The Bay Ridge Digest
A bi-weekly hyper-local Bay Ridge magazine-style podcast combining everything from culture, restaurant recommendations, history stories, current events, interviews, humor, and human interest.
The Bay Ridge Digest
The Bay Ridge Digest Podcast - EP014: We Remember Bay Ridge
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In The Bay Ridge Digest Podcast episode 14, we remember through the eyes of three Bay Ridge residents: A doula, a writer, and a musical director. In doing so, we’ll span several decades and maybe find out more about ourselves through the process.
Featured in this episode are these segments:
• With Jeff Samaha (@jeff_samaha) at St. Mary’s Antiochian Orthodox Church (@stmarysbrooklynya) and Hinch’s in the 1950s
• Jess from The Bookmark Shoppe (@thebookmarkshoppe) with some Bay Ridge-centric reads
• Three Light-Hearted Jokes from Freddie Friday (@freddiefridaystoryfuntime) with a PSA for the Itty Bitty Kitty Bay Ridge Cat Rescue (@ittybittykittynybayridge)
• Jeff Samaha on Forming Ridge Chorale and Becoming a stage manager at NBC in the 1960s
• Growing Up on Long Island with John P. Loonam (@jploonam)
• Tony Christiano of Nonno’s Pizza (@nonnospizza) on their most popular offerings and funny requests
• Why I’m launching the upcoming Bay Ridge Digest weekly Monday morning email newsletter in June
• Moving to Manhattan and then Bay Ridge, with John P. Loonam
• Growing up in Bay Ridge and Becoming a Doula, with Kerri Evers of The Brooklyn Birth Shop (@brooklynbirthshop)
• What defines a haunting with Christopher Wiecha and Aimee Pagano (@aimeenicolecollin)
Coming in June, The Bay Ridge Digest weekly Monday morning roundup email. It’ll feature upcoming Bay Ridge events, local classifieds, restaurant recs, human interest, and other Bay Ridge happenings. Want to sign up for this and find out more? Please do so at the completely revamped BayRidgeDigest.com
For more info on how to submit a story lead, please go to BayRidgeDigest.com. You can also get in touch by emailing BayRidgeDigest@gmail.com.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bayridgedigest/
It's funny you mentioned the Jews because on that show, Maddie Jalen Hall grew up in Bay Ridge, the film who used my house on 76th Street as the model for where her mother lived with her son. And that was a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_05And also James Franco's characters had to be from and there's Jonathan from St. Patrick.
SPEAKER_02I guess periodically people looking for sets go around Bay Ridge because of the character of the neighborhood. And they put a leaflet in my mailbox and I called them and I said, you know, I might be interested in they said fine, be home all day Tuesday. And Tuesday was like Rosh Hashanah. So I was like, oh, I can be home all day Tuesday. And they came in and they liked the house and I think my neighbors hated it. But it was fascinating.
SPEAKER_06And this is interior and exterior.
SPEAKER_02It was mostly interior, but yes, it was some exterior. Right. Yeah. There were like a hundred and twenty people in my house. And they'd carved out a little tiny space where the actors were, you know, at the dining room table and you can't see it, but they're surrounded by machines and people, and I would be among those people. And nobody would really know who I was. I was just some guy who might have a job and you know we're supposed to be doing something. At one point, Maggie Gillian Hall had an assistant and they were going long and they hadn't broken for lunch, and she said, Can you get me something to eat to her assistant? And the woman ran out to the catering table. And a couple minutes later, Maggie's just like, I really want to eat something. And I'm standing next to her, she's paying no attention to me, but I'm I'm thinking, This is my kitchen, like I should be a host here. It was very clear for some reason that she was a healthy person, so I didn't know if her like a candy barber. I was like, Would you like some dry fruit or a cracker and cheese and cracker or something? She looked at me and said, Who are you? I said, I live here, this is my kitchen, and you're welcome to eat something.
SPEAKER_06Welcome to the Bay Ridge Digest Podcast, episode 14. My name is James Scully. Tonight we remember through the eyes of three Bay Ridge residents: a doula, a writer, and a musical director. In doing so, we'll span several decades and maybe find out more about ourselves through the process. Subscribe to the Bay Ridge Digest Podcast everywhere you get a podcast. For more info on how to submit a story lead, please go to the completely revamped BayridgeDigest.com. You can also get in touch by emailing BayridgeDigest at gmail.com and follow on Instagram at Bay RidgeDigest. Want to take a ghost tour and see me in person? I'm debuting Ghosts of Old Bensonhurst this Saturday, May 16th, and leading revised version of Haunted Bay Ridge on Saturday, June 6th. Tickets to both can be found at the tours and events tab at BayridgeDigest.com or through the link tree at Bay Ridge Digest on Instagram. Coming in June, the next step in the Bay Ridge Digest, a weekly Monday morning roundup email delivered straight to your inbox, featuring Bay Ridge events, local classified, restaurant recs, human interest, and other important Bay Ridge happening. If you're a business owner listening to this, head to BayridgeDigest.com to see the media kit and wireframes to find out more. Want to receive this? Sign up for this email in the form at BayridgeDigest.com. Want to submit a story or important event? You already know that'll be happening this summer? Do so at BayridgeDigest.com. In need of anything from script writing to MCing, editing, producing, mixing, and directing, I do all these things. Been thinking about starting a podcast and not sure where to begin? I can help you produce your podcast in any stage, from pre-planning to post production. You can contact me for a consultation at James at the Wallbreakers.com.
SPEAKER_14Can you read this?
SPEAKER_20Yes, but you could read those words much more easily if you had one of the new Westinghouse television sets. Then just by turning a single knob, you could come right in close like this. See? It says electronic magnifier. And only the Westinghouse television sets have this wonderful new development that give you a real close-up whenever you want it. And all you have to do is turn this knob right here.
SPEAKER_25I got my first television in 1949. I had a television which was actually very unique. It was a big box. In those days, the TV screens were nine inches and they were in front of the box. My television was on the top of the box where you'd lift the screen open. And there'd be a nice 15-inch square screen and we were projected was inside facing it. And then bounced off a mirror to come out at you this way. It was black and white. We had a color wheel behind the TV. That's how the color was generated. This color wheel would spin, and I guess the primary colors would blend together and create the color picture. I don't remember having a color television until well, maybe ten years later. That was your typical turn the channel kind of TV rather than the remote. And I got interested in television because of that particular TV set.
SPEAKER_06Sunday, October 7th, 1951. Indian summer has given way to a day of thunderstorms, with two inches of rain expected. Luckily, we're in between games three and four of the World Series. New York Giants are up two games to one on the New York Yankees. So where are we? In Bay Ridge at 19281st Street on Ridge Boulevard, wrapping up the consecration of the new St. Mary's Antiochian Orthodox Church. The Antiochian Archdiocese is the jurisdiction of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch in the United States and Canada. Originally under the care of the Russian Orthodox Church, American and Canadian Sierra 11 Eastern Orthodox Christians were granted their own jurisdiction under the Church of Antioch in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. The local church stemmed from the First Orthodox Church on Washington Street in Manhattan. In the 1940s, the Bay Ridge Mission was renting quarters on 86th Street before erecting this beautiful structure, which was just consecrated today. The wet weather hasn't stemmed the turnout. The ceremony was presided over by Metropolitan Anthony Bashir, the spiritual head of the Syrian Orthodox Archdiocese of North America. Among the masses is Reverend Paul Schneerla. He's a tall black cassock clad man with a friendly smile. A convert to Orthodox Christianity, Father Paul completed studies at St. Vladimir's in the early 1940s. He was ordained in 1943 and was most recently serving in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It's been announced that his assignment will begin here in two weeks. Thanks to Reven Schneerla, next week we'll begin a permanent English liturgy at the church. Also among the parishioners is a boy with a camera.
SPEAKER_25Then I would look at the old Kodak box cameras. I got a hold of one of those and started taking pictures at nine years old. I remember being at St. Mary's Church for the groundbreaking. And I had my little brownie box camera, and I actually photographed the ribbon cutting for the groundbreaking of the church. And that picture got published in a newspaper. And I had no idea until my uncle handed me the picture from the newspaper and said, Look, you took this picture as a kid.
SPEAKER_06So who is this boy? His name might be familiar to you. It's Jeff Samaha.
SPEAKER_25Hi, this is Jeff Samaha. I am a longtime Bay Ridge resident. I grew up on 67th and 8th Avenue in Norwegian town, looking forward every year to the Norwegian parade. I moved then to Bay Ridge with my parents, living on 77th Street between Narras and Shore Road, and various other homes throughout my life. But Bay Ridge around Shore Road has been where I grew up. I'm from Lebanese background. My grandparents were born in Beirut on both sides of the family, and my parents were both born here in the States. So I'm, I guess, second-generation Lebanese, you would call it, but I'm an American. My mom grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and my father also grew up in Massachusetts, and then they both moved to 8th Avenue between 46th Street and 52nd Street, lived most of their lives there, and then moved to Bay Ridge when I was 13.
SPEAKER_07Given where you originally grew up, by say the Dust Bowl or Zeke's Roast Beef, do these ring bells?
SPEAKER_25Zeke's Roast Beef certainly does. That was across the street from the tennis court. That was across the street from my apartment building. Strangely enough, I never went to Zeke's, and I think it was called Arby's before that, but never went there for some reason. But I did play baseball in the tennis court across the street, and there was another field across the street from that. That was truly the baseball field. And I remember playing with my dad and with my uncle George.
SPEAKER_06Jeff lives with his father, mother, and younger sister. His father works in the garment industry.
