Class of 1972 - Class of 1972 Memories
Classmates,
Attached is the third of our class memoirs: “The Pick-up Artist,” by Dorian Dale. Prior to his involvement on
the 40th Reunion Committee, I had never spoken to or met Dorian; that was my loss as Dorian is a very
clever man with a real social conscience. He was a tremendous help on the committee as he teamed with
Nick Spitzer and Linda Bender to compile the songs on our playlist for the class party.
Dorian was born and raised in New York, N.Y. and now resides in West Gilgo Beach, N.Y. with his wife
Cindy and his 16 year old twins, Jeddiah and Lyla. During his college years when he was not playing
basketball, Dorian majored in physical anthropology; he was one of the organizers of the first Earth Day in
Philadelphia.
After Penn, Dorian attended graduate school at Columbia. He currently serves as the Energy and
Sustainability Director for the Town of Babylon in Suffolk County. For the work he has done in energy and
sustainability, Dorian was named the 8th Citi Distinguished Fellow in Leadership & Ethics at the NYU Stern
School of Business (SEC Chairperson Arthur Levitt was the first).
I know that you will enjoy his essay. If you wish to contribute a memoir of your own, please let me know by
emailing me at [email protected]. In coming months, we will have memoirs by H. Kell Yang, Barbara
Carton, Mitch Rofsky, Brian Keefe, and Margaret Rose Ryan.
Best,
Jeff Rothbard
President, Class of 1972
THE PICK-UP ARTIST
“Life (may be) like a box of chocolates,” but my college years passed as an
Odyssey of pick-up games, a fly Forrest Gump hitting the courts of Penn and Philly
in picaresque fashion.
There were the extra-curricular and academic venues: the promotional work
for the first Earth Day under the tutelage of Ian “Design with Nature” McHarg,
interspersed with La Terrace charm fests with Yippie mayoral candidate and soon to
be notorious murderer, Ira Einhorn; bearing witness to former Dixiecrat standardbearer, Sen. Strom Thurmond, bang out his age of 69 in push-ups after being pelted
by marshmallows; gaining entrée to caliber grad courses like Medical Anthropology,
taught by the congenial and compelling Barry Blumberg who would soon earn the
Nobel for his “Hunt for the Killer Virus;” introducing Julian Bond at Irvine
Auditorium on a dark and stormy night that had his fellow speaker backing out at the
last moment: “I’m wearing a pin emblazoned NAACP,” quipped Bond, making light
of the no-show. “It stands for Never Antag onize Adam Clayton Powell.”
Keep the faith, baby. Indeed.
The core of my faith and desire during my collegiate stretch was the pick-up
game. I spent more hours playing basketball in Gimbel Gym than anything else I did
in my time at Penn. Most of these pick-up games took place on the three side-by-side
full courts upstairs at Gimbel which, by the way, was donated by Bernard, the
department store magnate, who was quite the combative jock in his years at Penn.
Gimbel Gym, owing to a mix of lax security and a nod to athletic talent, was a
magnate for players beyond the Penn community. On any given day, you might team
up with former high school stars like West Philly’s Andre McCarter and Oscar
Berryman from Overbrook, Wilt the Stilt’s alma mater. Or you might get to run with
the Eagles’ star wide receiver, Ben Hawkins, and his teammate, Leroy Keyes, who
finished second to OJ Simpson for the ’68 Heisman.
In basketball, as in life, who you run with is the difference between playing
and sitting, between being a player or an also-ran.
On arriving at the Gimbel courts, I’d exercise the option of calling ‘winners,’
even though I’d frequently get drafted by a team higher in the queue. The draft was
variously based on past performance, shoot-around showcasing between games, or
just your look. It didn’t hurt that I was a fit 6’2”/195. One of my nicknames was
‘psych,’ short for the psychedelic surf jams I often sported some twenty years before
Woody Harrelson suited up in “White Men Can’t Jump.” In lieu of my eccentric
name, I’d intro myself as “Earl…as in Pearl,” as in Bullet-Knick star Earl, ‘The
Pearl’ Monroe, whose between-the-legs dribble/behind-the-back scoop shot I
mimicked. But my bread&butter on the days my J wasn’t going down, was tenacious
D and hard picks.
