There Was?

They’re saying there was a trace of snow yesterday, making this the latest first snowfall on record:

Yesterday, Jan. 10, a date that will live in meteorological history, snow flurries were glimpsed in Central Park for the first time this winter.

The previous record for the latest recorded snowfall was Jan. 4, 1878, when President Rutherford B. Hayes discussed with his Cabinet the possible minting of silver dollars.

The first snow yesterday, a chilly, blustery day, follows a period of unusual warmth throughout the Northeast and especially in New York City. A shift in the jet stream, which carries frigid air from the Arctic Circle, appears to have spared the region the usual winter storms so far, meteorologists say.

For the record, flurries fell in the park at 9:55 a.m., when the temperature was 33 degrees, according to the National Weather Service. It was over in less than 15 minutes. New Jersey got more snow, with Newark Liberty International Airport reporting a total of 0.1 inch.

Statist Looters, Let’s Handle This Quaker-Like

It may not be the Euphronios Krater but a group of Queens residents seeks to repatriate the Quaker-defending Flushing Remonstrance document to its rightful home:

A group of Queens activists is calling on Governor Eliot Spitzer to extend his “People’s Government” to lend a hand in bringing the Flushing Remonstrance back to the borough where the historic document was penned some 350 years ago.

Historian David Oats is leading the charge to convince state officials to release the document from a site where it has been stored for more than three centuries

“They aren’t holding the Remonstrance in a glass showcase,” Oats said. “They have it stored in a vault, in a virtual prison-like setting, where the public is unable to even view it.”

Oats, president of the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park World’s Fair Association, said his group traveled to Albany to attend the inauguration of Governor Spitzer, where they petitioned the governor for the permanent return of the Flushing Remonstrance to the borough of Queens.

“We are calling on Governor Spitzer to keep his word to bring new passion to Albany by helping to end the state’s nearly-threecentury stranglehold on the Remonstrance,” Oats said.

Oats said after a successful three-year battle, state officials agreed to a “temporary release” of the Remonstrance in 1999, when the document was delivered to the Main Street branch of the Queens Borough Public Library for a public viewing.

“Teams of state troopers brought the Remonstrance to Queens in an armored vehicle, not unlike those used to transport prisoners,” Oats said. “When the viewings were over, they returned it in the same vehicle.”

. . .

“Our ultimate aim is for the Remonstrance to be returned to Queens, to be permanently displayed in the newly expanded and renovated Queens Museum of Art — in the very building that served two World’s Fairs, in the very place where the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

For further information, see the website.

Express Trains . . . Who Needs Them?

After two students broke a non-Guinness approved record for speediest trip on the entire subway system back in August, another group enters the record book with an official time. Moral — taking express trains may not save much time after all:

With their chins held high and their bladders full, the high school buddies waltzed out of the No. 2 train at 241st St. in the Bronx and basked in the attention lavished on them by a group of nearly two dozen loved ones and reporters.

“It’s really hard to describe what it’s like to plan something for so long, and then not only to achieve it, but to break the record by such a solid margin,” gushed Bill Amarosa, 28, after his team swept through the station at 4:37 p.m.

The group of friends managed to stop at all of the system’s 468 stations in a time of 24 hours, 54 minutes and 3 seconds — beating the mark set in 1989 by nearly an hour and a half.

In August, two students blazed through the length of the subway system in slightly more than 24 hours, but their feat was not counted by Guinness because they failed to stop at every station.

. . .

Their journey began just after 3:30 p.m. Thursday.

Along the way, the six men were sustained by energy bars, McDonald’s hamburgers delivered to them by devoted friends and the unwavering support of MTA workers and fellow straphangers.

A conductor on a downtown B train announced yesterday morning: “Everybody, you should know you’re riding on the train with the guys who are trying to break the record.”

Road Trip . . . With Al Sharpton!

