Queens Chronicle 36th Anniversary 2014 by Queens Chronicle

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Queens Chronicle 36th Anniversary

OUR BOROUGH, OUR LIVES 2014 Queensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Largest Weekly Community Newspaper Group

36th Anniversary Edition

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QUEENS CHRONICLE

36th Anniversary

Published every week by

MARK I PUBLICATIONS, INC.

MARK WEIDLER President & Publisher SUSAN & STANLEY MERZON Founders Raymond G. Sito General Manager Peter C. Mastrosimone Editor-in-Chief Liz Rhoades Managing Editor Michael Gannon Editor Christopher Barca Associate Editor Tess McRae Associate Editor Anthony O’Reilly Associate Editor Terry Nusspickel Editorial Production Manager Jan Schulman Art Director Moeen Din Associate Art Director Ella Jipescu Associate Art Director Richard Weyhausen Proofreader Lisa LiCausi Office Manager Stela Barbu Administration Gregg Cohen Production Assistant

CONTENTS

Senior Account Executives: Jim Berkoff, Beverly Espinoza Patricia Gatt, Debrah Gordon, Al Rowe, Maureen Schuler

Contributors: Lloyd Carroll, Mark Lord, Ronald Marzlock, Cristina Schreil

Photographers: Gabrielle Lurie, Rick Maiman, Steve Malecki

Interns: Khorri Atkinson, Matthew Ern

Office: 62-33 Woodhaven Blvd. Rego Park, NY 11374-7769 Phone: (718) 205-8000 Fax: (718) 205-0150 Mail: P.O. Box 74-7769 Rego Park, NY 11374-7769 E-mail: Mailbox@qchron.com Website: www.qchron.com

PHOTOS BY ADRIAN JIPESCU

Account Executives:

• Amy Sciulli and Bob Holden battle bias ...........4

• Vincent Arcuri Jr. serves the people ...............14

• Dr. Vince Parnell saves children’s lives.............6

• Thomas Chen builds a top business ..............19

• Marion Maas paints her way through life .........6

• Larry O’Connell teaches high school..............20

• Jason Antos authors local history books .........7

• Leroy Gadsden fights for civil rights ...............20

• Mary Ann Carey heads CD 9 for years .............8

• Joe and Jeanette Fuoco teach music ............22

• Dan Mundy Sr. fights for Broad Channel ..........9

• Elly Berkovits Gross survives the Holocaust ....23

• Millicent O’Meally recalls old Flushing ...........10

• Paul Feddern returns from Vietnam ................24

• Beth Roa runs a homestyle restaurant ...........10

• Carolyn Scarano advocates for Astoria ..........24

• Sen. Joe Addabbo Jr. recalls his dad .............12

• Joe Ardizzone hangs on in Willets Point ........26

• Veso Buntic watches LIC evolve .....................12

• Pari Golyan raises a family of doctors ............27

• James Martinez grows as an actor .................13

• Carl Clay runs Black Spectrum Theatre .........29

• Kathy Kelly helps veterans get jobs ...............14

• Rabbi Sharon Ballan teaches the Torah .........30

TOTAL CIRCULATION: MEMBER

Supplement editor: Peter C. Mastrosimone; Cover illustrator: Ella Jipescu; Editorial layout: Terry Nusspickel On the cover: Station Square in Forest Hills / photo by Tess McRae; and Jason Antos with his Queens history books / photo by Mark Lord

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36th Anniversary Edition

OUR BOROUGH, OUR LIVES The old TV show “Naked City” famously told us there are eight million stories to be told in New York, one for every resident. That would be about 2.3 million for Queens, a bit more than can be told in one edition of one weekly newspaper. But in this, the Queens Chronicle’s 36th Anniversary special supplement, “Our Borough, Our Lives,” we relate the tales of 26 people from our shared home in a way that television would not. Many of the subjects are well-known, many are not. And even those who are talk about aspects of their lives and their communities that aren’t necessarily in the public eye. These are in-depth stories about life in Queens. State Sen. Joe Addabbo Jr. doesn’t discuss politics in Albany today; he talks about the influence his father, the late Rep. Joseph P. Addabbo Sr., had on his beliefs about public service, going all the way back to his childhood in Ozone Park. Community Board 5 Chairman Vincent Arcuri Jr.

doesn’t report on liquor licenses, crime rates or homeless shelter proposals; he talks about the discrimination his family faced when they moved to Glendale and his work, decades later, at Ground Zero after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. Rabbi Sharon Ballan doesn’t just discuss her leadership of Temple Beth Sholom in Flushing but also what drove her to become ordained and the negative reaction she heard from some as a woman leading a congregation. Juniper Park Civic Association President Bob Holden and his wife, Amy, don’t talk at all about issues facing Middle Village today but instead about the pressures she faced growing up there as an American of Italian and Japanese descent, ones that he also confronted as her boyfriend and then husband. You’ll learn what drove Jason Antos of Whitestone to write five books on Queens history so far; he’s working on a sixth. You’ll hear Joe and Jeanette Fuoco describe how they seek to instill more than the ability to play an instrument at their Ridgewood music center, teaching their students the area’s many connections to the industry as well. You’ll get to visualize Flushing as it was decades ago, as fewer and fewer people remember it,

through the recollections of longtime resident Millicent O’Meally. You’ll hear directly from Thomas Chen, the founder and CEO of Crystal Window & Door Systems, about how he arrived in Queens from Taiwan with little more than a strong work ethic and built a business empire from scratch. Vietnam War veteran Paul Feddern talks about serving in Southeast Asia and returning home to find that World War II servicemen looked down on him and his comrades. Community and environmental activist Dan Mundy Sr. discusses his advocacy over the years for his neighborhood of Broad Channel and the great bay that surrounds it. Jamaica NAACP President Leroy Gadsden relates how the fight for civil rights is one he and his organization continue to wage. These are some of the diverse stories on all different subjects that you’ll find in “Our Borough, Our Lives.” We hope you’ll enjoy them — and even learn from them things you didn’t know about Queens — as you celebrate our 36th anniversary with us in these pages.

Peter C. Mastrosimone

Editor-in-Chief

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C M ANN page 4 Y K MIDDLE VILLAGE AND MASPETH

Coping with racism as a kid and a couple Amy Sciulli and Bob Holden were taunted over her ethnic mix by Peter C. Mastrosimone Bob Holden and his pal Pete Sava ge we r e w a l k i n g u p E l io t Avenue in Middle Village one day in 1968 looking for girls — they were 16, what else would they be doing? — when they saw two up ahead near Lutheran Avenue, going the same direction they were. Savage went up the block to check them out. He came back quickly with a blunt report. “Hey Holder, they’re Chinese,” he said, only he used a less-kind term. “So what?” Holden said. “I want the taller one.” It was Bob’s first indication that the girl he would eventually marry, Amy Sciulli, was seen as different by people in the Middle Village-Maspeth area where they both lived. For Amy, if she had heard Pete, the casual slur would have been nothing new. The daughter of an American soldier, Angelo Sciulli, and his Japanese war bride, Yukiko Asano, Amy had been facing prejudice practically since the day her family moved to

Amy Sciulli and Bob Holden celebrating their second Christmas as a couple, in 1970, and another one decades later with their children, Brian, left, Jane and Robert Jr. One of the two kept the dark, flowing locks they once shared. COURTESY PHOTOS Middle Village. She hadn’t experienced it when they lived in Japan, or even in Germany, but Queens was different. The war had ended more than 15 years earlier, but among many here, the animosity against

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America’s enemies had not, and it was exacerbated by plain old racism. Amy would walk into a store and be greeted by taunts of “Ching, chong” or “Chow mein” — the mostly young men and boys who picked

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on her neither knowing nor caring that she was half-Japanese, not Chinese. One time when she was working as a cashier at the then-new Silver Barn Farms on Caldwell Avenue, and gave someone the wrong change

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back, the customer told her, “Go back to your country.” “It was very upsetting,” she recalled. “I hated being different. I wanted to fit in, and I thought I did, but every time somebody said something, I felt like an outcast, like I didn’t belong.” One of Amy’s close friends, Marie Mulholland, was in the same boat as a half-Japanese, half-Irish girl. Marie didn’t just sit back and take the abuse as Amy did. “She was a lot tougher than me,” Holden said. “She would strike back and say something. She would curse at them in Japanese.” Amy, on the other hand, wanted so much to fit in that she told her family never to speak to her in Japanese, and she eventually forgot what she knew of the language. “I remember telling my sister, ‘Don’t tell anyone we’re Japanese,’” she said. But Anna Sciulli, a few years younger than Amy, didn’t get taunted the way her big sister did. While Amy would take the abuse, continued on page 28

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BAYSIDE, FLUSHING AND NEW HYDE PARK

Saving babies’ lives, one heart at a time Dr. Vince Parnell is NSLIJ’s chief of pediatric cardiac surgery by Peter C. Mastrosimone Editor-in-Chief

were to think much about that while working, you couldn’t do the job. “We’re just highly trained over a long period of time,” he said. “It’s just what you do; it’s what you’re used to.” Parnell lives in Garden City, LI with his wife, Terri Ann, a health literacy consultant and nurse. Together they have six grown children — one a doctor, one a nurse, another studying to become a nurse, two of them teachers and one a park police officer. Public service of one kind or another seems to be the family business. “They’ve been pretty heavily influenced by their parents,” Parnell said. Terri Ann is the doctor’s second wife, and they both came into the marriage already having their children. His first wife, Beverlee, née Burke, who also was from Bayside, died of cancer at age 51. A big family is the only kind Parnell knows, being the eldest of nine siblings. They all grew up in a four-bedroom house on 205th Street between 36th and 38th avenues, and their lives OTO

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There was never much doubt that Dr. Vince Parnell Jr. would go into medicine, just like his father, Dr. Vince Parnell Sr. “My father was a physician who practiced at Flushing Hospital for 30 years,” the younger Parnell said. “So I think to some extent, if your dad’s a fireman, you want to be a fireman when you grow up, and something like that was my pathway.” But that didn’t mean the path would be exactly the same. As an obstetrician who shared a practice on Murray Street in Flushing with Dr. George Lawrence, the elder Parnell often had to rush out of the family’s Bayside house at all hours to deliver babies. That wasn’t what his son wanted to find himself doing. “I was familiar with what my dad’s life was like and the respect and deference he garnered in the community and from his patients as a physician,” Parnell said. “My father was an obstetrician. So probably the other thing I learned from him, other than that medicine was a good pursuit, was that I knew obstetrics wasn’t what I wanted to do.” Like all doctors, Parnell was exposed to different aspects of the field in medical school, in his case SUNY Downstate Medi-

cal Center in Brooklyn. It was surgery that he found most appealing — cardiothoracic surgery in particular. “There was something dramatic and just very exhilarating about being in the operating room and seeing a person’s heart and what the surgeons I worked with could do with it,” he said. “There is an immediate problem and the results are very tangible.” Today Parnell is surgeon-in-chief and chief of pediatric cardiac surgery at the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York, a part of the North Shore-LIJ Health System, located virtually on the city line in New Hyde Park. There he saves lives for a living, children’s lives. But the work isn’t as dramatic as the public tends to think, he says. Parnell and his fellow surgeon at Cohen, Dr. David B. Meyer, operate on congenital heart conditions, and most of the time they know exactly what the outcome will be. It’s not that a heart surgeon gets inured to the fact of saving lives, Parnell said, but if you

QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014 Page 6

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were largely centered around Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament Parish, where they all went to church and school. “I was probably a pretty typical city kid,” Parnell said, recalling games of stickball and touch football in the street, or at Bayside High School or PS 130; movies at the Bayside Theatre on Bell Boulevard or the RKO Keith’s Theater in Flushing (“It was beautiful,” he recalled); and shopping with his family at Gertz and E.J. Korvette in Flushing. While he’s been on Long Island for years and is more likely to dine out or shop in Garden City or Manhasset than Queens, Parnell has fond memories of his youth in Bayside and still makes contributions to Blessed Sacrament, which he said “provided a very good educational experience ... and did a great job for me, and my eight brothers and sisters as well.” Dedicated to his family and his profession, Parnell said he’s not big on hobbies, though he does some traveling. He also performs free surgeries through charity, something he said is harder to arrange than it used to be, due to the changing economics of the medical field. Asked what he does with his free time, he immediately said, as if to prove a cliché untrue, or be an exception to a rule, three short words. Q “I don’t golf.”

