The Bay News has employed more people over the years than the populations of some American towns. We checked in with a few of the early pioneers, including the mom and pop who made the paper a Brooklyn institution, and remembered other notables no longer with us.
Ed and Rhoda Luster
The Lusters — he a New York University grad from Marine Park, she a Brooklyn College alum from East Flatbush — merged the Kings Courier and the Flatbush Life into Courier Life Publications in the early 1960s, and spent the next half a century building a media empire of 22 weekly community newspapers, each one a virtual almanac of juicy news and local advertisements.
“No one had a paper that was 125 pages any place in the country,” says Ed Luster, 80. “When we were at full steam, we had no competition.”
The Lusters made the Bay News an “ABC newspaper,” meaning its circulation was audited, assuring advertisers their message was reaching readers.
The super strides were rooted in a simple vision.
“The goal was to make the paper financially a success and to make a community paper in every section of Brooklyn,” says Rhoda Luster, who managed payroll and personnel, and personally interviewed each employee.
These days the retired moguls split their time between their homes in Arizona and Connecticut, their three children — “two doctors and a publisher” — and their eight grandchildren, while their Brooklyn news revolution soldiers on under new visionaries.
Norman Fallick
Co-publisher and World War II aerial engineer gunner Norman Fallick triggered the paper’s boom when he negotiated its sale with founder Charlie Peterson in the mid-1950s.
“We gave him $1,000 and made our money back in a week,” says the silver-tongued salesman who secured cost-cutting, second-class mailing privileges and snagged a free, white convertible from a local car dealership to promote the popular Miss Kings Highway and Miss Brooklyn contests.
Fallick and fetching finalists in bathing suits cruised along Ocean Parkway, Coney Island Avenue, and Sheepshead Bay Road, and stumped for votes at local hangouts, including the now-defunct Dubrow’s Cafeteria at E.16th Street and Kings Highway, and the former Kingsway Cinema a few blocks away on Coney Island Avenue.
“We were showing the girls off and getting publicity,” says the spry senior, 92, who edited the Courier’s Harbor Watch army newspaper until his retirement in 2007.
Fallick lives in New Jersey with his wife, Sandra — a former assistant advertising manager he met at the paper — and spends his time auditing courses at Princeton University and producing Comcast TV programs for seniors.
He credits the Lusters with the Bay News’ ripe, old age.
“Ed, Rhoda, and Cliff were responsible for bringing the paper to where it is today,” he says.
Theda Spitz
Midwood resident Theda Spitz was hired in 1961 as a part-time book-keeper for $1.50 an hour, after responding to an advertisement she saw in a beauty parlor, but she changed the Bay News’ commercial trajectory when she sold a lucrative center-page advertisement to the Richmond County Savings Bank for a specialty issue, the likes of which we’re still publishing today.
Corporate titans, including Brooklyn Union Gas, Con Edison, and the New York Press Association, soon became regular advertisers alongside the mom-and-pops, thanks to Spitz’s savvy sales knack.
“You have to know how to talk to people and deliver what you promised them,” says the Williamsburg native, 90, who was Ed Luster’s personal assistant, and worked at the paper for 48 years before retiring in 2009.
Spitz still drives, loves to play blackjack in Atlantic City, and faithfully reads the Bay News.
“I really relish it for the local news because it’s interesting to me and brings the community together,” she says.
Allan J. Fromberg
Long before he was deputy commissioner for public affairs at the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, Allan Fromberg worked 14-hour days at the Bay News, editing newspapers and supplements, designing and approving pages, taking photographs, managing reporter assignments, covering community events, and writing articles and columns — a drill that proved invaluable, he claims.
“I look back on my time there as one of the greatest experiences of my life and a training ground that has helped me in everything I’ve done since,” says Fromberg, who worked at Courier Life’s Sheepshead Bay office from 1987 to 1993.
The editorial jack-of-all-trades was a prolific headline writer before the age of digital pagination, writing each screamer by hand and using mathematics to make sure it fit the allotted spaces.
“Back in those days, we scribbled headlines on slug pads, and the pressure was on to sometimes write hundreds in a given hour to keep up with the production department,” says Fromberg. “Looking back at how easy it was to make a mistake going that fast, I’m amazed that we did as well as we did.”
Sometimes a blooper managed to slip by, causing him agita.
“I once wrote a headline for a story about 300 uniformed sanitation workers, but when it came out in the paper it read ‘300 uninformed sanitation workers!’” says Fromberg. “I knew that someone, somewhere was disappointed, and that weighed on me.”
He came to regard the Bay News as being more than a vehicle for delivering community news.
“I considered it just as important for us to make our neighbors feel special, and that’s why I loved doing the parades, and the block parties, and the school plays,” says Fromberg, who went on to become Rudy Giuliani’s deputy press secretary and an assistant commissioner at the Department of Transportation. “The people and groups you were covering welcomed you in as if you were family.”
