What better way to make a friend then one that loves to read? Kids at Steinway created book critters out of recycled paper, straws, wiggly eyes and a bit of imagination. Kids learned about the benefits of recycling as well as the different uses of things considered to be “trash”. Using colorful paper strips they decorated each strip to add to the body of the critter. With the help of some glue they added wiggly eyes and straw antennas.
In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 1/21 Kids and their caregivers created peace doves out of coffee filters. Martin Luther King Jr. spent his lifetime promoting peace and fighting for equal civil rights for everyone. Children learned about his role in advancing the Civil Rights Movement as well as his non violent approach. Dr. King was one of the greatest orators in American history and is remembered for his famous " I Have a Dream" speech. Caregivers and Kids enjoyed learning about him and his tranquil ways. What better way to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day than to create colorful doves made from coffee filters ?
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The passing of time is changing the way Americans recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day, at Queens Library and around the country. Each year, a larger percentage of the population was not alive before the famed civil rights leader was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Keeping Dr. King’s memory alive is especially important to Johnnie Dent, Community Library Manager at Queens Library at East Elmhurst -- and not just because she works in one of the most-established African-American neighborhoods in Queens.
Dent, who has been with the library for nearly 39 years, is the cousin of the late Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s widow. They grew up together in Marion, Alabama and came of age as the fight against segregation was coming to a head.
She organizes library events like jazz tributes and student discussions of Dr. King, along with helping to run two college scholarship programs with church groups in East Elmhurst.
“Every program that we do, I will say, ‘I need you to know that Mrs. King and I were first cousins,’” Dent says of her interactions with young people. “I’ll tell them that my mother went to jail. I’ll tell them that my mother went across the Selma bridge [as part of the 1965 march on Montgomery, Alabama]. … I’ll do anything to let them know that what he did was for real—it wasn’t just something you read about.”
Through it all, Coretta Scott King supported her husband. Dent remembers her as a strong woman taking a support role for the sake of a noble cause.
“She was her own person; an opera singer, even after they were married and their first kid came,” Dent says. “She was touring while she was pregnant, to fund the movement.”
Dent says that, along with attending memorial events, the best way to honor the legacy of Dr. King and Coretta Scott King is to get involved in community service.
“It was about the downtrodden, that was his biggest thing—the poor,” she says. “With Hurricane Sandy, I’ve seen so many things, subtle things going on that people are doing—that’s the kind of service that he was about and that we want to see rendered.”
A thoughtful conversation emerged after the Saturday evening (01/05/13) screening of this alarming film which detailed the plight of ocean life due to over fishing of our oceans. Fish populations are in severe decline with some experts in the film predicting a seafood crisis by the year 2050. One suggestion for countering this trend is to eat small fish. Much like it takes 54 kilos of grain to produce one kilo of beef, it takes 50 kilos of small fish (like sardine or anchovy) to produce one kilo of larger fish like salmon. Because of this, it is better to eat the smaller fish directly. Small fish also require less time to reproduce and contain less mercury than larger fish. Another idea is to be an informed consumer. You can make informed buying decisions by not ordering fish that are on the endangered species list, asking your grocer or server if the fish on offer was sustainably caught or farmed. You can also look for and purchase Marine Stewardship Council Certified Sustainable Seafood.
Some interesting facts presented in the film include that, despite increased number of fishing vessels, industrial technology and area fished, the worldwide catch has been declining since the late 1980s. When scientist propose catch limits that would help populations recover, politicians often ignore them and allow an unsustainable number of fish to be brought to market each year. In fact the organizations that police the international fishing industry allow that 99.6% of the ocean to be fished. That leaves a mere 0.04% of protected aquatic habitat. It is estimated that in order to allow populations to recover we would need to protect least one-third (33%) of our oceans.
After the film, engaged Queens Library patrons shared thoughts on the film and expanded the conversation to include topics that where not thoroughly explained in the film. These included the melting of icebergs resulting in the acidification of our oceans, massive amounts of plastic in the oceans causing multiple problems and the FDA's recent approval of the first genetically modified organisms in the animal kingdom allowed into our food system in the form of AquaBounty GMO salmon. There are lots of things to be aware of and coming together as a community to learn and discuss these things is important so we can collectively address the issues we are faced with.
