Love is kind of like when you see
a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. It’s just a
little while, and then it burns away… Love is a fog that burns with the first
daylight of reality. Charles Bukowski
I will be speaking and signing books at St. Johns on October 3rd (see) This is all for a good cause and I'd love to meet you so come on and support the boys at St. John's.
I will be signing books at the Deep River Ct. Library on October 3 fro 2:00 to 4:00 so please drop by and see us.
Excerpt from my book "No Time to Say Goodbye:
Memoirs of a Life in Foster Care.
Chapter Thirty Four
Success is stumbling from failure to failure
with no loss of enthusiasm. -Winston
Churchill
In September, I moved to New Haven. I was one of the fifty
percent of foster children who leave the system without a high school diploma,
and one of the fifteen percent who enrolled in college. Jack and I and some
other guys from Waterbury leased an apartment in downtown New Haven.
In a lot of ways, I don’t mind that I had so
little early formal education. Looking back, all that early schooling might
have done is prevent me from being as well-educated as I eventually became. My
mind had always belonged to me, and not a lot of people can say that. You learn
to look for similar people, the permanently curious. I have always found people
on that never-ending quest to be far more interesting than those whom society
has decided are educated.
My goal was to make self-education, the
exercise of always taking in new information, the process of living a full
life. The knowledge I picked up along the way would also prepare me for future
living, but if it didn’t, that was all right too. A lot of times looking for the
answer teaches you more than learning the answer. As part of that all-inclusive
outlook, I never let mistakes I’ve made embarrass me permanently, because
nothing teaches better than learning and understand how a mistake came to be
made. Mistakes are not only unavoidable; they are a handy learning tool.
I could control learning and take as much of
it as I wanted. Self-education, aside from being tuition-free, is very
flexible. There are no fixed hours. I controlled my destiny. I could not
control the fact that no one loved me, that I trusted no one, that I had no
idea where to find food and shelter for another day, and had no one to accept
me for who I was, to support me in my dreams. But I could control how smart I
became. It’s not much, but when you’ve got nothing, even a tiny thing is a lot.
Learning made me grow. Besides, it was the only path I had. I couldn’t step
back into safety—that path was never there for me. Experience can be brutal,
but it is also the most effective teacher.
What I needed to know a formal education would
not give me. I needed to know how to make friends and keep them, how to find a
job, build a company, buy a house, love people, spot a con artist, and
recognize a liar.
Truthfully, the only thing classroom teaching
ever taught me was that I was inadequate. I learned I was incompetent. Hell, I
already knew that. But education is sacrosanct. It’s our national religion and
you have to be a damned fool to question its value out loud.
Where my self-education was concerned, I was
never intellectually dishonest or passive. If I
didn’t want to learn something because I believed it to be stupid or pointless,
I didn’t learn it. People don’t talk about it much, but the reason so many give
up educating themselves after school is that for twelve years, from first grade
through high school, they were forced to study things they couldn’t care less
about.
Nor was my education dependent on what others
thought I should know. I learned because I wanted to know. What others wanted
to know is their business. I learned because it was the most
important thing in my universe, because I was building a world for myself where
it would be impossible to live and not learn. Many times I learned stuff that
didn’t teach me, but it made me think, which had the same value as learning. No
matter what they say, there is no single, correct way to become educated. There
are a million ways to become educated, but you must be resolute in overcoming
the obstacles to learning.
Now almost six decades later, I can give you
the sum of what I learned through educating myself and that is this: To
continue to grow you must use what you learn to change. The purpose of learning
and the purpose of living is growth. That’s why God gave us a body that stops
growing but gifted us with minds that can learn until the last day of our
lives. No small thing, that. In the world before us, as Alvin Toffler says, the
illiterate will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot
learn, unlearn, and relearn. It’s not all that difficult. If you’re paying
attention in life, living and learning are the same.
Being self-educated gave me an enormous sense
of empowerment and motivation to know more. When I decided to educate myself,
to take joy in learning, I gave myself tremendous power. I wasn’t locked in a
room to learn or pitted against another child in some insane competition. My
education is a private matter, between myself and the world of knowledge.
My act of
independence worked for me, but by no means does it work for everyone. The reason foster kids don’t fit in the world of regular
people is that regular people grow up surrounded by and drenched in rules.
Foster kids grow up learning to survive. If a rule doesn’t help you survive,
you have no need for the rule, so you just ignore it and walk over it. That’s
why so many of us end up in prison. Regular people know how to get around a
rule because they’ve been getting around rules since infancy. They know how to
lie, use excuses, and refract reality. And that’s largely how so many of them
stay out of jail.
But in the end, I would have given my right
arm to have gone to a prom, to have the same friends year after year, to be
bored with my humdrum teenage life. To have my own telephone, to have a collection
of memorabilia from stuff I did and places I went. I would have given my right
arm to be normal.
College was scary at first, and I bounced
around, a little lost and confused. I sat through several classes I didn’t
belong in, and couldn’t find other classrooms where I did belong. But I was
excited about the future, and proud to be where I was.
The adjunct English professor-doctoral
candidate who taught American Literature 101 was a tall, thin woman, a New
Yorker, only a few years older than I, who had a penchant for tight black
clothes and the deep, psycho-political motivation behind the great American
novels.
Her first name was Tina. She was naturally
sexy, and she knew the effect that she had on the young men in the class, whose
hallway conversation consisted of speculating whether she wore no bra or a
black bra under her snug, dark pullover. The young women in the class
disapproved of her and rolled their eyes at her twists and turns across the
room.
I studied and admired these feline movements
as she went on about my old friends Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, pausing
occasionally to purse her full lips together and wave back her ink-black hair.
“Fitzgerald’s writing style is very elegant,
isn’t it? Formal, really?” I asked after class one day, making sure our eyes
locked.
“Oh, it is,” she said, returning my gaze.
“Especially when compared to his contemporary, Hemingway, who was very much the
opposite in his style.”
We fell silent for a second, staring at each
other, the moment broken when she fingered her hair. We were both smiling,
knowing exactly what we were doing.
“Lots of visual imagery and symbolism,” I
whispered.
“With whom?” she asked in a deep whisper.
“Who cares?” I said, and took her into my
arms and kissed her as she slammed the classroom door shut with her
stiletto-heeled boots.
We both lived in the old Wooster Square
neighborhood in New Haven, me in a two-bedroom apartment that overlooking the
highway, she in a massive and graceful brownstone that overlooking the park.
I met her there every morning for breakfast
and quickie sex before going to school, although sometimes we lounged in her
bed for hours, discussing literature, politics, and philosophy.
“You are wonderfully naïve and hopelessly,
absolutely, despairingly Catholic,” she said.
“I agree,” I said.
I also agreed, at her insistence, to keep our
arrangement low-key and to use “some caution,” as she said, “because my
housemates work in academia and wouldn’t see this, this thing we have, as at
all cool.” So I never met her housemates. I agreed never to drop by in the
evenings or on weekends, and she had no desire to drop by my humble home a few
blocks away.
She was a wonderfully adventurous and
inventive lover, fond of role-playing and costumes and somewhat turned on by
rough sex, which I found to be a complete turn-off. But that was between us.
Most of her experience and what she liked was far beyond my small-town grasp of
the wider world. The only thing we had in common was fervid sex and love of
literature. Otherwise we were different on every level, starting with the fact
that she was considerably taller than I, and continuing to the fact that she
was very, very rich.
She came from an old New York Knickerbocker
family made fabulously wealthy through their real estate holdings in the city,
and I was fascinated by it all. She lived most of her early childhood in
Europe, where her mother’s mother was a viscountess. After several years at the
four-hundred-and-something-year-old Charterhouse School, she moved back to the
States to live with her father after he married a world-famous financier. He
was a partner in a New York investment-banking firm. Her father packed her off
to the Taft School and then to Yale.
One morning when we were in bed, looking over
her childhood photographs, I asked her how rich she was, and she shrugged. “I
don’t know. No one ever told me.”
“How could you not know?” I asked.
“These people,” she said, referring to her
tribe of the super-elites as if she were not a part of them, “they don’t
discuss this sort of thing. There is an office in Manhattan that handles all
that, you know, money, and all that sort of business.” I noticed that she spat
out the word “money” like a bullet. “They don’t tell me much.”
Then she glanced around the empty room as if
to make sure no one was listening and said, in a hushed tone, “I know how much
the furnishings in this house are worth.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Quarter of a million,” she said, and threw
back her head and laughed. “I saw it on the lease.”
“The lease?” I asked. “You lease this place?”
“My trust fund leases it from my father’s
company,” she said.
I asked the obvious question: “What could possibly
be worth a quarter of a million?”