SPEAKER_25He was a pattern maker. And he did design one thing that you might recognize if you remember the Dr. Kildare shirt. And it became a style that women wore after that was designed. And my father was the designer of that. And he never got credit for it because the company he worked for stole the idea from him. And that was that. But you can't take it away from him. He designed it, he cut it, made the pattern for it. I was thinking about how life was so much different back then in the 50s and 60s. And it was, in my mind, a more peaceful time. Just even locally around the neighborhood. People were more friendly. An analog life versus a digital life. No cell phones, no computers, no laptops. We played in the street. We had a good time playing stickball, handball, baseball.
SPEAKER_06Jeff went to William McKinley Junior High School at 7305 Fort Hamilton Parkway in 1953. And then Fort Hamilton High School in 1956. It was in school that his life began to take direction.
SPEAKER_25My first musical experience was McKinley, and I joined the Glee Club, a choral group, and I was in that for maybe a year, and McKinley brought in the first band program, and I was offered an opportunity to learn an instrument. So I chose the trumpet and joined the band, and that was my first musical experience with a band orchestra. From there, high school, I worked the regular band, the dance band, did the prawns as a trumpet player, first trumpet. While I was in high school, joined the All-City Chorus, which was conducted by a gentleman who wrote, or I should say, arranged, the Battle Hymn of the Republic. His name was Peter Wolhouski. Each section of that chorus had its own teacher. So we would go in on Saturday mornings, go to our specific groups, alter, tenor, soprano, bass. I was a tenor, so I was in the tenor section. And we would rehearse for two hours, and then on the third hour, we'd go to the auditorium, and Peter Wolhowski would be on stage, and he would conduct whatever song we were rehearsing that particular day. And he'd put all four sections together, and we would finalize that rehearsal with that particular song. Very, very specific kind of guy who was so smart and so talented. He could hear somebody singing off pitch. Now there's 300 people sitting in the auditorium, and he would point to somebody in the 15th row, six seats in, and say, You're flat. Get out. That was it for that person. You had one chance to make it right. So that was my all-city experience. And that teacher who did the tenor section lived in Bay Ridge. Her name was Catherine Drakis. I would eventually be driving her in every Saturday morning. She knew I lived in Bay Ridge and needed a ride to Giulia Richmond High School in Manhattan, where we rehearsed. So I'd pick her up and drive her every Saturday morning. And then when I graduated from high school, my all-city experience ended. And she invited me to assist her after that. For years or so after, maybe two or three years, I would assist her.
SPEAKER_06Time moves on, and suddenly it's Sunday, May 11, 1958, at about uh 2.30 p.m. We're heading into Hinches at 8518 Fifth Avenue. Jeff isn't singing with the Old City chorus and playing in bands. He's hanging out with friends in Bay Ridge at places like this. Hey, you hungry? Come on. Let's get a late lunch.
SPEAKER_16There's a way station for the Diamond and Black Hill State Flock. Eyewitness of French.
SPEAKER_068518 Fifth Avenue was built in 1921.
unknownFrontier.
SPEAKER_06For 10 years, the ground floor storefront changed repeatedly. Until 1931, when Rikertz Tea Room opened. Mainly a candy shop and ice cream parlor. Local teenagers loved it so much they started a catchphrase. Meet me at Rikertz. Rikert's featured some of the neighborhood's earliest neon signage. In 1948, Herman Hinch purchased the business, rebranding it. In 10 years, it's become famous for its egg creams, Belgian waffles, cheeseburgers, and chocolate displays in the window. Thanks, dear. Hey Jeff, what are the big hangout spots?
SPEAKER_25We always hung out at the green tea room on 86th Street between 4th and 5th. And then there was the competitive place to hang out where some of the more competitive kids hung out. Pinches around the corner. So there was a special group of kids that hung out there, and we were always competitive with each other, and I never knew which group I belonged to because I had friends in both. Then there was Burnbaum's. That was a really cool store. In the back of Burnbaum's was the record department. Being a music lover, I needed to work, so I asked if I could work in the record department. And I worked in the record department for a few years at a dollar an hour. And it was probably the most fun I had throughout my high school time. Another place that was memorable was Nathan's, 7th Avenue and 86th Street. And before it was Nathan's, the service people were on roller skates. So you would park in the parking lot and they would come around on roller skates and take your order right from the car.
SPEAKER_06Jeff's also heavily involved with Alsac, known as Aiding Leukemia-stricken children, were the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities. It was founded by Danny Thomas in 1957. Later that year, the four wall players at the Flag Corp Playhouse put on the Alsac Follies, with all proceeds being donated. The play was such a success that it was moved to Fort Hamilton, and Danny Thomas appeared.
SPEAKER_25Including the parents of children with cancer. They're given a place to stay. Everything is free, including housing. His legacy was just amazing. And he has saved so many children. So it was a proud moment for me to have worked on Alsac.
SPEAKER_06We'll pick up with Jeff later in this episode.
SPEAKER_23We're located at 8415 3rd Avenue. So we are open from 10 to 8 every day, and I have a few book recommendations for you. One is Bay Ridge, etc. by Ted General, Jack Latour, and Peter Scarpa. They're from the Bay Ridge Historical Society. Also got Old Bay Ridge in Ovington Village, a history by Matthew Scarpa. And then this one is slightly less local, but still pretty local. Haunted Staten Island by Mariana Biazzo Rendazzo. Perfect if you are already waiting for Halloween. We're on Instagram at the Bookmark Shop. We are also on Facebook, but I'm not gonna lie, everything you see on Instagram is on Facebook as well. We also have a newsletter that you can sign up for. Just scroll to the bottom of our website. And we have a lot of events coming up, so keep an eye out for those. You can also see those on our social media and on the homepage of the website. Alright, that's it for me.
SPEAKER_06Frederick Fred Friday back with another world popular joke session here on the Beyridge Daddy Podcast. You know what I'm saying, producer? Say owner. It's me, James. That's my producer James, my left-hand man. Getting me ready for another friendly joke session here. Hello, people. Tell them why we're here. Well, before our jokes, we'd like to mention why, Freddy. The itty bitty kitty bay rich cat risk, you know? Yeah, if you stop in the Henry Hardy's at 9314 Third Avenue, you can donate 25 bucks and get a free t-shirt to help save these cats. All proceeds go to vet visits, cat food, and supplies. You can also go to their website at ittybittykitty ny.org and donate that way, and t-shirt shipping is available. To see more of the cats they're helping, visit the Instagram page at ittybitty kitty ny Bay Ridge. You ready, Freddie? Yeah, I'm ready. Hey listen, what's up? What's my favorite thing to eat? What's your favorite thing to eat? Eat salads? What are you kidding, murder? It's chocolate chip cookies, you know? What does this have to do with anything? What's my first joke? Oh, okay. So listen, people, we're gonna get right into the jokes today. We're not gonna do lots of preambles, you know. I'm not gonna Freddie, why do NBA players love chocolate chip cookies? You know, because the playoff going on right now. When we're recording the year, the New York Knickerbockers are into the third round of the playoffs for the second year in a row. So why do NBA players love chocolate chip cookies? Uh because they can eat as many as they like? Well, I mean anybody can do that unless you got the diabetes, you know. But no no no. That's not it. No, no, no, no. You give up, people? Yeah, I think they give up. Because they can dunk them. My jokes are always cute. You know they cute. Hey, what's up? Why couldn't the gardener plant flowers in me? Why couldn't the gardener plant flowers in me? Yeah, why couldn't the gardener plant flowers in me, people? Oh, you're already laughing hard? Oh boy. I give up. Why couldn't the gardener plant flowers in me? Because he hadn't botany. He hadn't botany. Alright, I'll give you that one. That was a weak. It was a good made joke. Okay, one more, one more. Okay. What is Spring's favorite kind of pickle? What is Spring's favorite kind of pickle? Yeah, what is Spring's favorite kind of pickle? You don't gotta keep repeating, man. I don't know, gherkins? No, not gherkins and not sandwich tacos or bread and butter chips neither. I don't know, Freddy. What is Spring's favorite kind of pickle then? Daffodils. Who loves pickles? Pickles are great for a barbecue.
SPEAKER_11Oh my god.
SPEAKER_06Okay, Freddy. Well, if you'd like us to mention a specific animal rescue center, please email at bayridge digest at gmail.com or DM at Bay Ridge Digest on Instagram. You can also see Freddy's archives of jokes and stories, at Freddy Friday's story fun time on Instagram, and at Freddy Friday on YouTube. And Freddie spells his name how. F-R-E-E-D-I-E, you know, like Mercury. Well, until next time, Freddie. Until the next episode of the Bear Ridge Digest Podcast, you know, you gotta expand. We gotta I need more segments. Oh yeah. What do you say, Freddie? We say toodos. Hope you enjoyed that joke.
SPEAKER_25I went to St. John's University for a year and found out I went to Pace College after that, and I hooked up with three guys who were starting a singing group. As part of the singing group, we would rehearse in the hallways of the pace college by the staircases. So it was really a great place to rehearse. I ended up doing that more than going to class. So ultimately I left pace.
SPEAKER_07My grandfather, he was a year older than you. My grandmother always jokes, and she's born in 44, my grandmother, about there was a do-op group on every corner in those days.
SPEAKER_25It's absolutely true. If I had a street corner to sing on, I would be on the corner with three other guys doing doo-op. The funny thing is, one of the guys made a contact in the recording industry. We were given the opportunity to rehearse and record a very bubblegum type, kind of a cheesy rock and roll song. But it was an opportunity to get on the radio. One of the guys in the quartet said, No, I don't want to do this song. It's not a good song, let's not do it. And I had this feeling that this was a mistake, a big mistake. I remembered driving my 1966 Le Mans Podtiac on the highway one day, listening to the radio, and sure enough, the song comes on the radio, performed by another group, and I said, Darn, he lost out.
SPEAKER_06Jeff Samaha graduated from Fort Hamilton High School in 1960. As you just heard, he went to both St. John's and then Pace before leaving school. It was Jeff's parish that gave him his next steps.
