If I waited for perfection.........................

“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.” - Herbert Spencer

My younger brother Danny (left) and I in a photomatic at Lake Quaspaug Connecticut in 196. We entered foster care one month after this was taken.

How Congress Could Fix Obamacare for Former Foster Children

One senator wants to add it to child welfare legislation this fall.

BY DYLAN SCOTT

August 19, 2015 A Democratic senator is hoping to attach a fix for one of the Affordable Care Act's numerous glitches—this one for coverage of foster children—to child-welfare legislation expected to move this Congress, National Journal has learned.

It will be a test of Democrats' ability to finagle any minor changes to Obamacare while they are stuck in the minority, and Republican willingness to accept any alterations that acknowledge the law's likely continuation.

Sen. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania has introduced a stand-alone bill that would address a problem for foster children created by the health care law. Obamacare required states to provide Medicaid coverage to former foster youths until age 26—a provision to accompany the popular requirement that insurers allow children to stay on their parents' insurance until the same age.

But the Obama administration interpreted the law's language to mean that former foster children would be covered by Medicaid only in the state where they had been in foster care. If they moved to another state, they wouldn't be eligible to enroll in the program.

Casey's bill would clarify that former foster kids should be eligible for Medicaid coverage in any state until age 26.

It is one of those technical fixes to Obamacare that Democrats have long hoped to make, but which Republicans have been reluctant to take up while they advocate for the full repeal of the law. The legislation has no other sponsors and no guarantee of action in the GOP-controlled Senate.

So the primary strategy for actually getting the policy enacted is wrapping it into a bigger child welfare package that Congress is expected to advance later this year, a Casey aide said.

Working in Casey's favor is that a broader legislative package is likely to move. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch said this month that he hoped to mark up legislation in the fall that would "reduce the reliance on foster-care group homes and allow states to use their federal foster-care dollars for these prevention services."

The underlying bill is expected to be bipartisan. Senate Finance ranking member Ron Wyden introduced legislation before the August recess aimed at Hatch's goals, and the senator from Utah indicated a willingness to work with Wyden and other members of the committee to put a proposal together.

But an Obamacare provision could add drama to the process. Hatch's office did not respond to requests for comment on Casey's bill.

“A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.”

--Oscar Wilde

“Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

But you are eternity and you are the mirror.”

                                                  Kahlil Gibran

  People taking pictures of people: Galway, Ireland

 I'm an amateur photographer, I travel a lot so some years ago and I noticed that everywhere I went there was someone taking a photo of someone else. It's part of the human condition and I think it’s fun so I started snapping pictures of people taking pictures. 

PHOTOGRAPHS I'VE TAKEN: IRELAND

  

WHY THE WORLD NEEDS EDITORS.....................

Excerpt from my book "No Time to Say Goodbye: Memoirs of a Life in Foster Care.

  It was about that time that I started to date a girl from town named Lina Lentz, a voluptuous blonde with large brown eyes, a ready smile and a happy, easygoing disposition. She was a pleasure to be with, and people liked her. She was also—and this sounds much harsher than I intend it to sound—as dumb as a brick. But she was the girl who laughed away the dark clouds, and she arrived exactly at the right moment.

  I met her on a winter’s day, one of the best in my life. There is a large pond in the middle of the village of Deep River, Roger’s Pond, and when it was frozen over the locals ice fished and skated there. Teens congregated around a small fire at the pond’s edge. That’s where I saw her first, standing around the fire with her girlfriends, covered from neck to toe in a long black coat of a kind popular with the girls that year. Her bright blonde hair poured out from under a white crocheted hat and spread across her slender shoulders and seemed even brighter set against her coat. White home-knitted mittens covered her small hands, and the winter’s cold had turned her pretty face crimson. A fog settled across the pond combined itself with the white smoke from the fire, and giving her an angelic appearance. We stared in silence at each other for a full minute until someone broke the spell and cracked, “So when’s the wedding for you two?”

  It was a good day.

  Lina’s family arrived in Deep River from Sweden in the early nineteenth century, and her grandfather was one of the town’s founders. Her father was a rough sort, with a gravelly voice and disposition that made me nervous. We were opposites of each other in every way possible. He didn’t know what to make of me, or what his daughter saw in me.

  But he didn’t have to worry about me marrying into the family since my relationship with Lina was strictly physical, and nothing else. In fact, we barely spoke to each other, and on reflection, I really didn’t know much about her, what she liked, what she didn’t like, her favorite foods—nothing, really. I did know she was a shapely, amorous girl who was fond of sex.

  We spent the early summer of 1969 in a massive field on the grounds of St. John’s that gave a splendid view of the river below and was far away from everything else. The field gave us privacy to get on with the heady business of exploring each other’s bodies.

  Lina waited for me there, having already laid out a blanket for us and prepared a lunch she brought from home. Like most kids of the time, we brought along transistor radios and listened to our favorite AM rock stations, FM being mostly an empty wasteland.  

  One day in early May, we were laid out naked across the blanket, resting from our latest round of explorations. We were silently staring up into the blue sky and listening to the radio when toward the river I saw a large group of older people with cameras and binoculars staring up at us from the nearby railroad tracks.   

 “Look,” I said. “Voyeurs!”

 Lina opened her eyes and saw them, smiled and waved at them, and several waved back. “What country are voyeurs from?” she asked.

  She stood up and did a slow, very sexual interpretation of a football cheer for the folks:

Give me a T!

Give me an I!

Give me a E!

Give me a T!

Give me an S!

What’s that spell?

Breasts!

  As I said, she was a good girl but she was a dumb girl, God bless her, and I stood and gave her rousing applause anyway, and we both took long and graceful bows.

 What we didn’t know was that the group was made up of state and local officials who were on a research trip to consider funding a tourist railroad on the old tracks running along the river’s edge. Someone in the group sent Father Mac Donald a grainy but accurate photo of Lina and I in all our naked, smiling glory.  

 A few weeks later, I was called into Father MacDonald’s capacious office on the second floor, where he flashed the photo at me.

 “Can you explain this?” he snapped, his finger unknowingly tapping the portion of the photo where Lina’s breasts were. 

  “No, Father,” I said. I tried to sound repentant but I couldn’t. I found myself fighting back the urge to burst out laughing. I don’t know if it was nerves or the fact that I just didn’t care anymore.

  He pushed the black-and-white photo closer to my face and said, “Well, isn’t that you?” 

  “No, Father,” I laughed. “I don’t have boobs.”

  He literally threw the book at me, a large black bound book. I was restricted to my room for two months and denied all privileges, and became a sort of legend in the storied history of Mount Saint John.

http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/

In 1962, six year old John Tuohy, his two brothers and two sisters entered Connecticut’s foster care system and were promptly split apart. Over the next ten years, John would live in more than ten foster homes, group homes and state schools, from his native Waterbury to Ansonia, New Haven, West Haven, Deep River and Hartford. In the end, a decade later, the state returned him to the same home and the same parents they had taken him from. As tragic as is funny compelling story will make you cry and laugh as you journey with this child to overcome the obstacles of the foster care system and find his dreams.

http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/0692361294/

http://amemoirofalifeinfostercare.blogspot.com/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John William Tuohy is a writer who lives in Washington DC. He holds an MFA in writing from Lindenwood University. He is the author of numerous non-fiction on the history of organized crime including the ground break biography of bootlegger Roger Tuohy "When Capone's Mob Murdered Touhy" and "Guns and Glamour: A History of Organized Crime in Chicago."

His non-fiction crime short stories have appeared in The New Criminologist, American Mafia and other publications. John won the City of Chicago's Celtic Playfest for his work The Hannigan's of Beverly, and his short story fiction work, Karma Finds Franny Glass, appeared in AdmitTwo Magazine in October of 2008.

His play, Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a public performance at the Actors Chapel in Manhattan in February of 2007 as part of the groups Reading Series for New York project. In June of 2008, the play won the Virginia Theater of The First Amendment Award for best new play.

 Contact John: JWTUOHY95@GMAIL.COM

GOOD WORDS TO HAVE………………..

Paul Pry (paul pry) noun An excessively inquisitive person. From a character in the comedic play Paul Pry by John Poole (1786-1872). Earliest documented use: 1826. Also see nosy parker.

Lorelei: (LOR-uh-ly) noun: A dangerously seductive woman. In German legend Lorelei was a nymph who sat on a rock of the same name on the Rhine river. Her songs lured sailors to their destruction on the rock. Earliest documented use: 1878. Also see siren, Mata Hari, and Circe.

An eponym is a word coined after a person, from Greek epi- (upon) + -onym (name). The English language has thousands of them, for men and women, from fact and fiction, obscure and well-known, home-grown and borrowed from other languages.

HERE'S PLEASANT POEM FOR YOU TO ENJOY................

Magellan Street, 1974

by Maxine Kumin

Magellan Street, 1974

This is the year you fall in

love with the Bengali poet,

and the Armenian bakery stays open

Saturday nights until eleven

across the street from your sunny

apartment with steep fo'c'sle stairs

up to an attic bedroom.

Three-decker tenement flank you.

Cyclone fences enclose

flamingos on diaper-size lawns.

This is the year, in a kitchen

you brighten with pots of basil

and untidy mint, I see how

your life will open, will burst from

the maze in its walled-in garden

and streak towards the horizon.

Your pastel maps lie open

on the counter as we stand here

not quite up to exchanging

our lists of sorrows, our day books,

our night thoughts, and burn the first batch

of chocolate walnut cookies.

Of course you move on,

my circumnavigator.

Tonight as I cruise past your corner,

a light goes on in the window.

Two shapes sit at the table.

Maxine Kumin (June 6, 1925 – February 6, 2014) was a poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981–1982

In 1957, she studied poetry with John Holmes at the Boston Center for Adult Education. There she met Anne Sexton, with whom she started a friendship that continued until Sexton's suicide in 1974. Kumin taught English from 1958 to 1961 and 1965 to 1968 at Tufts University; from 1961 to 1963 she was a scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. She also held appointments as a visiting lecturer and poet in residence at many American colleges and universities. From 1976 until her death in February 2014, she and her husband lived on a farm in Warner, New Hampshire, where they bred Arabian and quarter horses.

Kumin's many awards include the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize for Poetry (1972), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1973) for Up Country, in 1995 the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the 1994 Poets' Prize (for Looking for Luck), an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for excellence in literature (1980), an Academy of American Poets fellowship (1986), the 1999 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and six honorary degrees. In 1979, the Supersisters trading card set was produced and distributed; one of the cards featured Kumin's name and picture. In 1981–1982, she served as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress.

She taught poetry in New England College's Low-Residency MFA Program. She was also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review. Together with fellow-poet Carolyn Kizer, she first served on and then resigned from the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, an act that galvanized the movement for opening this august body to broader representation by women and minorities.

Kumin, aged 88, died in February 2014 at her home in Warner, following a year of failing health.

         Author of new book says Americans have famous Robert Frost poem all wrong

His name is David Orr. Author of The Road Not Taken, he is a poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review. David calls the famous Robert Frost poem that shares the title and subject of his new book "the poem everyone loves and almost everyone gets wrong." Orr's book, released August 18, 2015, comes down the road to poetry enthusiasts one hundred years after the first printing of Frost's great poem in August 1915.

"I began the book by talking about a commercial in New Zealand, and it’s a commercial for Ford cars," explained Orr during an interview with Jeffrey Brown of PBS, "And the narration of the commercial is nothing but someone reading 'The Road Not Taken.' They don’t attribute it to Frost. They don’t even tell you what it is. They just read the poem. The fact that you could recite a poem written by an American in New Zealand today, a 100-year-old poem, is pretty amazing, and that they’re expected to recognize it, know what it is, have associations with it. I mean, it’s an incredibly popular piece of writing."

The poem, quintessentially written as a play on choice, has long been a subject of study assigned to students by high school teachers and college and university professors. In his book synopsis on Amazon, Orr asks two questions: "Is ['The Road Not Taken'] a paean to triumphant self-assertion, where an individual boldly chooses to live outside conformity? Or a biting commentary on human self-deception, where a person chooses between identical roads and yet later romanticizes the decision as life altering?"

The poetry columnist added that Frost's famous last line is often quoted in graduation speeches and commercials: “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” Perhaps the car commercial meant to convey that sense of individuality one can achieve by traveling down the road in the choice of vehicle being advertised. Orr stated, "There’s no company in the world that would put the poem up as part of their commercial if they knew what the poem is more likely to mean."

Orr says he believes Frost used the poem to convey that it doesn't matter which road is taken. "In the middle of the poem," said Orr, "Frost writes: 'Though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same, and both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black...' And, in fact, what Frost is suggesting is that when the speaker later claims that the road he took was less traveled and that it made all the difference, the speaker will just be making up a story after the fact to justify a choice that maybe wasn’t even really a choice in the first place."

David Orr shared what he believes is some of Robert Frost's personal reasoning for writing the piece. Per Orr, Frost "claims that he wrote it because he used to go on walks with the English poet Edward Thomas, because Frost spent a brief time in England. It was actually the beginning of his career as a poet." The young Thomas would often regret whichever path the two had taken, and Frost wrote this great poem as "a joke at his friend's expense."

One of the catalysts for consternation among poetry readers is the true meaning of any given poem. A true poet is a wordsmith, and many scholars would not argue that Robert Frost ranks among the best of the best of poets throughout history. His words are crafted upon the page, chosen one-by-one, much as DaVinci would have selected each chosen color to blend into the hint of a smile on his great masterpiece.