“Well, that chair,” she said, pointing to an
otherwise modest-looking desk chair in the middle of the room that was covered
in clothes. “It’s a Le Corbusier.”
“I knew that,” I said. And looking around the
room, I noticed how terribly messy she was. Clothes were tossed on the floor on
piles.
“Then you are familiar with Monsieur Jeanneret?” she said, using the real
name of the architect and designer.
“Familiar? Of course, but we
don’t talk anymore,” I said. “We had a falling out.”
“Over what?”
“Fabrics,” I said.
Besides being almost insatiable sexually, she
had a wealth of knowledge about a world I didn’t know, a world of good wine,
good food, quality, and unapologetic refinement and standards.
By the middle of October my money was gone.
Tina and my roommates could count on their parents to pay for most of their
expenses, and student loans picked up the rest, but my student-loan money had
all gone to pay tuition.
Jack was gone by then. He had lasted less
than a month at Southern Connecticut State College.
“I just can’t go to school anymore,” he told
me one day. “I’m leaving.”
“So what will you do?” I asked.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,”
he said, and then leaned into me and said, “Army,” and then sat back in his
chair.
“You want to start an army?” I asked.
“No,” he said, leaning forward again. “Me and
you, we join the Army, see the world.”
“You join the Navy to see the world, Jack,” I
said.
He waved it off. “I can’t swim. So? What do
you think? We’ll join together.”
“Naw,” I said. “I can’t. Jack, I want to do
something with my life. I’ll never join the Army.”
I would live to eat those words.
At first, I took the bus to the University,
and when the money ran out, I walked the five miles across town in the dead of
winter. Finally, I just stopped going. I had to work again, and took any job I
could find that fit my class schedule. I rented myself out to the Yale
Psychology Department for experiments, washed dishes and bused tables in
restaurants, and drove limo, delivering celebrities to the local theater
circuit.
When November came around and the school
closed for Thanksgiving, I pretended for
my roommates’ benefit that I was headed back home to Waterbury for a turkey
dinner, but there was no home to go to. My home was where I lived.
Everything in our lives depends on the limits
we accept for ourselves. When you accept a larger life, you accept larger
regrets, and the troubles that come along with them. And that was what I had to
do now. I had taken on an enormous challenge by enrolling in college, but by
the beginning of December, I had to admit defeat. I had fallen drastically
behind in my schoolwork. Yes, I had to work, but I was also out of my league. I
simply wasn’t ready for college, and as a result I wasn’t able to keep up and
lacked the basic skills to navigate academia. Had I stayed another semester, I
would have flunked out, anyway. I would not be one of the two percent of foster
kids who graduate from college.
A few days before the semester ended, I
walked over to Tina’s brownstone. I had a plan. I could pay rent if she let me
move in, regroup, and then restart college again in a semester or two. Her
place was enormous, after all. It was possible for both of us to live there and
rarely see each other. After all, we had slowly graduated from mornings-only
sessions to my spending the night.
I saw a remarkably handsome, well-dressed man
in his early thirties, carrying suitcases down Tina’s front stairs. He handed
the bags to a chauffeur, who loaded them into the trunk of a black sedan with
New York plates.
He watched me approach the house and I smiled
at him, nodded, and walked up the stairs.
“May I help you?” he asked. The driver turned
and watched us.
“I’m going to see Tina,” I said, and
continued up the stairs.
“We’re a bit rushed for time right now,” he
said, walking toward me. He seemed unnecessarily hostile. “Perhaps I can help
you.”
“I’m going to see Tina,” I said again, and
continued up the stairs.
“And what is your business with my wife?” he
snapped.
I stopped dead in my tracks, stared into the
hallway of the house through the open front door, and tried to process the words
I had just heard.
“Who are you?” he asked, taking another step
toward me.
I looked off into the cold fog that had
settled in the park across the street.
“I’m—I’m—” I felt like a fool and wanted to
say that, but I didn’t. “Man, I’m just nobody at all.”
“Tina,” I heard
him say, “Who is this person?”
I didn’t turn to look at her.
“I don’t know who he is,” she said smartly.
I had been shot through the heart with an
icicle. I could feel my face turn crimson. I looked down the slate steps past her
husband and into the eyes of the driver, who, embarrassed for me, turned his
head.
With nowhere else to go, I returned to
Waterbury to figure out what to do with my life and I returned a lot less
little cocky and self-assured. It seemed as if my life of desperation would
never end and the new life of my dreams would never begin.
I went back to the mills and unloaded boxes
on the shipping docks and rented a small apartment in a run-down neighborhood.
For the first few weeks, I lived like a man in a trance. It was part of my
illness. Instead of dealing with my stress through violence, as I had in the
past, I opted for the secondary response in the fight-or-flight syndrome: I
fled. I withdrew. I became apathetic and gave up trying to thrive. Detaching
wasn’t difficult because I was attached to so little. I daydreamed excessively
of a better life, a new world, a different place where and I belonged to
something and someone, a place and time where I wasn’t insignificant, a place
where I made a difference.
Waterbury is a bar town, a drinking man’s
town, where just about every neighborhood has a saloon. I drank my weekends
away with my friends, each of them as lost and confused as I.
We found one tavern, The Shamrock Café, a
classic Waterbury dive, where the bartender, an enormous red-faced man, was an
alcoholic who usually passed out about closing time. When he did, we closed the
curtains on the windows, locked the door, dragged the bartender to a bench in
the back room and let him sleep it off, and served ourselves.
We took great pride in the fact that we never
shortchanged the saloon. At the end of every drinking session, about five a.m.,
we passed the hat and collected more than enough money to pay for what we had
drunk, ensuring that the bartender’s register always came out in the black,
usually with a hefty profit. Then we watered down the bottles behind the bar.
The last thing we wanted was for him to be fired.
One night, after the bartender had passed
out, we got too loud for too long and at about four a.m. two squad cars pulled
up outside the saloon. A very young cop banged on the glass with his
nightstick. I unlocked the door, but kept it closed by pressing my body against
it, along with several other guys.
“Can I help you, officer?” I asked.
“Open the door, wise guy!”
“I’m sorry,” I said sympathetically. “We’re
closed.”
“Open the door or I’ll open your head,” he
said, and pushed against the door.
Had I not been young, had I not been drunk
and had I not been I, I would have let the remark pass. But I was young and
drunk and me, so I punched him in the forehead and slammed the door shut. But I
hadn’t locked it, and within seconds, four cops were inside the bar and
swinging their clubs at everything—furniture, people, each other. The cop I had
punched pointed at me and yelled, “There he is! That one!” I ran for the back
door, opened it, and let in six more cops. I was taken to the jail with four or
five other kids and locked away for the night.
The next morning the prosecutor told the
judge that the cop I had smacked claimed that he was “grievously injured” and
was suffering from head and neck trauma. He was on paid sick leave for two
months from a half-hearted punch that barely grazed him.
The judge said, “What do you have to say for
yourself?”
“Shouldn’t I have a lawyer?” I asked.
“Don’t get smart,” the prosecutor snapped.
“I’m not,” I said. “But I need a lawyer.”
“You struck a police officer!” he yelled.
“Which is why I need a lawyer,” I said.
“The officer is badly injured.”
“He’s a scam artist,” I said. “There‘s nothing
wrong with him.” I turned to the judge and said, “Feel free to jump in here at
any point.”
The judge called off the prosecutor and
turned his attention to me. “Let’s cut through this,” he said. “I will schedule
a hearing and give you the time and opportunity to retain counsel, but hear me
well, young man. You are being charged with a felony assault on an officer of
the law. Now you can fight it or, you can consider another option. Walk over to
the federal building and talk to one of the military recruiters. If you enter
military service within one month from this date, charges will be dropped.
Otherwise, I foresee a long and expensive court case before you in which you
more than probably will be convicted and jailed. “
I went to see the Air Force recruiter first.
My brother Paulie was in the Air Force. Judging from his letters, he seemed to
like it, and he looked great in the photos he sent, dressed in a sharp blue
uniform. But the Air Force wasn’t interested in me, because I failed on the
mechanical and technical ability tests.
So I went to see the Army recruiter. I took
the aptitude test, and I scored very high on clerical skills. The recruiter
seemed genuinely impressed and happy to have me. He was old for a recruiter: in
his early forties I figured. He looked over my records and said, “Yeah, I got
sent to the recruiter by a judge myself.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Got drunk,” he said in a slow drawl that we
weren’t used to hearing in northwestern Connecticut. “And liberated myself a
squad car.”
We both cracked up laughing.
“I don’t why they got all the way they did
about it,” he said. “I was gonna give it back.”
We relaxed, and he asked about my background.
He seemed genuinely moved by my story of my life in foster care.