SPEAKER_25Somebody decided for me that I would become the choral director for St. Nicholas Cathedral in downtown Brooklyn, which was my mother's church, and I was brought up Catholic and Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox or Antiochian Orthodox. There was a new priest who was becoming the pastor at St. Nicholas. My uncle, George, who was the president of the Board of Trustees, invited the pastor to his home, along with me and my family, who made up the choir, basically. My cousins and my aunts and my mother were choir members. The priest said, you know what? Since your family is the basis of the choir, you should be the choir director. He fired the guy that was teaching the choir at the time he joined the church and hired me to be the choir director. I was 19 years old. And I did that for 10 years.
SPEAKER_06Jeff also got a job with NBC at Rockefeller Center in 1965.
SPEAKER_25A friend of mine was working at NBC in the sales department, and he says, You know, you're so interested in video and doing productions. Why don't you let me introduce you to somebody in the page department? And that was the beginning of my career 57 years ago. In those days, we had pages and guides at NBC. The pages filled the audiences for the TV shows in-house. And the guides took the tours around the building, showing the tour people what the studios looked like, what the editing areas looked like, the videotape areas. I did that for about four months and got hired as a log clerk. You had to log television shows from sign-on to sign-off for the FCC. And my job was to watch TV and log anything that happened out of the ordinary. And I did that for about eight months. And then a vacation relief job opened up as a stage manager. And I said, Wow, that's what I really want to do. I remember standing in the back as a page, standing in the back of a studio, looking down on the set, and watching the guy in charge of the studio floor. And that was the stage manager. And I said, I want to be that guy. So when that opened up as a vacation relief job, I knew I was taking a chance because my regular job may not stay open at the end of the summer to go back to. And I said, you know, if I'm going to get anywhere in life, I have to take risks. So I took the job. I did summer relief for three months. And then my old job came back. And that old job, strangely enough, was sitting in an office, and I had a big spreadsheet in front of me. And I booked videotape sessions and viewing sessions for the commercial people who would come in and want to look at commercials. I'd be in the viewing room and I would set it up and have those commercials played in the room. But I would set that schedule up on a spreadsheet. Each of us in that office had two days to create the broadcast day from 6 a.m. to sign-off. I booked all the equipment, the videotape machines, the film projectors in that day. And that would then get published for that broadcast day, and they put out a routine to the whole building. And people would follow that like it was the Bible for broadcast. So if you were in the control room and you were a technical director or a director and you would want to see where your equipment was scheduled, you'd look on the sheet that I would draw and it would show where the tape machines are, which studio was coming out of. Did that scheduling until they moved me into the mobile unit division, which I would schedule mobile units around the country for football and baseball and all the other sporting events. And if our own mobile units, if we ran out of them because there were so many events going on, I would then have to call a TV station in the particular town they needed a unit and rent from them. So I was the renter for NBC for mobile units traveling around the country for sports. And that would take me to my second year as a vacation relief stage manager, and then again the third year. And then I was told, okay, this is it. One more shot as vacation relief. You have to become permanent or you have to leave the company. And I went for it. And during that time as the third year vacation relief stage manager, the job became permanent.
SPEAKER_06Now Jeff was still the choral director for St. Nicholas Cathedral.
SPEAKER_25During that time, I said, you know what, I'm tired of doing sacred music. I'd like to do something in the pop vein. So I started what was known as the Ridge Corral. And that was 1968. I was put in a very strange situation. When I was speaking to the president of the Board of Trustees of Fourth Avenue Presbyterian, I don't remember who the pastor was at the time, but I know I dealt with the president. I said, look, if you give us this space, I'll do a show for you in six months. I knew I could put something together in six months, but the strange thing about it was I hadn't formed the chorus yet. So I was booked to do a show without a chorus. As soon as he said, yes, okay, let's do it, I said, Oh my God. Now I started writing to all the people I knew who were in church choirs and school choruses and invited maybe a hundred people. Out of the hundred, I got 25 people who said, okay, let's do it. So we put together the Ridge Chorale for the very first time and we performed five songs at a luncheon six months later at Fourth Avenue Presbyterian. And that was the beginning, the very first concert that we did in 1969. We started rehearsing in 1968. As a matter of fact, we started it rehearsing at the wrong time. We pulled together the 25 people in the beginning of the summer that year. Attendance was abysmal because people were on vacation. They didn't want to come and rehearse. We learned a lesson from that. We never really pulled anything together during the summer since then because people just don't show up. We broke up for a short time, but I still have that commitment to the church. So we started up again in the fall, and that was the true beginning of the Ridge Corral.
SPEAKER_06Well, Jeff was putting together the Ridge Corral in late 1968. He was also becoming a permanent stage manager at NBC.
SPEAKER_25Believe it or not, they threw me into a soap opera, which is probably the most difficult production to do, especially as a new stage manager. And now I'm in charge of the floor, I'm in charge of the actors, making sure the sets were correct. I'd be in at 7 a.m. in the rehearsal room downstairs, and I would have to set up furniture that would track with the studio set so the actors could rehearse and pretend that they're sitting at a table that I would set up in that room. And I would do that every day in at 7, do an hour of rehearsal there, then go upstairs to the studio where the actors then became familiar with the set. And they would move around the set. While they're moving around the set, going over their lines, the director would be looking in the cameras, viewfinders, deciding on what shots were going to happen when. Once the director was ready, I would get the actors in place and start the first rehearsal on camera. That would take place, and then they would go to videotape. And before videotape, there was no recording of the show. You'd go live after that rehearsal. That was very, very scary. You're on the air, you make a mistake, thousands, maybe millions of people are watching. But then I got used to it. Videotape came out, and that was the end of that. And then I moved on from soap operas to the Today Show. And I did the Today Show for a couple of years.
SPEAKER_16Good morning, it's today. It's April 22nd. You're another top story.
SPEAKER_06Turning Rich Corral into Jeff Tomahawk Productions on the next episode of the Bay Ridge Dodges podcast. Interested in advertising your business on the Bay Ridge Digest Podcast? Get in touch with me at James at the Wallbreaker.com. Now enjoy this teaser for Burning Gotham. What's Burning Gotham? It's an historically accurate audio fiction soap opera. I created, produced, directed, and co-wrote it. The first eight episodes are out anywhere you get a podcast or Burning Gotham.com. Episodes are ten to fifteen minutes in length. Burning Gotham made the twenty twenty two Tribeca Film Festival as an audio selection. Right now, experience New York City like you've never before.
SPEAKER_13The speculation is out of control. The whole republic is going to come.
SPEAKER_01Gentlemen, gentlemen.
SPEAKER_06Will you make the right deal?
SPEAKER_12Memories are short in New York. If you don't make a fortune, someone else will.
SPEAKER_01I know you've been bringing rosemary to port illegally. I have eyes and ears and noses and tongues everywhere.
SPEAKER_06Or fall to greed.
SPEAKER_12If I was caught with diamonds at any time, any time, my sister and I would have been getting raped and murdered. I do this for you. Look at what we got here, Brick Duck!
SPEAKER_19Looks like we're caught as a dandy and a whore, all alone on South Street with nowhere to find. Ain't that right, boy?
SPEAKER_06But whatever you choose, there's the choice. You just always make the same choice, the one for yourself. Just make sure you get out in time.
SPEAKER_03Lord, have mercy on us all.
SPEAKER_06Out now on your favorite podcast app. Burning Gotham, the 2022 Tribeca Select Audio Soap Opera, about the fastest growing city in the world, and the opportunists who shaped it. To find out more, go to Burning Gotham.com.
SPEAKER_10Were you an AMFM radio kid?
SPEAKER_02I was chronologically an AM and then an FM. I grew up in the changeover. I found out when I was in my twenties that my mother was a huge Frank Sinatra fan and had been at the Paramount in those pictures and films you see of girls screening. My mother's in there somewhere screening at Frank Sinatra. And then my father saw Muddy Waters play somewhere and was a big Cal Basie fan. But they seemed to have this attitude that that kind of love of music was something you did when you were young, but that when you were adult, we didn't have a stereo in my house. When I was a teenager we got a stereo and then we bore records, but my parents never had any of their own music and didn't seem drawn to it. But we did listen to AM Radio in the car. So, you know, Cousin Brucey and the NCA good guys, those Long Island radio stations. Very popular. My mother did like the Beatles. My father thought they were drug-using, dangerous, narcotics pushing degenerates, but my mother kind of liked them and liked other songs. So all of that top 40 pop music of the mid-sixties was part of my life. And then as I got older, we started buying records, my brothers and sisters and I. And then FM radio became a famous. I, you know, sort of remember discovering WPLJ and WNEW and that album-oriented stuff. And I am kind of a there's hardly any of it left, but I am kind of a DJ guy. You know, I was a big Vince Elsa fan, and he was on the radio. That notion that it wasn't just coming from a playlist that someone determined, but the DJ was deciding right now. I am in the mood to hear this song and put that off.
SPEAKER_06It's been 10 days since Richard Nixon resigned as the 37th president. Five days ago, Congress authorized U.S. citizens to own gold again. Where are we on this hot August evening? We're driving east on Long Island's New York State Route 27. Better known in these parts as Sunrise Highway. We're going towards Rockville Center. A bar called the Rusty Hinge.
unknownAnd I'm just so pleased. I am so proud. They with NBC. It is sort of a culmination of a career. Every guy, I think, in radio wants it.
SPEAKER_06The councilman here is the 5th District's John W. Widler. And the 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age to 18, was ratified in time for the 72 presidential election. Though many young voters here supported Democratic nominee George McGovern's anti-war platform. All of Long Island was carried heavily by Richard Nixon. The man you just heard at the top is at this moment going into his junior year of high school.
unknownIn the studio.
SPEAKER_06His name is John P. Loonham.