To open the book on discussion for this classic poem, with the book's release and consequent news coverage, is a great service to American literature in 2015. The commentary alone, from the PBS News interview with Orr, has proven that poetry, like chivalry, is not dead. One admitted college English professor posted that he was 'thrilled to see that someone finally 'got' this poem.' The commenting professor pointed out that 'Frost's poems often shift on a word, not an image or a line.'

The Road Not Taken was published for the poem’s centennial, along with a new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Frost’s poems, edited and introduced by Orr himself.

Here is the poem in its entirety for your perusal.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim

Because it was grassy and wanted wear,

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Visit our Shakespeare Blog at the address below

http://shakespeareinamericanenglish.blogspot.com/

Excerpt from my book "When Capone’s Mob Murdered Touhy.” 

   Roger wrote that he had two business deals with Capone in 1927 because Capone had trouble getting beer for his joints. Capone called Touhy and asked him to sell him 500 barrels and since Touhy had a surplus he agreed and told Capone to send 500 empties to the cooperage. He would send 500 barrels back for the price of $37.50 per barrel, a discount because of the large order.

   Capone called back and asked for another 300 barrels. Touhy agreed and told Capone when he expected to be paid. The day before the money was due, Capone called and said that 50 of the barrels were leakers and that he wouldn't pay.

   'I'll pay you for seven hundred and fifty, ok?" 'You owe me for eight hundred and I expect to be paid for eight hundred."

   "Well the boys told me there were some leakers, but I'll check on it."

   Capone paid the $30,000 in cash and called a week later and asked for more. Touhy refused, saying his regular customers were taking all of his output. Knowing that it may have been Capone testing his ability to draw him in or to see what he could produce by taking him to be his biggest customer, 'What was the use of needling him by saying I didn't do business with weasels."

   In late 1927, Capone told Willie Heeney, Roger's former business partner, to go out to Des Plains to see Roger and encourage him to come around to Capone's way of thinking. By now, Heeney was working full time in the outfit's enormous prostitution racket where he would stay until the depression set in and he switched over to labor racketeering and narcotics. He soon became his own best customer and became hooked on heroin.

   Roger agreed to meet Heeney at the Arch, one of his road houses in Schiller Park, managed by his brother Eddie. Arriving with Heeney at the meeting was Frankie Rio, Capone's favorite bodyguard and enforcer whose presence was no doubt meant to impress Touhy. Heeney was the spokesman, telling them that Capone wanted to open the county for brothels, taxi dance halls and punch board rackets. He was willing to split the proceeds evenly with Kolb and Touhy to which Rio added, "A1 says this is virgin territory for whorehouses."

   Roger told Henney that he didn't want or need Capone as a partner, and that although the locals might tolerate speakeasies and gambling dens, whorehouses and taxi dance halls were something else. However, there was at least one brothel in operation in Des Plains at 304 Center Street, apartment 38, above Matt Kolb's brother's laundry store/handbook operation. There were at least three women working on the property and photos of the nude women were later taken from Willie Sharkey when he was arrested in Wisconsin. The FBI later noted that "there were many noisy parties in this apartment and numerous men visited them." A neighbor noted that "six men at a time would enter or leave the apartment together. The next group would enter the apartment only after the first group had left."

   FBI agents later tracked down two of the women and described them in their reports as "nice looking women" and "very attractive women. "

   Among those identified as regulars to the apartment were "Chicken" McFadden, Basil Banghart and George Wilke. Willie Sharkey, Touhy's enforcer, rented an apartment in the building under the name T.J. Burns and used the Park Ridge Chief of Police as his reference.

   Next, Capone sent Jimmy Fawcett and Murray "the Camel" Humpreys out to Des Plains to talk to Roger. The probable reason for sending Fawcett and Humpreys to see Touhy was, in all likelihood, to try one last time to get him to fall into line before the real shooting started. Sending Fawcett, an old hand Capone gunman, was a smart move. Touhy had known Fawcett for years, the two of them living along the edges of Chicago unionism for several years. Humpreys may have been new to Touhy. The Camel, Touhy said, did all the talking. Humpreys got things off to a bad start. He said Touhy was "putting [his] nose where it don't belong and that means trouble."

   'Mr. Capone" the Camel hissed, 'is upset at the Touhys and that isn't good." Capone wanted Touhy to stop offering protection to the Teamster Union bosses.

   Afterward Roger went to Cicero with him and Fawcett and talked over the problems with Frank Nitti. There are several versions of what happened next, but the end result of each version is the same.

   When the Camel was done with his threats, Touhy put a pistol into his mouth and told him never to show his face in Des Plains again. Humpreys offered to buy back his life with his new car but Touhy let them go. After the pair had left, Fawcett returned and offered "to kill Humpreys on the way back into Chicago and for an extra few grand, Rog, I'll knock off that son of a bitch Nitti too."

   Years later, Touhy told the story, or at least a cleaned up version of it, in his memoir. When the book hit the streets, an infuriated and humiliated Murray Humpreys denied that it ever happened.

   Capone tried a different tactic; he would push Touhy to see how far he could get before a shooting war broke out. Starting in the early summer of 1927, he tried to work his way into Touhy's territory by opening several whorehouses just inside Des Plains. That same day, Roger and Tommy Touhy, backed by several truckloads of their men and a squad of Cook County police, raided the bordellos, broke them up and chased the women back to Chicago. All the while, Capone kept sending his beer salesmen into Touhy's territory where they achieved a fair amount of success by drastically undercutting Touhy's prices, but the ever shrewd Kolb recognized Capone's ploy and refused to be prodded into a price war that they couldn't win. Instead, the Touhys responded by sending a simple message to any saloon keeper who sold Capone's beer inside their territory. If the bar owner sold Capone's brew, they would wreck the place. If he continued, they would burn his place to the ground. That was the way Joe Touhy, Roger's older brother, died, in June of 1929. Eyewitnesses said that Joe and his crew were breaking up a speakeasy that the Capones had opened in Schiller Park. When a waiter reached for something under the bar, Joe Touhy's own man, a hood named Paul Pagen, fired off a warning burst from his machine gun, accidentally killing Touhy.

   Johnny Touhy, the third eldest brother, didn't call it an accident. He killed Pagen in revenge for Joe's murder and was sentenced to prison for ten years to life. However he was released in four years, his brothers having purchased his freedom with bribes. "And that's what money," wrote the Chicago Tribune of John's release, "well spent in Chicago will do. "

   A few months after his parole was granted, Johnny was arrested again for attempted murder of a Capone goon. He was sent back to StatevillePrison where he died of consumption in a barren hospital room.

   The remaining brothers, Roger, Tommy and Eddie, declared war on Capone after Joe was killed and Johnny was jailed. From 1928 until 1930, the dusty back roads of northern Cook County ran red with gangster blood from an otherwise quiet gang war that went largely unnoticed until 1931, when all hell broke loose.

Modern day Thoreau spreads word of living deliberately

BY HUGH MARKEY FOR THE SUN CHRONICLE

The Transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau pulled up stakes in the mid-19th century to spend two years, two months and two days in the Walden woods.

While careful readers will know that he was not completely isolated (he often dined with his good friend and fellow writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, and lived a mere two miles outside town), the fact that he committed himself to the natural world is no small feat.

In his words, Thoreau went to the woods to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

In 2012, Keith Cowley spent 365 days visiting the woods for six to eight hours a day. Now he is trying to spread some of what the woods taught him about living deliberately by establishing the New-Native Foundation, which he hopes will encourage people to act in an environmentally ethical way.

Cowley, 34, of Westerly, describes his organization as a resource for outdoors people dedicated to living in harmony with nature, which includes sustainable farming and foraging, ethical hunting, trapping and foresting.

Those who choose to continue that ethic become a part of what he calls the American system of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, or ATEK.

"I'm a forager, and that's my main commitment to the ATEK experience. Foraging is a way to connect to the environment. I forage for food, especially things like mushrooms, nuts and berries. As an ethical forager, we only take what's necessary. There are certain techniques that we use to insure that a crop will return.

"For example, rather than take an entire plant, we will take only a portion. Likewise, we may take only enough of a given plant so that it will not adversely affect the ecosystem of a given area. And there are other ways of foraging, such as bush craft (using materials found in the outdoors to create furniture, tools and crafts) that can be done ethically."

The idea of creating ATEK came to Cowley during that year-long experiment in 2012 when he committed himself to spending serious time in the outdoors.

"I had the time on my hands. I had just come off a five-year period where I was learning about internal arts, such as different forms of meditation," he said.

Cowley secured the cooperation of the Westerly Community Land Trust, visiting that town's property holdings as part of his daily visits. During this period, he would let nature dictate the course of his day. His time involved meditation as well as exercise and exploration. Gradually, the idea of establishing a resource for others came to mind.

"I thought I could be the guy to challenge people and ask, 'Who are you?' 'Where do you come from?', 'Where do you live? Are you responsible for the environment from which you come?'"

Eventually, Cowley founded the New-Native Foundation (www.newnativefoundation.org), a website that invites people to "re-discover America." He sees the need for rediscovery as going back to Colonial times.

"When we came here, we became disconnected from the land. We did not treat the indigenous people well and, even today, much of our food doesn't even come from around here. That's why we're encouraging a new approach, one that embraces nature, so that all the decisions we make going forward, whether in our personal lives or in business all derive from an awareness of nature.

"At the moment, part of the problem is that we don't have an educational system to encourage environmentally sensitive foraging and other connections to the natural environment. That's where ATEK comes in."

Cowley envisions the establishment of a human resource organized through ATEK, where people will be willing to help others identify the ethical behavior in their lives.

"I believe that everyone is a knowledge keeper, to some degree or density. The takeaway for the average person is to be resourceful, to consider their environment in every decision, and to know that there is a resource out there to explain whether an action is environmentally ethical. Hopefully, through the New-Native Foundation, there will be people out there who can help answer that question."

***

Keith Cowley is the author of "Environmental Connection: A New-Native Initiative," which is available atwww.newnativefoundation.org.

Hugh Markey is a freelance writer, naturalist and teacher living in Richmond, R.I. Read more of his work on his blog "Science and Nature for a Pie" at http://scienceandnatureforapie.com and follow him on Facebook athttp://facebook.com/scienceandnatureforapie.

"Out of love and hatred out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws."

Excerpt from my book “On the Waterfront: The 

Making of a Great American Film”

BIT PART PLAYERS

 Fred Gwynne: For the role of an uneducated goon named Slim, Kazan chose six foot five actor Frederick Hubbard Gwynne, or Fred Gwynne, the son of a wealthy Wall Street broker (His mother was a cartoonist) who died from complications after routine surgery in 1932.  During the war, Fred enlisted in the Navy and served on a sub chaser, on his discharge attended the New York Phoenix School of Design.  The role of Slim, small as it was, was a stretch for the Groton Prep, Harvard University graduate ('51) where he performed in the drag troupe, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals and was president and chief cartoonist of The Harvard Lampoon After a successful run in A Midsummer Night's Dream, he moved to New York to pursue a career in films and stage.  To tall and unattractive to be a leading man, he landed a supporting role in Mrs. McThing on Broadway, starring Helen Hayes, working part time as a copywriter for the J. Walter Thompson Advertising agency to make ends meet between assignments.

After Waterfront, his first film role, he landed his first major Broadway role in the musical, Irma La Duce where TV producer Nat Hiken who hired Gwynne to co-star as Francis Maldoon in the NBC television series, Car 54, Where Are You?  (1961-1963)  

Just before the show was canceled, one of his children drowned in the family pool.  Between Waterfront and Car 54, he published his first children's book in 1958, Best in Show.  In 1964, he was cast in the CBS television series, The Munsters, which typecast the actor for nearly two decades.  In that time, he penned several more children's books including God's First World, A Chocolate Moose for Dinner, and A Little Pigeon Toad.  He returned to the stage in the early 1970s, and won critical acclaim as Big Daddy in the Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Elizabeth Ashley and as Claudius in Hamlet, and the stage manager in Our Town.  In 1976, he won an Obie Award for his performance in the off-Broadway play, Grand Magic.

    He made a return to the screen with a small role in Bernardo Bertolucci's Luna, Ironweed, Fatal Attraction, The Cotton Club and My Cousin Vinny.  Gwynne retired in the early 1992 with his wife Deborah to his farm in Rural Maryland, accepting occasional voice-over work.  In the later part of the year, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died on July 2, 1993, at the age of 66.  During the trial scene in Waterfront, when asked for his name Gwynne, as Slim, answers “Malden Skulovich” fellow actor Karl Malden’s real name.

 Thomas Hanley played the role of Tommy, the little boy who idolizes Terry Malloy.  He was 13 years old when he ran across an assistant producer on the film installing Terry Malloy’s pigeon coops on the roof of his apartment building.  Hanley recalled “We were alone, my mother and I.  My father had been a dockworker and was murdered by the mob when I was 4 months old.  We were dead broke.  My mother hadn’t paid the rent in eight months.  Still when I found Brownie (Arthur Brown, the Assistant producer former dockworker and a drinking buddy of Schulberg’s) I said, “What are you doing on my roof” here we were 8 months behind in the rent and I was calling it my roof!  Brownie said that he had known my dad and that he was going to get me a part in the film.  I didn’t believe him.  I didn’t think he had that kind of pull.  He paid me a couple of bucks a week to feed the pigeons but only because he thought I would tear the coop down if he didn’t pay. But he got me the part.”

