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Light Rain Bellmore-Merrick remembers Mario Cuomo
Local leaders recall New York's 52nd governor
On Oct. 21, 1982, Democrat Mario Cuomo, then a candidate for governor of New York, was campaigning furiously on Long Island. Among his stops was WGBB radio, on Landsdowne Avenue in Merrick, where he debated Lewis Lehrman, his Republican-Conservative opponent and an investment banker.
Richard Kessel, a native Merokean whom Cuomo later named executive director of the New York State Consumer Protection Board, was there that day. He had lunch with Cuomo afterward.
Kessel had met Cuomo in 1975, when Cuomo was appointed New York’s secretary of state by then Gov. Hugh Carey. Cuomo and Kessel, who earned a political science degree from Columbia University, became fast friends.
Cuomo died of heart failure on New Year’s Day, only hours after his son, Andrew, was inaugurated for a second term as New York’s governor. Born June 15, 1932, Mario Cuomo was 82.
Kessel was among the hundreds of mourners, including Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, who attended Cuomo’s Jan. 5 wake at Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home in Manhattan. A Mass followed the next day at St. Ignatius Loyola Church, also in Manhattan.
A brilliant, regular guy
Cuomo served three terms as New York’s 52nd governor, from 1983 to 1994.
He “was a brilliant man and a great pal,” Kessel said. “He was a great friend. He was compassionate. He was strong. He was one of the strongest and toughest basketball players I’ve ever played with.”
Kessel was head of the Consumer Protection Board from 1984 to 1995, when he was removed from the post by incoming Gov. George Pataki. Riding a pro-death penalty wave and decrying the state’s faltering economy, the virtually unknown Pataki, a Republican, defeated Cuomo in 1994, denying him a fourth term in the governor’s office.
Kessel remembered weekly basketball games between him and Cuomo and their respective staffs, played on Monday nights in a State Department of Corrections gym in Albany. “He was very good a pushing me into a wall,” Kessel joked. “I never complained. He was very, very competitive. He was a regular guy.”
