Press Secretary Horwitz

By Jay Horwitz

Before I come to the Mets, I wanted to join the Kennedy Administration. I wanted to be the next Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary. I was all in on Camelot. Then came the assassination.

Like I do on every November 22, I think back to where I was on the day President Kennedy was killed. I was on the 7-train headed for NYU’s University Heights Campus in the Bronx where I would perform my duties as a manager at a practice session for the Violets basketball team.

I was too distraught to attend the Giants game two days later at Yankee Stadium. Like the rest of America, I was shocked to watch on TV as Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald.

I dabbled in politics for a few years after that, stuffing envelopes for RFK in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972, but that was the end of that and I became a baseball lifer when I came to Flushing on April 1, 1980.