SPEAKER_02My name is John Lunum. I go by John P. because I have a son who's also John Loonum and a writer. And I am the author of The Price of Their Toys, which is a collection of short stories, and of the forthcoming novel Music the World Makes, which should be out later in the year. So I grew up in Rockville Center. Some of the locations in the book, well, some of them are just names that I just borrowed. But in some cases, in order to help me organize the story, I would call up the map of Rockville Center and say, okay, the character has to move here. So I don't name the town, but I use places from there.
SPEAKER_05For example, Sunrise Highway is something that comes up in multiple stories in the book.
SPEAKER_11Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Was that a significant roadway for you growing up? Why was that?
SPEAKER_02It's the main shopping drag through Rockville Center. And I grew up as a child in the 60s and as an adolescent in the 70s. And this is before the advent of big box stores. Rockful Center was nothing like Bay Ridge in most ways. But Bay Ridge is still dominated by small mountain pop shops. There were a few big name stores, but they're generally not like that. And that was what life on Long Island was. I used to joke that each town on Long Island, Rockville Center, Baldwin, Freeport, was the same town just recreated. There would be, you know, a barber shop, a hardware store, you know, this, and then you'd move over to the next town, and there was a barber shop and a hardware store. It always seemed to me that that was the center of each town. And it had this name Sunrise, which, you know, for a writer, you're just like, oh, there's a name with a little meaning to it. You can either have someone go to Sunrise Highway ironically, or maybe it means something, but it's a nice name.
SPEAKER_06John's already getting bored of Long Island. He wants to be a writer, and he wants to get himself to New York City.
SPEAKER_02My mother was a writer. The book, the Colester Short Stories, is dedicated to Eileen Herbert Jordan. That was my mother. So I grew up with the notion that you could be a writer. Whereas I think other people don't figure out until high school, this is something you can do. I guess I'd started taking it seriously late in high school, and certainly by the end of college, I thought this is what I want to do. And then I discovered how hard it is to make a living doing it. I did a bunch of other things and I ultimately became a high school teacher.
SPEAKER_05Now, was it easier in your mother's era? So we're talking, say, the 60s.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
SPEAKER_05Was it easier to earn a living wage, either contributing pieces for magazines, etc.?
SPEAKER_02So for most of her career, she was also an editor. She was an editor for Woman's Day magazine. And I think before I was born, she held other positions. But I think it was easier because, for instance, for her career, there were magazines like Red Book and Good Housekeeping and Woman's Day. And they carried one or two or three short stories in every issue. So there was a magazine market out there that you could work with. And she also wrote articles and interviews. Towards the end of her life, AARP had uh a magazine called Modern Maturity that I think they've let lats, but she was writing essays for them, sort of satirical comic pieces on aging.
SPEAKER_05Do you have any of her old articles in the original hard copies?
SPEAKER_02I do. I don't think she realized, I don't think anybody realized how crazed we would become about collecting, and that a whole issue, a red book, might actually be worth something now. So she cut them all out and I have them in files. My father had been a lawyer and then he um moved into management consulting. But for most of my life, my mother was a major breadwinner. I grew up in like a dictionary definition of a dysfunctional family. Both my parents were alcoholics. It took me a long time to like siblings? Yeah, I'm one of four. I have an older sister, a younger brother, and a younger sister. Things that families get done, we just couldn't get done. And I have a sort of semi-serious joke that I tell with my siblings. When certain things come up, I just think, well, what would dad do? And let me do the opposite of that, and then I'll be fine. Most of them, when I joke like that, it's trivial, but like, you know, when I became old enough to own a car, I was like, oh, how do you take care of a car? But whatever dad did was wrong. So you do the opposite of that. And you know, when I became a father, I had to think through, like, all right, how do you do this? And look around and go, okay, there are people doing it well, just because my father, I mean, he had his good points. He was a charming guy. He was very funny, he was really, really smart. And he had worked his way and helped his family through the depression and World War II, and he became a successful lawyer. And then something happened and it fell apart. And by the time I was, say, 12 years old, he wasn't interested in responsibility anymore.
SPEAKER_05That was also an era where people suddenly stopped wanting to feel so responsible.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. You know, if you're talking about the late 60s, early 70s, and there are shows like Mad Men, which do a good job of encapsulating the energy of the 1960s. Yeah. The death of Camelot, or you know, what are the moments that cause this stuff?
SPEAKER_05For example, how old are you when the moon landing happens?
SPEAKER_02Help remind me, that's 1970? 1969. I was 11. And my father was a lover of history and an avid reader.
SPEAKER_06As somebody growing up on Long Island, what is New York City to you in your childhood and teenage years?
SPEAKER_02I thought, until I was really an adult, this was universal. New York was like a beacon. Long Island, you know, Nassau County suburbs, when I was a child, was a really good place to be a child. But around 12 or 13, it kind of goes sour on you. There's no place to go, you can't get anywhere without a car, you can't drive for years, and New York was like, oh, there's life there, and it's only a train ride away. But that sometimes made it seem very distant. The writer Joan Didion, who grew up in California but lived in New York for a while, has a line in one of her essays that you can't really appreciate New York if you're born there. You have to have been somewhere else and see it as a beacon and then come and experience it. I don't know if that's true, but that encapsulates my experience. I had an aunt who uh lived in Manhattan, my father's sister, and she would, from a very young age, have my brother and I or my sisters come in and visit her, and that awakened this sense that, like, this is a whole other world with lots of possibilities. Where was she living? She was in Stivesentown. My father and his mother and my aunt were original residents in Stivesentown. Somewhere around 1948, they moved into one of their first buildings, and my aunt lived there for the rest of her life. And where did your mother grow up? My mother grew up in Balden on Long Island.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02So part of my love for New York was my father. He openly disdained the suburbs and openly wished that he could have stayed in New York City. My mother wanted him to move out there. I think he had his generation's fears of how the city was changing. He was like, oh no, you can't bring kids up in the city anymore. So he was willing to move to Long Island, but he always disdained it and he told stories of growing up in New York that made it seem wonderful to me.
SPEAKER_05So then by the time you were graduating high school in 1976, eventually you moved to New York City proper, right?
SPEAKER_06So at what point did you start to spend more time in the city limits than in Long Island?
SPEAKER_02You know, it wasn't really until after college. I went to college up in Albany. And I came down sometimes to the city, but more often I just went home to Long Island. And then when I graduated from college and I had no place to go in New York City, I went home, but I was like, oh, I gotta get out of here. You know, my plan from the time I went to college was that I would graduate and move to the city. And I didn't move directly to the city, there were some other steps in the way, but always I was like, this has to lead me to living in the city.
SPEAKER_05So what year did you move to New York City?
SPEAKER_06We'll pick up with John as he moved to Manhattan a little later in this episode. As an aside, the audio of Cousin Brucey Morrow on 66 W NBC from August 19, 1974, comes courtesy of Ellis Feaster. You can support his YouTube channel at ELLIS FEASTER.
SPEAKER_04So before Nona's open here, do you remember what was here on the spot before you?
SPEAKER_18Yes, it was another pizzeria. It was called Bongusto. It's been a pizzeria here for I'll gonna say close to 40, 50 years now. So when I first bought the place, they left the awning, the sign. We took it down to put our new flush sign. When we took it down, I guess no one decides to take the other signs down, so they just kept building on top of it. So when I took everything down, it says Salon Joe's, Bongusto, and I think there was one more pizzeria. I forgot what that one was, but that was from like the 80s. So that was a cool experience, and it's yes, it's been a pizzeria since then.
SPEAKER_07What's your most requested slice?
SPEAKER_18Ooh, that's a good question. Buffalo chicken is very popular with the younger crowd, but then I have like a mushroom and onion slice, it's very popular. Zucchini with the bacon, and our grandma nonetheless, actually, with the crushed pumped tomatoes, fresh pizza, a little garlic and oil, die for it. I think those are pretty much our biggest sellers for now. Obviously, our regular, but the specialty slices, that's been our biggest movers.
SPEAKER_07Do you have any memory of like the weirdest thing anybody ever said? Can you do a custom this?
SPEAKER_18Oh god. I mean, people would order like pineapple, like anchovies someone got one time, which is actually sounds disgusting to me. So I don't know, but to them, I guess they liked it. They came back for it more and more often. That was probably the most bizarre order I've gotten yet. Anchovies and pineapple. Yeah, well, the pineapple. I mean, I get it with the ham, you know. I don't know. I get it with the ham and the pepperoni, but when you get it with the anchovies, I'm like, nah, that's a little crazy now. It's salt and the sweet, and they're all over the place.
SPEAKER_07Right, yeah.
SPEAKER_18But they liked it, so I sell it.
SPEAKER_07What are some of your most non-pizza selling items?
SPEAKER_18Our chicken colapmer heroes are a very big seller, chicken color parm dishes. Our grilled chicken Caesar wrap is very big on the menu. And again, with that, I just got gluten-free wrap, so that's now on the list. Big ZD lasagna. We make fresh, everyone loves that. We're available on slice, girl pub, beyond menu, Uber Eats, Doordash. So that's normally where people would most likely find my menus. And at Nono's Pizza on Instagram.
