A niece recently confirmed what members of my dad’s branch of the Emerine family had been saying for years: We’re distant cousins of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who’s better known as Mark Twain.
Although I’m pleased, it hasn’t made any of us best-selling authors.
My daughter’s husband is related to Tom Mix, the cowboy movie star who died in a car crash near Florence many years ago. But that doesn’t make my grandsons cowboys or successful actors.
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Nor would my distant link to Twain make me a viable political candidate this year. I would be hammered with charges of guilt by association.
Back in the early 1960s, Jack Carson, a colleague of mine at the Tucson Daily Citizen, introduced me to Bill Bonanno, son of New York boss Joe Bonanno, as the younger Bonanno was entering the Federal Building for a hearing.
I also went to Detroit boss Pete Licavoli’s Grace Ranch at Speedway and Wilmot once to ask him a question my city editor wanted answered.
Licavoli looked me in the eye and said, "He isn’t here." Four guys with him nodded in agreement.
Mob figure Charles "Batts" Battaglia and I had a tense chat inside the old Pima County Courthouse because Citizen photographer Art Grasberger wanted to take Battaglia’s picture. When Batts linked arms with Grasberger to keep him at his side, I took the camera and shot them both.
There’s more. Thirty years later, I bought a house a few doors from Bill and Rosalie Bonanno and found them to be nice people and good neighbors.
When I left my garage door open as I left for the airport one weekend, a neighbor called Bill. He walked into the garage, hit the button and scampered out before it closed.
I also went to Bill and Rosalie’s 50th anniversary party and to some neighborhood events they attended. And I visited the funeral home when Bill died earlier this year.
Then there’s a long friendship with Barbara Elfbrandt and her attorney, Ed Morgan, who helped her win an appeal of Arizona’s loyalty oath for teachers before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Another friend, George Miller, lost his teaching job in the 1950s when he refused to testify during Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt. George started a painting business in Tucson and served as mayor.
And one of the pastors at a local church I belonged to was dismissed because he had made improper advances to a teenage girl at his former church.
Guilt by association has become a factor in the 2008 presidential race.
Barack Obama has been attacked because he knows a college professor who belonged to a terrorist group when Obama was 8 years-old. The presidential candidate has also been blamed for statements by the minister of a church he belonged to for 20 years.
And John McCain has been criticized for divorcing his ex-wife to marry his present one, as well as for his role in the U.S. Senate’s investigation of favoritism shown to businessman Charles Keating.
When I was Googling last week for any new info about the murder of former Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, I found entries mentioning Bolles, Phoenix liquor dealer Jim Hensley and Hensley’s late associate, Kemper Marley.
Marley, a rancher and liquor dealer, was linked to the Bolles car bombing but never charged. It occurred several years before McCain met and married Hensley’s daughter, Cindy.
None of these tales about Obama or McCain should influence anyone’s vote for president.
We face too many serious issues to base our votes on some e-mails, partisan TV reports, newspaper columns or mail from organizations with righteous-sounding names that breathlessly reveal who the candidates once knew or lived near.
We are better than that, and so are John McCain and Barack Obama.
Contact Steve Emerine or e-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. Emerine, a Tucson resident since 1960, has run Steve Emerine Strategic Public Relations since 1994. He is a former local newspaper reporter, editor and columnist and served as Pima County Assessor from 1973 to 1980. He is a regular Monday guest on the John C. Scott radio talk show, which airs from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. and from 11 a.m. to noon weekdays on The Voice KVOI 690-AM. This column appears weekly in Inside Tucson Business.
Comments
cc123 wrote on Oct 27, 2008 7:58 AM:
At least thats what Steve Emerine wants you to believe. "
Sandy wrote on Oct 26, 2008 12:10 PM:
A big farewell dinner was held in their honor by AAAN with a commemorative book filled with testimonials from their friends and political allies. These included the left wing anti-war group Not In My Name, the Electronic Intifada, and the ex-Weatherman domestic terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. (There were also testimonials from then-state Senator Barack Obama and the mayor of Chicago.) "
Priebles wrote on Oct 24, 2008 4:32 PM:
They just can't comprehend what you are saying. "
cc123 wrote on Oct 24, 2008 2:33 PM:
So you are saying Ayers did not work with Obama on two boards and give out $100 million---and this is a lie by the right wings blogs?
Did those videos I see of Reverend Wright rail against USA and Israel were made from those right wing movie making evil geniuses?
Do mean that Rezko was framed by the RNC machine?
Are you saying that Rashid Kalhdi really does love Israel?
So you are saying Obama had nothing to do with Farakhan and the million man march?
Wow, thanks Steve I am glad you are here---still not sure why we should care anything about your history "
Priebles wrote on Oct 24, 2008 2:06 PM:
This may come as a huge surprise to you Steve...but it's not about you!
Deflect, equivocate, and flack for Obama all you want by letting us all about your meaningless life. It still does not address the point of his association with terrorists and radicals in any relevant or truthful way. But then that was your intent by writing the article to begin with wasn't it? "
Steve Emerine wrote on Oct 23, 2008 6:49 AM:
1. I was educated in Moscow but later infiltrated the Strategic Air Command's underground headquarters near Omaha.
2. My daughter currently lives in Moscow.
3. My most recent visits to Moscow occurred in 2006 and 2007, where I renewed contacts with the Muscovites I met in college.
