Sidebar: Shanker Still the Head of his Class
Nov 8, 2004 4:31 PM
It is a rain-soaked Saturday afternoon and I'm making small-talk with Al Shanker about his taste in eyewear. Why, I ask, did he switch from wire-rim to his trademark black, thick-frame glasses? "I started being on television a lot and George (Altomare) said wire-rims made me look shifty," he answers.
Ah, so that explains the "Buddy Holly look," I tell him. He stares back blankly.
"Buddy Holly, the '50s rock-n-roll star who was killed in the plane crash.You know, Peggy Sue?" I say incredulously.
Still nothing.
"He's kidding, right?" I ask Eadie, his wife of some 35 years.
"He's not," she says seriously. "Al barely knows Elvis."
By now Shanker is smiling. "You see, when it comes to cultural literacy...."
Pop culture icons aside, there aren't many subjects Al Shanker can't hold forth on. A voracious reader, he can give you the gist and a critique of a book he read 40 years ago. Listening, you can't help but think that had Shanker stuck to the university path he would have run one high-powered graduate seminar.
He's bookish, all right, but there's much more to him. Over the years Shanker's passions have included photography, baking and wine-making -- he'd buy grapes by the bushel for pressing and keep up to 300 gallons of wine aging in barrels in his basement. An audiophile extraordinaire, countless union comrades will tell you about the time he spent setting up their home stereo systems.
But, in the end, it's Shanker's almost extraterrestrial mind that grabs you.Take the day I visit him at Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital. At his bedside are books by the educational-reform guru E.D. Hirsch and Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm -- he seldom reads fewer than two books at a time. With the bags of therapeutic "potion," as he calls it, slowly emptying into his veins,Shanker and I begin what was to be about a three-hour interview. Naturally,we're interrupted no fewer than a dozen times by hospital personnel and telephone calls, some lasting as long as 10 minutes.
Each time, I push the pause button on the tape recorder and, so as not to appear as if I'm eavesdropping, stare at the ceiling or out the window.Invariably, within a minute or so, I would forget where we were in the conversation. Not to worry. No matter whether he'd been interrupted in mid-sentence or mid-thought, Shanker never once asked, "Now where was I?"Instead it was always "As I was saying."
This kind of clarity of mind even shows up in the way he listens. In response to my overly long, wordy and sometimes disjointed interrogation, he's able to tease out a central thesis or at least a good question, saying, "If you're asking me whether--"
As for Shanker's answers, well, they're anything but stock. Talking with him you never get the feeling he's searching the hard drive for some old file -- a rare quality in a world where public discourse has been dumbed down by fortune cookie sound bites and pat answers. And sometimes after rolling an issue around in his mind he'll actually say, "I don't know."
A former Daily News reporter who covered Shanker for years says: "He's afresh thinker. Here he is, close to 70 years old and still searching."
Shanker, he said, had a reputation among reporters for straight answers,sometimes to a fault. "The guy just hates PR. He's so honest it used to get him into trouble. Say what you want about Al, he's a mensch."