Former subjects kept in touch.
“One woman and her mother appreciated my feature writing so much, they have followed my career even to today,” he says. “Every holiday, without exception, I will get a phone call or a card from them wishing me well.”
Lou Powsner [1921–2014]
Our late columnist Lou Powsner, whom the Bay News inherited with the Brooklyn Graphic in the early 1990s, was a walking institution whose writing career spanned more than 60 years — and who helped cops in 79 arrests after being held up at gunpoint multiple times at the men’s store he operated on Mermaid Avenue for 44 years.
His salty, sassy “Speak Out” column demanded answers from bureaucrats he suspected of foul play. The World War II staff sergeant with “Kelly’s Kobras” — the last B-24 liberator bombardment group to be dispatched from the U.S. — was called “The Mouth that Roared” for his flow of tart gems delivered without fear or favor. He once informed ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s mother during a re-election campaign stop that he would not vote for her “emperor son.”
Powsner was a diehard activist who belonged to just about every local group in his community, including Community Board 13, the Kings Highway and Coney Island boards of trade, Bensonhurst West End Community Council, and the Joint Council of Kings Board of Trade.
Councilman Mark Treyger (D-Coney Island) submitted a proposal in December to dedicate a Coney Island street to the beloved ink-slinger.
Denis Hamill
Veteran journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and New York Daily News columnist Denis Hamill cut his teeth as a Courier cub reporter, covering crime and politics for two years in the early 1970s out of the Bay News’ original office at 1159 Flatbush Ave. on a block bustling with mom-and-pop stores near Clarendon Road.
“Working at the Courier taught me all the nuts and bolts of journalism and it all became unbelievably handy because I learned how the city worked,” says Hamill, who took the B-41 bus along Flatbush Avenue from his Park Slope home everyday and reported to then-editor Bernie Edelman.
One of his early stories was about a robbery at the Loew’s Kings Theatre in Flatbush — the luxurious movie house that re-opened in February after a $95-million makeover. Another involved interviewing shocked neighbors of a Brooklyn firefighter charged with being an accomplice in the 1975 kidnapping of the son of Seagram billionaire Edgar Bronfman. That same year, Hamill profiled Brooklyn-born director Martin Davidson when his teen gang film “The Lords of Flatbush” hit the big screen, starring an unknown actor named Sylvester Stallone.
“We gave it big play,” says Hamill, who scored another coup when influential Brooklyn Democratic leader Meade Esposito, who rarely spoke to the press, granted the rookie reporter a face-to-face.
The hard-scrabble, cigar-chomping Esposito — who once ran for district leader and knocked on doors asking voters if they had any parking tickets that needed “taken care of” — was caught off-guard by the Courier correspondent’s pointed inquiries.
“I was just a kid, and I asked him how much patronage he had, and he said to me, ‘Who do you think you are?’ ” says Hamill. “Then he smiled and said, ‘Actually I have a lot.’ ”
Hamill also wrote a column called “Under the Boardwalk,” exploring a borough so removed from today that yellow cab drivers refused to travel here.
“Brooklyn was much more working class and family oriented then,” he says. “It was filled with natives and immigrants, not yuppified like it is today.”
Hamill went on to author 10 novels, write for national publications, pen screenplays, and launch other creative projects, but he attributes his considerable communications skills to the community newspaper that gave him his start.
“Everything I learned about covering news I learned while working at the Bay News,” he says.
Sol Polish [1915-2011]
No one recalled Brooklyn better than avid chronicler Sol Polish, whose hilarious offerings typed on a Smith Corona typewriter appeared on these pages week after week for more than 20 years.
Polish, a World War II foot soldier and code-breaker, wielded his rapier wit like a swashbuckler, and his Runyonesque recollections whipped into a pair of memorable columns called “Remembering Brooklyn” and “Looking Back” detailed life before, during, and after the Great Depression with childhood pals named “Greazy Gus,” “Goomba,” and “Suchie.”
In a 2007 piece entitled “The gang finds a girl oasis,” he writes: “Greazy Gus had done some real good reconnaissance on that block and we found that what was off limits on East 98th Street was routine here. We were now a little older and looking for more action than was available within our own neighbors.”
Polish and his wife, Lil, hand-delivered his columns, the last of which appeared on April 29, 2011.
The Bay News’ esteemed alumni association also includes: New York Post reporter Gary Buiso, Daily News crime reporter Thomas Tracy, business journalist Joyce Hanson, The Chief-Leader editor-in-chief Richard Steier, news photographers Todd Maisel and Paul Martinka, class-action Manhattan attorney John Rizio-Hamilton, Crain’s New York Business assistant managing editor Erik Engquist, American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut director of communications Patrick Gallahue, State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s press secretary Matthew Sweeney, American International Group senior vice president Christina Pretto, American Cancer Society executive vice president and division operating officer Kris Kim, and author Michael Crewdson.
