TV Quote of the Day (‘Barney Miller,’ As Fish Receives a Stupefying Retirement Gift)

Det. Phil Fish [played by Abe Vigoda] [opens his present]: “What is it?”

Det. Stan “Wojo” Wojciehowicz [played by Max Gail]: “It's a New York City municipal bond.”

[All the cops in the precinct stand silently aghast, until…]

Det. Sgt. Nick Yemana [played by Jack Soo] [horrified]: “Oh, my God.”

Fish [still trying to comprehend this]: “A New York City municipal bond?”

“Wojo”: “Yeah. Hey, it's worth a thousand dollars when it matures.”

Fish: “If it matures... in 1997... I would have been 83.”—Barney Miller, Season 4, Episode 2, “Good-Bye, Mr. Fish: Part 2,” original air date Sept. 22, 1977, teleplay by Reinhold Weege, directed by Danny Arnold
 
For reasons related to my school workload and the series’ prime-time schedule, I seldom saw Barney Miller during its eight-year run. With (somewhat) more leisure time now to catch its syndicated reruns, I finally caught up with this two-part episode on the retirement of Det. Fish.
 
Many baby boomers like myself are now facing the future confronting the lovable grouch of the NYPD 12^th Precinct. I was fully prepared for the poignancy of his goodbye (necessitated by Vigoda’s departure for a short-lived spinoff series involving Fish and his wife).
 
What I didn’t expect was Wojo’s going-away present for his comrade and friend. That inappropriate gift provoked a roar of laughter from the studio audience at the time, too.
 
No wonder: Less than two years before, New York’s plunge toward a bankruptcy filing—and the notorious New York Daily News headline it inspired (“Ford to City: Drop Dead”)—put Gotham on a brink from which it only narrowly stepped back from, though not without massive cuts in services and a sharp falloff in quality of life.
 
Nor did it help that only two months before this episode premiered, New York received another black eye: a nearly 24-hour blackout that led to a massive outbreak of looting.
 
The very survival of the city, then, was at stake when Wojo presented Fish with this gift—which meant, of course, that with no city, no maturity on that bond.
 
Barney Miller lasted nearly my whole time in high school and college, a period when New York struggled to climb out of its deep hole. The crazies that came like an unstoppable tide into the 12^th Precinct were just a sample of the collective insanity gripping the city.
 
At various points, it seemed like Barney and his staff were the only bulwarks against what Fish called “the trouble this city is in." In this retirement episode, the pressures of that fight seemed to get to Fish at last, as he came perilously close to abusing a suspect until Barney stepped in.
 
Three years after the sitcom went off the air, showrunner Danny Arnold was honored with the Writer’s Guild of America’s Paddy Chayefsky Award for his lifetime achievement in TV. 

While his sitcom was usually more genial than Chayefsky’s dyspeptic screen satires, the daily dilemmas of this stationhouse reminded me of a line from the latter’s Oscar-winning screenplay for The Hospital: “Among us middle class, love doesn't triumph over all—responsibility does.”

Photo of the Day: Carrie Tower, Brown University

In late October 10 years ago, I visited Brown University while vacationing in Providence, R.I. I was impressed with the architecture of the Ivy League campus, but, with so much happening in my world and my life the last decade, I had little reason to think back on it.

Until late yesterday, that is, when I saw the first awful news of yesterday’s campus shooting that left two students dead and nine others injured.

Among the photos I took 10 years ago was this one of the 95-foot-tall campanile clocktower on the Quiet Green adjacent to the Van Wickle Gates, Hope College and University Hall.

Carrie Tower was named for Carrie Mathilde Brown, granddaughter of Brown University namesake Nicholas Brown Jr., whose death in 1892 after 16 years of marriage devastated her husband, Count Paul Bajnotti of Turin, Italy. The widower left this tangible reminder of his wife in the city where they first met.

Preeminently, then, Carrie Tower stands for the enduring power of love—a force so strong, according to the monument's inscription, that "Love is Strong as Death." The truth of that statement will be tested in the days ahead, not just at Brown but in gun-maddened America. 

