20 North Shore Towers Courier n December 2013 Reporter, Playwright, Speech Writer Did you know that Alfred “Al” Connable, the handsome man in Building Two with the Midwestern accent, wrote plays at the Yale Drama School? Most of his career was spent writing speeches for aspiring presidential candidates like Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale and Robert Kennedy. Andrew Cuomo, Robert Wagner, Harrison Goldin, Eugene Nickerson and Tom Suozzi were some other politicians who used Connable as their speech writer. He spent 23 years at Columbia University writing speeches for President Michael Sovern and three other presidents. How did this grandson of a coal miner in Scotland get his start? He grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University. “The fear of poverty was always present in our house, yet growing up in Ann Arbor was idyllic. I’d wake up each morning to the clip-clop of the milk man’s horse. I’d race out to ride with him to the end of the block and then ran back to bed until a quarter to seven. After school we rode our bikes all over town, keeping track of the time from the chimes of the University Carillon which could be heard for miles around. I earned money to buy my bike by delivering the Ann Arbor News and selling the Saturday Evening Post, with its great Norman Rockwell covers, Zane Grey westerns and the Tugboat Annie serial. Once a week my father, my kid brother and I would wash the car on a sunken bridge in the Huron River.” In 1948, when he was 16, Connable took a summer job at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which was then housed in a brownstone near Columbia on Morningside Heights. Each day he traveled to Great Neck via the Long Island Railroad, then took a bus down Lakeville Road to Lake Success and the huge dome that had been Sperry Gyroscope headquarters during World War II. This is across from the now-Long Island Jewish Medical Center and in sight of the North Shore Towers site. The Sperry dome served as the home of the United Nations (UN) until its new building was constructed near the East River. Connable covered various council meetings and picked up material for use in Carnegie publications. As an undergraduate at Michigan, he won two Hopwood fiction awards and a national news prize for his coverage of the Morey-Pell murder trial in The Michigan Daily, of which he eventually became the City editor, and the United Press, for which he was the Ann Arbor correspondent. After graduation, Connable worked for the Associated Press (AP) in Rome and then was drafted for the Korean War. His last assignment for AP was covering the Venice Film Festival. While in the Army he wrote a training film, “Behind Enemy Lines,” and a play, “The Silver Eagle,” which he sent off to Yale. He was accepted by the Drama school and after, the Army man studied in New Haven for three years, earning a Masters’ degree on the GI Bill and the MCA Fellowship. He came down to New York, rented a loft at the corner of Bowery and Houston for $55 a month, published science fiction stories, composed the music for an Actors Studio production and courted a pretty Michigan alumna named Roma. More about this accomplished lady in next month’s column. Connable went to City Hall to write speeches for Mayor Robert Wagner, then to Mineola as the speechwriter for Gene Nickerson, the Nassau County Executive, who became a lifelong friend. Somehow Connable found time to write several books while serving as a speechwriter and fathering two sons. The first was “Tigers of Tammany,” a history of the New York Democratic Party (published by Holt) and among others was a spy novel, “Twelve Trains to Babylon.” (Little Brown) Connable and Roma were married in 1962 and moved first to Westchester and then to Roslyn. Connable recalls that it was not until he came here that he was made aware of distinctions between Jews and Gentiles. “In Ann Arbor, a university town, both groups were secular and quite assimilated. My Uncle Ted, for example, often wore his yarmulke at home but he called it his ‘thinking cap.’” Stay tuned. Next month, will be Roma Connable’s fascinating story: a Brooklyn girl who found her soulmate while writing for the campus newspaper at the University of Michigan. By FRED CHERNOW ALFRED CONNABLE THE COURIER/Photos by Maggie Hayes
NST122013
To see the actual publication please follow the link above