Happy Birthday, Nephew Eddie

Edward Edgar Ekis’s mother worked at the local Five & Ten store on First Avenue. You know, the one with the mechanical jalopies and "Ride "Em Cowboy!" outside the store - a dime did it. On Friday nights, Asst. Manager, Ellie Ekis closed the store at 9pm. This put Mrs. Ekis home at 9:15.

our first album cover, Ed, Buddy, teepee

Sometime in 1969, on one Friday the cocktail lamp was lit at 5pm and the first wave would roll in. There were seven to ten regulars, a poker game always got going, and the music blasted. (I never played cards, I stunk at cards.)  J Geils, “Looking For a Love,” “Floyd’s Hotel,” Jeff Beck, "Truth," Humble Pie, “Thirty Days In The Hole,” Black Sabbath, “Paranoid,” Black Oak Arkansas, “Jim Dandy,” Jacksons, “Never Can Say Goodbye,” Led Zep, “Everything,” The Who, “Who’s Next,” “Quad,” Beatles, “Rubber Soul & Revolver,” Sly, “Everything single song he did," “Billy Preston, “Outer Space,” and every worth while 45 single from 1962 and forward. 



Eddies' older brother Ginter had a doctorate in Entomology, the scientific study of insects. Eddie bought into science and loved exotic animals. Fall 1970, Ginter came home from a research trip to India with a gift for his brother - two Rhesus monkeys. Eddie named them Chiquita and Toto. Eddie caged in the tiny tar roof of the beauty parlor under his second floor apartment. They loved beer and lived in a cage in the kitchen and had a terrace out the window when the weather was nice. A porch for everybody. If the weather was right we’d move two chairs and a bottle of Yago Sangria out there and hang out with the monkeys, but if they didn’t like the music they went cuckoo crazy nuts and pulled our hair. We carefully made our record selections. Toto & Chicata hated Black Oak Arkansas.

At five to nine everyone knew the drill. The brown bags came out and all the empties into the garbage. Ekis ran to the turntable for our “Go out,” last song. We'd march out of the building, on our way to somewhere that was never as much fun as Ekis's house.We sang along:

I'm looking, I'm looking, I'm looking,
Somebody help me find my baby!



Happy 61st Birthday, Edward Edgar Ekis, we miss you, brother.

Yvette, Joe & Eddie

Eddie warming up

Gerard, Eddie & Karl

Chris, Gerard, Nick & Eddie 1966

Ed, Gerard & Arlene

look pretty happy to me, Ed & Arlene

Buddy, Ed, tp

And When You Wake Up, It's A New Morning

Tommy & Rory on subway platform going to Freedomland @ 1962

Rory loved adventures. He joined Freddy Muller and me on one in 1966. Not sure who first discovered it, but starting at 70th Street near the FDR drive down by the East River, you could enter the New York Hospital complex down a flight of stairs into a sub-basement that had a series of walking tunnels that led through many areas of the hospital. The hair on the back of our necks stood up when we passed through the pathology area where every conceivable human body part was floating in liquid in huge glass jars. At first we went down the eerie tunnels because we could, but eventually found they led to the sub-basement of Olin Hall at 69th Street and York Avenue where we found a regulation size wood floor basketball court. This made Freddy and I very happy and Rory indifferent. Rory liked getting spooked and had no interest in sports.

Next time Freddy and I brought a basketball and Rory wandered around until it was time to leave or we got chased by doctors playing a pick-up game. Eventually, the whole neighborhood found out the secret of the buried court. That blew it for everyone, security started keeping an eye out for us. Looking back, this was the best time of our lives together.

Rory Pryor @ 21 years old

Rory's Mom & Baby Ellie for Uncle Mommy's  Bday

Rory was born 60 years ago today, and died at 42. He was a fine artist but left little of his art behind because he gave it away to his friends. The three pieces shown here are Rory's. Happy Birthday, Brother.

