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The Road to Crown Heights

The Rebbe looks at the bleachers from his chair, eyeing us long distance. I’m holding sweet Kiddush wine in a paper cup, the kind they give you at the dentist’s to rinse out your mouth. I’m supposed to wait until the Rebbe looks at me, then say “ L’chaim” (“To life”) and drink the wine. But I can’t tell whether the Rebbe   is looking at me. Thousands of other eyes parked inside 770, headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, compete with mine to hold the Rebbe’s gaze. The Rebbe has resumed speaking. Apparently, he’s given up hope of making eye contact with me. I try to prepare myself for another hour of uninterrupted talk in Yiddish, a language I don’t understand, with the exception of   a few words, such as “ meshugana ,” “ schlep ” and “ oy , ” none of which, I assume, figure very prominently in the Rebbe’s Torah talks. As I peer at the Rebbe, my mind wanders. The Rebbe is wearing a wide-brimmed fedora hat made by an Italian company called “Borsalino.” He wears i...
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Campaigning with Tom

By Moshe Parelman     Jimmy Carter, 1976               Tom Long and I were standing by the curb outside his house. He wanted to show me something. On the street someone had written with red spray paint, “Humphrey Sucks.” I wondered who would have done such a thing. Living as we were in highly Republican Johnson County, a collection of upscale Kansas City  suburbs , there were certainly a lot of suspects. Then I noticed a hint of a smile starting to form at the corner of Tom’s mouth. How could I have been so gullible? Tom, of course, had written it himself.             Hubert Humphrey was a favorite politician of my family. Humphrey was a kind of Jewish heirloom. In fact, earlier that year, my parents had asked my Ouija board who would win the presidential election in 1976. Wonder of wonders, the Ouija board spelled out “Humphrey.” What the Ouija...
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These Are a Few of My Favorite (Kansas City Chiefs) Things (1969-2022)

By Moshe Parelman Dedicated to War Paint, the horse who rode up and down the sideline during Chiefs games, carrying a man dressed as an Indian warrior. If he could have talked, he would have pointed out how insensitive this ritual was. 1.           Hank Stram        Hank Stram coached the Chiefs from the inception of the American Football League in 1960 until 1974. In that time he produced three championships and one Super Bowl victory. Stram never fit the profile of the NFL coach. He didn’t have a southern accent; he didn’t wear a hat; he wasn’t a tough guy. He was more the genius, the football visionary, or as he called himself in a famous mic’d up performance while coaching the Chiefs in Super Bowl IV, “The Mentor.”        In seventh grade I was in the same Unified Studies class as Hank Stram’s son, Gary. (Unified Studies was a 1970s liberal approach to education involving the merger of social studies and Engl...
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