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In the tradition of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, and Phillip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, The Candlestickmaker recalls a Vietnam that seared disenchantment into a post World War II generation who learned to question authority at all levels. A coming-of-age story bookended by shocking revelations that shatter illusions about patriotism, government and the nature of modern warfare, The Candlestickmaker takes readers on a voyage that will guarantee they never read the Mother Goose nursery rhyme in the same way again.

Reviews:

I really enjoyed this well-written story of the Vietnam experience from a different perspective……True Crime author, Dennis Griffin

Yes, it is classified as fiction, but the truth of The Candlestickmaker is that is is one hell of a read, and undoubtedly firmly based in facts as scary as war itself……True Crime author, Burl Barer

Great story of a different sort of Vietnam, out on the ocean instead of in the trenches, but just as apt for today’s reading audience who may be more familiar with soldiers and sailors whose lives have been changed forever upon their return from the Middle East. And always in the background, the sinister threat of government drug experiments upon the young and innocent who are guinea pigs fighting an unpopular war, even as their innocence withers away…..Reader

Dennis McDougal will be participating in the panel called “How Dare you? How to Research the Unauthorized Celebrity Bio and Live to Tell the Tale” scheduled for the 4-5:30 slot on Saturday, May 19. 

If you plan to write about a famous living person, people close to your subject will likely insist that you have no right to intrude on his or her privacy. This session will clue you in on what to do next.

Panelists:

• Beverly Gray, moderator
• Andrew Morton
• Dennis McDougal
• TBD

For 2012, BIO has extended the Compleat Biographer Conference to three days, and it will offer even more panels and workshops than in past years as well as a slate of master classes. The conference, which will be held on the campus of the University of Southern California, will run from Friday, May 18, through Sunday, May 20, 2012.

• On Friday, May 18, a set of research workshops, open to a limited number of members, will be held in leading research facilities in the Los Angeles area; bus transportation, as well as a gourmet picnic lunch, will be included
• On Saturday, May 19, five tracks of panels (see below) will offer members an extraordinary selection of options.
• On Sunday, May 20, several master classes will be offered to a limited number of members.

Full conference schedule and registration: http://www.biographersinternational.org/conference.html

Kraft on Death Row

Surviving a Serial Killer

When he was 13, Dietrich Carpio-Timmerman went to a matinee near his mother’s apartment in the L.A.suburb of Cudahy. It was February, 1980, and Disney’s Return to Witch Mountain was showing – a kid flick he wanted to see badly enough that he didn’t mind going by himself. What followed was cautionary at best, nightmarish at worst.

After Carpio-Timmerman bought his popcorn and settled in, an older guy – mustached, paunchy, shaggy – began circling, getting up, moving to another seat again and again until he was right next to Dietrich.

“There were dark circles all around his eyes, like he hadn’t slept for days,” Carpio-Timmerman recalled a quarter century later. “He looked like a sinister version of a stuffed toy raccoon I had as a child.”

The man’s whispered dialogue was classic predator. Did Dietrich have a girlfriend? Why wasn’t he at the movies with her? Why was he alone? Did he like boys instead of girls?

Carpio-Timmerman was polite, deferential and naïve with the persistent stranger. When the questions grew more insistent, more suggestive and finally, flat out lewd, Dietrich excused himself and said he had to use the restroom. He fairly ran to the lobby where he searched out the manager and told him what had happened. Shaken to the point of tears, Dietrich waited with a concession clerk while the manager did a short reconnaissance. He returned to announce that no one matching the stranger’s description was among the largely kid-only audience, but that a side exit down near the screen was wide open, and hadn’t been shortly before the film began.

After his mother picked him up outside the theater, she half-listened to her son while she hummed along to Crystal Gayle on the radio. Forget about it, she counseled. A harrowing experience perhaps, but no harm, no foul.

