Talk Bronx New York

Fordham Honors An Artful Dodger Broadcaster

You might say the signature call of baseball’s greatest living radio announcer is the sound of silence.

That ability to let the moment tell the story is one reason why, even though Vin Scully has spent the last half-century living 3,000 miles from his Bronx birthplace, he will be honored tomorrow night by his Bronx alma mater, Fordham University radio station WFUV (90.7 FM).

Scully’s voice, one of the many irreplaceable treasures the Dodgers took with them when they abandoned Brooklyn in 1957, has over 59 years called many of the most indelible plays from America’s best game.

It has not overcalled one of them. When Elston Howard grounded out to Pee Wee Reese on Oct. 4, 1955, giving the Brooklyn Dodgers their only World Championship, Scully said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world.”

When Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run in April 1974, Scully reported, “It is gone” and said nothing for 25 seconds, letting the cheers tell the story.

When Mookie Wilson’s ground ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs in 1986, Scully told TV audiences, “The Mets win it!” and then remained silent for more than three minutes as celebration erupted.

In 1988, when a crippled Kirk Gibson hit a two-out, two-strike, two-run ninth inning homer to win a World Series game off baseball’s best reliever, Scully again said, “It is gone” and remained silent for 67 seconds. Read more..

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George Washington From The Bronx? 

I GREW up in the rough-and-tumble Morrisania section of the East Bronx. I’m not sure when Morrisania’s gangs began, but they were already there during the Revolutionary War.

It wasn’t patriots and Tories who battled it out in Morrisania during the British occupation of Manhattan, a period that lasted from 1776 to 1783, but their surrogates, called Skinners and Cowboys, who scalped men, molested women and murdered children of both sides.

The gangs of Boston Road and Southern Boulevard circa 1950 weren’t as mean and malicious, but I lived in a whirlwind of chaos nevertheless, where I was my own urban guerrilla who had to battle his way to school block by block.

There were terrible racial and religious divides in Morrisania. I belonged to the little enclave of poor Polish and Russian Jews that collected at the borders of Crotona Park.

There might have been physicists living in the Byzantine palaces of Crotona Park East, but they were failed physicists, men inhabiting some mysterious cocoon that no one could explain, least of all themselves.

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Born In The Bronx

Joe Conzo: Co-Author Of The Book Born In The Bronx

Born In The Bronx .. Hip Hop’s Baby Picture Album  

Joe Conzo accredited to being Hip Hop’s 1st photographer took a minute to talk it up with Talk Bronx about his new book Born In The Bronx and the book signing.

Through Born in the Bronx, Joe Conzo presents a unique cross-section of an explosive and experimental time in music history. Born in the Bronx is a striking anthology of Hip Hop’s baby steps. Not only does it capture the emergence of a burgeoning culture but also the fashion and character of the surrounding community through rare photographs of MC’s and DJs to records, flyers, and other ephemera.

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Sound advice on books

“Born in the Bronx: A Visual Record of the Early Days of Hip Hop,”
edited by Johan Kugelberg

As you turn the pages of this lovingly curated look at the birth of hip-hop in the “Boogie Down” Bronx of the 1970s and ’80s, you can practically hear the snap of breakbeats, smell the fumes of spray paint, and feel the bodies bumping on neighborhood basketball courts. The book attempts to capture the volatile borough, which was both a vibrant melting pot and racial pressure cooker filled with social activists and destructive gangs, good music, and bad drugs.

Editor Johan Kugelberg lays out an eye-popping assortment of artifacts from this criminally under-documented formative period. Photos of early pioneers such as Grandmaster Caz and the Cold Crush Brothers, many by scenester Joe Conzo, contrast with stark images of burnt-out lots strewn with garbage and dotted by abandoned cars. A clutch of flyers illustrates how the scene morphed from house parties, with handwritten invites on lined 3-by-5 cards, to swanky affairs announced by the elaborate, Art Deco-inspired creations of Buddy Esquire.

A foreword by Afrika Bambaataa and a timeline by hip-hop historian Jeff Chang further tell the tale of how urban blight and youthful enthusiasm combined to create this new art form. Kugelberg also shares the personal soundtrack he used while putting the book together as well as lists of other must-have and hard-to-find artists of the era, many of whom never made the transition from vinyl glory.

While most of the names will be unfamiliar to all but the most hard-core hip-hop heads, this is history worth learning for fans of everyone from Kool Herc to Jay-Z.

SOURCE: Boston.com

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