4. I lived for nearly two years in Illinois. A year of that was in Oak Park, near Chicago, where Ayers lives.
You guys haven't done your homework. I'm disappointed you haven't revealed that despite my University of Idaho degree when I was in Moscow, Idaho, I spent three years as a U.S. Air Force officer with a top-secret clearance. And how did you miss my residency in Illinois when I was 7 and again when I was 10? The fact that Obama now represents that state in the Senate isn't just a coincidence, my friends.
How could you miss all those obvious connections? "
Ted wrote on Oct 22, 2008 4:55 PM:
Here’s what you need to know. Klonsky is an unabashed communist whose current mission is to spread Marxist ideology in the American classroom. Obama funded him to the tune of nearly $2 million. Obama, moreover, gave Klonsky a broad platform to broadcast his ideas: a “social justice” blog on the official Obama campaign website.
Mike Klonsky formed a Maoist organization, first known as the “October League,” which ultimately became the “Communist Party (Marxist Leninist).” Klonsky was CP(ML)’s chairman. He was so highly thought of by Mao’s regime that he was among the first Americans invited to visit Communist China. When he was feted there in 1977, a year after Mao’s death, the communist leadership hailed Klonsky’s party as “reflecting the aspirations of the proletariat and working people.”
Klonsky was a regular guest of the Chicoms until 1981, when the relationship soured over the post-Mao leadership’s free-market reforms. (Yes, Klonsky is apparently more committed to communism than China’s own Communist Party.) So what was a Leftist radical without platform to do? Why, what else? He became an American college professor specializing in education.
After getting his doctorate, Klonsky eventually made his way to Chicago and hooked up with his old SDS comrade (and self-professed “small ‘c’ communist”) Bill Ayers. Together, they co-founded the Small Schools Workshop in 1991. The goal — as Ayers has repeatedly made clear, most prominently in a 2006 speech before Hugo Chavez at an education forum in Caracas — is to bring the same Leftist revolution that has always galvanized them into the classroom.
When Obama and Ayers collaborated together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) education-reform project, with Obama chairing the board that oversaw funding decisions, CAC underwrote the Klonsky/Ayers Small Schools Workshop with a whopping $1,056,162. And that’s not all. Nearly another million dollars was steered to the Small Schools Workshop by the Joyce and Woods Funds when Obama sat on their boards. The grand total comes to $1,968,718.
On the Obama campaign’s official website, Klonsky ran a blog for the candidate, as Klonsky put it, on “education politics and teaching for social justice.” He ran it, that is, until blogger Steve Diamond called attention to it back in June. A that point, the Obama campaign scrubbed the site of all Klonsky traces.
As Klonsky has explained, “My own support for Obama is … a recognition that the Obama campaign has become a rallying point for young activists and offers hope for rebuilding the civil rights and antiwar coalitions that have potential to become a real critical force in society.”
So get ready for Klonsky’s “social justice.” It’s what Barack Obama calls “change.” "
Jackie wrote on Oct 22, 2008 10:52 AM:
Scotty wrote on Oct 19, 2008 2:07 PM:
Sandy wrote on Oct 18, 2008 3:07 PM:
The leader of a country will naturally attempt to reshape that nation into the image of his values. The history and background of a person are instrumental in shaping that person's values---Values from experiences. "
josh wrote on Oct 18, 2008 12:54 PM:
Let's get REAL, PEOPLE!!! "
Priebles wrote on Oct 17, 2008 4:19 PM:
Maybe associating and "participating" with Ayres, Wright and Kalidi are not negative things. But if they are not a big deal then why is he and every liberal like you lying about it and actively trying to cover it up?
It's not the crime...it's the cover-up. "
cc123 wrote on Oct 17, 2008 3:45 PM:
You may be right it is not about association...it is about judgment. You don't choose your family but you choose your friends—which also means you choose the people you work with.
I suspect you then say Obama had limited contact with his association Ayers, the founder of the Annenberg challenge when Obama was Chairman and they dolled out over $100 million—now this requires a suspension of disbelief. Remember this is an education foundation. They gave money and created programs based on Ayers ideology—he’s the founder. Ayers education ideology is very clear in his 16 books.
You are right...."We face too many serious issues to base our votes on some e-mails, partisan TV reports, newspaper columns or mail from organizations with righteous-sounding names that breathlessly reveal who the candidates once knew or lived near...
You are right....instead base your vote on character and judgment. Ask yourself which candidate sat in a church for 20 years where the pastor spewed anti-American, divisive hate—where Oprah left because of the incendiary sermons, Ask yourself would you buy a house for a $300k discount from a now convicted felon. Ask yourself would you associate, train, defend in court, hire an organization that is now implicated in the greatest voter fraud in history. Ask yourself would you dine, befriend, praise, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization? Ask yourself would you take the second largest amount of fund raising from freddie mac and fannie mae--where fraud and subprime loans created one of the greatest financial melt downs in the history of the US. And then ask yourself, would you “work with” a guy named Ayers. Are these people in your circle of 5?
Steve Emerine wants you to dismiss this “association” as a distraction. Steve Emerine wants you to drink the kool-aid. I suggest you ask some else to taste it first. "
Ron Emerine wrote on Oct 17, 2008 2:56 PM: