The spiritual journey involves going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory, continually moving forward. The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path may be to just keep moving. Pema Chödrön
Mademoiselle, Gustave Jean Jacquet
Man Ray, Lydia with Mannequins, 1932
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.....
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.
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....
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/
“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 cand
idly 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
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.
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
Winston Churchill as a war correspondent for the Morning Post during the Boer War in South Africa, 1899
WWII —- Hanging of Mariya “Masha” Bruskina and Volodia Shcherbatsevich of the Minsk Resistance
DON'T YOU WANT TO SEE THE ENTIRE WORLD?
I DO
Mall of the Emirates, Dubai, UAE
Mannes, Norway, Tor-Ivar Næss
HERE'S PLEASANT POEM FOR YOU TO ENJOY................
"Flight,"
by Louis Jenkins from The Winter Road
Flight
Past mishaps might be attributed to an incomplete
understanding of the laws of aerodynamics or perhaps even
to a more basic failure of the imagination, but were to be
expected. Remember, this is solo flight unencumbered by
bicycle parts, aluminum and nylon or even feathers. A tour
de force, really. There's a lot of running and flapping involved
and as you get older and heavier, a lot more huffing and
puffing. But on a bright day like today with a strong
headwind blowing up from the sea, when, having slipped the
surly bonds of common sense and knowing she is watching,
waiting in breathless anticipation, you send yourself
hurtling down the long, green slope to the cliffs, who knows?
You might just make it.
GOOD WORDS TO HAVE…………
Ignominious \ig-nuh-MIN-ee-us\ 1 : marked with or
characterized by disgrace or shame : dishonorable 2 :deserving of shame or
infamy : despicable 3 : humiliating, degrading
The -nom- of ignominious comes
from nomen, the Latin word for "name" or "repute." (Nomen
is also the root of misnomer, nomenclature, and nominal, among others.) The ig-
part of the word is akin to the negative prefix in-; when joined to the root
-nom-, it indicates the namelessness that goes with shame or dishonor. To
suffer an ignominious fate is to lose the opportunity to make a name for
oneself or to lose one's good name. When ignominious was first borrowed from a
French form of the word in the 15th century, it meant "disgraced" or
"dishonorable." The word continues to have such meanings, but it also
has the somewhat milder meanings of "embarrassing" and
"humiliating."
That best portion of a man's
life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love. William
Wordsworth
Honesty does not always bring a
response of love, but it is absolutely essential to it. Ray Blanton
To love is so startling it leaves
little time for anything else. Emily Dickinson
If so many men, so many minds,
certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love. Leo Tolstoy
We look forward to the time when
the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the
blessings of peace. William E. Gladstone
Bandaid for writers (Valentines Day gift for me)
January was a tough month for us. My young brother died of cancer less than six months after he learned he had it. To get us out of the slump we were in we took a short vacation to Orlando Florida
Dulles Airport at 5:30 in the morning......yuk
Mary, ready to go
We love Cuban food and there is a place in Orlando Padrino's that we really enjoy
Cuban white bean and ham soup
While we were in Orlando we found place called Landry's for seafood....my favorite.
When in Orlando we never miss an opportunity to eat Peruvian
We like to cook at home as well.
Lomo saltado, a Peruvian stir fry dish of steak and fries
Another Peruvian favorite call Papa Rellena (Stuffed potato)
Short ribs to eat while we watch Downton Abbey
Available on Amazon Books
Available at Amazon Books
Nothing is more simple than
greatness; indeed to be simple is to be great.
It the proof of high culture to
say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
That which we call sin in others
is experiment for us.
Every man alone is sincere. At
the entrance of a second person hypocrisy begins.
Sincerity is the luxury allowed
like diadems and authority Only to the highest rank. Every man alone is
sincere. At the entrance of a second person hypocrisy begins.
Sincerity is the highest
compliment you can pay
THE ART AND BEAUTY OF BALLET
Alberto Blanco Pérez - Orlando Ballet
I'm a big big Fan of
Bukowski
MUSIC FOR THE SOUL
Eric Dolphy by Tjarko Ten Have
AND NOW, A BEATLES BREAK
TODAY'S ALLEGED MOB GUY
Bill Kaplan, who had
been around the gambling world since the days of Al Capone, was one of the last
independent gamblers in the city in the 1960s. He had built up a lucrative
racing and handicapping service on Clark Street that supplied odds to bookmakers
all over the world in the years before the nation's scattered wire services
were legislated out of existence by the government and supplanted by the Las
Vegas casinos. One day, "Milwaukee Phil" Alderisio's attempt to
squeeze him out of business. It was just a matter of time before Alderisio grew
tired of asking and simply killed Kaplan and Kaplan knew it. Kaplan went to mob
lawyer George Bieber and Mike Brodkin
and cut a deal in which he would hand over 50% of his business in so long as
the somber and deadly Alderisio stayed away from him and his business. It was a
lucrative offer and the Outfit sent in the smooth, educated Don Angelini as the
intermediary
Eventually, Angelini
was selected as the Chicago family's replacement for Tony Spilotro out in Las
Vegas, but by then, the mobs interest and influence had floundered. Cops and
crooks alike considered the refined and urbane Angelini to be a cut above the
rest. Unlike the other representatives sent out to Las Vegas by the mob, Tony
Spilotro, Marshal Caifano or Johnny Roselli, Angelina was a thinking man, a
true gambler who never intimidated or killed anyone. Angelini, like Spilotro
and Caifano, was barred from entering Las Vegas casinos by the state of Nevada
and by the state of Illinois.
Splitting his time
between Las Vegas, the West Coast and Chicago, in November of 1989, Dominic
Cortina (Born 1929) and Angelini, pled guilty to charges that they ran a
multimillion dollar betting empire that took wagers on college and professional
football, basketball and baseball games. (Others involved in the case included
Joseph Rosengard, Joseph Spadavecchio Leonard Zullo, Raymond Tominello, Richard
Catezone, Louis Parilli, and his brother, Charles Parilli) The group took in
bets of up to $188,000 a day at 16 different locations in Chicago, Oak Park and
Bensenville Illinois.
Cortina organized the
ring, supervised the booking offices, gave large bettors telephone numbers to
place their bets, and paid out and collected winning and losing wagers from
special gamblers, according to the charges. Angelini provided the point spread,
known as "the line," and took bets from gamblers outside the Chicago
area. In one instance, Angelini took bets totaling $16,000 from one
out-of-state bettor on the outcome of football games being played by Boston
College, Clemson, Nebraska, Mississippi, Texas and Southern California.