Here's lyrics from one of Rory's favorite songs, "Baker Street," by Jerry Rafferty.

And when you wake up, it's a new morning
The sun is shining, it's a new morning
You're going, You're going home.

Harold and Maude plant a tree for Rory

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD5fMMXwZs8&feature=related

My passion for New York City and it's neighborhoods developed a long time ago, when Dad and Mom dragged us all over town walking, biking, subways, boats and buses.

We had no car so we never got anywhere quickly. This left a lot of time to think about what we were seeing and where we were going, and view things more slowly than if you flew by in a Buick. As a kid you tend to pick something visual to focus on to avoid boredom and my brother, Rory, and I had lots of targets.

Add Dad's obsessive photo taking, and I ended up with a broad pictorial record of most of our trips around the city in the 1960s. In most of these photographs, Rory is front and center, the lead player in the scene.

Looking at these photos, Rory's engaged photogenic face always makes me think we had a better time than we really did. I never mind this delusion.

Rory Pryor at lake 1962

Rory at Central Park, nice hat!

Rory Full Moon Collage with birds

Rory's Chalk Orchestra

Rory with his girls at Queen of Angels 8th grade grad in Sunnyside @1970

Rory sipping milk in 1st grade St. Stephen's Nov 1962

I Could've Died Right Then and There ~ Jints ~ Yankee Stadium 1970

Ron Johnson scores winning TD vs. Skins Nov 1970

Best live "Old Yankee Stadium, we were there," sports days ever with Dad.

New York Giants beat the Washington Redskins 35-33 ~ Nov 1970 ~ Jints came back from 19 points down with a quarter to go. Tucker Fredrickson's best game as a pro. Ron Johnson scored winning sweep right in front of Dad & me seating behind Yankee dugout. The Stadium rocked like it was a Rolling Stones concert. Dad and I hugged as if we were going out. The concrete below our feet was going up and down, up and down.  I didn’t care if the Stadium fell in on us. I could’ve died right then and there.

Dad’s gone fourteen years, when Dallas loses, I feel his smile. When the Giants win, I feel Dad’s hug and kiss.

At one point, (maybe they still do) the New York Daily News Sports Department sold prints of photos to the public. In the early 1980s I went down to their 42^nd Street building with old dates in mind. Special Mickey Mantle days and terrific Giant victories. The photos in the papers from those special days were tattooed to my brain. I asked for the 1964, 1967 and 1970 files. 

I found Mickey Mantle’s 500 homer, Mantle’s homer off Barney Schultz breaking Ruth’s Series record. Tarkenton rolling out in a win against the Cowboys, Bob Tucker in same game and the crown jewel, Ron Johnson scoring on the sweep against the Skins in 1970. Doug Van Horn, Willie Young, Willie Harper and Don Hermann blocking efficiently on the play.

While I was looking through the photos I received a bonus.  A guy came into the empty side room where I was looking through the photos.  He leaned over me and asked, “What cha doing?”

It was Bill Gallo the News sports cartoonist.  He sat with me for a half hour shooting the breeze, getting a kick out of my intensity and knowledge of his old hero & goat photos from past World Series. Bill was very nice to me. The 6 photos I bought cost me $95. It was a good day.

Yankee Stadium 1962

Ryan's Daughter Rocks In Story & Song

Joe

Where's Poppa? ~ Thomas Pryor's Stoops to Nuts Father's Day Show... 

Thank you, Colin Dempsey, Joe Dettmore, Nicole Ferraro, Tim & Una McGillicuddy for your wonderful songs & stories last night at Ryans Daughter. Thank you to a knockout audience who rooted us on. Walter, you are the best host on earth, thank you, Buddy, and thank you, Jim & Mick, for letting us play in your home. The spirit of the neighborhood takes up steady residence inside Ryan's Daughter and we are all lucky for that. hugs, Tommy

ps here is a public link to a ton of photos from last night.