The New York Times reported that recently — just off the island of Midway, where the pivotal naval battle of the Pacific War was fought 71 years ago — archaeological divers discovered the remains of an historical rarity.
In 10 feet of water, they found the propeller and other broken, rusted pieces of a Brewster Buffalo, one of the fighter planes flown by the U.S. Marine Corps from the naval base at Midway up until the battle.
Those sad pieces, along with everything else erased by hard impact and decades of corrosion, came from Queens — Long Island City, in fact.
The Brewster Buffalo was the U.S. Navy’s first single-seat monoplane fighter. While it wasn’t exactly sleek, it was fast for its time — and a coup for Brewster, a former carriage and automobile manufacturer, which scored the contract against big-name competitors like Grumman. Brewster converted its factory at 27-01 Queens Plaza North and started cranking out the squat planes.
The Buffalo was a big deal when it entered service around 1938, but it was pitifully obsolete by the time Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941. In fact, the plane’s landing gear proved too weak to land on aircraft carriers, so the planes were shunted off to the Marines for use on land bases.
The Marines hated the Buffalo, which was outmatched by the Japanese Zero. When Japanese planes attacked the Midway airbase during the battle, aviators flying the Buffalo were decimated. In the book Semper Fi in the Sky, author Gerald Astor quotes the report of one pilot, Marine Capt. Phil White: “Any commander who orders pilots out in [a Buffalo] should consider the pilot lost before leaving the ground. It is inferior to the planes we are fighting in every respect.”
The Buffalo was quickly phased out by the Navy and Marines, but it was embraced by Finland, which used them with great success against the air force of the invading Soviet Union in 1941. In fact, the world’s only remaining Brewster Buffalo was fished out of a Finnish lake in 1998.
And the company? According to information in our Archives, it started in the early 19th century, but did not last much beyond the Buffalo’s disastrous combat debut. Fraught with mismanagement but fueled by massive military contracts, Brewster built a huge new factory in Bucks County, Pennsylvania to build a new dive bomber for the Navy. Its production was so wracked with embezzlement and union disputes that the company spent much of the war under government management or congressional investigations. The company dissolved in April 1946, its place in history assured by the stubby, finicky little plane from Queens that flopped in the Pacific but soared in Nordic latitudes.
The old factory in Long Island City has a new and more successful claim on aviation these days: JetBlue’s headquarters is now located there.
Want to learn about successful New York airplane makers? You’ve got to look at Long Island. Grumman and Republic, two of the biggest names in military aerospace, both operated factories there.
The week of January 7 marked the start of a new season of a certain popular television series about a federal marshal and the colorful criminal underworld in the rural county he calls home. While you can enjoy the show without knowing much about its origins, its protagonist is the creation of a dizzyingly prolific writer named Elmore Leonard, whose masterful career in genre fiction spanned more than 50 years. Leonard died August 20, 2013 at age 87, leaving behind a massive legacy for writers of crime fiction and westerns.
Born in New Orleans and a Detroit resident since 1934, Leonard got his start writing Western stories in the 1950s (the film 3:10 to Yuma is an adaptation from one of his early successes). He gradually transitioned into writing amusingly hardnosed stories about American lowlifes. His novels are populated with eccentric characters: exotic dancers, small-time gangsters, con men, bookies, and shady lawmen. And the opportunistic, mercenary charm of these characters has translated into 19 cinematic adaptations, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Jackie Brown and Mr. Majestyk.
For stories about the Raylan Givens character as Leonard wrote him before the hit TV series, check out Pronto and Riding the Rap.
January 20 marks the 127th anniversary of the patenting of the roller coaster. These scream-inducing attractions have spread all over the world and endured their own peaks and troughs of popularity, but you can’t tell the story without talking about Queens, where a pioneer of the craft brought his final designs.
LaMarcus Adna Thompson filed the original roller coaster patent in 1885. At that point he had already built a “scenic railway” attraction at Coney Island in 1884, consisting of two towers and a dip in the middle.
He based the design on gravity railways such as the Mauch Chunk Rail Road in Pennsylvania, which ferried coal from a company mine to its chutes on the Lehigh River, relying on gravity to propel the carriages along the track. Mules were required to tow the carriages 9 miles back up to the mine and then ride the trains back downhill, sharing the twists, turns and scenic thrills with their drivers.