Flash forward to June. Dietrich and his mother are watching the nightly news when the face of a newly-arrested suspect in a string of ghastly thrill murders flashes on the TV screen. “William George Bonin” read the name beneath the mug shot. Dietrich gasped. That was the man who had tried to seduce him, he told his mother. But if he was looking for sympathy, he’d come to the wrong place. His mother lectured him on the difference between boys and girls. If it had been a bobbysoxer who’d barely escaped molesting, there might have been cause to go to the police. But Dietrich was a strapping young man who could have and should have protected himself. Besides, the last thing she needed as a single mother was to get involved in a homicide investigation.

“I cried for days when I found out more and more details of Bonin’s crimes, but in my family that was it,” recalled Carpio-Timmerman. “My mother would never speak another word about it, not that she ever really did.  She even tried to make it seem like it never happened.  However the fear was always there and many times I’d go into the bushes at the back of our apartment building were I had built a fort, and just cry alone so no one would know.  I had two sisters, but only my older one lived inLos Angeleswith my mom and me.  Neither of my sisters ever knew what had happened until I was 34 years old.  Silence and deception were the keys to our family’s very foundation.”

William Bonin

William George Bonin would go down in L.A.infamy as the Freeway Killer, though that turned out to be something of a misnomer. He was the chieftain of a tribe of freeway killers as it turned out. Carpio-Timmerman followed every sordid detail of the case clear to its end, though he knew better than to share his horror and fascination with his family. A few months after Bonin’s arrest, his interest ratcheted up again when it turned out that one of Bonin’s victims was a kid just slightly older than Dietrich who also happened to be the younger brother of one of Carpio-Timmerman’s teachers.

As prosecution got underway, Carpio-Timmerman took steps to face down his own demons himself. Without tipping off his mother, he climbed aboard a city bus armed with a newspaper story that identified where Bonin lived in the nearby city of Downey. He got off near Bonin’s house, appropriately located on Angell Street.

“I don’t know what I thought I would accomplish by doing this,” he recalled. “As I stared at it I began to well-up. The front door opened. I quickly began walking down the street as I saw a man emerge and get into his car. I headed back to the bus stop with my heart in my throat.  The car passed me and turned down a street in the opposite direction.  I cried all the way back home.”

Three more years would pass before Carpio-Timmerman and the rest of L.A. came to understand that Bonin and his deranged disciples were not the only Freeway Killers. In fact, Bonin was a distant second to the biggest predator of all. Carpio-Timmerman never went to the movies with Randy Steven Kraft, but when he met him face to face, he felt the same chill that William George Bonin gave him on that long-ago afternoon when he went to see Return to Witch Mountain.

With sinister irony, Bonin and Kraft not only came to know each other; they would eventually become Death Row bridge partners inside the walls of San Quentin with two other serial killers completing the foursome. It was in pursuit of answers that Carpio-Timmerman began writing letters to all of the bridge players. By the time he mustered the nerve to request visitation, it was too late to confront Bonin. He was executed in the gas chamber in 1996. Asked in a radio interview days before his death if he had any regrets, Bonin said without a hint of irony that he had always been a pretty good bowler in his teens and did feel some remorse that he hadn’t gone on to be a professional.

Bonin was long gone, but Carpio-Timmerman was still able to ask Kraft the same question he’d wanted to put to Bonin – the question that had haunted him for nearly 25 years. Why?

The answer he got from Kraft was no better than a bowling trophy.

“Randy was one truly deranged man,” Carpio-Timmerman recalled. “He is not only the ultimate sociopath and most psychotic human being I’ve ever had the displeasure of getting to know, but for all his sweetness, he is the scariest man I have ever met. All of this I learned quite by accident because, initially, I was only interested in what he could tell me about Bonin.”

  (To be continued) 

For the complete story about serial killer Randy Kraft, purchase Dennis McDougal’s 1991 book, ANGEL OF DARKNESS.  Available at all online and local book retailers.

