From the Jets Bears Game 11/19/2006

A Tradition Like Many Others’

This article reminds me of what my father and I do every Jets game as well. Ok, we haven't been doing this since the Shea Days like them, but we have been pretty consistent since 1998. I think we missed ONE game (Buffalo 2004).

I drive from PA (1:45min one way) to sit in a parking lot for three hours thinking about the yard work I didn't finish the day before. You see, it doesn't matter... I've learned that the JETS take priority. It will be 1-2 more years when my son will be old enough to join us, and that in itself will start a new tradition. I like the quote about getting his ashes spread in 4E. So what do you think Dad, put ours in 13C?

A Tradition Like Many Others’
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
East Rutherford, N.J.
New York Times

ON a crisp Sunday morning last month, Kevin Carpenter and a dozen friends and relatives gathered in the parking lot at Giants Stadium to prepare themselves for a Jets game, just as they have done for the last 22 years.

Mr. Carpenter, 50, had made the chili the night before, then left that morning at 8:30 — four and a half hours before kickoff — for the 90-minute drive from his home in Lake Ronkonkoma, N.Y. Traveling with him were his wife, Deirdre, and the youngest of their four children, 7-year-old Devin, whose face they had painted green and white.

The Carpenters parked in Section 4E, beneath darkening clouds and spiraling footballs. They set up a table and chairs and fired up the grill a few feet in back of the family S.U.V., the one with the plates that read OVRDUE. But these are not vanity plates; they’re more like humility plates. For Jets fans, it has been a long time since 1969, the year their team went to, and won, its only Super Bowl.

“A lot of years, a lot of crazy games and crazy weather,” said Jeremiah Suppes, 65, a retired New York City police detective who drove in from Seaford, N.Y., with the youngest of his three sons, Michael, 36, to join the Carpenter tailgate party. “I have some great memories.”

And the ticket stubs to prove it.

“Take a look at these,” Mr. Suppes said, reaching into the pocket of a bright-green down vest with a fading Jets logo on the chest and pulling out a stack of yellowing stubs that went as far back as 1970, the year he became a Jets season ticket holder.

Mr. Carpenter got his season ticket in the late ’70s. He met Mr. Suppes through mutual friends who all agreed there was really only one proper way to spend an early Sunday: eating, drinking and talking football in parking lots.

“Tailgating at Jet games is a priority,” said Mr. Carpenter, an administrator for the Commack School District, who wore a Jets safari hat and a No. 79 jersey with “M. Powell” across the back (Marvin Powell was an All-Pro offensive tackle in the early ’80s).

Mr. Carpenter’s wife knows all about priorities.

“We cut short our honeymoon in Cancún to make it to a Jets game on time,” she said. “We took the six-day package instead of the full week.”

The Carpenters and the Suppeses are part of a Long Island group whose numbers can swell to 100 or more on any given Sunday and who have been tailgating at Jets games since 1984, the year the team left Shea Stadium for the Meadowlands.

Through rain and snow and heartbreaking losses, Carpenter and company have not lost their enthusiasm for tailgating or for football, which one member of the group, Barry Chapman, a 61-year-old hospital administrator from Bethpage, described as “two separate events.”

“We come out here for this,” said Mr. Chapman, who is Mr. Suppes’s cousin, pointing to the hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on the grill (he has been known to bring venison in hunting season) and to his fellow tailgaters, who were sipping wine, beer or something stronger while sitting in beach chairs.

“But we go in there for that,” he continued, pointing to the Jets banners hanging from Giants Stadium, where his favorite team was a few hours away from a stirring victory over the Detroit Lions.

Michael Suppes, who followed his father into the New York Police Department, said that Jet-setting at the Meadowlands had led him to miss a number of family functions over the years and often prevented him from making significant Sunday contributions to his other home team.

After a late afternoon game, the return ride to Seaford can be roughly three hours — twice as long as the ride in — leaving Mr. Suppes just enough time to kiss his wife, Deanna, and their 4-year-old daughter, Ciara, goodnight. Then it’s time to crawl into bed, pray for the Jets and go to sleep.

