Happiness is not ready made. it comes from.......

Sculpture this and Sculpture that

Isamu Noguchi, Leonie Gilmour, 1932, terra cotta

A portrait of the artist’s mother completed in the year before her death, and one of a handful of non-commissioned portraits Noguchi undertook as a personal tribute.

Photo by Kevin Noble

The Noguchi Museum

DON'T YOU JUST LOVE POP ART?

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

ROLLS-ROYCE DREAMS

by Ginger Andrews

Using salal leaves for money,

my youngest sister and I

paid an older sister

to taxi an abandoned car

in our backyard. Our sister

knew how to shift gears,

turn smoothly with a hand signal,

and make perfect screeching stop sounds.

We drove to the beach,

to the market, to Sunday School,

past our would-be boyfriends’ houses,

to any town, anywhere.

We shopped for expensive clothes everywhere.

Our sister would open our doors

and say, Meter’s runnin’ ladies,

but take your time.

We rode all over in that ugly green Hudson

with its broken front windshield, springs poking

through its back seat, blackberry vines growing

through rusted floorboards;

with no wheels, no tires, taillights busted,

headlights missing, and gas gauge on empty.

“Rolls-Royce Dreams” appears in Ginger Andrews‘ collection An Honest Answer (Story Line Press, 1999), available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ginger Andrews, born in North Bend, Oregon, in 1956, won the 1999 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize with her volume, An Honest Answer. She has lived most of her life in Oregon, where she cleans houses for a living with her sisters. She is also a janitor and Sunday School teacher at her church. Her poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, Poetry, River Sedge, The American Voice, and in several anthologies, including Good Poems edited by Garrison Keillor. Keillor has read poems from An Honest Answer more than ten times on The Writer’s Almanac.

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

THE ART OF PULP

 THE ART OF WAR............

 Photographs I’ve taken

New Orleans

 

                                                         MUSIC FOR THE SOUL

Sam Cooke 

AND NOW, A BEATLES BREAK ..........................

TODAY'S ALLEGED MOB GUY
Action Jackson, Chicago

 Jackson, William AKA Action Jackson Born 1923 Died 1961 Gangster. Murder victim. By comparison to New York, the Chicago Mob has had relatively few problems with informants within its ranks, in some part because informants, once discovered, or even suspected, were dispatched quickly. 

The Chicago Mobs gangster in charge of Calumet City, Illinois, was Frankie Abatte who lived peacefully at 672 Douglas Avenue in Calumet with his daughters and wife. Abatte had been in the sugar rationing racket during the Second World War and then went on to supervising the Oak Lawn racing track where he also kept thoroughbred horses.   The underworld gossip was that he had fallen behind on his taxes and was talking to the Federal government, trying to work a deal for himself to avoid a long prison sentence. Unfortunately for Abatte, the mob found out and killed him with a bullet in the face. His nude dead body on the side of a road in Hot Springs Arkansas April 22, 1944.  A few days later, his Capo’s, (or lieutenants) Tommy Neglia and Onofrio Vitale were killed.  Vitale was found face down in a sewer, Neglia was gunned down while getting his hair cut in a barbershops. In 1953, Boss Paul Ricca ordered the murder of Anthony Ragucci, one of his sub bosses who began in the rackets under Al Capone. Ricca suspected that Ragucci, who had tax troubles, was talking to the Federal government.   Police found Ragucci shot to death on October 1 1953 and left face down in a sewer on 35th street. His brother identified him by his ring with the initials “AR” since the rest of his body was so ravaged by the cold. In July 1954, Charlie Gioe, a lifelong member of the mob, asked mob lawyer Sidney Korshak to help Paul Ricca with his naturalization papers. One month later on August 8 1954 Gioe was machine gunned to death and his body stuffed in the trunk of a stolen car. The mob suspected that he was talking to the federal tax people or knew too much about Ricca’s immigration status. It didn’t matter. They killed him as soon as they suspected him so he couldn’t have told them much. Shortly afterwards, another hoodlum, Paul “Needle Nose” Labriola was poisoned, strangled and shot to death under the suspicion that he had turned informer.  One informant they missed was Frank The Bump Bompensiero was the Chicago mobs Capo in San Diego, California who was Jailed by the federal government jailed him in 1955. Bompensiero felt that the outfit should have taken better care of his family while he was in prison. When he was released, Giancana demoted him to a solders rank. As a result Bompensiero turned F.B.I informant and provided information on the organization for two decades.

 Since the early 1950s, 300 pound, hood William “Billy Action” Jackson, had been a loan collector and leg breaker for Willie “Potatoes” Daddano, a one of Giancana’s childhood friends and a lieutenant in his organization. Jackson was not only loyal to the Outfit; he had spurred the FBI’s attempts to turn him into a well-paid informant.  However, somehow, the Bosses assumed that Jackson was an informant.

In the winter of 1961, two of Giancana’s best men, Turk Torrello and Fiore “Fifi” Buccieri, kidnapped Jackson off a Chicago street. They pulled their car up to Jackson while he walked down the street towards a parking lot. Rushing out of their car, they beat Jackson to the ground with tire irons, threw him in the trunk of his own car and drove him to a meat rendering plant owned, in part, by Paul Ricca.  Two years after Jackson murder, Buccieri, Torrello and a half dozen other hoods were captured on an FBI microphone talking about the murder. Buccieri’s account of the murder convulsed his listeners into fits of laughter. He said that Jackson was dead man as soon “As I learned that big fat slob was a stool pigeon for the G” [1] At the plant, they told Jackson that they suspected that he was an informer. When Jackson resisted, they shot him “just once in the knee” Buccieri later laughed “You should have heard that fat prick scream! .... So then I shoved that electric stick (a cattle prod) up his ass and he shit all over the fucking joint! Boy! Did he stink!”? [2]As a point of professional pride, Jackie Cerone, another hood, took credit for the cattle prod idea having once seen the Chicago police use one on a burglar they had arrested.

The two hoods then impaled Jackson enormous frame on to a large iron meat hook, ramming the hook through his rectum. “He was so fuck’n heavy” Torrello laughed “He bent the fuck’n hook...we had his fat ass up there for three days” Buccieri giggled “You should of seen this guy, like a fuck’n elephant, he was. Then (Torrello) hits him in the balls with that electric prod thing...so we toss water on him to give the electric thing a better charge, so now he’s screaming....”They smashed his knees with a hammer used on cattle, and burned his penis with the cattle prod and stabbed him with an ice pick in the ears and eye balls, all the while asking “What did you tell the G?”  And “Who did you rat on?”   Torrello said “It took him three days to croak, three days, I got him on that fuck’n hook...I still don’t know why he didn’t admit to be a stoolie” [3]  Remarkably, Jackson lived for three days before he died of shock.  

   Another version of Jackson’s murder is that he killed in retaliation for the brutal rape-torture of a mob associates wife. 

---

[1]  Roemer Man Against the Mob, FBI file

[2]  Roemer, Man Against the Mob, FBI file

[3]  FBI field report 1963

 Action Jackson as trunk music

This Day in Jewish History 1996: A Mobster and Lawyer Who Defended Himself Beautifully Dies

'A nod from Korshak, and Vegas shuts down': Sidney Korshak had an A-list of clients, but his true power arose from organized crime

David B. Green Jan 20, 2016 8:03 AM

The tax cheat: hero or villain?

On January 20, 1996, Sidney Korshak, a lawyer who parlayed his knowledge of the law into avoiding arrest or indictment while carrying on a profitable career in U.S. organized crime, died, at the age of 88. In the first of a series of investigative pieces about him, in 1976, The New York Times noted that, “To scores of Federal, state and local law enforcement officials, Mr. Korshak is the most important link between organized crime and legitimate business.”

With his role as lawyer to some of the nation’s biggest labor unions, his reputation among the Chicago mafia as “our man,” and his connections in the entertainment and hotel industries, Korshak became known as a “fixer,” someone who could make seemingly impossible deals materialize, and the threat of crippling strikes magically evaporate.

Writing about his close friend in his 1994 memoir, former Paramount Pictures chief Robert Evans put it like this: "Let's just say that a nod from Korshak, and the teamsters change management. A nod from Korshak, and Santa Anita [racetrack] closes. A nod from Korshak, and Vegas shuts down. A nod from Korshak, and the Dodgers can suddenly play night baseball."

 Sidney Roy Korshak was born on June 6, 1907, in Chicago. His father, Harry Korshak, was a Kiev-born Jew who had succeeded as a building contractor in Chicago. His mother was the former Rebecca Beatrice Lashkovitz, born in Odessa.

Sidney’s older brother, Theodore, became a small-time Chicago criminal and drug addict, who died in obscurity in 1971. His younger brother, Marshall, also became a lawyer, but he went on to a career in Chicago politics and in the Illinois state senate, which was at least nominally different from a career in organized crime.

Growing up in Chicago’s Lawndale neighborhood, Sidney attended  the Theodore Herzl elementary school, Marshall High School, the University of Wisconsin (where he was a boxing champion), and DePaul University, where he obtained his law degree in 1930.

Within months, Korshak was defending members of Al Capone’s crime syndicate. When necessary, he would arrange for a judge to be paid off so as to guarantee the desired verdict. Additionally, as one former Chicago judge told the New York Times, “Sidney always had contact with high-class girls. Not your $50 girl, but girls costing $250 or more."

It was Korshak too, according to a source interviewed by The Times, who arranged for Senator Estes Kefauver, who had come to Chicago in 1952 to take testimony for his organized-crime commission, to be entrapped by a prostitute (and a hidden camera) at the Drake Hotel. Confronted with the images, Kefauver hurriedly left town without hearing a single witness.

Guess who cast Al Pacino in 'Godfather'

Korshak’s secret strength was his ability to mediate between his legitimate clients - which included Hilton and Hyatt, the Los Angeles Dodgers, Max Factor and General Dynamics - and the crime organizations and powerful labor unions with which he was involved.

It was he, for example who organized all of the pension funds of the huge Teamsters labor union under a single roof. He then used the truck drivers’ collected retirement savings as a private bank for off-the-books loans to the film industry and the burgeoning hotel scene in Las Vegas. It was not out of graciousness that Teamsters chief Jimmy Hoffa famously vacated the presidential suite at the Riviera Hotel in Vegas for Korshak, when the latter arrived for a conclave of Teamsters lawyers in 1961.

And, according to long piece in Vanity Fair that ran shortly after Korshak’s death, he was the man who made the phone call to MGM owner Kirk Kerkorian that convinced him that is studio should release actor Al Pacino from another film so that he could appear in Paramount’s “Godfather.” Korshak had reportedly asked Kerkorian, a hotel magnate, if he really wanted to get construction on his next hotel finished.

Sidney Korshak died of a heart attack at his Beverly Hills home, just one day after his younger brother, Marshall, died in Chicago, at age 85. 

David B. Green

Haaretz Contributor

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/features/1.698328

 THE QUOTABLE EMERSON 

Available at Amazon Books or at Barnes and Noble 

This time like all times is a very good One if we but know what to do with it.

These times of ours are serious and full of calamity but all times are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger.

The surest poison is time.

So much of our time is spent in preparation so much in routine and so much in retrospect that the amount of each person's genius is confined to a very few hours.

The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish huckstering Trade.

We rail at trade but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America and destroyed feudalism and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.

I do not hesitate to read all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable -- any real insight or broad human sentiment.

Just five months ago humanity got its first glimpse of the Plutonian surface, and the questions raised as the photos beam in are stacking up.

The latest: are those giant alien snails traversing the former planet's vast ice caps?

The images in question arrived back on Earth on Christmas Eve, snapped by the New Horizons probe during its July flyby of Pluto, and published by NASA in January. Among the vastness of marvels revealed in these photos from billions of miles away, some dark apparitions are attracting the highest scrutiny.

They dot a plane of solid nitrogen, frequently appearing along snowy pathways similar in form to the slime trails left by earth snails on concrete. They seemed domed, though irregular, in shape. They vary in size from a suburban house to an office building.

Alien snails, right? Probably not.

According to NASA, the dark forms dwell on the "Sputnik Planum," a plain of solid nitrogen hundreds of miles across, divided by the trails into irregular cells. (Nitrogen freezes around -340F under Earth pressure.)

Those cells, according to estimates, are created by creeping fluid motion in the deep icy surface. William McKinnon, a leader in the New Horizons imaging team, equated the motion to a lava lamp—giant blobs, warmed slightly by Pluto's modest internal heat, rise and break the surface like slow-bubbling lava. The supposed snail paths are created at the perimeter of each great blob.

As for the snails themselves: NASA calls them dirty-icebergs, tinted by debris, naturally pushed into the troughs between the cells of the Sputnik Planum.

Click through our slideshow to see the dirty Plutonian icebergs, plus astounding close-ups of the distant world.

WHAT IS LOVE?

Love cures people—both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. ~Karl Menninger

Love doesn't sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new. ~Ursula K. Le Guin

Love is not singular except in syllable. ~Marvin Taylor

Scientists Are Searching for Space Chemicals That Could Never Exist on Earth

Bizarre chemicals in deep space could help explain the origins of life

By Danny Lewis

smithsonian.com

Every molecule in the universe vibrates in its own particular way, depending on how its atoms are arranged. By studying the electromagnetic radiation stars and nebulas emit, astronomers can extrapolate all kinds of information from millions of miles away, down to their chemical makeup.

As is turns out, the seemingly countless combinations of chemical compounds found on Earth are just a tiny fraction of what scientists are finding in space. Many of these space compounds could never exist on Earth and could hold clues for how the building blocks of life came to be, Clara Moskowitz writes for Scientific American.

Until the late 1960s, scientists doubted that molecules could exist in interstellar space at all, rationalizing that the conditions were much too harsh for chemical compounds. But in 1968, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley named Charles Townes decided to take a look anyway.

After upgrading the six-meter antenna at California’s Hat Creek Radio observatory, Townes discovered traces of ammonia in the Sagittarius B2 cloud, Moskowitz writes.