Joey Auippa, greedy and
thoughtless, demanded that Angelini and his boss Dom Cortina to explore all
avenues outside of Las Vegas in an effort to determine new "skimming
possibilities." So Angelini found, eventually, the Rincon Indian
reservation in California. In all likelihood, the Outfit would have passed on
the Rincon reservation deal because it was such a disorganized mess, filled
with tribal backbiting and politics. However, Angelini and DiFronzo came to the
attention of the West Coast FBI after they made several messy collections out
west. The Bureau taped their phones and gained information, most of it from the
financier Richard Silberman who was involved with Angelini.
The plan was to finance
the tribe's venture into gambling, take over the operations, skim money from
the casinos as well as use it to launder money from narcotics sales. Dom
Angelini placed Chris Petti, the outfit's man in San Diego, in charge of the
takeover. Petti, in turn, was to deal directly with Angelini's brother-in-law,
Michael Caracci, a soldier in the DiFronzo crew. The two hoods fought endlessly
and complained about each other to Chicago through the back channels. Caracci contacted Petti at the same San Diego
pay phone they had been using for years, which, unknown to them the FBI had
tapped years before in a different case. The FBI sent in an undercover agent
named Peter Carmassi, who presented himself as a money launderer for a Columbian
drug cartel. The Chicago mob, in the meantime, had decided that Rincon was a
bust and wouldn’t put any money into it. However, they would allow Angelini and
Petti to stay involved if they could find an outside source to finance the
plan. Carmassi, the FBI agent, showed an interest. In several tape recorded and filmed meetings
with undercover agent Carmassi, Petti laid out the entire scam to take over the
Rincon reservation gambling concession.
On January 9, 1992, the
government indicted Petti, DiFronzo, Carlisi and the reservation's lawyer, on
15 counts of criminal conspiracy. DiFronzo and Angelini were convicted and got
a 37-month sentence, with fines approaching one million dollars. Carlisi,
DiFronzo and Angelini would all go to prison in 1993 on federal racketeering
charges.
Carlisi was eventually
released from the case but Angelini and DiFronzo were convicted and each
received 37 months for their part in the scheme. Both sentences were later
reduced on appeal. Angelini died at age
after fighting cancer for years. The Outfit never replaced Angelini out west
and the position of Representato to Las Vegas is, by all accounts, no more.
I LOVE BLACK AND WHITE
PHOTOS FROM FILM
Vivian Maier, Bored looking lady sitting in front of a shop, New York, 1954.
THE ART OF PULP
Sculpture this and Sculpture that
Pyche revived by Cupids Kiss
DON'T YOU JUST LOVE POP ART?
Ice Cream ,1964 Belgian artist Evelyne Axell
THE ART OF WAR............
IC 342, a spiral galaxy found 10 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Camelopardalis.
The art and joy of cinematography
Amelie | Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001, France)
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Cinematographer: Bruno Delbonnel
AND HERE'S SOME ANIMALS FOR YOU...................
Voltolino Fontani
By Martina Tanga
Albeit a national reputation,
Voltolino Fontani lived and worked his entire life in his hometown of Livorno.
He is mainly known for having founded the art group Eaismo(atomic era-ism, also
known as “arte nucleare” or nuclear art) in 1948, together with painters
Marcello Landi, Angelo Sirio Pellegrini, Aldo Neri, and the philosopher Guido
Favati.
Their manifesto preceded, by a few years, the better-known “Pittura Nucleare” declaration by Enrico Baj in 1951, and by the Mystical Manifesto, written by Salvador Dalì in that same year. Inspired by Surrealist and Dada movements of the first half of the 20th century, the Eaismo, like Pittura Nucleare, was a political, abstract art movement that sought to portray the human existential spirit the face of nuclear atomic warfare.
All of these artists were
inspired by the latest development in science – atomic theory – and the
imminent threat of the nuclear war. As a result, two competing forces energized
their paintings: an apocalyptic future and humanity’s survival of the impending
obliteration.
Fontani studied with painter
Beppe Guzzi in the 1930s. He worked heavily in the Eaismo style from 1948 until
1959.
This phase, however, can be subsequently divided into two distinct moments. The paintings dated from the 1950s are barely figurative – verging on abstract – scenes reminiscent of the Holocaust and the concentration camps in blaring and often dissonant colors. The canvases from the latter part of the decade, instead, are completely abstract, as Fontani experimented with cuts, fractures, drips, burns.
Then, in the 1960s, Fontani’s painting style shifted again, this time seemingly integrating works from this Eaismo period, but with a cubist inflection, and the colors white, gray, blue, fuchsia dominate.
Fontani passed away in 1976.
Since his death, an archive dedicated to collecting the artist’s work in
Livorno has been established. Hopefully, this will open the doors to new
scholarship on Fontani in the near future.
NYCPlaywrights
February 13, 2016
Nancy_GMAIL
***
PLAYWRIGHTS OPPORTUNITIES ***
Theatre Conspiracy Eighteenth
Annual New Play Contest
All works submitted will be read
and judged by a panel of qualified theatre teachers, directors and performers.
Script Parameters: Work submitted to the contest must be a full length play
with seven actors or less and have simple to moderate technical demands. Plays
having up to three previous productions are welcome. No musicals, we are a tone
deaf theatre company!. Remuneration: First place: $700.00 and full production.
However, it is our goal to produce more than one entry each year.
***
Next Act! celebrating its five
year anniversary, is an expansion of Capital Repertory Theatre’s continued
commitment to the development of new work. At the same time, the weekend long
summit is designed to complement the Upper Hudson Valley’s rich diverse
populations. The summits directly reflect the theatre’s mission, “to create
meaningful theatre generated from an authentic link to the community.” Next
Act! New Play Summit 5 takes place October 21 - 24, 2016 and will feature
readings of four never-before produced plays, with additional special events
throughout the weekend.