Thompson’s Coney Island ride was a hit. It touched off a roller coaster arms race of sorts. Among the advancements was the “Drop the Dip,” which burned to the ground in 1907, was rebuilt, and came to be regarded by some as the first modern “high-speed” coaster. The Coney Island coaster that remains, the legendary Cyclone, was built in 1927 on the site of Thompson’s first scenic railway. It’s one of the few wooden roller coasters still in operation, though several replicas pay homage to it around the world.
Thompson wound up taking his big ideas to Queens, where his efforts paved the way for the lost, lamented Rockaways’ Playland. In 1901, Thompson had built a new scenic railway at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. But his business prospects were dashed when President William McKinley was assassinated there. According to Richard Geist, whose family ran Playland for decades, Thompson was enticed to bring the entire elevated railway to an existing amusement park at Far Rockaway. It became known as the L.A. Thompson Amusement Park. A picture in our Archives depicts one of the scenic railways constructed at the location, its support beams appearing to plunge straight into the surf.
The park soldiered on until 1928, two years after the amusement impresario died. At that point the park was sold to the Geist family, who changed the name to Rockaways’ Playland and commenced several decades of financially tenuous operation. Their Atom Smasher coaster was built in 1939 to coincide with the roller coaster on the midway at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. It was a central attraction for years, appearing in the 1952 film Cinerama. After Playland closed for good in 1985, the old roller coaster was the centerpiece of the dramatic dismantlement process, as seen above in our Archive photo, making way for condominiums.
Roller coasters had it rough throughout the country in the mid-20th century. Queens was home to other amusement parks that have since vanished from the landscape, like Fairyland, which closed in 1968 to make way for the Queens Center Mall, and Adventurer’s Inn, which was roughly where the New York Times printing plant is now on the Whitestone Expressway — and was condemned by the city in 1973.
Most of the coasters on Coney Island were also razed to make way for development. But The Cyclone lives on, a relic of the heady era Thompson ushered in, and proof that the twists, turns, and rapid plunges of a well-constructed coaster offer thrills that never get old.
Want to learn more about Coney Island? Check out this documentary.
January 15 marks the birthday of one of the greatest drummers of all time: Gene Krupa.
Born in Chicago in 1909, Krupa had been groomed for the priesthood by his parents, but decided to go his own way. He started playing the instrument in the 1920s and his powerful, busy drumming style came to the foreground in the 1930s, the heyday of what’s known as “big band” jazz.
You might know his drumming best from the classic Benny Goodman rendition of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” featured in countless films about the 1930s and World War II, available here in this 1938 Carnegie Hall performance. Krupa’s heavy rolls on the toms gives a burly, ominous underpinning to the soaring brass and woodwinds.
Krupa’s style helped define the era, but his fame faded some as the size of popular jazz combos shrank after World War II. He enjoyed a resurgence in the 1950s, including a film about his life, and retired in the 1960s, opening a music school and playing the occasional show.
Krupa died in 1973, but his influence is monumental among drummers, even outside of jazz. KISS drummer Peter Criss trained at Krupa’s school, while Neil Peart of the prog rock band Rush has paid explicit tribute to Krupa at concerts. He pops up occasionally in pop culture, such as the street drummer in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, advertising his ability to play in Krupa’s style. In a film wallowing in the debauchery and sleaze of 1970s New York, the Krupa mention is a brief, melancholy callback to a more elegant time in the city’s history.
Krupa’s drum set is now enshrined at the Smithsonian, alongside that of his friendly competitor Buddy Rich, with whom Krupa held several “drum battle” concerts, starting in 1952.
Want to learn more about Gene Krupa? Check out his biography.
I recently read Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball by New York Mets pitcher and Cy Young Award winner R. A. Dickey. Mr. Dickey’s story is not the typical athlete’s tale of success. He had many obstacles in his upbringing to overcome, including the divorce of his parents, sexual abuse, physical ailments that affected his ability to pitch, and more. His story is very inspirational, and a really good read. I highly recommend this book for those who enjoy stories about athletes, as well as for those who just want to be inspired by an individual’s spirituality and commitment to a goal. And winning the Cy Young Award for his pitching success this past season really put the cherry on the sundae!