“How easy, and how exciting!” Townes wrote for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 2006. “The news media as well as scientists began buzzing us.”

Scientists realized that space was full of chemicals. Since Townes’ discovery, astronomers have identified more than 200 different types of compounds floating around in space, often very different than what scientists see on Earth. But even if scientists can recreate the chemicals in a lab, sometimes it’s still unclear what the chemical actually is, Mozkowitz reports.

“You can get to the point where you’ve produced in the lab the same molecule that’s occurring in space but you don’t necessarily know what the molecule is,” physicist Michael McCarthy, who works at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics tells Moskowitz. “So then you have to try to infer the elemental composition from a combination of different laboratory experiments with different samples.”

This kind of forensics work led astrochemists to believe that the Horsehead Nebula could be a giant, naturally-occurring petroleum refinery. In 2011, astronomers at the Institute of Millimeter Radioastronomy (IRAM) puzzled over a strange wavelength appearing in readings from the enormous cloud of dust and gas. Analysis showed it was most likely a molecule called C3H+, or propynylidyne, which is found in oil and natural gas on Earth, Philippa Warr wrote for Wired in 2012.

This hunt for new chemicals also yields insights into how the basic building blocks of life might have formed. Scientists propose that one type of these blocks, or amino acids, form in molecular clouds as stars are born and are then carried to Earth by comets or asteroids.

Astronomers have found evidence of amino acids in space, but more research needs to be done to say for sure how they form and if they are unique to Earth, Moskowitz writes.

Whatever the origins of life are, it’s clear that scientists have a lot to learn from the strange chemicals floating between the stars.

Does Icy Pluto Have a Hidden Ocean? New Horizons Offers New Clues

Data from the NASA probe are helping to build a solid case for a liquid ocean inside the tiny, distant world

By Ker Than

When NASA's New Horizons spacecraft reached Pluto last July, it gave scientists their first detailed look at one of the most mysterious objects in the solar system. In addition to wonders like soaring mountains, ice volcanoes and a giant heart-shaped basin, images beamed back by the probe revealed a surface marred by a network of fissures and a notably spherical shape.

For some scientists, those last two discoveries are hints that something even wilder may be hidden inside the tiny world, because they are the first direct clues that Pluto could host a subsurface ocean beneath its thick, icy crust. If confirmed, an ocean on Pluto would have profound implications, because it would increase the likelihood that other icy bodies could host liquid water—and possibly life.

"The fact that even cold, distant Pluto could have a subsurface ocean means that there are potential habitats even in apparently unpromising locations," says Francis Nimmo, a New Horizons scientist based at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Aside from Earth, no bodies in the solar system have large amounts of liquid water on their surfaces. That's a bummer for astrobiologists, as most scientists believe that water is a necessary ingredient for life to arise.

Still, space probes have been collecting evidence for decades that icy moons around Jupiter and Saturn hold vast oceans beneath their crusts. Saturn's moon Enceladus spews geysers that are tantalizingly rich with water and carbon, while Jupiter's Europa is covered in fractures and ridges that hint at a subsurface ocean melting through the ice. These worlds are currently considered some of the best places to look for life elsewhere in the solar system.

Pluto is similarly icy, but the difference is that those moons have more obvious sources of heat to keep internal water liquid: the gravitational kneading they receive as they swing around their massive parent planets. Pluto has no massive companion and orbits between 3 and 5 billion miles from the sun, so astronomers mostly thought it must be too cold for a modern ocean.

Some theoretical models suggested that radioactive decay in Pluto's rocky interior could heat things up enough to create a subsurface ocean at some point in its history, maybe even enough heat that waters persist today, but there was no real evidence, says Nimmo—until now.

Speaking at a recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, Nimmo outlined two key clues from New Horizons. Neither one alone is a slam dunk, he says, but together, they're suggestive.

First, New Horizons revealed the presence of extensional tectonics, faults and fissures across the face of Pluto that could indicate the surface has undergone expansion in the recent past.

"An easy way of doing that is if you have an ocean that's starting to refreeze," Nimmo says, because water expands in volume as it changes from a liquid to a solid. "As the liquid water freezes back into ice, the outer surface of Pluto has to move outward, and you get expansion."

The second piece of evidence has to do with Pluto's shape, in particular, the notable lack of a bulge around its equator like the one found on Earth, its moon and other rounded celestial bodies.

As spherical bodies spin, the rotational forces push material toward the equator, flattening them out somewhat. The moon's equatorial bulge is even greater than it should be given its current rotation rate, and scientists think that's because it was spinning faster earlier in its history, when lunar rock was more ductile. By contrast, although Pluto is spinning faster than our moon, it has no bulge at all.

"The moon is recording an ancient spin state," Nimmo says. "Pluto shows no evidence of that. There are different ways of destroying a fossil bulge, and one of them is to have an ocean." That's because water has more freedom of motion than ice, so a global liquid layer sloshing around inside would help counteract the spinning forces, reducing such a bulge.

So far, the New Horizons team is making a pretty solid case for an ocean on Pluto, says Amy Barr Mlinar, an expert in the formation and evolution of solid planetary bodies at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.

“It's based on a basic planetary-science type of analysis. It doesn't require a lot of fancy modeling where there are 45 different input parameters that can be messed up," says Barr Mlinar.

But not everyone is convinced just yet, even other members of the New Horizons team. Pluto's surface cracks could be explained by other internal changes in the ice's temperature or structure, says Bill McKinnon, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Likewise, the collapse of a fossil bulge is consistent with an ocean on Pluto," McKinnon says. "But an ocean is not required. Nor does it mean the ocean, even if it did exist, has to exist today. The collapse of the fossil bulge could have occurred billions of years ago."

New Horizons performed a single flyby of Pluto. For more concrete proof of Pluto’s ocean, “we would need to go back with an orbiter mission, maybe later in this century,” McKinnon says.

If future tests do confirm the presence of an ocean on Pluto, McKinnon thinks there could be even more hidden seas waiting to be discovered in the fringes of the solar system. Pluto is part of the Kuiper belt, a ring of similar bodies that could also be generating internal heat from radioactive decay.

"Other large Kuiper belt objects are similarly or even more rock-rich, so these worlds could also have oceans," he says.

Such distant oceans would be very different from what we're accustomed to on Earth, notes Nadine Barlow, an astronomer at Northern Arizona University. Besides being locked beneath dozens of feet of ice, a Plutonian ocean would almost certainly have a different composition than Earth's seas.

"We have to remember that the ices out at Pluto not only include water ice but also carbon dioxide and methane ices," says Barlow. Compared to our seas, Pluto's potential ocean would also likely be especially briny, rich in dissolved salts and ammonia that would help reduce its freezing point and keep it in a liquid state.

Those extra ingredients would make Pluto's seawater unappealing to astronauts, but it's still possible some forms of extreme life could call such an ocean home. And while New Horizons has already sped away from Pluto towards its next Kuiper belt target, NASA's planned mission to the Jovian moon Europa might be a crucial testing ground for studying subsurface oceans on icy bodies and determining their feasibility for hosting life.

That means the Europa mission and any future treks to explore Pluto will need to take precautions so as not to contaminate any potentially life-supporting environments with terrestrial organisms, says Barlow.

Barr Mlinar agrees: "We may have to think of clever ways to explore the chemistry of Pluto's ocean from the surface," she says. "We have to learn more about the geology of these bodies and how material from the ocean can be expressed on the surface."

Available at Amazon Books or at Barnes and Noble 

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.

Old, Dense Star Clusters Might Be the Place to Look for Complex Alien Life

The age and density of globular star clusters could give alien life both the time and resources necessary to brew complex society

By Marissa Fessenden
January 8, 2016

The universe is more than a smattering of distant stars—it’s also chock-full of other worlds. But if the universe is so crowded, where is the alien life? While there are many theories addressing this apparent contradiction, known as the Fermi Paradox, new research suggests that people may just not be looking for aliens in the right places.
A pair of scientists, Rosane Di Stefano, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Alak Ray, of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, in India, suggest we should be looking to globular clusters. The duo explained their research this week in a presentation at the American Astronomical Society meeting.
Globular clusters are dense clumps of stars that formed billions of years before our solar system. This age and close proximity of so many potential worlds together could give alien life both the time and resources necessary to brew complex society, reports Alexandra Witze for Nature.
Developing the technology to hop from star system to star system within a cluster would be easier than the kind of power needed for Earthlings to cross the distance to our nearest neighbors, explains Rachel Feltman for The Washington Post. That means that interstellar travel and communication would be easier in a globular cluster, which could provide many benefits—for one, if the resources of one planet were exhausted, an advanced civilization could jump to the next star system or planet more easily.
"The Voyager probes are 100 billion miles from Earth, or one-tenth as far as it would take to reach the closest star if we lived in a globular cluster,” Di Stefano says in a press statement. "That means sending an interstellar probe is something a civilization at our technological level could do in a globular cluster." Since globular clusters are so old, if a civilization exists in one, it could already be far more advanced than our own, residing on a planet that is nearly 4.5 billion years old.
So far, few researchers have looked to globular clusters to find evidence of alien life or even planets at all—only one planet has ever been spotted in a globular cluster.
The prevailing wisdom is that gravitational interactions between all of the closely grouped stars would rip apart any nascent planets before they could form. Also, since these clusters formed on an average of about 10 billion years ago, the stars they host have fewer heavy elements like iron and silicon—the building blocks for rocky planets, according to a press release.
Even so, that doesn’t mean that planets can’t form in such clusters, Di Stefano and Ray argue. Stars in clusters are longer-lived  and dimmer, so any habitable planets would be those that “huddle close” to their stars in the narrow zone where temperatures are warm enough for liquid water to flow, Feltman explains. This close grouping could actually protect planets from gravitational interactions, according to De Stefano and Ray.
The team determined that there is a sweet spot for the spacing of stars within a cluster that is "stable enough for a planet to form and survive for billions of years,” Witze writes. That distance works out to be about 100 to 1,000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
Di Stefano even has a list of clusters that researchers should investigate, Witze reports. Terzan 5, a cluster hanging out near the center of the Milky Way, is at the top of that list. That cluster is very dense but also carries more metal than most other documented globular clusters.
With the clusters so far away, the first discovery of life is more likely simple microbes in someplace like the subsurface ocean of Enceladus, Saturn’s geyser-spouting moon. But these Di Stefano and Ray don't think we should lose hope: There may be aliens capable of holding a conversation with us some where out there amid the stars.

I was invited to the home of some Russian Friends of mine and had a great Eastern Russian meal 

Stark-white Tethys and smoggy Titan are pictured with gas giant Saturn in images from the Cassini space probe.

The Min Min lights are one of Australia’s most mysterious phenomenons. The bizarre glowing orbs are said to follow travellers, even up to long distances. One of the first reported sightings of these unexplainable orbs was in 1981 after the local Min Min Hotel went up in flames. There has since been thousands of reported sightings. People say that the orbs are oval and float along around 1 meter above the ground. The cause of these lights remain a complete mystery.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

The astronomer whose work helped kick Pluto out of the pantheon of planets says he has good reason to believe there’s an undiscovered planet bigger than Earth lurking in the distant reaches of our solar system.

That’s quite a claim, because Mike Brown of Caltech is no stranger to this part of our cosmic neighborhood. After all, he discovered Eris, an icy world more massive than Pluto that proved our old friend wasn’t special enough to be considered a full-fledged planet. He also introduced the world to Sedna, a first-of-its-kind dwarf planet that’s so far out there, its region of space was long thought to be an empty no man’s land.

Now Brown has teamed up with Caltech colleague Konstantin Batygin to do a new analysis of oddities in the orbits of small, icy bodies out beyond Neptune. In their report published Wednesday in The Astronomical Journal, the researchers say it looks like the orbits are all being affected by the presence of an unseen planet that’s about 10 times more massive than Earth (though still much smaller than Uranus or Neptune) — the size astronomers refer to as a super-Earth.

Russian Prison Official Steals Highway

In an outrageous story of alleged theft, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested National Prison Service Acting Deputy Chief Alexander Protopopov and his accomplices this week for (literal) highway robbery

Protopopov allegedly stole 50 km (31 miles) of road worth 6 million roubles (US $79,000) in the northern Komi region of Russia.

Road construction is one of the most corrupt infrastructure sectors in Russia costing much more than others, according to Agence-France Presse (AFP). Russia’s roads have some of the poorest conditions in the world, reported online industry journal World Highways.

The Russian Investigative Committee alleged he conspired with accomplices, Ivanov, Korzhov, and Jabbarly to dismantle the highway and profit from selling it.

Protopopov ostensibly oversaw the dismantling of the road into 7,000 reinforced concrete slabs between 2014 and 2015 and struck a deal with Jabbarly’s company, Esthete LLC which sold them. The slabs were removed under the guise of recycling by Esthete LLC, added Kommersant.

Russian authorities have charged Protopopov with embezzlement of public property, organized crime by prior conspiracy and abuse of his official position which could land him 10 years in prison, according to AFP.

Protopopov and his accomplices argue, however, that the road was not public property, reported Kommersant.

THE ART AND BEAUTY OF HUMANS IN MOTION

Renata Shakirova in Laurencia

I'm a big big Fan of Bukowski 

Human relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops Charles Bukowski

On 18 June, 1982, 20-year-old married mother of one, Kelly Dove, was working the night shift by herself at the Imperial gas station in Harrisonburg, Virginia. At around midnight, she called the police to report that a man had been harassing her throughout the night. She told them that he was driving a silver Ford. She called a second time and told police that the man was “dressed improperly.” She then called the police a third time to report a threatening phone call. While on the phone to the police for the third time, which was around 2:30AM, she began to panic, saying “Please hurry, he’s back!” Police finally arrived at the station after the third phone call but Kelly was nowhere to be found. There appeared to be no sign of struggle and Kelly’s purse was left behind, along with a magazine that she was in the process of reading. The police (obviously) received a lot of criticism due to the fact that they didn’t go to the station until the third and final call from Kelly. Kelly was legally declared dead in 1989 but what happened to her that night remains a mystery.

