There lots of links in the post. Let’s give it up for that guy invented the hyperlink.
I linked to my father’s website in my last post and then poked around the site for a bit. Many of the presentations that he had linked to no longer work in Safari. Some wouldn’t work in Chrome either so Peggi and I tracked down the original Keynote files from 2012 and generated new html pages. We started with the slides from the talk my father gave to the New Jersey Engineering Society in Montclair New Jersey, something my brother, Mark, had arranged. The presentation tracks his engineering work for Kodak and UR. The work he did at the Art Deco Hawkeye plant was top secret.
By chance this morning’s paper had an article about the city securing the site due to increasing criminal activity, Kodak is bankrupt and the current owner, Phoenix Investors, a Milwaukee-based real estate investment firm, acquired the property through a bankruptcy auction after the previous owner, WBS Capital, defaulted and the lender foreclosed.
I worked B trick in Hawkeye one summer as a janitor. We were assigned a route and then found a place to play cards until it was time to punch out. My father was working on a top-secret aerial reconnaissance mission for the U.S. government during the Cold War. The project, known as “Bridgehead” produced lenses and film for cameras that flew over Russia to see where they might have tanks, bombs, munition plants, planes and troops.
While looking for my father’s original files I came across the drawing above that my father sent to my brother, Mark, in 1970 when he was in prison for smoking a joint. I had cracked up, totaled it turn out, the family VW Bug while he was sitting in jail. I wrote about the accident back in 2013. I never saw this drawing above until my brother gave it to me to put in the display case of an art show. I am amazed at how my father was able to visually present a story he heard from me (the accident.) One detail my father left out though was that the guy I hit was a famous mobster’ Sammy G. Gingillo. He was killed in 1978 when a bomb was detonated as sat down in his car parked outside Ben’s Cafe Society downtown. I read a great book about the Rochester mob written by Georgia Durante, Sammy’s girlfriend. Sammy was killed in 1978 when a bomb was detonated as he entered his car, which was parked outside Ben’s Cafe Society.
2 Comments
I’ve known you about a half century and never knew you hit Sammy G. And you are here to tell the tale.
I think a lot more went on in that Gov division of Hawkeye than we will ever know about.
At least you hit him! I was shocked to realize I had been very close to THREE in three of the five Mafia famlies still extant in NYC.