REGO PARK, DOUGLASTON AND ELMHURST

Creating within a changing Queens Acclaimed painter at heart of borough’s art community by Cristina Schreil

36th Anniversary Edition

Chronicle Contributor

After more than 70 years of painting, artist Marion Maas has put away her brushes. Until recently, she painted every day — and her Rego Park home can prove it. Maas, 84, lives in a house just around the block from where she lived as a child. In that home, she created her first painting at age 12 while sick for a period of time. “When I was little, those bungalows on Alderton [Street] used to be full of cherry trees,” Maas said of the neighborhood. She would attend cookouts along the block. “It’s all different now,” Maas said. Her parents were close by for years and would babysit when Maas painted. The natural beauty Maas admired has seemingly been honored within the hundreds of art pieces in her home. She’s sold some over the years, but she’s kept many that were once exhibited. “I did painting a lot to escape. It was like therapy,” Maas said. She laughed, gesturing at her vast collection. “A lot of therapy.” She’s painted landscapes, flowers, woodlands, still life, portraits, abstract shapes and lush gardens. The imaginative forms and rich hues she has taken seem to channel

worlds that teeter between the real and surreal. Maas, who studied at Pratt Institute, has been in shows throughout the area, including ones at the Queens Museum, Flushing Town Hall, Queensboro Community College, St. John’s University, Queens College, JFK Airport and the Austin Steak and Ale House in Kew Gardens. She’s also been exhibited in the Rego Park location of the Queens Library. In 2007, she earned the Ridgewood Institute of Art Award. It was one of many she’s received throughout her career. She shared her home with her three children and her late husband, photographer George Maas, who documented the New York City Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. Maas said her husband would bring home f lowers left over from events. She would paint these and her husband’s photos, such as of ballet slippers. As teenagers, they met in German class at Newtown High School in Elmhurst. “He was selling photographs of the high school and I bought one. He said, ‘I want to take your picture,’” Maas said. It was the first of many he took of Maas.

Rego Park native and recognized painter Marion Maas stands in front of some of her pieces that PHOTO BY CRISTINA SCHREIL were once exhibited at the Queens Museum. His black and white portraits of her stand out against the sea of colors in her art. She spent time in studios in upstate New York and on Long Island, but also found a community in Douglaston’s National Art League, a nonprofit studio space for artists.

“I would go because I could see friends,” Maas said. Even with her painting routine not what it used to be, Maas still creates when she sees the right opportunity, recently decorating a Q foam skull for Halloween.

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Writing history, one neighborhood at a time Jason Antos is working on his sixth book about Queens’ past by Mark Lord

had never belonged to Houdini, but to Howard Thurston, his mentor. And he discovered that the home was being used as a halfway house for recovAt the age of 33, lifelong Whitestone resident ering alcoholics and drug users. Jason Antos has already published five books on “From that moment, I carried with me in the the history of his native borough, but even more back of my mind that there were historical things amazing is what piqued his interest in the subject no one paid attention to,” he said. in the first place. Antos developed his writing skills at Robert F. “My love for local history started in elementary Kennedy Community High School in Flushing and school,” he said. As youngsters were wont to do at CW Post College, where he majored in cinema back then, Antos and his childhood friends spent studies and minored in English. From there, he much of their time playing in the street. spent a year working at Random House. He earned Nearby was the Arthur Hammerstein House, a a master’s degree in communications from the Unineo-Tudor-style home built in 1924 for the uncle of versity of Miami. Oscar Hammerstein II, who famously collaborated While in Miami, he realized he “wanted to make with Richard Rodgers on a string of Broadway the leap to write professionally,” with a particular musicals. interest in historical nonfiction. Queens seemed a By the 1980s, Antos said, the house had been natural subject. abandoned. “It became our clubhouse,” he said. “It It didn’t take long for him to be approved by was all overgrown, very foreboding, spooky. No Arcadia Publishing to write a book for their Imagone would come down to bother us.” es of America series ... on his hometown of WhiteIt was his introduction to all things historical. stone. That was in 2006, and Antos became the “I had always been writing since I was a kid,” he said, usually “about real life things that were hap- Jason Antos and a collection of the Arcadia series of books about Queens. The youngest author on Arcadia’s roster. The publicaPHOTO BY MARK LORD tion led Antos to his first book talk, at the Barnes pening to me.” But, he added, back then, “I never Whitestone resident has authored five of them so far. & Noble bookstore in Bay Terrace, where, he said, realized I was a nonfiction writer.” Armed with “my pad and little camera,” Antos rang the “The book was flying off the shelves.” While he was in the fifth grade, Antos was assigned to His first book signing took place, appropriately enough, write a report. His teacher suggested that he look into the bell and introduced himself to the woman who greeted him. “She took me around the house. It was beautiful,” he at Harpell Chemist, a drugstore on 150th Street and 14th former home of magician Harry Houdini, which was also continued on page 31 recalled. But two things startled him. He was told the home located in the area, as a possible topic. Chronicle Contributor

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Leading a community district for 31 years Mary Ann Carey looks back on her service with fond memories by Anthony O’Reilly Associate Editor

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who at the time was campaigning for the seat. “It was scary as hell,” she said of riding the animal. Another cleanup project that Carey is proud of is the work done on Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, which during the late 1980s was underutilized by residents because of the poor condition the building at 89-00 Van Wyck Expressway was in. “The services they provided were excellent,” she said of the hospital. “It’s just that people were afraid to go there.” S h e s a id t h e b o a r d worked with elected officials to bring the building back to its former glory, a state it continues to be in to this day. “Now everybody wants to go there,” she said. “And all the hospitals that were taking its patients are closed now.” During her time as district manager, many controversial applications for real estate projects were brought up, but the most memorable to her is the development of 82-02 Kew Gardens Road, a 12-story building that houses multiple corporate offices. OB

A blizzard was making its way through Queens in March of 1983 as Mary Ann Carey waited for Community Board 9 to take a vote on whether or not it would hire her as the new district manager for the area. “Everyone kept leaving because of the blizzard,” she said. “I kept saying, ‘Oh no, that was one of my supporters’ as they left.” At the end of the night, Carey was approved as the new district manager by a margin of one vote. She would hold the job for 31 years, before retiring last month. In an interview with the Chronicle, Carey looked back on several of the projects she took on while working with the Kew Gardens-based community board. One of the first projects she worked on was developing the AIDS Center for Queens County, a storefront at Jamaica Avenue and 117th Street in Richmond Hill that worked with people who had the virus. The center was built at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and during a time when people were afraid of catching the virus from those who had the disease. “People at the time were ill-informed,”

Carey said. “They were very nervous about having a place like that over there.” She said that, much like the current hysteria over Ebola, people in the eighties were unaware of how people caught the AIDS virus. “A lot of residents and a number of board members were against [the center],” she said. Carey also said one of her main priorities while with the board was to revamp Forest Park, which previously was overrun with drug dealers and cracked sidewalks. “It was horrible,” she said of the park. “It was a known drug place.” Carey said the board, along with several elected off icials, worked to appoint a forest park administrator, Debby Kuha, who oversaw the safety, activities and programs of the park. Since the effort to keep the park safe was initiated, the area has held thousands of free events for park-goers. One of Carey’s favorite park memories was participating in an elephant race around 1989 with then-Mayor Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani,

36th Anniversary Edition

KEW GARDENS AND BEYOND

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Carey said the building’s developer originally intended for the structure to be built much higher, but agreed to the 12-story limit under zoning laws after residents said they did not want to see something that tall in the community. Another one of her favorite memories was being arrested while working at the community board’s office. The “officers” who handcuffed Carey and booked her belonged to the Boys and Girls Club of America. They held her on bail until she could raise money for the American Cancer Society by calling her contacts and asking them to donate money to the nonprofit. “It was so cute,” she said. Carey now lives in Howard Beach, where she has resided since about 2000. A former resident of Ozone Park, Carey said she was one of the lucky ones during Superstorm Sandy because she had f lood insurance, which paid for some of the damage her house had sustained. Carey said she will miss “everything” about being district manager, and added she will spend her time working with the Kiwanis Club of Howard Beach, an organization she has Q worked with in the past.

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happened in 1982. But that wasn’t the end of the neighborhood’s troubles. In the late 1980s, the state Department of Environmental Conservation began handing out fines or threatening massive violations to residents due to environmental infractions that Mundy said no one even knew about. “They came in here like gangbangers,” he said. “That was a terrible thing to go through.” That led Mundy to help fight for sewers to be constructed under neighborhood streets. Over the next few decades, Mundy took part in fights to build a new library and help preserve and clean Jamaica Bay, which he continues as part of Jamaica Bay Eco-Watchers. Today, many of the neighborhood’s residents are legacy denizens, their families having lived there for generations. That includes the Mundys. Dan Sr. married “the girl around the corner,” and the two raised their children in the neighborhood. His son, Dan Mundy Jr., is also a civic activist and took a leadership role in fighting new flood maps that threatened Broad Channel with higher flood insurance rates after Sandy, which the senior Mundy noted affected “every single resident of Broad Channel.” At 76 years old, Mundy isn’t calling it quits just yet. Earlier this month he stood alongside Mayor de Blasio as the city’s top official touted the city’s Sandy recovery program, Build it Back, which Mundy said still has its problems. And Mundy’s agenda is still packed. In the first week of November alone, the activist said he would attend meetings with the Federal Aviation Administration over the airplane noise problem from JFK Airport, and with city officials over the Build it Back program. He has also helped successfully get the city to raise several street levels in the neighborhood. “Every time I think I want to slow down, I get a phone call and something new was on the Q table,” he said.