“I got no kin myself, partner,” he said
“Army’s my family now. Best dang thing that ever happened to me. I seen the
world two, three times already. I got a steady paycheck and people respect what
I do.”
“Can I learn to cook in the army?”
He leaned forward and whispered, “In the
military the colored more or less got the corner on the kitchen work. You want
to land yourself something with a future, records clerk, maybe get sent down to
D.C,. get yourself assigned to the Pentagon or a post over in Europe, you know,
see the world. The other option is to freeze your ass off on the DMZ over in
Korea, and you don’t want that.”
Suddenly, I didn’t look at a four-year term
in the military as merely an alternative to a jail sentence. I saw myself
bouncing around European hotspots, incredibly handsome in a crisp uniform, with
money in my pocket.
The next day I was driven down to New York
City to take the physical. It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen.
Several hundred young men, maybe even a thousand, in their skivvies, walking
around an enormous room, all of us lost, dazed, and confused.
Some of these guys had dodged the draft and
were there under the watchful eyes of dozens of federal marshals lined up
against one of the walls. After eight hours of being poked, prodded, stuck, and
poked again, I was given a large red envelope. I had been rejected. I had the
respiratory problems of an old man, high blood pressure, partial loss of
hearing, very bad teeth, very flat, very wide feet and I tested positive for
tuberculosis.
“Frankly,” the doctor said, “I don’t know how
the hell you’re even standing up,” and that was when the sergeant told me that
if they bottled everything that was wrong with me “we could take over the world
without a shot.”
At the courthouse the next day I tried to
give the red envelope to the judge, but by then I was old news. No cops, no
angry prosecutor. Nobody cared anymore. A clerk told me to go home and to keep
“your stupid ass out of trouble.”
A few weeks later the police stopped my car
without cause, frisked me, and searched the car. One of the cops recognized me
and decided to roust me. They found an ounce of grass in the glove compartment
and took that for themselves, but when they found a .22-caliber rifle in the
trunk—I had taken up target shooting—they arrested me for possession of a
deadly weapon. It was an illegal search and an illegal arrest and the charges
were eventually dropped, but it was a proverbial warning shot. The next time
they stopped me—and no doubt there would be a next time—if I moved too fast at
the wrong moment, one would have an excuse to gun me down or break my head
open, not an unusual occurrence with the Waterbury Police Department.
It was time to go. The war in Vietnam, our
seemingly endless national nightmare, was drawing to an excruciating close and
the Connecticut industrial base, which produced everything from bullets to jet
engines to submarines, was feeling the brunt of it. The smaller shops were
closing or moving overseas, and before the end of the decade massive foundries
followed suit. That wasn’t good for me and tens of thousands of other unskilled
laborers. I had a job—not a good job, but it was a job—and with every passing
day there were fewer and fewer jobs to be had.
I had decided that I wanted to earn my living
as a writer and the only place in Waterbury where they paid you for writing was
at the local newspaper. My opportunity came when the paper had an opening for a
night janitor. Opportunities are easy to miss, because they don’t always show
up in their best clothes. Sometimes opportunities look like beggars in rags.
After an eight-hour shift in the shop tossing thirty-pound crates I hustled
down to the newspaper building and cleaned toilets, with a vague plan that it
would somehow lead to a reporter’s position.
On weekends I roamed the bars, an easy task
in a hard-drinking town, ending each Saturday night drunk and in bed with some
girl whose name I couldn’t remember and who couldn’t remember mine either, and
neither one of us cared. I saw less and less of my friends, because they were
quickly veering away from whiskey and the occasional joint to cocaine, acid,
and eventually heroin that would, over time, kill more than one of them.
One Friday afternoon at the close of the
working day the idiot bosses in their fucking ties and suit coats came down and
handed out pink slips to every other person on the floor. I got one. They were
firing us. Then they turned and, without a word, went back to their offices.
Corporate pricks.
I got a job at the hospital as a guard in the
emergency room, which, in a rough town like Waterbury, translated into being a
bouncer. It was one of the roughest and most dangerous jobs I ever had. I still
worked as a part-time night janitor at the newspaper but that wasn’t going
anywhere. With every passing day it was more and more obvious that my ship
wasn’t going to come in, so I would have to swim out to the goddamned thing.
But swim to where? Where was my ship? Which way was it?
The answer came with a phone call from my
sister Bridget. She and her husband and kids had moved to Washington, D.C. My
brother Denny was stationed there, too, at the Army’s Fort Myers in Arlington,
Virginia. Bridget said that life there was good, that there was plenty of work
and lots of opportunity. It was a growing, bustling place, a place for a new
beginning.
I went up to the top of Pine Hill to think it
over. I sat there alone, looking down on the city. I noticed that around me,
Holy Land USA, the miniature Jerusalem dotted by a fifty-foot glow-in-the-dark
cross, was rubble now, and the view from that sacred place no longer beautiful.
It is hard to leave a place, especially if
it’s the only place you know, and its worse when you have absolutely no idea
what’s beyond your horizon of knowledge. It was a paradox—what a wonderful
word. Leaving made me wish that I could stay, and leaving reminded me of the
many reasons why I had to go.
There is a sense of danger in leaving what
you know, even if what you know isn’t much. These mill towns with their narrow
lanes and often narrow minds were all I really knew and I feared that if I left
it behind, I would lose it and not find anything to replace it. The other
reason I didn’t want to go was because I wanted to be the kind of person who
stays, who builds a stable and predictable life. But I wasn’t one of the
people, nor would I ever be.
I had a vision for my life. It wasn’t clear,
but it was beautiful and involved leaving my history and my poverty behind me.
I wasn’t happy about who I was or where I was, but I didn’t worry about it. It
didn’t define me. We’re always in the making. God always has us on his anvil,
melting, bending and shaping us for another purpose.
It was time to change, to find a new purpose.
I was tired of fighting the windstorm I was
tossed into, and instead I would let go and ride with the winds of change. How bad could it be, compared to the life I
knew? I was living life as if it were a
rehearsal for the real thing. Another
beginning might be rough at first, but any place worth getting to is going to
have some problems. I wanted the good
life, the life well lived, and you can’t buy that or marry into it. It’s there
to be found, and it can be taken by those who want it and have the resolve to
make it happen for themselves.
It was empowering to choose to leave,
especially when I came from a lifetime of being left, because leaving and being
left are different. But they were the only two things I really knew all about
and understood. Leaving and being left are a large part of the disordered world
of the foster kid. It’s the way it is, and you have to pick up the pieces on
your own. And for foster kids, when you stop picking up the pieces is when you
start to die.
I had nothing to lose because I had nothing.
The people I could have cared about were all scattered to the winds. No one
there knew if or cared if I was dead or alive, and that didn’t seem like it
would change anytime soon. I was realistic about being poor. I was quickly
approaching the age when I would start looking for a wife. People marry young
in the Valley. There wasn’t much I could offer a girl.
In a way, I was running away, but that was
all right, since running away is easier than trying to change things that can’t
be changed. I had a sense, the sort of feeling a young person has, that if I
stayed in Waterbury, something inside me would die. Whatever it was would leave
and never come back. I don’t know what it was, except that I knew the light in
my eyes was slowly dimming and I could not afford to lose any more of me than I
already had. If I stayed, I would become lost, and no one would come to look
for me.
I wanted a clean slate, a blank page I would
write on and reinvent myself and foster care, and poverty would have no role.
“Look not mournfully into the past,” my old
friend Longfellow had written. “It comes not back again. Wisely improve the
present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future, without fear.”
So I left. Without fear.
I
refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless
midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood
can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional
love will have the final word.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Sculpture this and Sculpture
that
Mercury. 1650-54.Artus Quellinus. Flemish 1609-1668. marble. Royal Palace. Amsterdam.
I
love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and
grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they
whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue
their principles unto death.
Life's
but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the
stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound
and fury, signifying nothing.
Visit
our Shakespeare Blog at the address below
http://shakespeareinamericanenglish.blogspot.com/
HERE'S MY NEW BOOK, ITS AVAILABLE IN E BOOK AND PRINT ON AMAZON.COM AND AT ALL BARNES AND NOBLE STORES
This is a book of short stories taken
from the things I saw and heard in my childhood in the factory town of Ansonia
in southwestern Connecticut. Most of these stories, or as true as I recall them
because I witnessed these events many years ago through the eyes of child and are
retold to you now with the pen and hindsight of an older man. The only
exception is the story Beat Time
which is based on the disappearance of Beat poet Lew Welch. Decades before I
knew who Welch was, I was told that he had made his from California to New
Haven, Connecticut, where was an alcoholic living in a mission. The notion
fascinated me and I filed it away but never forgot it.