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Sholom Aleichem, on Not Being ‘Worried About God So Much’)

“I wasn’t worried about God so much. I could come to terms with Him one way or another. What bothered me was people. Why should human beings bring suffering to others and to themselves, when they could all live together in peace and goodwill?”—Yiddish fiction writer and playwright Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, a.k.a. Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916), “Schprintze,” in Favorite Tales of Sholom Aleichem, translated by Julius and Frances Butwin (1983)

Photo of the Day: Toni Morrison ‘Bench by the Road’ Project, Nyack, NY

Besides Carson McCullers, the Nyack area’s other major literary luminary was Toni Morrison. While walking in the village’s Memorial Park a couple of weekends ago, I came across and took a photo of this commemoration of African-American history that the Nobel Literature laureate (who resided a few miles away, in Grandview-on-Hudson) highlighted.

Ten years ago this past May, as part of the Toni Morrison Society’s “Bench on the Road” project, the novelist attended a public ceremony commemorating an individual who was part of the vast diaspora resulting from the forced “Middle Passage” from African freedom to American slavery.

The project took its name from Morrison’s 1989 observation about the lack of public places “to think about…to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves.”

This roadside monument honors Cynthia Hesdra, a former slave who became a successful businesswoman and property owner in Nyack. As a conductor on the Underground Railroad, she aided others from the South in achieving the liberty and opportunity she had come to enjoy.

The Underground Railroad involved the transfer of an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people to freedom—a mass movement in which countless ordinary citizens performed extraordinary deeds. They changed America forever by defying legally sanctioned, government-sponsored, shameful racism.

Visitors passing through Nyack would do well to ponder how Cynthia Hesdra did her part, and how each of us could do ours now.

Quote of the Day (Chaim Grade, on an Annoying Son-In-Law)

“It vexed him that his son-in-law replied to every question, ‘What do I know?’”— Lithuanian-born Yiddish novelist and poet Chaim Grade (1910-1982), Sons and Daughters, translated by Rose Waldman (2025)

TV Quote of the Day (Norm Macdonald, on 20th-Century German Militarism)

“The entire earth, there’s only one country that frightens me – that’s the country of Germany. I don’t know if you guys are students of history or not, but… For those of you who aren’t, Germany, in the previous century – in the early part… they decided to go to war. And who did they choose to go to war with? The world. So you think that would last about five seconds and the world would f------g win, and that would be that. But it was actually close!”—Canadian stand-up comic, actor, and writer Norm Macdonald (1959-2021), “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip and Trickery” (special), Sept. 18, 2017

Well, there are a whole bunch of people right now who are not “students of history,” and that would be those American voters who put back in office a President who complained relentlessly about the cost of paying for the defense of Europe.

Now, as Isaac Stanley-Becker’s story in the new January 2026 issue of The Atlantic notes, Germany, which turned away from its militaristic tradition in atonement for World War II, is re-starting its war machine in earnest. 

It’s not just Vladimir Putin’s threat to Ukraine that has scared it, but the harsh rhetoric of Donald Trump (given unforgettable form by his chief attack dog, Vice President J.D. Vance, at the Munich security conference earlier this year).

And all of that was before the release late last week of the administration’s new national security strategy.

By overwhelmingly shifting blame for the rise in tensions in Europe from Russia to European democracies (which, the document helpfully informs us, is risking “civilizational erasure”), the reactionary regime in Washington is laying out nothing less than “a clear plan for subversion in Europe,” aptly notes Tara Varma’s summary for the Brookings Institution. 

Europe’s only alternative, she concludes, is clear: “prepare, invest in its own security and resilience, and resist these intimidation and influence operations coming from its closest ally.”

It might take a while, but MAGA will rue the consequences of what it has wrought in a rearming Germany. As Macdonald noted, this principal power in Central Europe was awfully good at making war in the first half of the 20^th century. The United States learned, to its regret, that isolationism only allowed that war machine to run amok.

Who is to say, in a country where the far right is rearing its head again, that history won’t repeat itself?

The image accompanying this post, of German troops parading through Warsaw, Poland, in September 1939, comes from the National Archives at College Park, Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S).

Quote of the Day (Joseph Conrad, on Judging a Man)

“You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.”— Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Lord Jim (1900)