Some Republicans blame Dr. Anthony Fauci for being too strict and changing COVID-19 precautions that caused economic and educational upheaval.
His advice to wear masks and frequently wash your hands, maintain six feet of separation and avoid group gatherings may not have been completely necessary. But it probably significantly reduced the amount of severe sicknesses and death.
Suppose Dr. Fauci said at the outset that we don’t have exact scientific information about this new disease, so do whatever you want for a year or so, while we gather more information. Then we can be more accurate about what you should have done.
In the meantime (he might have said but didn’t), just tolerate whatever severe sickness and death occurs, because that will give us more information to provide more accurate advice.
Carl Schneider, Delray Beach
A Polo Grounds memory
Sunday, June 23, is the 61st anniversary of the day that Jimmy Piersall hit his 100th career home run and ran the bases backwards — and I was there.
It was 1963 at the Polo Grounds (Shea Stadium wasn’t built). Piersall, in what turned out to be his last homer as a New York Met, hit one out and began to basically moonwalk around the bases.
I turned 12 on that day, and I remember screaming with the rest of the crowd. My dad appeared dumbfounded.
I read years later that Manager Casey Stengel told Piersall “you’ll never play for my bleepin’ team again” and soon afterward, he was released.
Piersall did play four more years for the Los Angeles Angels, but thanks to his antics, June 23, 1963 will always remain my wackiest, coolest memory of my dad and I at the ballpark. R.I.P., Jimmy, you were quite a character.
Neal Bluestein, Boca Raton
Las Olas and its sidewalks
I recently wrote to Fort Lauderdale’s mayor and my commissioner about the arrangement the Las Olas Boulevard restaurants have with the city that allows them to use the sidewalks as expanded restaurant space.
I assume these are, or were, public sidewalks, but they didn’t respond.
Before the pandemic, we used to stroll down both sides of Las Olas on wide sidewalks. Post-pandemic we squeeze, single file, past restaurant tables shaded with quasi-permanent roofs and awnings, feeling the copious amounts of cool air flowing outside in a misguided effort to stop global warming.
If the restaurants don’t own the sidewalks, do they pay rent to the city for the use of them? And if they do not own the sidewalks, should restaurants remove their tables and remodel their storefronts and remove their front walls if they want “outdoor-ish” sidewalk dining?
As with Tunnel Top Park, the city has wasted millions of dollars on consultants and engineers redesigning Las Olas to be what many of us don’t like, at a final estimated cost of more than $100 million, let’s hope they don’t turn the Boulevard into just another street.
“Las Olas Street” just doesn’t sound the same.
George Mulhorn, Fort Lauderdale
Not the unions’ fault
Sorry, but I had to laugh at the feeble attempts, and the audacity, of Maddie Dermon of the group Freedom Foundation to blame teachers’ unions in Florida for us being next to last or dead last in teacher salaries.
You can be sure that any conservative Republican anti-worker group that uses “freedom” in its name is for anything but.
Ron Davidson, Margate