The cult classic about Southern California serial murderer Randy Kraft, the mild-mannered computer whiz by day and lust killer at night, who holds the dubious distinction of being one of the most prolific murderers (approximately 67 victims) in modern U.S. history. (Warner Books)

From the Hearsts to the Murdochs, powerful families have often controlled the newspapers we read. The author, and Kennedy family member, tells us why they do it and where it leads

Privileged Son

By Dennis McDougal

Buy

“I’m from the Navy,” began NCIS investigator Julie Haney. “I’ve just got some Navy business to talk with you about. It will only take a few minutes.”

“Can I have my attorney present please?” asked Randy Kraft.

He kibitzed a bit with his Death Row counselor while Haney fidgeted nervously, regarding the clipped but articulate words that spilled from his mouth. He looked more like the aging computer analyst that he once had been that the man regarded by many in law enforcement as the nation’s most prolific serial killer. Judging by a self-portrait he’d sketched in jail decades earlier, when he was still awaiting trial, he thought of himself as quite handsome, though his eyes then, as now, were fathomless. Following his powwow with the counselor, he remained adamant about what he would and would not say to the visitor.

“Please contact my attorney,” he said.

“You won’t give me five minutes, Randy?” asked Haney.

“No, I won’t give you any time,” he answered. “Contact my attorneys please.”

“Five minutes?”

He shook his closely-cropped, balding noggin. “That’s it. That’s my answer.”

“You don’t want to help?”

“You don’t wanna help me,” he fired back. “Contact my attorneys and help them.”

“I would like to help you,” Haney pleaded.

“No you wouldn’t.”

Not true, Haney told me a few weeks later. If there were some way to help Randy Kraft step back from the abyss he’d created for himself nearly half a century ago, she would be among the first to volunteer. Atoning for multiple recreational homicides committed over a dozen years or more is not likely. But as long as a human being is still walking and talking on this side of the deathly hallows, there’s always a chance. Apparently not with Randy though.

Haney had brought a letter with her guaranteeing Randy immunity from prosecution if he would only speak with her. All she wanted was confirmation that Kraft had done in a 19-year-old Marine fromDes Moinesnamed Oral Stuart back in 1974, but she was never able to even get that far in their conversation. She wasn’t looking to add another felony to the 18 upon which he had already been convicted. In fact, she told him, he didn’t even have to talk. All he had to do was listen.

“Randy, this is about someone who we are just trying to close the file on for this 80-year-old woman, for her son,” said Haney. “There is zero criminal liability for you. I promise. I have the documentation. We’re just trying to close the Navy file. That’s all.”

“No.”

“We’re just trying to close the deserter file.”

“No.”

“It’s a chance for you to do something good.”

“You can do something good and call my attorneys…”

His voice rose from irritated to angry. The room was close, Spartan and painted an institutional urine yellow. While Haney and Kraft’s counselor were separated from the agitated convict by a small rectangular table, the NCIS agent still felt threatened. She wondered briefly if it might not have been a better idea to have asked the guards to cage him in the black mesh restraining apparatus at one side of the room rather than sit facing him separated only by air. His eyes, thought Haney. His eyes were dead eyes that quickened only when he snarled.

“I’d like to be nice to you,” she persisted.

“You’re the people who put me here,” said Randy in his escalating voice.

“I’m not the people who put you here,” said Haney. “I’m an American citizen, if that’s what put you here, then that’s it. The Navy had nothing to do with putting you here.”

“That’s not true.”

“I’m surprised you won’t just sit there and listen and not say anything,” said Haney.

But Haney was new to his world. All she knew was what she’d read about his years of secret sadism and the various psychological theories as to how he’d evolved from a freckle-faced kid growing up in the Orange County suburb of Westminster into an unspeakable monster.

