On my dad’s 9th birthday, his parents, Ethel and Morris, surprised him with a beautiful Lionel train set. The name Lionel still invokes instant wonder and nostalgia for many boys (of any age, but mostly older boys, in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, though experiencing one first-hand will leave almost anyone overwhelmed with age-defying awe). Lionel was synonymous with that perfectly crafted ideal world within a world – realistic train sets made since the turn of the 20th century, capturing the magic of an only recently conquered North American continent. IT was only in 1869 that the great American Railroad united East and West – a trip that once took close to 6 weeks suddenly diminished into just one – an “annihilation of time and space” as Rebecca Solnit once referred to that technologically dizzying age. 

Toy trains may have first appeared as an answer to the dollhouse, but they coincided with the mighty effects of the real thing, symbols of a gravity-defying new American empire. They also benefited from the new ubiquity of electricity, by the 1930’spreading through a grid that sent magical currents into every home, even the most rural. Model trains could now enable every boy to become a master of his own universe. With a Lionel in your hand, or your finger on the train on-switch, you held the power of a little god, instilled with an imagination that could take flight to the most infinite realms. May we all have the confidence and ambition of a small boy with his first train set. 

For Ricky, the greatest joy lay in building the little world around the train, and a small town began to grow in the attic of the Friedman house on Delta Place in Kingston, NY. Ricky’s friend, Lee Forst, also had a Lionel, and the two delved into tending to their new miniature worlds. Lee and Ricky would save their allowances and regularly head to Woolworth’s on Wall Street, in Kingston’s uptown, to buy new additions. On one trip the two pooled their resources to buy a few figures, but realized they were several cents short for one more they really wanted. In probably the only act of dishonesty in his entire life, Ricky agreed with Lee on a plan to steal that one figure. On their way home, they would take turns holding it until they felt they had made a safe escape, finally parting ways at Noone Lane and Pearl Street.

When Ricky was around 10 or 11, he came home one day to find that his father had suddenly packed up his Lionel in boxes. Morris, who apart from baseball took little interest in his son’s leisure time, offered no explanation. It was sent to cousin Bobby’s, in Queens. Ricky actually was not as devastated as perhaps Ethel and Morris had feared — Lee’s train set was cooler and bigger anyway. But it certainly left Ricky puzzled. It would take more than 50 years for this mystery of the Lionel train set to be solved. 

The answer would come with the DJT era and its resurrection of some especially vile ghosts – with one in particular. Roy Cohn has returned to haunt us — mocking us in our belief that a spirit like his could ever be bottled up and kept on a shelf in the past. A spate of profiles, in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and many others, and several documentaries, have revisited this real-life bogeyman. Cohn’s latter-life villainy took the form of a vicious New York power broker, who knew how to bend the law and men to his will to achieve success for his clients, which included Donald Trump, a young developer setting his hooks into Manhattan. An eager acolyte, Trump absorbed the lessons Cohn imparted.

But Cohn’s notoriety began very early in his career. As a young prosecutor in his early 20’s, he seized on the fervor of McCarthyism, hunting Communists, real and imagined. To many, his most unforgiveable sin was his role in the prosecution of the Rosenbergs in 1951 for spying for the Soviets. Their execution in 1953 would be the only the only one carried out for espionage in modern American history (Senator McCarthy himself took note and invited Cohn to work for him). 

This is not the first time Cohn’s ghost has been summoned to hold a mirror to present societal sins – in Tony Kushner’s incredible play cycle about Reagan’s America and the AIDS crisis, Angels in America, Roy Cohn (played by Al Pacino in the HBO adaptation), plays mentor to a young and earnest  Mormon just arrived in New York who, like himself, is gay and closeted. An actual ghost – Ethel Rosenberg (played by Meryl Streep) — appears with her own lessons and reminders from the past – specially sent to taunt Cohn as he succumbs to that disease he would not acknowledge, in a ruthless world he helped create.

That Cohn was one of the Jewish prosecutors of Jewish Communists was not a coincidence (he would also claim that the judge – Irving Kaufman, and the lead prosecutor, Irving Saypol, were appointed on his recommendation, and that the death sentence was his idea as well). Neither was the fact that the Rosenbergs were Jewish. The American Communist Party had adherents of all faiths and backgrounds, but Jews formed a disproportionate percentage. In Yiddish, American Socialism often found its idiom. 

Ethel and Morris Friedman counted themselves among the party’s ranks, with membership in a cell in Woodstock. They met playing tennis at Camp Unity – a summer retreat for Communists of a certain age. While living picture-perfect middle-class lives, they were acutely aware of what lay just below the surface – not only poverty and class struggles, but a racism and inhumanity they saw as too intrinsic to the American fabric.

To Ethel and Morris, Roy Cohn was not only a monster, but a personally and viscerally felt one. Ricky always knew that – their politics and membership in the party helped form him, a red diaper baby that would realize more of their ideals than even they would. So, it was with intense interest that he read every single article that has come out in the last few years about Roy Cohn. In one article, or perhaps once more going down a rabbit hole (another t-shirt idea – Ricky Loves Wiki), Ricky discovered that Roy Cohn was the grand-nephew of Joshua Lionel Cowen, the founder of Lionel. More shockingly, he learned that in 1959, when Cowen and his son were mired in a family dispute over the company, Cohn saw his opportunity and undertook a hostile takeover of the model train company (yes, within his own family). By 1963, after disastrous leadership, Cohn was forced to resign. 

Ricky finally understood – he tracked back to late 50’s Kingston, to his train set sitting in a box, and the news that it was going to cousin Bobby (whose father, uncle Max, Ricky now figured out, was the only Republican in the family). Young Ricky’s world was a near-perfect technicolor reel of a 1950’s small-town childhood, with years of sentiment and nostalgia saturating the colors further, and fixing postcard-like memories as missives to the future. His life was framed in that Delta Place house with his father working long days as a company man (Barclay Knitwear), and then hours on the weekend lobbing baseballs to his son till dusk and dinner.  Ricky’s mother Ethel tended to hearth and home, with a fierce devotion for her family. 

The Lionel was a perfect embodiment of that particular reel. But history and reality were playing on a different one, and at times intruded. Morris would always battle with his competing instincts of radical politics and the expediency of American material comfort, and often completely irreconcilable but equally deeply felt convictions (he both tried to unionize the Barclay Knitwear shop and then offered to become foreman when the company fled upstate to avoid the union; there are MANY more examples). After realizing a father is not an omniscient god (it’s usually the father, even if mothers are actually closer to the real thing) we are left with several choices – dismiss the whole because the taint of the arbitrariness and idiosyncracies (or some worse qualities) are overwhelming, or, pick and choose, and hold on to the more virtuous, and to the most personally resonant. 

(Morris may be forgiven for the Lionel, but Ethel may not be for throwing out Ricky’s baseball cards when they moved downstate to New York).