Mendel Letters 91 — Lindsay’s Campaign for Mayor
August 20, 2022
Dear Mendel
During the summer of 1965, I had my first taste of politics. I was still going to the “Y” youth program at the Concourse “Y,” but it was only a few days a week. That summer Congressman John V. Lindsay from Manhattan announced he was running for Mayor of New York City as a reform Republican and Liberal candidate in a challenge to the Democratic Party machine that controlled the city government.
The Lindsay campaign set up neighborhood offices across the five boroughs. The closest one to us was on University Avenue near Junior High School 82. One day I biked over and volunteered to work for the campaign. I don’t think you thought one way or another about Lindsay, you were just glad your fifteen-year-old son found something to keep him busy and out of trouble.
I basically had two jobs at the Lindsay campaign’s University Avenue office. Most days I worked the phones. We would call people in the voting district and tell them we were from a polling company. Depending on their answers we divided them up into three categories, pro-Lindsey, unsure, and opposed, and we created a file. The campaign followed-up with the unsure voters and tried to convince them to support Lindsay. On Election Day, campaign volunteers reminded our list of pro-Lindsey voters to go to the polls. Elections were held every four years but did not coincide with Presidential and Gubernatorial races so turnout was always light. My other big job was riding around the southwest Bronx on my bicycle leaving campaign literature in the lobby of apartment buildings.
On Election Day, in a big upset, Lindsay narrowly defeated the Democratic Party candidate, the City Comptroller Abraham Beame, and Conservative Party celebrity William F. Buckley. During Lindsay’s first administration there were major strikes and race riots in New York City and Lindsay, as Mayor, was blamed. Lindsay was also accused of ignoring the outer-boroughs during a 1969 snowstorm and he lost the Republican Party nomination when he sought reelection. Lindsay decided to run for reelection anyway in an independent campaign with support from the Liberal Party and he was reelected in a three-way race. Many felt, including me, that Lindsay was reelected because the city was in a state of euphoria following the World Series victory by the Miracle Mets and the good-feeling rubbed off on the Mayor.
John Lindsay was very photogenic and had higher political ambitions. In 1971 he switched to the Democratic Party and campaigned for its 1972 Presidential nomination and in 1980 for nomination to the Senate. Both times he lost. I drifted away from electoral politics and concentrated on the anti-war movement and organizing on the CCNY campus and at the United Community Centers in East New York Brooklyn.
Your son
Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.
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