 Brownie arranged for Hanley to be brought down to Manhattan to the Actor’s Studio where Schulberg and Kazan were testing for parts. “Kazan and Schulberg and Brando were wonderful to me.  Kinder then they had to be.  They were trying to help me.”  In the first meeting, Kazan wanted to get a reaction out of the boy to test his acting skills "They knew my background, and Kazan said my father was probably murdered because he was a squealer.  They were trying to provoke me, and I flung a chair across the room.  That's the response Kazan wanted.”

 Marlon Brando told me to bring my mother to the set on day and I did.  He told her that he had arranged for me to have an agent to help me get more roles.  He was a very decent guy.  To get me geared up, emotional, for the scene where I throw the dead pigeon at Marlon, Kazan and Schulberg put me in a room with a guy from the neighborhood, he had a role in the film as a cop, and I hated him.  The guy made some remarks about my father and got me upset and that’s how I was so emotional for the part”

  Kazan’s was famous for manipulating performers to get a desired reaction.  During the filming of Viva Zapata, Kazan apparently told Anthony Quinn that Brando was saying horrible things about him behind his back to heighten the conflict between their two characters on screen.  The criticism of this technique, while it is necessary occasionally, but as a pattern,  suggested to many in Hollywood that Kazan held a  cynicism and a lack of confidence in his ability to convince actors of the emotional truth of a scene and provide the means to arrive at it.

 Kazan the child him $500 a week for three weeks’ worth of work.  “It kept us from starving…..He (Brando) was just a real regular guy," he says.  "He could have had the limo pick him up to come to work every morning, but instead he took the train in from Manhattan dressed as a longshoreman.  People respected that.  They loved Karl Malden, too."

Hanley went on to earn his living as a dockworker.  In 2005, he was running as a reform candidate for union steward in the mobbed up ILA local that still runs the Hoboken ports.    

Martin Balsam, by then a veteran character actor of stage and television, made his film debut in Waterfront, (uncredited though it was) as Crime Commission investigator Gillette.  Raised in the Bronx, Balsam was the oldest of three children of women’s sportswear sales clerk whose motto was "All actors are bums.”  Regardless, after service in the Navy during the second war, Balsam joined New York's Actors Studio, supporting himself by waiting on tables and ushering at Radio City Music Hall.

 Balsam followed Waterfront with a beefy role in Sidney Lumet's Twelve Angry Men (1957) and strong performances as the doomed solider in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), the police chief in Cape Fear (1962, he was also in the 1991 remake by Scorsese) and the studio chief in Edward Dmytryk's The Carpetbaggers (1964).  In 1965, he won a well-deserved Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Jason Robards Jr.'s agent brother in A Thousand Clowns.

 Leif Erikson played the role of the second Waterfront Crime Commission Investigator, Glover.  Erikson had been a big band singer and trombone player before moving into acting in 1935 when he made his debut as a corpse in the Zane Grey Western.  Erickson was under contract to Universal during the early 1940s before joining the military during World War 2 (he was injured in combat twice) although he had been in at least 20 films; Waterfront was his leading credit up until that point.  He had been married to the troubled actor Frances Farmer.  They divorced in 1942.  A year later, she was wrongfully declared mentally incompetent in 1943 and committed to an asylum for seven years before she was released.  Erickson later made it big on television on the program The High Chaparral (1967-71).

UNCREDITED ROLES IN THE FILM

Dan Bergin played the role of Sidney.  Born in Ireland, as were several other members of the cast and crew, Waterfront was his first film.  Bergin was a film editor by training.

Don Blackman plays the role of Luke, the only African American in the film with a line.  (Several African-Americans are pictured in the film)  Blackman was a professional wrestler who landed uncredited roles in several films before Waterfront.  Aside from Waterfront, he best remembered as The Doll Man in Blacula films of the 1970s.

Rudy Bond played Moose.  A combat infantry veteran in World War 2, Kazan introduced him to acting when he enrolled him in the Actors Studio.  He went on to have a role in most of Kazan’s more important productions.  He later played the role of Cuneo in The Godfather. 

Jere Delaney had an uncredited role in the film as a dockworker.  A stage actor, Waterfront was his last film.  (Out of only three, he appeared in)

Anthony Galento The heavyweight fighter Two Ton Tony Galento (Dominic Anthony Galento) makes a brief appearance in the film as Truck, one of John Friendly's goons.  Galento, who once replied to an inquiry about his thoughts on William Shakespeare by saying, "I'll moider da bum." knocked down heavyweight great Joe Louis in their 1939 title match in the second round.  Louis made it to his feet on the two count and won the match.  The night before the Louis fight, Tony’s brother walked into his bar and asked Tony for a couple if free tickets for the fight.  Tony told him to stand in line like everybody else.  His brother hit him over the head with a beer bottle.  The bartender stitched up the three-inch gash in his head and the Lewis fight stayed on schedule.  That same night, Lewis gave him 23 more stitches in the face. 

 Galento, at 5 foot 9 and 250 pounds, (“A beer barrel with feet” the New York Times called him) was a Northern New Jersey hero, who took on the best heavyweights of his day including Max Bear and closed out his career with a 74-22-6 record with 51 knockouts.  Galento, a notoriously dirty fighter, tormented his opponents inside and outside the ring.  The usually east going Joe Lewis said that Galento was the only man in the entire sport of boxing he ever hated.  He trained on beer and southern Italian food.  He hated the country and refused to go into the mountains to a training camp.  Instead, he did his roadwork after dark in New Jersey because, he said, "I fight at night, don’t I?"

 Galento would appear in two other films, Wind Across the Everglades and The Best Things in Life Are Free.  Galento died on July 22, 1979 after a three-year battle against diabetes that cost him the amputation of a foot, then, later both legs.

 

  Michael Gazzo Waterfront also introduced the great actor Michael Gazzo in an uncredited bit part.  He became better known as Frankie Pentangeli on the Godfather Trilogy.  The film’s director, Francis Ford Coppola wanted Kazan to play the role of Hyman Roth in the film, Godfather 11, but Kazan declined.

 Gazzo was also a respected acting teacher and award-winning playwright who wrote the acclaimed work A Hatful of Rain a portrait of a lower-middle-class worker who attempts to break his drug addiction.  It was turned into a film in 1957, co-written by Gazzo.  He also wrote King Creole, an Elvis Presley film.

 Gazzo broke into show business as a stage director and actor at the Great Neck Playhouse in New York, while studying at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research in the mid-1940s.  He had a life long association with the Actors Studio.  Most of his career was spent as a writer and teacher.  He came back to film in the 1971 film, The Gang that Couldn't Shoot straight, based loosely on the life of gangster Joey Gallo.  He received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his work in the Godfather Part Two, an award he probably should have won.  (Waterfront extra Rudy Bond also played a role in the Godfather films, as Mafia Don Cuoneo)

    

Suzanne Hahn landed a bit role in the film.  Then an out of work actor, she had recently graduated from LSU where her roommate was actor Joan Woodward.  In mid-December of 1953, she got a telegram telling her to report to Hoboken for a work as an extra.  The telegram had arrived late and Hahn assumed that she would not be hired.  However, on the bus ride over to New Jersey she sat next to one of Kazan’s assistant directors who was also late for work.  He managed to get her a walk on role as a bar fly type who sauntered over to the jukebox and leans over it looking at the selection.  The job lasted for three weeks.  Three years later, she landed another role in the Broadway production of The Three Penny Opera where she met actor John Astin.  They were married in 1956.  Two of their three children are actors.  

John F. Hamilton played Pop Doyle.  He had been appearing in films since 1924.  Waterfront was his last role.  Born in Britain, Hamilton had appeared in several films as a child including one Hitchcock film, which has since been lost. 

John Heldabrand played the role of Mutt.  Waterfront was his first film.  He appeared, briefly, in one other film and never acted again.

Anna Hegira played the role of Mrs. Collins, the women in the alley.  Waterfront was her first film.  She is best known for her role as Thomna in the film The Arrangement 

Pat Hingle (Martin Patterson Hingle) played the uncredited role of Jocko the Bartender in the scene where Terry takes Edie for a drink.  "We were filming in Hoboken, New Jersey, in late fall," he recalled.  They were mostly doing the waterfront scenes, but they had some interior scenes ready, in case the weather got bad.  Therefore, I was there, day after day, in my apron, waiting for the weather to turn - but it never did.  Anyway, I watched Kazan - and it was fascinating. He worked differently with every actor on the set, finding his own way to communicate with all of them."

 He later became better known as Commissioner Gordon in the Batman movies.  Interestingly enough Alan Napier, who played the role of Alfred the Butler on the Batman television series, also played the role of the Communist ringleader in John Wayne's Anti-Communist-Pro-HUAC film, Big Jim McLean.

 Hingle was a solid character player on stage, screen and TV for over four decades.  He began acting as a student at the University of Texas, made the move to New York in the late 1940s, studied at the American Theater Wing, and became Kazan's protégé at the Actor's Studio.  He followed Waterfront with a breakthrough-supporting role in Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961), as Warren Beatty's brusque father. 

 Hingle appeared in a series of Clint Eastwood flicks including the conflicted police chief father of a rapist in Sudden Impact (1983) and as the hanging judge in Hang 'Em High (1968); He played a bartender again in The Quick and the Dead (1995).  His other work would include roles in Shaft (2000) The Grifters (1990) Batman (1989) The Falcon and the Snowman (1985) Nevada Smith (1966) The Ugly American (1963) Splendor in the Grass (1961) Norma Rae, The Gauntlet, The Carey Treatment and others.  Waterfront was his first film

Clifton James held an uncredited role in the film.  His other worked included Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) Eight Men Out  (1988) Cool Hand Luke (1967) The Chase (1966) Black Like Me (1964) Invitation to a Gunfighter, The Man With the Golden Gun, The Reivers The Last Detail, Will Penny, Superman II, Silver Streak and back to New Jersey again in Hell, Heaven or Hoboken

Tommy Kennedy a retired Hoboken police officers was hired as an extra for the film at $7.  When payday came, he was given $5.  "Where's the other deuce?”  I asked.  "And I soon learned it was a kickback, just like the dock workers [pay] in the film.  The movie's part of Hoboken history.  As a cop I got stopped so many times by tourists who wanted to know where Marlon Brando fought Lee J. Cobb that I probably could've made more money as a tour guide."

Frankie Fame, an uncredited gangster, took the job because it paid “$2 an hour and a cup of coffee.  I knew the heavyweight boxer Tony Galento from Jersey City.  He got me into On the Waterfront. To this day, my kids whoop it up when they see me diving for chips in the shape-up.”

Arthur Keegan played Jimmy played a dockworker.  Before Waterfront, he had a small role in From Here to Eternity as Treadwell, (1953) Otherwise; Waterfront was his last credited film.

Scottie MacGregor played an uncredited role as a Longshoreman’s mother.  A stage actor by training she is best known for her role as Mrs. Olson on the television program Little House on the Prairie.

Edward McNally played an uncredited role as Terry Malloy’s neighbor. Waterfront was his first film out of career total of 17 films.

Barry Malcolm starred as Johnny Friendly’s banker.  Born in Ireland, he had been in films since 1923.

Tiger Joe Marsh (born Joseph Marusich) played an uncredited role of a police officer; however, Kazan would also cast him in bit parts in Viva Zapata!  and Panic in the Streets.  He also had a role in The Joe Louis Story (1953)   Marsh was an interesting character.  A Chicagoan from the wrong side of the tracks, he had been a professional wrestler, winning the World Heavyweight title in 1937.  He continued wrestling into the late 1950s and later was the original model for Mr. Clean advertisements.  His career had a revival in the early 1980s when he appeared on Simon & Simon in the role of Otto. 

Tami Mauriello as Tillio.  Mauriello was a tough, talented former light heavyweight who had failed in two courageous title attempts against champion Gus Lesnevitch, in the 1940s.  After an 11 bout winning streak in the heavyweight division, Mauriello became Joe Louis's second title defense after his military service, September 18, 1946 in New York.  Mauriello stunned Louis briefly with a wild right, but wound up a first-round KO victim.  Tami became a boxing trivia item when he told a live network radio interviewer: "I hurt Louis, but I got too God damn careless."  Tami did knock out heavy weight great Jersey Joe Wolcott, Mauriello was a close friend of Frank Sinatra.  Once, during a scene that included Mauriello facing the camera, the boxer was expressionless.  Kazan needed him to look angry.  The five foot five and a half inch wiry director leaped from his chair, smacked the fighter as hard as he could across the face and yelled "Okay, roll em"    Mauriello was frozen for a moment, stupefied.  When he regained his sense, he lunged at Kazan and had to be pulled back by the stagehands, while Kazan walked backwards away from the set explaining, “It’s a method of acting Tam, that’s all!” 

Mike O’Dowd played Specs.

Nehemiah Persoff played the cabdriver.  Born in Jerusalem, Israel he moved to the US age 9.  He went on to star in Schulberg’s story, The Harder they Fall and became the voice of Papa Mousekewitz in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, (1991) In his career; Persoff appeared in over 500 television programs and films. 

