Sue’s cookies, remembering Jack Kemp and Jack Johnson

Ohioan Sue Donegan, originally from Torrington, never forgets. Every Christmas she bakes and boxes cookies and sends them to me. This year they arrived on Sunday, but I didn’t open them until Tuesday, the day after Christmas.

I didn’t dare, for fear I would lose control, dive into them and ruin Christmas dinner. Besides, I like to share such delectable treats with some of the kids who grew up with Susie.

Sue is the eldest daughter of the late Steve Donegan, who took me fishing one memorable summer day when our family was visiting his at their summer headquarters at Twin Lakes.

Steve was a veteran fisherman, while I barely knew how to bait a hook. It was great fun for me and Steve was, luckily, a patient man besides being a good friend. He did all the rowing, too. A fine day, good sizzling things on the grill, happy kids, contentment and a pleasant memory that endures all these decades later. Prompted, of course, by pal Sue’s fabulous assorted cookies.

Care for one? Sorry, too late.

⏩ New Year’s resolution: Walk every morning at the armory . . . I have a terrific Christmas CD called “A Lovely Way to Spend Christmas.” Kristin Chenoweth — little woman, big voice — is the featured artist. I break it out every year because I get such a happy jolt out of her rendition of “Sleigh Ride,” a duet with John Pizzarelli. At one point she calls out, “I’m fre-e-e-zing,” and it simply knocks my hat off. She’s terrific . . . The Bills gave the Pats all they wanted for a half Sunday before giving way to the inevitable. I root for them because I remember the once-great Buffalo teams of Jack Kemp and Cookie Gilchrist. But mostly because son-in-law Biff Toth of Manchester hails originally from Buffalo and he’s a huge fan of the Bills and the NHL Sabres, and I’m a big Biff fan . . . Former president Gerald Ford, an all-American football player (center) at Michigan, was an athlete just about all of his life. As president, he took a vigorous swim every day in the White House pool. The AP’s “This Day in

History” noted yesterday (Tuesday) that he died at age 93 on Dec. 26, 2006. Ford was, for certain, the best athlete ever to sit in the big Oval Office chair.

⏩ Remembering Kemp: He died of cancer at age 73 in 2009. A terrific quarterback who followed his gridiron career with another

highly successful career in politics. He served nine terms as a congressman from the Buffalo area, was George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and, finally, when Bob Dole ran for president in 1996, Kemp was his running mate. That election is remembered as the one by which Bill Clinton, with Al Gore as VP, won his second term and Texas zillionier

and businessman Ross Perot (Reform Party), with running mate economist Pat Choate, pulled in over eight million votes, even though he was pretty much ignored by the media and excluded from some presidential debates.

⏩ Examining Tuesday’s “This Day in History’’ feature, I learned it was on Dec. 26, 1908, that Jack Johnson knocked out Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, to become the first African-American to hold the world heavyweight championship. I rushed to my bookcase and pulled out “Unforgivable Blackness,” by Geoffrey C. Ward, subtitled, “The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.” I’ll read it again, soon. The book is lavishly praised on its overleaf by two Pulitzer Prize-winners, Doris Kearns Goodwin and David Levering.