“I remember my dad taking me to Jets games at Shea Stadium when I was a kid, and now we’re together again in New Jersey,” he said. “Anywhere the Jets are, we are.”

Though the team has only once rewarded the Suppeses’ loyalty with a National Football League championship, Michael said that huddling with friends and family — his two brothers, Stephen, 45, and Jeremiah Jr., 38, had to miss the game against the Lions — was motivation enough to keep crossing the Hudson.

“Getting together with everyone is just a lot of fun, a lot of laughs,” he said. “There’s so much work to do at home, but when I come here, I forget about all of that.”

As he spoke, Michael Suppes spotted young Devin Carpenter, who was wearing a No. 87 Laveranues Coles jersey and tossing a football around. Mr. Suppes raised his hands to show that he was open, then hauled in a pass that was on the money.

“You know what?” he said, smiling. “I can always clean the yard next week.”

As game time approached, the tailgaters agreed that if the food tasted good on Sunday afternoons, it tasted even better on those rare Monday nights when the Jets played at home.

“Ahh,” Mr. Chapman said, toasting a lamppost. “There’s nothing so romantic as to be eating lobster under the sodium lights.”

Although members of the group have tailgated together on the road — before Jets games in Miami, Indianapolis and New Orleans, for instance — they have one city they still hope to visit.

“I want to tailgate in the city that hosts the Super Bowl that the Jets are in,” Mr. Carpenter said. “I was 13 years old when we won it last, so wherever it is, whenever it is, I’m going.”

With kickoff less than a half-hour away, the winds started picking up, the sun hid behind some clouds and the temperature dropped. The group had made quite a dent in its bottle of “Jets juice” — vodka turned bright green with food dye.

One event was winding down. The other, equally important, was about to begin.

“You know, when you add it all up, this tailgating thing doesn’t make much sense,” Mr. Carpenter said. “We drive for hours just to sit in a parking lot, sometimes in the freezing cold and rain and snow. But I love doing it, because I love the Jets and I love getting together with friends.

“I told my wife that when I die, I want my ashes spread out right here — in Section 4E.”

Hungarian soccer great Ferenc Puskas dead at 79

Posted From ESPN

BUDAPEST, Hungary -- Ferenc Puskas, who captained the Hungarian national teams of the 1950s and led Real Madrid to three European Cup titles, died Friday at 79.

Considered one of the all-time greats of world soccer, Puskas died in a Budapest hospital from respiratory and circulatory failure, family spokesman Gyorgy Szollosy said.

Puskas had been hospitalized for six years with Alzheimer's disease and was being treated for a fever and pneumonia in recent days. He had been in intensive care since September.

Nicknamed the "Galloping Major" in reference to his army rank, Puskas scored 84 goals in 85 matches for Hungary between 1945 and 1956. The stocky, left-footed forward guided the "Magical Magyars" to an Olympic gold medal in 1952 and to the final of the 1954 World Cup, where they lost to West Germany.

He starred in two of the most famous games in European soccer history -- scoring twice in Hungary's stunning 6-3 upset over England at Wembley Stadium in 1953, and scoring four goals in Real Madrid's 7-3 win over Eintracht Frankfurt in the 1960 European Cup final.

In 1999, Puskas was voted the sixth-best player of the 20th century, behind Pele, Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, Alfredo Di Stefano and Diego Maradona.

The Budapest stadium was renamed Ferenc Puskas Stadion in 2002.

Sparta New Jersey

Having been raised in Sparta NJ, I periodically search the Internet for links and information on what is happening in my old town. I found these links on Sparta NJ:

• Mayor Audio
• My Sparta
• A 10 Minute Film on Sparta

Ishkie's WWII Drawings from 1945

WWII - Anthony D's Journal

David - Soccer 2006

Woman Charged with Getting Painkillers Illegally

Thursday, November 9, 6:17 p.m.
Story by: WNEP


A woman from Lackawanna County is accused of getting painkillers illegally after stealing prescription pads from a doctor for whom she used to work.