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

Chen Harland

Interior (My Dining Room) by Wassily Kandinsky

Norman Rockwell, Homecoming, Post Cover, December 25, 1948 (including himself and Grandma Moses in the group and one little girl in red posing as the twins)

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love Marcus Aurelius

Swedish Detainee 'Confesses' on Chinese TV

He's being made a public example. Peter Dahlin, a Swedish activist working in China's beleaguered human rights law community, confessed to and apologized for hurting the feelings of the Chinese people and "causing harm" to their government. Dahlin's NGO, Chinese Urgent Action Working Group, said his "absurd" confession, broadcast on state television, was clearly scripted. Some observers believe that this rare public humiliation of a foreign national was staged to support China's narrative that human rights lawyers are fomenting dissent as part of a Western conspiracy against the country's stability.

Fairy Tales Predate Bible and Greek Myths

BY JENNIFER VIEGAS

Many well known fairy tales predate the existence of modern European languages and major world religions, finds new research.

The findings, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, open up the possibility that popular folktales influenced writings in Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible and other religious works. They also negate the claims of some scholars who have held that most traditional fairy tales originated much more recently.

"Versions of 'Beauty and the Beast,' 'Rumplestiltskin' and 'Jack and the Beanstalk' have probably been around since before the existence of many modern European languages, like English, German, Russian and French, and would have originally been told in a now extinct ancestral language from which those tongues evolved," co-author Jamshid Tehrani of Durham University told Discovery News.

Tehrani added, “It is difficult to put precise dates on such things, but we're looking in the region of 4–6,000 years old.”

Tehrani and co-author Sara Graça da Silva of the New University of Lisbon investigated whether 275 Indo-European fairy tales were more likely to be shared by closely related populations than more distantly related ones. They tested whether the sharing of the tales could be predicted by how close populations were geographically, or by how related their languages are.

The process enabled the researchers to separate the effects of tales traveling between neighboring groups (such as through trade or migrations) from tales that had been inherited from common ancestral groups. This narrowed the number of tales down to 76 whose distributions could be primarily explained by common heritage.

Stonehenge Made to Glisten: Photos

The researchers next mapped the 76 tales on a "family tree" of Indo-European languages to see how far the stories could be traced back, using the same techniques that biologists utilize to reconstruct the evolution of genetically inherited traits.

One of the oldest tales of the bunch was determined to be "The Smith and the Devil," in which a blacksmith sells his soul to a devil/evil spirit in return for the power to weld any materials together. The blacksmith then uses that power to attach the devil to a stool or tree, and only releases the devil on the condition that he may keep his soul.

"We trace this tale back to the Bronze Age ancestors of the Indo-European language family," Tehrani said.

Two New Portraits of Shakespeare Found

BY ROSSELLA LORENZI

In the last years of his life, William Shakespeare was an elegant gentleman who spent time at his Stratford residence, sitting on an elaborately carved chair in the company of a book and an adoring dog.

About two decades earlier, he was a relatively young man exuding self-confidence and proud smiles.

These powerful images emerge from two previously unknown portraits of Shakespeare, according to Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, a professor of English at Mainz University, Germany.

 "I subjected the images to fundamental tests of identity and authenticity, and these revealed that we are dealing with true-to-life portraits of Shakespeare, one from his youth, the second from his old age," Hammerschmidt-Hummel told Discovery News.

She announced the new finding this morning at a press conference at Mainz Cathedral.

According to the German academic, one portrait, possibly painted around 1594, when the poet was about 30 years old, depicts Shakespeare as a young London playwright and author of sonnets who has reached the first height of his unparalleled literary career.

"Showing amazing self-confidence, the man appears to cast his spell over the viewer with a touch of a triumphant smile," Hammerschmidt-Hummel said.

Hung in the bedchamber of Prince Franz (1740-1817), in the Gothic House of the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm, the 2.4- by 2-foot portrait was seized in 1945 by the Soviet army.

"It has been lost ever since. Today there is only a high-quality, monochrome photograph from 1936, now in the Photo Marburg Picture Archive," Hammerschmidt-Hummel said.

Archival research shows Prince Franz brought the picture from his trip to England from 1763 to 1764. Records show it was given to him as a gift by Thomas Hart, a distant relative of Shakespeare.

While the Wörlitz portrait only depicts Shakespeare's facial features, the second portrait shows the whole person of Shakespeare for the first time.

"We can see he wasn't a very tall man," Hammerschmidt-Hummel said.

The painting is estimated to show Shakespeare at the age of 50, about two years before his death and it portrays the Bard as an affluent, older gentleman living in retirement. He sits on an elaborately carved chair, holding a a book in his left hand and resting his right hand on the head of a dog, which is sitting to his right.

Alice Baber, Red Passage (1966)

MISH MOSH..........................................

Mish Mash: noun \ˈmish-ˌmash, -ˌmäsh\ A : hodgepodge, jumble “The painting was just a mishmash of colors and abstract shapes as far as we could tell”. Origin Middle English & Yiddish; Middle English mysse masche, perhaps reduplication of mash mash; Yiddish mish-mash, perhaps reduplication of mishn to mix. First Known Use: 15th century

Charles Earl Bowles, better known as “Black Bart,” was an English-born American Old West outlaw noted for the poetic messages he left behind after two of his robberies

Hadrian’s Wall was built by the Romans as a defensive fortification against the northern tribes.

Francesca Woodman. Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island. 1976

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 No Time to Say Goodbye: Memoirs of a Life in Foster Care and Short Stories from a Small Town. He is also 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 MY LATEST BOOKS.....

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.

Although the book is based on three sets of time (breakfast, lunch and dinner) and the diner is opened in the early morning and closed at night, time stands still inside the Diner. The hour on the big clock on the wall never changes time and much like my memories of that place, everything remains the same.

http://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Small-William-Tuohy/dp/1517270456/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444164878&sr=1-1&keywords=short+stories+from+a+small+town

The Valley Lives

By Marion Marchetto, author of The Bridgewater Chronicles on October 15, 2015

Short Stores from a Small Town is set in The Valley (known to outsiders as The Lower Naugatuck Valley) in Connecticut. While the short stories are contemporary they provide insight into the timeless qualities of an Industrial Era community and the values and morals of the people who live there. Some are first or second generation Americans, some are transplants, yet each takes on the mantle of Valleyite and wears it proudly. It isn't easy for an author to take the reader on a journey down memory lane and involve the reader in the life stories of a group of seemingly unrelated characters. I say seemingly because by book's end the reader will realize that he/she has done more than meet a group of loosely related characters.

We meet all of the characters during a one-day time period as each of them finds their way to the Valley Diner on a rainy autumn day. From our first meeting with Angel, the educationally challenged man who opens and closes the diner, to our farewell for the day to the young waitress whose smile hides her despair we meet a cross section of the Valley population. Rich, poor, ambitious, and not so ambitious, each life proves that there is more to it beneath the surface. And the one thing that binds these lives together is The Valley itself. Not so much a place (or a memory) but an almost palpable living thing that becomes a part of its inhabitants.

Let me be the first the congratulate author John William Tuohy on a job well done. He has evoked the heart of The Valley and in doing so brought to life the fabric that Valleyites wear as a mantle of pride. While set in a specific region of the country, the stories that unfold within the pages of this slim volume are similar to those that live in many a small town from coast to coast.

By Sandra Mendyk

Just read "Short Stories from a Small Town," and couldn't put it down! Like Mr. Tuohy's other books I read, they keep your interest, especially if you're from a small town and can relate to the lives of the people he writes about. I recommend this book for anyone interested in human interest stories. His characters all have a central place where the stories take place--a diner--and come from different walks of life and wrestle with different problems of everyday life. Enjoyable and thoughtful.

I loved how the author wrote about "his people"

By kathee

A touching thoughtful book. I loved how the author wrote about "his people", the people he knew as a child from his town. It is based on sets of time in the local diner, breakfast , lunch and dinner, but time stands still ... Highly recommend !

WONDERFUL book, I loved it!

By John M. Cribbins

What wonderful stories...I just loved this book.... It is great how it is written following, breakfast, lunch, dinner, at a diner. Great characters.... I just loved it....

 No Time To Say Goodbye.

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/

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

QUOTES FROM THE BOOK

 “I am here because I worked too hard and too long not to be here. But although I told the university that I would walk across the stage to take my diploma, I won’t. At age fifty-seven, I’m too damned old, and I’d look ridiculous in this crowd. From where I’m standing in the back of the hall, I can see that I am at least two decades older than most of the parents of these kids in their black caps and gowns.

So I’ll graduate with this class, but I won’t walk across the stage and collect my diploma with them; I’ll have the school send it to my house. I only want to hear my name called. I’ll imagine what the rest would have been like. When you’ve had a life like mine, you learn to do that, to imagine the good things.

The ceremony is about to begin. It’s a warm June day and a hallway of glass doors leading to the parking lot are open, the dignitaries march onto the stage, a janitor slams the doors shut, one after the other.

That banging sound.

It’s Christmas Day 1961 and three Waterbury cops are throwing their bulk against our sorely overmatched front door. They are wearing their long woolen blue coats and white gloves and they swear at the cold.

They’ve finally come for us, in the dead of night, to take us away, just as our mother said they would.”

********************

“Otherwise, there were no long goodbyes or emotional scenes. That isn’t part of foster care. You just leave and you just die a little bit. Just a little bit because a little bit more of you understands that this is the way it’s going to be. And you grow hard around the edges, just a little bit. Not in some big way, but just a little bit because you have to, because if you don’t it only hurts worse the next time and a little bit more of you will die. And you don’t want that because you know that if enough little bits of you die enough times, a part of you leaves. Do you know what I mean? You’re still there, but a part of you leaves until you stand on the sidelines of life, simply watching, like a ghost that everyone can see and no one is bothered by. You become the saddest thing there is: a child of God who has given .”

  ********************

“As I said, you die a little bit in foster care, but I spose we all die a little bit in our daily lives, no matter what path God has chosen for us. But there is always a balance to that sadness; there’s always a balance. You only have to look for it. And if you look for it, you’ll see it. I saw it in a well-meaning nun who wanted to share the joy of her life’s work with us. I saw it in an old man in a garden who shared the beauty of the soil and the joy he took in art, and I saw it in the simple decency and kindness of an underpaid nurse’s aide. Yeah. Great things rain  on us. The magnificence of life’s affirmations are all around us, every day, everywhere. They usually go unnoticed because they seldom arrive with the drama and heartbreak of those hundreds of negative things that drain our souls. But yeah, it’s there, the good stuff, the stuff worth living for. You only have to look for it and when you see it, carry it around right there at the of your heart so it’s always there when you need it. And you’ll need it a lot, because life is hard.”

  ********************

“As sad as I so often was, and I was often overwhelmed with sadness, I never admitted it, and I don’t recall ever having said aloud that I was sad. I tried not to think about it, about all the sad things, because I had this feeling that if I started to think about it, that was all I would ever think of again. I often had a nightmare of falling  into a deep dark well that I could never climb out of. But then there was the other part of me that honestly believed I wasn’t sad at all, and I had little compassion for those who dwelled in sadness. Strange how that works. You would think that it would be the other way around.”

********************

 “In late October of 1962, it was our turn to go. Miss Hanrahan appeared in her state Ford Rambler, which, by that point, seemed more like a hearse than a nice lady’s car. Our belongings were packed in a brown bags. The ladies in the kitchen, familiar with our love of food, made us twelve fried-fish sandwiches each large enough to feed eight grown men and wrapped them in tinfoil for the ride ahead of us. Miss Louisa, drenched with tears, walked us to the car and before she let go of my hand she said, “When you a big, grown man, you come back and see Miss Louisa, you hear?”

“But,” I said, “you won’t know who I am. I’ll be big.”

“No, child,” she said as she gave me her last hug, “you always know forever the peoples you love. They with you forever. They don’t never leave you.”

She was right, of course. Those we love never leave us because we carry them with us in our hearts and a piece of us is within them. They change with us and they grow old with us and with time, they are a part of us, and thank God for that.”

********************

 “One day at the library I found a stack of record albums. I was hoping I’d find ta Beatles album, but it was all classical music so I reached for the first name I knew, Beethoven. I checked it out his Sixth Symphony and walked home. I didn’t own a record player and I don’t know why I took it out. I had Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony but nothing to play it on.”

********************

 “The next day, when I came home from the library, there was a small, used red record player in my room. I found my mother in the kitchen and spotted a bandage taped to her arm.

“Ma,” I asked. “Where did you get the money for the record player?”

“I had it saved,” she lied.

My father lived well, had a large house and an expensive imported car, wanted for little, and gave nothing. My mother lived on welfare in a slum and sold her blood to the Red Cross to get me a record player.

“Education is everything, Johnny,” she said, as she headed for the refrigerator to get me food. “You get smart like regular people and you don’t have to live like this no more.”

She and I were not hugging types, but I put my hand on her shoulder as she washed the dishes with her back to me and she said, in best Brooklynese, “So go and enjoy, already.” My father always said I was my mother’s son and I was proud of that. On her good days, she was a good and noble thing to be a part of.

That evening, I plugged in the red record player and placed it by the window. My mother and I took the kitchen chairs out to the porch and listened to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony from beginning to end, as we watched the oil-stained waters of the Mad River roll by. It was a good night, another good night, one of many that have blessed my life.”

********************

“The next day I was driven 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  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 ,” 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.”

********************

“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  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  to the newspaper building and cleaned toilets, with a vague plan that it would somehow lead to a reporter’s .”

********************

“One Friday afternoon at the close of the working day the idiot bosses in their fucking ties and suit coats came  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.”

********************

“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.”

********************

“Imagine being beaten  every day for something you didn’t do and yet, when it’s over, you keep on smiling. That’s what every day of Donald’s life was like. His death was a small death. No one mourned his passing; they merely agreed it was for the best that he be forgotten as quickly as possible, since his was a life misspent.”

