About Me
My Back Pages
I’m a native New Yorker, born on the island of Manhattan to GI Bill art student parents who fled “Kentuckiana” for NYC to raise a family in a more liberal environment. Their first apartment was a third-floor walkup a block south of the Meatpacking District; in a neighborhood of meat cutters and longshore workers.
When I was two, we moved to Parkway Village in Queens where my sisters Daphne & Amy were born. Parkway Village was unique, a planned community of garden apartments for families of United Nations diplomats and employees, as well as WW II veterans. Living there was a formative experience, with friends and playmates from many nations and parents who looked after all the children as if they were their own. It was truly a village within the metropolis.
We lived in Parkway Village for five years. At the request of the United Nations International Cooperative Community we moved to a caretaker’s cottage on an abandoned estate in Briarcliff Manor, Westchester County, which had been optioned as a site for a suburban extension of Parkway Village. For city kids it was magical. There were acres of woodland to roam, ruins to explore, and ponds and streams to splash in. But there was considerable opposition to the development from neighboring property owners; there were public hearing comments with subtle racist dog whistles and a fire of suspicious origin destroyed a barn that was intended to be the community center. The UNICC wanted eyes on the property and my parents had the necessary rural skills to live in a house with a coal fired boiler, a remote pumphouse for water and a half mile long driveway. In the end the necessary building permits were denied and the project was killed due to prejudice: another formative experience.
In 1961 we moved to a rented carriage house at Teatown Lake Nature Reservation and the Stoner children all attended public schools in Croton on Hudson, a liberal bastion north of New York City. Croton was a caring community that went to extraordinary lengths to provide recreational and educational resources for children and adults. In the early sixties a group of parents came together to create a summer sailing program: fathers and sons worked evenings and weekends to build a fleet of sail boats; build a launching ramp and construct a seawall and floating docks. The village recreation department hired a sailing instructor and offered lessons for a nominal sum, making it affordable for middle and working class kids to learn sailing. Croton was a village that valued the arts. Parents organized a summer Shakespeare Festival for high school & college students, many of whom went on the successful careers in theater and film. Again, this experience informs my beliefs on what people working in concert can accomplish.
My youthful experiences took place against the backdrop of the tumultuous 60s: the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, assassinations, urban unrest.
I took a short break from school to sail professionally: working on charter schooners in New England and in the Caribbean. After a couple of years I returned to the Hudson Valley and resumed my education. I put myself through college working summers as a union carpenter with Local 608, United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners of America and as a night shift convenience store clerk when school was in session.
My Involvement
I've been a political activist since junior high school. In 1964 I helped out on the Lyndon Baines Johnson campaign: stuffing envelopes, leafleting and sign waving at rallies.In high school I was an anti-Vietnam War activist, even helping to organize protests in our little village.
In 1969 -70 I was a volunteer with the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater: a 75’ long recreation of a 19th century sailing cargo boat. We sailed up and down the Hudson River stopping at towns and villages along the way to call attention to the industrial pollution damaging the waterway, taking school children out on the water to teach them about the ecology of the river, and bringing politicos aboard to show them sites where untreated wastewater was flowing into the water.
Like many I drifted away from political activity in my late 20s and early 30s, although I was a reliable voter. Then in 1996 my wife and I bought a small house, not much more than a shack, in South Nyack – another Hudson riverfront village – and we got involved in local Democratic politics. Dana was elected as a village trustee and we both worked hard to elect good people to local government.
In 1998 I was recruited by a neighbor to carry nominating petitions to place Peter Vallone, a standard issue Democrat running for Governor of New York, on the ballot for the nascent Working Families Party. The goal was to garner 50,000 votes on the WFP line to become an official ballot status party. When all the votes were counted the party received 51,325 votes, gaining ballot status for the next four years. The party has maintained ballot status ever since.
The Working Families Party was organized by civic action groups and progressive labor unions dissatisfied with the stasis in New York politics: with a Republican governor, a Republican majority State Senate, and with the State Assembly held by the Democrats advancing any sort of progressive agenda was difficult. In New York ( and other states ) WFP functions as the ORGANIZED left wing of the Democratic Party. Using New York States unique fusion voting laws WFP could cross endorse good candidates and when the polls closed the votes on both ballot lines would be added together for a final total. Having the ballot line allowed the party to cajole or pressure electeds to vote the right way on our issues.
In 1999 I was elected chapter chair, and in 2002 was elected as a state committee member and appointed to the state executive committee, where I served until 2012.
Working Families invested time and money in training its activists, and I learned quite a lot: the importance of grassroots organizing, power analysis, messaging, field work and coalition building.
Here in New Orleans I've been involved in the campaign to rein in short term rentals.
I'm a member of the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure club, joining as an associate member in 2018 and advancing to full membership in 2023. I've been a Parade Marshal and a member of the Lundi Gras Festival Committee, as well as a Lieutenant in the Zulu Governor's Krewe.