Police said Jamie Calianno of Olyphant stole two prescription pads from a doctor in Greentown in Pike County and was able to get all kinds of painkillers from pharmacies in the MidValley.

"She was going to local pharmacies and writing prescriptions out for various drugs including Vicodin, Oxycontin and others. She would than get the prescriptions for them," explained Trooper Connie Devens.

Police said Calianno was getting prescription painkillers illegally over a three-year period.

Other Links to News on the web:

• WYOU
• The Times Tribune
  

There are Heroes Everywhere!

A WWII Vet gets recognized during my Lunch
Break at Wegmen's in Wilkes-Barre, PA. I have so much respect for
individuals such as Saul and it was an honor to see the ceremony take place as I was running for my sandwich. - Erik

World War II veteran finally awarded medal for his battle wound
A place in his heart

By RORY SWEENEY rsweeney@leader.net
TIMES LEADER/PETE G. WILCOX
Saul Gelb and his wife Jean take in moment after he received his Purple Heart. < WILKES-BARRE TWP. – It was late 1944 or early 1945 when Sgt. Saul Gelb, hunkered down in a house near the Danube River in Germany, was shot in the left arm. He and a fellow U.S. soldier surveyed the grim situation from upstairs windows.

Cut off from the rest of their 261st Regiment in the 65th Infantry Division, the small band of soldiers was surrounded by units of the German army.

“God, I thought I’d bleed to death,” Gelb recalled on Thursday.
But he lived, and the standoff continued until American fighter planes thundered overhead days later, forcing a German withdrawal.

The soldier who had been with Gelb upstairs wanted him to apply immediately for the Purple Heart, but he was unable to. As the frontlines of World War II progressed toward Berlin and Gelb’s injury healed, the urgency to apply faded and was finally forgotten.

That is until a little more than a month ago, when Gelb’s daughter, Lani Abramson, decided it was time her father got his due.

“It was just all of the sudden,” she explained. “I heard him (discuss) the Purple Heart more (saying) ‘I wish I had it.’”

On Thursday, the Edwardsville resident finally was decorated with the U.S. military medal bestowed upon those injured in combat.

The ceremony was short and unrehearsed, with the pinning of the medal on Gelb’s dark-blue blazer and a disjointed salute between the recipient and the presenters, Mike Sunder and John Havay of the American Legion Post 12 in Somerville, N.J.

Held at a much less hostile locale than the Western Front – the Wegmans food market in Wilkes-Barre Township – the medal presentation attracted a small crowd of family and curious onlookers, who intermittently approached Gelb to ogle his medal and shake his hand. Store manager Keith Grierson personally cut a specially made cake emblazoned with the Purple Heart emblem.

Asked last week to host the event, Grierson said it was a “no-brainer” to allow it because Gelb “and his wife (Jean) are practically in here every day.”
“I’ll say to my wife (in the morning), ‘Where do you want to go?’ She’ll say, ‘You know where I want to go,’” Gelb said.

Whether it was the familiar setting or his personality, Gelb hardly wasted a second without retelling well-worn stories from his four years at war.

“I hated every day of it. I didn’t like the hike all the time. … I was always hungry.”
But he had an idea. He became friendly with the supply sergeant and lied that he had a restaurant back home. “That’s how I got to become a cook. I was never hungry after that.”
The presentation capped several years of work by Gelb’s family to restore his collection of military medals, many of which Gelb lost in the flooding caused by Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972. Jeff Isacson, the husband of Gelb’s daughter Gayle, had created a display for the medals, which included two Bronze Stars.

Asked what heroic act he performed to receive the highly prestigious stars, Gelb couldn’t remember.

“I did so many outstanding things. That’s why I’m still here.”

ON THE WEB
To see more photos from Sgt. Saul Gelb’s Purple Heart ceremony, log on to www.timesleader.com.

Rory Sweeney, a Times Leader staff writer, may be reached at 970-7418.