********************

“Then there are all of those children, the ones who aren’t resilient. The ones who slowly, quietly die. I think the difference is that the kids who bounce back learn to bear a little bit more than they thought they could, and they soon understand that the secret to surviving foster care is to accept finite disappointments while never losing infinite hope. I think that was how Donald survived as long as he did, by never losing his faith in the wish that tomorrow would be better. But as time went by, day after day, the tomorrows never got better; they got worse, and he simply gave . In the way he saw the world, pain was inevitable, but no one ever explained to him that suffering was optional.”

********************

“In foster care it’s easier to measure what you’ve lost over what you have gained, because it there aren’t many gains in that life and you are a prisoner to someone else’s plans for your life.”

********************

“I developed an interest in major league baseball and the 1960s were, as far as I’m concerned (with a nod to the Babe Ruth era of the 1920s), the Golden Age of Baseball. Like most people in the valley, I was a diehard Yankees fan and, in a pinch, a Mets fan. They were New York teams, and most New Englanders rooted for the Boston Red Sox, but our end of Connecticut was geographically and culturally closer to New York than Boston, and that’s where our loyalties went.

And what was not to love? The Yankees ruled the earth in those days. The great Roger Maris set one Major League record after another and even he was almost always one hit shy of Mickey Mantle, God on High of the Green Diamond.”

********************

“For the first time in my life, I was eating well and from plates—glass plates, no less, not out of the frying pan because somebody lost all the plates in the last move. Now when we ate, we sat at a fine round oak table in sturdy chairs that matched. No one rushed through the meal or argued over who got the biggest portion, and we ate three times a day.”

********************

 “The single greatest influence in our lives was the church. The Catholic Church in the 1960s differs from what it is today, especially in the Naugatuck Valley, in those days an overwhelmingly conservative Catholic place.

I was part of what might have been the last generation of American Catholic children who completely and unquestioningly accepted the sernatural as real. Miracles happened. Virgin birth and transubstantiation made perfect sense. Mere humans did in fact, become saints. There was a Holy Ghost. Guardian angels walked beside us and our patron saints really did put in a good word for us every now and then.”

********************

“Henry read it and said, “A story has to have three things. They are a beginning, a middle and an end. They don’t have to be in that order. You can start a story at the end or end it in the middle. There are no rules on that except where you, the author, decide to put all three parts. Your story has a beginning and an end. But it’s good. Go put in a middle and bring it back to me.”

I went away encouraged, rewrote the story and returned it to him two days later. Again he looked it over and said, “It’s a good story but it lacks a bullet-between-the-eyes opening. Your stories should always have a knock-’em-dead opening.” Then, looking with exaggerated suspicion around the crime-prone denizens of the room with an exaggerated suspicion, he said loudly, “I don’t mean that literally.”

********************

“A few days after I began my short story, I returned to his desk and handed him my dates. He pushed his wire-rimmed reading glasses way  on his nose and focused on the two pages. “Okay, you got a beginning; you got yourself a middle and an end. You got a wing-dinger opening line. But you don’t have an establishing paragraph. Do you know what that is?”

He didn’t wait for me to answer.

“It’s kinda like an outdated road map for the reader,” he said. “It gives the reader a general idea of where you’re taking him, but doesn’t tell him exactly how you intend to get there, which is all he needs to know.”

********************

“I don’t know’,” he said. “Those three words from a willing soul are the start of a grand and magnificent voyage.” And with that he began a discourse that lasted for several weeks, covering scene-setting, establishing conflict, plot twists, and first- and third-person narration. [ I learned in these rapid-fire mini-dissertations that like most literature lovers I would come to know, Henry was a book snob. He assumed that if a current author was popular and widely enjoyed, then he or she had no merit. He made a few exceptions, such as Kurt Vonnegut, although that was mostly because Vonnegut lived on Cape Cod and so he probably had some merits as a human being, if not as a writer.

I think that the way Henry saw it was that he was not being a snob. In fact I would venture that in his view of things, snobbery had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was a matter of standards. It was bout quality in the author’s craftsmanship.”

********************

 “The foundries were vast, dark castles built for efficiency, not comfort. Even in the mild New England summers, when the warm air combined with the stagnant heat from the machines or open flames in the huge melting rooms where the iron was cast, the effects were overwhelming. The heat came in unrelenting waves and sucked the soul from your body. In the winter, the enormous factories were impossible to heat and frigid New England air reigned sreme in the long halls.

The work was difficult, noisy, mind-numbing, sometimes dangerous and highly regulated. Bathroom and lunch breaks were scheduled  to the second. There was no place to make a private phone call. Company guards, dressed in drab uniforms straight out of a James Cagney prison film [those films were in black and white, notoriously tough, weren’t there to guard company property. They were there to keep an eye on us.

No one entered or the left the building without punching in or out on a clock, because the doors were locked and opened electronically from the main office.”

********************

 “So he sings,” he continued as if Denny had said nothing. “His solo mio, that with her in his life he is rich because she is so beautiful that she makes the sun more beautiful, you understand?” And at that he dropped the hoe, closed his eyes and spread out his arms wide and with the fading sun shining on his handsome face he sang:

Che bella cosa è na jurnata 'e sole

n'aria serena doppo na tempesta!

Pe' ll'aria fresca pare già na festa

Che bella cosa e' na jurnata 'e sole

Ma n'atu sole,

cchiù bello, oi ne'

'O sole mio

sta 'nfronte a te!

'O sole, 'o sole mio

sta 'nfronte a te!

sta 'nfronte a te!

It looked like fun. We dropped our tools and joined him, belting out something that sounded remarkably like Napolitano. We sang as loud as we could, holding on to each note as long as we could before we ran out of breath, and then we sang again, occasionally dropping to one knee, holding our hands over our hearts with exaggerated looks of deep pain. Although we made the words , we sang with the deepest passion, with the best that we had, with all of our hearts, and that made us artists, great artists, for in that song, we had made all that art is: the creation of something from nothing, fashioned with all of the soul, born from joy.

And as that beautiful summer sun set over Waterbury, the Brass City, the City of Churches, our voices floated above the wonderful aromas of the garden, across the red sky and joined the spirits in eternity.”

********************

“It didn’t last long. Not many good things in a foster kid’s life last long. One day, Maura was gone. Her few things were packed in paper bags and a tearful Miss Louisa carried her out to Miss Hanrahan’s black state-owned Ford sedan with the state emblem on the door, and she was gone. The state had found a foster home that would take a little girl but couldn’t take the rest of us. There were no long goodbyes. She was just gone. I remember having an enormous sense of helplessness when they took her. Maura didn’t know where she were going or long she would be there. She was just gone”

********************

“After another second had passed I added, “But you’re pretty, pretty,” and as soon as I said it I thought, “Pretty, pretty? John, you’re an idiot.” But she squeezed my hand and when I looked at her I saw her entire lovely face was aglow with a wonderful smile, the kind of smile you get when you have won something.

“Why do you rub your fingers together all the time?” she asked me, and I felt the breath leave my body and gasped for air. She had seen me do my crazy finger thing, my affliction. I clenched my teeth while I searched for a long, exaggerated lie to tell her about why I did what I did. I didn’t want to be the crazy kid with tics, I wanted to be James Bond 007, so slick ice avoided me.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I bite my nails, see?” and she showed me the backs of her hands. Her finger nails were painted a color I later learned was puce.

“My Dad, he blinks all the time, he doesn’t know why either,” she continued. She looked  her feet and said, “I shouldn’t have asked you that. I’m really nervous and I say stid things when I’m nervous. I’m a girl and this is my first date, and for girls this really is a very big deal.”

I understood completely. I was so nervous I couldn’t feel my toes, so I started moving them  and  to make sure they were still there.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I don’t know why I do that with my fingers; it’s a thing I do.”

“Well, you’re really cute when you do it,” she said.

“I know,” I said, and I don’t know why I said it, but I did.”

********************

“So began my love affair with books. Years later, as a college student, I remember having a choice between a few slices of pizza that would have held me over for a day or a copy of On the Road. I bought the book. I would have forgotten what the pizza tasted like, but I still remember Kerouac.

The world was mine for the reading. I traveled with my books. I was there on a tramp steamer in the North Atlantic with the Hardy Boys, piecing together an unsolvable crime. I rode into the Valley of Death with the six hundred and I stood at the graves of Uncas and Cora and listened to the mournful song of the Lenni Linape. Although I braved a frozen death at Valley Forge and felt the spin of a hundred bullets at Shiloh, I was never afraid. I was there as much as you are where you are, right this second. I smelled the gunsmoke and tasted the frost. And it was good to be there. No one could harm me there. No one could punch me, slap me, call me stid, or pretend I wasn’t in the room. The other kids raced through books so they could get the completion stamp on their library card. I didn’t care about that stid completion stamp. I didn’t want to race through books. I wanted books to walk slowly through me, stop, and touch my brain and my memory. If a book couldn’t do that, it probably wasn’t a very good book. Besides, it isn’t how much you read, it’s what you read.

What I learned from books, from young Ben Franklin’s anger at his brother to Anne Frank’s longing for the way her life used to be, was that I wasn’t alone in my pain. All that caused me such anguish affected others, too, and that connected me to them and that connected me to my books. I loved everything about books. I loved that odd sensation of turning the final page, realizing the story had ended, and feeling that I was saying a last goodbye to a new friend.”

********************

“I had developed a very complicated and little-understood disorder called misophonia, which means “hatred of sound.” Certain sounds act as triggers that turn me from a Teddy bear into an agitated grizzly bear. People with misophonia are annoyed, sometimes to the point of rage, by ordinary sounds such as people eating, breathing, sniffing, or coughing, certain consonants, or repetitive sounds. Those triggers, and there are dozens of them, set off anxiety and avoidant behaviors.

What is a mild irritation for most people -- the person who keeps sniffling, a buzzing fly in a closed room—those are major irritants to people with misophonia because we have virtually no ability to ignore those sounds, and life can be a near constant bombardment of noises that bother us. I figured out that the best way to cope was to avoid the triggers. So I turned off the television at certain sounds and avoided loud people. All of these things gave me a reputation as a high-strung, moody and difficult child. I knew my overreactions weren’t normal. My playmates knew it”

********************

“Sometimes in the midst of our darkest moments it’s easy to forget that it’s  to us to turn on the light, but that’s what I did. I switched on the light, the light of cognizance.”

********************

 “I don’t know what I would have done if they had hugged me. I probably would have frozen in place, become stiff. It took most of my life to overcome my distaste for physical contact and not to stiffen when I was touched, or flinch, twitch, fidget, and eventually figure out how to move away. I learned to accept being hugged by my children when they were infants. Their joy at seeing me enter a room was real and filled with true love and affection and it showed in their embraces. Like a convert, when I learned the joy and comfort of being hugged by and hugging those I loved, I became a regular practitioner.”

********************

“Most people don’t understand how mighty the power of touch is, how mighty a kind word can be, how important a listening ear is, or how giving an honest compliment can move the child who has not known those things, only watched them from afar. As insignificant as they can be, they have the power to change a life.”

********************

 “They were no better than common thieves. They stole our childhood. But even with that, I was heartbroken that I would not know the Wozniaks anymore, the only people who came close to being parents to me. I would be conscious of their absence for the rest of my life. I needed them. You know, if you think about it, we all need each other. But even with all of the evidence against the Wozniaks, I had conflicted emotions about them, then and now. They were the closest I had to a real family and real parents.

But now I was bankrt of any feelings at all towards them at all.

I felt then, and feel now, a great sense of loss. I felt as if I were burying them. when I never really had them to lose in the first place. Disillusioned is probably a better word. In fact the very definition of disillusionment is a sense of loss for something you never had. When you are disillusioned and disappointed enough times, you shoping. That’s what happens to many foster kids. We become loners, not because we enjoy the solitude, but because we let people into our lives and they disappoint us. So we close  and travel alone. Even in a crowd, we’re alone.

Because I survived, I was one of the lucky ones. Why is it so hard to articulate love, yet so easy to express disappointment?”

********************

“My first and lasting impression of the Connecticut River Valley is its serene beauty, especially in the autumn months. Deep River was a near picture-perfect New England village. When I arrived there, the town was a typical working-class place, nothing like the trendy per-income enclave it became. The town center had a cluster of shops, a movie theater open only on weekends, several white-steepled churches (none of them Catholic), the town hall, and a Victorian library. It was small, even by Ansonia standards.”

********************

 “While I may not have been a bastion of good mental health, many of these boys were on their way to becoming crazier than they already were. Most couldn’t relate to other people socially at all, because they only dealt inappropriately with other people or didn’t respond to overtures of friendship or even engage in basic conversations.

Some became too familiar with you too fast, following their new, latest friend everywhere, including the showers, insisting on giving you items that were dear to them and sharing everything else. They also had the awful habit of touching other people, putting their hands on you as a sign of affection or friendship, and for people like myself, with my affliction and disdain for being touched unless I wanted to be touched, these guys were a nightmare. It was often difficult to get word in edgewise with these kids, and when I did, they interrted me—not in some obnoxious way, but because they wanted to be included in every single aspect of everything you did.

The other ones, the stone-cold silent ones, reacted with deep suspicion toward even the slightest attempt to befriend them or the smallest show of kindness. If you touched some of these children, even accidentally, they would warn you to back away. They didn’t care what others thought of them or anything else, and almost all their talk concerned punching and hurting and maiming.

I noticed that most of these kids, the ones who were truly damaged, were eventually filtered out of St. John’s to who knows where. Institutions have a way of protecting themselves from future problems.”

********************

“Jesus,” I prayed silently, “please fix it so that my turn to read won’t come around.”

And then the nun called my name, but before I stood I thought, “I’ll bet you think this is funny, huh, Jesus?”

I stood and stared at the sentence assigned to me and believed that, through some miracle, I would suddenly be able to read it and not be humiliated. I stood there and stared at it until the children started giggling and snickering and Sister told me to sit.”