The collected stories are loosely
modeled around Joyce’s novel, Dubliners (I
also borrowed from the novels character and place names. Ivy Day, my character in “Local Orphan is Hero” is also the name
of chapter in Dubliners, etc.) and like Joyce I wanted to write about my
people, the people I knew as a child, the working class in small town America
and I wanted to give a complete view of them as well. As a result the stories
are about the divorced, Gays, black people, the working poor, the middle class,
the lost and the found, the contented and the discontented.
Conversely
many of the stories in this book are about starting life over again as a result
of suicide (The Hanging Party, Small
Town Tragedy, Beat
Time) or from a near death experience
(Anna Bell Lee and the Charge of the
Light Brigade, A Brief Summer)
and
natural occurring death. (The
Best Laid Plans, The Winter Years, Balanced and Serene)
With
the exception of Jesus Loves Shaqunda, in each story there is a rebirth
from the death. (Shaqunda is
reported as having died of pneumonia in The Winter Years)
Sal,
the desperate and depressed divorcee in Things
Change, changes his life in Lunch
Hour when asks the waitress for a date and she accepts. (Which we learn in Closing Time, the last story in the
book) In The Arranged Time,
Thisby is given the option of change and whether she takes it or, we don’t
know. The death of Greta’s husband in A Matter of Time has led her to the
diner and into the waiting arms of the outgoing and loveable Gabe.
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:
MYWRITERSSITE.BLOGSPOT.COM
JWTUOHY95@GMAIL.COM
HERE'S SOME PHOTOS FROM TOUHY'S SAGA
"Teets" Battaglia, center head bowed, was one of Touhy's killers.
Willie Sharkey, said to have the IQ of a child, was Touhy top killer. he later hung himself in his jail cell..
Excerpt from my book "When Capone’s
Mob Murdered Touhy.”
Prelude to a
Hoax
When Roger Touhy learned that the mob had murdered
Anton Cermak, he rented a plane and flew to Indianapolis to meet with the leaders
of the Teamsters International Council. Roger wanted to plan their next steps
in the war against the syndicate. But the meeting didn't go well. The
International was pulling out of the fight. It was, in effect, surrendering to
the syndicate. The union's leadership felt that although Touhy had won battles,
without Cermak's clout behind him he would never win the war.
Without the Teamsters' financial support,
Roger knew that the war was lost. The best thing to do was to hold off the
syndicate for as long as he could, make as much money as he could, fold up his
operation and leave Chicago forever, perhaps living out his dream to retire to
the wilds of Colorado.
He had other reasons to worry, too. United
States Postal Inspectors were hot on his trail for the string of mail robberies
that he and his gang had pulled off the year before. Although the robberies had
gone well, the rumor in the underworld was that Gus Winkler, one of the crooks
who helped Touhy cash in the stolen mail loot, was informing on him.
Roger decided to plug the leak on October
9,1934.
'Smiling" Gus Winkler's motto was
"Take care of Winkler first." He had spent most of his criminal
career doing just that. This was why the Touhys and everyone else connected
with the mail robberies wrongly suspected him of being the government's
informant in the mail robberies.
Touhy's own spies had reported that Winkler
was seen in the FBI's office in the Bankers Building and on the day before they
put seventy-two bullets into him he was seen talking with special agent Melvin
Purvis on a side street just inside the Loop.
Before Winkler was tied to the case it was
widely assumed that Touhy was at odds with him.
Gus Winkler had started out as a member of
Eagan's Rats and by age twenty was a safe blower by trade. He did time from
1920-1926, sentenced for assault and wounding with a deadly weapon. He left St.
Louis, moved to Chicago and struck up a lifelong friendship with Fred
"Killer" Burke, which was how he first came to the attention of
Chicago detectives in 1929.
In 1932 Winkler turned over bonds from a
Lincoln, Nebraska robbery in which he had played a part to the Secret Six, a
group of Chicago business executives who had banded together to take action
against the Chicago underworld. When the cops started to close in, Winkler cut
a deal and informed on the others so long as he could walk, reasoning that he
had always made it clear that he would squeal in order to save himself.
Winkler took Newberry's place in the
northside gangs as a chief financial backer and even moved into Newberry's old
apartment at 3300 Lake Shore Drive. In an effort to appear more refined in the
later days of his life, he started to wear glasses to cover up his crooked
glass eye. He even married a tall, beautiful blonde.
The cops Winkler consorted with were amused
by him. It was easy to be amused by Gus Winkler; he was good-natured, smart and
a smooth talker. On one of his frequent stops by the detective bureau Winkler
told them that he often envisioned his own death by bullets. Most of the cops
and criminals in Chicago agreed that Winkler was probably one of the shooters
in the St. Valentine's Day massacre, after which he went into seclusion in
Cicero where he was said to be in semi-retirement, plotting crimes.
He was widely considered to be too cowardly
to execute the crimes he planned. "No man in Chicago history ever played
both ends against the middle so adroitly," it was said of him. When
Newberry was killed he moved into the Northside gang's leadership and offered
shelter and equipment to gangsters on the run.
Winkler was an egomaniac who talked
incessantly. Once during a poker game he bragged to his lawyer, Joe Marovitz
and the nightclub star, Joe E. Lewis, 'You know, I'm the toughest guy in Chicago...maybe
the toughest guy in the whole country. " Without looking up from his cards
Marovitz threw a right cross on to Winkler's chin and knocked him out of his
chair.
"Why'd you do that?" Winkler
asked.
"To show you that you're not the
toughest guy in this room."
Winkler and his wife, "Mother" (as
he called her)
had
one of the strangest relationships in gangdom. She reviewed each and every
illegal endeavor her husband became involved with, first chastising him about
the heavenly and earthly illegalities of his work and then for possible slip
ups in the plan 'Sure, Mother, " Winkler would say "You're right, it
is an un-Christian act. Now that you've got that load off your chest tell us if
the plan is alright."
Gifted with an eagle's eye for detail, she
would review a plan over and over again, looking for potential problems before
giving her approval. "She's the best I've ever seen," Winkler
boasted.
According to Joe E. Lewis, Winkler had one
eye shot out during a mail robbery and was convinced that the Touhys were out
to kill him because he had "not apportioned the loot equitably. " The
day before he was killed, Winkler went to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota with his
lawyer, Joe Marovitz and Joe E. Lewis, to let the doctors have a look at Lewis'
recently slashed throat. When they returned to Chicago Winkler refused to leave
his lawyer's side. "I can't go back to my hotel and I'm afraid to register
at a new one. Got any idea where I can go?" he asked Lewis, who gave him
the extra key to his suite at the Seneca Hotel.
The next day he was gunned down. Winkler's
killer had waited an hour and a half for him outside the beer plant owned by
Cook County Commissioner Charles Weber at 1414 Roscoe Street. As Winkler
strolled toward Weber's office the killers leaped out of a green truck and
fired low; in all seventy-two pellets and bullets went into him in a matter of
seconds. He was literally riddled with pellets from his neck to his ankles with
most of them going into his back, yet not one bullet hit his head or face.
"Turn me over, I can't breathe," he gasped.
He asked for a priest before he died and
doctors found a half dozen religious relics pinned to his underwear. He was a
big donor to Father Coughlin who sent him the medals. Winkler died begging for
God's mercy on his soul, saying the Lord's Prayer to Father James Fitzgerald.
When told that Winkler was dead, a postal
inspector threw up his arms and said "Well, this balls up an already
balled up case."
The Touhys were suspected of ordering the
killing. Hood-for-hire Dominic Marzano was held for questioning and Matt Kolb's
old boss, Martin Guifolye, who was now mostly a gambler, was also being sought
for questioning. Guifolye called the police and said he was available for
questioning at any time. The cops also hauled in Babe Baron, a "0" of
Jacob Arvey who was a close friend of international con man John Factor. Baron,
a future kingpin for the mob in Las Vegas, was known to have killed Jimmy Walsh
in front of Henrici's Restaurant on December 3, 1929. When cops picked him up
for questioning in Winkler's death Baron was carrying a pistol in his coat
pocket. He was released after several hours. Baron would go on to run one of
the city's more successful car dealerships in the 1950s, due in part to a
lucrative contract he had to repair city police cars.
Another suspect was Joe Bergi, Winkler's
partner in a garage where he fitted cars with bulletproof siding and windows,
police lights and sirens that cop cars used in 1933. Baron later took over all
the garage businesses.
In September of that year, Bergi was
arrested for harboring "Machine Gun" Kelly. Winkler was suspected of
having told the police that Bergi was hiding Kelly and provided information
about Kelly's role in the Urshel kidnapping case.
As Winkler was a snitch, there were too many
suspects for his murder. To this day the crime remains unsolved.