SPEAKER_06I mentioned that I graduated from Pratt Institute. That was 2008. I figured I'd spend my life as an art director, designer, and copywriter. I'll have a little more to say about the 2008 Great Recession later in this episode. But I got my first real full-time job in the spring of 2009. It was with Daily Candy. Ladies of a certain age might remember it. Created in 2000 by Danny Levy, and originally a Daily Email newsletter, Daily Candy sent you the fashion food and fun in your city. It helped spawn Urban Daddy, Thrill List, and countless other email newsletters. I only worked for Daily Candy for about 16 months. The person who got me hired, Alison De Benedictus, a wonderful creative director, saw something in this brash, often lazy, overgrown kid. So much so that she brought me with her to Conde Nest when she left Daily Candy in the summer 2010. But Daily Candy left a huge impression on me. Why am I bringing this up? Well, perhaps you've heard. This June, I'm launching a weekly Monday morning Roundup email. It'll feature Bay Ridge events, local classifieds, restaurant wrecks, human interest, and other important Bay Ridge happenings. There's a need for this here. I'll give you an example as to why. A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with Anginette Stokes. She's the Narrows Community Theater Board President. They were putting on a production of Brigadoon. Did you go? Well, I couldn't attend because I already had both the Bay Ridge Fifth Avenue Bids annual meeting and the Fort Hamilton High School Hall of Fame ceremony that same weekend. These wonderful groups were unaware of what each other was doing. Sure, we connect with things going on, but there's no centralized source for information on our local happenings. I've just redesigned BayridgeDigest.com. I've also put together a media kit for both the podcast and the upcoming newsletter. The site is now a hub for all of these things, as well as my upcoming tours and more. Want to sponsor the upcoming newsletter? How to is in the media kit and through the sponsor tab as well. Businesses can have their logo in the weekly newsletter, and individuals can support both the newsletter and the podcast. I'll be running the entire process through Patreon. Want to receive this weekly newsletter? Sign up in the form at BayridgeDigest.com. It's free to do so. It's also free to submit upcoming happenings. You can do that on the site as well. As always, if you have any questions, reach out to me at Bayridge Digest at gmail.com or shoot me a DM at Bayridge Digest on Instagram. My goal is to launch the email Monday, June 29th, just in time for Independence Day weekend.
SPEAKER_02We live together through the Enam war and through that period. And I saw him as someone who was at least sometimes capable of changing his mind. He grew up during World War II and had the kind of attitude of, you know, America first. But towards the end of the enamel war, he was like, I don't know, this might not have been the same situation. He grew up in a really Catholic world and went to all Catholic schools, way through college and law school. He began to re-evaluate some of his religious beliefs prompted by Vatican II. I'd never heard of anybody else having this reaction, but I remember part of Vatican II was the church explicitly condemned anti-Semitism. And I remember going to church one Sunday and the priest explicitly kind of warning or advising the parishioners that they should not be anti-Semitic. And my father grew up in Manhattan and knew lots of different kinds of people. And I remember him driving home and being very angry and saying, Why is he telling me not to be anti-Semitic? I'm not anti-Semitic. The church has been the one who said we're better than the Jews. I didn't say we're better than the Jews. So why is he now lecturing me about this? And then he had the same response to the end of the Latin mass. He said, I'm not the one who said Latin was God's language. They made me learn it. Now they're taking it away. And I think one of his good qualities was some ability to look around and go, Oh, the world was different than I thought, and I need to rethink this. My mother also went to Catholic school on Long Island. There was a coffee shop where they would go, I don't know if it was lunchtime or after school, and they would smoke cigarettes, and nuns would come in periodically. And she had a story of a girl who'd been caught, and if she got caught again, she was going to get thrown into school, and the nun came in, and she put her cigarette out in her palm. She burned herself rather than face the nuns. She different, you know, and then she could put her fist around and say, No, sister, there's no cigarette.
SPEAKER_15Good morning. This is Dallas Townsend with the CBS World News Roundup. There won't be any cry of play ball today in baseball's major leagues. The players have gone on strike after failing to settle their dispute with the owners over the owners' plan to restrict movement of players among the teams. Chris Kelly has the story in New York.
SPEAKER_06Friday, June 12th, 1981, near St. Mark's Place in Manhattan. It's here where we're picking up our story with John P. Moonham. As we heard earlier, he began taking trips into the city to visit his aunt. But his mother also worked in Times Square.
SPEAKER_02My mother took over as the breadwinner of my family and worked as an editor, and the building was the uh Montgomery Ward headquarters. It's still there, it's no longer the Montgomery Ward headquarters, but it's right in Times Square. And when I was in high school, some of my friends would tease me, Oh, your mother works on 42nd Street. And I remember going to work with her sometimes and her walking through Times Square, which was really like it was a rough area. Nothing like the Times Square of now. Except in the crowd and the energy. But lots of people who were clearly homeless. Lots of people who were clearly sex workers. And my mother wandering around. And I have this great memory of once walking with her, she had her pocketbook on her arm, and this sort of rough and tough-looking guy approaches her and says, Excuse me, ma'am, your pocketbook is open. Your wallet is hanging out. She was like, Oh, thank you very much. She closed your pocketbook and walked on. And my Long Island stereotype of like, everyone here is gonna mug me was like, Oh, I guess not everybody here is gonna mug me.
SPEAKER_06In 1981, St. Mark's Place was one of the counterculture epicenters. In July, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards filmed the music video for Waiting for a Friend here. In August, MTV launched. Patty Astor's Fun Gallery opened at 229 East 11th Street, helping to launch the mainstream careers of Basquiat, Herring, and Kenny Sharp. It was also where John moved. And then living on St.
SPEAKER_02Mark's Place. And then I later moved to Brooklyn. It was kind of later in life that I discovered how cool St. Mark's Place was at the time. I managed to, you know, live on the block Madonna was starting her career and never know who she was. You know, Jean-Michel Bascal was wandering around somewhere, and my son sometimes teases me because he was an art history major, and he once said to me, like, Keith Herring was doing major artworks on subway posters, and you didn't think to take one? And I said, Nobody took them. It was just graffiti, and it was interesting, but nobody thought to tear them down and keep them. And then we went to a Keith Heron retrospective one day, and there were people who turned them down and they're now worth a fortune. He was like, You were the dummy who walked by.
SPEAKER_06John mentioned earlier that he grew up in what he called a dysfunctional family. It's helped influence his latest collection the price of their toys. As you might be able to guess, there's going to be a part two of my interview with John in the next episode of the Bear Ridge Diges podcast. That'll focus completely on his writing career. But let's touch on some of the themes now.
SPEAKER_02We went through a period with and I feel guilty saying this because it wasn't like I was a six-year-old. Sometimes I was old enough to have gotten up and but nobody mowed the lawn. And on Long Island, you don't mow your lawn. That's a serious crime against the kidney. So it did stand out for us.
SPEAKER_05I'm just opening the book because there's a particular story about a kid who's an adolescent who picks up the teenage girl at the beach.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. And there's a lot of references to that father in the community that was Manifest Destiny, right?
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Was that something where you were pulling from your own life and that?
SPEAKER_02Yes. There's only one detail in that story that's really strictly autobiographical, but a lot of them are a twist on autobiography.
SPEAKER_06I thought there was a melancholy tone to basically every one of them. How does a collection like this come about?
SPEAKER_02So this was not written as a collection. Some of these are more than 20 years old. I've been writing them for a long time. I have other stories that are not in here. But at a certain point, I had a group of stories I'd published eight or ten, and I was like, it's time for me to put together a collection. And to be honest, I tried a few different themes. Then I hit upon this one to take out all the stories that were kind of about males trying to be males. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a boy? And hit upon the idea. I said, Oh, I've done some about young boys and I've done some about old men, and I sort of have every age and to put them in age order, and I like that. And I have a friend, he regularly posts on Facebook pictures of himself with very expensive sports cards. And then that that quote, the price of their toys. I said, Oh, that's a great title. Just a note on perseverance, if there are any writers out there, it got rejected more than 20 times. The collection in both. Yeah, before Cornerstone took it. And I would sometimes adjust it, shift stories around. But it was basically the same thing. I have gotten to a point where I can submit things and get rejected. And whatever part of my brain that is insulted or hurt or let down by that, I just compartmentalize and go, oh, they rejected it. Good, I can submit it somewhere else.
SPEAKER_05Yes, right. Because you have to. If you don't have the skin, how can you do it? Yeah, yeah, you'll stop.
SPEAKER_02You won't be able to put up with it. If I still reacted the way I did when I was 30, where it was like a crime against humanity that they didn't dare recognize my genius, I would have given up a long time ago.
SPEAKER_05Would you say that you're a nostalgic person? Where is the melancholy tone of these stories in this collection, and would you agree that there is a melancholy tone? Yeah. Why?
SPEAKER_02That's a good question. It's probably part of my personality. I'm not drawn to do a complete short story and then do 12 drafts of it if it ends happily. I mean, I have done it, not everything I've written is like this, but I am drawn towards these stories where the character is torn or disappointed in some way.
SPEAKER_06From the time I was 12 or 13 years old, I started reading Raymond Chandler novels, Philip Modell.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. And although the themes are not anything like a Chandler novel, but I found that the way you set scenes and write dialogue, there seemed to be a similarity towards this. Somebody once wrote that he wrote like a slumming angel. Yeah. Raymond Chandler. And there's something about that. There's no very overtly wealthy people in this collection. Right. It's all sort of working class, yeah. People trying to figure things out for themselves and Maybe failing at it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I had been writing a lot of stories, and this is true in this collection, where whatever happens, the character ends up alone.
SPEAKER_05And that's kind of the Marlowe character. He always winds up alone. But that's obviously not how you've lived your life.
SPEAKER_02No, and I don't think it's how most people live. I mean, some people do, obviously, by choice and are happy. Some people do, I think, more unhappily. I think that one of the things that's consciously on my mind, it is a very American way of thinking of maleness.
SPEAKER_05It's Gary Cooper riding off into the sunset.
SPEAKER_02It's also Henry David Thoreau. You gotta go to Walden and live by yourself. It's that notion. It took me until I was certainly a fully formed adult, but even older than that before I realized not everybody in the world thinks that way. I really like it if at the end of a story, the reader understands something about the character that maybe the character himself hasn't quite grasped. The James Joyce thing about Epiphany, the character will have some new understanding of their position. Well, I kind of would like the Epiphany to be for the reader. This may be why James Joyce is a better writer than me. And not so much for the character. So in the last story. I was putting them in chronological order, but in my mind, the second to last story, Dying Dahl, that character is older. And I've gone back a little bit, made the man, and I don't think that character is quite as old. But I wanted to end on that scene of these two men embracing and saying, What's happening? I think a reader would have a glimmer of an answer to that question, What's Happening? about aging and loneliness that the characters are still just beginning to face.