William Ramoth was a Clifton New Jersey Policeman who had fought professionally under the name Billy Kilroy.  He was introduced into the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame in November 1978.  Ramoth heard that former heavyweight contender Anthony "Two Ton Tony" Galento was in Hoboken for the filming Waterfront and Ramoth, who knew Galento, drove over to Hoboken to see him.  The pair was having a drink in a tavern when Kazan walked in and noticed that Ramoth, who was wearing a leather jacket, resembled Marlon Brando from a distance.  He asked Ramoth if he had any boxing experience.  He was hired as Brando’s double for the fight scenes.  Ramoth went on to do fight scenes and serve as a technical adviser in 12 more films, acting, as Paul Newman's double in The Hustler and Somebody Up There Likes Me.  He also made guest appearances on several television shows, including To Tell the Truth and I've Got a Secret.

Rosie the Cat There is a scene in the film where Brando picks up Edie’s cat, which earlier Pop Doyle explains, is a stray, which was taken in by Edie, and he cares for.  The cats name was Rosie and it lived upstairs in an apartment above the saloon used as Johnny Friendly’s bar.  When the cat walked across a shooting scene in the bar, a stagehand picked it up and used it in the next scene between Brando and Saint.  However, the stagehand neglected to tell the cat’s owner, which caused a minor argument on the filming set.   

Johnny Seven (John Anthony Fetto) played an uncredited longshoreman.  He would go on to appear in over 600 Television shows, 26 movies, 2 Broadway shows and Off-Broadway Shows.  He is best known from the TV series Ironside (1967) in which he played the role of Lieutenant Carl Reese (1969-1975)

  

Abe Simon  The role of Barney, a gangster, was played by Abe Simon, a middleweight great who lost only 3 of 31 bouts (1948-1952) and accidentally killed a fighter inside the ring with a single blow to the head.  Simon had been an advisor, along with boxing great Willie Pep, on the film Requiem for a Heavyweight.  Simon made two unsuccessfully challenges for the Heavyweight Title and was the only Jew to fight for the title.  On his first attempt, he was stopped by Joe Louis in 13th round at Detroit's Olympia Stadium on March 21, 1941.  In his second attempt on March 27, 1942, he was stopped again by Louis, this time in six rounds at Madison Square Garden.

James Westerfield starred as Big Mac.  A legendary character actor he would play roles in over 50 films and 75 television programs during his career.  However, his first love was the stage

OTHER MEMBERS OF THE FILM AND DEVELOPMENT CREW

Howard Block was an assistant camera operator (uncredited in the film) Waterfront was his first film.  He received a Life Time Achievement Award (called a Cammy) in 1998.  Like so many others from the films crew, he also worked on The Godfather.

Robert Hodes was the script supervisor.  Waterfront was his first film.  He continued to work with Kazan throughout the remainder of his career. 

 Working with Boris Kaufman was Cinematographer Jimmy Howe.  With over 120 films to his credit, Wong is still considered one of the greatest cinematographers in the history of motion pictures.  Born on August 28, 1899, in Kwangtung, China, as James Wong (He was born Wong Tung Jim but was known as Jimmy Howe during his stint at M-G-M he was given the middle name of "Wong" by the publicity department to add an exotic flair.) grew up in Washington State.  He grew up with the dream of becoming a professional boxer.  As a teenager, he landed a job as a delivery clerk for a commercial photographer, which, in 1917, led to an entry-level position of cutting-room helper in a studio back lot.  He became a slate-boy for Cecil B. DeMille and who promoted him to assistant camera operator.  By 1922, Howe was a full-fledged director of photography.  In 1949, Howe was brought in to film (secretly) the screen test for Greta Garbo's proposed comeback film La Duchesse de Langeais.  Garbo demanded the test be shot in Black and White, which was granted, but there is a persistent rumor that Wong shot a second reel of the actor in color anyway.  Wong perfected experimental techniques that became standard after his creative applications, especially for deep focus and used hand-held cameras, which created a unique perspective for the audience.  In the boxing film Body and Soul (1947), he put the cinematographer on roller skates, using a small, hand-held camera to follow the action more intimately and dramatically.  He was also a master of the artful use of light and shadow and his innovative yet unobtrusive camera work.

He would work with some of the biggest names in the business, from Victor Fleming to John Frankenheimer.  Called 'Low Key Hoe' for his unassuming style, he pioneered the use of deep-focus photography and of the hand-held camera.  He was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Algiers, (1938) a film produced by Walter Wanger, Schulberg’s former boss on Winter Carnival.  Algiers starred Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr.  Followed by his 1955 win at the Academy for The Rose Tattoo starring Anna Magnani and Burt Lancaster, a second Academy Award for Hud (1963) Starring Paul Newman and a second nomination for his final film Funny Girl starring Barbara Streisand

Anna Hill Johnstone was the wardrobe supervisor.  She also later worked on the Godfather films.  Johnstone was actually a customer designer by trade.  Johnstone accompanied Budd Schulberg to the play starring the unknown Eva Marie Saint.

George Justin would be the Production Manager.  Waterfront was also his first film.  He went on to become Vice President Production Management for Paramount Pictures, Executive Production Manager for Orion Pictures and Senior Vice President Production Management.

 Kazan’s Assistant director was Charles H. Maguire.  Waterfront was also one of his first films.  Like most of the cast and crew for Waterfront, Charlie Maguire became a Kazan regular.  The director hired him again for A Face in the Crowd and Baby Doll.  Maguire began his career in the film industry in the early 1950s while working as a prop man in New York's Local 52.  He traveled to Hoboken, interviewed with Kazan for a job as property master, and ended up as assistant director on the film. Tutored by director Robert Aldrich, he moved to Los Angeles in the mid-'60s to find frequent work as a producer and assistant director on such films as Fail-Safe (1964) and The Sand Peebles (1966).  Maguire would work as a director or producer on some of the best-known films of the twentieth century including Patriot Games (1992) Shampoo (1975) The Parallax View, (1974) The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) The Arrangement (1969) I Love You Alice B. Toklas!  (1968) Splendor in the Grass (1961) and The Hustler.  He continued his collaborations with Kazan until the end of their careers.

 For his film editor, Kazan's chose of the best in the business, Arthur Eugene Milford, who had been working on his craft since 1926 and would span five decades of work before he retired.  Milford entered silent films as a stuntman and title writer and graduated to an editor’s position in 1926 with Two Can Play starring Clara Bow.  He worked for Columbia Pictures, RKO and Republic pictures, including several Capra films including Flight (1929), Platinum Blonde (1931) and Lost Horizon (1937) for which he won the first of two Oscars.  During the Second World War, he led the film editorial department for the Office of War Information.  Afterwards, he worked for Atomic Energy Commission's film editorial department as chief Editor before returning to feature film work under Kazan.  Milford went on to edited Kazan's Baby Doll (1956), A Face in the Crowd (1957) Splendor in the Grass (1961) Arthur Penn's The Chase (1966) and later worked on Inchon (1982) a dud financed by South Korean investors.

Mary Roach (Faye) was the hairstylist for the cast.  Waterfront was her first film.

Fred Ryle was the makeup artist.  He had been working in films since 1928.

 James (Jimmy) Shield's was the films soundman.  Waterfront was his second film

Dale Tate (Uncredited in the film) created the films titles.  Tate also had an uncredited role in the film classic The Attack of the 50-Foot Women.

Guy Thomajan was the films Dialogue supervisor.  Thomajan was also an accomplished director and actor who had roles in most of Kazan’s other films

Flo Transfield was the films wardrobe mistress.  She continued to work with Kazan on most of his other films. 

Sam Rheiner was the films Assistant to the Producer (Sam Spiegel)   Waterfront was his next to last film.

Arthur Steckler was the Second Assistant Director.  Waterfront was his second film.  He also went on to work in several other Kazan films. 

HERE IS AN EXCEPT FROM MY BOOK "THE BOOK OF AMERICAN-JEWISH GANGSTERS"

(Max Zellner is a pen name, it was my grandfather's born name. During World War 1 he changed it to the less German sounding Paul Selner)

Cohen-Dragna War: Micky Cohen, born Cohen Meyer Harris Born September 4,1913 Brooklyn, New York. Died July 29 1976.   Mickey Cohen was an affable, if slightly mentally unbalanced drug pusher in LA, by way of Chicago. Jack Dragna represented the local LA Mafia, the so-called Micky Mouse Mob.

     Originally from Brooklyn, the Cohen’s moved to Los Angeles in 1920, where Micky’s father ran a drug store. At the start of prohibition, Cohen’s older made gin in the back of the store at Micky, at age 9, was the operations delivery boy until he was arrested.

      Cohen turned to prize fighting in his teen years and had a brief but respectable career before he landed in Chicago and worked in the Capone organization at various odd jobs but was forced to leave town after he took part in a gun battle that left several gamblers dead. 

    Cleveland mobster Lou Rothkopf is said to have taken a liking to Cohen, something that was easy to do, and sent him to Los Angeles to work with Bugsy Siegel. When Siegel was murdered in 1947, Cohen was granted most of the dead gangsters gambling operations around Los Angeles.

     It was around this time that Cohen supposedly Cohen introduced a hoodlum named Johnny Stompanato to troubled movie starlet Lana Turner. Cohen then wired Stompanato’s bedroom and recorded the actress and Stompanato having sex and then pressed two thousand copies of the master recording and sold them $5 each. Turner’s daughter, Cheryl, later stabbed Stompanato to death in a killing ruled to be justifiable homicide.

    The essence of the Dragna-Cohen war was control and power. Although Dragna was the unquestioned Mafia power west of Las Vegas, he felt slighted within the ranks of the traditional mob that moved in on Las Vegas without so much as a nod to him and generally disrespected by freelance hoods like Mickey Cohen and Jack Whalen who ran their bookie and narcotics operations.

     Dragna and Cohen could not be more different.  Jack Dragna (He was born Ignazio Dragna but renamed himself years later in LA) was born on April 18, 1891, in Corleone, Sicily and arrived in the United States as a child. He returned to Sicily in 1908 and served a hitch in the Italian army. He then travelled back to the US in 1914. Dragna is the suspected killer of Bernard Baff, a hapless kosher chicken wholesaler in Brooklyn.  There is a possibility that Dragna worked with the New York mobs and the Capone operation at some point before venturing out west. Over the years, he had convictions for attempted extortion (1915) and served time in San Quinton prison. He was released in 1918 and never again arrested for a serious offense.

     Dragna, who lived at 3927 Hubert Avenue in Los Angeles, took over the tiny LA outfit in 1931 after the boss, Joe Ardizonne vanished in 1931. (He lived at 10949 North Mount Gleason Avenue) A shy and retiring person, he avoided the limelight and the newspaper people. However, on April 15, 1951, when the LA police began a harassment campaign against the Mafia, the cops recorded Dragna having sex in his girlfriend’s trailer at 330 Mariposa Street in LA and arrested him (and her) for engaging in lewd acts by consent (Oral sex) 

     Mickey Cohen, on the other hand, went out of his way to bring attention to himself, especially the press, which generally went lightly on him as a flashy, interesting character. Flashy, good humored and outgoing, Cohen quickly became the overall public favorite in the short lived, almost comical war with Dragna largely because Cohen understood the fundamentals of public relations. When an elderly widow named Elsie Phillips lost her house at 5631 Homeside Avenue in LA in a suit over an unpaid $8.00 radio repair bill, Cohen paid the lien judgment ($1,013.95) for her. Then his men beat the radio repairman up.

     The shooting started when Dragna demanded a piece of the $40 per phone per week plus a general surcharge of $5.00 that Cohen was charging bookie. Cohen refused. So on February 7,  1950, Dragna, planted a bomb under Cohen’s home on 413 Moreno Blvd. in West Hollywood. (The same street where Jack Dragna lived) 

     The bomb, which went off at 4:15 AM, left a crater ten feet deep and broke every window in every house for 5,000 feet around. The explosion was felt seven miles away. The problem was, for Dragna anyway, was that his men had placed the bomb directly under a double laid cement floor where Cohen kept his safe. Because of that, the bomb blasted sideways instead of upwards. All that happened to Cohen was that the explosion lifted him up out of his bed and threw him back down again. His wife, LaVonne, their maid and the Cohen family dog were uninjured in the blast.

     Members of the Sica gang were rounded up and questioned in the bombing but released when no evidence could be found to tie them to the case.

    “I am completely in the dark as to who done it” Cohen said and then added “And I ain’t no gangster” The newspapers reported that Cohen was “almost put to tears” that his neighbors could have been hurt in the blast. One neighbor responded “That’s very touching. What would be even more touching is if Cohen moved away from here” The neighbors then declared the Cohen “an intolerable nuisance” and demanded they leave the neighborhood. Cohen sent out a three- page letter to each resident, begging their forgiveness and asking that they reconsider.

      Next, Dragna sent Sam Bruno to shot Cohen to death. Bruno was said to be the best shot in the mob. One bright, beautiful afternoon he hid behind a tree and fired a shotgun into Cohen's car as he drove by. He fired another round and effectively killed the car but Cohen was untouched. The bullets didn’t even come near him.

      After that, mobster started saying, and probably believing, that Cohen made a pack with the devil. In Las Vegas, they were actually taking odds on how long it would take to kill him off and the odds were in Micky Cohen’s favor. There were a number of failed attempts, all of which Cohen survived, basically through dumb luck.

