BOB RASKIN: A COLORFUL AND COMPLEX LIFE By Bob Howitt (
[email protected]) As youngsters, probably most of us have those mixed feelings about parental attendance at our sporting events. Do we want them there to see us make an error or miss the free throw or fail to make the tackle--not really, but if they are never at the game, how will they see our base hit, clutch jumper, or crucial play at the goal line. In maybe 300 games of high school baseball and basketball, Bob’s father Max was there so few times that Bob can remember the details clearly almost a half-century later. (He can also recall that, among other things, his father tried to scare Bob by saying he would be bald by 17 and that he would never do well at algebra.) “I struck out my first two times at the plate in one game, and my father left. Then I had two doubles. At a basketball game, I had two points at halftime, and Max left, which meant he missed a second half in which I scored 17 points.” The lost opportunities of his cold and distant father to create a close parental relationship in a way foretold a series of missed chances for the golden ring for Bob in his adult life. Nonetheless, as the bumper sticker says, and accurately for articulate, intelligent, energetic, personable people like Bob, when a window closes, somewhere a door opens. Bob was born in Brooklyn in 1941. At the time, Max ran a stand which sold sausage and root beer (6 cents for the combination) at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, a location which represented challenges to life, liberty, and the pursuit of profit.