Randy Kraft self portrait

She didn’t know Randy himself because he would never allow that to happen. The slight 66-year-old male who sat opposite her in crisp, tidy prison denim and starched chambray shirt had once sanctioned a website managed by his older sister, but beyond bucolic blogs about his youth, there was nothing to reveal how and why he became the most notorious thrill killer in the annals of California crime. Despite overwhelming evidence, he still maintains to the present day that he was framed. He keeps his waning appeals alive through the federal public defender’s office inLos Angeles and trusts no one, least of all a government agent like Julie Haney. Everyone was out to get him and he would not risk even sitting silent to listen to her plead Oral Stuart’s case.

“It’s the same as being on the stand at trial,” he snarled at her. “You can draw your own conclusions from reactions and stuff. I don’t wanna be, ‘He’s making reactions and stuff,’ you know. Then you can say, ‘Well, he did it because the eyebrows went up.’ You know, ‘He breathed heavy.’”

Less than 10 minutes after her interview began, Kraft was on his feet demanding to be escorted back to Death Row.

Had Haney been male, meek and gay, like Dietrech Timmerman-Carpio, things might have turned out differently.

Randy Kraft at 1989 trial

A lingering Randy Kraft fallacy is that he preyed only on gays; that he killed with impunity at a time when most homosexuals remained closeted and cops didn’t care whether they lived or died.

While the second half of the premise may be accurate, the first isn’t. Randy Kraft was an equal opportunity sadist. Twelve of his known victims were as straight as the United States Marines or, as Eleanor Roosevelt once famously described them, “underpaid, oversexed teenage killers.” Oral Alfred Stuart met those qualifications when he disappeared. The blonde six-foot-one 180 pound PFC from Des Moines would have been Randy’s unlucky 13^th Marine and living proof that Kraft didn’t just favor gays … living proof, that is, until the weekend of Nov. 9, 1974, when the one-time Iowa farm boy went AWOL, never to be seen alive again.

Oral Stuart wouldn’t have been the first serviceman to turn a weekend pass into a run for his life. During the Vietnam era, America’s least popular war created over 50,000 deserters –nearly as high a number as those who died in combat overseas. Stuart was deemed to be just the latest Marine to light out for parts unknown, until his body showed up some time later on a deserted highway a long way from Camp Pendleton. The local medical examiner ruled out foul play.

“How could he do that?” asked Julie Haney, the NCIS cold case investigator who has taken up Stuart’s cause more than a generation later. “He had bite marks on his neck! And ligature marks! How’d they get there?”

It was a plea from Stuart’s mother who is now in her 80s, that sent Haney to San Quentin to question Kraft. Many of his victims were military and even though Stuart was not on the original list of almost 50 kills attributed to Kraft, there was one other clue. As one of the most prolific serial murderers – if not the most prolific – in American history, Kraft kept a handwritten list in the trunk of hisToyota with 62 coded entries. Law enforcement called it his “scorecard” and matched most of the one or two-word names to tortured and maimed bodies left on display at the side of roads inCalifornia andOregon over a 13-year period.

But some entries never did find their matching corpse. One in particular stood out to Haney:

IOWA

Haney became convinced that the 19-year-old kid fromDes Moines who’d been condemned as a deserter for decades was, in fact, one more entry on Randy’s tally sheet. She decided to pay Kraft a visit. What was more, it got her to thinking about the dozens of other deserters that she and her colleagues had tried tracking down over the years. Most turned up, either living or dead, but there were always a few who never did. How many hitched a ride to eternity with Kraft? How many lonely, loaded enlisted men looking for a little weekend sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll never made it back to the base courtesy of the so-called Scorecard Killer?

Randy Kraft on Death Row Today

During the last week of November, Haney made the trip from San Diego to the moldering medieval prison at the north end of San Francisco Bay. As a visiting investigator, she was accorded some courtesies, but a maximum security fortress like San Quentin is often harder to break into in its own way than it is to break out. Death Row is even worse.

By the time Randy’s counselor guided her into a tiny, windowless conference room, she’d been waiting for awhile. Kraft was none too keen on speaking with her. He was none too keen on any official visitor.