     The Kefauver Committee caused Cohen to be convicted of income tax evasion. He was sentenced to four years in federal prison. In 1961, a separate indictment found him guilty of income tax evasion in a second case. Sent to Alcatraz, Cohen was attacked by another inmate who hit the aging gangster in the skull with a lead pipe, dramatically effecting his motor skills.

“The guy” Cohen said “scrambled my brains” He was released from prison in 1972 and died in his sleep four years later.

ICONIC WRITERS

Ninety-five and going strong: the cult of Charles Bukowski

Although he died in 1993, the poet and writer is almost the perfect fit for the Internet and social reading.

Aditya Mani Jha 

It’s hard to overthink what one feels about Charles Bukowski, because the moment you are on the verge of doing so, his grizzled, pock-marked ghost-face rebukes you: “If it doesn’t come bursting out of you / in spite of everything / don’t do it.” This is exactly the kind of urgent, irrepressible emotion that Bukowski provokes in his readers.

A lot of writers are blessed with a steady fan following; writers like Bukowski inspire a cult. He remains one of the most quoted writers on social media despite the fact that he died in 1993, much before the true impact of the Internet era kicked in.

One of the reasons behind’s Bukowski’s posthumous celebrity is that he fits a certain writerly archetype: the hard-drinking, chain-smoking, womanising man-about-town, a person as likely to end up face down in the gutter, bruised and battered, as to write a poem about the entire affair. Shortly after publishing his first short story in 1946, he went on a bender that lasted nearly ten years. His poor liver might have thrown the towel in, but, as the story goes, Bukowski shooed away a priest (who had come to preside over his last rites) and picked up the pieces of his life.

He then went on to unleash his literary alter-ego upon the world: Henry “Hank” Chinaski, the protagonist of five of his six novels, including, most famously, Factotum (1975) and Ham on Rye (1982). Ham on Rye is Bukowski’s retort to American coming-of-age novels like Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, the novel being parodied in the title.

William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies as an elaborate, erudite spoof of R.M. Ballantyne’sCoral Island; it was almost as if Golding was telling Ballantyne: “This is what would reallyhappen if a bunch of so-called civilised British kids were to be marooned on an island”. WithHam on Rye, Bukowski was telling Salinger: “This is what growing up as an angry, confused and down-on-luck teenager feels like.”

 His penchant for literal as well as literary spats was well-known: yet another reason why he is adored in the age of online voyeurism. On Writing, released earlier in August, is a collection of letters written by Bukowski to friends and acquaintances. In these remarkable documents, he misses no chance to slag off the rich, the famous and the well-received among his colleagues and his predecessors.

Shakespeare is dismissed rather summarily (“stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard”). William Burroughs’s cutup technique, according to Bukowski, was “just (the) ghetto bored flip of a safe and secure man.” Unsurprisingly, the writer he admired most was John Fante (1909-83), the author of the novel Ask the Dust. Fante, like Bukowski himself, was an autobiographical writer whose accounts of the California lowlife can be considered a precursor to Ham on Rye and the rest of Bukowski’s oeuvre.

Most modern-day readers, though, are reeled in by Bukowski’s poetry; he published more than 50 collections of verse in all, a staggering output by any standards. Most of these poems were published in small literary magazines and by indie presses; this built his reputation as the definitive underground writer of his time.

His collaborations with Robert Crumb, the godfather of the alternative “comix” movement were a confirmation of the same: Crumb illustrated extracts from some of his novels to create one-shot comicbooks, most of which are out of print today.

A typical Bukowski poem is deceptively simple. The subjects are not too different from his prose, at least at a superficial level: there is still plenty of alcohol, women and visits to the racetrack. But Bukowski’s Zen-like punchiness and the inherent brevity of the medium make his poems far more accessible and universal than his “hyperlocal” California novels. His shorter poems, like What Can I Do, are an investigation into (and a critique of) the artistic process.

it’s true:

pain and suffering

helps to create

what we call

art.

given the choice

I’d never choose

this damned

pain

and suffering

for myself

but somehow it finds

me

as the royalties

continue to roll on

in.

And therein lies the rub: just like Hemingway’s style inspired an avalanche of wannabe-minimalist short fiction (most of which was unreadable), Bukowski’s success has spawned a legion of imitators who have swamped us with poorly written blank verse. Sadly, this has meant that academic critics have largely ignored Bukowski’s body of work; he is not and probably will never be a syllabus mainstay.

Personally speaking, what I admire most about Bukowski’s writing is his ability to elevate commonplace desolation to apocalyptic proportions. His wisdom was not the breeze in your face; it was a punch to your gut. In the poem Tragedy of the Leaves, Bukowski writes about the morning he had his final confrontation with his angry landlady. The poem begins: 

 I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,

the potted plants yellow as corn;

my woman was gone

and the empty bottles like bled corpses

surrounded me with their uselessness

The word “dryness” indicates that he is out of booze and out of money, but also that in the absence of booze, he is like a plant that hasn’t been watered for a while and is dying because of this. The empty bottles are “bled corpses”; another tongue-in-cheek way of humanising a drunkard’s boorish behaviour. But Bukowski is not interested in shying away from his comeuppance: if he is a good-for-nothing alcoholic who cannot pay his rent, that’s what he’ll own up to be. The last lines of the poem are memorable:

and I walked into a dark hall

where the landlady stood

execrating and final,

sending me to hell,

waving her fat, sweaty arms

and screaming

screaming for rent

because the world has failed us

both

 If he had been alive, Bukowski would have celebrated his 95th birthday earlier this month. Don’t imagine for a moment, though, that this would have stopped him from throwing the first punch in a barroom brawl.

HERE'S SOME NICE ART FOR YOU TO LOOK AT....ENJOY!

 Emily Winfield Martin

 Entering the Lemaire Channel, Antartica - Edward Seago

 Fairfield Porter- Buttercups

Franz Kopallik 

 “If people knew how hard I worked to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful. - Michelangelo”

THE ART OF WAR...............................

WHY DON'T WE HAVE THIS IN THE UNITED STATES?

Family violence leave for Vic govt workers

The days of worrying about losing wages or even jobs could soon be over for many public sector workers dealing with family violence in Victoria.

Paid family violence leave for men and women will be included in all new enterprise agreements for public service workers.

Many workers delayed seeking help for domestic violence because of fears of losing their jobs, or could be financially disadvantaged for taking action, Prevention of Family Violence Minister Fiona Richardson said.

"Family violence leave sends a clear message to victims that they're supported in their workplace and do not have to suffer in silence," she said on Monday.

The move comes after Victoria's Royal Commission into Family Violence on Friday wrapped up four weeks of public hearings detailing the devastating impact family violence had on children, services and the community.

About 40 new enterprise agreements to be negotiated in the next 18 months will include the new entitlement.

Details about how many days can be claimed have not been finalised but the ACTU is calling for 10 days.

Australian of the Year Rosie Batty says 10 days would have made a big difference for her the year before her son was murdered by his father in 2014.

About 25 per cent of workers experienced domestic violence at some point of their life, the ACTU's submission to the royal commission said.

It also heard family violence was a major cause of homelessness and that many victims stayed in their homes with their attackers because of fears of financial destitution.

Industrial Relations Minister Natalie Hutchins said no industry was immune and she hoped the measure would set an example for other employers.

She said an employee in her own department had needed to take time off work to go to court and the police.

"I have watched her struggle through that and I know that if you invest in your people and you be flexible and supporting, that actually you retain that (person)," she said.

About 1.6 million Australian workers can access family violence leave under schemes introduced by companies including National Australia Bank and Ikea.

The Future of Work: Shorter Hours, Higher Pay

The latest entry in a special project in which business and labor leaders, social scientists, technology visionaries, activists, and journalists weigh in on the most consequential changes in the workplace.

DOROTHY SUE COBBLE 

Most Americans work too much and are paid too little. Reversing these trends is the most important thing we can do to improve the lives of workers and their families today.

Dorothy Sue Cobble is Distinguished Professor of History and Labor Studies at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Time and money are connected but not in the way we often think. For all too long we’ve been trying to raise our pay by lengthening our hours. In truth, we need to shorten our hours. Then and only then will we be able to raise our pay.

Less work and more pay is not an impossible dream. Many countries have made great progress toward its realization. Indeed, countries with the least income inequality also have some of the best time policies. A number of European nations mandate a month of paid vacation every year and many have workweeks of under 35 hours; Canada just expanded its paid parental leave to 54 weeks for new parents, putting it ahead of the world norm of three months of paid leave; and even Japan, famous for karōshi or death by overwork, is considering laws to require workers take paid holidays.

But some say America is just different. Our income inequality is among the world’s highest. The United States, Swaziland, Lesotho, and Papua New Guinea are the only nations without paid maternity leave. And as of 2015, 42 percent of U.S. employees have no paid vacation at all.

But the truth is that America has not always been an outlier when it comes to overwork and underpay. There’s a long and vibrant American tradition of struggle for shorter hours and higher pay and it got results. We lessened both time and income inequality a century ago and we can do so again.

There have been two great American shorter-time movements: the labor movement’s shorter-hours struggle and the women’s movement fight for work-family balance. Both have much to teach about why less work is essential to economic prosperity, democratic governance, and individual happiness.

Let’s look first at the labor movement. The bumper sticker is right: The American labor movement gave us the weekend. It also helped give it to Europeans and others. Ending long hours was the top demand of American workers in the 19th century. In 1886, a general strike for the eight-hour day called by the American Federation of Labor inspired similar movements throughout the industrializing world.

But the shorter-hours call was not just for action; it was for a new economics. In the century leading up to the New Deal, the American labor movement was an intellectual hotbed, the center of some of the most creative economic thinking around. Shorter hours solved the problem of overwork and underwork. “As long as there is one man who seeks employment and can not obtain it, the hours of work are too long,” Sam Gompers, president of the AFL, explained in 1887.

Shorter hours increased profits and raised wages. Shorter hours meant greater productivity, more technological investment, lower turnover costs, and less worker illness and job injury. Employers could afford to pay workers more, and limiting the supply of work time increased its value. American workers organized for shorter hours and higher pay. They insisted that the real American work ethic—one that valued a worker’s time and effort with fair pay—be honored in practice, not just in rhetoric.

The political and moral case for shorter hours was just as important as the economic. Without time for education, reflection, and civic participation, the American experiment in representative democracy was doomed. Shorter hours, the American labor movement claimed, made us better citizens, better family members, and better people.

This first great movement for shorter hours negotiated agreements with employers allowing workers more control over when and how much they worked. It passed living-wage ordinances and fair-hour laws in states and municipalities across the country. It helped secure the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, the first federal law setting minimum wages and maximum hours for men and women.

After the 1930s, the labor movement shifted its focus from a shorter workday to a shorter work year and a shorter work life. At mid-century, big labor negotiated what Walter Reuther, the visionary head of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, called “lumps of leisure”: paid vacations (an unheard-of benefit for blue-collar workers), paid holidays or the three-day weekend, and retirement (a new idea!) paid by Social Security and company benefits.

The second shorter-time movement is what I call the other women’s movement. A century ago, American feminists donned their white dresses and, with American flags fluttering, marched in massive suffrage parades in cities large and small. They also took to the streets and to the ballot box to end overwork and underpay. This second movement, like the first, believed shorter hours raised pay, created more jobs, and preserved American democracy. But they also wanted to end women’s “double day,” or long hours at home and on the job. They sought more choice in where they spent their work time and they insisted that family work was as important as market work.

They led the fight for work-family balance before we even had a name for it: they changed public opinion, laws, and employer practice, gaining job-protected leave during childbirth and childrearing, restrictions on involuntary overtime, and more flexibility in work time and place. Time and money were connected, they argued, and leaves must be paid for most women to benefit.

Raising women’s wages was an integral part of their work-family agenda. They helped extend minimum-wage protections to the majority of women, including domestic, retail, and service workers. Beginning in 1945 and for the next 18 years, they introduced “equal pay for comparable work” legislation. In 1963, John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, a law they hoped would be the first step toward ending sex-based wage discrimination.

Today, the struggle against overwork and underpay is gaining ground. Laws mandating paid family leave have been secured in California, New Jersey, and other states. Campaigns for paid sick leave are succeeding. The Fight for Fifteen and other efforts to raise wages are making a difference and show no sign of waning.

What’s crucial is to connect these efforts and to understand them as part of a long American history of successful struggle for shorter hours and higher pay.

A few months ago, my Rutgers undergraduates and I met for one of our last classroom discussions of the semester. Many of my students hold multiple jobs even as they attend school full time. As I’ve done many times, I assigned readings on overwork and the history of American shorter-time movements. It was late in the semester, late in the afternoon, and very hot. For the first time in many years, the importance of the topic needed no explanation. They raised their tired heads off their desks and began talking animatedly.

For the Future of Work, a special project from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, business and labor leaders, social scientists, technology visionaries, activists, and journalists weigh in on the most consequential changes in the workplace, and what anxieties and possibilities they might produce.

Take action to find happiness: An Experiment in Happiness

Troy Galyon

As I settle into the new school year and get accustomed to the new schedule, I cannot help but think about the few short months ago when summer was just beginning.

As I’m sure many other students around campus are doing, I’m reminiscing on those passing moments of joy spent with friends as we traveled or the fond memories of being free of all obligations and doing anything and everything my heart desired.

