I decided to use Phil’s name for at least two reasons, I realize now.  It’s a cool name and it recalls a couple of funny stories my father told my sister and me about his colleague and friend, Phil Trombino.  

I have nothing but good things to say about Phil, who I don’t believe I ever met in person or spoke to, so there is nothing for anybody to fear when I use his actual name.  

It’s a different case with the blond, folk-singing member of MENSA who became my father’s deathly enemy after their close friendship ended and she moved out of New York.   His story was that she was pathologically competitive, had this insane need to be right no matter what, and this became especially, and maddeningly, intense when she was wrong.  

Her version is that my father and Gladys set her up to publicly humiliate her, at the end of a long campaign of conspiracy and sabotage by my father and Gladys.  Gladys, a colleague at the Human Relations Unit and a beloved friend, and my father were, for many years, thick as thieves.

I have good reason to believe both of these stories.  I have stories of the former folk-singer in her later years, we were in touch not that long ago, but I would not want her name dragged into this Book of Irv.  I’m fairly sure she wouldn’t either.

I would also not use the unique and colorful last name of his good friend Harold, who put a price of $75 on their long affectionate friendship.  Harold and Irv were really the ideal, dark-humored brothers neither of them had ever had.  In addition to having a keen sense of humor and a deadpan style, Harold was held up to my sister and me as a living genius.

“He’s literally a genius,” my father explained it to us once.  “He can speak, read and write about six languages, all very well.  He’s a licensed electrician, can wire and build anything.  He flies an airplane, he can take a plane’s engine apart and put it back together.  He built that house they live in and he installed all the plumbing.   He’s a wine expert.  And he plays several musical instruments.”

“Violin, cello, piano, banjo, mandolin, ukulele, organ…,” my mother said, beginning to count them off,  “he plays about ten instruments, maybe more.  Saxophone also, I think, and clarinet, I think, and flute.  Yes, I’ve heard him play the flute.  He’s an excellent flautist,” added my mother.

Excellent player, genius, droll and likable fellow, but after putting a price of $75 on my father’s friendship nobody ever talked about him again in our house, that I can recall.  Except in the context of a great memory my sister and I have about his son’s hilarious and completely off-beat joke, I don’t think his name ever came up again at the dinner table where, in the old days, we’d see him from time to time when he’d stopped by the house in the car he rebuilt himself to drop off a book for my father or just say hello on his way out to the Island. 

Harold’s probably gone by now, he’d be over ninety if he was alive, but just the same, the way things ended with him and my father, it would only be hurtful to Harold’s family, if they ever read this, to learn the details of the ugly end without a chapter about the years of their great friendship, years I know little about, since I was too young to witness any but the last few.  My sister and I loved Harold and enjoyed his family.  We have a few hilarious memories of times spent with Harold, or Harold’s kids.

But Phil Trombino, I found it impossible not to type his name  when I mentioned the Italian member of the Mod Squad at the Human Relations Unit.   I did a google search, and his name popped right up.  Phil did play minor league ball, for seven seasons, it turns out.  Now I had a primary source.  Suddenly we learn that he was born in 1947, so he must have been a kid when he worked with my father.  “You could look it up,” as Casey Stengel used to say.  In 2016, of course, you can look it up, and it takes less than a second.  I went to look at the back of his baseball card.  

Phil Trombino was a lifetime .309 hitter as a minor league first and third-baseman and occasional outfielder.  He played in the minors from the age of 20 to 27 or so.  His last year in professional baseball was the year I graduated from High School.

This is what got me wondering about the time frame of the Human Relations Unit. The summer that I was eleven years old, prime time for the Office of Intergroup Relations, I would think, in 1967, Phil Trombino was the starting first baseman for the Iona College baseball team.  That season he hit .441, setting a school record that stood for years.  To this day it’s the second highest season average ever compiled by an Iona College baseball player.