********************

 “My affliction decided to join us, forcing me to push my toes on the floor as though I were trying to eject myself from the chair. I prayed she didn’t notice what the affliction was making me do. I half expected to be eaten alive or murdered and buried out back in the school yard.

“I’m not afraid of you, ya know,” I said, although I was terrified of her. The words hurt her, but that wasn’t my intent. She turned her face and looked out the window into North Cliff Street. She knew what her face and twisted body looked like, and she probably knew what the kids said about her. It was probably an open wound for her and I had just tossed salt into it.

I was instantly ashamed of what I done and tried to correct myself. I didn’t mean to be hurtful, because I knew what it was like to be ridiculed for something that was beyond one’s control, such as my affliction, and how it made me afraid to touch the chalk because the feel of chalk to people like me is overwhelming. If I had to write on the blackboard, I held the chalk with the cuff of my shirt and the class laughed.

“You look good in a nun’s suit,” I said. It was a stid thing to say, but I meant well by it. She looked  at the black robe as if she were seeing it for the first time.”

********************

“Jews were a frequent topic of conversation with all of the Wozniaks, which was surprising, since none of them had any contact at all with anything even remotely Jewish.

While watching television, Walter would point out who was and who was not Jewish and Helen’s frequent comment when watching the television news was, “And won’t the Jews be happy about that!” To bargain with a merchant for a lower price was to “Jew him ,” and that sort of thing.

Walter’s mother and father were far worse. They despised the Jews and blamed them for everything from the start of World War I to the Kennedy assassination to the rising price of beef.

I didn’t pay much heed to any of this. It wasn’t my problem, and if I were to think through all the ethnic, racial and religious barbs the Wozniaks threw out in the course of a week, I’d think about nothing else.

After being told about a part of my mother’s heritage, the Wozniaks began their verbal and cultural assault against us. As odd as it sounds, they might not always have intended to be mean.”

********************

“Explaining the Jews in a Catholic school when you’re Irish is like having to explain your country’s foreign policy while on a vacation in France. You don’t know what you’re talking about and no matter what you say, they’re not going to like it anyway.”

********************

 “You could read the story of his entire life on his face in one glance.”

********************

 “As interesting as that was, it didn’t inspire me. What did was that here was a Jew who was tough with his fists, a Jew who fought back. The only Jews I had ever heard of surrendered or were beaten by the Romans, the Egyptians, or the Nazis. You name it, it seemed like everyone on earth at some point had taken their turn slapping the Jews around. But not Benny Leonard. I figured you’d have to kill Benny Leonard before he surrendered.”

********************

“One afternoon Walter brought Izzy to the house for lunch and, pointing to me, he said to Izzy, “He’s one of your tribe.”

Dobkins lifted his head to look at me and after a few seconds said, “I don’t see it.”

“The mother’s a Jew,” Walter answered, as if he were describing the breeding of a mongrel dog.

“Then you are a Jew,” Izzy said, and sort of blessed me with his salami sandwich.”

********************

“Sometimes a man must stand for what is right and sometimes you must simply walk away and suffer the babblings of weak-minded fools or try to change their minds. It’s like teachin’ a pig to sing. It is a waste of your time and it annoys the pig.”

********************

 “Father, I can’t take this,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a priest, Father.”

“And my money’s no good because of it? What are you? A member of the Masonic Lodge?”

“Naw, Father,” I said. “I just feel guilty taking money from you.”

“Well, you’re Irish and Jewish. You have to feel guilty over somethin’, don’t ya? Take the money and be happy ye have it.”

― John William Tuohy, No time to say goodbye: memoirs of a life n foster care

********************

 “I caddied—more accurately, I drove the golf cart—for Father O’Leary and his friends throughout most of the summer of that year. I was a good caddie because I saw nothing when they passed the bottle of whiskey and turned a deaf ear to yet another colorful reinvention of the words “motherless son of a bitch from hell” when the golf ball betrayed them.”

********************

“Weeks turned into months and a year passed, but I didn’t miss my parents. I missed the memory of them. I assumed that part of my life was over. I didn’t understand that I was required to have an attachment to them, to these people I barely knew. Rather, it was my understanding that I was sposed to switch my attachment to my foster parents. So I acted on that notion and no one corrected me, so I assumed that what I was doing was good and healthy.”

********************

“I felt empty a lot and I sometimes had a sense—and I know this sounds strange—that I really had no existence as my own person, that I could disappear and no one would notice or remember that I had ever existed. It is a terrifying thing to live with. I kept myself busy to avoid that feeling, because somehow being busy made me feel less empty.”

********************

“Denny thought our parents needed a combination of material goods and temperamental changes before he could return home.

“If Dad buys Ma a car, then she’ll love him, and they’ll get back together and she won’t be all crazy anymore,” he said. For years he held out the possibility that those things would happen and all would change. “If we had more things, like stoves and cars,” he told me at night in our bedroom, “and Ma wasn’t like she is, we could go home.”

********************

 “Because we were raised in a bigoted and hate-filled home, we simply assumed that calling someone a “cheap Jew” or saying someone “Jewed him ” were perfectly acceptable ways to communicate. Or at least we did until the day came when I called one of the cousins, a Neanderthal DeRosa boy, “a little Jew,” and he told me he wasn’t the Jew, that I was the Jew, and he even got Helen and Nana to confirm it for him.

It came as a shock to me to find out we were a part of this obviously terrible tribe of skinflint, trouble-making, double-dealing, shrewdly smart desert people. When Denny found out, he was crestfallen because he had assumed that being Jewish meant, according to what his former foster family the Skodiens had taught him, a life behind a desk crunching numbers. “And I hate math,” he said, shaking his head.

So here we were, accused Jews living in a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Not a good situation. Walter’s father was the worst. Learning about our few drops of Jewish blood seemed to ignite a special, long-held hatred in him. He became vile over nothing, finding any excuse to deride the Jews in front of us until Helen made him stop. We didn’t know what to make of it, except to write it off as another case of Wozniak-inspired insanity, but as young as we were, we could tell that at some point in his life he had crossed swords with a Jew someplace and came out on the losing end and we were going to pay for it. But because we really didn’t feel ourselves to be Jews, it didn’t sink in that he intended to hurt us with his crazy tirades. As I said, it’s hard to insult somebody when they don’t understand the insult, and it’s equally hard to insult them when they out and out refuse to be insulted.

Word got around quickly.”

********************

“I hit him for every single thing that was wrong in my life and kicked him in a fierce fury of madness as he sobbed and covered his face and screamed. I hit him because Walter hit me and I hit him because I hated my life and I hit him because I just wanted to go home and I hit him because I didn’t know where home was.”

********************

 “I also told him about the dramatic, vivid verbal picture of God that the nuns drew for us—an enormous, slightly dangerous and very touchy guy with white hair and a long white beard.

“It’s all the talk of feeble minds,” he whispered to me in confidence. “Those nuns know as much about prayer as they do about sex. Listen to me, now. God is everywhere and alive in everything, while them nuns figured God is as good as dead, a recluse in a permanently bad mood. Well, I refuse to believe that to my God, my maker and creator, my life is little more than a dice game.” He stopped and turned and looked at me and said, “Never believe that a life full of sin puts you on a direct route to hell. Even if you only know a little bit about God, you learn pretty quick that he’s big on U-turns, dead stops and starting over again.”

As each day passes and my memories of Father O’Leary and Sister Emmarentia fade, and I can no longer recall their faces or the sounds of their voices as clearly as I could a decade ago, what remains, clear and uncluttered, are the lessons I took from them.”

********************

 “Eventually, many years later, I came to see him the way everyone else saw him—a nice guy who, despite all the damage he did to us, wasn’t a bad man, not inherently bad, anyway. He just wasn’t very bright, and was in over his head on almost every level of life. He was capable of only so much and not a drop more, and because he seemed so harmless and lost, people not only liked him, they protected him.

My mother, despite her poverty, left the opposite impression. She left no doubt that she was psychologically tough and mentally sharp, and because of that the Wozniaks disliked her.

And that was another difference between my mother and father. My father was a whiner, a complainer, a perpetually unhappy man unable to comprehend the simple fact that sometimes life is unfair. My mother never complained, and yet her poverty-stricken life was miserable. She never carried on about the early death of her raging alcoholic mother, or the father who raped her, or of a diet dictated by the restrictions of food stamps.”

********************

SAMPLE CHAPTER

Chapter One

 To read the first 12 chapters of this book, visit it's BlogSpot @             amemoirofalifeinfostercare.blogspot.com/

Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

   I am here because I worked too hard and too long not to be here. But although I told the university that I would walk across the stage to take my diploma, I won't. At age fifty-seven, I'm too damned old, and I'd look ridiculous in this crowd. From where I'm standing in the back of the hall, I can see that I am at least two decades older than most of the parents of these kids in their black caps and gowns.

  So I'll graduate with this class, but I won't walk across the stage and collect my diploma with them; I'll have the school send it to my house. I only want to hear my name called. I'll imagine what the rest would have been like. When you've had a life like mine, you learn to do that, to imagine the good things.

  The ceremony is about to begin. It's a warm June day and a hallway of glass doors leading to the parking lot are open, the dignitaries march onto the stage, a janitor slams the doors shut, one after the other. 

  That banging sound.

  It's Christmas Day 1961 and three Waterbury cops are throwing their bulk against our sorely overmatched front door. They are wearing their long woolen blue coats and white gloves and they swear at the cold.

  They've finally come for us, in the dead of night, to take us away, just as our mother said they would.

  "They'll come and get you kids," she screamed at us, "and put youse all in an orphanage where you'll get the beatin's youse deserve, and there won't be no food either."

  That's why we're terrified, that's why we don't open the door and that's how I remember that night. I was six years old then, one month away from my seventh birthday. My older brother, the perpetually-worried, white-haired Paulie, was ten. He is my half-brother, actually, although I have never thought of him that way. He was simply my brother. My youngest brother, Denny, was six; Maura, the baby, was four; and Bridget, our auburn-haired leader, my half -sister, was twelve.

  We didn't know where our mother was. The welfare check, and thank God for it, had arrived, so maybe she was at a gin mill downtown spending it all, as she had done a few times before.

 Maybe she'd met yet another guy, another barfly, who wouldn't be able to remember our names because his beer-soaked brain can't remember anything. We are thankful that he'll disappear after the money runs out or the social worker lady comes around and tells him he has to leave because the welfare won't pay for him as well as for us. It snowed that day and after the snow had finished falling, the temperature dropped and the winds started.

  "Maybe she went to Brooklyn," Paulie said, as we walked through the snow to the Salvation Army offices one that afternoon before the cops came for us.

  "She didn't go back to New York," Bridget snapped. "She probably just--"

  "She always says she gonna leave and go back home to Brooklyn," I interrupted.

  "Yeah," Denny chirped, mostly because he was determined to be taken as our equal in all things, including this conversation.

  We walked along in silence for a second, kicking the freshly fallen snow from our paths, and then Paulie added what we were all thinking: "Maybe they put her back in Saint Mary's."

  No one answered him. Instead, we fell into our own thoughts, recalling how, several times in the past, when too much of life came at our mother at once, she broke down and lay in bed for weeks in a dark room, not speaking and barely eating. It was a frightening and disturbing thing to watch.

  "It don't matter," Bridget snapped again, more out of exhaustion than anything else. She was always cranky. The weight of taking care of us, and of being old well before her time, strained her. "It don't matter," she mumbled.

  It didn't matter that night either, that awful night, when the cops were at the door and she wasn't there. We hadn't seen our mother for two days, and after that night, we wouldn't see her for another two years.

  When we returned home that day, the sun had gone down and it was dark inside the house because we hadn't paid the light bill. We never paid the bills, so the lights were almost always off and there was no heat because we didn't pay that bill either. And now we needed the heat. We needed the heat more than we needed the lights.

The cold winter winds pushed up at us from the Atlantic Ocean and down on us from frigid Canada and battered our part of northwestern Connecticut, shoving freezing drifts of snow against the paper-thin walls of our ramshackle house and covering our windows in a thick veneer of silver-colored ice.

  The house was built around 1910 by the factories to house immigrant workers mostly brought in from southern Italy. These mill houses weren't built to last. They had no basements; only four windows, all in the front; and paper-thin walls. Most of the construction was done with plywood and tarpaper. The interiors were long and narrow and dark.

 Bridget turned the gas oven on to keep us warm. "Youse go get the big mattress and bring it in here by the stove," she commanded us. Denny, Paulie, and I went to the bed that was in the cramped living room and wrestled the stained and dark mattress, with some effort, into the kitchen. Bridget covered Maura in as many shirts as she could find, in a vain effort to stop the chills that racked her tiny and frail body and caused her to shake.

  We took great pains to position the hulking mattress in exactly the right spot by the stove and then slid, fully dressed, under a pile of dirty sheets, coats, and drapes that was our blanket. We squeezed close to fend off the cold, the baby in the middle and the older kids at the ends.

  "Move over, ya yutz, ya," Paulie would say to Denny and me because half of his butt was hanging out onto the cold linoleum floor. We could toss insults in Yiddish. We learned them from our mother, whose father was a Jew and who grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in New York.

  I assumed that those words we learned were standard American English, in wide and constant use across our great land. It wasn't until I was in my mid-twenties and moved from the Naugatuck Valley and Connecticut that I came to understand that most Americans would never utter a sentence like, "You and your fakakta plans".

  We also spoke with the Waterbury aversion to the sound of the letter "T," replacing it with the letter "D," meaning that "them, there, those, and these" were pronounced "dem, dere, dose, and dese." We were also practitioners of "youse," the northern working-class equivalent to "you-all," as in "Are youse leaving or are youse staying?"

  "Move in, ya yutz, ya," Paulie said again with a laugh, but we didn't move because the only place to move was to push Bridget off the mattress, which we were not about to do because Bridget packed a wallop that could probably put a grown man down. Then Paulie pushed us, and at the other end of the mattress, Bridget pushed back with a laugh, and an exaggerated, rear-ends pushing war for control of the mattress broke out.

