The Luna Park Gazette

There’s something so comforting about the sound of foghorn. It’s a voice of safety and guidance, a saintly sound that seeks to protect sailors from harm. Now I’m a certified landlubber, but I live near the Narrows in Bay Ridge and whenever the fog rolls in I get an earful of that beautiful noise rolling in right behind it. It’s a nice old timey sound that harks back to another age of sailing ships and fishing villages. Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story “ The Fog Horn ” features a sea monster that mistakes a remote lighthouse’s foghorn for the mating call of one of its own. The giant creature eventually topples the lighthouse in a fit of rage and the story formed the basis of the monster movie classic The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms . Thankfully that has yet to happen in my neighborhood. I came to appreciate this singular symphony even more during a recent meditation session. Now I’m just getting over a nasty virus that had wrapped my head in a fogbank of congestion, fatigue,...

On the morning of August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman climbed to the observation deck of the University of Texas at Austin with a cache of weapons and started shooting. Whitman’s killing spree, probably America’s first mass shooting, would leave 17 people dead and 31 others injured. It was an incredible, shocking moment in this country’s history and it is the subject of Keith Maitland’s riveting documentary, Tower , which PBS broadcast last week. “It was not something you’d expect from our beautiful tower,” one woman says about the incident years later. I have to be honest--I sobbed so much during this film I must’ve gone through an entire box of tissues. Using a combination of old news footage, current interviews, and rotoscope animation, Maitland tells the survivors’ shocking stories of what happened over the course of 96 horrific minutes. There’s Alex Hernandez, who was shot off his bicycle as he delivered newspapers; and Allen Crum, a manager of the University Book Store Co-...

We heard about the fire from the mailman who had stopped by the office that morning to make a delivery. It was July 21, 1987 and a propane gas explosion had ripped through the block on 50th Street and 18th Avenue. I was working for the Bay Ridge Home Reporter , a neighborhood weekly, and I was assigned to cover the blast. It was one of my first big stories. The smoke from the explosion and resulting fire rose high over this Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. I had never seen so many fire engines, police cars, ambulances and news vans in my life. I was just getting over a nasty summer cold, but I forgot about that as I joined a group of reporters who were penned in an impromptu press area that was formed by two police barriers. All I could see was smoke and rubble. I broke out the paper’s Polaroid camera—yes, seriously--and began snapping pictures. In a case of excruciatingly bad timing, I ran out of film just as a firefighter staggered away from the flames, tumbled on to a stretc...

I came bounding out of PS 102 one afternoon many years ago dying to tell my parents the great news. This was kindergarten around 1962 and I had just made local history by proudly printing my name. My mother and father were waiting for me in my dad’s car, and I climbed in the back seat, breathlessly reporting how I had spelled “R-O-B-E-R-T.” And then I showed them the paper I was clutching as irrefutable evidence of this tremendous event. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” my mother said. “Now you just have to learn how to print ‘Lenihan.’” I was confused. I had just reached the plateau by cranking out my first name, the only one I ever used. It’s not like I was writing checks or signing contracts. Why complicate things? I eventually caught on that I would need the surname to get through life and a short time later I actually was writing checks and signing contracts. And it hasn’t stopped since. But what I remember most about that day was seeing my parents waiting outside school for m...