SPEAKER_06In the 1980s, John met his wife Maria. She's, by the way, the cover illustrator for the price of their toys. He also became a teacher.
SPEAKER_02I didn't set out at any point to be a teacher. I was still thinking of myself as I'm gonna be a professional writer and not having any success getting freelance work or not even knowing how to go about getting freelance work and working temp jobs and different things like that. I was at City College getting a master's in creative writing. The City College campus has a high school on the campus. It used to be Music Good Art, and it's now A. Philip Randolph. In 1984, there was such a severe teaching shortage that they let virtually anybody become a teacher. You could start teaching and do your accreditation at night. They would give you a certain amount of time to get to 12 education credits. And I said to myself, Well, this is a job, and it's only 10 months, and you get paid for 12. I'll have a free vacation when I can write at the end of it. So I was going to do it for a year just to get the two months paid vacation. I saw a love of it. It was so difficult. I think I arrogantly went in thinking, you know, this is easy. I've been in classrooms, I know, you know. And it was so hard. And I remember saying to my wife at some point, like in March of the year, this is really, really hard, and I'm really, really bad at it. But I really want to be good at this. I think these kids deserve better than they're getting from me. I did not think I did it for 35 years. I was 25 years old. I didn't think anybody did anything for 35 years. My second year I went back, and one of my colleagues, who was much older, asked me how it's going. I said, you know, I'm gonna do another year. I don't know if I could do this for very long. And he just smiled and pointed to me and said, Oh no, you're gonna be doing this for over 30 years. You're gonna get a pension out of this. And I was like, you are nuts. But he was right. I did.
SPEAKER_14Good morning, Bill Lynch with the CBS World News Roundup. There is no good political news for President Bush in the latest unemployment numbers, which, as we hear from business reporter John Stayer, remained at a five-year high last month with nearly 9 million Americans on the board.
SPEAKER_06Fast forward, and it's suddenly February of 1992. The Winter Olympics are beginning in France, and the U.S. economy is facing a downturn as presidential primary campaigns begin. In Brooklyn, Patrick Daly, the principal of PS-15 in Red Hook, was killed when caught in a crossfire while searching for a missing student. And on February 26th, two students were shot to death in the hallway at Thomas Jefferson High School in East New York, just an hour before Mayor David Dinkins was scheduled to visit the school. It was that month that John moved to Bay Ridge with his family.
SPEAKER_05You mentioned moving to Brooklyn. Is that before or after you met your wife?
SPEAKER_02That's after. We live in what was her grandparents' house. My wife also grew up on Long Island, but her mother grew up in Bay Ridge on 74th Street, and then the family moved to 76th Street. My wife and I were married and living in sort of the Midwood section. My wife's grandmother passed away, and her grandfather really couldn't live alone. So we did the house at that point. And that was about 1992? And I had been here to visit the family before. So my introduction to Bay Ridge comes sometime in the late 80s.
SPEAKER_06We'll pick up with John P. Loonham in the next episode of the Bay Ridge Digest podcast. But if you haven't read the price of their toys, you can grab a copy at the bookmark shop at 8415 Third Avenue. You can contact me for a consultation at james at the wallbreakers.com. If you're a regular listener of the Bavers Digest Podcast, you hear everything from fully produced history segments to wacky jokes. Thanks, Freddy, to narrative interviews. Here's a commercial spot. Special thanks to Brett Solomini for lending his vocal talent. See what else he's been up to at Brett Underscore Solomini on Instagram. That's B-R-E-T-T underscore S O L I M I N E.
SPEAKER_03I think I finally lost. Hello, sir. You what do you want? You know what I want. How could I possibly?
SPEAKER_06You're roaming through the city. You have a voice. Use it. I'm trying to use it. Ah. But are you using it correctly? What do you mean? Isn't it obvious? Script writing. Narrative nonfiction, audio fiction, editing, producing, mixing, directing, acting.
SPEAKER_03What does this have to do with you following me through the street on a rainy night? Have you utilized any of this?
SPEAKER_06No? Well then, it's time you launched a podcast or at least some kind of audio production.
SPEAKER_03Why would I need to do that?
SPEAKER_06You're in one already.
SPEAKER_04I am?
SPEAKER_06What do you think this is? Stalking! No, you're in my commercial spot. I'm James Scully. I do all these things.
SPEAKER_03Wait, you mean you wrote, directed, produced, and mixed this?
SPEAKER_06Yep. Reach me at James at the Wallbreakers.com.
SPEAKER_03Well do I get paid for my time at least?
SPEAKER_10I hope you like pepperoni on your pizza. My dad, he was huge.
SPEAKER_21He was like six foot four. Really big, strong guy. And he was the most gentle, gentle father with us. But it was a very different time when you were a cop back then. You used to have to like follow your prisoner. So my dad worked in Crown Height in the 7-1 precinct. And back in the you know, 80s and 90s, it was really, really different from what it is now. It was really dangerous. So he did make a lot of arrests, and he wouldn't be home for days at a time. But when he was home, he was really great trying to help my mom just manage seven kids and stuff, and we'd try to be good and give her a break and stuff. But I used to think that my dad was great with watching us until my mom said he used to actually just put you all in one room with the TV on, and then he'd lay and fall asleep in front of the door so none of you could escape. That was probably where we all had so much fun too. But yeah, so he was an awesome dad. He definitely raised us to, you know, in that way of always being aware of your surroundings and always be safe, which has played out well in my life. Apparently, he was like a really tough, hardcore, very awesome cop. The community that he worked in, the majority of the community was black and brown families from all different areas and backgrounds, and then a very heavy Hasidic Jewish and religious Jewish community. But he was very loved by the communities that he served, and that's a little bit of a different part of what I hear usually. He really fought hard to make it a very safe community for everybody. I was coat checking once when I was like 15 or 14 here in Bay Ridge, and I complimented a woman's shield. She had a necklace that had like a police shield on it, which was you know something the cops' wives would get. And then I told her that my dad was a cop, and then she told her husband, and then the guy came back and was like, Oh, where's your father work? And I was like, Oh, his name is Bobby Ebbers. And the guy just went like white, and then his wife started tearing up, and they were like, Oh my god, your dad actually saved my life. And meanwhile, my dad had never actually met that cop. So there's a lot of like history for my dad being a really great cop, but like a community cop, and then also like really took care of his cops. He was a PBI delegate.
SPEAKER_06This is Carrie Evers.
SPEAKER_21Hi, my name is Carrie Evers. I am the founder of the Brooklyn Birth Shop here at 185 Marine Avenue. Suite 1C. You can always call me by the window where you see the Brooklyn Birth Shop if I don't answer the bell. I am a birth educator, a birth duela, an elactation consultant, and a mother of two amazing teenagers.
SPEAKER_06As you just heard at the outset, Carrie's a Bay Ridge girl.
SPEAKER_09No, I just noticed something. When we hit record, your Brooklyn accent suddenly got a lot lighter.
SPEAKER_21Yes. So I am of the age where we were shamed for how we sound over the phone and over things that are recorded.
SPEAKER_09So where in Brooklyn are you from?
SPEAKER_21Bay Ridge. 7311 Fourth Avenue. It's on Fourth Avenue.
SPEAKER_09Now this is Irish?
SPEAKER_21A little bit Irish, a little bit Lithuanian, and a bunch of other good stuff. But people just thought we were Irish because my dad's a retired cop and we had a big family, so we we kind of just went with it because people love Irish people.
SPEAKER_09Now in the line of seven, wherever you bought.
SPEAKER_21I am the middle of everybody. Everybody's less than two years apart. So it's Ian and then five girls and then Brendan. So into each other. I get it. They are still really cute. She was in Woodstock while he was in Vietnam. And he proposed to her on their first date.
SPEAKER_06Hey Kerry, what are some of the bearage things you missed from the 80s and 90s?
SPEAKER_21I missed the Optimo stores where you could go in the back and play the big arcade game kind of things. I miss those. I missed Thompson's Fish Market. That was, I think it was on 72nd and 3rd. And you could get like a bag of fries, the best. Yeah. Gino's Pizzeria was somewhere that I always went, but there was a bagel shop right next to it. I missed that bagel shop actually. I miss Issa's. That was like in the middle of 73rd and 74th. That was like an optimum. So I used to get jelly rings and then play video games and get my mother's cigarettes from there sometimes. But yeah, those little spots were really good. And Gino's was great, and there's a bagel shop right next to Gino's that was really great. Listen to my order. A cinnamon bagel with butter microwaved. Yeah. Oh my god. Delicious. Oh. Yeah, so I missed those spots. There was Mr. Hans and Mimi and Hans, that's no longer there.
SPEAKER_08Where did you go to school?