***
The Blank Theatre Young
Playwrights Festival is a 24-year-old nationwide playwriting competition for
writers ages 9 to 19. The 12 best plays are chosen by a panel of theatre
professional from submissions across America. No other national competition
awards young playwrights with seeing their vision come to life on stage in a
professional production.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION on
these and other opportunities see the web site athttp://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** ASPECTS OF ACTING ***
A Day in the Life of an Actor:
Jim Hogan at TEDxPSU
***
Acting Tips - Actress Alissa
Juvan
***
The Business of Acting - Matt
DeCapua
***
Tom Hanks, Judi Dench, Leonardo
DiCaprio, Olivia Colman and more talk candidly to Film4 about the art of screen
acting
***
Approaching the Study of Acting
I -- New York Acting Classes NYC NY at the Actors Theater Workshop
***
Uta Hagen's Acting Class
***
STAGE VS SCREEN ACTING Part 1
***
Bruce Barton on Cold Reading
***
The Art of Acting and Writing
With Rainn Wilson, Jesse Eisenberg, and David Hare (audio)
***
The Art of Suit Acting -
Godzilla
***
Script Analysis is Bullshit
***
Script Analysis By Ellen
Gerstein
THE BEAT POETS
Beat poetry evolved during the 1940s in both New York City and on the west coast, although San Francisco became the heart of the movement in the early 1950s. The end of World War II left poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso questioning mainstream politics and culture. A Brief Guide to the Beat Poets | Academy of American Poets https://www.poets.org/poetsorg
“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.” - Jack Kerouac
The San Antonio Railway Ghost
Children
Texas’ most famous ghost story, arguably, is that of the ghost
children that supposedly haunt a San Antonio railway track. An intersection of
roadway and rail road track, which is located near the San Juan Mission, is the
scene of this mysterious tale.
As the tale goes, in the 1930′s, a school bus
filled with children stalled on the rail road track. Tragedy struck, when an
oncoming train crashed into the bus, killing all of the children and bus
driver. Legend says that any car that stops in the same area, will be pushed by
unseen hands over the train track until they reach safety.
People believe the
ghosts of the children haunt the area to protect people from another misfortune
like the one that cost them their lives. Many curious people have driven to the
area in an attempt to see if the famous legend is true; there have even been
numerous reports of tiny fingerprints being left imprinted on the car and
claims of ghostly children’s voices and laughter being heard in the area.
The Dewey Arch
The Dewey Arch was a magnificent triumphal arch that stood in Madison Square in
NYC, which celebrated the victory in the Battle of Manila Bay at the
Philippines. It was demolished in 1900.
The Dewey Arch was a triumphal
arch that stood from 1899 to 1900 atMadison Square in Manhattan, New York. It
had been erected for the parade in honor of Admiral George Dewey to celebrate
his victory in the Battle of Manila Bay at the Philippines in 1898.
In spring 1899, planning for
the parade, which was scheduled for September, began. Architect Charles R.
Lamb found support for his idea of building a triumphal arch amongst the
members of the National Sculpture Society, of which he also was a member. A
committee of the society, comprising Lamb,Karl Bitter, Frederick W. Ruckstull,
John Quincy Adams Ward, and John De Witt Warner, proposed the construction
of an arch to the city of New York, which approved these plans in July 1899.
With only about two months
left, it was decided to build the arch and itscolonnade in staff, a material
that had been used for the temporary buildings of several World's Fairs.
Modeled after the Arch of Titus in Rome, the Dewey Arch was decorated
with the works of 28 sculptors and topped by a large quadriga (done by Ward) that showed four horses drawing a ship. At night, the arch was illuminated with
electric light bulbs.
After the parade on September
30, 1899, the arch quickly began to deteriorate. An attempt to raise money to
have the arch rebuilt with more durable materials (as had been done for the
arch in Washington Square Park) failed, and thus the arch was demolished in
1900. The larger sculptures were sent to Charleston for an exhibit, and were
destroyed afterward.
Who put Bella in the witch elm?
It was 1943 in Worchester,
England. Four young boys were poaching on Lord Cobham’s estate in the woods
looking for bird eggs and rabbits. They happened upon an elm tree whilst out
looking for bird’s nests, but instead discovered something much more macabre: a
human skull, scraps of fabric, a wedding ring, and in a field nearby; severed
hand. Knowing that they were trespassing, they decided to put the skull back
and keep their discovery a secret. However, one of the younger boys eventually
caved in and told his parents, who alerted the police.
The body, referred to by the
name “Belladonna”, was sent to a professor at the Home Office Forensic Science
Laboratory in the West Midlands, who determined that the woman had died around
18 months prior. She was estimated to have been around 35 years old, five foot
tall with medium brown hair and had given birth at least once in her life.
There were no signs of trauma
to the body and no signs of physical harm or disease were detected. It was
ruled by the coroner that she died of asphyxiation, and was probably forced
into the tree hollow just after death. Strangely, her mouth was stuffed with
the high end silk fabric, taffeta.
Towards the end of the year,
graffiti began to appear. Mostly the vandalized messages were variations of
“Hagley Wood Bella” and “Who put Luebella down the wych-elm?” seemingly written
in the same hand.
There have been a lot of
theories about the Belladonna. Some speculate that she might have been a spy
selling secrets to the enemy, some say a witch, some even say it was a black
magic execution on account of the severed hand.
To this day, nobody is really
sure who, or even why, someone put Bella in the witch elm.
The Octavius
The Octavius was discovered
West of Greenland on October 11, 1775. Crew members boarded The Octavius and
discovered the crew dead and frozen solid.
The Captain of the ship was found in his cabin, frozen at his desk with his pen still in his hand. He was found accompanied by a deceased woman and a child covered in a blanket. The ship’s log showed that the ship had been afloat with the frozen crew on-board for over thirteen years.
The Captain of the ship was found in his cabin, frozen at his desk with his pen still in his hand. He was found accompanied by a deceased woman and a child covered in a blanket. The ship’s log showed that the ship had been afloat with the frozen crew on-board for over thirteen years.
Continuous effort, not strength
or intelligence is the key to unlocking our potential. -Liane Cardes
Long lunch: Spanish civil
servant skips work for years without anyone noticing
Joaquín García failed to show
up for his job at the water board for at least six years – and possibly as many
as 14
Jon Henley
Only when Joaquín García, a
Spanish civil servant, was due to collect an award for two decades of loyal and
dedicated service did anyone realise that he had not, in fact, shown up to work
for at least six years – and possibly as many as 14.
García, a 69-year-old engineer,
began working for the local authority in the south-western city of Cádiz in
1990, according to el Mundo, and in 1996 was posted to the municipal water
board, Agua de Cadiz, where his job was to supervise a waste water treatment
plant.
In 2010, when García – who has
now retired – was due to collect his long-service medal, the man who had hired
him, deputy mayor Jorge Blas Fernández, wondered where he was: “He was still on
the payroll,” he told the paper. “I thought, where is this man? Is he still
there? Has he retired? Has he died?”
After the former manager of the
water board, who had the office opposite Garcia’s, told Fernández he had not
seen his employee for several years, the deputy mayor called the engineer in.
