Assistant Assistant Director
Last week, Michele, our fabulous Assistant Director, had a friendly helper join her for the day.
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August 31, 2009
August 19, 2009
By the Time We Got to Atlantic City...
There is no song by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young with the above title, but there might easily have been one. It is all a matter of timing as the saying goes. Your faithful blogger would like to tell you that he atttended Woodstock, but in the interest of full disclosure cannot do this. He was faced with a dilemma in the summer of 1969 of attending rock festivals at Atlantic City Race Track or at Woodstock, NY. He and his friends chose the Atlantic City Pop Festival, and the rest is history. But in reconsidering this festival, it did have a great deal to offer. Attendance was 100,000 people, which pales before Woodstock's 500,000 but was still a substantial number. And the music was superb. You can view the line-up of musicians on the above link, and it did include many excellent performers. I particularly enjoyed Janis Joplin, Procol Harum, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Tim Buckley. People got along very well, and we were not in a sea of mud like the people at Woodstock which made it much more comfortable. And Crosby, Stills, and Nash were supposed to perform but did not show up and were replaced by the Chambers Brothers. So we really could have had a song about Atlantic City if they had shown up!
August 10, 2009
By the Time We Got to Woodstock....
in August of 1969, we had already experienced a heady summer with the Stonewall riots, a walk on the moon, and the grisly doings of the Manson family. And then came Woodstock.
As reports of the huge numbers of young people--over 500,000-descending on Yasgur's farm in upstate New York filtered out many thought it was going to be a gigiantic hippie disaster. Instead, there was great music, great camaraderie-to say the least -and tons of mud from all the rain. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock which took place August 15-18, several new books have been released :The Road to Woodstock by Michael Lang (Lang being one of the original backers), Woodstock: Three Days That Rocked the World and Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock. You can also watch the Academy Award wiinning documentary, Woodstock, which has additional footage not contained in the 1970 version.
August 06, 2009
Danbury's Mafia Murder
Monday July 27 marked the 100th anniversary of one of the most famous unsolved murders in Danbury. On July 27, 1909 Giovanni Zarcone was gunned down near his house on Hospital Avenue. He had been involved in Mafia operations in New York City and was a suspect in a gruesome incident called the Barrel Murder. This was a dispute between rival Mafia factions and the body was driven from the scene in one of Zarcone's wagons (he was parners in a butcher shop). Zarcone fled to Danbury and bought a 59 acre farm on Hospital Avenue. He was attacked on the night of July 27 by three men with shotguns who had waited in ambush for him. They pursued him to the doorstep of his house and fired a fatal blast into him. As you would expect there was consternation in Danbury. Police were sent looking for the killers and the militia was also called out but the murderers escaped and the case was never solved. There is an extensive article titled Mafia Murder in Danbury in Informer: The Journal of American Mafia History by Thomas Hunt (Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 2009) and much of the article is based on genealogy research materials available in the Danbury Library: City Directories, The News-Times on microfilm.