There was going to be a fundraiser for him, as I recall, at someplace called the Judson Church. The story said a committee had already been formed to take up a collection to help Joe rebuild. On the cover a Fred McDarrah photograph of Joe Cino standing in the middle of his burned out coffeehouse at 31 Cornelia Street, where people were putting on plays as part of something called off-off Broadway. Folksingers in pass-the-basket coffeehouses, street vendors selling sausage sandwiches for a quarter, crowds of babes in long hair and tight skirts and leather sandals, each one more mysterious looking than the last.Īnd over there at the newsstand, a paper that told you all about it - The Village Voice. So we gave up on the mess in Flushing and rode the subway to the Village. The Worlds Fair was a bust – insane crowds, oppressive heat and a blazing sun, absolutely no shade, and everything cost five times what it did a subway ride away in the city. The World's Fair beckoned.įritz and I rode through eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey and took a little steel truss bridge over to the Fresh Kills area of Staten Island, rode across the island, took the ferry to Manhattan and rode uptown to 32 nd Street, where we scored two single rooms at the Y for 75 cents a night. Fritz took a Greyhound from Kansas to meet up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where we began our journey by first riding east to New York City. My parents started sending my brother Frank and me across the country on Greyhound buses when I was 12 and Frank was 10. I was 17, Fritz was 16, and while 10-speed bikes were brand new on the American scene, the idea of turning a couple of teenagers loose like that for a summer wasn’t. My friend Fritz Lash and I were riding our 10-speed bikes across the country. I got my start at the Village Voice more than 50 years ago, and I’ve never told that story, so just for you, just this one time, here it is. The sad news last week that the venerable Village Voice will cease its newsprint edition and become an on-line only publication, not unlike Salon, brought back some memories.

The voice its very village voicey