The beauty of pick-up is that there are no box scores, no stats, no won&loss
records, just select memories of triumphs that get stored in the highlight reel in your
mind. So let’s go to some replays….
Two aspects of Russian Lit with Elliot Mossman stand out. There is the
Russian word ‘poshlost,’ which means ‘self-satisfied mediocrity’ and defines the
original slacker, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov. Then there is the game I played
following the semester’s Russian cocktail party that featured caviar crackers and
straight vodka sprinkled with pepper. I hit Gimbel right afterwards to work it off and
I dominated, skying for one bound after another, going strong back up to the hoop. It
couldn’t be that I smelled like a gin mill, as vodka has no odor. Professor
Riasanovsky might have said it explains how the Russians withstood the Siege of
Stalingrad for nearly 900 days.
The supreme Gimbel kudo came after a game I paired off against Quaker star
shooting guard, Dave Wohl. I felt I had held my own, a feeling that was jacked up an
order of magnitude by a couple of spectators (who may have been jerking my jock):
“That’s Dave Wohl? You’re better than him!”
Then there were the occasions when I got to be the spare wheel for the Holy
basketball Trinity of Jimmy Whelan, Joey McGettigan and Dom Irrera, joined, from
time-to-time, by Frannie O’Hanlon who co-captained the ’69-’70 Villanova
Wildcats. McGettigan, sporting two massive knee braces (to my one), was their big
man at about six foot. But they were spring-loaded and totally in sync with one
another, quintessential products of Catholic league ball. They’d pick an opponent’s
pockets, wrong-foot remaining defenders in a down-court weave and soar for a layup, often uncontested.
One time, when I was on the finish, I spied a defender out of the corner of my
eye racing back for the rejection. I pulled back on the straight lay-in as he sailed past,
remained suspended, then released a scoop shot that spun in for the score.
The Holy Trinity was astonished by my miraculous hang-time.
Wohl was drafted in the 3rd round by the 76ers a year after O’Hanlon was
drafted in the 8th. He parlayed a $15,000 contract into a half-dozen years on court
followed by an NBA coaching career which found him assisting the legendary Pat
Riley at LA followed by a stint as head coach of the New Jersey Nets. O’Hanlon teed
up a twenty-year head coaching career at Lafayette with a stint as assistant basketball
coach at Penn. Whelan went on to become a decidedly non-Boardwalk Mayor of
Atlantic City. While Irrera’s South Philly-inspired character, ‘Joey Bagadonuts,’
didn’t reach the proportions (so to speak) of Cosby’s ‘Fat Albert’ out of North Philly,
Dom keeps getting mileage out of his bada boom stand-up career, knowing that
comedy is like basketball – “If you don’t put the ball in the basket, then the crowd’s
not with you.” McGettigan took his talents as a trash-talking, sometime fantast to
lead prosecutor role in slamming Jerry Sandusky behind bars. Then there are those
passing bonds that bound back over time, leaving you to speculate, like that no-look
pass that didn’t connect.
Dave Wideman was, ostensibly, recruited to play football at Penn, as he was a
younger brother of all-Ivy forward, Rhodes Scholar turned Penn Prof. Never saw him
on the gridiron, only at Gimbel. He was a Groove Phi Groove frat brother with green
eyes and a Red Foxx fro to go with his blocky, fullback physique. What he lacked in
finesse, he made up for in a locomotive drive to the basket and round-mound of
rebounding Barkley-style. One day, post-Gimbel, Dave took me to task for the sorryass peanut butter and jelly I’d picked out at the WaWa market across the street. Only
diet I could afford, I said in jest. When I saw him again outside, he opened up his
olive drab army field jacket and insisted I take four different cuts of meat that he’d
picked up on five-finger discount. It was like your cat leaving a fresh-killed rabbit at
your door-step in order to show you to how to fend for yourself. Dave has been
conspicuous by his absence from post-Penn radar, even as his older brother has spun
tabloid experiences into Brothers and Keepers literary gold.
The double-entendre of pick-up can, like a back-door cut, lead to an easy
score. But let’s save that play for your highlight reel.
Dorian F. Dale, C’72