SPEAKER_21PS170, and then McKinley Junior High School, and then Fort Hamilton High School. And then I went to Brooklyn College for a little while. Got into the restaurant industry, which I loved. The restaurant industry was amazing. And then I did a little bit of the carpenter's union. That was like a big dream of mine was to eventually like work alongside a really skilled carpenter and learn. Carpenter's union was for a little while, and then the iron workers kicked off a four by four and it landed on me and I got hurt. So that didn't last that long. Adula is a Greek word. There's a little bit of controversy around it because the translation for it would be a female to female servant. So I would be there for another female during the time of her pregnancy, birth, and then into postpartum. That's what the word doula means. Families hire me in their pregnancy, and I'm basically their pregnancy Google, Reddit, and even AI. You can call and text me, and I will answer all your questions, but I'll answer it with a balance of a natural kind of understanding of what goes on in the woman's body during pregnancy, and then I'll give you the medical kind of side of it. So I'm always helping people learn what's happening in their body and to try to trust the process, which isn't easy because there's so much information out there that's telling you to be scared and telling you to be fearful and telling you a lot of things can go wrong. I'm here to calm that down for you. If something wasn't awesome or I didn't really love what you were sharing, I would ask you to call your midwife or your OB right away. But I guide you through that pregnancy. And then towards the end of the pregnancy, when your body's doing its own thing, I help you to piggyback and learn how to help your body get ready for the labor process. And then we build a birth plan together, or you take a birth education class, which is why I opened up the birth shop. So they're still talking about more negative things, and those things are gone now. So I'm trying to share the updated, real information about what's going on in New York City hospitals. But I wait for you to start your labor. I join you at some point in your labor process. Two women in the labor process actually our hormones are contagious. So when I join somebody at the right time in labor, which is when things start to become more active, my presence alone sort of strengthens that labor process. And then we move from home to hospital together. I call myself a dualist sister because I'm there for you in a way of I know what's gonna happen. I'm about two steps ahead, but I'm also your sister. I'm there to just really encourage you to just trust that you're amazing and that you're awesome. And I don't want you to be scared, I want you to be excited. I'm not advocating and speaking for you, but I'm also I'm there to kind of enhance the experience. So I really try to connect with the staff to try to build that team that's gonna be around you so everybody knows how awesome and amazing this family that I'm working for is, and that they understand what that woman's hoping for in that experience, whether that's an epidural or not. I really share information really fast with the medical staff, and then I stay with you until you have the baby, and I take videos or photos so you remember. I'm a lactation consultant as well, so I help with the initial latching. Breastfeeding can be overwhelming for people, but I help them to understand that it's actually very individual. So to just kind of learn the baby and their new motherhood and just to you know embrace that a little bit. I do a post-partum visit and I stay in touch with people for the rest of their lives after that. And then they invite me to be with them for their next babies and things like that. But I always remain a resource and I always tell people, especially families that are living in Brooklyn now, like we're in this together, we're parents together, so I you can always reach out, you can always call me.
SPEAKER_06Now you just heard that Carrie is not a midwife, so what's the difference?
SPEAKER_21I don't do anything medical with people in the sense of like I'm not doing cervical exams, I'm not checking for dilation, I'm not drawing blood, I'm not checking your heart rate. There's nothing medical about me at all. A midwife does everything that an OB does, it's just that they cannot perform, legally cannot perform a cesarean birth. But everything that an OB does, the midwife does.
SPEAKER_06So, how did this birth work journey begin?
SPEAKER_21Probably it was when my sisters were having their babies. I was raised just kind of like a tomboy. I didn't express emotions through crying or you know, saying, like, I love you. We were just kind of like, you know, we didn't need to say too much. But my sister, one sister, was giving birth, and they let us all be in the labor room, but she wasn't really gonna have the baby anytime soon. And then just when things, I guess, started picking up, there was this moment where the doctors were like, Okay, you have to leave now. And then I had this little feeling where I wanted to stay with her and like hug her or like hold her a little bit, and then that feeling I could still feel that feeling today of having that for the first time, like having this feeling of wanting to kind of hug somebody, but wanting to nurture them, wanting to take care of them, and that was such a new feeling for me. And then my sisters and I kind of showed up for each other in our own birth experiences. It was only until I was out drinking in the West Village with a bunch of Canadians, and the Canadians were talking about the healthcare system, and then they were talking about home birth, midwives, and doula, and then I was like, What's the doula? Basically, I realized that I had been a doula for a couple of girls in my life and younger women in my life. I rang my sister and was like, Oh my gosh, you're not even gonna believe this. There's a job, there's like a position called a doula.
SPEAKER_06The next big step in Carrie's journey to being a doula was deciding to have an at-home birth.
SPEAKER_21Watching my sisters in their pregnancies and then into their birth experiences definitely left like an impression on me. And when I was going to have a baby, I wanted something very different from what they experienced. Even though they had positive experiences in their own ways, I wanted something very different. So I actually had a home birth into my pregnancy and into that experience. It's really where I became a doula.
SPEAKER_09What was it that you saw that you said, okay, I want something different?
SPEAKER_21It could sound a little bit too like anti-hospital, but I'm not. I love hospital births now. I wouldn't have loved them back then. So this is 18 years ago. And what was happening in the birth world 18 years ago was a lot of medicalized births. So if you came in in labor or if you had a few contractions, you would be asked to come into, but maybe told to come into the hospital right away. And then they would administer medications that were trying to kind of speed up the process. And a lot of times that was hard on the baby, and that would lead to a cesarean, or that would lead to the need for an epidural. So an epidural back then was also very, very heavy and concentrated and different, and it could affect the way that you were actually able to give birth. I didn't want the pressure of any of that, so I decided to stay outside of the hospital. Also, back to growing up with a big family, I'm comfortable with a lot of people around. And safety for me meant my whole family there. So I knew that by having a home birth, I can have my whole family near or in that same room with me. And that was very, very important to me. I wanted to be left alone and I did trust the process. Every labor gets really powerful, really tough, meaning really intense and really painful, but it's not the whole labor. So I knew that my mom had more of positive birth stories because when you would ask her about things, her memory was more of like, oh, I think you were bought at this hospital and that hospital. Where other women, when you listen to their stories, their stories are very traumatic. So I knew that there's probably a side of my genetics that can lean into knowing that my mom did it, I can do it. My sisters did it, even though it was a little bit different, a different time, I can do it. So I used knowing that they did remarkable jobs, even though their labor experiences were different than mine. I just knew that I could do it and I wanted to do it. So I had a home birth, a midwife, and I gave birth in a pool.
SPEAKER_06Carrie got her first doula certification in the fall of 2008.
SPEAKER_21In order to become legitimate, I took uh Dona, which is the doulas of North America. So I took their training course, and then you become certified through them. And that's how I began my work as a doula. 2008.
SPEAKER_06Now, I don't know how much you remember about the fall of 2008.
SPEAKER_13The latest plunge in stocks. This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. No jump start for Detroit. The auto industry loan appears to be all but dead in Congress. And who'll be advising the new president? Names of top cabinet picks emerge. Good morning, I'm Nick Young with the CBS World News Roundup.
SPEAKER_21It wasn't easy. Nobody in Brooklyn was looking for a duela. And most of the families that I was interviewing for actually weren't from America. It was years of a lot of interesting competition, I guess, too, because there was only a small number of us. I'd be walking into an apartment building and I'd see another duela kind of passing me by. I would wonder if she had dueler. And then over time I would see that same doula, the same few doulas. So that was kind of interesting and fun. When you're from Brooklyn and you're a New Yorker in that way, right, you have way, way different personality than anybody else. So I was very eager to meet other people, but a lot of the other doulas were very much like we're not friends. We're like competition, I guess. So I didn't become friends with a lot of the doulas that probably were doing it for a little bit longer than me, unfortunately. But it was funny. I mean, you know, who cares at the same time? I don't see anybody as competition. Business brings business. People will hire me because they want me.
SPEAKER_07So as the 2010s come around, my guess would be that when you start to get clients in Brooklyn, they're in places like Mark Slow. But there's a certain kind of clientele living there.
SPEAKER_21Right. I wasn't being hired by Brooklyn people for a really long time, probably in the last five years, was when I started getting hired by Brooklyn, Brooklyn people. I was getting hired by non-Brooklyn people, people that were moving into Brooklyn and Manhattan because they weren't around their family. So they needed somebody to be there. So that's where I was being hired. But the clientele was very much always Manhattan, but very much Park Slope into downtown Brooklyn, Dumbo. Yeah, just like all over, you know, those areas of Brooklyn.
SPEAKER_07To go back for a second, you said initially in 2008 and nine, and most of the women are not from the United States.
SPEAKER_21It was like French women or women from Germany, and then different like small countries that you're like, wait, where is that a little bit, you know? So I would meet like an OB, they wouldn't understand what we were doing either just yet. And then sometimes I'd get a call that there was a woman alone in a hospital, like a public hospital, let's say. I would go and be her duel, and she was maybe, you know, from Africa and not speaking any English. So there was, you know, uh language barriers and cultural barriers. So just a different country thing for a while.
SPEAKER_06We'll have more with Carrie in the next episode of the Bay Ridge Digest Podcast. But if you haven't heard, she owns the Brooklyn Birth Shop at 185 Marine Avenue, just off Third Avenue here in Bay Ridge. You can find out more about the courses she offers at Brooklynbirthshop.com. You can also follow her on Instagram at Brooklyn Birth Shop. By the way, Carrie's been a part of nearly 1,000 births.
SPEAKER_21Like I mentioned a little bit earlier, when women join each other in the labor process, there's definitely an energy exchange. And inside of that, sometimes when I walk into a room, an apartment, whatever it is, somebody's home, and they're in more active labor, I actually just observe the first two to three contractions. And then from there, that sort of helps me to figure out what to do next. A lot of times, there's so much coming off of that woman, so much coming away from her during those contractions that you really have to, it's like a kind of a cool dance. You really have to make sure that you're not stopping things from happening, right? You're not trying to stop things, you're trying to really create a place for her to trust everything that's happening. Because again, it's getting more intense, which is painful.
SPEAKER_08Well, when you say this a lot can lobber, you mean physical energy.
