By Mel Damski
If I ran the zoo
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July 28, 2021
I recently said goodbye to my Uncle Harry Rosenfeld. Three weeks ago, when our part of the world was experiencing record high temperatures, I flew across the country to Albany, New York to visit my famous 91-year-old uncle who had contracted COVID-19 in his retirement home.
We hugged, we chatted. I took pictures of Harry and my wonderful aunt Annie and I left knowing that it was likely that this was the last time we would be together.
Last week, I got to watch Harry’s funeral live online. It was an amazing tribute to an amazing man, with wonderful appearances by my cousins, his daughters Susan, Amy and Stefanie.
In the 1960s Harry was the foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune. He went to the Washington Post, was promoted to Metro editor in 1970 and was put in charge of the Watergate investigation in 1972. In 1978 he became executive editor of Albany’s two daily newspapers. I have pictures of him with Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, and Teddy Kennedy, as well as Dustin Hoffman, who played Carl Bernstein in the film “All the President’s Men.”
When I was a teenager, Harry got me a summer job putting up signs promoting Jimmy Breslin’s column in the Herald Tribune and then, after I was the sports editor of my high school and college newspapers, he helped me get my promotion from being a Suffolk Sun sports writer to becoming a general assignment reporter for Newsday, a daily on Long Island.
What’s most compelling to me about my uncle’s life is that he grew up Jewish in Hitler’s Germany and was eight years old when came to the U.S. His parents, Solomon and Esther, were Polish so Harry and my mother Rachel had Polish passports and therefore were sent with their parents to Warsaw rather than a concentration camp.
My mother was eight years older so she was deprived of a high school education, but Harry got to go to junior high and high school in New York City and then college at Syracuse University where he developed a love of journalism.
He was known as a tough, demanding editor who also had a good, although somewhat dark, sense of humor.
My journalism career led me to being a documentary filmmaker and then a movie director, but journalism is still in my blood and that’s why I’m writing this column while I also start prepping my next documentary.
I am so proud that my uncle overcame great odds to have a remarkable career and so grateful to him for inspiring me to become a journalist. Hopefully you will check out his Washington Post tribute online.
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