Leaving Story Avenue
My journey from the projects to the front page
Paul LaRosa

Park Slope Publishing
2012 /ISBN: 9780983796305
Memoir
Amazon

Reviewed by Carolyn Howard-Johnson

The Smell of New York, the Smell of Printers Ink

Emmy Award-Winning Producer Talks Journalism and New York

True to journalistic ethics, here, a disclaimer. I started out in journalism. Printer's ink has colored my thumbs (and given me asthma) since I first wrote kitschy columns for my high school newspaper, and I loved New York even in its grittier days when I lived there while I put my husband through Columbia all the while being secretly envious it was not I riding the subway uptown to study journalism.

Perhaps this disclaimer explains why I was hooked from the first chapter of Leaving Story Avenue by Paul LaRosa. The chapter is a very nearly a poem about newsrooms in the days before computers. Linotype machines/molten lead/brittle old men/pneumatic tubes/composing room floor/sweat-soaked air. I mean, do people even know what pneumatic tubes are these days? That I have a few memories to add to his (I was a writer for a daily paper the decade before LaRosa), I'll settle for this…excitement. This description of humanity. This love of free press.

This first chapter only leads the reader to wondering what brought this kid (the book is LaRosa's own story) into a newsroom, why he deserved that first promotion from copyboy to cub reporter. From then on in, it's a project in the Bronx (years before they became tough-and some years during). It's Catholic schools (which happen to be mirrored by others, as it happens) in the days of knuckle-rapping. It's the days when parents left kids to their own devices, their own choices-so when they succeeded they could stick their thumbs in their armpits and let out a loud cock-a-doodle-doo. It's youth in its exuberance and stupidity (Holden Caulfield anyone?). And, yep, it's New York. Then. The roots of what we love now. Diversity.

Here is a book from an indie publisher. It's a slim book to make them proud. Nothing fancy, mind you. But honest. And one that points to an even more important future for small publishers and authors with ideas of their own. It's a memoir most anyone will love.