“I asked him: what are you doing?” Fernández said. “What did you do yesterday?
And the previous month? He could not answer.”
A court this week fined Garcia
€27,000 (£21,000), the equivalent after tax of one year of his annual salary,
having earlier found that the engineer did not appear to have occupied his
office for “at least six years” and had done “absolutely no work” between 2007
and 2010, the year before he retired.
García told the court that he
had turned up to the office, although he admitted he may not have kept regular
business hours. He said he was the victim of workplace bullying because of his
family’s socialist politics and had been deliberately sidelined at the water
board.
His friends told El Mundo that
the engineer had been unwilling to report his allegations of harassment because
he “had a family to support” and was worried that he would not find another job
at his age. He had been so depressed by his situation that he had seen a
psychiatrist, they said.
The tribunal concluded that the
water board had believed García was the responsibility of the city council for
most of the period of his employment, while the city council thought he was
working for the water board.
The engineer made the most of
the confusion, becoming an avid reader of philosophy and an expert on the works
of Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher credited with laying the foundations of the
Enlightenment.
Big Soda Following Path of Big Tobacco Overseas
By Karina Meier - Cigarette
sales have dropped by more than half in the U.S. over the past 50 years.
Labeling practices for tobacco products and statewide smoking bans in indoor
public places are now commonplace. Big tobacco companies, seeing no end in the
ever decreasing consumption of tobacco, started moving their businesses
elsewhere.
Washington, DC - infoZine -
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire - Where to, exactly? Wherever they didn’t have
to put up with such stringent restrictions about where they could sell their
products or how they could be consumed, namely developing countries.
Now the major soft drink
companies, Coca Cola and PepsiCo, are following their footsteps.
“The interest of corporations
in investing in emerging markets is based on a simple premise: potential huge
profits in countries whose economies are growing fast,” a report released
Tuesday by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said.
The reasons that lowered the
amount of smokers are the same that are now pushing people in the U.S. away
from soda. Bad science has been dispelled, and prevention has focused on young
people, with many states banning soda in schools.
Though most initiatives to
control or tax sweet drinks have failed, public awareness of their negative
impact on health is higher than ever. Bottled water is set to overcome soda as
the most consumed beverage over the next few years.
“More and more places are going
to limit soda consumption” Jim O’Hara from the CSPI said Wednesday. He drew
parallels with how tobacco restrictions were first met with strong opposition.
Since 1998, soda consumption in
the U.S. has dropped 25 percent.
Despite the downward trend in
the U.S., the same does not apply elsewhere, the report says. Mexico, India,
Brazil and Argentina are some of biggest markets for beverages, and consumption
there is rising.
Mexico is the largest market
for soft drinks and one of the countries with the highest rates of childhood
obesity. Coca Cola is set to invest $20 billion in Mexico and Brazil alone over
the next five years. That’s roughly two-thirds of its worldwide investments.
Every Mexican consumes an average of 728 8-ounce cans of soda from Coca Cola
brands per year, or about 45.5 gallons per person. The world average is just
under 6 gallons.
However, as with tobacco, the
center hopes soda consumption will soon start to slow down abroad as well. In
the U.S. about diet sodas make up about 30 percent of sales. Diet sodas are not
popular in other countries.
In many places, it’s already
happening. Mexico imposed an 8 percent tax on soft drinks in 2014 as part of
efforts to curb obesity and diabetes. In Colombia and Argentina, healthier
substitutes such as tea or coffee are replacing soda, as worries about the
health impact of soda become more widespread. India and Peru are requiring
warning labels on high calorie, high sodium or high sugar drinks and snacks.
However, setting up public
policies that aim to reduce the consumption of sugar-rich beverages has always
been hard, and that is unlikely to change. Taxing soft drinks and adding
warning labels to packaging are always heavily opposed by soft drinks
manufacturers. To illustrate this point, the report show pictures of schools
and small shops in very remote areas of the world covered in Coca Cola advertising.
“In countries from Ghana to
South Africa, advertisements for soda are even found on school entrance signs.
Thus, children are repeatedly exposed to soda advertising each and every school
day,” the report said.
In November 2013, Ecuador tried
a traffic light style warning on soft drinks, meaning products would get green,
yellow or red labels according to their nutritional values. However, the World
Trade Organization, intervened and the warning was moved from the front of the
label to the back. Chile’s warning label has faced the same backlash, but the
government is moving forward with the initiative.
Even the U.S, the only place
with a successful soda tax is Berkeley, Calif. However, this might change in
the near future.
O’Hara said he hopes these
kinds of policies, coupled with more preventive measures, particularly those
focused on children, will gain traction eventually, and that drinking less soda
will become more of a global trend.
In response to the CSPI report,
the International Council of Beverages Associations said in a statement that
its marketing practices are responsible, and that “CSPI ignores the economic
importance of the jobs and the investments beverage companies bring to hundreds
of thousands of employees and their families worldwide.” Coca Cola and PepsiCo
are both members of the ICBA.
FROM LLR BOOKS. COM
Litchfield Literary Books. A
really small company run by writers.
AMERICAN HISTORY
The
Day Nixon Met Elvis
Paperback 46 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Day-Nixon-Met-elvis/
Theodore
Roosevelt: Letters to his Children. 1903-1918
Paperback 194 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Theodore-Roosevelt-Letters-Children-1903-1918/dp/
THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND
CIVILIZATIONS
The
Works of Horace
Paperback 174 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Works-Horace-Richard-Willoughby/
The
Quotable Greeks
Paperback 234 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby
The
Quotable Epictetus
Paperback 142 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Epictetus-Golden-Sayings
Quo
Vadis: A narrative of the time of Nero
Paperback 420 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quo-Vadis-Narrative-Time-Nero
CHILDRENS BOOKS
The
Porchless Pumpkin: A Halloween Story for Children
A Halloween play for young
children. By consent of the author, this play may be performed, at no charge,
by educational institutions, neighborhood organizations and other
not-for-profit-organizations.
A fun story with a moral
“I believe that Denny O'Day is an
American treasure and this little book proves it. Jack is a pumpkin who happens
to be very small, by pumpkins standards and as a result he goes unbought in the
pumpkin patch on Halloween eve, but at the last moment he is given his chance
to prove that just because you're small doesn't mean you can't be brave. Here
is the point that I found so wonderful, the book stresses that while size
doesn't matter when it comes to courage...ITS OKAY TO BE SCARED....as well. I
think children need to hear that, that's its okay to be unsure because life is
a ongoing lesson isn't it?”
