Author Archives: Ben
Cry Uncle
I grew up in a violent world. Boys do that, everywhere, like it or not. But I had a particular problem growing up a lonely Jewish kid in the late 1950s and early 1960s in a working-class section of an East Tennessee town. My closest relatives lived 750 miles north. Summers down south were languorous, […]
Posted in Essay Categories, Personal Politics
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That Gallus Old Codger
Here he is, “that gallus old codger,” as Damon Runyon would write some ten months later: 52-year old Daddy Browning at the time of his engagement to 15-year old Frances “Peaches” Heenan. Look at the evil mug on the chap ! And what are those bandages and scars on Peaches’ face, neck and arms? It’s March […]
Posted in Call Me Daddy: Essays, Essay Categories
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A Brooklynite’s Valentine Turns to Bloody Revenge: Talk at BLDG 92
From Wallabout Bay to the End of Her Rope: A Brooklynite’s Valentine Turns to Bloody Revenge. Join historian and raconteur Benjamin Feldman as he tells the gruesome story of a Valentine gone horribly wrong.
Posted in Talks & Events
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A deed, now done…
My Skype screen glowed and there he was, his 66-year old voice as clear as a bell, a bald head with a kind face beaming at me. Bob Newmark looks a bit like a kind-faced Kojak, or perhaps Yul Brynner in his prime. Once again my friend Roger Joslyn, genealogist extroardinaire, plucked an arrow from […]
Posted in Essay Categories, Found Objects
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Dumped
Driving east on a mid-town street in the mid-1980s, my acquaintance Andy W. spotted a bronze plaque in a pile of demolition debris. Intrigued by the shiny item, he stopped and rescued this memorial plaque, dumped on the street at the start of renovation of a former union headquarters of the millinery trade. How in heaven’s name could […]
Posted in Essay Categories, Found Objects
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Batya in the Heart of Darkness
The title of Joseph Conrad’s novel has always intrigued me, though I’ve never cracked a page. I understand the scenes to be strange and frightful; you never know what’s coming next. New York City is a jungle, too, of cultures and races, living at each other’s edges, and so it is at Bedford and Nostrand, […]
More on Peaches and Daddy
Peaches Browning may have failed in her bid for wealth when her suit for divorce, a property settlement, and alimony against Daddy Browning failed in March, 1926, but all was not lost. Her fame was nationwide now, and her teenage dreams of a stage career on solid ground. Caroline Heenan, Peaches’ mother, who had encouraged […]
Posted in Call Me Daddy: Essays, Essay Categories
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Chasing a Name Lost to Time: The New York Times
Originally published at http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/chasing-a-name-lost-to-time-2/ July 2, 2011 Chasing a Name Lost to Time By JOSEPH BERGER Benjamin P. Feldman, a retired real estate investor with the time and the money to chase his enthusiasms, was rummaging through a bin at a flea market in Chelsea last winter when he came across a weathered leather change […]
Posted in Press, Sol Goldberg biography
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A Sow’s Ear…
“You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse” goes the popular refrain. I beg to differ, though. Sometimes one may. Browsing among the vast piles of bric-a-brac in a Chelsea flea market right before Hannukah, a tiny leather change purse caught my eye. Sifting through piles of dust-covered junk, golden lettering on the […]