Colin

Wednesday

Tim

Una

Happy Couple

The Man That Makes It Happen

My Agent, Milo, on the carpet

If you like my work check out my memoir, "I Hate the Dallas Cowboys - tales of a scrappy New York boyhood." Available at Logos Book Store or online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The book has 119 Amazon five star reviews out of 119 total reviews posted. We're pitching a perfect game. My old world echoes TV's "The Wonder Years" ~ just add taverns, subways and Checker cabs.

Celebrating Fathers Tomorrow @ Ryan's Daughter @ 7-10pm ~ FREE SHOW

Dad & Tommy on way to Bear Mountain @1963

Quick nudge, pardon me please...

"Where's Poppa?" ~ Thomas Pryor's Stoops to Nuts Father's Day Show ~ TOMORROW NIGHT, Friday, June 17, 2016. @ 7-10 pm upstairs at Ryan's Daughter

S2N artists: with Colin Dempsey, Joe Dettmore, Nicole Ferraro, Tim McGillicuddy & Una  McGillicuddy.

Thomas Pryor's your host, it's a cuckoo crazy nuts FREE S2N event. Bring your Pa, Da and all your  recollections of Poppa. I'll be doing Yorkville stories about Daddy O'Pryor from scenes in my  upcoming solo play, "City Boy" (Feb 2017.) 

Doing these shows at Ryan's Daughter (Thank you, Jim, Mick & Walter!) we hope to preserve our neighborhood's character  and texture through word and song and raise the alert on our diminishing street light and vanishing stoops.

Colin Dempsey is an Irish singer-songwriter, writer and storyteller based in New York. He is also the singer and guitarist for Indie-Rock duo Supersmall. Their debut album Silent Moon was recently released to positive reviews and is available everywhere. Colin is also part of the Heavy Mental Neuroscience folk rock duo So We Are. Rosanne Cash described “So We Are” as a kind of “post-modern Everly Brothers.” Colin has performed on NPR, SiriusXM Radio, Dublin City FM, and various east coast radio stations. He performs every first Monday of the month at The Four Faced Liar in the west village as a regular on the NYSolo6 songwriter series.

Joe Dettmore is the Creative Director of The Daily Show for the past 11 years. Mr. Dettmore sung "California Girls" with The Losers Lounge at Joe's Pub. He also acts, performs improvisation and is a wicked storyteller. On the side he makes professional quality stain glass windows.

Nicole Ferraro is a writer, editor, and storyteller living in NYC. Her personal essays have been published in The New York Times, Story Collider Magazine, The Frisky, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, and elsewhere. Nicole is also the cohost of New York Story Exchange, a monthly storytelling series at Cornelia Street Cafe. Her first solo show WHY SO MUCH SHAME? debuted at the 2016 FRIGID Festival to rave reviews. By day she works as the editor in chief of Netted, a publication by The Webby Awards. t: @NicoleFerraro e: ntd.ferraro@gmail-dot-com

Tim McGillicuddy is a poet and playwright born and raised in Yorkville. He has four books of poetry Tomorrow Never Comes, Saratoga Here I Come, A Music Box and In the Soil’s Reach,(Shires Press, Manchester, VT) and has had individual poems published in literary journals here and there. His comedy The Irish Play was produced at the Irish Arts Center in New York City in 2007 by Theodore Mann of Circle in the Square Theatre, and later in Burlington, Vermont as part of the Irish Arts Festival. A play for children, The Sparrow with a Clipped Wing, was first produced in Burlington and later in New York at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He currently resides with his family in New York City and is in the process of having a book published about the messy business of construction.

Una McGillicuddy hails from Dublin's Fair City, where she grew up on a rich diet of songs,stories and live theater. While there, she performed in both the Dublin and Edinburgh Theater Festivals, playing roles from Stoppard to Shakespeare. Since coming to the States in '85, she has been acting, telling stories and singing songs to all who have an ear for them ... not least to her 7th grade students of American history! 