Paperback: 42 pages
http://www.amazon.com/OLANTERN-PORCHLESS-PUMPKIN-Halloween-Children
It's
Not All Right to be a Foster Kid....no matter what they tell you: Tweet the
books contents
Paperback 94 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Right-Foster-Kid-no-matter-what
From the Author
I spent my childhood, from age
seven through seventeen, in foster care.
Over the course of those ten years, many decent, well-meaning, and
concerned people told me, "It's okay to be foster kid."
In saying that, those very good
people meant to encourage me, and I appreciated their kindness then, and all
these many decades later, I still appreciate their good intentions. But as I
was tossed around the foster care system, it began to dawn on me that they were
wrong. It was not all right to be a
foster kid.
During my time in the system, I
was bounced every eighteen months from three foster homes to an orphanage to a
boy's school and to a group home before I left on my own accord at age
seventeen.
In the course of my stay in
foster care, I was severely beaten in two homes by my "care givers"
and separated from my four siblings who were also in care, sometimes only
blocks away from where I was living.
I left the system rather than to
wait to age out, although the effects of leaving the system without any family,
means, or safety net of any kind, were the same as if I had aged out. I lived
in poverty for the first part of my life, dropped out of high school, and had
continuous problems with the law.
Today, almost nothing about foster care has
changed. Exactly what happened to me is
happening to some other child, somewhere in America, right now. The system, corrupt, bloated, and
inefficient, goes on, unchanging and secretive.
Something has gone wrong in a
system that was originally a compassionate social policy built to improve lives
but is now a definitive cause in ruining lives.
Due to gross negligence, mismanagement, apathy, and greed, mostly what
the foster care system builds are dangerous consequences. Truly, foster care
has become our epic national disgrace and a nightmare for those of us who have
lived through it.
Yet there is a suspicion among
some Americans that foster care costs too much, undermines the work ethic, and
is at odds with a satisfying life.
Others see foster care as a part of the welfare system, as legal plunder
of the public treasuries.
None of that is true; in fact, all that sort
of thinking does is to blame the victims.
There is not a single child in the system who wants to be there or asked
to be there. Foster kids are in foster
care because they had nowhere else to go.
It's that simple. And believe me,
if those kids could get out of the system and be reunited with their parents
and lead normal, healthy lives, they would. And if foster care is a sort of
legal plunder of the public treasuries, it's not the kids in the system who are
doing the plundering.
We need to end this needless suffering. We need to end it because it is morally and
ethically wrong and because the generations to come will not judge us on the
might of our armed forces or our technological advancements or on our fabulous
wealth.
Rather, they will judge us, I am certain, on
our compassion for those who are friendless, on our decency to those who have
nothing and on our efforts, successful or not, to make our nation and our world
a better place. And if we cannot
accomplish those things in the short time allotted to us, then let them say of
us "at least they tried."
You can change the tragedy of
foster care and here's how to do it. We
have created this book so that almost all of it can be tweeted out by you to
the world. You have the power to improve
the lives of those in our society who are least able to defend themselves. All you need is the will to do it.
If the American people, as good, decent and
generous as they are, knew what was going on in foster care, in their name and
with their money, they would stop it.
But, generally speaking, although the public has a vague notion that
foster care is a mess, they don't have the complete picture. They are not aware
of the human, economic and social cost that the mismanagement of the foster
care system puts on our nation.
By tweeting the facts laid out in
this work, you can help to change all of that.
You can make a difference. You
can change things for the better.
We can always change the future
for a foster kid; to make it better ...you have the power to do that. Speak up
(or tweet out) because it's your country.
Don't depend on the "The other guy" to speak up for these
kids, because you are the other guy.
We cannot build a future for
foster children, but we can build foster children for the future and the time
to start that change is today.
No
time to say Goodbye: Memoirs of a life in foster
Paperbook 440 Books
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir
BOOKS
ABOUT FILM
On
the Waterfront: The Making of a Great American Film
Paperback: 416 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Waterfront-Making-Great-American-Film/
BOOKS
ABOUT GHOSTS AND THE SUPERNATUAL
Scotish
Ghost Stories
Paperback 186 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Scottish-Ghost-Stories-Elliott-ODonell
HUMOR
BOOKS
The
Book of funny odd and interesting things people say
Paperback: 278 pages
http://www.amazon.com/book-funny-interesting-things-people
The
Wee Book of Irish Jokes
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook
Perfect
Behavior: A guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises
http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Behavior-Ladies-Gentlemen-Social
BOOKS
ABOUT THE 1960s
You
Don’t Need a Weatherman. Underground 1969
Paperback 122 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Weatherman-Notes-Weatherman-Underground-1969
Baby
Boomers Guide to the Beatles Songs of the Sixties
Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-Guide-Beatles-Songs-Sixties/
Baby
Boomers Guide to Songs of the 1960s
http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Boomers-Guide-Songs-1960s
IRISH- AMERICANA
The
Connecticut Irish
Paper back 140 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly
The Wee Book of Irish Jokes
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook/
The
Wee Book of Irish Recipes
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-Recipes/
The Wee Book of the American-Irish Gangsters
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-American-Gangsters/
The Wee book of Irish Blessings...
http://www.amazon.com/Series-Blessing-Proverbs-Toasts-ebook/
The
Wee Book of the American Irish in Their Own Words
http://www.amazon.com/Book-American-Irish-Their-Words/
Everything
you need to know about St. Patrick
Paperback 26 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Need-About-Saint-Patrick
A
Reading Book in Ancient Irish History
Paperback 147pages
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Book-Ancient-Irish-History
The
Book of Things Irish
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Things-Irish-William-Tuohy/
Poets
and Dreamer; Stories translated from the Irish
Paperback 158 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Poets-Dreamers-Stories-Translated-Irish/
The
History of the Great Irish Famine: Abridged and Illustrated
Paperback 356 pages
http://www.amazon.com/History-Great-Irish-Famine-Illustrated/
BOOKS ABOUT NEW ENGLAND
The
New England Mafia
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook/
Wicked
Good New England Recipes
http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Good-New-England-Recipes/
The
Connecticut Irish
Paper back 140 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly
The
Twenty-Fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers
Paperback 64 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Fifth-Regiment-Connecticut-Volunteers-Rebellion
The
Life of James Mars
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Life-James-Mars-Slave-Connecticut
Stories
of Colonial Connecticut
Paperback 116 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Colonial-Connnecticut-Caroline-Clifford
What
they Say in Old New England
Paperback 194 pages
http://www.amazon.com/What-they-say-New-England/
BOOK ABOUT ORGANIZED CRIME
Chicago Organized Crime
Chicago-Mob-Bosses
http://www.amazon.com/Chicagos-Mob-Bosses-Accardo-ebook
The
Mob Files: It Happened Here: Places of Note in Chicago gangland 1900-2000
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-1900-2000-ebook
An
Illustrated Chronological History of the Chicago Mob. Time Line 1837-2000
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Chronological-History-Chicago-1837-2000/
Mob
Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Buster-Peterson-Committee-ebook/
The
Mob Files. Guns and Glamour: The Chicago Mob. A History. 1900-2000
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Guns-Glamour-ebook/
Shooting
the Mob: Organized crime in photos. Crime Boss Tony Accardo
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-photos-Accardo/
Shooting
the Mob: Organized Crime in Photos: The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Valentines-Massacre
The
Life and World of Al Capone in Photos
http://www.amazon.com/Life-World-Al-Capone
AL
CAPONE: The Biography of a Self-Made Man.: Revised from the 0riginal 1930
edition.Over 200 new photographs
Paperback: 340 pages
http://www.amazon.com/CAPONE-Biography-Self-Made-Over-photographs
Whacked.
