First up is Mr. Kilgannon's contribution to the muse when he wrote a February piece about the Rikers Island inmates who write novels, poetry and stories and even have them published, or self-published. It's quite a revelation, and one of the more positive things to read about Rikers aside from all the crappy news.
Mr. Kilgannon is a senior reporter for The New York Times who I like to think is in an enviable position of self assigning his stories. His articles tend to be about parts of New York that only a native, or long-term transplant might know about.
The first time I started to pay attention to his byline was when he wrote about Murph the Surf, Jack Roland Murphy, and the Star of India sapphire 1964 heist from the Museum of Natural History. The "brains" if you can give the robbers that much attention of the heist, was Murph, a Miami based surfer dude into crime. I remember the heist and wrote about it in three postings.
Murph had gotten out of prison for a murder he committed and made good copy for the evangelical bent he went on after getting out of prison. Murph has remained such a memory for me I even repeated a bit of the story in a posting about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. I think Murph the Surf will always be a part of my memories.
Corey, along with a photographer did a great piece about the slowly shrinking junk yards in Willets Point hard by Citi Field in Queens. The view from the 7 train was always filled with the junk yards where auto parts can be found for maybe anything ever built.
There once were so many junk yard operators that they literally took over a city street to dump the wrecks. The city eventually claimed the street back, but there has always been a movement to get rid of the yards completely and build perhaps a soccer stadium. Might happen yet.
If you ask even a native New Yorker what goes on in Hart Island in the East River they may draw a blank. But Hart Island is where NYC has long, and continues to bury the unclaimed bodies. It's a potter's field. Corey did a pieces on that speck of land that also serves as nursery for growing the trees that the city needs to plant at curbs.
Finally, Corey gets to cover the unraveling of the Gilgo Beach serial murders now that there is a suspect, Rex Heuermann awaiting trail with no bail. Mr. Heuermann has been positively linked to four of the 11 bodies found along a strip of highway in Suffolk County near Gilgo Beach, a surfer's beach.
My guess is perhaps of his senior reporter status and his familiarity with that section of Long Island ,Corey has been filing several updates on the release of new evidence and the people who are involved in bringing Mr. Heuermann to justice.
Mr. Kilgannon gets to island hop around New York City. How is that possible? Well, after Hart island there is Rikers Island where on 413 acres there are housed 6,200 detainees. Rikers Island will never be the site of a tour bus.
It is accessible from an exit off the Queensboro/59th Street Bridge/Mayor Koch Bridge. Where else but in New York can a piece of infrastructure carry multiple names? There was of course the family of Abraham Rycken who once lived there in 1664, when the Dutch were the principle inhabitants of NYC.
And finally, the source of what Mr. Kilgannon wrote that has served as a muse for this posting. In February 2024 Corey wrote a piece on how a notorious jail has become a hotbed for literary efforts, principally from the incarcerated.
It is an inspiring fell good piece about a bad place that would hardly seem to be a place that would give growth to writing. But Mr. Kilgannon points out that there several writers who have become famous who did a stretch behind bars: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde and E.E. Cummings are offered as examples.
I finally caught up to Corey's February piece and read it and was a little surprised he omitted O Henry, the pen name for William Sydney Porter who famously wrote short stories like The Gift of the Magi and Cabbages and Kings, and The Cop and the Anthem.
Porter did time in Texas for embezzling a bank. He was known for writing many of his short stories from a booth in Pete's Tavern on Irving Place and 18th street in Manhattan, a place I'm greatly familiar with since it was a block from the family flower shop. (I've written about Pete's often.)
Pete's keeps the above photo of O Henry in a back dining room. They used to make a deal of being called the Tavern that O Henry Made Famous, which proved to confuse me a kid when I passed Pete's and saw that slogan on their awning.
At 10 years-old or so I didn't know O Henry was a person, let alone a writer. So, why would a bar that I thought was called O Henry say they made themselves famous? There are things that stumped me then, and still stump me. My speech pathologist daughter tells me I "do not process things well." Yeah, so? Get them an education and they start to diagnose you. No matter.
Further on is school past the age of 10 I was exposed to short story anthologies and there were a few of O Henry's stories in there. I liked them, and still do. It was then I learned that O Henry was the pen name for William Sydney Porter
As a youngster I read lots of Landmark books and tons of Hardy Boys books by Franklin W. Dixon. I was devastated to later learn that F.W. wasn't a real person I could met, but was rather a pen name for the stable of writers the publisher chose for the more than 200 Hardy Boy books. Quelle dommage.
So, finally reading Corey's piece this past Sunday morning I felt it would be a good time to Tweet (X) him (@coreykilgannon) that he omitted O Henry. I never heard from him. No big deal.
Sunday's a day for trying to get current with the tidal wave of newspapers that can pile up if I don't stay with it.
So, on the same Sunday, in the afternoon, I take in Ben Zimmer's column, Heard on the Street, in the weekend Wall Street Journal. Ben's column consists of taking a word or phrase of the week that seems to have become prominently uttered in the media and analyzing its origins and many meanings through time. If you liked William Safire, you will like Ben.
For those who have an ear for this kind of thing, paying attention to the latest flavor of news that has a half-life of a Tsetse fly, you might recall that New York's Chuck Schumer, the leader of the U.S. Senate, took Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to task and said basically he should leave office or get replaced: he's gumming of the peace talks regarding Gaza.
It was a bold stance to take, and it didn't go unnoticed by many once Bibi's response to the good senator became news itself.
Bibi shot back that Israel is not a "Banana Republic." Chuck didn't say that, but by definition he was calling for a change in Israel's leadership much like those who wanted to oust Latin American dictators from office, Latin America being a major exporter of bananas. Thus, their countries were Banana Republics.
Ben latches onto the weekly media utterances and provides a disquisition on the origins of the word or phrase. Even if you know what the reference to Banana Republic implies, his pieces are always interesting.
Thus, we are treated to how bananas came to shipped to Western, North American countries. Unmentioned in Ben's piece that how Harry Belafonte launched a career singing the Calypso hit "Day-O. The Banana Boat" song, "Come mistah tally man tally me bananas, daylight come and I wan go home," is about working at night loading bananas onto cargo ships. It was too hot during the day, so the labor was done during cooler night. Day-O of course is a stadium organ favorite to get the crowd going, and I really doubt the fans know it's about loading bananas.
Within Ben's Sunday piece—wait for it—are the names of some of these Latin American countries that have been exporting bananas. Honduras is mentioned in connection with that because that is where in 1890 William Sydney Porter (O Henry) lived trying to evade bank embezzlement charges. He was a fugitive in a Banana Republic.
And there it is! A thought about O Henry in the morning, and reading about O Henry while learning more about the origins of the phrase Banana Republic in the afternoon, on the same day!
Is this a fluke? A coincidence? Divine intervention? No, it's life on a Möbius Strip where we are all connected.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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