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For outside observers, the worst crisis to ever befall the small community of Broad Channel might seem like it happened two years ago. But for lifelong residents like Dan Mundy Sr., Hurricane Sandy was just the latest in the many crises the small community in the heart of Jamaica Bay has had to weather throughout its history, including a time when the very existence of the neighborhood was at stake. And Mundy was there for many of them. The retired firefighter was born in Broad Channel and raised there. When he was a kid in the 1940s, the community, which sits on an island in the middle of the bay, was a different place. “You grew up more or less isolated, but that’s where you made all your friends,” he said. It’s where you worked and played and had a good time. Children would go to school here through the eighth grade.” Isolated from the rest of the city, connected only by bridges, Broad Channel residents learned to be fairly self-reliant and make do with what they had, which was plenty of green space and the large body of water that surrounds it — Jamaica Bay. “There were no city parks; we made our own ballfields,” he said. “You kind of made do. Being deprived of those things was not at all bad, because you had the environment here no one else had.” But if they didn’t really need City Hall, City Hall apparently had no use for them either. Broad Channel was very nearly wiped off the map half a century ago, not by a natural disaster, but an act of man. As the city sought to expand JFK Airport, in the mid 1960s residents were close to being told to leave. Broad Channel’s residents did not own their homes until the 1980s. Before that, their properties were leased by the city. At the beginning of John Lindsay’s administration, the leases were changed to monthly, meaning residents did not know if they would be able to stay in their homes after 30 days. That, Mundy said, was taken as a sign the city was forcing them out. For him, that was his call to civic service. As a young man just starting out raising his family in the neighborhood, he felt a call to protect it. After all, the neighborhood had just received an incredible national honor. Broad Channel’s Boy Scout troop, which Mundy had helped reorganize, had just marched with President Lyndon Johnson at the opening of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. “I think what kept me involved in civic affairs is that the community was always fighting for its existence,” he said. “People were panicking at that time. There was a real possibility that all your dreams were going down the drain.” Mundy was on a committee that hired a surveyor and was one of the five people appointed to help negotiate the land sale so Broad Channel residents could own their homes, which finally

Page 9 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014

BROAD CHANNEL

QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014 Page 10

C M ANN page 10 Y K FLUSHING

Looking back at a community that was Millicent O’Meally recalls a vibrant downtown different from today by Liz Rhoades Managing Editor

Millicent O’Meally has lived in Flushing for more than 50 years. The changes she has seen — from sleepy community to fast-paced transit hub — are dramatic and life-changing. “I enjoyed downtown when it was like a little country-type location,” O’Meally said. “There were little shops you could go in and out, even to get food for dinner. It was quaint.” Today, Downtown Flushing is a whirlwind of activity, with a Chinatown larger than the one in Manhattan. Major construction projects like the mixed-use Flushing Commons development add to the clogged streets and general congestion. But sit back and listen to O’Meally, who is retired but still active in her community, and you’ll get a taste of what Flushing used to be like. She remembers that on the corner of Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue was a Woolworth’s that you could enter directly from the subway. Another 5 & 10, Grant’s, was also

located on Main Street. “The department store Gertz was next to Woolworth’s and it became Stern’s and now it’s Macy’s,” O’Meally said. “There was also an Alexander’s nearby and I shopped there.” She recalls a luncheonette in the Gertz basement “with decent food” and later a diner near Macy’s that was very well-liked. “The Tower Diner on Northern Boulevard near the RKO Keith’s Theatre was also very popular,” she said. “You had dessert there after a movie.” There was also a Jahn’s ice cream parlor on Main Street near the Long Island Rail Road train trestle with an old-fashioned look, featuring marble countertops. The moldering Keith’s Theatre on Northern Boulevard is set for Millicent O’Meally, across from the site of the former Peck’s Office Supply in development as apartments, but in Flushing. It is being developed as a hotel and other amenities. PHOTO BY RICK MAIMAN O’Meally’s day, it was a dream of a movie palace. “The inside was She remembers another movie quite elegant in its day. It’s a welfare gorgeous with a large fountain in the house, the Prospect Theatre near hotel today. center,” she said. “You felt like you Kissena Boulevard and a hotel, The For dining, the O’Meallys enjoyed were in a different world.” Sanford, on Sanford Avenue that was two Italian restaurants, Old Roma,

near the railroad station, and one further south on Main called Baciagalup’s. She recalls her daughter getting all her art supplies at Peck’s and the family purchasing a computer desk there. Peck’s Office Supply has been razed and its old home will become a 12-story hotel and office tower. O’Meally shopped at the Purple Pickle for produce and Blue Star for fresh meat and small groceries. For some time, she remembers, Flushing Town Hall was a closed, crumbling wreck. Across the street, the Armory was used to “temporarily” house homeless women. “The ladies would find a way to get into Town Hall, creating a need to install a chain-link fence with barbed wire at the top. It was not a pretty sight,” O’Meally said. She said the downtown district started to look rundown in the 1980s, with businesses closing, but that Asians started to open shops, others followed and the area started to be renewed. “It’s very different looking Q now,” she said.

WOODSIDE

Upholding culinary traditions in Little Manila ‘Papa’s’ is off the beaten path, but lures adventurous eaters by Cristina Schreil

36th Anniversary Edition

Chronicle Contributor

One traditional restaurant has an unlikely modern fan base. Papa’s Kitchen, a petite eatery that feels more like a family’s home, is on Woodside Avenue and 66th Street, close to the heart of “Little Manila,” on Roosevelt Avenue. Co-owner Beth Roa, who runs Papa’s with brother Miguel, said it is, however, far away enough to discourage Filipinos. “Some of them would ask us, ‘Why do we have to walk all the way there to eat the food if we can have that same food in one of those restaurants on 69th Street?’” Roa said. It’s pushed Roa, who has a degree in hotel and restaurant management, to take advantage of the area’s diversity. “We kind of changed the strategy. What we did was we started courting different nationalities, talking to them,” Roa said. Roa said the homey restaurant, which opened in 2012, started to lure food bloggers. “I guess our business is thriving because of the non-Filipino customers,” Roa said. The Roas replicate comfort food from their childhoods, conjuring dishes like “laing,” a Southern Philippines dish of taro leaves and creamy coconut milk with chunks of crab.

Beth Roa, co-owner of the Woodside Filipino comfort food restaurant “Papa’s Kitchen,” poses in PHOTO BY CRISTINA SCHREIL front of the eatery. The Roas signed the lease on the space on Father’s Day of 2012. They were able to open that October with financial help from family and friends. At times, the Roas’ father, a cook and the eatery’s namesake, is on hand to taste.

Papa’s opened amid a booming Manhattan trend toward Filipino fusion food. Roa said reinvention is a fine goal, but isn’t for them. “We want to concentrate more on the roots where we actually came from,” Roa said.

“We don’t want to change it.” Roa demonstrates eating the family-style dishes to some non-Filipinos. A crowd-dazzler is “balut,” a boiled chicken embryo and street food delicacy. They buy a lot of their food at the Phil-Am market on Roosevelt Avenue and 70th Street but prefer an Italian butcher. A focal point is a TV for karaoke — a staple of many Filipino homes that Roa said isn’t in other eateries in Little Manila. Roa or staff present the microphone to unsuspecting diners: “It’s your turn.” The Roas are gearing up for a six-week karaoke contest in December. The winner gets a “boodle fight” feast, a military-style meal in which patrons eat with their hands, a symbol of brotherhood. “Lechón,” a whole pig, is the focal point. Chris Carbonell, last year’s winner, lives closer to St. John’s University but has been to Papa’s every week for over a year. “Here, my very first time, they just accepted me,” Carbonell said. “This is my second home.” The Roas recently applied for and were accepted to the state program Start Up New York. They hope to use the boost to help them Q expand their restaurant to the backyard.

C M ANN page 11 Y K Page 11 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014

How do Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Mark-Viverito take care of their “moral obligations?”

Central Park Five settlement:

$41 million

Benefits for injured police officers:

Nothing

Mayor de Blasio paid off his political debts by adding $26 million to the Central Park Five settlement over City lawyers’ objections. But he and the Speaker think it’s just too expensive to give recently-hired NYPD officers the same disability beneﬁts as every other police officer in New York State. Their priorities speak for themselves...

Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association of the City of New York 125 Broad Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10004 • 212-233-5531

Patrick J. Lynch, President

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36th Anniversary Edition

Support equal benefits for injured police officers

QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014 Page 12

C M ANN page 12 Y K OZONE PARK AND HOWARD BEACH

Following in his father’s footsteps Addabbo grew up a politician’s son and, eventually, became one by Peter C. Mastrosimone Editor-in-Chief

As a young man growing up in Ozone Park, Joe Addabbo Jr. had more reason than most to stay out of trouble. While most kids might be worried about parents, principals or even police catching them doing something wrong, Joe Jr. was also concerned about public perception. Whether boyhood mistakes like putting a carelessly thrown baseball through someone’s window or more serious teenage risks such as alcohol or drugs, he had an extra reason to steer clear: He didn’t want to cause his father, U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Addabbo, to lose an election. “I was afraid to walk on my neighbor’s lawn because it might cost my dad a vote,” Addabbo said. “I felt that because of who my father was, I had to show respect to the community.” While the future city councilman and state senator stayed on the straight and narrow in part due to those political concerns, he had no ambitions to run for office himself — not as a student at Nativity BVM School, Archbishop Molloy High School, St. John’s University or Touro Law School, and not even as president of the Ozone Tudor Civic Association. He said his goal in the civic, as executive secretary for Community Board 10 and as an attorney, however, was always the same and

State Sen. Joe Addabbo Jr. illustrates how some politicians put themselves above the people, something he said his father, the late Rep. Joe Addabbo Sr., seen here in his congressional office PHOTO BY PETER C. MASTROSIMONE, LEFT, AND COURTESY PHOTO with a teenage Joe Jr. in 1980, never did. one he learned from his father’s attitude toward public service: to help people. He recalled a talk he had with his father at the old Blue Fountain Diner on Crossbay Boulevard that cemented in his mind the meaning of elective office, long before he sought it. “He said people go into politics for different reasons, but there’s only one real reason, and

that’s to help people,” he said. “That has to be your focus 100 percent, always. If you see people who stray away from that focus, they’re the ones who get in trouble. And to this day, when you see an elected official getting arrested, their focus is not the people. They strayed away and had their focus on themselves.” After years of working as an attorney, the

younger Addabbo eventually decided he could further his goal of helping people through elective office. He first was elected to the City Council and now serves in the state Senate. Addabbo said he also learned humility from his father, emphasizing how many officials seem to believe they’re above their constituents when they’re really not. Other key lessons were making sure his own family doesn’t get caught up in the limelight, something he makes sure to do with his daughters, Alexis and Arianna, and to spend quality time with them, even when the quantity of time isn’t as much as he’d want. To this day, said Addabbo (D-Howard Beach), he tries to think of what his father would do in a given situation. He hasn’t been able to ask him directly for nearly 30 years, as he died of cancer in 1986, when he was 61 and his son just 21. He admitted being a little jealous of City Councilman Paul Vallone (D-Bayside) and his brother, former Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. of Astoria, because they can still seek the advice of their own politician father, former Council Speaker Peter Vallone Sr. “That’s a great gift, to be able to say, ‘Dad, how would you handle this, how did you handle this?’” he said. “I find myself often turning around and saying, ‘What would my dad do, Q how did he handle a similar situation?’”

LONG ISLAND CITY AND THE EAST RIVER

Boating around the new and old LIC Veso Buntic aims to keep community strong despite development by Tess McRae

36th Anniversary Edition

Associate Editor

Down Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City, past the trendy joints such as Woodbines and Alobar, the neighborhood begins to look more like it did 30 years ago — industrial and urban — drastically different from the modern greenspace waterfront and shiny towering apartment buildings. But behind a brick-layered warehouse used by the Department of Transportation is a cultural oasis that won’t be found in TimeOut New York. Anable Basin is hard to describe. It is part restaurant, part bar and part sailing experience, and it has been one of the betterkept secrets in Long Island City. “I’ve been here about seven or eight years and we have the season from April to November,” Veso Buntic, owner of the business, said. “I love boats and I wanted to bring the experience here where you have a nice view and can relax.” The Woodside resident has taken New Yorkers on the river for years — originally docking at South Street Seaport. “After 9/11, we couldn’t be there any more so I moved around and then found this place,” Buntic said. “It’s different from the

rest, it’s relaxing and just nice.” Though not a lifelong Long Island City resident or business owner, Buntic has seen the neighborhood undergo signif icant changes. In fact, standing on the pier, looking south, one can see the gateway to the new Gantry State Park — a moder n, minimalist-style public space that has become the crown jewel to many, but not to Buntic. “Development will happen, I know that,” he said. “I’m in construction and I know t h a t m ay b e i n a decade or so, this will all be developed, but right now, the people Veso Buntic who live in these new buildings are not part of the community yet.” Despite a growing arts and dining culture on thoroughfares including Jackson Avenue and Vernon Boulevard, Buntic said the new residents don’t spend much time in the area outside of staying inside their own apartments.

