FOR THE RECORD

FOR THE RECORD

In 1966 Mayor Lindsay's Parks Commissioner, Tom Hoving, named the young Henry Stern to be the agency's Executive Director.

According to the late Bert Rose, who was then a top official at District Council 37, Mr. Stern decided to flex his muscles by firing a couple of parks workers, and the union flexed back by pulling lifeguards off the beaches in Brooklyn at the start of the Memorial Day weekend.

As Mr. Rose recounted it, the sudden suspension of swimming led to a City Hall summons of Mr. Hoving at his summer house. A quick bit of telephone negotiating led to the firings being rescinded, which led to the lifeguards being summoned, in many cases from under the boardwalks where they had been lolling during their job action. It also subsequently led to a summons of Mr. Stern to Mr. Hoving's office.

As Mr. Stern told the tale to an aging and adoring crowd at the Museum of the City of New York last week during a discussion of legendary Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, Mr. Hoving told him he was removing him from his job at the insistence of DC 37 Executive Director Victor Gotbaum.

"I'm grateful to Victor, because it got me a great pension," Mr. Stern said, noting that he immediately moved over to become Assistant City Administrator in Deputy Mayor Timothy Costello's office.

He didn't mention it to the crowd, but while Mr. Gotbaum had the Mayor's ear, Mr. Stern had his own political hook: membership in the Liberal Party, which had played a key role in getting Mr. Lindsay elected the previous year and later gave him the ballot line that won him a second term after he lost the Republican mayoral primary in 1969.

Mr. Stern later added to his municipal service as a City Councilman At Large before Mayor Ed Koch appointed him Parks Commissioner in 1983.

Mr. Stern lost that job when Mr. Koch's bid for a fourth term was defeated by David Dinkins in 1989.

"Ironically, Dinkins threw me out to make way for Betsy Gotbaum," Mr. Stern said, "but I still got my pension."

Mr. Stern would later characterize his four years out of city government as "the time when I was away," a euphemism more frequently used by ex-cons to refer to their periods of incarceration.

As to his pension, he might have added, but didn't, that it was further fattened after Rudy Giuliani unseated Mr. Dinkins in the 1993 mayoral election. He tapped Mr. Stern - a frequent Dinkins critic as head of Citizens Union and a continued stalwart in the Liberal Party, which gave Mr. Giuliani an alternative line for support from Democrats who didn't like voting Republican - to return as Parks Commissioner for his eight years in office.

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Governor Spitzer, the self-proclaimed "steamroller" of Albany, has apparently lost steam and is no longer on a roll with the public, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released April 4.

Seven weeks earlier, his brash style won him the approval of 61 percent of the state voters who responded to a Quinnipiac survey, but his favorable job rating is now down to 48 percent.

The primary cause of his plummeting popularity appears to be the effective advertising campaign by Local 1199, the giant health-care union, that asserted that his proposed cuts in hospitals and nursing homes would jeopardize the quality of patient care. Sixty-four percent of those surveyed said they believed the cuts - which were scaled back during final budget negotiations with the Legislature - would endanger treatment.

The poll noted that only 34 percent of the 1,528 registered voters who responded had a good opinion of the Legislature. That doesn't necessarily suggest individual legislators should feel threatened, since the record shows their re-election prospects are the surest thing this side of the Yankee Stadium beer concession when the Red Sox are in town.

But the opinion expressed by Quinnipiac polling director Mickey Carroll back when Mr. Spitzer was still riding high on public esteem seemed to be corroborated by the latest findings. Mr. Carroll said then that the new Governor would either use his intimidating style to get things done or be viewed as a loose cannon who didn't cooperate enough to be effective.