When Aboud arrived in New York, he couldn’t speak a word of English. He’d enter an eatery and cluck like a chicken in order to get a plate of scrambled eggs. Life was rough, but much better than back in Aleppo.…
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terry berkson - Page 3
We lived in Bensonhurst, in a 12-room Victorian that had been divided into apartments. I occupied the second floor with my dad, while Chickie and his wife and two babies lived on the first floor and my Aunt Edna and Uncle Dave and their sons Leo and Charlie lived on the attic floor. There was also Mr. Bilideau, the boarder, who was a leftover from the time when my grandmother had rented rooms. There had once been a Mr. Yumtov…
I was a late starter at deer hunting because I moved back to Brooklyn just before I turned 16. It was while in the Army and reading Hemingway and Faulkner that I got the bug to hunt whitetails on Panther Mountain with my old friend Gerard in Richfield Springs.…
I have a tremendous resistance to change. I guess that’s why, in my 50s, I had the same bicycle for 43 years, the same power lawn mower for 40 years and the same old Chevy convertible for more than 30 years. Alice, my wife of 27 years at that time, must have felt pretty secure knowing my propensity for maintaining the status quo.…
Once a year, Dad would let the Buick down and get it started, not without a lot of trouble. It was always a group effort. Roger’s father and a couple of other guys on the block would help push it out onto the driveway. They’d inflate the tires and trickle gas into the carburetor.…
For several years, my wife Alice and I have been attending a summer concert that takes place at the Windfall Dutch Barn in Salt Springville, New York. There’s always a different group that comes to entertain, but musician and composer Carlton Clay usually enthusiastically presides over the event. One year, conductor and pianist Charles Schneider, accompanied by four singers, came to explain and then demonstrate how Leonard Bernstein almost mathematically put together “West Side Story”—not to mention words by Stephen…
I knew they didn’t like American soldiers in Germany, but I didn’t encounter unfriendly vibes from the French until attending the Running of the Bulls in July of 1966 in Pamplona, Spain. I am a Francophile, due to my maternal grandmother’s origin being a French mountain village in the province of Auvergne.…
Iron String Press is the sole remaining independent and locally owned newspaper publishing enterprise in Otsego County. Through its print publications and its digital counterpart, AllOtsego.com, Otsego County households have the benefit of local news in local hands at a time when the U.S. is losing an average of more than two community newspapers each week.…
I was working on construction in a high-rise building in lower Manhattan. My partner, “Roidney” Bunion, was 10 years younger than me, an ex-football player and a product of the “tune out and turn on” generation.…
Riemenschneider worked in a Gothic style and produced figures whose faces clearly expressed sensitive, complex inner emotions. While looking at the altar you could almost hear Christ saying, “One of you will betray me.” The various “Not me!” expressions on the faces of the disciples are easy to read.…