Randy, you see, is an innocent man. Julie Haney knew what she was up against when the door finally swung open and a fit but frowning 67-year-old prisoner was escorted inside. The first thing she noticed was his eyes. There once may have been someone there behind them, but the dark shining pupils that stared straight at her were as blank as a shark’s.

“Where are you from” he demanded.

And things went downhill from there.

(To be continued) 

January 5, 2012

     After a wave of killings of homeless men in the area, police said Wednesday that they are looking for a “serious, dangerous serial killer operating in Orange County.”

Thus read the lead of a story in today’s Los Angeles Times, but that very same opening sentence could have run 30 years ago in the same newspaper, been just as accurate, and might have saved half a dozen lives or more in the bargain.

But that story of the search for Randy Steven Kraft did not run in the Times or any other paper, and as a result, the classic mild-mannered computer programmer with a side career of serial murder went undetected for another year. Kraft continued drugging, raping, murdering and dumping corpses of young men alongSouthern California’s vast freeway system for 17 more months, until he was arrested in the spring of 1983.

Sometime after midnight on May 14, 1983, two CHP officers pulled a late model Toyota over on the San Diego Freeway. The driver had been weaving a bit and they ordered him out of the car for a field sobriety test which he failed. When one of the officers went around to the passenger side to ask the guy sitting there if he wanted to drive his buddy’s car home, he found Terry Gambrel, a dying Marine who expired within the hour despite the best efforts of EMTs and the emergency room staff at a nearby hospital. Besides ingesting lethal doses of prescription drugs laced in a bottle of Moosehead Lager, Gambrel had also been strangled with his own belt and laces from his shoes. When the CHP officers opened the passenger door, they found his pants down around his ankles and his tortured genitals exposed. A Camp Pendleton boot who left a grieving family back in theMidwest, Gambrel would be the last of Randy’s dozens upon dozens of victims.

“A lot of people in law enforcement believe he’s the worst serial killer in U.S. history,” said Julie Haney, a career investigator for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. “There’s the Green River Killer, then Randy, and nobody else – not Ted Bundy, not Jeffrey Dahmer — nobody even comes anywhere near their numbers.”

Officially, theGreen River’s Gary Ridgeway confessed to killing 71 young women over a 16 year period after his arrest in 1998. Randy is believed to have done in at least 67 over 13 years, but he has never confessed to any of them.

Special Agent Haney maintains that Kraft’s real number is probably closer to 100. Though he has been sitting in a cell on San Quentin’s Death Row for more than two decades now, Kraft maintains that he is an innocent man railroaded by a legal system that has outrageously blamed him for the savage, sadistic thrill killings of unsuspecting young males in at least three states. The facts, a judge and jury begged to differ. Physical evidence by the boxful, including a so-called “scorecard” encrypted with 62 entries commemorating his most satisfying murders, was found in his car, his home and his office. The only baffling piece of the Randy puzzle that remains is why he is coming up on his 67^th birthday this March while the family and friends of his many victims continue to grieve. In the 28 years Kraft has spent behind bars, he has atoned for nothing and seems destined to die peacefully in his sleep.

Because the story of Kraft’s killing spree became my first book (Angel of Darkness, Warner Books, 1991), I hear postscripts pretty frequently. I get from relatives of victims, friends, law enforcement emails on average around once or twice a month, all looking for answers: Why did Kraft do it? Why does he continue to deny his crimes? And, most important of all, why does he continue to live in isolated but comparative comfort at state expense despite his conviction of 16 of the many, many monstrous murders that he committed?

I try to answer as best I can, but I’m no oracle, no sage. I’m an armchair psychologist at best who undertook Angel of Darkness to try to better understand how a demon like Randy happens in the first place. And yet here I am a quarter century later with no better answer than the one I came up with then, and which Special Agent Haney repeated to me over lunch last month at a restaurant where we met in Long Beach, not far from Kraft’s old killing grounds.

“He did it because he likes it!” said Haney.

