The Luna Park Gazette

Mrs. Thomas J. White was one angry lady. A resident of Indianapolis and a member of the Indiana Textbook Commission, Mrs. White demanded that the story of “Robin Hood” be removed from schoolbooks. Robin Hood is one of the most beloved characters of all time. Who can forget Errol Flynn's turn as Robin Hood in the classic 1938 film? There have over 70 versions of Robin Hood in TV and movies, and while this one is my personal favorite, you’ve got plenty of others to choose from. How can anyone have a beef with Robin Hood? However, Robin Hood rankled Mrs. White because, she claimed, the story pushed Communist doctrine. “They want to stress it because he robbed the rich and gave it to the poor,” she said. “That's the communist line. It's just a smearing of law and order and anything that disrupts law and order is their meat.” I should mention here that the story of Mrs. White was in a New York Times article from Nov. 14, 1953, which I came across while doing res...

“Virtue lies in our power, and similarly so does vice; because where it is in our power to act, it is also in our power not to act...” ― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics Back in the Eighties, when I was working at a weekly newspaper in Bay Ridge, I covered a speech given by a prominent law enforcement official. This was during a period when many Wall Street executives were being arrested and during a question-and-answer period, this official was asked for his thoughts on why the supposedly brightest and best were being locked up. He suggested that we should go back to teaching ethics, like the ancient Greeks, explaining to young people why it's wrong to steal, why it's wrong to lie. "That's a very interesting point," my editor said upon reading my story and I agreed. That speaker was Rudy Giuliani, who was then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and a crimefighting media star, who had made a name for himself prosecuting mobsters...

The man with the telephoto camera smiled at me and squeezed my shoulder. “What is it about bubbles that we love so much?” he asked as he walked by. This wasn’t a rhetorical question, as the air around us was filled with soapy spheres, courtesy of The Bubble Girls, two women who dress up in outrageously colorful outfits and make all kinds of magic happen with wands and water. They’ve been making regular appearances at the Bay Ridge Summer Stroll, a series of street fares, where long stretches of Third Avenue are closed to traffic so that local merchants, artists and others can set up shop outdoors. There’s a lot of music and dancing and food, but The Bubble Girls are my favorite attraction by far. The Bubble Girls are like glassblowers, who create massive, fragile figures that float overhead like spirits or alien life forms. They’re composers who work with bubbles instead of music. Yeah, I know. What the hell is wrong with me? Why am I obsessing over bubbles like a five-y...

You never get over being a police reporter. I covered the cop beat in the Poconos for five years and even though I turned in my scanner 30 years ago, I still get a charge whenever I hear sirens or see flashing red lights. I felt that buzz last week when I was walking from the gym and I spotted an ambulance on the other side of Third Avenue at 83rd Street. Immediately the old instincts kicked in. Was there an accident, or an assault, or did somebody keel over? I didn’t see any other activity, but there was a young woman and a cameraman dead head on the corner. At first, I thought they were shooting a film and I decided to ask them about their project. But as I got closer, I noticed the woman was holding a microphone from Channel 12, so I reckoned they were covering whatever the hell was going on across the street. “Hey, there,” I said, “do you know what’s going on?” “No,” the woman said. “Actually, we’re here for something else. I wonder if I could ask you some questions...