Yet, while the thoughts of summer are a fun getaway in our minds from the daily routine of school, there is so much more that we could be doing to improve our happiness here on campus besides just pining for summer. Instead of dreading classes and complaining about our schedules, why don’t we do something about it?

I have discovered that this outlook changes everything.

Life does not stop and start at summer or at the weekend. Life happens each day. We do not need some excuse to live life or to seek adventure or happiness. Why does the day of the week make a difference in our choices, freedoms and thoughts?

During the summer, many people don’t even keep track of days, and they live each day to the fullest. School comes, and they dread every day that is not a holiday. I say continue that summer trend and live each day to the fullest.

Happiness will not come to us. We have to create our own happiness.

There is happiness in change as well. This school year brings with it new opportunities and challenges which we will undoubtedly grow from. This semester will affect us all as much if not more than the summer did.

New relationships will be formed and new friendships will be made. If we all sit around thinking about how hard our classes are or how boring our morning lecture is, we are not creating happiness for ourselves, but instead inhibiting happiness from growing at all.

Take a different approach to school if you, like so many students that go to class just because they feel like they have to, complain every day about how much you hate this or that about a class. Attempt to live each day as happy as you can be.

Instead of thinking about how bad class and school are every day, think about how great it is to see friends, work towards an esteemed end-goal and grow and change into the adult that you want yourself to be.

Embrace change. Love life. Be happy.

We need to change the way we see the world. We need to see it through a lens of acceptance for everyone and happiness with everyone around us and within ourselves. Try happiness. I challenge you to try happiness just for one day. When you begin to complain about a certain aspect of life, rethink your position and say something that you are happy about with your life.

Imagine the change at UT that would occur if every student and faculty member adopted a new, happier outlook on life. Help others to be happier, and you will be happier in turn. Let us live on a campus of people making devoted to making others happy.

This column is designed to make you think differently about life by living happier and helping others live happier as well. When we help each other, both parties — the helped and the helper — go away feeling better about themselves and one another.

If we could all be this way and create a chain reaction of people helping one another, not only this campus but the world could be turned into a better place full of caring individuals that make up an incredibly loving human race.

Troy Galyon is a junior in supply chain management. He can be reached at tgalyon2@vols.utk.edu.

BAIL OR JAIL: POOR CHOICE

By Will Brunch

MY DAILY NEWS colleague Helen Ubiñas has done an outstanding job in her last couple of columns - contrasting the Great Papal Panic of '15 with Philadelphia's seeming acquiescence to high levels of gun violence and poverty. "Go rogue, pontiff," she wrote last Tuesday. "Throw caution and schedules to the wind and head to one of the city neighborhoods hardest hit by poverty and crime."

I agree - yet I'd also note that Pope Francis already has a pretty bold schedule. He is, after all, going to jail - the city's Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, to be exact. Visiting prisoners and offering them hope is part of the pope's shtick, to use a mixed metaphor. Just last month, Francis visited one of the world's most overcrowded correctional facilities, in Bolivia, and told inmates "we should not think that everything is lost."

When he comes to Philly, I wonder if the pontiff will acknowledge this: In any American city or county lockup, many prisoners shouldn't even be there - victims of a flawed system that locks people up for months who've been convicted of no crime, yet simply are too poor to post bail.

This Sunday, the New York Times Magazine ran a remarkable expose called "The Bail Trap." It notes that President Obama's admirable push to reform the federal criminal justice system - much of it rolled out this summer in Philadelphia in a speech to the NAACP - will only make a dent on the problem. That's because of the 2.2 million Americans now behind bars, fewer than 10 percent are held in a federal facility.

The bulk of the inmates are in state prisons, and a substantial portion also sit in county or municipal lockups like Philly's Curran-Fromhold. The Times notes that in these local jails, some six out of 10 haven't been convicted of anything yet and - in the cherished tenet of American criminal justice - remain innocent until proven guilty.

Notes the article: "Some of these inmates are being held because they're considered dangerous or unlikely to return to court for their hearings. But many of them simply cannot afford to pay the bail that has been set."

It noted that reform efforts are underway in New York, including a pilot program in which its city council set aside $1.4 million for low-level offenders. That, in turn, was inspired by a program established in 2007 called the Bronx Freedom Fund that used nonprofit dollars to bail out low-income people charged with nonviolent crimes. The program was killed in a somewhat ridiculous legal challenge, but what was learned - as reported by the Times - is simply mind-blowing:

"Ninety-six percent of the fund's clients made it to every one of their court appearances, a return rate higher even than that of people who posted their own bail. More than half of the Freedom Fund's clients, now able to fight their cases outside jail, saw their charges completely dismissed. Not a single client went to jail on the charges for which bail had been posted. By comparison, defendants held on bail for the duration of their cases were convicted 92 percent of the time. The numbers showed what everyone familiar with the system already knew anecdotally: Bail makes poor people who would otherwise win their cases plead guilty."

In Philadelphia, as attorney Christopher Markos wrote in the Daily News, Pope Francis at Curran-Fromhold "will see a massively overcrowded, understaffed facility and learn that a significant majority of the inmates suffering the intolerable conditions there are pretrial detainees - convicted of no crime, but jailed only because they are not able to afford bail."

In fact, as many as 75 percent of the roughly 8,000 people in the Philadelphia prison system are awaiting trial, most unable to afford bail.

There is hope of fixing the system here in the City of Brotherly Love - just not in time for the papal visit. Democratic mayoral nominee Jim Kenney is having something of a cruel summer as he presumptively waits for his swearing-in. The highlight of his off-season, however, came when he signaled in July that he's open to a reform of the bail system along the lines of what New York City is doing.

The roadblock to real reform has always been fear that a suspect awaiting trial will commit a heinous crime. True, but then if we jailed all of Philadelphia's 1.5 million citizens, we could get the murder rate down to zero, right? Providing alternatives to bail for people charged with nonviolent crimes wouldn't just be a humane thing to do - keeping folks employed and housed and keeping their families together - but it would save the city millions of dollars in new jail construction. The obstacle is that not just Kenney but also District Attorney Seth Williams and other key officials need to get on board.

I'm sure Pope Francis would give them his blessing.

A quarter of new moms return to work 2 weeks after childbirth

JOHN SMIERCIAK / CHICAGO TRIBUNE

In the United States, nearly a quarter of employed mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth, according to a new report from In These Times, a nonprofit magazine, which analyzed data from the Department of Labor and collected stories from mothers who kept working through pain and grief.

It's not because they recover at a supernatural pace. Or because they value their jobs over their babies.

Some simply can't afford the pay cut. Buying groceries for many American women trumps resting for as long as the doctor advises. So they go back to the office — even if the C-section cuts haven't yet healed or a premature baby remains in the hospital.

National data points to a probable culprit: Only 13 percent of workers in the U.S. have access to any paid leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Forty percent of U.S. households with children under 18, meanwhile, rely heavily on a mother's income, Pew data shows.

A 2012 survey commissioned by the Department of Labor polled all workers who had taken family or medical leave. In These Times dug into the data further to learn what happened to new moms. They found 23 percent of women who had left work to care for an infant took less than two weeks off.

Less educated workers appeared to have it much worse: Eighty percent of college graduates took at least six weeks off to care for a new baby, and only 54 percent of women without degrees did so.

And about 43 million American workers have no paid sick leave, or time off for parents to care for sick kids. Access depends on occupation. Those with the highest salaries often enjoy the most generous benefits: 88-percent of private sector managers and financial workers enjoy paid time off, more than double the rate among service workers (40-percent) and construction workers (38-percent).

One mother interviewed by investigative reporter Sharon Lerner fell through the cracks of the Family Medical Leave Act, which guarantees at least 12 weeks of unpaid leave to 1) new parents at companies with more than 50 employees and 2) who have worked there for at least a year.

The woman, a counselor at a small college with a master's degree, saved up vacation days and purchased disability insurance to prepare for two months with no income. She tried to time her baby to qualify for job-protected leave. As the story describes:

She had started her job in February 2014, which meant that she wouldn't qualify until the following February. She counted back nine months from then and got to May, but then, to be safe, tacked on another two months in case the baby came early, so: July. That's when she and Rachid would start trying for a second.

But the woman went into premature labor, which wrecked her plan. According to the story, she gave birth by C-section on Christmas Eve, too soon to qualify for leave or support from disability insurance. She returned to work two weeks later, Lerner reported, worrying about her son, who remained under medical supervision.

Half the lies they tell about me aren't true.”

THE BOOK OF FUNNY, ODD AND INTERESTING THINGS THAT PEOPLE SAY

Compiled by

John William Tuohy

Great Outdoors

Questions asked of Park Rangers at The Everglades National Park:

"Are the alligators real?"

"Are the baby alligators for sale?"

"Where are the rides?"

"What time does the two o'clock bus leave?"

Grand Canyon National Park:

"Was this man-made?"

"Do you light it up at night?"

"I bought tickets for the elevator to the bottom -- where is it?"

"Is the mule train air conditioned?"

"So where are the faces of the presidents?"

"So is that Canada over there?"

Denali National Park:

"What time to you feed the bears?"

"What's so wonderful about Wonder Lake?"

"Can you show me where the Yeti lives?"

"How often do you mow the tundra?"

Mesa Verde National Park:

"Did people build this, or did Indians?"

"Why did they build the ruins so close to the road?"

"Do you know of any undiscovered ruins?"

"Why did the Indians decide to live in Colorado?"

Yellowstone National Park:

"Does Old Faithful erupt at night?"

"Do you put the animals away at night?"

"How do you turn it on?"

"When does the guy who turns it on get to sleep?"

Carlsbad Caverns National Park:

"How much of the cave is underground?"

"So what's in the unexplored part of the cave?"

"Does it ever rain in here?"

"So what is this -- just a hole in the ground?"

 

Yosemite National Park:

"Where are the cages for the animals?"

"What time of year do you turn on Yosemite Falls?"

"What happened to the other half of Half Dome?"

"Can I get a picture taken with the carving of President Clinton?"

Banff National Park:

"Is that food coloring in the lakes?"

"When did you build the glaciers?"

"How much for a moose?"

"Where are the igloos?"

"How do the elk know they're supposed to cross at the Elk Crossing signs?"

"At what elevation does an elk become a moose?"

"Are the bears with collars tame?"

"Is there anywhere I can see the bears pose?"

"Is it ok to keep an open bag of bacon on the picnic table, or should I store it in my tent?"

"Where can I find Alpine Flamingos?"

"Where does Alberta end and Canada begin?"

"How far is Banff from Canada?"

"What's the best way to see Canada in a day?"

"When we enter British Columbia, do we have to convert our money to British pounds?"

"Where can I buy a raccoon hat? All Canadians own one, don't they?"

"Are there phones in Banff?"

"So it's eight kilometers away. Is that in miles?"

"We're on the decibel system, you know."

"Is that two kilometers by foot or by car?"

"Did I miss the turnoff for Canada?"

"Do you have a map of the State of Jasper?"

"Is this the part of Canada that speaks French, or is that Saskatchewan?"

"If I go to British Columbia, do I have to go through Ontario?"

"Do they search you at the British Columbia border?"

"Are there birds in Canada?"

"I saw an animal on the way to Banff today. Could you tell me what it was?"

Glacier National Park:

"When do the deer become elk?"

“When do the glaciers go by?"

 

Isle Royale National Park:

"I just saw the ugliest horse I've ever seen." -- After seeing a moose.

Sutter's Fort State Historic Park, Sacramento

"Where are the tracks the wagon trains ran on?"

Forest Service Feedback

Escalators would help on steep uphill sections."

"A small deer came into my camp and stole my bag of pickles. Is there a way I can get reimbursed? Please call."

"Instead of a permit system or regulations, the Forest Service needs to reduce worldwide population growth to limit the number of visitors to wilderness."

"Trails need to be wider so people can walk while holding hands."

"Ban walking sticks in wilderness. Hikers that use walking sticks are more likely to chase animals."

"All the mile markers are missing this year."

"Found a smoldering cigarette left by a horse."

"Trails need to be reconstructed. Please avoid building trails that go uphill."

"Too many bugs and leeches and spiders and spider webs. Please spray the wilderness to rid the area of these pests."

"Please pave the trails so they can be plowed of snow in the winter."

"Chairlifts need to be in some places so that we can get to wonderful views without having to hike to them."

"The coyotes made too much noise last night and kept me awake. Please eradicate these annoying animals."

"Reflectors need to be placed on trees every 50 feet so people can hike at night with flashlights."

"A McDonald's would be nice at the trailhead."

"The places where trails do not exist are not well marked."

"Too many rocks in the mountains."

"Need more signs to keep area pristine."