When Haney first called me the previous month, I thought it was a prank call. She identified herself as a cold case specialist for NCIS and I had always half believed that NCIS was an invention of Mark Harmon and CBS. Turns out that NCIS is real enough and Special Agent Haney has been working for them out of Camp Pendleton, El Toro and the USN bases in and around San Diego for the past 15 years. One of her duties is to find out what becomes of Marine deserters who go AWOL and are never heard from again. It was just such a case that brought her to my doorstep – one Oral Alfred Stuart, a Marine PFC who set out on a four-day liberty pass during Veteran’s Day in 1974 and was never seen again.

Never seen alive, that is….

(To be continued)   

According to Urban Dictionary: “Something that’s really hip with a select group of people.”

Therefore, my 1991 book,  ANGEL OF DARKNESS is still a hip book with a select group of people!

Found this 2010 review by Kim Cantrell of True Crime Book Reviews and thought the select group of people who love a true crime classic might be interested!

MARCH 8, 2010

Caveat Lector
Review by Kim Cantrell

Randy Kraft was, by all appearances, your average ordinary Joe. He was neat, gainfully employed, and in a relationship.

An openly homosexual relationship.

In the 1970s and 80s. Before being gay was okay.

But that wouldn’t be the thing Kraft was best remembered for.

Not by a long shot.

While his homosexual lifestyle wasn’t closeted, the demon within Kraft that picked up hitchhikers along the freeways was known only to his victims.

A suspected total of 65 of them.

Having read true crime for over two decades now, I hate to admit the number of victims’ a serial killer tallies up isn’t so shocking anymore.

Disgusting. Disparanging. But not shocking.

And while that held true for Dennis McDougal’s book Angel of Darkness about Kraft’s crimes, there were still plenty of pages where I felt my stomach churning.

McDougal doesn’t sugar coat ANYTHING in this book.  His recounting of the crimes are about as straight-forward as anything I’ve ever read.

Gruesome.  Detailed.  Vivid.  Brutal.

A style that I have a love/hate relationship with.   I love the truth but, to steal a famous movie line, I can’t handle [that much] truth.

One downside to McDougal’s writing style is that he tends to jump around, often backtracking which creates a bit of confusion.

Overall, however, I found it to be a very interesting, if difficult, read.   I highly recommend adding Angel of Darknessto the TOP of your true crime reading list.

http://truecrimebookreviews.com/2010/03/angel-of-darkness-by-dennis-mcdougal-may-1991/

PALM DESERT – Rounding the bend from the San Gorgonio Pass into California’s Coachella Valley, Christmas is already in the air. No snow, mind you. No trees or yule logs or figgy puddings, but lots of inflatable Santas, tinseled palms and jingle bells pouring from the sunroofs of all the shiny ornaments rolling down Palm Canyon Drive.

Palm Desert is as good a metaphor for the winter of our discontent as any of the several recent clashes between cops and demonstrators protesting the widening wealth gap. During the holidays when most of the 99% are shivering somewhere north and east of here, America’s moneyed 1% jet in from colder climes to nest on one the many golf courses. Skies are blue, temperatures are balmy. Those who can afford the more welcoming clime choose here, not there. Somehow you’d think it would be jollier though. Thanks to TMZ and “Entertainment Tonight,” most equate Rodeo Drive with profligate American wealth. But the real ground zero is El Paseo in Palm Desert. Not a lot of caroling, but boy do those cash registers ring!

I was once a newspaperman working the fat-cat beat here back in the 1970s. The only thing that’s really changed is that consumerism has gone from extravagant to absurd. I dropped in at an estate jewelry consignment store yesterday looking for a Christmas gift, found a likely looking bauble, then asked the saleswoman “How much?” Without flexing a wrinkle on her much-lifted face, she said, “$60,000, but I’m sure the owner will come down to $40,000.” Nothing condescending in her tone; just matter of fact. I got the hell out before she asked me if that would be cash or charge.