“They work over there,” he said, pointing across the river at Manhattan. “They work there and then they come home and then when they want to go out, they go back over there. We want them to stay here. They d o n’t c o n t r i b u t e much — a few people do, a very small percentage.” For example, since the new high rises have gone up, he’s got ten complai nts about music and other quality-of-life issues from neighbors. “Next door [The Water’s Edge] has been here almost 50 years and now they’re getting calls about the PHOTO BY TESS MCRAE lights being on too bright,” he said. Buntic’s boating excursions just ended their inaugural season at Anable Basin. According to the owner, about 2,000 people took advantage of the free boat rides. “Next year we’ll sell tickets; we wanted to see if it would work and people, they love

it here,” he said. “You have kids running around, people having a good time and getting to know their neighbors.” Buntic said it’s places like his that will bring the new and the old Long Island City communities together. “I would say 90 to 95 percent of the people who come here are from places like Long Island City, Sunnyside, Astoria, Woodside,” he said. “When they find out we’re here, they come and enjoy.” For the newer residents though, Buntic said it will take time to integrate them into the neighborhood fully. “They need a reason to invest,” he said. “I think it will take awhile, but eventually, they’ll start having kids who will have to go to the nearby schools and then you’re forced to be a part of the community. That’s what I want here too.” Next year, Anable Basin Sailing Bar and Grill will also become a boating school and Buntic is expecting to launch more excursions beginning in April. “It’s a great place and people love getting on the water and seeing the Empire State Building, the bridges and everything, and they don’t have to drive or take a train,” Q Buntic said. “It’s beautiful.”

C M ANN page 13 Y K

Living the dream of becoming an actor

Season’s Greetings

BuNgalow from

BaR & RestauraNt

Page 13 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014

JACKSON HEIGHTS AND HOLLYWOOD

James Martinez chills at a Starbucks in Jackson Heights. The actor’s visit there proved much better PHOTO BY CRISTINA SCHREIL than one he famously made to a drug dealer’s home on “Breaking Bad.”

by Cristina Schreil Chronicle Contributor

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Shakespeare declared, “All the world’s a stage.” For actor James Martinez, the saying has applied more since graduating from Forest Hills High School in 1997, as his career has brought him to Los Angeles, Montreal, Vancouver, Bogota and beyond. Yet Jackson Heights, where he was born and raised, is still home. “I love where I grew up in Jackson Heights,” Martinez said as he sat in a Starbucks on 37th Avenue, near his family’s apartment. “I love the diversity and the fact that my family is here.” He splits his time between New York — where he says there are more jobs each day — and Los Angeles. But, he has a special bond with Queens. He tends to spend summers auditioning and working in New York, which is when the acting scene in LA slows. It gives him time to savor local flavors, like Thai food in Sunnyside or Vietnamese cuisine in Elmhurst. Yet his favorite “restaurant” is his mother’s kitchen. Martinez, who’s acted in several independent films and plays, as well as shows such as “Blue Bloods” and “Elementary,” is perhaps best known for one brief yet pivotal flashback scene in “Breaking Bad,” where he played the business partner of villain Gustavo Fring. (Spoiler alert: There’s not a happy ending.) Martinez described his time on the awardwinning megahit, which was different from other sets in that actors rehearsed before shooting, as a sort of artistic “Nirvana.” When he’s in Jackson Heights, he’s near childhood haunts, like IS 145 on 80th Street, his middle school, and PS 69 on 37th Avenue, where he says his love for performing first

took root when kids were encouraged to write and perform their own plays. “That was definitely the first hint that that’s what I wanted to do,” Martinez said. His projects there drew upon his earliest tendencies to observe and mimic the mannerisms of those around him, including his large Colombian family. “This is my identity, Jackson Heights,” he said. His early knack for making people laugh led him to two years of trying stand-up comedy. His shows, performed in various clubs in Manhattan, were peppered with impressionbased imaginings of what his favorite actors would do if they met in dreamed-up scenarios. For example: “What would happen if Jim Carrey and Al Pacino met in a subway car?” “It was scary,” Martinez said. “I did it for two years and then I was like, ‘What did I get continued on page 26 myself into?’” As he grew, he wanted to dig deeper with his storytelling. “It became less about impersonating and more about interpreting,” Martinez said. “[It was about] trying to see if I could explore these people’s lives.” He started acting in high school, attending classes at the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre in Manhattan and studying drama at FHHS. Forest Hills was where Martinez found his footing with acting. He met teachers who supported him and starred in his first role as the lead in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” and in “Bye Bye Birdie.” When it was time for college, one teacher, Larry O’Connell, mentioned Juilliard. His reaction: “What’s Juilliard?” O’Connell and fellow teachers took Martinez to hunt for monologues for the grueling continued on page 26

QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014 Page 14

C M ANN page 14 Y K FOREST HILLS AND BEYOND

Helping veterans find their message Speaking coach aids ex-military students in job hunts by Cristina Schreil Chronicle Contributor

One Forest Hills-based media coach is using her skills to give veterans a leg up in the job market. Kathy Kelly, who has a background in acting, directing, teaching, PR and communications, wanted to find a way to use her knack for public speaking to help others. In 2012, while many were still reeling from the recession, she launched Make Your Own Heat, where Kelly helps clients prepare for verbal presentations such as corporate pitches, panel talks and courtroom testimonies. She said people already have what it takes to present themselves well — they just don’t realize it, or think too much about perfection. “What I do is primarily take what they’ve got and make it shine,” Kelly said. “I think the biggest gift you can give someone is to believe in them. Through that comes confidence, and that’s what they really need.” Eager to help veterans returning to cities where homes were being foreclosed and where jobs were difficult to find, Kelly reached out to a veterans affairs office. This connected her to Four Block, a nonprofit organization that helps veterans transition into new careers, in March 2013.

Media coach Kathy Kelly, far right, rings the New York Stock Exchange opening bell with students PHOTO COURTESY FOUR BLOCK from Four Block, a career development organization for veterans. Four Block, which is now branching out nationally, first teamed up with colleges in the New York City area to assist student veterans with career development. They help vetera ns la nd paid i nter nsh ips at big corporations.

Kelly said Four Block soon realized the need for more hands-on instruction. Kelly has instructed five waves of communication classes focusing on pitches, interviews, presentations and networking. Class sizes increase each time, now hosting around 40 stu-

dents. She said there are about one to two women in each class. Four Block organizes mock interviews with different companies. Kelly helps students establish their “personal brands,” drilling down to their main message. A big part of that is helping them physically prepare for a nerve-wracking interview. She leads students in voice warm-ups and exercises, which she says helps immensely before any kind of public speaking. “Even with these big veterans who don’t want to jump up and down and make motorboat sounds, we do it,” she said, laughing. She said she also helps students realize how they can smoothly transition between two contrasting worlds. “The military, let’s face it, has been structure personified,” Kelly said. “And now, it’s something different and they’re really adjusting to it.” She guides students in breaking down what they did in the military and pointing out skills they may not have realized they had before. “How do you transfer running a munitions site to an office? In reality, to me, it’s very transferable because you have all of those organization skills,” she said. continued on page 26

GLENDALE AND BEYOND

Serving both his city and his community Vincent Arcuri Jr., twice the CB 5 chair, worked at Ground Zero for months by Christopher Barca

36th Anniversary Edition

Associate Editor

Growing up an Italian boy in 1940s Glendale, a heavily German neighborhood, wasn’t easy for Vincent Arcuri Jr. Old German women threw rocks at his mother over her nationality and called her a Gypsy because she had seven children. As a freshman at Richmond Hill High School, seniors would occasionally beat him up and steal his lunch money as he walked down Jamaica Avenue on his way to class. He also faced difficulties getting jobs early on in what would become his successful, lengthy career in construction because of his heritage. Despite forces trying to push him down along the way, Arcuri always found a way to rise above it all. Having served on Community Board 5 for 40 years, including the last decade as chairman, and being a vital part of the Sept. 11 cleanup effort, Arcuri has helped elevate his community and city as well. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, construction firms operating in the city such as Amec, where Arcuri worked as a senior vice president and project executive, were constantly made aware of terror threats made against the city and prepared accordingly. So on Sept. 11, 2001, as a stunned nation watched two towers burn, Arcuri’s team jumped into action. “It happened at what, 8:40 a.m.?” Arcuri said. “By 8:50 a.m., we were organized.” In the days after the attack, the Glendale resident and his

team worked side by side with police and fire officials in rescue and recovery operations. Once it became a cleanup effort, Arcuri helped create plans of action for removing debris from Amec’s quadrant of Ground Zero, while three other companies did the same on separate parts of “The Pile.” “Most of the time, I was planning where we were going and who’s doing what,” he said. “Then we brought in our crews with the cranes to excavate and remove materials.” For four months, Arcuri’s crew removed twisted steel beams, pulverized office supplies and, occasionally, human remains. Partly because of the hectic experience of working at Ground Zero, he retired from the “crazy” construction industry on Dec. 31, 2001, a day after his 63rd birthday, and focused on a life of dedicated civil service. Having already served a short term as the second-ever chairman of Community Board 5, Arcuri resumed the role a decade ago, which he says has him busier than he’s ever been. “I work seven days a week for free,” he joked. “Before, I worked only five days a week and got paid for it.” In his time as a Glendale resident and a CB 5 member, he’s seen the community undergo drastic changes. As a child, he and his friends would either be playing stickball on Central Avenue or running through a farm formerly located on 71st Street between Myrtle and Central avenues, with the shotgun-wielding farmer chasing them away. As southwest Queens evolved into more of a suburban environment from a rural one, Arcuri said, CB 5 changed a lot over the years as well, with issues such as residential

Vincent Arcuri Jr. works from home last Friday evening. PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER BARCA

rezoning and the proposed homeless shelter at 78-16 Cooper Ave. in Glendale serving as the board’s biggest issues under his watch. “It’s a lot more interesting now,” he said. Going forward, he expects the board’s biggest challenge to be preserving manufacturing space in order to support job growth in the area. And even at 74 years old, Arcuri expects to lead that effort as long as his fellow board members want him to. “Oh no,” said Arcuri, when asked if he had any plans on Q slowing down. “None at all.”