Thomas Pryor's work has appeared in The New York Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and other periodicals. His memoir, “I Hate the Dallas Cowboys - tales of a scrappy New York boyhood,” was published in 2014 (YBK). Pryor’s blog: "Yorkville: Stoops to Nuts," was chosen by The New York Times for their Blog Roll in 2008. Thomas appeared on PBS's "Baseball: A New York Love Story," NBC’s "New York Nonstop,” “This American Life,” and TV’s “Impractical Jokers.” His newspaper column ran in Our Town and The West Side Spirit. For five years, Thomas curated a monthly storytelling show, “City Stories: Stoops to Nuts,” at the Cornelia Street Café that Time Out Magazine, The New York Daily News and CBS News praised. His photography portfolio, "River to River - New York Scenes From a Bicycle," was published in 2012 (YBK). Cornelia Street Cafe hosted an exhibition of his photography. NBC TV,New York Press/Our Town Downtown and NY 1 TV highly recommended the exhibit and his portfolio. His passion is preserving the history of Yorkville and the Upper East Side through storytelling, writing and photography. His play about the neighborhood, “City Boy” will preview in February 2017. 

I'm raffling off something good. I swear on Daddy O'Pryor's grave. 

Tommy courtesy of David Stewart


If you like my work check out my memoir, "I Hate the Dallas Cowboys - tales of a scrappy New York boyhood." Available at Logos Book Store or online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The book has 119 Amazon five star reviews out of 119 total reviews posted. We're pitching a perfect game. My old world echoes TV's "The Wonder Years" ~ just add taverns, subways and Checker cabs.

At The Polo Grounds

"Where's Poppa?" ~ Thomas Pryor's Stoops to Nuts Father's Day Show 

Friday, June 17, 2016. @ 7-10 pm upstairs at Ryan's Daughter

S2N artists: with Colin Dempsey, Joe Dettmore, Nicole Ferraro, Tim McGillicuddy & Una McGillicuddy.

Thomas Pryor's your host, it's a cuckoo crazy nuts FREE S2N event. Bring your Pa, Da and all your recollections of Poppa. I'll be doing Yorkville stories about Daddy O'Pryor from scenes in my upcoming solo play, "City Boy" (Feb 2017.) We work to preserve our neighborhood's character and texture through word and song and raise the alert on our diminishing street light and vanishing stoops.

Loftus Tavern 1962

At The Polo Grounds

"Hey Dad, who were you just talking to down at the end of the bar?"

"Oh, that's Al Dorow, the quarterback for the New York Titans."

It was fall 1961, Dad and I were in Loftus Tavern after throwing the ball around outside on York Avenue. My two teams, the New York Giants, football, and the Yankees, baseball, were playing well, the Yankees won the World Series in October and the Giants were on their way to the NFL championship game. The Titans, in their second year in the new American Football League, were barely catching my attention at 7 years old. But Al Dorow was a professional football player, and he did talk to my Dad, so that made him important in my life.

"Dad, will you take me to a Titan game?"

The next Saturday, Dad took me to the Polo Grounds where we saw the Titans beat the Oakland Raiders. That was my first time at the Polo Grounds, the Natural History Museum of ballparks compared to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yankee Stadium. Even at 7, I recognized I was in a place like no other, and it was going to go away forever, you could see it, smell it, hear it, feel it. Being small, only emphasized how outsized the space was, first time I saw a picture of St. Peter's Basilica I thought of the Polo Grounds.

The next year, 1962, was the Mets first year. I punished my father for not taking me to New York Giants football games, so he made it up to me by taking me to many, many baseball games. When the Yankees were out of town it was only natural that he would take me up to the Polo Grounds for a Met game and he picked a beaut for our first outing.