It has always been thus in America’s wealth sties. Have any of the Occupy organizers ever stopped to wonder where Jaime Diamond or the Koch brothers spend their hard-earned billions? The heirs of Sam Walton don’t shop at Wal-Mart. The 1% wallow with their own. Wall Street is no place to stage a protest. You’ve got to go where they spend their Bush Era tax refunds, not where they “earn” them. Occupy should be crowding the much warmer public spaces of downtown Palm Desert. Camp out next to a tumbleweed sculpture of Dancer or Prancer and take frequent breaks for a latte at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. Protest in style where it’s warm and network camera crews are far more likely to set up satellite trucks through the long winter season.

Outside of its insular geography, this unique pocket of American greed offers the additional irony of looking far more like the landscape around Bethlehem than most the rest of the nation. But make no mistake: even a well-heeled Magi rolling through these parts would have to hock his camel just to buy a thimble full of frankincense. And medicinal-grade myrrh has got to go for at least $10,000 a pound. There’s plenty of gold at that estate jewelry consignment store. I know because there’s a Glen Beck-approved sign out front promising top dollar for the stuff.

Buy low, sell high.

That’s how they roll along El Paseo where those with platinum credit cards can always be assured of shopping in heavenly peace.

The musical interconnections of those gathered in Washington Square Park on Sunday boggle the mind. It’s billed as an annual folk music reunion, but to those who ask questions and dig deeper, the rewards are rich.

Washington Square, NYC

Take Roger Sprung, age 81. A pioneer in progressive bluegrass banjo, he has been playing in the park since 1947. After being exposed to country musician Bascom Lamar Lunsford in the South, Sprung almost single handily introduced authentic Southern bluegrass banjo picking styles to the folk music movement in Washington Square Park. He has recorded with Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. His “Tom Dooley” was recorded and popularized by the Kingston Trio.

Roger Sprung

Steve Mandell squared off with Eric Weissberg as the guitar-playing city boy versus the banjo playing country boy in the film, Deliverance. “Dueling Banjos” became a huge hit in 1973 and remains so today.

Steve Mandell

Peter Stampfel is the only person ever to play music with Bob Dylan, Sam Shepard, Mississippi John Hurt and Buckminster Fuller. He has a long legacy of folk and rock, and was a founding member of both the Fugs and the Holy Modal Rounders.

  

Pete Stampfel

Gene Yellin has been playing guitar and singing bluegrass in the New York area for 30 years. He has played with Breakfast Special, Hazel Dickens, Yellin Grass (with his bluegrass banjo playing brother, Bob), his own band with Michal Shapero, and numerous other bands through the years. He has recorded with Hazel Dickens (“Hard Hitting Songs from Hard Hit People” on Rounder).

  

Gene Yellin

Paul Prestopino (in the foreground) played for many years with the Chad Mitchell Trio, Peter Paul and Mary and Tom Paxton. The man with the washboard is Val Gelo, who has played primitive instruments with a host of bluegrass and country musicians. He now lives in Greensboro, North Carolina and came up for the reunion.

  

Paul Prestopino/Val Gelo

Irv Landau used to play at various folk clubs in Greenwich Village, opening for acts like Richie Havens. He still comes to the reunions to this day.

 

Irv Landau

Erik Frandsen is best known in the world of theater; he is one of the authors and songwriters of the well-known off-Broadway production “The Song of Singapore.” Although he still plays music, most of his energies now go into acting. Frandsen has recorded “Catfish” and other songs with Bob Dylan and also recorded with the late Dave Van Ronk.

Erik Frandsen

Arnie Soloman’s father knew Bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, who gave the young man a lesson on the mandolin at age 11. It made a life long impression and he still plays, even though he holds a job teaching English in Greensboro, North Carolina. Soloman came to New York City to be part of the reunion and to play with several legends.

 

Arnie Soloman

Woody Mann/Barry Kornfeld

 

Honorary member…..yours truly…me!

Dennis McDougal