overly broad. The otbs of new York, public benefit corporations, cannot continue to close on roman catholic Easter Sunday, the easter sunday of pope francis in preference to the Easter Sunday of the Greek orthodox church, the Easter sunday of his all holiness bartholomew 1. Ny const art 1,sec 3 prohibits the state from expressing its religious preference. Deleting [ palm sunday] from ny pml sec 109 leaves the statute vague, indefinite, overly broad and unconstitutional. The statute also includes December 25, the only Christian holiday, that is a federal holiday. On this day you can buy and cash ny state lottery tickets except at the otbs. On this day you can play the slot machines in new York. The people of new York should be free to choose whether to work, bet and or pray on any day of the year. Andrew cuomo must provide a reasoned explanation to new York as he signs or vetoes an amendment to ny pml sec 109, a law that should not be a ny law.
- 60
- 8
Father’s Day and the Gambler of Bay Parkway
Learning a life lesson about hope from buying $1 lottery tickets and dealing with a lottery of a different sort.
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
Father’s Day always seems to bring out the maudlin in us—lots of misty-eyed recollections of baseball games and driving lessons and hours tinkering with Dad in the garage, listening to his moral teachings about life and love and how to be an upstanding citizen.
In my case there were no baseball games and we didn’t own a car, let alone a garage. As for moral teachings, my father, Leon, was a man of few words. But he did manage to impart some improbable values. The joys of gambling, for one, the importance of Lady Luck and, above all, the fearsome power of the New York State Lottery.
I learned early on to trust in the promise and possibility of a simple $1 lottery ticket.
In our native Egypt, my father had been quite the flambeur, a regular at the poker games that were all over our Cairo neighborhood. Those were small-time affairs but family lore had it that “back in the day” he had been invited to join the poker table of that inveterate gambler—and big-time cheat—King Farouk.
Egypt, old Egypt, was a gambler’s mecca. My French- and Arabic-speaking father was equally at home in the casinos, which stayed open much of the night and where the poker and baccarat tables beckoned, and at the racetrack in Alexandria where, come summer, he was a fixture, happily abandoning his family for the thrill of les courses. He had a passion for a certain Jewish jockey, betting on any horse he rode.
It was a life of pleasure, and by the 1960s, it had ended painfully for my family and the tens of thousands of Jews and foreigners forced into exile by a military dictatorship intent on imposing its austere socialist values on sweet, oddly libertine Egypt.
After being stateless refugees for a year, my family—there were six of us—landed in a staid corner of Brooklyn in 1963. There were no casinos or baccarat tables in Bensonhurst, so my father’s passion for gambling led him to an improbable outlet: a new state lottery, announced in 1966 and instituted in 1967. With its promise of immediate fortunes, the lottery captured his imagination—and mine.
Had we found a ticket out of our wretched nouveau-pauvre status?
My father certainly thought so. As his steady companion in this new land, I joined him in a monthly father-daughter ritual of purchasing a one-dollar ticket. Hand in hand, we’d walk to the bank on Bay Parkway, a colorful thoroughfare that was a hub of commerce. Under some arcane rules, the bank was among the few licensed lottery vendors.
In the bank’s airy central chamber, my father would stand aside and let me fill out the form with our name, telephone number and address. As I understood it (and I never really did) the lottery authorities were supposed to contact you if your ticket was drawn. The papers were filled with stories about people who came home to find their lives transformed after hearing from the lottery folks.
I would print our contact information in my clearest, most painstaking 10-year-old script to make sure we’d be easy to reach.
At school, I daydreamed about the magic call that would change our lives. My father approached the purchase of each ticket with such boundless optimism that it seemed impossible that we could lose. Each time that he made the modest $1 purchase he would smile and declare: “C’est le gros lot”—this is the jackpot.
And I believed him, I absolutely believed him.
On the day of the drawing, I’d run home after school expecting the wonderful news to have arrived. Then I would learn that the mailman had come and gone, and there had been no Western Union cable or congratulatory phone call—and my heart would sink. But my father didn’t even blink. The Gambler of Bay Parkway knew how to lose, accepted loss with a kind of stoic grace. He taught me to live with the expectation that, whatever disappointments life brought, the next $1 lottery would yield the promised bounty.
Within a couple of years, another lottery—the Vietnam War lottery—came to dominate our lives. My oldest brother, Cesar, was of draft age in the 1960s and lived in fear of being conscripted. He was supporting the five of us (by then my sister had moved out) working at various clerical jobs, and we shuddered at the thought that he would leave us.
My brother counted on our father to help get him deferments. Every time Cesar reported to the draft board, he took my father with him. Together, they would ride the subway to Coney Island and walk several blocks in the shadow of the amusement park to the drab structure where the board convened.
Cesar still recalls the nightmarish cast of the journey, which was always made after dark. Coney Island was going to seed, and in cold weather the landscape was impossibly bleak. Every once in a while, a gust of icy wind blew in from the ocean and my father reached for my brother, and the two trudged on together.
My father would enter the draft-board building leaning on his cane and holding on to Cesar as if for dear life. He was an arresting sight, this tall, stooped old man in slightly rumpled clothes walking slowly, painfully. That of course was the point. The draft board seemed moved—it always granted the deferment.
Then, overnight, the system changed. In 1969, the Nixon administration announced that the draft would be driven by an impartial lottery, starting in 1970. Instead of relying on a panel of stone-faced men, my brother’s fate would be left to the stars. Whether he or other young men went to Vietnam was to be determined by a lottery pegged to their birthday. Each day of the year was assigned a number. The lower the number for your birth date, the greater a person’s chance of being drafted; the higher the number, the less likely he was going to war.
My father had always believed that life was a game of chance. Now the Vietnam lottery proved it.
My brother was born in Cairo on May 7—a date that drew number 35 in the lottery and all but guaranteed he would be hustled into service. But through a fluke, Cesar’s official papers listed his birthday as May 5. Somewhere in our travels from Cairo to New York, a clerk had made an error, and the record was never amended.
Because life really was a lottery as my father had said, May 5—my brother’s fake birthday—drew No. 364. There was almost no likelihood he would be drafted.
I can still hear my father chuckling about how we had hit the jackpot. Lady Luck had finally embraced my family.
Ms. Lagnado is a reporter for the Journal and the author of two memoirs of her Egyptian-Jewish family, “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit” (Harper Perennial, 2008) and “The Arrogant Years” (Ecco, 2012).
Write to Lucette Lagnado at lucette.lagnado@wsj.com
