Word: kramer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Another freshman, Jim Corcoran, clinched the Crimson victory 38 seconds later as he pinned Dartmouth 158-pounder Matt Kramer faster than the bewildered Kramer could say "full nelson." The two pins stretched the Crimson lead to 27-2, to mathematically eliminate the Big Green...
...Kramer deals with the first test of his administration, the threat of minority riots in 1967, by staging a huge block party. "We danced those kids and we danced them until they fell over. We didn't stop until they were so exhausted they couldn't have picked up a bottle to throw to save their lives. We were holding this city together with bubble gum." In campaign jargon, this is "keeping the city quiet...
However, the mayor is unable to deal with a black sit-in in his office, a police riot and a machine-dominated Housing Commission. When the police rampage through a peaceful black neighborhood, beating people and wrecking stores, Kramer refuses to mount his own investigation, leaving the matter in the hands of the F.B.I. The reform mayor shrugs like an old regular--it is too hot an issue to touch. If the Police and Fire Board had held hearings, he explains, "One half of the city would have accused them of a whitewash and the other half of injuring...
About Paterson is in many ways a politically naive work: Norwood chooses to treat Kramer's 1969 re-election as a tribute to the city's spirit. "Paterson had every reason to seek an easy way out; but the city did not choose to do so," she writes. "Underneath its hates and fears and confusions, the city's fiber ran strong." But one wants to know more about where the votes came from that kept Kramer in office, and how he managed to get them to the polls...
Crippled as it is, Paterson cannot solve its own problems. Urban renewal, the blind arm of the federal bureaucracy, cannot save it--Kramer's experience with HUD, which Norwood documents, demonstrates the insensitivity of federal aid to cities. But revenue sharing, which put money in the hands of the people who have already failed to manage the city, is not the answer either. We leave Paterson in confusion, clinging, like Sam Patch, to a belief in the spirit of a city that has persevered...