If you happened to see a Ford Club Wagon van speeding up I-95 sometime in the last couple of days, that could have been James Brown:

William Murrell, who had shuttled the music legend around for the past 15 years, drove Brown’s body on an 800-mile pilgrimage from Augusta, Ga., to Harlem — a trip that took him from 10 p.m. Wednesday to 10 a.m. yesterday.

“I drove him in life, and I drove him in death,” said Murrell, 47. “I can’t say no to Mr. Brown.”

The coffin had arrived too late at the funeral home for staff there to make a scheduled flight out of Atlanta. And the remaining flights that could carry the remains were all booked as well.

Without a second thought, Murrell yanked the backseats out of his Ford van and loaded up. He and a co-worker piloted the Ford Club Wagon van up I-95 with the Rev. Al Sharpton, the funeral home director and Brown’s 24-karat gold-plated coffin in back.

. . .

The incredible journey started with a frantic phone call from the C.A. Reid Sr. funeral home around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday telling Murrell there was trouble.

The custom-designed coffin — which needed its blue lining replaced with a special one of white satin — was running late.

There was no time to make the 2-1/2-hour trip from Augusta to Atlanta in time for the 7:45 p.m. scheduled Delta flight — or any other flights that night — they said.

All charter flights were booked, including Murrell’s two planes. And eager crowds were already massing in Harlem to say goodbye.

“They had to get him to the Apollo. They tried everything,” said Murrell, “It was my last chance to give him a ride of a lifetime.”

. . .

So Murrell didn’t hesitate in taking out the back three seats of the van, snagging a co-worker and racing to the funeral home to pick up the coffin, Sharpton and the funeral director.

And as if Brown himself were clearing their way, they zipped along the darkened roads at high speed.

“I didn’t go over 90,” Murrell chuckled yesterday, hours before he was set to drive Brown’s coffin on the return trip to Georgia.

City To Ford: Scoreboard

The Times revisits the Daily News’ famous headline after the former President, er, passes away at the age of 93:

Mr. Ford, on Oct. 29, 1975, gave a speech denying federal assistance to spare New York from bankruptcy. The front page of The Daily News the next day read: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

Mr. Ford never explicitly said “drop dead.” Yet those two words, arguably the essence of his remarks as encapsulated in the immortal headline, would, as he later acknowledged, cost him the presidency the following year, after Jimmy Carter, nominated by the Democrats in New York, narrowly carried the state.

“It more than annoyed me because it wasn’t accurate,” he recalled years later. “It was very unfair.”

That view is echoed in an evolving version of historical revisionism. Only two months after saying or meaning or merely implying “drop dead” — or, perhaps, resorting to tough love by holding the city’s feet to the fire — Mr. Ford signed legislation to provide federal loans to the city, which were repaid with interest.

. . .

The Ford administration’s politically suicidal demands to city officials — raise transit fares, abolish rent control, scrap free tuition at the City University — prompted Victor Gotbaum, the municipal labor leader, to complain that Mr. Simon barely believed in government at all, except for police and fire protection, “and he’s not sure about fire.”

David R. Gergen, an assistant to [treasury secretary William E.] Simon at the time and later a presidential adviser, recalled that Mr. Ford himself “was one of those moderate Republicans who actually liked New York” — he chose Nelson A. Rockefeller as his vice president — but that “he was offended by the city’s profligate spending.”

“The president’s speechwriters whipped up one draft, and I was asked by the White House chief of staff to write an alternative version,” Mr. Gergen said. “I wrote a hard-hitting piece, assuming that if it ever saw the light of day, the White House would, in the normal course, invite me to smooth the rough edges. Instead, someone plopped a few of my rough, unedited paragraphs into the final text.”

In the speech, the president said: “The people of this country will not be stampeded. They will not panic when a few desperate New York officials and bankers try to scare New York’s mortgage payments out of them.”

The speech had a powerful impact, Mr. Gergen said. “It was a doozy of a speech, but events caught both sides by surprise,” Mr. Gergen remembered. “New Yorkers had not foreseen how tough the president would be, and Republicans in Washington had not anticipated how angry the response would be.”