BLOGLAPEDIA’S BLOGS

ARCHITECTURE

Architecture for the blog of it

http://architecturefortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

THE ARTS

Art for the Blog of It

http://artfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

Art for the Pop of it

http://artforthepopofit.blogspot.com/

Photography for the blog of it

http://photographyfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

Music for the Blog of it

http://musicfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

Sculpture this and Sculpture that

http://sculpturethisandsculpturethat.blogspot.com/

The art of War (Propaganda art through the ages)

http://theartofwarcleverhuh.blogspot.com/

Album Art (Photographic arts)

http://albumartsocheesyitsgood.blogspot.com/

Pulp Fiction Trash (The art of Pulp Fiction covers)

http://pulpfictiontrash.blogspot.com/

Admit it, you want to Read this Book (The art of Pulp Fiction covers)

http://goaheadadmitityouwanttoread.blogspot.com/

FILM

The Godfather Trilogy BlogSpot

http://thegodfathertrilogyblogspot.blogspot.com/

On the Waterfront: The Making of a great American Film

http://onthewaterfrontthefilm.blogspot.com/

FOOD

Absolutely blogalicious

http://absolutelyblogalicious.blogspot.com/

The Wee Book of Irish Recipes (Book support site)

http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/

Good chowda (New England foods)

http://goodchowda.blogspot.com/

Old New England Recipes (Book support site)

http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com/

And I Love Clams (New England foods)

http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/

In Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener (New England foods)

http://inpraiseoftherhodeislandwiener.blogspot.com/

Wicked Cool New England Recipes (New England foods)

http://whickedcoolnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

Old New England Recipes (New England foods)

http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

FOSTER CARE

Foster Care new and Updates

http://www.facebook.com/FosterCareNews

Aging out of the system

http://agingoutofthesystem.blogspot.com/

Murder, Death and Abuse in the Foster Care system

http://murderdeathandabuseinfostercare.blogspot.com/

Angel and Saints in the Foster Care System

http://angelsandsaintsinthefostercare.blogspot.com/

The Foster Children’s Blogs

http://fosterchildrensblog.blogspot.com/

Foster Care Legislation

http://fostercarelegislation.blogspot.com/

The Foster Children’s Bill of Right

http://thefosterchildrensbillofrights.blogspot.com/

Foster Kids own Story

http://fosterkidsownstory.blogspot.com/

The Adventures of Foster Kid.

http://theadventuresoffosterkid.blogspot.com/

HEALTH

Me vs. Diabetes (Diabetes education site)

http://mevsdiabetes-bloglapedia.blogspot.com/

HISTORY

The Quotable Helen Keller

http://thequotablehelenkeller.blogspot.com/

Teddy Roosevelt's Letters to his children (Book support site)

http://teddyrooseveltsletterstohischildren.blogspot.com/

The Quotable Machiavelli (Book support site)

http://thequotablemachiavelli.blogspot.com/

HUMOR

Whatever you do, don't laugh

http://whateveryoudodontlaugh.blogspot.com/

The Quotable Grouch Marx

http://thequotablegrouchmarx.blogspot.com/

IRISH-AMERICANA

A Big Blog of Irish Literature

http://abigblogofirishliterature.blogspot.com/

The Wee Blog of Irish Jokes (Book support blog)

http://theweeblogofirishjokes.blogspot.com/

The Wee Blog of Irish Recipes

http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/

The Irish American Gangster

http://irishamericangangsters.blogspot.com

The Irish in their Own Words

http://theirishintheirownwords.blogspot.com/

When Washington Was Irish

http://whenwashingtonwasirish.blogspot.com/

The Wee Book of Irish Recipes (Book support site)

http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/

LITERATURE

Following Fitzgerald

http://followingfitzgerald.blogspot.com/

Shakespeare

http://shakespeareinamericanenglish.blogspot.com/

The Blogable Robert Frost

http://theblogablerobertfrost.blogspot.com/

Charles Dickens

http://charlesdickensfan.blogspot.com/

The Beat Poets of the Forever Generation

http://thebeatspoetsoftheforevergenera.blogspot.com/

Holden Caulfield Blog Spot

http://holdencaulfieldblogspot.blogspot.com/

The Quotable Oscar Wilde

http://thequotableoscarwilde.blogspot.com/

NEW ENGLAND BLOGS

The Quotable Thoreau

http://thequotablethenrydavidthoreau.blogspot.com/

Old New England Recipes

http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

Wicked Cool New England Recipes

http://whickedcoolnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

Emerson

http://emersonsaidit.blogspot.com/

The New England Mafia

http://thenewenglandmafia.blogspot.com/

And I Love Clams

http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/

In Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener

http://inpraiseoftherhodeislandwiener.blogspot.com/

Watch Hill

http://watchhillwesterly.blogspot.com/

York Beach

http://yorkbeachfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

The Connecticut History Blog

http://connecticuthistory.blogspot.com/

The Connecticut Irish

http://theconnecticutirish.blogspot.com/

Good chowda

http://goodchowda.blogspot.com/

NOSTALGIA

God, How I hated the 70s

http://godhowihatedthe70s.blogspot.com/

Child of the Sixties Forever

http://childofthesixtiesforeverandever.blogspot.com/

The Kennedy’s in the 60’s

http://thekennedysinthe60s.blogspot.com/

Music of the Sixties Forever

http://musicofthesixtiesforever.blogspot.com/

Elvis and Nixon at the White House (Book support site)

http://elvisandnixonatthewhitehouse.blogspot.com/

Beatles Fan Forever

http://beatlesfanforever.blogspot.com/

Year One, 1955

http://yearone1955.blogspot.com/

Robert Kennedy in His Own Words

http://rfkinhisownwords.blogspot.com/

The 1980s were fun

http://the1980swereokayactually.blogspot.com/

The 1990s. The last decade.

http://1990sthelastdecade.blogspot.com/

ORGANIZED CRIME

The Russian Mafia

http://russianmafiagangster.blogspot.com/

The American Jewish Gangster

http://theamericanjewishgangster.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Hollywood

http://themobinhollywood.blogspot.com/

We Only Kill Each Other

http://weonlykilleachother.blogspot.com/

Early Gangsters of New York City

http://earlygangstersofnewyorkcity.blogspot.com/

Al Capone: Biography of a self-made Man

http://alcaponethebiographyofaselfmademan.blogspot.com/

The Life and World of Al Capone

http://thelifeandworldofalcapone.blogspot.com/

The Salerno Report

http://salernoreportmafiaandurderjohnkennedy.blogspot.com/

Guns and Glamour

http://gunsandglamourthechicagomobahistory.blogspot.com/

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

http://thesaintvalentinesdaymassacre.blogspot.com/

Mob Testimony

http://mobtestimony.blogspot.com/

Recipes we would Die For

http://recipeswewoulddiefor.blogspot.com/

The Prohibition in Pictures

http://theprohibitioninpictures.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Pictures

http://themobinpictures.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Vegas

http://themobinvegasinpictures.blogspot.com/

The Irish American Gangster

http://irishamericangangsters.blogspot.com

Roger Touhy Gangster

http://rogertouhygangsters.blogspot.com/

Chicago’s Mob Bosses

http://chicagosmobbossesfromaccardoto.blogspot.com/

Chicago Gang Land: It Happened Here

http://chicagoganglandithappenedhere.blogspot.com/

Whacked: One Hundred years of Murder in Gangland

http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/

The Mob Across America

http://themobacrossamerica.blogspot.com/

Mob Cops, Lawyers and Front Men

http://mobcopslawyersandinformantsand.blogspot.com/

Shooting the Mob: Dutch Schultz

http://shootingthemobdutchschultz.blogspot.com/

Bugsy& His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill

http://bugsyandvirginiahill.blogspot.com/

After Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate on Organized Crime

http://aftervalachi.blogspot.com/

Mob Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee (Book support site)

http://virgilpetersonmobbuster.blogspot.com/

The US Government’s Timeline of Organized Crime (Book support site)

http://timelineoforganizedcrime.blogspot.com/

The Kefauver Organized Crime Hearings (Book support site)

http://thekefauverorganizedcrimehearings.blogspot.com/

Joe Valachi's testimony on the Mafia (Book support site)

http://joevalachistestimonyonthemafia.blogspot.com/

Mobsters in the News

http://mobstersinthenews.blogspot.com/

Shooting the Mob: Dead Mobsters (Book support site)

http://deadmobsters.blogspot.com/

The Stolen Years Full Text (Roger Touhy)

http://thestolenyearsfulltext.blogspot.com/

Mobsters in Black and White

http://mobstersinblackandwhite.blogspot.com/

Mafia Gangsters, Wiseguys and Goodfellas

http://mafiagangsterswiseguysandgoodfellas.blogspot.com/

Whacked: One Hundred Years of Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Mob (Book support site)

http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/

Gangland Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal (Book support site)

http://ganglandgaslightrosyrosenthal.blogspot.com/

The Best of the Mob Files Series (Book support site)

http://thebestofthemobfilesseries.blogspot.com/

PHILOSOPHY

It’s All Greek Mythology to me

http://itsallgreekmythologytome.blogspot.com/

PSYCHOLOGY

Psychologically Relevant

http://psychologicallyrelevant.blogspot.com/

SNOBBERY

The Rarifieid Tribe

http://therarifiedtribe.blogspot.com/

Perfect Behavior

http://perfectbehavior.blogspot.com/

TRAVEL

The Upscale Traveler

http://theupscaletraveler.blogspot.com/

TRIVIA

The Mish Mosh Blog

http://theupscaletraveler.blogspot.com/

WASHINGTON DC

DC Behind the Monuments

http://dcbehindthemonuments.blogspot.com/

Washington Oddities

http://washingtonoddities.blogspot.com/

When Washington Was Irish

http://whenwashingtonwasirish.blogspot.com/

FROM LLR BOOKS. COM

Litchfield Literary Books. A really small company run by writers.

AMERICAN HISTORY

The Day Nixon Met Elvis

Paperback 46 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Day-Nixon-Met-elvis/

Theodore Roosevelt: Letters to his Children. 1903-1918

Paperback 194 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Theodore-Roosevelt-Letters-Children-1903-1918/dp/

THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND CIVILIZATIONS

The Works of Horace

Paperback 174 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Works-Horace-Richard-Willoughby/

The Quotable Greeks

Paperback 234 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby

The Quotable Epictetus

Paperback 142 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Epictetus-Golden-Sayings

Quo Vadis: A narrative of the time of Nero

Paperback 420 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quo-Vadis-Narrative-Time-Nero

CHILDRENS BOOKS

The Porchless Pumpkin: A Halloween Story for Children

A Halloween play for young children. By consent of the author, this play may be performed, at no charge, by educational institutions, neighborhood organizations and other not-for-profit-organizations.

A fun story with a moral

“I believe that Denny O'Day is an American treasure and this little book proves it. Jack is a pumpkin who happens to be very small, by pumpkins standards and as a result he goes unbought in the pumpkin patch on Halloween eve, but at the last moment he is given his chance to prove that just because you're small doesn't mean you can't be brave. Here is the point that I found so wonderful, the book stresses that while size doesn't matter when it comes to courage...ITS OKAY TO BE SCARED....as well. I think children need to hear that, that's its okay to be unsure because life is a ongoing lesson isn't it?”

Paperback: 42 pages

http://www.amazon.com/OLANTERN-PORCHLESS-PUMPKIN-Halloween-Children

BOOKS ON FOSTER CARE

It's Not All Right to be a Foster Kid....no matter what they tell you: Tweet the books contents

Paperback 94 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Right-Foster-Kid-no-matter-what

From the Author

I spent my childhood, from age seven through seventeen, in foster care.  Over the course of those ten years, many decent, well-meaning, and concerned people told me, "It's okay to be foster kid."

In saying that, those very good people meant to encourage me, and I appreciated their kindness then, and all these many decades later, I still appreciate their good intentions. But as I was tossed around the foster care system, it began to dawn on me that they were wrong.  It was not all right to be a foster kid.

During my time in the system, I was bounced every eighteen months from three foster homes to an orphanage to a boy's school and to a group home before I left on my own accord at age seventeen.

In the course of my stay in foster care, I was severely beaten in two homes by my "care givers" and separated from my four siblings who were also in care, sometimes only blocks away from where I was living.

I left the system rather than to wait to age out, although the effects of leaving the system without any family, means, or safety net of any kind, were the same as if I had aged out. I lived in poverty for the first part of my life, dropped out of high school, and had continuous problems with the law.

 Today, almost nothing about foster care has changed.  Exactly what happened to me is happening to some other child, somewhere in America, right now.  The system, corrupt, bloated, and inefficient, goes on, unchanging and secretive.

Something has gone wrong in a system that was originally a compassionate social policy built to improve lives but is now a definitive cause in ruining lives.  Due to gross negligence, mismanagement, apathy, and greed, mostly what the foster care system builds are dangerous consequences. Truly, foster care has become our epic national disgrace and a nightmare for those of us who have lived through it.

Yet there is a suspicion among some Americans that foster care costs too much, undermines the work ethic, and is at odds with a satisfying life.  Others see foster care as a part of the welfare system, as legal plunder of the public treasuries.

 None of that is true; in fact, all that sort of thinking does is to blame the victims.  There is not a single child in the system who wants to be there or asked to be there.  Foster kids are in foster care because they had nowhere else to go.  It's that simple.  And believe me, if those kids could get out of the system and be reunited with their parents and lead normal, healthy lives, they would. And if foster care is a sort of legal plunder of the public treasuries, it's not the kids in the system who are doing the plundering.

 We need to end this needless suffering.  We need to end it because it is morally and ethically wrong and because the generations to come will not judge us on the might of our armed forces or our technological advancements or on our fabulous wealth.

 Rather, they will judge us, I am certain, on our compassion for those who are friendless, on our decency to those who have nothing and on our efforts, successful or not, to make our nation and our world a better place.  And if we cannot accomplish those things in the short time allotted to us, then let them say of us "at least they tried."

