1977

The calm of Queens was shattered when Son of Sam David Berkowitz killed a girl in a car, parked in Forest Hills.

A Piper Comanche twin-engine plane crashed into a factory yard on 129th Street, shortly after take-off from Flushing Airport at the start of the year. It would ignite a civic battle over the future of the airfield.... A federal investigation into alleged misappropriation of clients’ funds from the estates of clients he represented resulted in an indictment of City Councilman Matthew Troy....

A 285-count indictment against the developers of Village Mall in Bayside and Hillcrest was dropped in January by Jamaica Supreme Court....Demolition of the U.S. Pavilion in Flushing Meadows Corona Park began in February as the wrecking equipment arrived on the site....

The drive to save the Fire Department’s Rescue Co. 4 succeeded with the announcement that the city had decided to keep the unit at its Woodside site....The Astoria office of City Councilman Peter Vallone Sr. was firebombed in March. The fire completely destroyed the councilman’s legal files and personal papers and the office was gutted....

The Tribune ran a four-page section on the Concorde controversy, presenting both points of view, pro and con, concerning the debate about permitting the SST to land at JFK....The Tribune reported in late March that “Fear Stalks Forest Hills,” in the aftermath of a brutal and mysterious shooting, in which a gunman went up to a parked car at One Station Square and killed a girl sitting in the front seat. The killer was believed to be also responsible for a string of similar murders in other parts of the city. People were afraid to leave home at night, the article reported. Police said the killer was “deranged.”...

Queens Tribune founder Gary Ackerman resigned from his position as editor to pursue a career in politics. Though he did not win Councilman-at-Large, he won a seat the following year in the New York State Senate and was elected to Congress in 1983.

The Tribune reported that the United States Tennis Association was looking into the possibility of moving the U.S. Open championships out of the venerable West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills and into a new tennis center, to be constructed around the rarely-used Louis Armstrong Stadium in Flushing Meadows....Gary Ackerman was in a heated contest at the time with two opponents for the borough-wide seat of councilman-at-large....

Panic spread through Queens with news of a rapist on the loose.

The Tribune ran a photo essay, “Requiem for the Pavilion,” detailing the final days of the once-stately U.S. Pavilion as it was being demolished....In May, Flushing Airport appeared to face a turbulent future after the fatal crash of a light plane into a Flushing home that killed the pilot....

Five hundred people demonstrated in Flushing against pornography and the restricted zoning proposal before the City Planning Commission....For a few hours in June, a Queens man had the whole city holding its breath. Twenty-seven-year-old Hollis resident George Willig, like a human fly, climbed the entire 110-story-high sheer wall of the World Trade Center....

In mid-August, police captured David Berkowitz in Yonkers and brought the 24-year-old postal worker, under heavy security, to the Queens House of Detention and Criminal Court for arraignment. The Tribune obtained a copy of a letter that Berkowitz wrote to Captain Joseph Borrelli of Queens Homicide before his arrest in which he wrote, “The wemon (sic) of Queens are prettyist (sic) of all. It must be the water they drink. To the people of Queens, I love you.”

Rich Sandomir

This current Sports Media and Business columnist of The New York Times got his start in the newspaper business as a typesetter at the Tribune while in high school. He moved on to reporter and later editor in the days of the 1978 Blackout and Gary Ackerman’s first successful bid for public office.

I came to the Queens Tribune through the back door: as a high school typesetter. A very fast one, but a very bad one, I might say. My Multi-Media co-worker, Betty, was far more accomplished, but I was pathetic, and so, it should be noted, was the even-then-ancient Compugraphic system. We typed the stories onto a paper tape that resembled very narrow toilet paper and fed it into a computer, which regurgitated the article in a form that could be pasted up. Betty and I could count on a busy day when we had to type up Regina Vogel's community listings and Robert Engel's voluminous sports reports.

A year or so after I started working there, I became the features editor of the Queens College paper, Newsbeat, and I segued from typesetter/employee to client/customer. A year after that, I became the paper's editor-in-chief, so it became my responsibility to pack up the written copy, pick up the great and nocturnal typist, Barbara Johnson, in the wee hours of Saturday mornings, drive her to Multi-Media, case the storefront for any burglars (such was her worry and paranoia), then return Sunday mornings to oversee my staff, or at least keep them from playing too much roller-chair hockey in the office or go wild with food fights.

Things were really overseen by Melanie Tarlo and Meryl Wittenberg; if not for them, there would have been no Newsbeat. Late Sunday, it was another traditional responsibility to drive to Joe Wolf's godforsaken printing plant in Williamsburg, where I slipped the finished mechanicals under a garage door that was open slightly to accommodate my delivery. The next morning, or sometimes the afternoon, about 10,000 or so copies were delivered to a loading bay, and I loaded up my Dodge Dart and started delivering.

Congressman Gary Ackerman greets President Jimmy Carter. Photo by Rich Sandomir.

Simultaneously, I had become a reporter for the Queens Tribune, and for some reason (perhaps being that nobody else wanted the job) was named managing editor, or something like it, during the summer of 1978. (Did I get paid for that? I don't recall.) Through these years, I became attached to the ebullient David Oats, whose enthusiasm for local news (and most prominently, anything about the '64 World's Fair) was infectious, as were his stories about becoming friendly with Robert Moses. Always looming over the Tribune/Multi-Media empire, was Gary Ackerman, whose eventual electoral victory as a Congressman (which occurred well after my last days in his employ) is less vivid to me than his earlier and epochal campaign for councilman-at-large against the incumbent Eugene Mastropieri.

Being a journalist for the Tribune meant doing just about anything, short of selling ads. I was reporter, editor, photographer, newspaper delivery person (driving a beaten-up van to the post office) and gofer to the homes of photographers Joe Ullman, the most polite man on earth, and Carl Schaum, whose residence had what can only be called as a memorable odor. Some would call it a stench.

Only two stories stand out: the first was an expose of a street in Flushing that we called Queens' version of "Tobacco Road."

The second was being the photographer when Gary attended President Carter's signing of loan documents to the nearly bankrupt New York City. Gary got on one reception line that led up to the second floor of City Hall and photographers got on a second line. If our luck held, I'd get up to the second floor when Gary did. But the dignitaries' line moved slowly; mine moved quickly. I waited as long as the Secret Service would allow, but an agent plunked his hand in my chest and told me to leave. Just as I was about to disappear through a door, I heard Gary shout, "Richie! Richie!" I was probably 30 or 40 feet away, and I said to the agent, "That's my boss. Can I get back there?" I reasoned that Gary would shake the president's hand for as long as it took for me to get back in position. He let me, but as I unscrewed my lens cap and tried to focus, the clearly annoyed president leaned over to Mayor Koch and said, '"Who are these guys?" Koch replied, "What do you expect, they're from the Queens Tribune!" The caption for the resulting blurry photo read: "Heads of State."

I am certain that my years at that Flushing storefront, with nourishment from the Good Food Deli across Kissena Boulevard contributed to the confidence that would, a dozen years after my college graduation, lead me to employment at The New York Times.