One Hundred Years Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Outfit
Paperback: 172 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Whacked-Hundred-Murder-Mayhem-Chicago/
Las Vegas Organized Crime
The
Mob in Vegas
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Vegas-ebook
Bugsy
& His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill
http://www.amazon.com/Bugsy-His-Flamingo-Testimony-Virginia/
Testimony
by Mobsters Lewis McWillie, Joseph Campisi and Irwin Weiner (The Mob Files
Series)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-ebook
Rattling
the Cup on Chicago Crime.
Paperback 264 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Rattling-Cup-Chicago-Crime-Abridged
The
Life and Times of Terrible Tommy O’Connor.
Paperback 94 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-Terrible-Tommy-OConnor
The
Mob, Sam Giancana and the overthrow of the Black Policy Racket in Chicago
Paperback 200 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Giancana-ovethrow-Policy-Rackets-Chicago
When
Capone’s Mob Murdered Roger Touhy. In Photos
Paperback 234 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Capones-Murdered-Roger-Touhy-photos
Organized
Crime in Hollywood
The Mob in Hollywood
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Hollywood-ebook/
The
Bioff Scandal
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Bioff-Scandal-Shakedown-Hollywood-Studios
Organized
Crime in New York
Joe Pistone’s war on the mafia
http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Petrosinos-War-Mafia-Files/
Mob
Testimony: Joe Pistone, Michael Scars DiLeonardo, Angelo Lonardo and others
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Testimony-DiLeonardo-testimony-Undercover/
The
New York Mafia: The Origins of the New York Mob
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mafia-Origins
The
New York Mob: The Bosses
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mob-Bosses/
Organized
Crime 25 Years after Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate
http://www.amazon.com/Organized-Crime-Valachi-Hearings-ebook
Shooting
the mob: Dutch Schultz
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Photographs-Schultz
Gangland
Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal. (Illustrated)
http://www.amazon.com/Gangland-Gaslight-Killing-Rosenthal-Illustrated/
Early
Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City
Paperback 382 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Early-Street-Gangs-Gangsters-York
THE RUSSIAN MOBS
The
Russian Mafia in America
http://www.amazon.com/The-Russian-Mafia-America-ebook/
The
Threat of Russian Organzied Crime
Paperback 192 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Threat-Russian-Organized-Crime-photographs-ebook
Organized Crime/General
Best
of Mob Stories
http://www.amazon.com/Files-Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-Crime/
Best
of Mob Stories Part 2
http://www.amazon.com/Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-ebook/
Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters-ebook
Mob
Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobsters in Photos
http://www.amazon.com/Recipes-For-Meals-Mobsters-Photos
More
Mob Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobs
http://www.amazon.com/More-Recipes-Meals-Mobsters-Photos
The
New England Mafia
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook
Shooting
the mob. Organized crime in photos. Dead Mobsters, Gangsters and Hoods.
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-mob-Organized-photos-Mobsters-Gangsters/
The
Salerno Report: The Mafia and the Murder of President John F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/The-Salerno-Report-President-ebook/
The Mob Files: Mob Wars. "We only kill each
other"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Wars-other/
The
Mob across America
http://www.amazon.com/The-Files-Across-America-ebook/
The
US Government’s Time Line of Organzied Crime 1920-1987
http://www.amazon.com/GOVERNMENTS-ORGANIZED-1920-1987-Illustrated-ebook/
Early
Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City: 1800-1919. Illustrated
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-1800-1919-Illustrated-Street-ebook/
The
Mob Files: Mob Cops, Lawyers and Informants and Fronts
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Informants-ebook/
Gangster
Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated
Paperback: 128 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/
The
Book of American-Jewish Gangsters: A Pictorial History.
Paperback: 436 pages
http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-American-Jewish-Gangsters-Pictorial/
The
Mob and the Kennedy Assassination
Paperback 414 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-Mobsters
BOOKS ABOUT THE OLD WEST
The
Last Outlaw: The story of Cole Younger, by Himself
Paperback 152 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Outlaw-Story-Younger-Himself
BOOKS ON PHOTOGRAPHY
Chicago:
A photographic essay.
Paperback: 200 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Chicago-Photographic-Essay-William-Thomas
STAGE PLAYS
Boomers
on a train: A ten minute play
Paperback 22 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-train-ten-minute-Play-ebook
Four
Short Plays
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy
Four
More Short Plays
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy/
High
and Goodbye: Everybody gets the Timothy Leary they deserve. A full length play
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/High-Goodbye-Everybody-Timothy-deserve
Cyberdate.
An Everyday Love Story about Everyday People
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Cyberdate-Everyday-Story-People-ebook/
The
Dutchman's Soliloquy: A one Act Play based on the factual last words of
Gangster Dutch Schultz.