C M ANN page 15 Y K

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Page 15 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014

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C M ANN page 16 Y K

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C M ANN page 17 Y K WOK & GRILL SINCE 1978

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C M ANN page 18 Y K

C M ANN page 19 Y K

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There’s a reason they say hard work, laserlike determination and people skills can lead to great success in business: because it’s true. Just ask Thomas Chen. Chen came to the United States from Taiwan in 1982, when he was 27, with just a few dollars in his pocket and no English skills whatsoever. Settling in Elmhurst, he was alone for his first year here, having left his wife and their young son back home. His first job was ironing shirts and pants in a garment factory in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Today he heads a major national corporation with $60 million in annual sales, multiple subsidiaries and some international reach, one that he founded himself and still works hard every day to grow: Crystal Window & Door Systems. He’s earned enough wealth so he’s also a major philanthropist, supporting fellow immigrants, disaster relief, the arts, the Queens Library and more. His English may not be quite as good as his business acumen, but few things are. Chen is a king of commerce. And his home base has always been Queens. Crystal’s headquarters are in the College Point Industrial Park in Flushing and, though he and his family lived on Long Island for a while, Chen and his wife, Ana, have lived in Whitestone for nearly a decade and have no plans to move. It’s a short commute to work, and the business is everything. “I always think about the company,” Chen said. His older son, Steve, is Crystal’s chief operating officer, while his younger one, Johnson, recently graduated from St. John’s University School of Law and is planning a career in the legal profession. Not long after arriving in Queens, Chen took a job at a garment factory at 41st Avenue and Crescent Street in Long Island City, an area where many Taiwanese immigrants were working. At night, he was a building superintendent, getting a free apartment on top of his $200 monthly salary. He worked 16 hours a day, every day, something he said he did for seven years straight. He also found time to learn English, studying under a Mr. Wang at the Modern Chinese School in Flushing. Having done ironwork back in Taiwan, Chen set up a small shop on Sanford Avenue at College Point Boulevard in Flushing to make window guards, gates and fences. Since installing guards essentially locks windows in place,

many customers of what became his three-man shop wanted their glass replaced too. Chen soon realized that manufacturing and installing the windows themselves could be lucrative, and in 1987 he and two partners founded Clearview Windows to do just that. Chen did the labor while one partner handled the finances and the other, who spoke the best English, managed the deals that required that. Business was good, but in 1990 the latter partner decided to go off on his own. Chen then founded Crystal. “I had the vision, I knew the business,” he said. “I knew it would keep going, and I got the right people — smart and hardworking — and everybody worked together as a team to build the business step by step.” “There’s nobody harder-working than Thomas, who puts in more time and effort than anybody,” said Crystal spokesman Bob Nyman, who sat in on the Chronicle’s interview with Chen. “Thomas really lives and breathes and sleeps the company — when he sleeps.” The result is a firm that employs about 500 people in multiple locations and is one of the top 40 window manufacturers in the United States. One of its biggest jobs in Queens was LeFrak City, where 40,000 windows were replaced with ones made by Crystal. As CEO, Chen naturally has different duties than he did in the past. “It’s quite different,” he said. “Before, I was working the shop, working the sales, but now I don’t do that much anymore. Now I focus on new development and development of people.” continued on page 19 That development has three facets, Nyman explained: business development, as in expanding the company; product development, as in considering new materials and manufacturing equipment; and people development, as in recruiting the best possible employees. He also recently bought 180 acres of land in Pawling, NY, where he plans to establish Camp Crystal, something of a corporate retreat for the firm’s employees to enjoy. What does Chen do in the little free time he allows himself? He often attends fundraising galas as part of his philanthropy, and you might catch him at some of his favorite Flushing restaurants, such as Mulan, Asian Jewels Seafood and KumGangSan. Though he named those three when asked, he was reluctant to do so, not wanting to offend anyone he did not include. The people skills of the successful entrepreneur, always clear to see. Crystal clear, even. Q

Editor-in-Chief

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Page 19 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014

FLUSHING AND WESTERN QUEENS

QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014 Page 20

C M ANN page 20 Y K FOREST HILLS, REGO PARK AND BEYOND

Channeling a new role after 26 years Retired high school drama teacher helped students express themselves by Cristina Schreil Chronicle Contributor

It took a year on Long Island — a detour from what would become teacher Larry O’Connell’s 26 years at Forest Hills High School — to realize his love for Queens. “I was much more comfortable with the Queens kids,” O’Connell said. He’d left Forest Hills in 2001 to teach on Long Island, but missed his former students. “They’re street smart,” he said of Queens students. “You can take 70 kids from Queens and take them onto a subway in the city. They listen, they follow directions, they’re cool.” O’Connell retired in June after teaching what he estimates were over 5,000 students in English, film history and drama. He also helped mount plays beginning in 1992 with “Dracula.” “I’d say, you’re not a class, you’re a cast. You have to work together,” O’Connell said. He described one year when students performed “Fiddler on the Roof,” and he brought in a professional to help with the infamous “bottle dance,” in which performers balance glass bottles on their heads. They weren’t allowed to cheat with Velcro or plastic bottles. “They were up for it,” O’Connell said. “That’s why I love Forest Hills and that’s why

I love the Queens kid.” Riddled with anxiety, O’Connell watched them perform perfectly for an audience. Also at Forest Hills, O’Connell helped launch the Forest Hills Drama Academy, an extracurricular four-year program wherein students immerse themselves in theater craft, history and production. The academy, which began in 2006 with help from teachers Natalie Miletic and Juliana Fargias, focused on storytelling skills. The teachers wrote a curriculum outline and sought approval from the district office. They applied for membership in Theatre Development Fund’s Stage Door program, a nonprofit that fuels theater arts in city schools. That paid for guest teachers, usually known industry professionals, to instruct half of the classes each year. Later on, they teamed up with Fidelity FutureStage, a program that lets city public school students behind the scenes of Broadway theater. Through the program, students met professionals like Bronx-born actor Chazz Palminteri and Kevin Spacey. O’Connell, an actor and film buff as well as a member of the Dramatists Guild, wanted to ensure students gleaned lessons they could use their whole lives, instead of focusing on

Retired drama teacher Larry O’Connell poses with his “new assistant,” Harpo, in his Rego Park PHOTO BY CRISTINA SCHREIL home office. chasing fame or booking gigs. If chosen, students participate in eight classes covering acting techniques, directing and theater history, as well as filmmaking projects. O’Connell said the faculty wanted a

specific outlet for kids whose strengths are in performing in front of others. He said some parents took convincing. “What we said to them to calm their fears was, ‘We’re not trying to make your kid a continued on page 28

JAMAICA AND BEYOND

Fighting for civil rights in 21st-century Queens Leroy Gadsden, son of the South, charts Jamaica NAACP’s future by Michael Gannon

undertake might not be popular with the general public. Such was the case with William Hodges, who was accused of shooting and wounding a police officer in an altercation in Jamaica in 1999. In 2002, a judge ruled that Hodges had been denied a speedy trial. Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said at the time that the delays were caused by Hodges’ defense lawyer. Articles on the matter in the Daily News claimed that the judge and Hodges’ mother belonged to the same NAACP chapter; and that the organization had filed numerous complaints against the officer who was shot and others. “The issue was whether he got a speedy trial,” Gadsden said. “You have to have one set of rules.” Gadsden said there have been gains in Queens, such as in education, a subject that he argues passionately. “When I came here, I looked at New York City schools — in a rich city — and minority students were still in overpopulated R T ESY PHOTO

Leroy Gadsden was active in the NAACP in his native South Carolina long before he ever decided to come to Queens in 1991. “I heard the stories from older people who risked their lives trying to vote,” he said. “People who would get to the head of the line to register to vote only to have the window close ... People who were told they could take an hour for lunch but if they went to vote they would lose their jobs.” A job offer in New York for a supervisory position in law enforcement brought Gadsden to Queens, and allowed him to pursue both his career and his passion to help the civil rights organization further its goals. Gadsden had no formal contact with the Jamaica branch that he now heads when he first arrived in the big city. “I just found my local chapter, showed up and said, ‘Here I am.’” And in retrospect, Gadsden is glad he showed up ready to work. “I was surprised at the discrimination I found in Queens, discrimination I was told I’d be leaving behind in the South,” he said. “It wasn’t at that level, but it was more subtle, more under the covers. I didn’t expect that.”

The battlefield in Queens could be a middle school in Elmhurst, the courthouse or Borough Hall in Kew Gardens, a construction site in Jamaica or a meeting hall for any number of civic associations in what now is being touted as The World’s Borough. “With our diversity, we have to be very careful not to become polarized,” he said, selecting as an example hearings to set new legislative and City Council districts in the wake of the 2010 U.S. Census. He said blacks, Asians, Hispanics, whites, clergy and others all gathered at Borough Hall to make their voices heard, with far more agreement than dissent. Gadsden also said he is concerned with the potential for economic polarization within the African-American community given the diverse socioeconomic status among and within various neighborhoods in Queens. “We can’t allow ourselves to be set against each other,” he said. And, sometimes, Gadsden added, they can’t worry about the possibility that a cause they

COU

36th Anniversary Edition

Editor

classrooms,” he said. “Nonminorities could have 18 students per classroom; minorities could have 31 to 32.” He believes in some ways that Queens has not gained much ground, but does cite success in combating the NYPD’s pre-Mayor de Blasio stop-and-frisk procedures, and in keeping tabs on police brutality and abuse. On education he has seen some gains in the fight against colocation of charters in existing public schools. “We’ve gained some ground when it comes to awareness,” he said. But even that is far from a total victory. Gadsden is disappointed with the apathy for the voting process. “Our children aren’t being sat down every day, talked to at the dinner table about the sacrifices people had to make,” he said. “They aren’t hearing about their grandparents who voted while guys with guns were across from the courthouse. Sometimes they had to get white Jewish lawyers because the courts wouldn’t accept filings from blacks. “It bothers me when people say they don’t vote because it’s inconvenient or they say their vote doesn’t count,” Gadsden said. “My aunt once voted and that night the Ku Klux Klan gathered outside her house — in Q the 1960s.”

C M ANN page 21 Y K Page 21 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014

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C M ANN page 22 Y K RIDGEWOOD AND GLENDALE

Teaching not just music but local history Joe and Jeanette Fuoco are expert instructors and community stalwarts by Peter C. Mastrosimone Editor-in-Chief

Like a sensei teaching his students not just the moves of karate but the philosophy behind the art, master musicians Joe and Jeanette Fuoco will instruct you about far more than the right notes to play if you venture into their Glendale center. The Fuocos are not just top-notch musicians — he can play any instrument and began performing and even teaching in kindergarten, while she’s the best rhythm guitarist he’s ever heard — they’re true community people who love the area they grew up in and have served for decades. Both hail from Ridgewood and went to Christ the King High School in Middle Village, where they met back when Jeanette’s last name was Piccininni. Ridgewood and surrounding areas were a hub for music of all kinds when the Fuocos were kids, and they were at the center of it all and can recall it as easily as they can strum a guitar or hear a song and write down all the notes. Everything from rock ’n’ roll stars playing area clubs to innovative marching bands performing all kinds of music were here, and it wasn’t too far to the Gretsch guitar factory in Brooklyn or to the home of legendary composer, player and designer Les Paul in Jackson Heights. “This area was a hopping area, with music and musicians and these drum corps going around,” Joe recalled with boundless enthusiasm. “It’s a different era of time. When I sit and start telling the kids this, they’re really interested.” “They love it,” Jeanette chimed in. “They love hearing stories about what it was like in Ridgewood years ago.” Just what was it like there and in nearby areas musically? Tony Williams and the Platters played at Part II, a club at

They will rock you! Joe and Jeanette Fuoco strike a pose familiar to all their fans and music students, past and present, in PHOTO BY PETER C. MASTROSIMONE Queens and beyond. the corner of Metropolitan and Forest avenues. So did a band called The Hassles, whose front man was a kid from Long Island named Billy Joel. The Young Rascals played at Our Lady of Hope in Middle Village. Meanwhile the St. Matthias Blue Max and St. Aloysius Blue Eagles marching bands, led by Joe’s and Jeanette’s mothers, respectively, were developing unexpected repertoires the Fuocos say you just don’t see their counterparts anywhere doing today. Joe especially was wrapped up in music every waking moment. It all started when he was only 4, taking accordion les-

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sons from Henry Coleman at a studio near the corner of Onderdonk and Myrtle avenues. He could read music and play the guitar by the time he was 6, and even started teaching others how. By age 10, he was being hired to play at parties, and it was around that time that he started getting paid 50 cents for a music lesson. And he kept learning too, eventually becoming a student of Billy Bauer, a legendary jazz guitarist who had played with the likes of Nat King Cole, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Eventually there were too many kids learning music from Joe for his mother’s basement to accommodate them all, so he opened his first music center in 1973 when he was still a senior in high school. It operated out of a couple different locations until August 1982, when he bought the building at 66-20 Myrtle Ave. where Joe Fuoco’s Music Center remains to this day. The Fuocos do it all there: give lessons, sell instruments, repair instruments, record music. Though they live in Miller Place, LI, they’re in Queens all the time, and when they have to they stay in an apartment above the shop. Last Sunday afternoon, when they were closed but had a visitor, people knocked on the door asking about lessons twice in less than two hours (and the Fuocos note that they haven’t raised their prices in 15 years, saying it’s not about the money but the love of music). They offer a scholarship at St. Matthias, raise money for children with cancer and play at every community event they can, whether it’s a seasonal street fair or the annual Christmas tree lighting in front of Zum Stammtisch — though that one Joe does alone; it once got so cold his knuckles bled. But he won’t stop. Talk about loving what you do for a living and the place where continued on page 22 Q you do it. No one does more than Joe and Jeanette Fuoco.

