4-9-10
By JIM KEVLIN
For Sam Nader, a high point of his mayoral years was the opening of the Oneonta Municipal Airport in 1965.
Catskill Airways took the VIPs on a “maiden flight” to Syracuse, and among them was city GOP chairman Sterling Harrington AND city Democratic chairman Dr. Alexander Carson.
Republican Rockefeller’s lieutenant governor, Malcolm Wilson, cut the ribbon at the airfield up on the end of West Street.
And yet Sam Nader recalls friendly relations with U.S. Sen. Bobby Kennedy and Congressman Sam Stratton, both Democrats.
You don’t have to chat long with Sam Nader to realize he’s been able to get along with a lot of people over his almost 90 years, going back to his early days in what he calls “The League of Nations” – Oneonta’s Sixth Ward, the River Street
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neighborhood where he still lives today.
He can list a lot of accomplishments that would qualify him for the Otsego County Chamber’s Eugene Bettiol, Jr., Distinguished Citizen Award – he will received it Saturday, April 10 – but that underlying ability to get along with people, to bring people together, underlies them all.
When parents Elias and Rose brought him home from Fox Hospital in 1920, it was to a D&H-owned home at 90 West Broadway, a neighborhood of not just Lebanese, but Italians, Polish, Russians – “they were all my pals,” said Nader.
Growing up in the Great Depression, he recalls “we didn’t know we were poor” – everyone was in the same boat. Still, he remembers his dad, a laborer on the D&H, coming home with two old railroad ties, one under each arm.
That, and coal picked up along the railroad tracks, warmed the family in winters.
Nonetheless, the Naders put enough aside to buy their own home, at 107 River St., when Sam was in high school, and move their growing family there. Sam had an older brother, Nausif (Nate), and sisters Julia (Church), Adele, Dorothy (Minogue) and Jemele (Mitrano), who is living in New York City.
Nader’s mother emphasized education. Nate graduated from Hartwick College. Sam played baseball and basketball at OHS, Class of ‘38, attended Hartwick for a year, then spent a year at Bates College in Maine, before taking a year off. He got a job at Scintilla (later Bendix) in Sidney, and never went back.
After Pearl Harbor, Nader’s job was considered critical to the war effort, and he was exempt from the draft for a while, but only for a while. With the 28th Infantry Division, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, coming home with a Bronze Star and other decorations.
Productive years followed at Bendix, where Nader rose from salesman to director of purchasing.
A pal, Leroy “Sonny” House, got him on the board of directors of Oneonta’s Can-Am League baseball team, and also gave him additional contact with Sonny’s sister, Alice – “I just knew she was the girl for me.”
The two married, began raising a family – son John, recently retired mayor, and daughters Suzanne (Longo, of Havertown, Pa.) and Alice (O’Connor, of Lilbern, Ga.) – and bought the home at 95 River, where the father still lives today.
Nader credits his wife, who died in a car crash in Georgia while the family was on a trip 19 years ago – “a kid was reaching down for a tape casette,” and his car collided with the Nader vehicle – with his ability to balance job, family and political career.
“You have to have an understanding wife,” he said, sitting in an armchair in his sunny living room, under her photo as a young woman. “Without her, nothing would have been possible.”
As he tells it, Nader first wanted to be a big-league ballplayer, but lacked the skills, then a lawyer, but lacked the money for the education. His third ambition: mayor of Oneonta.
With his career and family settled, he successfully ran for alderman as a Republican in the late ‘50s, then for mayor in 1960 on the Good Government Ticket. The Democrats endorsed him, and “I won by 13 votes” against John Dunn, an attorney.
The second time, he went for both parties’ endorsement. He lost the Republican primary against former mayor Roger Hughes – “I couldn’t get over the railroad tracks.” (He’s too modest: wife Alice was a doctor’s daughter; brother-in-law Sonny went to Choate) – but swamped him in the general election.
He ticks off what he wanted to accomplish – and did – as mayor: Not just the airport, but extending water and sewer lines to allow SUNY Oneonta to catch the Rockefeller wave; annexing land from the Town of Oneonta; embracing fledgling Urban Renewal; getting the Susquehanna dredged; routing I-88 in an optimum way for the city.
When JFK launched the novel Accelerated Public Works Program in the early ‘60s, Nader made sure Oneonta was first in line, standing outside the door of PWP administrator Frank Trentacosta in New York City on the program’s first day.
When Trentacosta advised him a certain resolution was required, Nader – City Clerk Christine Mannona and Chamberlain Tom Natale accompanied him – said, “Where’s the typewriter?” And they hammered it out right there.
Oneonta ended up with more PWP money than any small city in the state, but Nader wasn’t shy about bonding, either: “It’s fine to be debt-free. But if your children are hungry and your roof is leaking, it’s not bad to borrow money to repair it.”
His circle of advisers was typically eclectic: Joe Molinari, the future judge who recruited him to run for alderman; Dr. Carson; Sid Levine of Oneonta Sales (the two later became long-time partners on the Oneonta Tigers); Dan Bolton, Oneonta S&L president; Harold DeGraw at the Oneonta Chamber; attorney Al Farone.
“I had a lot of very good people around me,” Nader recalled.
As the ‘60s went on, the anti-Vietnam War protests were roiling the nation – and the local campuses. Baseball, Nader figured, “would be a cohesive thing.”
For a while, he haunted the minor leagues: “If there were two baseball people meeting somewhere, I would be the third.” So he was among the first to hear the Boston Red Sox wanted to pull their NY-Penn League team out of Hornell. “We want it,” Nader told them.
When the Red Sox left after a couple of season, Sam put together 10 investors (again, the full gamut) in the Oneonta Athletic Corp. – 10 investors chipped in $1,000 each, and bought the Yankee franchise for $7,500.
Nader made a deal with his investors: He wouldn’t ask them for any more money; they wouldn’t second-guess him. “They kept their promise and I kept my promise.”
Forty years of baseball followed, four decades of fun, challenge and accomplishment, attested by the plaques, trophies and memorabilia that fill his first floor study and pack his basement.
There’s the famous story about going down to New
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York City to retrieve the hard-drinking Mickey Mantle, to make sure the famous hitter wouldn’t duck out on Yankees Day at Damaschke Field.
Another time, Sam got Joe DiMaggio – then, national spokesman for the coffee industry – up for another promotion. Would you like a cup of coffee? Alice asked. I only drink Sanka, DiMaggio replied. Nader sent John scooting to a neighborhood store for a jar.
As the years went on, there were some disappointments. To get New York City to build a new Yankee Stadium, George Steinbrenner – “a very good friend” – promised then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani he would bring the Oneonta Tigers to Staten Island.
Undeterred, Sam made the best deal he could with Detroit, and the Tigers’ franchise came to the city for three decades.
Yes, he said, he was disappointed that E. Miles Prentice, the New York City lawyer who bought the Tigers from him and Levine, moved the team earlier this year to Norwich, Conn.
Prentice is entitled to make money, he said, but he wishes the team had fulfilled its commitment to remain in Oneonta for two seasons.
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