On Christmas Eve of 1941, with the country three weeks into World War II, the front page of the Ridgewood Times ran a press release dated 55 years in the future. It announced that a one-year-old boy from 67-09 62nd Street had just been elected the 42nd president of the United States.
The whole thing was a gag, and the QNS columnist who writes under the byline The Old Timer resurfaced it on June 27 in the paper’s “Our Neighborhood: The Way It Was” column. The joke belonged to a newspaperman named Harold Stroh, a friend of the Kurtz family who, the Times reported at the time, wrote the fake announcement on a dare.
Here’s how it happened. The Kurtz household on 62nd Street was Anthony, his wife Mae Loretta, and their blue-eyed son Robert John, who was about to turn one. Stroh joked that he would write a biography of the toddler. Everybody laughed. Then, according to writer Nino Lo Bello’s front-page account in the December 24, 1941 edition, Stroh went to his typewriter, wrote a “press release” dated 1996 and mailed it to the paper.
The Times said that in its 33 years of publishing it had never received anything like it. Then it printed the whole thing.
The release laid out an entire imaginary life. Robert John Kurtz, born at Bethany Deaconess Hospital on December 29, 1940, graduates from Grover Cleveland High School in 1955, goes to Columbia Law School, opens a Ridgewood law office, and gets the old B.M.T. elevated structure torn down along Myrtle Avenue. He becomes president of the Ridgewood Republican Club, then an assistant district attorney, then a U.S. senator in 1984, and finally, in a “recent landslide election,” the 42nd president. Stroh even proposed the family’s two-family brick house be made a “national shrine.” The kicker: at 56, Kurtz would rank as one of the two youngest presidents in the nation’s history.
Stroh got exactly one number right, and it wasn’t the birthday. The 42nd president of the United States really was elected in the 1990s. It was Bill Clinton, who beat President George H.W. Bush in 1992 and, at 46, became the third-youngest person to hold the office. The Old Timer notes that Theodore Roosevelt remains the youngest ever, sworn in at 42, followed by John F. Kennedy at 43. The 1941 press release, for what it’s worth, botched Roosevelt’s age too, listing it as 54.
The rest of Stroh’s crystal ball fared no better. New York did not elect a U.S. senator in 1984 at all. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had cruised to re-election in 1982, and Al D’Amato won his second term in 1986, each to a six-year term. The Queens political story of 1984 belonged to Geraldine Ferraro, the congresswoman who became the first woman on a major party’s presidential ticket as Walter Mondale’s running mate. The Mondale-Ferraro ticket lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan and Bush.
A few of the release’s props were real, though. Bethany Deaconess Hospital, where the fictional president was said to be born, was an actual Ridgewood and Bushwick institution. According to Brownstoner, it was founded by the Eastern German Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, opened its main building in 1902, grew to eleven buildings, and closed in 1974 after Wyckoff Heights Hospital bought the site. Catholic Charities razed the complex in 1985 to build senior citizen apartments. The Myrtle Avenue elevated line that Kurtz was supposed to tear down is still running, now as the M train, with service restored this April after a nearly year-long modernization.
What the column can’t fill in is the ending. The Old Timer says he doesn’t know what became of the actual Robert John Kurtz, formerly of 67-09 62nd Street, and is asking readers who remember him to get in touch so he can tell the boy’s real story in a future column. Anyone with information can write to The Old Timer, c/o Ridgewood Times, 38-15 Bell Blvd., Bayside, NY 11361, or email [email protected].
Featured image: photo via Google Maps)