Even with Winkler dead, postal inspectors
were able to use the information he provided and move in on the mail robbers. A
secret indictment was filed naming Roger Touhy, Gus Schafer and others in his
gang as the persons behind the robberies.
Secret or not, Roger got word of the pending
indictment. On his lawyer's advice, he decided it was best to leave town until
they could work out a way to avoid indictment, either in the courtroom or
through bribes.
On July 17, 1933, Roger and four of his men
left for a brief working vacation to the north woods of Wisconsin to
Rohrbacher's Resort in the lake region. Although avoiding a subpoena was the
primary purpose of the trip, the other purpose was to find George Maitland.
Maitland was the sole witness in the killing of a syndicate enforcer named John
Renelli, whom the Touhys had gunned down several months before. Roger's
informants had discovered that Maitland was hiding out in the Lake region, at
Renelli's brother's place, The Chicago Tavern. However, when Maitland
discovered that Touhy was in the area he quickly fled back to the relative
safety of Chicago.
Traveling with Touhy, probably in the
capacity of a bodyguard, was thirty-six year old Gustave Schactel, aka Gus
Schafer. Jim Ryan, Touhy's top enforcer, had hired Schafer as a guard for his
beer collectors in May of 1933 and before long Schafer was planning additional
mail robberies for the gang. Schafer's brother, Joseph Schactel, was a Catholic
priest and a Ph.D. candidate at the Catholic University of America in
Washington D.C. For years, Gus had managed to keep his criminal life away from
his brother.
And what a criminal life it was. Schafer was
arrested in San Francisco on December 15, 1913 for burglary, and was sentenced
to five years' probation. He was arrested again that same year and sent to
prison for attempted larceny and released in 1916. He was arrested again on
March 9, 1922, in Oakland for highway robbery and sent to Stillwater Prison in
Minnesota on June 16, 1922. After his release he was arrested again on March
16, 1931, in Los Angeles on suspicion of robbery, grand theft auto and was sent
to prison in Pontiac, Michigan.
Schafer did more time in the Stillwater,
Minnesota prison for a jewelry store robbery. After that, Schafer had been
working in San Francisco on gambling boats as "atmosphere" as he put
it, from March of 1931 until March 1932 when he and his wife packed their Chevy
and relocated to Chicago.
The marriage had problems since its
inception in Oakland, California in 1920. When Gus went to prison in Minnesota
his wife filed for divorce, but when he was released she dropped the
proceedings. Schafer said he went to Chicago to make money on the World's Fair
liquor business and felt that "if I didn't make some money my marriage
would be on the rocks."
They settled in Oak Park and then Des Plains
where they were put up by a German family who had known Schafer's parents in
Europe. The family gave them a small apartment. Then in May of 1933 he was
brought into the Touhy organization as a hired gun. Roger and Tommy Touhy liked
Schafer's style. When they learned that he had been the prison movie
projectionist they promoted him to a minor official status in Tommy Maloy's
movie projectionists' union so he could explain his income.
The red-headed Schafer was a serious man by
nature, seldom smiling. As Touhy said "a big guffaw or belly laugh for him
was a slight twitch at the corners of the lips." But Schafer did have a
dry, hangman's wit that Tommy and Roger enjoyed.
After Schafer moved to Illinois he brought
in Patrick McDonald, a San Francisco gambler whom he had done time with. The
two of them, with Touhy's permission, opened a handbook in the Montrose
Apartments in Chicago.
The second bodyguard traveling with them was
Willie Sharkey, a career criminal and enforcer who had known the Touhys from
their days in the Valley. Sharky worked directly for "Chicken"
McFadden. Nearly fifty-nine years old, Sharkey was short and pot-bellied like
Roger, standing in at only five-feet, four-inches; he sported a four-inch
horizontal scar on his left cheek and a two-inch scar on the corner of his
right eyelid. Balding, he wore glasses and had a tattoo of a girl's head on his
right elbow which winked when he moved his arm in a certain way.
The Touhys liked Sharkey's easygoing manner
and good nature when he was sober, but otherwise they considered him dangerous,
slightly insane and not very bright.
"Willie had two talents," Touhy
said, "getting into jail and buying clothes that didn't fit him. He drank
too much and he wasn't too smart, but he had a good heart and I liked
him."
Sharkey's third talent was murder. At the
time of the trip into the northwoods, Sharkey was wanted for questioning in
Chicago in relation to at least five gangland slayings. In 1929 Willie and his
brother John Sharkey, who played a role in several of the
Touhys'
mail robberies, had opened a saloon just inside the Chicago line with an
unknown partner. In 1931, the Capones kicked in the front door to the saloon
and gunned down Sharkey's partner. "And since that time," John
Sharkey told FBI agent Melvin Purvis, "I moved out of Chicago because of
my relationship to my brother, and persons in the syndicate might endeavor to
cause me trouble, such as killing me."
Willie Sharkey was a shy man who never
married. However, he was proud of his brother and his family and supplemented
their income with his own. Willie lived with them in Park Ridge for a while,
giving his brother a Lincoln and a Ford.
The fourth person on the trip was Edward
Thomas Chicken McFadden, a labor racketeer from the old days. McFadden worked
as a food and poultry inspector for the Hoover administration during the first
World War. For seventeen years he had been employed as a poultry inspector and
contract loader on Water Street in Chicago.
According to Willie Sharkey, McFadden was a
friend and business associate of Big Tim Lynch before Lynch was killed. In
fact, the 1930 Lincoln Sedan that McFadden drove and registered in his own name
was actually owned by Lynch. They were both members of the same union, the
Chauffeurs and Teamsters Union of Maywood, Illinois. Sharkey said McFadden
stayed on in the union as the business manager but was forced to withdraw in
the last part of 1931 after the syndicate made several attempts to kill him.
In his labor organizing days, McFadden was
called "Father Tom" since he was prone to try and reason with his
quarry in soft, soothing tones before resorting to violence with them.
McFadden had been a friend of Roger's father
back when he walked a beat in the Lawndale district. His record dated back to
1901 when he was locked up for intent to rob. Other arrests included police
impersonation and labor slugging. In 1931, McFadden was sixty-seven years of
age and in ill health. His hearing was gone and he had just recently been
released from the Cook County Hospital for a gall bladder problem. Still,
McFadden had deep contacts in the labor union field and was the person most
responsible for bringing the Teamster unions over to Touhy's side in 1931.
The fifth and sixth persons on the trip were
more than probably August J. LaMarr (also known as Jimmy Lamar) and Leroy
Marshalk, one of Roger Touhy's best gunmen.
The group took Touhy's car-the same car used
by his hoods when they broke up The Dells casino. Touhy had purchased the car
on July 13, 1931 at Marquett Motors at 44 North Larmie Avenue with an initial
deposit of $695 and returned later in the day with $2,400 and paid the car off.
It was wrongly reported, by Melvin Purvis of the FBI, that the car had a
special gas tank to make a ten hour trip. It didn't. But it did have an iron,
almost bullet proof sheet that covered its engine block.
Rohrbacher later identified all the Touhys
as having stayed at his place in a rented cottage although he was adamant that
there were five persons in the party and not four. They had registered under
the names of F. McFarland, Chicago; J. Clark, Chicago; Sam Jones, Chicago; E.
Davis, Chicago; and Roger as Robert Morgan, Chicago. Robert Morgan was Touhy's
father-in-law. Before settling on Rohrbacher's, the group went to the Bayview Cottages,
stood on the edge of the lake and then
drove
away, telling the owner, A1 Shape, that they would be back the next day.
They stayed at Rohrbachers Resort for five
days and ate all their meals there. According to Rohrbacher, Touhy, sometimes
joined by McFadden, did most of the fishing and all of the others told him that
it was their first time at the resort area. He said that Sharkey and Schafer
were gone in the car most of the day and although they drank enormous amounts
of beer "they were agreeable to all other guests at all times" and
that they sent back the Milwaukee brand beer he sent up, taking only Hamm's
beer telling him that it was the only kind they ever drank.
Walter Kerslake, the Hamm Beer
representative for the area, reported selling "many, many cases of
beer"to a group of men at Rohrbacher's after George Rohrbacher told him
"they were the Touhy gang and had plenty of money and paid for things as
they got them."
Rohrbacher remembered Touhy catching a sev-
enteen-pound muskellunge one morning but he gave the fish to another guest, a
Doctor Reese of Chicago. An Indian guide named Frank St. Germaine later told
the FBI that Touhy went out in the boat fishing alone except on one occasion
when he was joined by Schafer. St. Germaine repeated the story frequently that
Touhy shot a muskellunge four times before bringing it into the boat and one
night at dusk Touhy threw six bottles of beer in the water and fired six shots
directly into the necks of all six bottles. Many years later another guide in
the region named Jim Ford, said that he had taken Touhy out fishing once and
watched as Touhy took a Tommy gun with him to the lake and fired it into the
water.