From the Inside Flap

By Dr. Wm. Anthony Connolly

This incredible memoir, No Time to Say Goodbye, tells of entertaining angels, dancing with devils, and of the abandoned children many viewed simply as raining manna from some lesser god.

The young and unfortunate lives of the Tuohy bruins—sometimes Irish, sometimes Jewish, often Catholic, rambunctious, but all imbued with Lion’s hearts—told here with brutal honesty leavened with humor and laudable introspective forgiveness. The memoir will have you falling to your knees thanking that benevolent Irish cop in the sky, your lucky stars, or hugging the oxygen out of your own kids the fate foisted upon Johnny and his siblings does not and did not befall your own brood. John William Tuohy, a nationally-recognized authority on organized crime and Irish levity, is your trusted guide through the weeds the decades of neglect ensnared he and his brothers and sisters, all suffering for the impersonal and often mercenary taint of the foster care system. Theirs, and Tuohy’s, story is not at all figures of speech as this review might suggest, but all too real and all too sad, and maddening. I wanted to scream. I wanted to get into a time machine, go back and adopt every last one of them. I was angry. I was captivated. The requisite damning verities of foster care are all here, regretfully, but what sets this story above others is its beating heart, even a bruised and broken one, still willing to forgive and understand, and continue to aid its walking wounded. I cannot recommend this book enough.

AMAZON REVIEWS

By jackieh on October 13, 2015

After reading about John's deeply personal and painful past, I just wanted to hug the child within him......and hug all the children who were thrown into the state's foster system....it is an amazing read.......

By Jane Pogoda on October 9, 2015

I truly enjoyed reading his memoir. I also grew up in Ansonia and had no idea conditions such as these existed. The saving grace is knowing the author made it out and survived the system. Just knowing he was able to have a family of his own made me happy. I attended the same grammar school and was happy that his experience there was not negative. I had a wonderful experience in that school. I wish that I could have been there for him when he was at the school since we were there at probably at the same time.

By Sue on September 27, 2015

Hi - just finished your novel "No time to say goodbye" - what a powerful read!!! - I bought it for my 90 year old mom who is an avid reader and lived in the valley all her life-she loved it also along with my sister- we are all born and raised in the valley- i.e. Derby and Ansonia

By David A. Wright on September 7, 2015

I enjoyed this book. I grew up in Ansonia CT and went to the Assumption School. Also reconized all the places he was talking about and some of the families.

By Robert G Manley on September 7, 2015

This is a wonderfully written book. It is heart wrenchingly sad at times and the next minute hilariously funny. I attribute that to the intelligence and wit of the author who combines the humor and pathos of his Irish catholic background and horrendous "foster kid" experience. He captures each character perfectly and the reader can easily visualize the individuals the author has to deal with on daily basis. Having lived part of my life in the parochial school system and having lived as a child in the same neighborhood as the author, I was vividly brought back to my childhood .Most importantly, it shows the strength of the soul and how just a little compassion can be so important to a lost child.

By LNA on July 9, 2015

John Tuohy writes with compelling honesty, and warmth. I grew up in Ansonia, CT myself, so it makes it even more real. He brings me immediately back there with his narrative, while he wounds my soul, as I realize I had no idea of the suffering of some of the children around me. His story is a must read, of courage and great spirit in the face of impoverishment, sorrow, and adult neglect. I could go on and on, but just get the book. If you're like me, you'll soon be reading it out loud to any person in the room who will listen. Many can suffer and overcome as they go through it, but few can find the words that take us through the story. John is a gifted writer to be able to do that.

By Barbara Pietruszka on June 29, 2015

I am from Connecticut so I was very familiar with many locations described in the book especially Ansonia where I lived. I totally enjoyed the book and would like to know more about the author. I recommend the book to everyone

By Joanne B. on June 28, 2015

What an emotional rollercoaster. I laughed. I cried. Once you start reading it's hard to stop. I was torn between wanting to gulp it up and read over and over each quote that started the chapter. I couldn't help but feel part of the Tuohy clan. I wanted to scream in their defense. It's truly hard to believe the challenges that foster children face. I can only pray that this story may touch even one person facing this life. It's an inspiring read. That will linger long after you finish it. This is a wonderfully written memoir that immediately pulls you in to the lives of the Tuohy family.

By Paul Day on June 15, 2015

Great reading. Life in foster care told from a very rare point of view.

By Jackie Malkes on June 5, 2015

This book is definitely a must for social workers working with children specifically. This is an excellent memoir which identifies the trails of foster children in the 1960s in the United States. The memoir captures stories of joy as well as nail biting terror, as the family is at times torn apart but finds each other later and finds solace in the experiences of one another. The stories capture the love siblings have for one another as well as the protection they have for one another in even the worst of circumstances. On the flip side, one of the most touching stories to me was when a Nun at the school helped him to read-- truly an example of how a positive person really helped to shape the author in times when circumstances at home were challenging and treacherous. I found the book to be a page turner and at times show how even in the hardest of circumstances there was a need to live and survive and make the best of any moment. The memoir is eye-opening and helped to shed light and make me feel proud of the volunteer work I take part in with disadvantaged children. Riveting....Must read....memory lane on steroids....Catholic school banter, blue color towns...Lawrence Welk on Sundays night's.

By Eileen on June 4, 2015

From ' No time to say Goodbye 'and authors John W. Touhys Gangster novels, his style never waivers...humorous to sadness to candidly realistic situations all his writings leaves the reader in awe......longing for more.

By karen pojakene on June 1, 2015

This book is a must-read for anyone who administers to the foster care program in any state. This is not a "fell through the cracks" life story, but rather a memoir of a life guided by strength and faith and a hard determination to survive. it is heartening to know that the "sewer" that life can become to steal our personal peace can be fought and our peace can be restored, scarred, but restored.

By Michelle Black on

A captivating, shocking, and deeply moving memoir, No Time to Say Goodbye is a true page turner. John shares the story of his childhood, from the struggles of living in poverty to being in the foster care system and simply trying to survive. You will be cheering for him all the way, as he never loses his will to thrive even in the darkest and bleakest of circumstances. This memoir is a very truthful and unapologetic glimpse into the way in which some of our most vulnerable citizens have been treated in the past and are still being treated today. It is truly eye-opening, and hopefully will inspire many people to take action in protection of vulnerable children.

By Kimberly on May 24, 2015

I found myself in tears while reading this book. John William Tuohy writes quite movingly about the world he grew up in; a world in which I had hoped did not exist within the foster care system. This book is at times funny, raw, compelling, heartbreaking and disturbing. I found myself rooting for John as he tries to escape from an incredibly difficult life. You will too!

By Geoffrey A. Childs on May 20, 2015

I found this book to be a compelling story of life in the Ct foster care system. at times disturbing and at others inspirational ,The author goes into great detail in this gritty memoir of His early life being abandoned into the states system and his subsequent escape from it. Every once in a while a book or even an article in a newspaper comes along that bears witness to an injustice or even something that's just plain wrong. This chronicle of the foster care system is such a book and should be required reading for any aspiring social workers.

The art and joy of cinematography

Saturday Night Fever

                                                            

World's richest 62 people are as wealthy as the poorest 50 percent

Matt Moreno

The gap between the poor and extremely rich is widening, and it's a troubling trend, 

The annual Oxfam International report says the world's 62 richest people have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the world. For comparison, it took 80 billionaires last year to make up half the world's wealth. Further back in 2010, that number was 388.

According to the report, there's been a drastic change of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

Since 2010, the wealth of the world's poorest has dropped by about $1 trillion, or 41 percent. The wealthiest have seen their riches rise by about $540 billion in that same time frame.

Oxfam's executive director said, "World leaders' concern about the escalating inequality crisis has so far not translated into concrete action — the world has become a much more unequal place and the trend is accelerating."

The report from Oxfam, a worldwide antipoverty group, was intentionally released shortly before the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland), where some of the world's wealthiest businesspeople and most powerful politicians will gather to discuss solutions to world poverty.

How Groucho Marx invented modern comedy

LEE SIEGEL

In 1929, the Marx Brothers hurtled onto the silver screen in The Cocoanuts and permanently changed popular culture.

For the first time, startled audiences in the US were presented with the spectacle of people conducting themselves in a social situation as if they were not in a social situation at all, but alone, in the privacy of their own homes.

Today, it’s fair to ask a question about how this shift has turned out. When comedy depends so much on the shattering of public taboos by the exposure of private behaviour, where does comedy go when all the taboos have been shattered?

The Marx Brothers’ explosion of private into public was a revelation. We rarely, if ever, say what we are really thinking when we are in public. If everyone did that, society would fall apart in a New York minute.

Imagine that you are an impecunious ne’er-do-well who is courting a wealthy woman. If she said to you, with wounded scepticism, “I don’t think you’d love me if I were poor,” you could well think to yourself, “I might, but I’d keep my mouth shut.” You could well think that. But no. You would never say it.

Yet that is exactly how Groucho, who finds himself in that very situation in The Cocoanuts, responds. At the same time, Harpo chases women around while honking his horn, a long stick with a rubber bulb at the bottom that he squeezes as he tears after them. And Chico mangles the English language in extravagant billows of mendacity to try to get what he wants.

These are not people who merely act on their impulses. These are people who lack a filter between their conscious and unconscious, and who refuse to stop being themselves no matter what social boundaries and prohibitions surround them.

By now the collapse of private into public is an old story. There are few, if any, human experiences that haven’t been represented in movies, on television, in popular fiction or in popular songs, or in a comic’s routines above all.

Louis C.K. has “joked” about hating children and gay people, having sexual intercourse with young girls and the atrocities of 9/11. In other words, he has obliterated the boundaries of vanity and pride that restrain most people from giving public utterance to their most private thoughts.

Amy Schumer occupies the same heedless, ego-imploding space: “What’s wrong with you that you want to be with me?” she asks her boyfriend in Trainwreck. Both comedians owe a debt to Groucho, who wrote in his legendary resignation letter: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”

Never mind that, in actuality, Groucho resigned from the club not in a funk of self-hatred but because he felt superior to the other members. There is a reason that his offhand quip has lived into posterity. It presents the shocking spectacle of a person abolishing the healthy self-respect and self-interest that, in the aggregate, hold a society together.

The Marx Brothers excelled at destroying their integrity as people, and from that point on, comedy began to race past the simple act of making people laugh.

Once supposedly funny movies depicted a bunch of actors burning books, as the Marxes do in Horse Feathers, humiliating and finally cuckolding a harmless lemonade vendor, as they do in Duck Soup, or impersonating a doctor and treating a kind, elderly and trusting dowager with a horse-pill, as Groucho does in A Day at the Races, a Pandora’s box of human darkness sprang open. Comedy got set on a path toward the destination it has reached today, where the simple act of saying the publicly unsayable has become more important than the well-constructed joke or the elaborate comic routine.

Perhaps this dizzying, unobstructed freedom is why so many comedians now strive harder and harder for outlaw status, as if defiantly insisting that they will never belong to any club that would have them as a member.

Having shamed and defeated all the prohibitions that used to justify comedy’s existence, comedians now seem to be yearning for good old-fashioned censure and repression, simply to feel alive as comedians.

Some of this comedy is liberating, skirting a type of seriousness, even tragedy, in its forays into the dark corners of psychology and society. Yet some people understandably long for the simpler art of making people laugh.

How would Groucho respond? Probably by suggesting, in his usual mode, that they should keep their mouths shut. Saying where you draw the line in comedy could well be the only forbidden thing left to say.

Lee Siegel is the author, most recently, of Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence, just published by Yale University Press.

I LOVE BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS FROM FILM

Smoke and Lovers, Memphis, 1992, Frank Stewart

Weegee

 

 Available at Amazon Books or at Barnes and Noble 

The Observation and Appreciation of Architecture

A region of the sky in the constellation of Sagittarius

False-color composite of Titan, moon of Saturn, created with images taken during the Cassini space probe’s closest flyby of the moon on April 16, 2005.

NGC 602 and Beyond by NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage team

ROGER TOUHY, THE LAST GANGSTER

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

JFK's pardons and the mob; Prohibition, Chicago's crime cadres and the staged kidnapping of "`Jake the Barber'" Factor, "the black sheep brother of the cosmetics king, Max Factor"; lifetime sentences, attempted jail busts and the perseverance of "a rumpled private detective and an eccentric lawyer" John W. Tuohy showcases all these and more sensational and shady happenings in When Capone's Mob Murdered Roger Touhy: The Strange Case of Touhy, Jake the Barber and the Kidnapping that Never Happened. The author started investigating Touhy's 1959 murder by Capone's gang in 1975 for an undergrad assignment. He traces the frame-job whereby Touhy was accused of the kidnapping, his decades in jail, his memoirs, his retrial and release and, finally, his murder, 28 days after regaining his freedom. Sixteen pages of photos.

From Library Journal

Roger Touhy, one of the "terrible Touhys" and leader of a bootlegging racket that challenged Capone's mob in Prohibition Chicago, had a lot to answer for, but the crime that put him behind bars was, ironically, one he didn't commit: the alleged kidnapping of Jake Factor, half-brother of Max Factor and international swindler. Author Tuohy (apparently no relation), a former staff investigator for the National Center for the Study of Organized Crime, briefly traces the history of the Touhys and the Capone mob, then describes Factor's plan to have himself kidnapped, putting Touhy behind bars and keeping himself from being deported. This miscarriage of justice lasted 17 years and ended in Touhy's parole and murder by the Capone mob 28 days later. Factor was never deported. The author spent 26 years researching this story, and he can't bear to waste a word of it. Though slim, the book still seems padded, with irrelevant detail muddying the main story. Touhy is a hard man to feel sorry for, but the author does his best. Sure to be popular in the Chicago area and with the many fans of mob history, this is suitable for larger public libraries and regional collections. Deirdre Bray Root, Middletown P.L., OH

BOOK REVIEW

     John William Tuohy, one of the most prolific crime writers in America, has penned a tragic, but fascinating story of Roger Touhy and John Factor. It's a tale born out of poverty and violence, a story of ambition gone wrong and deception on an enormous, almost unfathomable, scale. However, this is also a story of triumph of determination to survive, of a lifelong struggle for dignity and redemption of the spirit.

