Why do I call him Sid? Normally, I don’t approve of referring to people by their first name if you don’t know them well. I met him just once, spent the day with him, and was enamored with him ever after. That was back in 1990 when John Podhoretz had just hired me as a feature reporter at the Washington Times. He sent me up to New York to profile Sid, who taught me one invaluable lesson. When we sat down for lunch at Gallagher’s Steak House, Sid gave a pained look to my little reporter’s tape recorder. “You should never use that thing,” he told me. “No one will loosen up and talk to you if you’ve got a tape recorder going.” Take notes on a notepad, if you must. I’ve followed that sage advice ever since.

I remember so clearly his talking to me in a certain distinctively Jewish fatherly way. In fact he was from the same New Jersey town as my dad, Passaic, born within a year of each other. “Oh the Klinghoffers, I know them,” he said. 

Actually, he seemed to know everybody, everywhere he went. We spent that July day going from one old fashioned watering hole to another — Gallahger’s, the Yale Club, the Players Club, with a stop at J. Press to see about a sport shirt in between. He seemed pretty loose to me at lunch but kept getting looser as, sequentially, Bombay Gibsons turned to Johnnie Walker Blacks. By the end of the day, at the historic Players Club on Gramercy Park, he was greeted by a crowd of inebriated Jewish men with cries of “Hi Sid! and “Hi Damon!” (as in Runyon).