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C M ANN page 23 Y K Page 23 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014

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When Elly Berkovits Gross was 15 in 1944, she and other Jews were transported in a cattle car from the ghetto of Cehei in Romania to the Auschwitz-II/Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. Having hidden away a small pocketknife she happened to receive at a family wedding, she poked holes in the compartment so she, her mother and her 5-year-old brother could breathe. It was a small miracle soon cut short upon arrival. A man wearing striped rags told her to stand away from her brother and her mother. Shocked, she stayed by their side. But they were separated and she never saw them again. In “Elly: My True Story of the Holocaust,” Gross retells the haunting series of nightmares she was thrust into for being Jewish. Until the arrival of allied soldiers in April 1945, Gross endured the camp and worked as a slave laborer in a Volkswagen factory in Fallersleben, Germany. The entire time, she didn’t realize she was the only one in her family still alive. Her stories, which are available in many school libraries and have been translated into languages including Romanian and Spanish, also chart what happened to Gross after the war, when trying to re-establish her life. Her book, now regarded as a collectible, recalls her return to her family home to find strangers living there. After meeting her husband, Ernest, Gross lived in what she recalls to be a large home in Oradea, Romania. Another of her books has photographs of

family gatherings in their yard full of fruit trees. Suddenly, in 1965, a communist leader wanted their home. “I had satisfaction, we had a clean house, we were working, the children were doing well in school, and in July, they came with a Jeep,” she said. She was transported to a place she knew people returned from with broken bones. “I signed the papers and we left. After I signed I was trembling,” she said. The government had taken their home away. They were given visas and were told to leave the country. They waited for their visas to the United States in Italy in a “miserable room.” 26 When they came to continued New York on on page St. Patrick’s Day of 1966, they faced more hardships. Four heads of garlic Gross had put in her pocketbook for good luck were taken away by customs officials. “Everybody was laughing and was happy, and I was the only one who cried,” she said. A friend of her husband’s greeted them at JFK Airport and gave them a bit of food and money. They lived in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights and Bensonhurst. “The first night, I went out to the bathroom and something crawled on the wall and on the floor and I screamed that the whole house was ready to collapse,” she said. “It was the first time I saw a roach in my life. Whenever I got the chance, I was crying. I knew that when I was here I needed to push myself.” She and her husband worked constantly and continued on page 26

Chronicle Contributor

AROU

by Cristina Schreil

QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014 Page 24

C M ANN page 24 Y K FOREST HILLS AND SOUTHEAST ASIA

Serving in Vietnam, and then in the NYPD Paul Feddern recounts his time in the Army and reception back home by Matthew Ern Chronicle Contributor

Queens resident Paul Feddern served his country as a soldier in the Vietnam War and now serves his community as a prominent member of the Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 32. Born in Glendale in 1947, he now resides in Forest Hills. “It’s a very nice place to grow up,” he said of the borough. “I’ve been in Queens all my life.” Feddern is on the board of directors of the VVA, and served as the vice president of Whitestone-based Chapter 32 for the past four years. Just last weekend, he and his brother, Russ, who fought in Vietnam as a Marine, served as the grand marshals in the Queens Veterans Day Parade, held in Middle Village. After dropping out of college, Feddern volunteered for the Army, knowing that his draft exemption status was about to be revoked. There was no question in his mind what the right thing to do was. All of Feddern’s three brothers

and one sister would go on to hold some type of city service job, mostly in law enforcement. Feddern himself would become an NYPD officer, retiring as a detective. In December 1967 he arrived in Vietnam as a member of the 101st Airborne Division. He spent a year in country, serving in a mortar squad, which provided direct support for ground troops. The average age of the soldiers in his division was 19. “We were all very young to be in a war, and yet it seemed like a natural thing even though there was no support from home,” he explained. Feddern described the lack of publ ic ap prova l of t he wa r a s “disheartening.” The 101st landed in Cu-Chi at the main base camp of the 25th Infantry Division before convoying up to Hue, where it spent the bulk of the war. Feddern was stationed there during the brutal Tet Offensive in January 1968, the most savage fighting in the war to date. “It was so intense all throughout Vietnam. It was sort of like, how

didn’t we know about this?” Feddern said of the surprise guerilla attacks by Viet Cong soldiers. One statistic reported to him after the war said that 90 percent of the 101st was either killed or wounded in action. “You have to be very strong to come back and survive. To be whole,” he said. Although his family welcomed him home with open arms, most people had an icy indifference toward soldiers. “It wasn’t an embracing welcome.

Paul Feddern today and, at left with no shirt, with his 101st Division mortar PHOTO, LEFT, BY MATTHEW ERN; COURTESY PHOTO squad on Highway One near Hue. It was like, ‘Oh, you’re back?’ and you slid into your life without any fanfare. If people were proud of their service they wouldn’t let anyone know about it,” he explained. For Feddern, it was the attitudes of many World War II veterans that

hit him hardest. “We weren’t treated correctly by them. The general feeling was it wasn’t a declared war, so it wasn’t a ‘real’ war. Well if it wasn’t a real war, then how come so many people continued on page 30

ASTORIA

Giving back to her lifelong community Political activist Carolyn Scarano is also a civic and charity leader by Matthew Ern

36th Anniversary Edition

Chronicle Contributor

Carolyn Scarano co-founded the SHAREing and CAREing cancer support group. PHOTO BY MATTHEW ERN

Carolyn Scarano has lived in Astoria all her life, and there’s nothing that could ever change that. “I just love it. It’s such a diverse community with so much culture,” she said. Scarano and her sister Gloria were raised on politics and community engagement. Their father, Ralph DeMarco, worked for the borough president and founded the Taminent Regular Democratic Club, which Scarano now serves as an executive member. She’s been the Democratic leader of the 36th Assembly District for the past four years and also serves as the vice president of the United Community Civic Association. She is a founding member of the SHAREing and CAREing cancer support organization and volunteers at her parish, Immaculate Conception Church on 29th Street in Astoria, and the Ravenswood Lions organization benefiting the blind. “They kind of support each other,” Scarano said of the numerous groups she splits her time between. “That’s what makes this such a great community.” This year SHAREing and CAREing is celebrating its 20th anniversary, which members of the Taminent Club are also supporting. Scarano founded SHAREing and CAREing with fellow cancer survivors Anna Krill, Lucille Hartman and Mary Demakos. Scarano had been diagnosed with breast cancer in the late ’80s and was in recovery by the time Krill, whom she knew from the Taminent Club, got her own diagnosis. The four women felt that there wasn’t an adequate amount of support for cancer patients in the area and formed their own group,

which has since spread throughout the borough and out onto Long Island. They mostly deal with victims of breast and cervical cancer, but in recent years men diagnosed with prostate cancer have also been served by the organization. SHAREing and CAREing provides personal support for families and takes patients to and from treatments. The group held its first meeting at the Taminent Club and received funding from former City Councilman Peter Vallone Sr. The political organization endorses local candidates, works with the Democratic Party and keeps the community informed. According to Scarano officials from all levels of government from congressional Reps. Joe Crowley (D-Jackson Heights) and Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn) to Councilman Costa Constantinides (D-Astoria) have addressed the club. “It’s very interesting to people in the community to know what’s going on in Albany and Washington,” Scarano said. Scarano’s sister, Gloria Demarco Aloise, preceded her as district leader, serving until she passed away in 2011. At the United Community Civic, Scarano works closely with organization President Rosemarie Poveromo, whom she describes as a “dynamic woman” and “a true community activist.” The organization is involved in various types of community affairs with an emphasis on the environment. Scarano works as a caseworker at Martin de Porres Elementary School in Elmont, LI. She deals with emotionally troubled, specialneeds students who couldn’t be placed in public schools. Scarano has a teaching degree but has spent most of her career counseling children and families. The de Porres School recently opened a high Q school in Rockaway Park as well.

C M ANN page 25 Y K Page 25 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014

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Living in no-man’s land, hoping to stay Joe Ardizzone has spent his entire 81 years in Willets Pt. house by Liz Rhoades Managing Editor

He’s 81 and fighting to remain in the house where he was born. The Willets Point area — never a real neighborhood — is special to Joe Ardizzone and he wants to live out his life there. The only resident in the 60-acre site is battling the city and developers, who want to transform the Willets Point area into a mixed-use development, using the Citi Field parking lot for a mall and parking garage and adding shops, restaurants and parking to Ardizzone’s area off 126th Street. Today, Willets Point is filled with a few large factories and mostly junkyards and car repair shops. But it was a lot different when Ardizzone was growing up there. “It was always somewhat of an industrial area,” he said. “But there were lots of rabbits, wildflowers and birds.” It was before nearby LaGuardia Airport was built “and the sky was full of birds.” He also remembers seeing quail and pheasants as well as frogs, “but I haven’t seen a frog in 45 years.” His father built a couple of houses but the area, also known as the Iron Triangle, never developed into a residential neighborhood. His father had asked the city to put in sewers so he could build more residences, but it never happened. “It was a nice place for kids to grow up in,” Ardizzone said. “Our family had goats and chickens and a little farm with vegetables and fruit trees.” He remembers the 1939-40 World’s Fair, located across

36th Anniversary Edition

J. Martinez continued from page 13 Julliard audition, a three-day process. Martinez performed something from playwright and actor Eric Bogosian, which he said tapped into his New York identity. “That New York thing was in me, and Eric speaks that language,” he said. “He’s just so good at finding the poetry in New York. So, that came very easy.” He suspects he was one of the only New Yorkers — both during the audition process and after his acceptance — which helped him stand out. While at Juilliard, Queens became a kind of a safe haven removed from the stress of the intense program. Unlike his classmates, he could hop on a train and be home in minutes. These days, he’s still home often. He’s just wrapped a Liam Neeson film in which he plays a New York City detective, a role he landed when auditioning at Kaufmann Studios in Astoria. Despite what some may call a spectacular resume, his official IMDB page still spotlights his time at Forest Hills High. He stands by his gratitude to the teachers there. “Now I realize how important the role of a teacher is. It can make the difference between following your dreams and then not believing in yourself,” Martinez said. Q “I’m living the dream.”

Joe Ardizzone outside his Willets Point home. He lives upstairs and rents out the first floor to a deli-restaurant. He is the only PHOTO BY STEVE MALECKI resident in the 60-acre site. the street from his home in Flushing Meadows Park. “We used to cut the fence and go in to see the exhibits,” Ardizzone said. “It was delightful being there as a lot of the exhibits were free.”