     The story starts with John "Jake the Barber" Factor. The product of the turn of the century European ethnic slums of Chicago's west side, Jake's brother, Max Factor, would go on to create an international cosmetic empire.

     In 1926, Factor, grubstaked in a partnership with the great New York criminal genius, Arnold Rothstien, and Chicago's Al Capone, John Factor set up a stock scam in England that fleeced thousands of investors, including members of the royal family, out of $8 million dollars, an incredible sum of money in 1926.

     After the scam fell apart, Factor fled to France, where he formed another syndicate of con artists, who broke the bank at Monte Carlo by rigging the tables.

     Eventually, Factor fled to the safety of Capone's Chicago but the highest powers in the Empire demanded his arrest. However, Factor fought extradition all the way to the United States Supreme Court, but he had a weak case and deportation was inevitable. Just 24 hours before the court was to decide his fate, Factor paid to have himself kidnapped and his case was postponed. He reappeared in Chicago several days later, and, at the syndicates' urging, accused gangster Roger Touhy of the kidnapping.

     Roger "The Terrible" Touhy was the youngest son of an honest Chicago cop. Although born in the Valley, a teeming Irish slum, the family moved to rural Des Plains, Illinois while Roger was still a boy. Touhy's five older brothers stayed behind in the valley and soon flew under the leadership of "Terrible Tommy" O'Connor. By 1933, three of them would be shot dead in various disputes with the mob and one, Tommy, would lose the use of his legs by syndicate machine guns. Secure in the still rural suburbs of Cook County, Roger Touhy graduated as class valedictorian of his Catholic school. Afterwards, he briefly worked as an organizer for the Telegraph and Telecommunications Workers Union after being blacklisted by Western Union for his minor pro-labor activities.

     Touhy entered the Navy in the first world war and served two years, teaching Morse code to Officers at Harvard University.

     After the war, he rode the rails out west where he earned a living as a railroad telegraph operator and eventually made a small but respectable fortune as an oil well speculator.

     Returning to Chicago in 1924, Touhy married his childhood sweetheart, regrouped with his brothers and formed a partnership with a corrupt ward heeler named Matt Kolb, and, in 1925, he started a suburban bootlegging and slot machine operation in northwestern Cook County. Left out of the endless beer wars that plagued the gangs inside Chicago, Touhy's operation flourished. By 1926, his slot machine operations alone grossed over $1,000,000.00 a year, at a time when a gallon of gas cost eight cents.

     They were unusual gangsters. When the Klu Klux Klan, then at the height of its power, threatened the life of a priest who had befriended the gang, Tommy Touhy, Roger's older brother, the real "Terrible Touhy," broke into the Klan's national headquarters, stole its membership roles, and, despite an offer of $25,000 to return them, delivered the list to the priest who published the names in several Catholic newspapers the following day.

     Once, Touhy unthinkingly released several thousand gallons of putrid sour mash in to the Des Plains River one day before the city was to reenact its discovery by canoe-riding Jesuits a hundred years before. After a dressing down by the towns people Touhy spent $10,000.00 on perfume and doused the river with it, saving the day.

     They were inventive too. When the Chicago police levied a 50% protection tax on Touhy's beer, Touhy bought a fleet of Esso gasoline delivery trucks, kept the Esso logo on the vehicles, and delivered his booze to his speakeasies that way.

     In 1930, when Capone invaded the labor rackets, the union bosses, mostly Irish and completely corrupt, turned to the Touhy organization for protection. The intermittent gun battles between the Touhys and the Capone mob over control of beer routes which had been fought on the empty, back roads of rural Cook County, was now brought into the city where street battles extracted an awesome toll on both sides. The Chicago Tribune estimated the casualties to be one hundred dead in less then 12 months.

     By the winter of 1933, remarkably, Touhy was winning the war in large part because joining him in the struggle against the mob was Chicago's very corrupt, newly elected mayor Anthony "Ten percent Tony" Cermak, who was as much a gangster as he was an elected official.

     Cermak threw the entire weight of his office and the whole Chicago police force behind Touhy's forces. Eventually, two of Cermak's police bodyguards arrested Frank Nitti, the syndicate's boss, and, for a price, shot him six times. Nitti lived. As a result, two months later Nitti's gunmen caught up with Cermak at a political rally in Florida.

     Using previously overlooked Secret Service reports, this book proves, for the first time, that the mob stalked Cermak and used a hardened felon to kill him. The true story behind the mob's 1933 murder of Anton Cermak, will changes histories understanding of organized crimes forever. The fascinating thing about this killing is its eerie similarity to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas thirty years later, made even more macabre by the fact that several of the names associated with the Cermak killing were later aligned with the Kennedy killing.

     For many decades, it was whispered that the mob had executed Cermak for his role in the Touhy-syndicate war of 1931-33, but there was never proof. The official story is that a loner named Giuseppe Zangara, an out-of-work, Sicilian born drifter with communist leanings, traveled to Florida in the winter of 1933 and fired several shots at President Franklin Roosevelt. He missed the President, but killed Chicago's Mayor Anton Cermak instead. However, using long lost documents, Tuohy is able to prove that Zangara was a convicted felon with long ties to mob Mafia and that he very much intended to murder Anton Cermak.

     With Cermak dead, Touhy was on his own against the mob. At the same time, the United States Postal Service was closing in on his gang for pulling off the largest mail heists in US history at that time. The cash was used to fund Touhy's war with the Capones.Then in June of 1933, John Factor en he reappeared, Factor accused Roger Touhy of kidnapping him. After two sensational trials, Touhy was convicted of kidnapping John Factor and sentenced to 99 years in prison and Factor, after a series of complicated legal maneuvers, and using the mob's influence, was allowed to remain in the United States as a witness for the prosecution, however, he was still a wanted felon in England.

     By 1942 Roger Touhy had been in prison for nine years, his once vast fortune was gone. Roger's family was gone as well. At his request, his wife Clara had moved to Florida with their two sons in 1934. However, with the help of Touhy's remaining sister, the family retained a rumpled private detective, actually a down-and-out, a very shady and disbarred mob lawyer named Morrie Green.

     Disheveled of not, Green was a highly competent investigator and was able to piece together and prove the conspiracy that landed Touhy in jail. However, no court would hear the case, and by the fall of 1942, Touhy had exhausted every legal avenue open to him.Desperate, Touhy hatched a daring daylight breakout over the thirty foot walls of Stateville prison.The sensational escape ended three months later in a dramatic and bloody shootout between the convicts and the FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover.

     Less then three months after Touhy was captured, Fox Studios hired producer Brian Foy to churn out a mob financed docudrama film on the escape entitled, "Roger Touhy, The Last Gangster." The executive producer on the film was Johnny Roselli, the hood who later introduced Judy Campbell to Frank Sinatra. Touhy sued Fox and eventually won his case and the film was withdrawn from circulation. In 1962, Columbia pictures and John Houston tried to produce a remake of the film, but were scared off the project.

     While Touhy was on the run from prison, John Factor was convicted for m ail fraud and was sentenced and served ten years at hard labor. Factor's take from the scam was $10,000,000.00 in cash.

     Released in 1949, Factor took control of the Stardust Hotel Casino in 1955, then the largest operation on the Vegas strip. The casino's true owners, of course, were Chicago mob bosses Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, Murray Humpreys and Sam Giancana. From 1955 to 1963, the length of Factor's tenure at the casino, the US Justice Department estimated that the Chicago outfit skimmed between forty-eight to 200 million dollars from the Stardust alone.

     In 1956, while Factor and the outfit were growing rich off the Stardust, Roger Touhy hired a quirky, high strung, but highly effective lawyer named Robert B. Johnstone to take his case. A brilliant legal tactician, who worked incessantly on Touhy's freedom, Robert Johnstone managed to get Touhy's case heard before federal judge John P. Barnes, a refined magistrate filled with his own eccentricities. After two years of hearings, Barnes released a 1,500-page decision on Touhy's case, finding that Touhy was railroaded to prison in a conspiracy between the mob and the state attorney's office and that John Factor had kidnapped himself as a means to avoid extradition to England.

     Released from prison in 1959, Touhy wrote his life story "The Stolen Years" with legendary Chicago crime reporter, Ray Brennan. It was Brennan, as a young cub reporter, who broke the story of John Dillenger's sensational escape from Crown Point prison, supposedly with a bar of soap whittled to look like a pistol. It was also Brennan who brought about the end of Roger Touhy's mortal enemy, "Tubbo" Gilbert, the mob owned chief investigator for the Cook County state attorney's office, and who designed the frame-up that placed Touhy behind bars.

     Factor entered a suit against Roger Touhy, his book publishers and Ray Brennan, claiming it damaged his reputation as a "leading citizen of Nevada and a philanthropist."

     The teamsters, Factor's partners in the Stardust Casino, refused to ship the book and Chicago's bookstore owners were warned by Tony Accardo, in person, not to carry the book.

     Touhy and Johnstone fought back by drawing up the papers to enter a $300,000,000 lawsuit against John Factor, mob leaders Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo and Murray Humpreys as well as former Cook County state attorney Thomas Courtney and Tubbo Gilbert, his chief investigator, for wrongful imprisonment.

     The mob couldn't allow the suit to reach court, and considering Touhy's determination, Ray Brennan's nose for a good story and Bob Johnstone's legal talents, there was no doubt the case would make it to court. If the case went to court, John Factor, the outfit's figurehead at the lucrative Stardust Casino, could easily be tied in to illegal teamster loans. At the same time, the McClellan committee was looking into the ties between the teamsters, Las Vegas and organized crime and the raid at the mob conclave in New York state had awakened the FBI and brought them into the fight. So, Touhy's lawsuit was, in effect, his death sentence.

     Twenty-five days after his release from twenty-five years in prison, Roger Touhy was gunned down on a frigid December night on his sister's front door.

     Two years after Touhy's murder, in 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered his Justice Department to look into the highly suspect dealings of the Stardust Casino. Factor was still the owner on record, but had sold his interest in the casino portion of the hotel for a mere 7 million dollars. Then, in December of that year, the INS, working with the FBI on Bobby Kennedy's orders, informed Jake Factor that he was to be deported from the United States before the end of the month. Factor would be returned to England where he was still a wanted felon as a result of his 1928 stock scam. Just 48 hours before the deportation, Factor, John Kennedy's largest single personal political contributor, was granted a full and complete Presidential pardon which allowed him to stay in the United States.

     The story hints that Factor was more then probably an informant for the Internal Revenue Service, it also investigates the murky world of Presidential pardons, the last imperial power of the Executive branch. It's a sordid tale of abuse of privilege, the mob's best friend and perhaps it is time the American people reconsider the entire notion.

     The mob wasn't finished with Factor. Right after his pardon, Factor was involved in a vague, questionable financial plot to try and bail teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa out of his seemingly endless financial problems in Florida real estate. He was also involved with a questionable stock transaction with mobster Murray Humpreys. Factor spent the remaining twenty years of his life as a benefactor to California's Black ghettos. He tried, truly, to make amends for all of the suffering he had caused in his life. He spent millions of dollars building churches, gyms, parks and low cost housing in the poverty stricken ghettos. When he died, three United States Senators, the Mayor of Los Angles and several hundred poor Black waited in the rain to pay their last respects at Jake the Barber's funeral.

Interesting Information on A Little Known Case

By Bill Emblom

Author John Tuohy, who has a similar spelling of the last name to his subject Roger, but apparently no relation, has provided us with an interesting story of northwest Chicago beer baron Roger Touhy who was in competition with Al Capone during Capone's heyday. Touhy appeared to be winning the battle since Mayor Anton Cermak was deporting a number of Capone's cronies. However, the mob hit, according to the author, on Mayor Cermak in Miami, Florida, by Giuseppe Zangara following a speech by President-elect Roosevelt, put an end to the harrassment of Capone's cronies. The author details the staged "kidnapping" of Jake "the Barber" Factor who did this to avoid being deported to England and facing a prison sentence there for stock swindling, with Touhy having his rights violated and sent to prison for 25 years for the kidnapping that never happened. Factor and other Chicago mobsters were making a lot of money with the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas when they got word that Touhy was to be parolled and planned to write his life story. The mob, not wanting this, decided Touhy had to be eliminated. Touhy was murdered by hit men in 1959, 28 days after gaining his freedom. Jake Factor had also spent time in prison in the United States for a whiskey swindle involving 300 victims in 12 states. Two days before Factor was to be deported to England to face prison for the stock swindle President Kennedy granted Factor a full Presidential Pardon after Factor's contribution to the Bay of Pigs fund. President Kennedy, the author notes, issued 472 pardons (about half questionable) more than any president before or since.

There are a number of books on Capone and the Chicago mob. This book takes a look at an overlooked beer baron from that time period, Roger Touhy. It is a very worthwhile read and one that will hold your interest.

GREAT BOOK FROM CHICAGO AND ERA WAS MY DAD'S,TRUE TO STORY

Very good book. Hard to put down

Bymistakesweremadeon

Eight long years locked up for a kidnapping that was in fact a hoax, in autumn 1942, Roger Touhy & his gang of cons busted out of Stateville, the infamous "roundhouse" prison, southwest of Chicago Illinois. On the lam 2 months he was, when J Edgar & his agents sniffed him out in a run down 6-flat tenement on the city's far north lakefront. "Terrible Roger" had celebrated Christmas morning on the outside - just like all square Johns & Janes - but by New Year's Eve, was back in the bighouse.

Touhy's arrest hideout holds special interest to me because I grew up less than a mile away from it. Though I never knew so til 1975 when his bio was included in hard-boiled crime chronicler Jay Robert Nash's, Badmen & Bloodletters, a phone book sized encyclopedia of crooks & killers. Touhy's hard scrabble charisma stood out among 200 years' worth of sociopathic Americana Nash had alphabetized, and gotten a pulphouse publisher to print up for him.

