1974

Gov. Malcolm Wilson vetoed a 20-year project to fund a Queens Medical School.

An ongoing Tribune series on the deteriorating conditions in the Carlton Gardens apartment complex in Flushing got promises of corrective action from the landlord....Queens Borough President Donald Manes declared his candidacy for governor of the State of New York at a packed announcement press conference in Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel in April....

At Law Day ceremonies of the Queens County Bar Association in May, a model was unveiled for a new Civil Court Building and municipal parking garage, to be erected at a cost of $20 million on Sutphin Boulevard between 89th and 90th Avenues.... The Tribune reported that one of the borough’s most fragile but beautiful landmarks – the 130-year-old Weeping Beech tree in Flushing – was in danger of dying because of a lack of fencing to protect the tree from abuse and from a lack of proper feeding and care....The long-awaited announcement of the re-opening of the Queens Playhouse came when Mayor Abraham Beame was presented with the first tickets to the theater’s new season....

Just short of a year after the grand re-opening and dedication of the Louis Armstrong Stadium at Flushing Meadows, the city announced that it was closing the stadium because of “structural deficiencies”....

Mayor Beame came to Flushing and joined Tribune publisher Gary Ackerman in unveiling the first edition of the Tribune’s bicentennial souvenir editions, which were distributed before the 4th of July throughout Queens. The issues contained stories about Queens during the Revolution, the history of the borough and its landmarks and coverage of local bicentennial-related observances....

A bill allocating funds for a Queens medical school was vetoed by Governor Malcolm Wilson in June. Donald Manes said that the bill was the result of some 20 years of effort by county residents...A private plane headed towards Flushing Airport crashed into a utility pole and landed on the Whitestone Expressway, leaving the pilot, Larry Jones of Jamaica, injured….

The Board of Estimate gave its final OK to the long-awaited Flushing bus terminal. Manes called it a “tremendous boom to one of Queens’ prime business areas.”... In June, the Triboro Theater in Astoria was slated for demolition, but a community drive to save the theater and use it as a community cultural center got a boost when the City Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to grant official landmark status to the theater on Steinway Street....

The United States Pavilion was falling apart by 1974.

A nail was driven into the coffin of the Jamaica Avenue “el” with a $5.5 million federal appropriation to tear down the elevated line and build a new subway along Archer Avenue.… Donald Manes was sworn into office for his second term in January.... 1,200 people showed up at a hearing in Queens College’s Colden Auditorium to express their opposition to the proposed 4,500-unit apartment complex to be built over the Kew Gardens railyards. The audience, overwhelmingly opposed to the project, heckled the Lefrak spokesperson to the point that he left the meeting without finishing his presentation....

Donald Manes toured the site of the heavily vandalized U.S. Pavilion at Flushing Meadows, showing the destruction to the interior of the structure that once housed actual copies of the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation and other historic documents. President John F. Kennedy had broken ground for the pavilion in 1962 and President Lyndon Johnson opened the $14 million structure at the dedication of the 1964 World’s Fair....

Two years after the Tribune first exposed the slum-like conditions on Flushing’s 137th Street, Community Board 7 came to the aid of the inhabitants of the private homes who were plagued with substandard living conditions.

Doug Kennedy

My time at the Trib, as we affectionately called it back then, began a year or so before I actually started working there. As editor of the York College student newspaper, Pandora’s Box, in 1972, we had chosen Multi Media Advertising, the typsesetting arm of the Queens Tribune, to lay out and print our weekly publication.

Upon my graduation from college in the spring of 1973, then-publisher and current U.S. Congressman Gary Ackerman offered me a position as the evening production manager at Multi Media. However, as an aspiring journalist, we agreed that my duties would also include writing for the news department of the newspaper on Fridays.

Under my first professional editor, managing editor Jeff Tarlo, I covered a wide range of local stories including the shooting death of a 27-year-old police officer in Jamaica, the controversial proposed expansion of Flushing Airport, an explosion at a Bayside temple and my two biggest stories: the discovery of a secret memo about Queensborough Community College’s plans to buy up property surrounding the Bayside campus and the sexual assault and murder of a 17-year-old high school student, Leslie Zaret, in a Bayside schoolyard.

Some of my “lighter-side” stories included taking a poll with fellow reporter Marita Downes showing that Flushing residents, by a 66 percent majority, thought that President Nixon should resign. I also wrote a story about an unexpected incident when police officers commandeered my car, with me at the wheel, as they/we chased down an escaping felon along a crowded Main Street.

After my short time at the Trib reinforced my desire to be a working journalist, I went on to become managing editor of a small weekly paper, The Woodside Herald, as well as opening a typesetting shop similar to Multi Media with two former Tribune employees, one of whom, Steve Tannenbaum, I still work with today.

Although I did not end up as a full-time writer, I still work as a freelance editor for The Woodside Herald and have had a number of articles published in various local newspapers and magazines.

My congratulations to the Trib and its current and longtime publisher, Mike Schenkler, on 35 years of success in serving the Borough of Queens and its residents. Hard to believe that the borough I grew up in and the newspaper where I first worked have both lasted so long and so well.