Not so great was walking to school. Ardizzone said he had to walk a mile to PS 143 in Corona. The factories and auto shops moved to Willets Point after the 1939-40 World’s Fair closed. “A lot of the area was made into a park by [Parks Commissioner] Robert Moses, but he was never able to complete it and little by little the junkyards came in,” he said. Ardizzone continues to live in the house where he was born and “rents” the downstairs out as a deli and restaurant. “The owner hasn’t paid me in two years. Things are so bad,” he said. “What are you going to do?” He also owns the house next door, which he uses for storage. For 30 years, he ran a restaurant, Joseph’s, which mostly served lunch, and also had Joe’s Pit Stop Bar and Grill as well as a catering truck. “I stopped when I got too old,” he said. Now, he spends his time as a security guard to earn money to help finance his lawsuits against the city. He attends all meetings involving the future of Willets Point, often wearing a replica military uniform from 1776. “I want to show what our country is all about. I’m fighting for democracy.” Ardizzone is not afraid of being the only resident of Willets Point at night. “Some of the businesses stay open late and I get along with people so I don’t feel it’s dangerous,” he said. Most of his family is gone and he says he has no place to go if forced out of his home. “I’ll keep fighting the good Q fight,” Ardizzone said.

Elly Berkovits Gross continued from page 23 studied English while supporting their children. They moved to the Jamaica home she lives in now around 1970, first living in the downstairs basement apartment. It was a home, but Gross recalls how rainwater would pour in. A few years later, she would further her education. After getting her high school equivalency certificate, she attended a computer programming class at St. John’s University on weekends. She often walked to campus. “I lived in the lab, because the only way I could learn was if I practiced, and if I had something wrong, someone could tell me how to fix it,” she said. She earned a certificate in computer programming in 1986. It was at St. John’s that Gross’ classmates and professors helped her create an illustrated book of her childhood in Romania. “I had a dream always to write about my childhood,” she said. “We did the illustrations in the book.” Later on, she wanted to realize her dream of going to college and attended LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City. She’d take heavy books on the Q46 and Q65, or the E and R trains, on her commute. To earn extra credits, she took classes in piano and painting — an art she started as a child and continues to this day. She recalled the struggle of being one of

the oldest students but said her professors’ encouragement fueled her. She graduated in her sixties. She then turned to a commitment to remember the Holocaust. In 1995, the Shoah Visual History Foundation asked Gross to speak about her experiences. That led her to testifying in a lawsuit brought against factory companies that used slave laborers in World War II. After, she told more of her and her family’s story. She self-published books that she wrote in her home with help from two neighbors who edited the pages. In 2009, Scholastic printed her memoir. Today, she speaks about the Holocaust around the city. She said the stories are fading and are being overshadowed by other evils. In her home, she creates art. She has needlepoint artworks and around 80 or 90 paintings in a basement gallery. There is sharp contrast. In one corner, a red windmill sits in a field. In another, a prisoner wastes away. One painting clarifies what she sees as this coexistence of “heaven and hell”: on one side, Jews pray at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem; on the other are the four fiery chimneys she saw every day at Auschwitz. In the foreword of her memoir, Gross’s daughter puts it well: “My mother, Elly Gross, is not only a survivor; she is also an Q achiever.”

Kathy Kelly continued from page 14 Students also lear n to navigate some pre c onceived notions about ex-military. “They have to understand that they’re going to be in situations in interviews where the person feels guilty they didn’t go, feels uncomfortable because they don’t know what to ask, or they simply have no frame of reference,” Kelly said. “What we work on is going for that through-thread of [saying], ‘I’m the one for the job, here’s what I bring.’” She said anecdotes showing how students made negative situations positive is also key. Kelly began one-on-one consultations at Four Block last month, which she thinks will make a huge difference in bringing out veterans’ stories. “I tell [students], there’s no one better qualified than ex-military,” Kelly said. “You really see the big picture, you see the moving parts, how it all goes together as a process.” In addition to coaching at Four Block, Kelly hopes to expand her talks throughout Queens, where she’s noticed many new businesses moving to the borough. She just presented at the Central Library of Queens in Jamaica on speaking tips and presentation skills. What she shared echoed what she continually tells her Four Block students: Q “Let your passion come through.”

C M ANN page 27 Y K

Raising a family of successful doctors in Queens Pari Golyan is the ultimate matriarch, taking care of her sons and office by Mark Lord Chronicle Contributor

It’s not every mother who could find the fortitude to send her child out into the world all alone — 6,000 miles away, no less — in search of a better life. But Pari Golyan knew what was best for her family and today it is clear that the risk paid off. And she didn’t do it just once or twice. One by one, she sent her three eldest sons from their native Tehran, Iran to New York City to further their educations and improve their chances for success. “Joe came here himself to go to Yeshiva,” explained the no-nonsense matriarch of the son she gave birth to when she was 13. Today Joseph Golyan is a gastroenterologist who specializes in liver diseases. The revelations from “Mama,” as she is known to all, came as she took a brief respite in a small side room off the crowded main waiting area of Sinai North Shore Medical Center, the family’s ever-expanding complex on Austin Street in Forest Hills. Son number two, Bijan, who followed his brother to New York three or four years later, would become a cardiologist, specializing in echocardiography. Third son, Daniel, took a circuitous route on his way to America, includ-

ing a stop in France and a trip back home before he finally joined his two older brothers here. Today, he is also a cardiologist, with a specialty in electrophysiology. It took many years, but Mama reunited with her sons in their adopted country, with fourth and youngest son David in tow. One year later, they would be joined by “Papa” Nejattollah. The family settled in Brooklyn and now live on Long Island, but their feet are planted firmly in Queens. All three doctors are affiliated with the North Shore-LIJ Forest Hills Hospital,

Page 27 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014

FOREST HILLS AND IRAN

Mama Pari Golyan with her high-achieving family and, at left, taking care of business. COURTESY PHOTO, ABOVE, AND PHOTO BY MARK LORD

and their office is on Austin Street, where the staff includes a nutritionist, urologist, podiatrist and ophthalmologist. Working with them is David Golyan, who, according to his mother, always wanted to be a businessman. Today, he runs the financial side

of the family enterprise. The proud parents are ever-present figures in the office, with dad tending to remain on the sidelines, while Mama can usually be found in the center of everything: at the reception desk, continued on page 30

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Amy Sciulli and Bob Holden continued from page 4 her new boyfriend — who barely got to speak to her that day on Eliot but did the next day, and won her over a year later — didn’t. “One time in Juniper Park, a kid called her Mao, so I belted him, and we rolled down fighting,” Bob said. Holden also had to pay a price at home for the relationship. His father, Joseph, was none too pleased about it. A medic in the war, he had seen Japanese savagery firsthand, and he hadn’t forgotten. His alcoholism had made his relationship with his son a difficult one anyway. The only way they could relate was through sports, catching Dodgers games at Ebbets Field together — but always stopping at a bar on the way home. “I fought them in the war,” the elder Holden said when Bob said he and Amy were getting hitched. “How could you marry one?” It was only years later, after Joseph Holden died, that Bob’s uncle George DeCola — a cop whose nephew saw him as his surrogate father — explained the situation to the younger man in ways he could understand. Joseph Holden was the best man I knew, DeCola said, but the war changed him. It changed a lot of men. Back at her house, Amy’s father didn’t like Bob much either, declaring he wouldn’t tolerate even seeing him on his block — because of his long hair. Why couldn’t she date that clean-cut boy Charlie Kraus instead? “At the time I liked the Rolling Stones,”

Amy Holden said. “Bob was good-looking like Mick Jagger.” The couple could not be split up and spent a lot of time hanging out together on street corners in front of candy stores and places such as Howard Johnson’s and Jan’s Ice Cream Parlor on Queens Boulevard, and taking in movies at the old Elmwood Theatre. They actually took comfort from a celebrity marriage that predated theirs by a few years — that of Beatle John to Yoko Ono. “I think it was when John Lennon married Yoko Ono that people started to think it was OK to be Asian,” Amy said. The Holdens married on Sept. 21, 1973 and now have four adult children. Bob became a professor of graphic and communication design at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn and a civic leader known for his fierce defense of his community against anything he sees as a threat to it. Amy was a stay-at-home mom for about 20 years but then started working as a secretary at John Depp Architecture in Woodside. When City Councilman Tom Ognibene told the Holdens there was an opening for a secretary in then-Gov. George Pataki’s Manhattan office and suggested she apply, she reluctantly did, her modesty telling her it wasn’t the right place for her. She didn’t get the job right away, but a year later she was hired as an assistant to one of the governor’s aides, and when Pataki’s personal secretary

left to have a baby, she got that job. A few years later, following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, someone sent envelopes containing the poison anthrax to several U.S. officials including Pataki. It was Amy Holden who opened the envelope addressed to the governor. She turned out fine, not having ingested the poison, but the incident “was one of the scariest moments for us,” her husband said. And it’s just one more reason he can’t stand any insinuation that Amy Holden is any less American than anyone else. “Nobody is more American than my wife,” he said. “Her father was a decorated Army veteran who fought in two major wars. She’s George Pataki’s executive assistant. He only took two people with him into private life: John Cahill and Amy.” While the invective hurled at her lessened when she got into her 20s and eventually disappeared as more Asians moved into the area, Amy Holden never forgot it, and it changed her. “To this day, when I see a group of people, I cross the street,” she said. “I guess I just expect them to say something degrading or demeaning, usually when I see a group of young people.” But she harbors no ill will toward her hometown, where her family settled for good when she was in fourth grade and where her husband’s family had moved in decades earlier, remembering all the good times. “I loved growing up in Middle Village. I treasure those memories,” she said. “It’s a Q great place to live.”

O’Connell continued from page 20 star. What we’re trying to do is give them a good experience,’” O’Connell said. Being creative was also a big draw. “If a child learns to be creative, they would do well in this world,” O’Connell said. He was varied in his outlets, once taking students to a pinhole photography exhibit at the Queens Museum. O’Connell tapped into the “living history” of the diverse area and had students interview the oldest person in their families. Then, students would retell the story for classmates. The students told haunting stories of World War II bombings in Japan, the Holocaust and others. After over two decades of teaching, O’Connell is trying to establish new routines. He’s revitalizing his own acting career, and spends time writing plays at the Benjamin Rosenthal Library at Queens College. He’s also taking a stand-up comedy class in Manhattan. He said Astoria is loaded with affordable activities he wants to check out, like the Museum of the Moving Image. O’Connell, who lives in Rego Park, hopes to stay connected to the school. “I have faith in the future, because these kids are creative,” he said. “These kids are loving and they’re Q appreciative.”

Congratulations To The Queens Chronicle, Especially to Mark Weidler, Publisher and Staff on their Anniversary of Thirty-Six Great Years of Journalism

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Carl Clay today in the Black Spectrum Theatre, which he founded decades ago, and with Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, in an image taken from Clay’s book, “Poor-Ducing Theatre & Film at Black Spectrum.” PHOTOS BY MARK LORD, LEFT, AND COURTESY CARL CLAY

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He rarely speaks above a whisper, but Carl Clay, founder and executive producer of Black Spectrum Theatre, a communitybased professional company in Southeast Queens, manages to get the job done. Perhaps it’s his love for what he does. As he states in the introduction to his autobiographical work, “Poor-Ducing Theatre & Film at Black Spectrum,” in the theater “you can move at top speeds and roll in and out of the cloud of your mind and travel to places and meet people from every culture in the world without leaving the ground.” Born in Harlem, Clay moved with his family to St. Albans when he was 5 years old and has rarely strayed from his adopted neighborhood. Today, he lives in Laurelton, a stone’s throw from the theater, where he spends much of his time. The son of a Pullman Porter father and a homemaker mother, Clay credits his interest in the performing arts to his older brother, who Clay said “had NBA written all over him” but ultimately put down his basketball and picked up the saxophone. “My initial orientation to the arts came through him,” Clay said. Clay attended Newtown High School where, by the time he was in 10th grade, he started writing poetry. “I’m reading different cultural books and books about black history,” he said. “I got this idea to put together an operatic play, all mimed to Miles Davis’ ‘Bitches Brew,’” an album he discovered through his brother. The play was never performed, but Clay was not deterred, though his next effort at playwriting was no more successful. He faced censorship from an English teacher who found a phrase in the script objectionable and refused to let the play go on unless it were changed. Clay would not budge and the play did not go on.