You can change the tragedy of foster care and here's how to do it.  We have created this book so that almost all of it can be tweeted out by you to the world.  You have the power to improve the lives of those in our society who are least able to defend themselves.  All you need is the will to do it.

 If the American people, as good, decent and generous as they are, knew what was going on in foster care, in their name and with their money, they would stop it.  But, generally speaking, although the public has a vague notion that foster care is a mess, they don't have the complete picture. They are not aware of the human, economic and social cost that the mismanagement of the foster care system puts on our nation.

By tweeting the facts laid out in this work, you can help to change all of that.  You can make a difference.  You can change things for the better.

We can always change the future for a foster kid; to make it better ...you have the power to do that. Speak up (or tweet out) because it's your country.  Don't depend on the "The other guy" to speak up for these kids, because you are the other guy.

We cannot build a future for foster children, but we can build foster children for the future and the time to start that change is today.

No time to say Goodbye: Memoirs of a life in foster 

Paperbook 440 Books

http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir

  

BOOKS ABOUT FILM

On the Waterfront: The Making of a Great American Film

Paperback: 416 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Waterfront-Making-Great-American-Film/

BOOKS ABOUT GHOSTS AND THE SUPERNATUAL

Scotish Ghost Stories

Paperback 186 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Scottish-Ghost-Stories-Elliott-ODonell

HUMOR BOOKS

The Book of funny odd and interesting things people say

Paperback: 278 pages

http://www.amazon.com/book-funny-interesting-things-people

The Wee Book of Irish Jokes

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook

Perfect Behavior: A guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises

http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Behavior-Ladies-Gentlemen-Social

BOOKS ABOUT THE 1960s

You Don’t Need a Weatherman. Underground 1969

Paperback 122 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Weatherman-Notes-Weatherman-Underground-1969

Baby Boomers Guide to the Beatles Songs of the Sixties

Paperback

http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-Guide-Beatles-Songs-Sixties/

Baby Boomers Guide to Songs of the 1960s

http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Boomers-Guide-Songs-1960s

IRISH- AMERICANA

The Connecticut Irish

Paper back 140 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly

 The Wee Book of Irish Jokes

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook/

The Wee Book of Irish Recipes 

http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-Recipes/

 

 The Wee Book of the American-Irish Gangsters

  http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-American-Gangsters/

 The Wee book of Irish Blessings... 

http://www.amazon.com/Series-Blessing-Proverbs-Toasts-ebook/

The Wee Book of the American Irish in Their Own Words

http://www.amazon.com/Book-American-Irish-Their-Words/

Everything you need to know about St. Patrick

Paperback 26 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Need-About-Saint-Patrick

A Reading Book in Ancient Irish History

Paperback 147pages

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Book-Ancient-Irish-History

The Book of Things Irish

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Things-Irish-William-Tuohy/

Poets and Dreamer; Stories translated from the Irish

Paperback 158 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Poets-Dreamers-Stories-Translated-Irish/

The History of the Great Irish Famine: Abridged and Illustrated

Paperback 356 pages

http://www.amazon.com/History-Great-Irish-Famine-Illustrated/

BOOKS ABOUT NEW ENGLAND

The New England Mafia

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook/

Wicked Good New England Recipes

http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Good-New-England-Recipes/

The Connecticut Irish

Paper back 140 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly

The Twenty-Fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers

Paperback 64 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Fifth-Regiment-Connecticut-Volunteers-Rebellion

The Life of James Mars

Paperback 54 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Life-James-Mars-Slave-Connecticut

Stories of Colonial Connecticut

Paperback 116 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Colonial-Connnecticut-Caroline-Clifford

What they Say in Old New England

Paperback 194 pages

http://www.amazon.com/What-they-say-New-England/

BOOK ABOUT ORGANIZED CRIME

Chicago Organized Crime

Chicago-Mob-Bosses

http://www.amazon.com/Chicagos-Mob-Bosses-Accardo-ebook

The Mob Files: It Happened Here: Places of Note in Chicago gangland 1900-2000

http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-1900-2000-ebook

An Illustrated Chronological History of the Chicago Mob. Time Line 1837-2000

http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Chronological-History-Chicago-1837-2000/

Mob Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee

http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Buster-Peterson-Committee-ebook/

The Mob Files. Guns and Glamour: The Chicago Mob. A History. 1900-2000

http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Guns-Glamour-ebook/

Shooting the Mob: Organized crime in photos. Crime Boss Tony Accardo

http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-photos-Accardo/

Shooting the Mob: Organized Crime in Photos: The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.

http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Valentines-Massacre

The Life and World of Al Capone in Photos

http://www.amazon.com/Life-World-Al-Capone

AL CAPONE: The Biography of a Self-Made Man.: Revised from the 0riginal 1930 edition.Over 200 new photographs

Paperback: 340 pages

http://www.amazon.com/CAPONE-Biography-Self-Made-Over-photographs

Whacked. One Hundred Years Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Outfit

Paperback: 172 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Whacked-Hundred-Murder-Mayhem-Chicago/

Las Vegas Organized Crime

The Mob in Vegas

http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Vegas-ebook

Bugsy & His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill

http://www.amazon.com/Bugsy-His-Flamingo-Testimony-Virginia/

Testimony by Mobsters Lewis McWillie, Joseph Campisi and Irwin Weiner (The Mob Files Series)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-ebook

Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime.

Paperback 264 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Rattling-Cup-Chicago-Crime-Abridged

The Life and Times of Terrible Tommy O’Connor.

Paperback 94 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-Terrible-Tommy-OConnor

The Mob, Sam Giancana and the overthrow of the Black Policy Racket in Chicago

Paperback 200 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Giancana-ovethrow-Policy-Rackets-Chicago

When Capone’s Mob Murdered Roger Touhy. In Photos

Paperback 234 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Capones-Murdered-Roger-Touhy-photos

Organized Crime in Hollywood

The Mob in Hollywood

http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Hollywood-ebook/

The Bioff Scandal

Paperback 54 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Bioff-Scandal-Shakedown-Hollywood-Studios

Organized Crime in New York

Joe Pistone’s war on the mafia

http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Petrosinos-War-Mafia-Files/

Mob Testimony: Joe Pistone, Michael Scars DiLeonardo, Angelo Lonardo and others

http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Testimony-DiLeonardo-testimony-Undercover/

The New York Mafia: The Origins of the New York Mob

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mafia-Origins

The New York Mob: The Bosses

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mob-Bosses/

Organized Crime 25 Years after Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate

http://www.amazon.com/Organized-Crime-Valachi-Hearings-ebook

Shooting the mob: Dutch Schultz

http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Photographs-Schultz

Gangland Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal. (Illustrated)

http://www.amazon.com/Gangland-Gaslight-Killing-Rosenthal-Illustrated/

Early Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City

Paperback 382 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Early-Street-Gangs-Gangsters-York

THE RUSSIAN MOBS

The Russian Mafia in America

http://www.amazon.com/The-Russian-Mafia-America-ebook/

The Threat of Russian Organzied Crime

Paperback 192 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Threat-Russian-Organized-Crime-photographs-ebook

Organized Crime/General

Best of Mob Stories

http://www.amazon.com/Files-Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-Crime/

Best of Mob Stories Part 2

http://www.amazon.com/Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-ebook/

Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters

http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters-ebook

Mob Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobsters in Photos

http://www.amazon.com/Recipes-For-Meals-Mobsters-Photos

More Mob Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobs

http://www.amazon.com/More-Recipes-Meals-Mobsters-Photos

The New England Mafia

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook

Shooting the mob. Organized crime in photos. Dead Mobsters, Gangsters and Hoods.

http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-mob-Organized-photos-Mobsters-Gangsters/

The Salerno Report: The Mafia and the Murder of President John F. Kennedy

http://www.amazon.com/The-Salerno-Report-President-ebook/

The Mob Files: Mob Wars. "We only kill each other"

http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Wars-other/

The Mob across America

http://www.amazon.com/The-Files-Across-America-ebook/

The US Government’s Time Line of Organzied Crime 1920-1987

http://www.amazon.com/GOVERNMENTS-ORGANIZED-1920-1987-Illustrated-ebook/

Early Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City: 1800-1919. Illustrated

http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-1800-1919-Illustrated-Street-ebook/

The Mob Files: Mob Cops, Lawyers and Informants and Fronts

http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Informants-ebook/

Gangster Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated

Paperback: 128 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/

The Book of American-Jewish Gangsters: A Pictorial History.

Paperback: 436 pages

http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-American-Jewish-Gangsters-Pictorial/

The Mob and the Kennedy Assassination

Paperback 414 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-Mobsters

BOOKS ABOUT THE OLD WEST

The Last Outlaw: The story of Cole Younger, by Himself

Paperback 152 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Outlaw-Story-Younger-Himself

BOOKS ON PHOTOGRAPHY

Chicago: A photographic essay.

 Paperback: 200 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Chicago-Photographic-Essay-William-Thomas

STAGE PLAYS

Boomers on a train: A ten minute play

Paperback 22 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-train-ten-minute-Play-ebook

Four Short Plays

By John William Tuohy

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy

Four More Short Plays

By John William Tuohy

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy/

High and Goodbye: Everybody gets the Timothy Leary they deserve. A full length play

By John William Tuohy

http://www.amazon.com/High-Goodbye-Everybody-Timothy-deserve

Cyberdate. An Everyday Love Story about Everyday People

By John William Tuohy

http://www.amazon.com/Cyberdate-Everyday-Story-People-ebook/

The Dutchman's Soliloquy: A one Act Play based on the factual last words of Gangster Dutch Schultz.

By John William Tuohy

http://www.amazon.com/Dutchmans-Soliloquy-factual-Gangster-Schultz/

Fishbowling on The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: Or William S. Burroughs intersects with Dutch Schultz

Print Length: 57 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Fishbowling-Last-Words-Dutch-Schultz-ebook/

American Shakespeare: August Wilson in his own words. A One Act Play

By John William Tuohy

http://www.amazon.com/American-Shakespeare-August-Wilson-ebook

She Stoops to Conquer

http://www.amazon.com/She-Stoops-Conquer-Oliver-Goldsmith/

The Seven Deadly Sins of Gilligan’s Island: A ten minute play

Print Length: 14 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Deadly-Gilligans-Island-minute-ebook/

BOOKS ABOUT VIRGINIA

OUT OF CONTROL: An Informal History of the Fairfax County Police

http://www.amazon.com/Control-Informal-History-Fairfax-Police/

McLean Virginia. A short informal history

http://www.amazon.com/McLean-Virginia-Short-Informal-History/

THE QUOTABLE SERIES

The Quotable Emerson: Life lessons from the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Over 300 quotes

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Emerson-lessons-quotes

The Quotable John F. Kennedy

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-John-F-Kennedy/

The Quotable Oscar Wilde

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons/

The Quotable Machiavelli

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-Thayer/

The Quotable Confucius: Life Lesson from the Chinese Master

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese/

The Quotable Henry David Thoreau

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Henry-Thoreau-Quotables-ebook

The Quotable Robert F. Kennedy

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Robert-F-Kennedy-Illustrated/

The Quotable Writer: Writers on the Writers Life

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Writer-Quotables-ebook

The words of Walt Whitman: An American Poet

Paperback: 162 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Words-Walt-Whitman-American-Poet

Gangster Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated

Paperback: 128 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/

The Quotable Popes

Paperback 66 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Popes-Maria-Conasenti

The Quotable Kahlil Gibran with Artwork from Kahlil Gibran

Paperback 52 pages

Kahlil Gibran, an artist, poet, and writer was born on January 6, 1883 n the north of modern-day Lebanon and in what was then part of Ottoman Empire. He had no formal schooling in Lebanon. In 1895, the family immigrated to the United States when Kahlil was a young man and settled in South Boston. Gibran enrolled in an art school and was soon a member of the avant-garde community and became especially close to Boston artist, photographer, and publisher Fred Holland Day who encouraged and supported Gibran’s creative projects. An accomplished artist in drawing and watercolor, Kahlil attended art school in Paris from 1908 to 1910, pursuing a symbolist and romantic style. He held his first art exhibition of his drawings in 1904 in Boston, at Day's studio. It was at this exhibition, that Gibran met Mary Elizabeth Haskell, who ten years his senior. The two formed an important friendship and love affair that lasted the rest of Gibran’s short life. Haskell influenced every aspect of Gibran’s personal life and career. She became his editor when he began to write and ushered his first book into publication in 1918, The Madman, a slim volume of aphorisms and parables written in biblical cadence somewhere between poetry and prose. Gibran died in New York City on April 10, 1931, at the age of 48 from cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis.

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Kahlil-Gibran-artwork/

The Quotable Dorothy Parker

Paperback 86 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Dorothy-Parker-Proxy-Algan/

The Quotable Machiavelli

Paperback 36 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-L-Thayer

The Quotable Greeks

Paperback 230 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby

The Quotabe Oscar Wilde

Paperback 24 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons-words/

The Quotable Helen Keller

Paperback 66 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Helen-Keller-Richard-Willoughby

The Art of War: Sun Tzu

Paperback 60 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese-Quotables-ebook

The Quotable Shakespeare

Paperback 54 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Shakespeare-Richard-W-Willoughby

The Quotable Gorucho Marx

Paperback 46 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Groucho-Marx-Devon-Alexander