Knocked Out of Scarsdale
Q: Someone told me that former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson was driven out of his Scarsdale home in the ’60s by the Ku Klux Klan. Is that true?
—Dan Kelleher, Yonkers
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Heavyweight Champ Floyd Patterson had a Scarsdale PO box in the ’60s |
A: The short answer is no. But some of the spirit of your question may be on target, but exaggerated.
Brooklyn-raised Floyd Patterson was, at the time, the youngest man to become the heavyweight champ; he won the title in 1956 at the age of 21. (Later, Mike Tyson would break that milestone by four months.)
Patterson was a popular champion and was considered a true gentleman, unlike many of his contemporaries including the scary and menacing Sonny Liston and the then-Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali’s birth name), who was seen as a rabble-rousing, self-aggrandizing troublemaker.
In 1961, Patterson moved his family from Long Island to the Beech Hill area of Yonkers, which uses a Scarsdale post office. His biographer says that the family didn’t receive a warm reception—Patterson’s neighbor built a large fence so the family couldn’t be seen, and there were a couple of ugly incidents with the champ’s daughter at school. Pleasant? No. Welcoming? No. Racist? Probably. But the Klan didn’t march on the home.
The Pattersons lived at their Beech Hill home from 1961 to 1965 and then moved back to Long Island. He lost his title to Sonny Liston by first-round knockout in 1962, and he was knocked out again in the first round in the subsequent rematch. He lost to Muhammad Ali later in 1965, after he moved, and again in his last fight in 1972. He once said: “They said I was the fighter who got knocked down the most, but I also got up the most.”
Keep Your Cats Close
Q: Did they ever catch that sicko who brutally abused and killed all those cats in Yonkers? They were supposedly wild cats—but how did he or she find so many?
—Debbie Klenner-Feldman, White Plains
A: As the human companion to three felines, I find this story more than disturbing. So much so that all I’ll say for background is that there were a lot of dead cats found in a tree in Yonkers.
Rene Carcamo, 60, was charged with three misdemeanor counts of violating environmental conservation and two animal cruelty violations. He claims that the cats died in his apartment over the years from infections, and he hung them in bags so that other animals wouldn’t desecrate their bodies. That doesn’t really explain everything found at the scene, but I don’t want to get into it. Clearly there’s an issue of mental illness and hoarding involved in the case.
If they were indeed “wild cats” the answer to where he got them is pretty simple: current estimates of the feral cat population in the US range from 50 to 100 million.
Personally, I think anyone caught harming a kitty should be sentenced to an hour in a room with my friends who do cat rescues. Should the monster make it out, then the courts could put him or her in prison for three lifetimes, hopefully on a tier with violent felons who miss their own furry friends.
Two Clintons
Q: Why doesn’t the fact that the pastor at Hillary Clinton’s church was busted on child sex charges come up more in election talk? Is it just another example of the left-
oriented media ignoring the ugly truth about their candidates?
—Stephen Brandsdorfer, Yorktown Heights
A: First, turn down your Ted Nugent album, close the Glenn Beck book, and put Hannity on the DVR.
The truth is Clinton’s pastor was found guilty of those things.
The problem is it wasn’t Hillary Clinton’s pastor (nor was it Bill or Chelsea’s pastor). In fact, it didn’t even happen in Westchester County.
Some clergy guy in Clinton, New York (shown above, in Oneida County), was busted for the heinous crime. Some folks in their underground bunkers surfing the Internet picked up the headline without reading the story, and it went viral—or at least semi-viral. The story has nothing to do with candidate or non-candidate Hillary Clinton.