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Dutchmans-Soliloquy-factual-Gangster-Schultz/
Fishbowling
on The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: Or William S. Burroughs intersects with
Dutch Schultz
Print Length: 57 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Fishbowling-Last-Words-Dutch-Schultz-ebook/
American
Shakespeare: August Wilson in his own words. A One Act Play
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/American-Shakespeare-August-Wilson-ebook
She
Stoops to Conquer
http://www.amazon.com/She-Stoops-Conquer-Oliver-Goldsmith/
The
Seven Deadly Sins of Gilligan’s Island: A ten minute play
Print Length: 14 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Deadly-Gilligans-Island-minute-ebook/
BOOKS ABOUT VIRGINIA
OUT
OF CONTROL: An Informal History of the Fairfax County Police
http://www.amazon.com/Control-Informal-History-Fairfax-Police/
McLean
Virginia. A short informal history
http://www.amazon.com/McLean-Virginia-Short-Informal-History/
THE QUOTABLE SERIES
The
Quotable Emerson: Life lessons from the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Over 300
quotes
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Emerson-lessons-quotes
The
Quotable John F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-John-F-Kennedy/
The
Quotable Oscar Wilde
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons/
The
Quotable Machiavelli
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-Thayer/
The
Quotable Confucius: Life Lesson from the Chinese Master
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese/
The
Quotable Henry David Thoreau
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Henry-Thoreau-Quotables-ebook
The
Quotable Robert F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Robert-F-Kennedy-Illustrated/
The
Quotable Writer: Writers on the Writers Life
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Writer-Quotables-ebook
The
words of Walt Whitman: An American Poet
Paperback: 162 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Words-Walt-Whitman-American-Poet
Gangster
Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated
Paperback: 128 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/
The
Quotable Popes
Paperback 66 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Popes-Maria-Conasenti
The
Quotable Kahlil Gibran with Artwork from Kahlil Gibran
Paperback 52 pages
Kahlil Gibran, an artist, poet,
and writer was born on January 6, 1883 n the north of modern-day Lebanon and in
what was then part of Ottoman Empire. He had no formal schooling in Lebanon. In
1895, the family immigrated to the United States when Kahlil was a young man
and settled in South Boston. Gibran enrolled in an art school and was soon a
member of the avant-garde community and became especially close to Boston
artist, photographer, and publisher Fred Holland Day who encouraged and
supported Gibran’s creative projects. An accomplished artist in drawing and
watercolor, Kahlil attended art school in Paris from 1908 to 1910, pursuing a
symbolist and romantic style. He held his first art exhibition of his drawings
in 1904 in Boston, at Day's studio. It was at this exhibition, that Gibran met
Mary Elizabeth Haskell, who ten years his senior. The two formed an important
friendship and love affair that lasted the rest of Gibran’s short life. Haskell
influenced every aspect of Gibran’s personal life and career. She became his
editor when he began to write and ushered his first book into publication in
1918, The Madman, a slim volume of aphorisms and parables written in biblical
cadence somewhere between poetry and prose. Gibran died in New York City on
April 10, 1931, at the age of 48 from cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis.
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Kahlil-Gibran-artwork/
The
Quotable Dorothy Parker
Paperback 86 pages
The
Quotable Machiavelli
Paperback 36 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-L-Thayer
The
Quotable Greeks
Paperback 230 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby
The
Quotabe Oscar Wilde
Paperback 24 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons-words/
The
Quotable Helen Keller
Paperback 66 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Helen-Keller-Richard-Willoughby
The
Art of War: Sun Tzu
Paperback 60 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese-Quotables-ebook
The
Quotable Shakespeare
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Shakespeare-Richard-W-Willoughby
The
Quotable Gorucho Marx
Paperback 46 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Groucho-Marx-Devon-Alexander
BLOGLAPEDIA’S BLOGS
ARCHITECTURE
Architecture
for the blog of it
http://architecturefortheblogofit.blogspot.com/
THE ARTS
Art
for the Blog of It
http://artfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/
Art
for the Pop of it
http://artforthepopofit.blogspot.com/
Photography
for the blog of it
http://photographyfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/
Music
for the Blog of it
http://musicfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/
Sculpture
this and Sculpture that
http://sculpturethisandsculpturethat.blogspot.com/
The
art of War (Propaganda art through the ages)
http://theartofwarcleverhuh.blogspot.com/
Album
Art (Photographic arts)
http://albumartsocheesyitsgood.blogspot.com/
Pulp
Fiction Trash (The art of Pulp Fiction covers)
http://pulpfictiontrash.blogspot.com/
Admit
it, you want to Read this Book (The art of Pulp Fiction covers)
http://goaheadadmitityouwanttoread.blogspot.com/
FILM
The
Godfather Trilogy BlogSpot
http://thegodfathertrilogyblogspot.blogspot.com/
On
the Waterfront: The Making of a great American Film
http://onthewaterfrontthefilm.blogspot.com/
FOOD
Absolutely
blogalicious
http://absolutelyblogalicious.blogspot.com/
The
Wee Book of Irish Recipes (Book support site)
http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/
Good
chowda (New England foods)
http://goodchowda.blogspot.com/
Old
New England Recipes (Book support site)
http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com/
And I
Love Clams (New England foods)
http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/
In
Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener (New England foods)
http://inpraiseoftherhodeislandwiener.blogspot.com/
Wicked
Cool New England Recipes (New England foods)
http://whickedcoolnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com
Old
New England Recipes (New England foods)
http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com
FOSTER CARE
Foster Care new and Updates
Aging out of the system
Murder, Death and Abuse in the
Foster Care system
Angel and Saints in the Foster
Care System
The Foster Children’s Blogs
Foster Care Legislation
The Foster Children’s Bill of
Right
Foster Kids own Story
The Adventures of Foster Kid.