I read Nash's outlaw dictionary as a teen, and found Touhy's Prohibition era David vs Goliath battles with ultimate gangster kingpin, Al Capone quite alluring, in an anti-hero sorta way. Years later I learned Touhy had written a memoir, and reading his The Stolen Years only reinforced my image of an underdog speakeasy beer baron - slash suburban family man - outwitting the stone cold killer who masterminded the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Like most autobiographies tho, Touhy's book painted him the good guy. Just an everyday gent caught up in events, and he sold his story well. Had I been a saloonkeeper back then I could picture myself buying his sales pitch - and liking the guy too. I sure bought into his tale, which in hindsight criminal scribe Nash had too, because both writers portray Touhy - though admittedly a crook - as never "really" hurting anybody. Only doing what any down-to-earth bootlegger running a million dollar/year criminal enterprise would have.

What Capone's Mob Murdered Roger Touhy author John Tuohy does tho is, provide a more objective version of events, balancing out Touhy's white wash ... 'er ... make that subjectively ... remembered telling of his life & times. Author Tuohy's account of gangster Touhy's account forced me - grown up now - to re-account for my own original take on the story.

As a kid back then, Touhy seemed almost a Robin Hood- ish hood - if you'll pardon a very lame pun. Forty years on tho re-considering the evidence, I think a persuasive - if not iron-clad convincing - case can be made for his conviction in the kidnapping of swindler scumbag Jake the Barber Factor. At least as far as conspiracy to do so goes, anyways. (Please excuse the crude redundancy there but Factor's stench truly was that of the dog s*** one steps in on those unfortunate occasions one does.)

Touhy's memoir painted himself as almost an innocent bystander at his own life's events. But he was a very smart & savvy guy - no dummy by a long shot. And I kinda do believe now, to not have known his own henchmen were in on Factor's ploy to stave off deportation and imprisonment, Touhy would have had to be as naive a Prohibition crime boss - and make no mistake he was one - as I was as a teenage kid reading Nash's thug-opedia,

On the other hand, the guy was the father of two sons and it's repulsive to consider he would have taken part in loathsomeness the crime of kidnapping was - even if the abducted victim was an adult and as repulsively loathsome as widows & orphans conman, Jake Factor.

This book's target audience is crime buffs no doubt, but it's an interesting read just the same; and includes anecdotes and insights I had not known of before. Unfortunately too, one that knocks a hero of mine down a peg or two - or more like ten.

Circa 1960, President Kennedy pardoned Jake the Barber, a fact that reading of almost made me puke. Then again JFK and the Chicago Mob did make for some strange bedfellowery every now & again. I'll always admire WWII US Navy commander Kennedy's astonishing (word chosen carefully) bravery following his PT boat's sinking, but him signing that document - effectively wiping Factor's s*** stain clean - as payback for campaign contributions Factor made to him, was REALLY nauseating to read.

Come to think of it tho, the terms "criminal douchedog" & "any political candidate" are pretty much interchangeable.

Anyways tho ... rest in peace Rog, & I raise a toast - of virtual bootleg ale - in your honor: "Turns out you weren't the hard-luck mug I'd thought you were, but what the hell, at least you had style." And guts to meet your inevitable end with more grace than a gangster should.

Post Note: Author Tuohy's re-examination of the evidence in the Roger Touhy case does include some heroes - guys & women - who attempted to find the truth of what did happen. Reading about people like that IS rewarding. They showed true courage - and decency - in a world reeking of corruption & deceit. So, here's to the lawyer who took on a lost cause; the private detective who dug up buried facts; and most of all, Touhy's wife & sister who stood by his side all those years.

Crime don't pay, kids

Very good organized crime book. A rather obscure gangster story which makes it fresh to read. I do not like these minimum word requirements for a review. (There, I have met my minimum)

Chicago Gangster History At It's Best

ByJ. CROSBYon

As a 4th generation Chicagoan, I just loved this book. Growing up in the 1950's and 60's I heard the name "Terrible Touhy's" mentioned many times. Roger was thought of as a great man, and seems to have been held in high esteem among the old timer Chicagoans.

That said, I thought this book to be nothing but interesting and well written. (It inspired me to find a copy of Roger's "Stolen Years" bio.) I do recommend this book to other folks interested in prohibition/depression era Chicago crime research. It is a must have for your library of Gangsters literature from that era. Chock full of information and the reader is transported back in time.

I'd like to know just what is "The Valley" area today in Chicago. I still live in the Windy City and would like to see if anything remains from the early days of the 20th century.

A good writer and a good book! I will buy some more of Mr. Tuohy's work.

Great story, great read

ByBookreaderon

A complex tale of gangsters, political kickback, mob wars and corrupt politicians told with wit and humor at a good pace. Highly recommend this book.

One of the best books I've read in a long time....

If you're into mafioso, read this! I loved it. Bought a copy for my brother to read for his birthday--good stuff.

GOOD WORDS TO HAVE…………

Straitlaced or straight-laced (STRAYT-layst): Excessively strict, rigid, old-fashioned, or prudish. From Middle English streit (narrow), from Old French estreit, from Latin strictus, past particle of stringere (to bind, draw tight) + laqueus (noose). Earliest documented use: 1630.

Eloquent: Since eloquent can have something to do with speaking, it makes sense that it comes from the Latin verb loqui, which means "to speak." Loqui is the parent of many "talkative" offspring in English. Loquacious, which means "given to fluent or excessive talk," also arose from loqui. Another loqui relative is circumlocution, a word that means someone is talking around a subject to avoid making a direct statement (circum- means "around"). And a ventriloquist is someone who makes his or her voice sound like it's coming from another source.

Planet Saturn, along with moons Tethys and Dione, observed by the Voyager 1 space probe on November 3, 1980.

Dogs Mimic Each Other’s Expressions, Too

The behavioral findings hint that dogs, like humans, might be capable of their own form of empathy 

By Rachel Nuwer

This week, millions of people around the world will no doubt experience rapid mimicry—an involuntary, split-second mirroring of another person’s facial expressions—as they exchange smiles over gifts, good meals and holiday traditions. This phenomenon, observed in humans and many other primates, is considered a basic building block of our ability to feel empathy.

“When your companion or friend smiles, you don’t know why exactly, but you immediately react with the same smile to him or her,” says Elisabetta Palagi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pisa in Italy.

“It’s an extremely important phenomenon, because through this mimicry you can feel the same emotion as the other person.”

Now Palagi and her colleagues have found that it’s not just humans and our close relatives who experience these empathy-building benefits. For the first time, they have demonstrated that dogs use rapid mimicry with other dogs to reinforce social bonds and get on the same playful wavelength.

The findings don’t come as too much of a surprise to Palagi, because dogs are socially savvy in a number of other ways. For example, they share more food and show higher degrees of social behavior with dogs they are already friends with than ones that are strangers. In addition, dogs can read the facial expressions of their owners, and they get a burst of oxytocin, a hormone associated with social bonding, simply by gazing into their owner’s eyes.

To see if dogs also engage in rapid mimicry, Palagi and her colleagues first identified typical play behaviors—the doggie versions of smiles and beams. One is the “relaxed open-mouth,” a canine grin, and another is the “play bow,” a stance romping pooches often assume that involves the front legs angled down, the back legs up and the tail wagging.

For days the researches headed to a park in Palermo where the owners of 49 purebreds and mutts volunteered their pets to take part in the experiment. Palagi asked the owners to let their dogs play freely while she and her colleagues videotaped the interactions. In total, they collected 50 hours of recordings that included some 200 play sessions.

They analyzed the footage frame-by-frame to see which dogs engaged in play, scoring rapid mimicry on the basis of whether the second dog emulated the first within one second of spotting the relaxed open-mouth or the play bow.

As the researchers report this week in Royal Society Open Science, not only did dogs engage in rapid mimicry, but the behavioral phenomenon was also associated with play sessions that lasted longer than encounters that didn’t contain any mimicry.

Dogs that were already friends—as confirmed by their owners—also engaged in more mimicry than dogs that were mere acquaintances, while dogs that were acquaintances engaged in more mimicry than ones that were meeting for the first time.

“We found a gradient of rapid social mimicry according to the familiarity of dogs,” Palagi says. “Like humans, dogs are affected more by their friends.” 

“This is a well thought-out paper that is superbly executed and consequently provides very compelling data,” says Sergio Pellis, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. “The authors demonstrate both rapid mimicry and emotional contagion in a non-primate mammal—the dog—thus laying out the possibility that this trait may be widespread among mammals, and maybe other animals as well.”

The findings hint that dogs may be able to experience some form of empathy, but more studies will be needed to explore that hypothesis. The researchers also hope to perform a similar study in wolves so they can investigate whether mimicry is a phenomenon found generally in canines, or if it developed particularly in dogs as part of the domestication process.

Finally, Palagi thinks that the work could lead to a way to evaluate a dog’s psychological health.

“Facial and emotional contagion are strongly impaired when human subjects are suffering from certain psychological disorders,” she says. “We hope our findings can be useful for dog rehabilitators in the future.” 

AND HERE'S SOME ANIMALS FOR YOU................... 

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The Quotable Grouch Marx

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IRISH-AMERICANA

A Big Blog of Irish Literature

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The Irish in their Own Words

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When Washington Was Irish

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The Wee Book of Irish Recipes (Book support site)

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LITERATURE

Following Fitzgerald

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Shakespeare

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The Blogable Robert Frost

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Charles Dickens

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Holden Caulfield Blog Spot

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The Quotable Oscar Wilde

http://thequotableoscarwilde.blogspot.com/

NEW ENGLAND BLOGS

The Quotable Thoreau

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Old New England Recipes

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Wicked Cool New England Recipes

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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

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Watch Hill

http://watchhillwesterly.blogspot.com/

York Beach

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The Connecticut History Blog

http://connecticuthistory.blogspot.com/

The Connecticut Irish

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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

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Music of the Sixties Forever

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

http://elvisandnixonatthewhitehouse.blogspot.com/

Beatles Fan Forever

http://beatlesfanforever.blogspot.com/

Year One, 1955

http://yearone1955.blogspot.com/

Robert Kennedy in His Own Words

http://rfkinhisownwords.blogspot.com/

The 1980s were fun

http://the1980swereokayactually.blogspot.com/

The 1990s. The last decade.

http://1990sthelastdecade.blogspot.com/

ORGANIZED CRIME

The Russian Mafia

http://russianmafiagangster.blogspot.com/

The American Jewish Gangster

http://theamericanjewishgangster.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Hollywood

http://themobinhollywood.blogspot.com/

We Only Kill Each Other

http://weonlykilleachother.blogspot.com/

Early Gangsters of New York City

http://earlygangstersofnewyorkcity.blogspot.com/

Al Capone: Biography of a self-made Man

http://alcaponethebiographyofaselfmademan.blogspot.com/

The Life and World of Al Capone

http://thelifeandworldofalcapone.blogspot.com/

The Salerno Report

http://salernoreportmafiaandurderjohnkennedy.blogspot.com/

Guns and Glamour

http://gunsandglamourthechicagomobahistory.blogspot.com/

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

http://thesaintvalentinesdaymassacre.blogspot.com/

Mob Testimony

http://mobtestimony.blogspot.com/

Recipes we would Die For

http://recipeswewoulddiefor.blogspot.com/

The Prohibition in Pictures

http://theprohibitioninpictures.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Pictures

http://themobinpictures.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Vegas

http://themobinvegasinpictures.blogspot.com/

The Irish American Gangster

http://irishamericangangsters.blogspot.com

Roger Touhy Gangster

http://rogertouhygangsters.blogspot.com/

Chicago’s Mob Bosses

http://chicagosmobbossesfromaccardoto.blogspot.com/

Chicago Gang Land: It Happened Here

http://chicagoganglandithappenedhere.blogspot.com/

Whacked: One Hundred years of Murder in Gangland

http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/

The Mob Across America

http://themobacrossamerica.blogspot.com/

Mob Cops, Lawyers and Front Men

http://mobcopslawyersandinformantsand.blogspot.com/

Shooting the Mob: Dutch Schultz

http://shootingthemobdutchschultz.blogspot.com/

Bugsy& His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill

http://bugsyandvirginiahill.blogspot.com/

After Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate on Organized Crime

http://aftervalachi.blogspot.com/

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

http://virgilpetersonmobbuster.blogspot.com/

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

http://timelineoforganizedcrime.blogspot.com/

The Kefauver Organized Crime Hearings (Book support site)

http://thekefauverorganizedcrimehearings.blogspot.com/

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

http://joevalachistestimonyonthemafia.blogspot.com/

Mobsters in the News

http://mobstersinthenews.blogspot.com/

Shooting the Mob: Dead Mobsters (Book support site)

http://deadmobsters.blogspot.com/

The Stolen Years Full Text (Roger Touhy)

http://thestolenyearsfulltext.blogspot.com/

Mobsters in Black and White

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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

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PSYCHOLOGY

Psychologically Relevant

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SNOBBERY

The Rarifieid Tribe

http://therarifiedtribe.blogspot.com/

Perfect Behavior

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TRAVEL

The Upscale Traveler

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TRIVIA

The Mish Mosh Blog

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WASHINGTON DC

DC Behind the Monuments

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Washington Oddities

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When Washington Was Irish

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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

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 Dorothy Parker

Paperback 86 pages

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

The Quotable Machiavelli

Paperback 36 pages

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

The Quotable Greeks

Paperback 230 pages

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

The Quotabe Oscar Wilde

Paperback 24 pages

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

The Quotable Helen Keller

Paperback 66 pages

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

The Art of War: Sun Tzu

Paperback 60 pages

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

The Quotable Shakespeare

Paperback 54 pages

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

The Quotable Gorucho Marx

Paperback 46 pages

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

THE FOLLOWING BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT AMAZON BOOKS AND BARNES AND NOBLE

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 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