"Tuohy
stood up in the boat one day when they were out fishing and unloaded his Tommy
gun on the waters. That old machine gun blasted away. It was good for a laugh.
And if I remember, he did get a fish or two."
Fishermen carried pistols to shoot the
twenty- five pound muskie because once they were pulled into the boat, they
tended to flip around and with their huge, sharp teeth it was better to just
shoot them. It was legal to carry a pistol when fishing in those days. However,
pistols were outlawed after one too many drunken fishermen shot holes in the
bottom of boats or themselves.
On Sunday Touhy, McFadden, Schafer and
Sharkey walked into Harry's Place, a saloon run by Harry Bowman and asked for
directions to the Minocqua Heights Golf and Country Club.
That testimony was tainted because Bowman
had known Eddie McFadden years before. They were also identified by the
bartender, Joe Streich. However, the more reliable summer police chief of
Minocqua, Jay Jossart, recalled seeing them in the area, as did Deputy Sheriff
Titus of Midlake who spotted McFadden at the Chicago Tavern which was owned by
Tony Renelli on the southwest side of Lake Delavan. The Touhys had shot and
killed Renelli's brother at The Dells two month before.
After Roger and the others were arrested,
Renelli told the FBI "that he had heard rumors that he was to be
"bumped off' by the Touhys and he appeared to be in great fear. He made
the remark during the interview that, "You have the big shots" or
"you have the main ones" and that "the others are only barrel
pushers for the leaders."
The report went on to say "He also made
the remark that the right parties were being held but would not enlarge on the
statement and even said
that
he could not see why Touhy would go into that racket (kidnapping) as he was
making good money and also that it was a surprise to him that McFadden would
get so involved as he never appeared to be that sort."
Buck Gordon of Gordon's Place, a tavern on
the southwest side of Lake Delavan said that he knew Sharkey and that Sharkey
had been around there as well. It was Gordon who told Tony Renelli that Sharkey
had been around looking for him and had asked Gordon where Renelli was located.
Gordon had bought his beer from the Touhys for years. An FBI report read,
"He was made to admit that he bought beer from this gang for many years
and that regularly once a week, a man would come around to collect. He was
shown the photographs of these parties and picked out the photograph of George
Wilke as the party who had collected for this beer. He told the story which is
not believed by this agent, that he had bought this beer for years but never
knew just who he bought from and never questioned the collector or asked for
his name. Gordon is known around the region as a braggart."
O.E. Heissler, the manager of the Minocqua
Golf and Country Club identified all four of them as having played golf there
on two separate occasions but couldn't recall a fifth person, Marshalk, who had
been seen with them in most other places around the resort area. After golf, a
bathing-suit clad Roger Touhy came into Parker's resort, about mile and half
from Rohrbachers. He had arrived in a boat equipped with a Johnson high-powered
motor. Parker tried to strike up a conversation with Touhy and said "I
know most of the boats on the lake but I can't recall that one, who does it
belong to?" He said that Touhy looked at him and asked "What's it to
you?"
The boat could have belonged to anyone of Touhy's old friends. The area was
saturated with bootleggers and other undesirables including Rudy Kreigel, a
little known but successful rum runner and Fred Ullrick who ran Ullrick's
Resort in Webster, Wisconsin. Ullrick's was a known gangster hideout and
suspected by the FBI as being the place where millionaire William Hamm was held
during his kidnapping.
Ray Henderson, a bootlegger from Burlington,
Wisconsin kept a summer cottage on Lac du Flambeau as did "Bugs"
Moran. In fact, Moran's sister, Cassady, lived in the region full time. Sam
"Golf Bag" Hunt and Frank Nitti had a place in the north woods, as
did Ralph Capone and most of Chicago's mayors. John Dillinger was said to have
buried $200,000 in Eagle River and after Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, rumors abounded
that Hoffa was buried near a summer place that he owned with Alan Dorfman.
But most important of all, Terrible Tommy
O'Connor was said to live in the region where he had been running Touhy's
bootlegging operation from a small cabin in Elkhorn, Wisconsin since his
disappearance twelve years earlier.
With all of the serious muscle that Touhy
had gathered for this retreat, it was clear to everyone that something was
afoot. After four days in the lake region, the group left for Chicago on July
19, 1933, a Wednesday morning at about 6:30 A.M. They stopped at Harry Newman's
restaurant on Highway 12 near Lake Geneva at 11:00 A.M. and paid their checks
separately, each one using clean crisp ten- dollar bills. McFadden purchased
the gas with a ten-dollar bill and Touhy wore his alligator slicker that he
purchased in Florida in 1931 for "a whole
lotta
Jack." They stopped for gas once again at Wagner's station just outside of
Elkhorn, Wisconsin, where a second car that had been following them waved off,
turned around and drove back toward the lakes. It is assumed by many that
Terrible Tommy was the second driver.
Elkhorn police officer Harry Ward, a
slightly built rookie cop who did motorcycle duty near Highway 12-the road
Touhy was using on his way back to Chicago-had just finished his shift and was
on his way home when the town bell, an alarm system used to notify police of an
incoming call at the station, pierced the air.
Ward answered the call reluctantly. Driving
at a high speed, Touhy had knocked over a telephone pole on private property
just inside the Elkhorn town line. The owner wanted the car stopped and
restitution made for the cost of repairing the damage. The night marshal said,
"It's a big Chrysler sedan on Route 12."
Ward stopped Touhy, who was driving seventy
miles per hour, because he noticed that the car's left front fender was badly
dented. Touhy denied hitting the pole and after a brief, sharp exchange Ward
ordered Roger to drive to the police station. It was probably at that point
that all of the men in the car slid their guns out of their pockets and into
the seat folds. Roy Marshalk, the most wanted of the group, managed to slip out
of the car and disappear.
At the police station, Roger was told that
the cost of replacing the pole was estimated to be $22. Pay that amount, Roger
was told, and he could leave. Roger, who was carrying $2,500 on him, refused to
pay, arguing that he had just had placed two phone poles on his property for
only $18. An argument broke out that lasted for forty minutes.
Meanwhile, Deputy Ward conducted an illegal
search of Touhy's car. Digging his hands deep under the seat cushions he found
six pistols, three of them rigged to fire. That was all Ward needed to hold
them. Wisconsin was one of the few states to have a law forbidding citizens to
carry machine guns, which, technically, the pistol was.
The town Sheriff called Touhy's mortal
enemy, Tubbo Gilbert, the States Attorney's Chief Investigator in Cook County.
In turn, Gilbert called Melvin Purvis, the FBI's Special Agent in charge of the
Chicago office to tell him that Roger Touhy had been arrested in Elkhorn,
Wisconsin. Gilbert also said that he felt strongly that Purvis should arrest
Touhy for the kidnapping of William Hamm, the St. Paul Brewer who had been snatched
off the street several days before.
Purvis agreed, but before leaving for
Elkhorn, he held a press conference and declared that "The Touhy gang is
being held in Elkhorn by the FBI, where they have positively been identified as
being the kidnappers of William A. Hamm."
Roger Touhy had never heard of William Hamm.
Nor did he know that several days before his arrest, Hamm had been kidnapped by
Alvin Karpis and the Barker gang as he was walking home from his office in St.
Paul. Exactly why Karpis decided to kidnap Hamm will probably never be known.
Certainly Hamm's wealth was one factor, but there were whispers in St. Paul
that while the respectable Hamm's prestigious brewery was selling legal near
beer out the front doors, Hamm and the local underworld gang, the Keatings mob,
were also selling bootleg beer out the back door.
It was rumored that Hamm, in a moment of
stupid ambition or greed or both, double-crossed the Keatings. The kidnapping
and $75,000 ransom it is suspected, was their way of recouping their losses.
Another interesting aspect of the story was
that at some point, the Keatings-Hamm operation started to compete with Roger
Touhy's own bootleg operation in the Wisconsin area. Threats were made on both
sides and tensions ran high. Also interesting was that Roger knew Alvin Karpis.
In fact, Karpis had worked for both A1 Capone and Frank Nitti as a labor goon
in 1930 and 1931, terrorizing and perhaps even killing the same union men that
Touhy was being paid to protect. And now Karpis was about to frame Roger Touhy
for the Hamm kidnapping. No proof has indicated that the mob ordered Karpis to
frame Touhy for the kidnapping, but it seems apparent that they did.
A few days after Hamm was kidnapped his
mother died, leaving behind an estate valued at $4,411,647. The public was
outraged over her death and blamed the shock of her son's abduction as the
cause.