Friday night, June 1, 1962, the New York Mets versus the San Francisco Giants. The first New York appearance by the Giants since they ran away from home with the Brooklyn Dodgers after the 1957 season. Even though there were nearly 45,000 people there, Dad found us two seats high up in the grandstands right behind home plate in Section 1. The crowd's energy felt like they just left Circus Maximus, saw too few Christians die and wanted blood, now!

Dad did a score card in pencil, and I remember getting excited about three names, Paul Pryor, the third base umpire had the same last name as mine; Augie Donatelli, the head umpire behind the plate had the greatest sounding umpire's name I ever heard; and Willie Mays, in my mind Mickey Mantle's arch rival, was starting in centerfield for the Giants.

By the time the game started, there were two ejections in the section next to us. By the third inning, Dad threatened the guy behind us, "If one more drop of beer touches my kid's head, you and I have a problem." The guy said nothing. I stayed dry. In the top of the fifth, Willie Mays hit a homer, the only homer I would ever see Willie hit live. The homer triggered fights on top of us, below us and to each of our sides. I spent the sixth inning under my father's seat watching the game from between his legs. Dad pressed me to leave and I agreed when the Giants went up 9-1 in the top of the 7th inning.

I held Dad's hand walking to the subway. I knew he liked that.

This story appeared first in Mr. Beller's Neighborhood


If you like my work check out my memoir, "I Hate the Dallas Cowboys - tales of a scrappy New York boyhood." Available at Logos Book Store or online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The book has 118 Amazon five star reviews out of 118 total reviews posted. We're pitching a perfect game. My old world echoes TV's "The Wonder Years" ~ just add taverns, subways and Checker cabs.

Hanging Out On The Stoop

Charlie on 511 E. 84th Street stoop

Hey Charlie!

Do Your Ears Hang Low?
Do They Wobble to and Fro?
Can You Tie Them in a Knot?
Can You Tie Them in a Bow?
Can You Throw Them Over Your Shoulder Like a Continental Soldier?

"Where's Poppa?" ~ Thomas Pryor's Stoops to Nuts Father's Day Show

Friday, June 17, 2016. @ 7-10pm upstairs at Ryan's Daughter
S2N artists: Colin Dempsey, Joe Dettmore, Nicole Ferraro, Tim McGillicuddy & Una McGillicuddy. 

Thomas Pryor's your host, it's a cuckoo crazy nuts FREE S2N event. Bring your Pa, Da and all your recollections of Poppa. I'll be doing Yorkville stories about Daddy O'Pryor from scenes in my upcoming solo play, "City Boy" (Feb 2017.) We work to preserve our neighborhood's character and texture through word and song and raise the alert on our diminishing street light and vanishing stoops.

Charlie on 511 E. 84th Street stoop

Charlie on 511 E. 84th Street stoop

Charlie on 511 E. 84th Street stoop

511 East 84th Street stoop here ~ my family almost bought this building in the early 1950s. My great grandparents lived in an apt on the first floor. Either my uncle or my father backed out, they were each going to take one of the floors. My father with my great-grandmother Rode in this photo in 1946.

If you like my work check out my memoir, "I Hate the Dallas Cowboys - tales of a scrappy New York boyhood." Available at Logos Book Store or online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

The book has 118 Amazon five star reviews out of 118 total reviews posted. We're pitching a perfect game. My old world echoes TV's "The Wonder Years" ~ just add taverns, subways and Checker cabs.

as a boy on 83rd Street, I'd walk around the corner to the 500 block of 84th Street and make believe I had my own bedroom in one of the beautiful townhouses on that block instead of the top of the bunk bed I split with Rory and half a toy chest in our broom closet sized bedroom.

In winter I complained it was hot, Rory complained it was cold, the heat from the standing steam pipe rose up in our tiny room with the useless air shaft window. Then I met the Freehills on EEA, heard about their Archie Bell & The Drells "Tighten Up" sleeping spaces. I stopped complaining.