He eventually asked permission of the pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church on 200th Street in St. Albans as a theater space. Along with a group of like-minded friends, Clay came up with the name Black Spectrum, which was born in late 1970. He took one of his plays, “Black Love,” on the college circuit up and down the East Coast, and he created a genre he calls “disco theater,” which brought performances to discotheques and other clubs. His experience in the theatre expanded, and, he recalled, “I decided this was something I wanted to do. I was getting my chops in directing and writing. All of that became synthesized.” As luck would have it, Clay, armed with talent and ambition, seemed to find himself in the right place at the right time — at several important junctures along the path to success. Among the individuals he met was Melvin Van Peebles, a Renaissance man in film and theater, who was to exert a major influence on the up-and-coming artist. continued on page 31I “It was an eye-opening experience. learned a lot in terms of the business,” Clay said. He worked behind the scenes and as an actor in Van Peebles’ film “Greased Lightning” and eventually found his way to California and the lots of Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox. In his youth, Clay had worked as a delivery boy at Marty’s Drugs, a store at the corner of Linden Boulevard and 204th Street in St. Albans. Little could he have imagined the significance that space would come to have for him. By the late 1970s, Clay recalled, the area “looked like Beirut.” The store was long since abandoned, “no use to anybody.” In what he termed “a kind of coming back and making good,” Clay and company transformed the space into what would become continued on page 31

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Page 29 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014

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QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 13, 2014 Page 30

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Finding fulfillment by sharing the Torah Beth Sholom Rabbi Sharon Ballan dropped an ad career for Judaism by Laura A. Shepard When future rabbi Sharon Ballan was growing up, her mother told her she could be anything she wanted: a doctor, a lawyer or an Indian chief. Even so, “rabbi” was never on her radar. But years later, in 2009, Ballan was ordained, and she became the rabbi at Temple Beth Sholom in Flushing soon after. She grew up in Lynbrook, LI in an observant reform family. Reform congregations are on the more liberal spectrum of Judaism and always egalitarian, so women are equal participants in religious rituals. Ballan remarked that she was Bat Mitzvahed around 1974, when the first woman rabbi was admitted to the reform seminary. Even at her congregation, when they first discussed a woman being ordained as a rabbi, the first thing that came out of everybody’s mouth was, “Who’s going to hire her?” “It was so ingrained that it was always a man’s position to be a rabbi, that the thought never even entered my mind,” Ballan said. “I always enjoyed, I loved being able to read from the Torah, and I was thrilled that we were egalitarian, that as a

girl I was reading from the Torah.” Ballan noted that many temples at the time did not offer Bat Mitzvahs for girls, they merely had confirmations. She remembered her family fretting about bringing her Orthodox grandfather to temple to hear her read from the Torah, but that he just cried and said “A-plus” because he was impressed that she was able to do that. Though she’d always envisioned herself going into a professional field that was not women-oriented, religious service did not make the grade. “I think if a rabbi had said at one time, you’d be good at this, I might have been directed to go into it,” she added. Instead, Ballan majored in communications and minored in fine art at Adelphi University. After graduation, she ended up at an advertising agency. She worked hard, but did not find her career as meaningful as her Saturday mor ning Torah study group. She’d taken a hiatus from studying while she was in college and raising a family, but got back to it when she realized she wanted to teach her daughter. “Slowly, as I got more involved in the sy nagog ue, I realized that my career wasn’t as fulfilling as being involved in

Paul Feddern

Pari Golyan

continued from page 24 were dying?” Feddern and his comrades-in-arms vowed that never again would one generation of veterans abandon another. The VVA tries to be supportive and inclusive of everyone, including Vietnam War-era vets who didn’t actually fight. “Everybody helped, it doesn’t matter where you served. You went where your country needed you,” Feddern said. In the fall of 1969 he became a city cop, working in Brooklyn until retiring in 1989. After that he got a job at Home Depot, where he worked for 10 years until a knee injury ended his career in 1998. Now Feddern has plenty of time to devote to community engagement and his large family. Feddern married his wife, Teresa, in October 1971 and the couple had their first child a year later. Their children, John, Jill and Amanda, would give them four grandchildren, the oldest of which just started college. Among other services, the VVA buries indigent veterans, serving as surrogate families for the deceased. Since 2008 the organization has buried 92 vets and five of their spouses. The group also auctions off war memorabilia and other military items to pay for programs at the veterans hospital in Q St. Albans.

continued from page 27 filing, answering telephones, greeting patients and making lunch for the family and anyone who may be hungry. On occasion, one or more of her 13 grandchildren join them for lunch. “I’m old, but I feel young” being around them,” she said. “I’m very happy. I know all my kids have good lives. God gave good children to me. I say ‘thank you’ to God.” Her children, in turn, are appreciative of all she has done for them. “She sacrificed her life for us,” said Bijan, who, like his brothers, is always referred to by patients by his first name to avoid confusion. “She always emphasized education and helping other people and being good people.” In fact, Mama Golyan had always wanted to be a doctor herself, “but in my homeland I couldn’t because of the changes in government.” Pari Golyan was married at the age of 12, thanks to an arrangement by her parents. Her husband was six years older. In their earlier years together, her husband, a retired electronics salesman, wanted her to stay home to take care of the children. He eventually encouraged her to follow her dream of attending medical school, but it never happened. “I got a BS Q and that was it,” she said.

Chronicle Contributor

Judaism, studying Torah and helping other people,” Ballan said. “There were a number of other things going on in my life, but the icing on the cake was being in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001.” Believing that the Torah’s main point is that people should “repair the world,” Ballan was driven by the events of that day to do so. She realized that her work at the advertising agency, where she was support staff and had to be available for very long hours, wasn’t as meaningful. One client “had the audacity to call up on Sept. 11 asking, ‘Do you mean my ad’s not going to run?’ and we’re like ‘Dude, did you see what we watched?’ So I just realized that there’s got to be something else out there. “As a rabbi, you get to help people at different stages of their life and you get to be with them and help them at important moments: in sickness, in death, in marriage, in teaching children and ultimately, I thought that was a lot more valuable than trying to sell toothpaste, or whatever product it was that week,” she said. Occasionally, the rabbi at her synagogue would tell Ballan that she would be good at being a rabbi and a number of others agreed. She looked into it and enrolled part time at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic seminary, in 2003. She noted that by the time she went, the idea of becoming a woman rabbi did not seem weird because women had already been going for 30 years. In fact, more than 50 percent of the people there were women, which Ballan says is common in all liberal streams of Judaism and Christianity. While she was a student, she tutored Bar and Bat Mitzvah students at the Hollis Hills Jewish Center and Little Neck Jewish Center in Queens and had a student congregation in Pennsylvania. Living in Little Neck, after being ordained she heard that the rabbi of Beth Sholom was retiring, so she applied. “I didn’t feel any kind of bias until I started applying for jobs in 2009, where you would get people that would make a comment like, ‘We’re not looking at women,’ which was very surprising to me” Ballan said. “Another congregation in Queens told my placement director, ‘We had a woman, we tried a woman and we don’t want to look at a woman,’ and I’m thinking ‘Well excuse me, but we’re not all alike.’ “You wouldn’t necessarily think that in a regular job if you’re going for a spot, they would think, ‘Should we pick the man or the woman?’ but in this particular job, they think it,” Ballan said. Temple Beth Sholom was a good fit for her because it was nearby, with the right size congregation and several members knew her from her work at other temples in Queens. The cantor, Kathy Barr, is also a woman. Her predecessor was also a woman. Congregations in Queens have dwindled

Rabbi Sharon Ballan at Temple Beth Sholom PHOTO BY LAURA A. SHEPARD in Flushing. in recent decades, as the Jewish population has aged or moved elsewhere. Ballan said that much of her work involves trying to stay af loat and provide a liberal Jewish model for Northeast Queens. There are continued onarea, page 30 few other reform temples in the as most are orthodox or conservative. “I try to teach the kids to have those values,” Ballan said, “I got a number of our older kids to go to the Climate Change March … and I have the kids involved with the Samuel Field Y, doing mitzvah [good deed] things for them and food drives.” Last week, the temple’s Sisterhood coordinated a rummage sale to help community members get clothing and other items. As a rabbi, Ballan said, she has served as a role model for young girls, by showing them that they can accept certain rituals, such as wearing a tallit [prayer shawl], that were traditionally only practiced by men. “I still get people, especially in the Orthodox community, looking at me a little weird,” Ballan said, noting that while the refor m movement readily accepts women as rabbis the other denominations don’t always. Ballan and the temple’s male president were once invited to Shabbat morning service at a conser vat ive sy nagog ue i n Queens, where they invited the man to sit on the platform, but not her. At another temple, she would not be asked to lead services on days when a cer tain member attended because he would walk out if a woman led. “You can’t change everybody,” Ballan said. “We only got the vote in 1920. It’s come a long way in 100 years, but there’s still bias and sexism out there. It’s getting better out there, but feminism was getting a bad name and it was kind of a dirty word for a while and I couldn’t figure out why. I just think everyone should be equal and that’s the way we should be judged, on our Q own merits.”

C M ANN page 31 Y K

continued from page 7 Avenue, blocks from where Antos has lived all his life, that has been serving the community since 1906. Four additional Arcadia books came in rapid succession: “Shea Stadium,” in 2007; “Queens Then & Now,” in 2009; “Flushing Then & Now,” in 2011; and “Jackson Heights” last year. Antos is working on his latest, a look at Corona, scheduled for publication next summer. In addition to writing about the borough, Antos has earned a reputation as a noted Queens historian through his walking tours, presentations as guest speaker at innumerable events and involvement with several Queensbased historical societies. For his work, he has been honored with multiple awards and acknowledgments. Along the way, he said, “You meet all these people. I never knew they existed before and now they’re like an extended family.” He is particularly proud of the influence he has had in turning younger people onto the borough’s history. “Since I started doing this, the crowd has gotten younger and younger,” he said of his presentations, “and the authors have gotten younger and younger. I had something to do with Q that.”

continued from page 29 the first home of the Black Spectrum Theatre. Today, the theater is much enlarged and updated, in its long-standing home in Roy Wilkins Park in Jamaica, where it is considered a centerpiece in the borough’s black artistic community. In addition to showing original plays and films, bringing in celebrities for appearances and even hosting political discussions, the theater trains young people in acting. It is an achievement of which Clay is obviously proud. “Our community was underserved and still is in many ways,” he said, but he sees the theater as an opportunity “to enlighten AfricanAmerican youth” through “socially relevant projects.” “We’re here because of the blood, sweat and tears of a lot of people. We’ve brought into this community entertainment, ways of thinking and exposure to different cultures. “We set the pace for a lot of things in this community,” he said. Switching briefly to third person, he added, “Carl Clay is sometimes misunderstood because of my determination and headstrong desire to fulfill our mission. People can confuse that — they take it as being difficult. All it is Q is a great love of the community.”

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