"There was a national hysteria and
rightly so against the crime of kidnapping," Touhy wrote. "Clergymen
ranted against it from their pulpits and so did editorial writers in their
columns. The noisier politicians in Washington tried to outshout each other in
being against the crime that everybody loathed...the FBI set up and trained
special crews of experts to fly to any section of the country upon a report of
a ransom kidnapping. U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings appointed a special
aide, Joseph B. Keenan, to supervise the prosecution of kidnappers. No effort
was being spared, or money either, to put an end to kidnapping. Every police
officer and prosecutor in America wanted to solve a kidnapping. Anyone of them
who put a kidnapper in the electric chair would be a hero. I, Roger Touhy, and
two co-defendants were going to have the murky distinction of being the first
men convicted."
Eventually, Hamm's ransom was paid and the
brewer was released unharmed and Roger Touhy stood accused of the crime.
The day after Roger and the others were
arrested, Tubbo Gilbert, Special Agent Melvin Purvis and Chicago Police Chief
of Detectives Shoemaker were in Elkhorn to retrieve him. Purvis talked with
Touhy first and told him that he was going to be arrested for the kidnapping of
William Hamm. "I recalled," Touhy said, "that I had a solid
alibi for June 15.1 told Purvis so....He looked at me with the tight-lipped,
gimlet-eyed way that FBI men had-and which detectives on television have
plagiarized."
It made no difference to Purvis. Before noon
that day Roger and the others were charged with kidnapping William Hamm and
were transported to the FBI's office in Chicago for further questioning. But,
back in Chicago, Purvis was worried. None of the money found on Roger or the
others could be traced to the William Hamm ransom. Furthermore Purvis knew
through informants that Alvin Karpis was the primary suspect in the kidnapping
and that Touhy and the others weren't regarded as kidnappers by the underworld
or the Chicago police, despite their reputation as gangsters.
"I saw Roger for the first time in
person," Purvis wrote, "when he was brought back to Chicago.
Handcuffed and under guard, he was delivered to my office. I sat behind my desk
and shot questions at him. Touhy wouldn't talk. I can still see him sitting in
the leather chair with that mouth full of protruding teeth. His curly hair was
neatly barbered, his body was lean and hard under his sports suit, his eyes
were dreamy and disarming. Touhy wouldn't say a word. When I asked a question
he laughed. When I demanded an answer he laughed. Finally I said to him,
"Well anyway, what's your name?" Touhy looked at me and grinned,
closed his lips and shook his head. He had gained the impression that we were
trying to make him talk so an unseen listener might identify his voice as being
that one of the kidnappers."
That evening Touhy and others were
questioned for hours. While Purvis was in charge, beating prisoners was
standard practice for the Chicago office of the FBI. His secretary once wrote,
"I sometimes saw the bruised knuckles of the agents who had used more
primitive arguments with refractory prisoners."
One so-called refractory prisoner met his
death that way. The day after Purvis' agents shot John Dillinger to death, a
small time bootlegger named James Probasco was brought to the FBI's 19th floor
office in the Bankers Building for questioning. Agents claimed Probasco leaped
out of the window for no apparent reason, falling nineteen stories into an
alley narrowly missing a passerby. Witnesses later said that the agents held
Probasco out the window by his wrists, but lost their grip, causing the outlaw
to fall to his death.
In his memos to J. Edgar Hoover in
Washington, Purvis said that on this day Touhy was "grilled" by FBI
agents from 1:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M.
Now it was Roger Touhy's turn. "Weeks
of hell followed," Touhy wrote. They were kept in isolation in tiny
darkened cells. He was allowed to sleep in twenty-minute intervals and then
awakened and beaten. The entire processes was repeated twenty minutes later.
They punched out seven of his teeth, three vertebrae in his upper spine were
fractured and he lost twenty-five pounds in four weeks.
Purvis never did secure a confession out of
Roger or the others, but he formally charged them with kidnapping William Hamm
anyway.
The following day, as if just to show how
bad Roger Touhy's luck could be, President Roosevelt went on national radio and
announced the federal government's war on kidnappers.
"The Hamm trial" Roger wrote
"had a sort of 'let's pretend we're all nuts' tone to it."
The Department of Justice was so certain of
a victory in the case that it asked for the trial to be broadcast live, which
would have made it the first ever to go over the airwaves, but the presiding
judge declined. However, the government argued successfully that Roger's wife
shouldn't be able to testify on his behalf. This was just as well, since the
past several weeks had been so hard on Clara.
Purvis, whom Clara had booted off Touhy's
estate the week before, had arranged it so that she wasn't allowed into the
courtroom until the jury was seated and then she was searched every time she
entered the court. When court was over for the day, she retreated to her hotel
room, where she clipped newspaper stories about the kidnapping for Roger's
lawyer, William Scott Stewart. Lonely and scared, Clara made the mistake of
allowing a female reporter into her hotel room to chat. Grateful for the
company, Clara spoke freely about anything and everything, including her views
on the federal government, the backwoods of Wisconsin, and the jury.
In the next morning's edition, the reporter
dramatically twisted virtually everything Clara had said, more or less making
her out to be a gun moll and co-conspirator in the case. From that moment on
Clara never spoke to another reporter for the rest of her life.
But Clara had a few minor victories as well.
When she visited her husband in jail during the trial, two FBI agents dutifully
wrote down every word the couple uttered to each other, no matter how
commonplace.
Roger recalled: Two FBI men, each with a pencil poised above
a pad of paper sat at the ends of the table. I smiled at each of them
apologetically and said that I hadn't seen my wife for a long time and did they
mind very much if I held her hand? They nodded agreeably. Clara and I clasped
hands and began telegraphing to each other. A short pressure of a finger was a
dot and a long pressure a dash. We had practiced it often when talking secretly
in front of our sons. Vocally I talked inanely about our neighbors and such, at
the same time telegraphing instructions to her. At the end of our conversation,
we coded each other the message of "30" and "73" which meant
"that's all" and "Best regards." The listening FBI men
gaped at us. They hadn't heard enough to merit putting the pencil to paper.
In court, Roger's lawyer ripped into the
government's case and within days had torn it apart. Everything that could go
wrong for the government did. The prosecution's primary witness, taxi driver
Leo Allison, first positively identified Eddie McFadden as the man who gave him
the ransom note and then said it was Roger Touhy. After a drilling by William
Scott Stewart, Allison said he couldn't be sure at all.
Another witness who had sworn he overheard
ransom demands being made over a pay phone by Touhy changed his tune. On the
stand he said "Roger Touhy bears a close resemblance to the man" he
saw and refused to go further. A third witness took the stand and said that he
had watched Roger and the others following Hamm in a car as the brewer walked
home. Touhy hired private detectives to check the witness out and within two
days they were able to prove that this witness had been at work in a printing
plant in Chicago on the day he said he saw Touhy and the others in St. Paul.
When questioned about why he lied, the witness said that he had been pressured
into it by the FBI.
William Hamm couldn't, or wouldn't, identify
Touhy and his crew. Instead he appeared extremely evasive on the witness stand.
Nor was he any help to the FBI agents who were investigating the case. In fact,
right after he was returned by his kidnappers, Hamm flew to New York and stayed
there, incommunicado, until the trail began.
Watching their case fall apart, the
government started to play hardball. FBI agents went to an Indianapolis hotel
where Roger had stayed for one night while Hamm was being abducted. They
confiscated the hotel's registration cards and destroyed them.
A key
Touhy witness named Edward J. Meany was told by one of Purvis' men "If you
go to St. Paul to testify for Touhy, you'll be sorry and maybe you won't come
back."
Vincent Connors testified that he had seen
Touhy in a night club in Des Plains on the night Hamm was kidnapped. After he
gave his testimony he was arrested by the FBI on the dubious charge of
registering in a hotel under a false name. Apparently Clara had booked Connors'
room under William Scott Stewart's firm's name, which was against the state's
moral laws but certainly not a federal offense.
When the trial was over, the United States
Deputy Attorney General George F. Sullivan, in his summary of the state's case,
mispronounced names, confused dates and lost his place, and when he accused
Touhy's lawyer, William Scott Stewart of "vituperative sarcasm and abuse
heaped upon the prosecution," Stewart smiled, waved and then took a slight
bow.
The jury found them all innocent of
kidnapping William Hamm, the first defeat for the government's war on
kidnapping since the passage of the Lindbergh law.
