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Exclusive: Crow sang to feds about Lance http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more-sports/sheryl-crow-interviewed-federal-agents-part-doping-investigation-lance-armstrong-tour-de-france-winning-teams-article-1.1149231?localLinksEnabled=false

Say what’s on your mind here: http://www.zoomvillage.com/newsStory.cfm/8325/State-buys-controversial-Busti-St-for-demolition
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State buys controversial Busti St. for demolition
http://www.zoomvillage.comGov. Andrew Cuomo passed through the City of Buffalo on Saturday so fast the local media was alerted only three hours ahead of his visit! He announced a preliminary agreement where the State of New york buys the Busti Ave…

Thelma Reed  born June 2, 1917 died on Tuesday, March 6, 2012 in Buffalo, New York. She began to write her memoirs in her 70s and completed the book “Black Girl From Tannery Flats” at age 84.

She had a remarkable story, one that started in her birth place in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1917 that continued in Buffalo, New York after she migrated as a single mother with her son now famed novelist Ishmael Reed.

But read what Ismael Reed wrote about his mother after she published her memoirs in Counterpunch, February 2009.

I regret I didn’t meet her, but I’ll read the “Black Girl From Tannery Flats” soon and know I’ll carry her spirit inside of me.

Ishmael Reed, wrote, thousands of black American families have an unsolved murder or murders in their history, murders that affect their descendants,” a theme as a black Puerto Rican woman, I can relate to in my family difficult  to divulge.

So I’m sure Thelma Reed’s story will touch my life deeply because she had compassion and understood forgiveness in her life and gave up her dreams caring for others, fulfilling her goals  though late in life for this reason.

That’s what makes her a remarkable women.  And Especially for women in Buffalo, New York honors her memory on Women’s history month in March 2012.

“When I called my mother from New York in 1966, excited because Doubleday had signed to publish my first novel, her response was that she was going to write a book, too. “Everybody else is doing it,” she added. Since she was burdened by a load of family responsibilities,I didn’t take her seriously. After my younger brothers and sister left home,my mother’s responsibilities lessened.

My grandmother and grandmother’s brother, for whom she had cared for many years, died, and my mother and stepfather sold their home and entered a senior citizens’apartment. In 1993, my stepfather died and, shortly afterwards, his mother, an Alzheimer’s patient, also died. My mother had been her caretaker for seventeen years.

After the death of the last person for whom she had taken upon herself to provide caretaker services,my mother settled in an apartment in a building owned by my youngest brother. It was here in 1998 that she began her book Black Girl From Tannery Flats, filling composition books with notes written in an elegant penmanship that is no longer required of school students.”

http://thebuffalopuertoricanpress.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/a-polancarz-affair-at-the-olivencia-center/.

Darlene Mercado

Birthday wishes to Darlene Mercado and Gloria Sanchez Pagan two Puerto Rican women working with the community in education and mental health.

Gloria Sanchez Pagan

http://thebuffalopuertoricanpress.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/school-district-turning-around-bilingual-center-33-parents-unhappy-about-losing-medina/.

Womanist Musings: “Modeling Sucks: Or How I met Colin Powell and Other World Leaders” By Kola Boof.

by Virgina Sanchez-Korrol

March is designated as Women’s History Month, but nowadays you don’t have to wait until the month rolls around to find women in history texts, extraordinary individuals whose life experiences have made a difference and ought to be in history and others whose everyday existence contributes to the historical record. I’m often struck by the fact that although everybody has one, a history that is, one’s individual stories are seldom considered to be connected to “history.”

Consider the case of the woman who taught me Spanish. The setting was Bay Ridge High School in mid-twentieth century Brooklyn, New York, when I was a seventeen year old student in Ella Wolfe’s Spanish class. A small, diminutive woman of uncertain age and ethnicity, my teacher’s no-nonsense expectations struck fear in the hearts of most of her students. Not one to conform to prevailing fashions, she wore her long gray hair coiled in a braid on top of her head giving an illusion of added stature. She dressed in colorfully embroidered Mexican blouses and full skirts accenting her look with sparkling silver jewelry and dangling earrings. Like a sun-drenched marigold in a field of late autumn leaves, Wolfe usually stood out among a faculty of rather drably dressed colleagues.

But it was her classroom lectures that I most fondly recall. These were peppered with references to golden nuggets of an elusive past that I was academically unprepared to unravel. Past ghosts filtered in and out of the classroom; her very good friends, Frida and Diego, someone named Trotsky, and events that took place in exotic places like Mexico, far beyond the temporal and geographic boundaries of my unsophisticated Brooklyn world.

Fast forward to the 1990s and a PBS documentary on the lives of the world-renowned artists, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. And there was Ella Wolfe! Where once I thought my teacher’s life ended with the school’s dismissal bell, now she commanded my undivided attention.

She was born Ella Goldberg in Kherson, Ukraine in 1896, and at the age of ten came to live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. While an undergraduate at Hunter College, she wed the future scholar, Bertram D. Wolfe, then a student at City College, entering into a sixty-year partnership as loving spouses and intellectual colleagues. Infused with the radical ideologies of the period, the couple’s first jobs were at the Socialist Rand School. By 1917 they were at the forefront of the American Communist movement supporting the Russian Revolution, the labor movement and other progressive causes.

The Wolfes opposed America’s entry into World War I and left for Moscow but they soon became equally disheartened with the results of the revolution. Hounded now by the political left and the right, after years of living underground the roaring twenties found the couple in Mexico City. There they joined international bohemian circles and befriended the leading intellectuals and artists of the day, among them, Rivera and Kahlo. Frida would become Ella’s close companion and confidant. After the Second World War, the Wolfes returned to live in Brooklyn Heights; he to continue the writing of copious biographical and scholarly works on Communism, and she to teach Spanish literature at Columbia University, Hunter College and the New York City public schools.

Relocating to Stanford University’s Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace in 1966, Ella Wolfe would spend the rest of her life organizing her husband’s extensive literary works and, as the last remaining link with the genesis of the communist movement in the United States, providing vital eye witness accounts for researchers. In these, it was always the people she had encountered that held center stage.

Shaped by the historical events of her times, Ella Wolfe lived a life according to her convictions. She railed against inequality, sexism, women’s oppression and the plight of the poor. On more than one occasion, she expressed her love of teaching, “the love of excellence and truth and integrity.” On January 13, 2000, my old high school teacher died at the age of 103.

Not a day goes by that history does not envelop me in ways that inform the present, through the narratives of ordinary people, places and events. While March is a convenient reminder, I don’t want to wait for special months to experience these adventurous connections. Would you?

Dr. Virgina Sanchez-Korrol, Historian & Professor Emerita, CUNY-Brooklyn College

Story Credit: Huffington Post