HEALTH
Me
vs. Diabetes (Diabetes education site)
http://mevsdiabetes-bloglapedia.blogspot.com/
HISTORY
The
Quotable Helen Keller
http://thequotablehelenkeller.blogspot.com/
Teddy
Roosevelt's Letters to his children (Book support site)
http://teddyrooseveltsletterstohischildren.blogspot.com/
The
Quotable Machiavelli (Book support site)
http://thequotablemachiavelli.blogspot.com/
HUMOR
Whatever
you do, don't laugh
http://whateveryoudodontlaugh.blogspot.com/
The
Quotable Grouch Marx
http://thequotablegrouchmarx.blogspot.com/
IRISH-AMERICANA
A Big
Blog of Irish Literature
http://abigblogofirishliterature.blogspot.com/
The
Wee Blog of Irish Jokes (Book support blog)
http://theweeblogofirishjokes.blogspot.com/
The
Wee Blog of Irish Recipes
http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/
The
Irish American Gangster
http://irishamericangangsters.blogspot.com
The
Irish in their Own Words
http://theirishintheirownwords.blogspot.com/
When
Washington Was Irish
http://whenwashingtonwasirish.blogspot.com/
The
Wee Book of Irish Recipes (Book support site)
http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/
LITERATURE
Following
Fitzgerald
http://followingfitzgerald.blogspot.com/
Shakespeare
http://shakespeareinamericanenglish.blogspot.com/
The
Blogable Robert Frost
http://theblogablerobertfrost.blogspot.com/
Charles
Dickens
http://charlesdickensfan.blogspot.com/
The
Beat Poets of the Forever Generation
http://thebeatspoetsoftheforevergenera.blogspot.com/
Holden
Caulfield Blog Spot
http://holdencaulfieldblogspot.blogspot.com/
The
Quotable Oscar Wilde
http://thequotableoscarwilde.blogspot.com/
NEW ENGLAND BLOGS
The
Quotable Thoreau
http://thequotablethenrydavidthoreau.blogspot.com/
Old
New England Recipes
http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com
Wicked
Cool New England Recipes
http://whickedcoolnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com
Emerson
http://emersonsaidit.blogspot.com/
The
New England Mafia
http://thenewenglandmafia.blogspot.com/
And I
Love Clams
http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/
In
Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener
http://inpraiseoftherhodeislandwiener.blogspot.com/
Watch
Hill
http://watchhillwesterly.blogspot.com/
York
Beach
http://yorkbeachfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/
The
Connecticut History Blog
http://connecticuthistory.blogspot.com/
The
Connecticut Irish
http://theconnecticutirish.blogspot.com/
Good
chowda
http://goodchowda.blogspot.com/
NOSTALGIA
God,
How I hated the 70s
http://godhowihatedthe70s.blogspot.com/
Child
of the Sixties Forever
http://childofthesixtiesforeverandever.blogspot.com/
The
Kennedy’s in the 60’s
http://thekennedysinthe60s.blogspot.com/
Music
of the Sixties Forever
http://musicofthesixtiesforever.blogspot.com/
Elvis
and Nixon at the White House (Book support site)
http://elvisandnixonatthewhitehouse.blogspot.com/
Beatles
Fan Forever
http://beatlesfanforever.blogspot.com/
Year
One, 1955
http://yearone1955.blogspot.com/
Robert
Kennedy in His Own Words
The
1980s were fun
http://the1980swereokayactually.blogspot.com/
The
1990s. The last decade.
http://1990sthelastdecade.blogspot.com/
ORGANIZED CRIME
The
Russian Mafia
http://russianmafiagangster.blogspot.com/
The
American Jewish Gangster
http://theamericanjewishgangster.blogspot.com/
The
Mob in Hollywood
http://themobinhollywood.blogspot.com/
We
Only Kill Each Other
http://weonlykilleachother.blogspot.com/
Early
Gangsters of New York City
http://earlygangstersofnewyorkcity.blogspot.com/
Al
Capone: Biography of a self-made Man
http://alcaponethebiographyofaselfmademan.blogspot.com/
The
Life and World of Al Capone
http://thelifeandworldofalcapone.blogspot.com/
The
Salerno Report
http://salernoreportmafiaandurderjohnkennedy.blogspot.com/
Guns
and Glamour
http://gunsandglamourthechicagomobahistory.blogspot.com/
The
St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
http://thesaintvalentinesdaymassacre.blogspot.com/
Mob
Testimony
http://mobtestimony.blogspot.com/
Recipes
we would Die For
http://recipeswewoulddiefor.blogspot.com/
The
Prohibition in Pictures
http://theprohibitioninpictures.blogspot.com/
The
Mob in Pictures
http://themobinpictures.blogspot.com/
The
Mob in Vegas
http://themobinvegasinpictures.blogspot.com/
The
Irish American Gangster
http://irishamericangangsters.blogspot.com
Roger
Touhy Gangster
http://rogertouhygangsters.blogspot.com/
Chicago’s
Mob Bosses
http://chicagosmobbossesfromaccardoto.blogspot.com/
Chicago
Gang Land: It Happened Here
http://chicagoganglandithappenedhere.blogspot.com/
Whacked:
One Hundred years of Murder in Gangland
http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/
The
Mob Across America
http://themobacrossamerica.blogspot.com/
Mob
Cops, Lawyers and Front Men
http://mobcopslawyersandinformantsand.blogspot.com/
Shooting
the Mob: Dutch Schultz
http://shootingthemobdutchschultz.blogspot.com/
Bugsy&
His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill
http://bugsyandvirginiahill.blogspot.com/
After
Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate on Organized Crime
http://aftervalachi.blogspot.com/
Mob
Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee (Book
support site)
http://virgilpetersonmobbuster.blogspot.com/
The
US Government’s Timeline of Organized Crime (Book support site)
http://timelineoforganizedcrime.blogspot.com/
The
Kefauver Organized Crime Hearings (Book support site)
http://thekefauverorganizedcrimehearings.blogspot.com/
Joe
Valachi's testimony on the Mafia (Book support site)
http://joevalachistestimonyonthemafia.blogspot.com/
Mobsters
in the News
http://mobstersinthenews.blogspot.com/
Shooting
the Mob: Dead Mobsters (Book support site)
http://deadmobsters.blogspot.com/
The
Stolen Years Full Text (Roger Touhy)
http://thestolenyearsfulltext.blogspot.com/
Mobsters
in Black and White
http://mobstersinblackandwhite.blogspot.com/
Mafia
Gangsters, Wiseguys and Goodfellas
http://mafiagangsterswiseguysandgoodfellas.blogspot.com/
Whacked:
One Hundred Years of Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Mob (Book support site)
http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/
Gangland
Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal (Book support site)
http://ganglandgaslightrosyrosenthal.blogspot.com/
The
Best of the Mob Files Series (Book support site)
http://thebestofthemobfilesseries.blogspot.com/
PHILOSOPHY
It’s
All Greek Mythology to me
http://itsallgreekmythologytome.blogspot.com/
PSYCHOLOGY
Psychologically
Relevant
http://psychologicallyrelevant.blogspot.com/
SNOBBERY
The
Rarifieid Tribe
http://therarifiedtribe.blogspot.com/
Perfect
Behavior
http://perfectbehavior.blogspot.com/
TRAVEL
The
Upscale Traveler
http://theupscaletraveler.blogspot.com/
TRIVIA
The
Mish Mosh Blog
http://theupscaletraveler.blogspot.com/
WASHINGTON DC
DC
Behind the Monuments
http://dcbehindthemonuments.blogspot.com/
Washington
Oddities
http://washingtonoddities.blogspot.com/
When
Washington Was Irish
http://whenwashingtonwasirish.blogspot.com/