SPEAKER_21Yeah. And then inside of that energy, believe it or not, is how her body is communicating with my doula brain and my dual heart. So I know if I were to touch her now or interrupt her by asking her anything, or stand too close to her, that can kind of throw things off. So I just watch and then I wait for the contractions to be over and I make some suggestions. Or I do ask questions of where are you feeling that? What's going on? During just at the start of that next contraction, I'll say, I'm gonna hold you here, I'm gonna touch you, or you know, I'm asking I'll always for consent, but in a different way, in a particular way for each woman because it's so different. And then I'll just say, if there's anything that I'm doing that you don't like, you just tell me. And very often that touch is more of a gift of like, okay, I'm helping you to release the fear inside of this power that's happening. We do not need any fear in our labor process. And sometimes people think pain, fear always makes pain feel worse too. So I'm trying to release that. It's funny because all the trainings I've taken, all the workshops I've taken over the years, it's the one where I actually took classes from like retired CIA agents, retired military guys, retired interrogation, where it's a lot of mirror work. I'm moving in a certain way to help her start to move instead of staying in that little bit of a fear place. So I'm doing a lot of movement on my own and breath work. So she starts to copy my work. So I'll start with what she's doing, and then I'll start to slowly switch it. So then she begins to open up and kind of soften her body, which helps her to welcome those contractions.
SPEAKER_09Now, after someone gives birth to a healthy baby and you're there the whole time, obviously, this is one could argue the greatest thing about life is birth of life. The greatest, right?
SPEAKER_08The greatest.
SPEAKER_09You're glowing, just thinking about it. How much does that take out of? Are you on a high up?
SPEAKER_21Oh yeah. No, it is always. I can be with somebody for 38 hours, I could be with somebody for 12 hours, I could be with somebody for however long it takes. And yes, during that, sometimes I'm like, oh, I'd love to take a nap or something, right? I don't, I don't sleep at anybody's birth, even if they're sleeping and resting, I'm keeping my ear to the baby's heart rate, I'm making sure that everything's good. But there's something so beautiful and magical and special and intimate in that kind of lead up, not just to the actual baby being born, but that lead up where no matter what the woman has decided on and how she wants to give birth, when you get closer and closer to that happening, even again before the baby arrives, there's just a beautiful, beautiful energy that's there, and everybody feels it. After the baby's born, and then the mom and baby and dad are partners and sweethearts, and everybody gets to hold on to each other and be with each other. I've never been to the same birth. I've never experienced the same feelings in a way, but I usually leave and I think the energy that I'm in, it's so inspiring where I'm making every phone call I need to make, I'm answering the emails I have to answer. I'm so high, I'm somewhere else. If I could like bottle what that is, that would be awesome. Obviously, it's hormones and an oxytocin, because again, that's all of it. And then, yeah, I'll crash really hard for about three hours, and then I have to be a mom and a business owner.
SPEAKER_00We're driving in our truck to uh be dropped off at certain places, and there happened to be a crow hanging on the probably a fishing line, which nobody would be able to hang from one point to another. It was like mind-boggling, how the heck did somebody, I mean, get a line up there and then the crow getting caught up on that. But I also I have pictures of orbs and everything else from Battle Hill. When they first opened up the kiosk or 25th Street to look up the graves, I would stay after work and do all the genealogical stuff of putting out a last name from A, putting down the first person buried, then how many people were buried there from their family. So that gives me a better idea. So the more people that I counted, the longer they're here in Brooklyn. So then I went to Battle Hill and I just got a an intuitive feeling to take a picture now, and I got these ghost figures coming at me, and I also have these orbs on Battle Hill, so because you know there's a lot of unrest on that hill because a lot of soldiers got killed. I collect stuff like that.
SPEAKER_07And the cemetery always closes at dusk.
SPEAKER_06The hours get shorter in the winter time, obviously, but so I'm assuming this would have been nighttime, no one else is really around, right?
SPEAKER_00Right, and the security guards, they let me walk around, do whatever I wanted over there, so because they knew me for a long time.
SPEAKER_06He was a longtime employee of Greenwood Cemetery. How do we define a ghost? What makes us gravitate towards spooky stories, and not just in October? Many of us have experienced odd or otherworldly things. Bay Ridge native Amy Pagano Collin is one of them.
SPEAKER_24We lived in an apartment before being in the house that I'm in now with a roommate, and we had a number of very strange things happening there. In Bay Ridge, it was on 84th Street. We used to rent there, and my roommate and I, my good friend, we would sit in the living room and the lights would turn on, and they were the kind of lights that you had to actually push it up. And it was a very old building, and we would both see that. At one point, they will different things would turn on in the apartment, and even at one point we had like a chain broken on the door. We had to have the cops come. It was so freaky, and they said, Nothing has happened from outside the door. This would have happened from inside. It was a chain that just broke. Candles would get lit. I mean, I could keep you here and you're gonna go, wow, she's nuts. But it wasn't just me. When I start my now husband, he said, You just feel something in the house. So we don't know what it was, but you definitely had something going on it.
SPEAKER_07Skeptics would say all the old electricity, but then you start adding more things on top of that. No, I don't believe that.
SPEAKER_24Never saw anything there, but really the most you just had a feeling, so you would come down this long hallway and you would just feel like there was just a weird presence there. But we never saw anything, other than, you know, lights going on and off, and I wasn't drunk because my you know, like you tell people like, oh, you must have been drinking. No, really not.
SPEAKER_06I grew up in a house on Bay Parkway in Bensonhurst that had lots of strange activity. Don't believe me? Just ask my mom.
SPEAKER_22It would be like you hear it.
SPEAKER_07Only in the basement, though.
SPEAKER_22In the basement. Well, that was that.
SPEAKER_07But when you say almost a hum as if they were through the wall, like it was next door or something.
SPEAKER_22Yes and no, but there was no one next door for that. And then as a kid, for me, where my bedroom was, all night long I would hear. It sounded like someone would be walking in the dining room because the floors creaked, but in a pattern, not just like the house settling, walking back and forth.
SPEAKER_06What causes these supposed paranormal things to happen? Are they trapped spirits who are unable to move on? Interdimensional visitors, energetic imprints from the past history of a house. Or is it something ancient, something tied to the land itself? Greenwood's not the only cemetery that Chris Weecha has been a part of. On 16th Avenue, between 84th and 85th Streets, is the old Neutric Cemetery. It was established in 1654, even before the Reformed Church congregation arose in 1677 and took over the grounds. More than 1,300 people have been interred here.
SPEAKER_00And at one point the cemetery branched out even further if it went back to the 1600s, which we have no records of. So how far out did it go? Because if you look at the level of the street compared to the cemetery, that these bodies must have been removed or something like that. So that's another mystery. Uh I want to figure out where those bodies went and how far the cemetery went out. I have a book that has all the churchyards of Brooklyn, Flatbush, Flatlands, the Utrecht, Gravesend. I wrote down how old some a lot of these people were during the Revolutionary War, and how many people up to like 1860 something, the burials. So it goes back a long time. This history gotta be brought out and preserved. And I want to get these stones, fix them up if I could. I already made a suggestion for that. And the military, of course, I want the militiamen that were around before this Revolutionary War to really be honored by, I guess, Fort Hamilton.
SPEAKER_06At the cemetery, you can find graves for some of the earliest and most prominent families of the time. Many have names you'll recognize because they remain today in our streets and neighborhoods. Van Brunt, Cortillew, Cropsey, Emmons, Benson, Leffertz, Nostret, and Bennett. There's also a communal grave for Revolutionary War soldiers in an area near the intersection of today's 16th Avenue and 84th Street, where church members of African descent are buried. Wanna see this cemetery? I'm debuting a brand new tour called Ghosts of Old Bensonhurst this Saturday, May 16th at 6 p.m. I'm also leading Haunted Bay Ridge on Saturday, June 6th, from 6.30 to 8.30. There'll be a lot of local history mixed in for those who don't necessarily believe in ghosts and spooks. From a ghost that knocked on walls, to the spirit of a murdered lawyer, to a ghost haunting a local railroad, to a shadow being watching a little boy, to the oldest cemetery in our midst. It's time to turn up our collars, hit the streets, and beware of Bensoners' things that go bumpin' at night. Wanna get tickets? Go to BayridgeDigest.com and click on the tours and events tab. Or go to Linktree slash the Wallbreakers. That's L-I-N-K-T-R.e slash the Wallbreakers at either at Bayridge Digest or at the Wallbreakers on Instagram.
SPEAKER_25And Ley Mez was not opening their rights at all for the years that I was doing choral. I started the group in 1968 and I did choral concerts and then the middle segment of the performance was staged songs from Broadway. So I would take a scene from LeMiz and produce that as part two of the overall concert. I must have done every scene of Lehmez over the years without getting the rights until finally the rights opened up. And when the rights opened, I grabbed them.
SPEAKER_06Next time on the Bay Ridge Digest Podcast, we pick up our chats with Jeff Samaha, John P. Loonham, and Carrie Evers. We welcome new businesses and commemorate Memorial Day. The reading material used in today's episode included articles from The Bay Ridge Home Reporter, Caravan, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Newsday, and Pastdaily.com. Thank you to the guests, Tony Cristiano, Carrie Evers, Jess Goodwin, John P. Lunham, Amy Pagano, Jeff Samaha, Maureen Scully, and Christopher Weecha. A special thank you to Gordon Skeen of PassDalily.com. All those historical news broadcasts, yeah, they come courtesy of him. A special second thank you to Ellis Feaster for the audio of Cousin Brucie Morrow on 66WNBC. Support his YouTube channel at E L L I S F-E-A-S-T-E-R. Coming in June, the Bay Ridge Digest Weekly Monday morning roundup email. It'll feature upcoming Bay Ridge events, local classifieds, restaurant wrecks human interest, and all other Bay Ridge happenings. Want to sign up for this and find out more? Please do so at the completely revamped Bayridge Digest.com. For more info on how to submit a story lead, please go to BayridgeDigest.com. You can also get in touch by emailing Bayridge Digest at gmail.com. So until May 28th, my name is James Scully. This has been the Bay Ridge Digest Podcast episode 14, and I'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you very much.