Right after they were declared innocent,
Willie Sharkey turned to Roger and said "Well, they went through a lot of
goddamn trouble for a $22 phone pole."Later that night, Sharkey used his
own necktie to hang himself in his cell. Sharkey had shown bizarre behavior for
weeks. One time he fell asleep during the trial. When he awoke, he stood up and
tried to walk out of the courtroom and had to be pulled back and held down by
deputies. Another time, he turned to William Scott Stewart and said in a very
loud voice, "My hair is full of electricity, I guess that's a sign,"
and then laughed uncontrollably for several minutes.
When Touhy was told about Sharkey he said
"Willie's life might not have amounted to much, but he shouldn't have been
driven to ending it."
As sympathetic as those words were, Sharkey
may have feared for his life because during the trial he had talked to the FBI,
although no one outside the Bureau is certain of exactly what he told them.
Sharkey may have been concerned that FBI agent Purvis1 told Touhy that he was
talking to them-a mean but common trick of the agency.
1. In 1960, one month after Roger Touhy
was murdered, Melvin Purvis, long since retired from the FBI, put a .45 caliber
pistol to his head and killed himself.
The couple from the Woodstock Album cover still together all these years later
As
the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he
kills passes into himself so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
300
quotes from Emerson
To
view more Emerson quotes or read a life background on Emerson please visit the
books blog spot. We update the blog bi-monthly emersonsaidit.blogspot.com
So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them. Stephen Chbosky
The first recorded photo bomb, 1853
That
is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are
universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You
belong. F. Scott Fitzgerald
DON’T WORRY-BE HAPPY
Life
is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only
creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in
whatever way they like. Lao Tzu
Should A
Christian Pursue Happiness?
Prof. Chris Kaczor says yes, as long as we understand what
happiness is
ZOE ROMANOWSKY
Dr. Christopher Kaczor, a
professor of philosophy and ethics, had always assumed that psychology was an
alternative to religion. Then he discovered “positive psychology” and all that
changed.
In fact, Kaczor was so impressed
with the ways in which Christianity and positive psychology overlapped, he
wrote a book about it: The Gospel of Happiness: Rediscover Your Faith Through
Spiritual Practice.
Published by Image, an imprint of
Penguin Random House, The Gospel of Happiness looks at the empirical findings
in positive psychology that point to the wisdom and validity of Christian
practices and teachings. It also contains a lot of practical suggestions for
how to be happier in your every day life, something everybody seeks.
Many Christians are still
skeptical about psychology, but Kaczor says that just because Freud was an
atheist and anti-religion doesn’t mean psychology hasn’t come a long way in
understanding what it is to be human.
Positive psychology is a branch
of psychology that focuses on how human beings attain satisfaction and meaning.
Personal growth and a view to the future is emphasized over pathology or an
obsession with the past. The term “positive psychology” originates with Abraham
Maslow, but took a front seat in the general field of psychology in 1998 when
Martin Seligman, decided it would be the theme of his tenure as president of
the America Psychological Association. Since then, a great deal of research has
validated the effectiveness of positive psychology in the aid of well-being and
mental health.
“Just as Aristotle’s natural
theology bolstered Christian theology, today positive psychology provides an
empirical justification and aid for Christian practice, a kind of natural moral
theology,” says Kaczor.
The Christian practices and
teachings of prayer, gratitude, forgiveness, and virtue, for example, are
related to and can be greatly enriched by elements of positive psychology such
as meaning, relationships, achievement, engagement and positive emotion.
In this video interview with
Aleteia’s Zoe Romanowsky, Prof. Kaczor talks about our pursuit of happiness,
and his desire to help Christians uncover the link between their faith and
their well-being with his new book.
Life
is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on
without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being
unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends. Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology
HERE'S SOME NICE ART FOR YOU TO LOOK AT....ENJOY!
Ralston Crawford was one of a group of American Precisionists, along with Charles Demuth, Louis Lozowick, and Charles Sheeler. Although they never formally organized themselves into a movement, they were dedicated to presenting compositions based on simplified forms, clear outlines, and minimal detail. They emphasized modern American subjects in their landscape paintings and prints.
This screenprint by Crawford is
called “Grey Street.”
Ralston Crawford, "Grey
Street," 1940, color screenprint on wove paper, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams,
2008.115.1343
People
are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I
don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.’ I
don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds. Carl
Rogers
I LOVE BLACK AND WHITE
PHOTOS
WHY THE WORLD NEEDS EDITORS.....................
THE ART OF PULP
THE ART OF WAR...............................
Photographs I’ve taken
Every
year my wife and I go to the Upperville Colt & Horse Show, the oldest horse
show in America. Started in 1853 by Colonel (CSA) Richard “Dick” Henry Dulany,
The Dulany family descend from the O'Dulaneys of Queen's County, Ireland.
The
show was designed to showcase and improve local breeding stock in Northern
Virginia. Colonel Dulany continued to run the show until his death in 1906. The
show has occupied the same scenic spot since its inception 155 years ago; under
the shady oak trees of Grafton Farm, near Upperville, Virginia, about a half
hour from where I live.
Dulany
was riding cross-country one cold winter's day and came across a young colt who
was cast in a low fence. Stopping to free the young horse, he realized the colt
had been stuck long enough for his feet to have frozen. Reflecting on the fate
of the young horse, Dulany decided to start a colt & filly show to
encourage better care of young horses, and to inspire local breeders to breed
better stock.
The
show was scheduled for June under the oak trees at Grafton Farm, a centrally
located Dulany farm on route 50 two miles east of Upperville. The first show
listed two classes, one for colts, and one for fillies. Prior to the first
show, Colonel Dulany went to Manhattan to consult with silversmith Louis
Tiffany to design a suitable trophy, the labor on which was donated by Mr.
Tiffany for the event. The first show proved so popular, a club was formed to
run the show. The club, originally called the Upperville Union Club, elected
Colonel Dulany as its first president.
The
show, considered one of the most prestigious in the country, now spans seven
days and showcases over two thousand horse and rider combinations. The prize
list includes classes in breeding, hunters, and jumpers, and entries range from
local children to leading Olympic and Show Jumping World Cup horses and riders.
The
show attracts over 20,000 spectators and finishes with the popular $100,000
Budweiser Grand Prix on the final Sunday.
WE NEED PAID FAMILY LEAVE FOR AMERICANS
U.S. failing
mothers in paid maternity leave
Published 1:42 pm Thursday, August 27, 2015
AUSTIN, Texas (Texas News Service) — The U.S. is dramatically
behind the rest of the world in providing adequate support for mothers to spend
time with their newborn babies, according to an investigative report by In
These Times magazine.
Sharon Lerner, the report’s author, found most other countries,
rich or poor, mandate paid maternity leave. Lerner says American moms
frequently have to choose between bonding with newborns or paying the rent.
“Only 13 percent of women have access to any paid time off after
they have children,” says Lerner. “That means 87 percent of American women
don’t have paid leave. So what do they do when they have children?”
To find out, Lerner spent months following challenges faced by
four new mothers. Lerner says for Natasha Long in Mississippi, back to work
three weeks after giving birth, the hardest part was missed bonding time.
Long worked four to five 12-hour shifts a week, developed symptoms
of depression and was prescribed antidepressants. Now three years old, Long’s
child still refuses to call her mama.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, more than one in five
of the nation’s top 10 percent of earners get paid family leave, compared to
one in twenty earners in the bottom 25 percent.
Lerner points out in Sweden all mothers, regardless of income
level, get 16 months paid leave. In Finland, she says in addition to nine
months paid maternity time the mother or father can continue to receive paid
time off until the child’s third birthday.
“At this point, pretty much everyone else in the world does it
differently,” says Lerner. “We as a country aren’t handling the situation well.
It’s not an individual problem, it’s a national problem, it’s a policy problem
and I do think that’s how we’ll solve it.”
California, New York and New Jersey are the only states with paid
family leave legislation on the books.
President Barack Obama asked Congress to deliver a bill mandating
seven days of paid leave in his 2015 State of the Union address. Senate
Democrats responded with a bill that was rejected by Senate Republicans earlier
this month.
- See
more at:
http://www.orangeleader.com/2015/08/27/magazine-u-s-failing-mothers-in-paid-maternity-leave/#sthash.phifycC9.dpuf
(below) This painting depicts Moses
using the rod that had parted the Red Sea to bring water miraculously out of a
rock, quenching the thirst of the thirsty and weary Israelites. The subject had
political overtones in the Netherlands, for the Dutch drew parallels between
their decades-long quest for independence from Spain and the Israelites' escape
from Egypt.
"Pleasure and Piety: The
Art of Joachim Wtewael
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
Aging out of the system
Murder, Death and Abuse in the
Foster Care system
Angel and Saints in the Foster
Care System
The Foster Children’s Blogs
Foster Care Legislation
The Foster Children’s Bill of
Right
Foster Kids own Story
The Adventures of Foster Kid.
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
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
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