This is a principled decision. I have had several relatives with Parkinson’s, including my brother who lived with it for 30 years and was not too much disabled with it for most of that time. But the congressman is right–the progress of the disease cannot be predicted.
I hope he enjoys a long and happy retirement.
Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) is also not running for re-election.
That’s sad. All of the news today is sad or distressing. I’ think I’ll sign off and watch Casablanca.
I join you in wishing him well.
On the other hand, he has served since 1990. He is 75 years old. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. As I look back on his career (I am not a constituent),when he got elected to Herman Badillo’s seat, he was viewed as a great hope for the PR community. His biggest moment that I can recall was his questioning of Mark McGwire during the congressional hearings on PEDs in Major League Baseball. A somewhat adulatory and only reluctantly critical question which was really a short speech.
I do not know if his son will run for his seat, but he has a son who is (I believe) an elected State legislator. So, I will wonder if that is part of his consideration, too.
Councilman Richie Torres would be an excellent candidate. He’s done yeoman work in the council and bridges the gap between the AOC wing and workaday mainstream Democrats.
I don’t really know too much about Serrano’s district except my impression living here since Badillo was in the seat is that the population is very heavily Puerto Rican. When I worked in East Harlem from the late 80s to the late 90s, I was always very impressed with Guillermo Linares, the first DR NYC Councilmember. His election had the unintended consequence of sending to East Harlem an aspirant (who shall remain nameless) to Linares’ Washington Heights NYC City Council seat, where he ran for every position imaginable and won one single term in the State assembly. During this term he who shall remain nameless and some other Latino assemblymen caucused with the Republicans to give them a working majority.
Guillermo Linares was always an effective councilman.
After Badillo was poached by the Koch administration for a deputy mayor position he was replaced by Robert Garcia who got wrapped up in the Wedtech scandal.
Wow! I had forgotten Roberto Garcia. Thanks. And yes. So Serrano succeeded him. Bobby Garcia.
I think it was about time for Badillo to move on to bigger and better things. Not that his stint in the Koch Administration was either bigger or better.
Being PR, when I volunteered to do Poll Watching in my early 30’s, I was usually sent to a PR or Latino community. For the Reagan-Mondale election, I got sent to be at the opening at 5AM of a school polling location on Spofford Avenue in the Bronx. At about 10 AM Badillo made an appearance to check in on how things were hanging. I ran into him again, “many years later, as I stood in front of the firing squad” (to poach Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s beginning to 100 Years of Solitude) when, as a widowed, early 40’s Dad, I attended my son’s First Communion. I think Badillo had a grandchild or a young relative who had attended the same Religious Instruction class at The Loyola School in Manhattan.
I worked in that area for no joke Wedtech in the mid-80’s. I commuted from my folks in Westchester. It was my 2nd gig after I graduated college where I learned a lot and met some of the most salt of the earth people imaginable. We often had discussions about the politics of the day, so it was helpful to get the variety of views.
I was one of the last ones there to clean up and send materials and tooling back to the Feds after they went under.
I think that all politicians who are 75 or older should quit. I am sorry about Serrano’s parkinson’s and wish him well.
You are jogging my memory. Wedtech was supposed to be some Defense contractor, located in the rather unique Bronx community, no? Weren’t Mario Biaggi and his son also involved in that scandal? I can swear they were convicted in that case too. If I recall the spirit of the times, it was very hopeful when Wedtech was announced, that jobs were going to be provided for national defense in the Bronx, previously the poster child for American Racists gravitating to the GOP for all that was wrong in America. I think it was one of Reagan’s propagandists who said, of Foreign Affairs and the need for GOP toughness, “the World is like the South Bronx at 3 AM.”
Well, if you were left to clean up it means (1) you were deemed to be one of the few people there with Integrity, and (2) gave you some interesting experiences and great stories to tell.
I had a relative lived in Westchester after Yonkers working for Al Del Bello. In the 70s there was a local Soda Pop supplier that would still deliver wooden cases of glass bottles of a soda brand Leewood. Wonder if you grew up with it? It was good. Can’t remember if it was Ginger Ale or a sort of Lemon 7Up kind of soda. In Puerto Rico we had an outfit called Santurce Soda Water, their plant was right near the entrance /exit of the Army Base where we first lived there. They had a really great Lemon kind of soda, called Fria. Logo was a Polar Bear on an ice floe.
Yes Wedtech was a defense contractor that started out as a machine shop. In the 80’s they grew into a larger concern because of the efforts of Biaggi, Garcia and others to steer federal funds to underserved areas.
I was employed as a Production planner in the engine division where I was responsible for getting the parts together from vendors and in house for the production of engines for tank generators. They also had patents for rotary engines and co generation equipment. What I found interesting and I eventually based my MPA grad school thesis on was military conversion, companies that after the Cold War could manufacture civilian products.
Towards the end when the scandals were starting to hit the papers some of us got suspicious. Vendors weren’t getting paid so I had go to AP for checks to pay vendors cash in advance so we could get parts on the floor.
While I was one of the last people there at the end the work consisted of sending old tooling to the Pentagon and other vendors who could finish the orders.
Back then I lived in Yorktown where I grew up. The commute to the Bronx wasn’t bad around 45 minutes to either location on E136th Street or Gerard Ave. I later bought a coop in Yonkers near the Hudson River and the city line thinking it would be the new gentrified Hoboken. Lo and behold it didn’t quite take place so in the late 90’s I moved to Jackson Heights Queens after a relative passed away who bequeathed me a coop that needed work. There I had to deal with an obstinate board but it’s gotten better over the years.
Then, we are neighbors. I also inhabit a Jackson Hts coop apartment which my deceased wife and I purchased in 1990. It was a good place (better than where I lived before, Greenwich Village) for the fate that awaited me of raising a child as a single parent. I kind of prefer the 90s and early 2000s to what it is becoming. You know what I am talking about. I had a close relative who lived in Yonkers while her husband worked for Al Del Bello, in a beautiful apartment overlooking the river. Turned out, Son of Sam was living right in their neighborhood, on Broadway, below the gorgeous river view and stucco walls. And casement windows…
I lived in the Park Hill neighborhood just up the hill from Broadway. It was one of the few coop buildings in the neighborhood. It was quite convenient for the commute to Manhattan or the Bronx. I used to walk down the hill and catch the bus to the 1 train at 242nd st.
I was a teenager during the Summer of Sam living up in Yorktown. When I would go into the city for shopping or concerts or whatever some of my neighbors would think I was weird. “Don’t you know Son of Sam is on the loose”, “The Bronx is on fire”, As if he was coming for me.
Summer of Sam was the summer right before I came to NYC for school. My HS summer job was next door to a hotel which flew in the NYT and The NY Daily News. From whom I was able to spend the summer scaring myself about where I was moving. Also that summer there was a blackout which provoked looting in certain parts of NYC. I have a friend who used to love to run in the Yonkers Marathon. He said it was easy to enroll, and had this absolute killer hill.