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Paul
DeRienzo
I was born in the shadow of New York City, just a few
blocks away from the City line in Westchester County. My
family is of Italian and Hungarian extraction, having come
to New York during the great wave of immigration at the turn
of the last century. My dad grew up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn
and mom in the North Bronx. I was born on Memorial Day 1956,
the first of four children. I was educated in Catholic
schools until I was 16 and then in a small, integrated
private school where I graduated in 1974. I went on to
college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison where I
majored in Political Science. In 1980 I returned to New York
where I studied Political Economy at the Graduate Faculty of
the New School for Social Research. In 1983 I moved to the
Lower East Side where I have lived, at various addresses,
ever since.
I became politically conscious during the time of civil
rights and anti-war protests. I was a couple of years
younger than the baby boomers that dominated the era, but I
was a 10 year old who watched the news and I was always
aware of the political world around me. In 1968 my
grandfather took me to visit Hungary, it was the time of
Prague Spring and I'll never forget the Soviet troops
marching through the square in the town where many of my
ancestors originated.
Besides politics I was always interested in pop culture
and I grew up to relatives and neighbors dancing to Motown
and watching American Bandstand every afternoon after
school. I learn to love both R&B and R&R and I never
tried to separate the two genres despite the obvious and
open racial antagonism that existed at the time. Whether it
was the Temptations or Black Sabbath I learned to love the
music that was the soundtrack for the 60s and 70s.
In 1971, while in High School at Fordham Prep I started
to hang out at the McGovern for President HQ on Webster
Avenue under the old Third Avenue El. I had a little bit of
the rogue and troublemaker about me and my star rose quickly
as I became a youth activist in the Bronx working for the
reform Democrats. I became further, and more seriously
politicized as I met returning Vietnam veterans whose war
stories and commitment to end the Vietnam War left me
greatly impressed. It was obvious that I wasn't alone and
that the war and the men who pursued it were deeply
unpopular in my part of the world.
I'll never forget watching the wall of TV sets in the
appliance section at the old S. Kleins on Central Avenue as
President Nixon made his resignation announcement. It was
barely a month later on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin
where I joined thousands of students who poured into the
streets protesting Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon. We
occupied a McDonalds, fought running battles with the cops
and generally had a grand old time. In those streets I
decided to become a radical, a promise I kept ever since.
Even then I suspected there was a lot I didn't know and much
I had to learn. As the furor of the anti-war movement waned
I fell in with a group of left liberal politicos at the
Wisconsin Student Association and I ran for and was elected
a student representative for the Social Studies Department
at UW. I ran about five times and never lost once. It was
soon after the arrest of Dwight Armstrong, who with his
brother Karl and two others had bombed the Army Mathematics
center accidentally killing a graduate student. The
conservative students managed a big comeback after that
incident and for most of my time in student politics we
fought a defensive battle against encroaching student
apathy.
All wasn't gloom and doom, because during the Iran
hostage crisis the students began the first major popular
movement designed to protect Iranian students from brutal
attacks by campus reactionaries. I became friendly with many
leftist groups and worked closely with the Iranian Student
Association, battling a crooked professional clown who had
seized control of the student fees budget in order to throw
toga parties. In one memorable occasion dozens of Iranians
backed me up at a tense meeting where we forced the student
government to donate money to the Iranian student groups.
During this time I traveled to Mississippi to join
African-American workers on strike against slave-like
working conditions at a local chicken processing plant. I
also played a major role in organizing "The 80s
Conference" which brought former members of the Black
Panthers together with Yippies, Rock Against Racism, counter
culturalists and socialist groups. It's where I met Anita
Hoffman, Bobby Seale, Bill Kunstler and many other great 60s
luminaries. Soon afterwards I took on organizing a series of
Rock Against Racism concerts in Madison culminating in a
huge open-air show in a lakeside park. In the days leading
up to the show while I was putting up posters for the
concert with a female friend we were brutally attacked by a
man who turned out to be off duty Madison police officer
named Fred Fuller. In a wild fight I protected the woman as
Fuller beat her head into a parked car in front of 200
witnesses. In the subsequent highly publicized assault trial
Fuller was acquitted, my first real taste of the failings of
the American justice system.
I was involved in many interesting political events in
Madison, Chicago and the Midwest during this time and I
almost moved to Chicago, a politicized and activist city
with a long history of radical resistance to the powers that
be. Instead I returned to New York and eventually wound up
on the Lower East Side where I became deeply involved in
supporting the revolutions in Central America. Throughout
the early and middle 80s, during the reaction of the Reagan
years, I traveled as a reporter to hotspots in Nicaragua,
Honduras, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Belize and
Costa Rica. I met the founders of the Sandinista revolution
and was present at a meeting between Panama's Manuel Noriega
and Sandinista President Daniel Ortega. Back in New York I
was active in anti-apartheid politics, continuing similar
activism that I had precipitated in Madison. Through my
coverage of anti-South Africa protests I became reacquainted
with WBAI. I had grown up listening to BAI and had even
attended events at the old church on the Upper East Side,
dragging my less politicized friends along with me. In the
early 80s I had met Dennis Bernstein and appeared on a
number of BAI talk shows, but I really got involved, with
the urging of Bob Fass, with the BAI news in 1986.Starting
as a volunteer I began to tell the story of my neighborhood,
which had been targeted by gentrifiers who were strong
arming the long time poor residents into moving so they
could be replaced by high end yuppies. My coverage of the
Lower East Side peaked on a hot summer night in 1988 when
police launched a search and destroy mission against the
neighborhood in a fight that started over a curfew in
Tompkins Square Park. Before the night was over 125 people
were injured, most had no idea that police were even
planning to close the park when all hell broke lose. In the
ensuing 3 years a bitter fight between the city and hundreds
of activists was punctuated by the armed occupation of the
neighborhood, the forced closing of the park and
establishment of a curfew that stands to this day.
Throughout that period I generated hundreds of news stories
for WBAI and was eventually hired as a WBAI news reporter.
The nineties in NYC were marked by an increase in police
brutality as the Dinkins and then the Giuliani regime
wrestled with an awakening majority minority city that had
become very different than the New York of my youth.
Immigrants from South America, Eastern Europe, China, Asia
and the Middle East have changed the cultural complexion of
New York forever and for the better, but the city's rulers
have been slow to adapt. During this period from 1991 until
1998 I generated about 1000 news stories for WBAI, mostly,
but not limited to NYC issues. I also began to spread out
and produce for other mediums and on a wide variety of
subjects. I was a regular contributor to the weekly news
magazine Downtown, and my articles and interviews appeared
in the Village Voice and Newsday. I produced radio for the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, WNYC, the American Urban
Radio Network and Pacifica Network News. I also covered
extensively the Democratic National Convention in both 1992
and 1996, reporting numerous times during Pacifica's
coverage of these events.
In 1998 I left Pacifica to become Editor-in-Chief of High
Times magazine, I also worked for Penthouse Magazine,
writing a cover article on the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act before the events of September 11 made FISA
a well known acronym. I also edited an Internet website
called Indieplanet where I met the legendary boxer and
humanitarian Muhammed Ali. Later I founded a new magazine
called Heads, which was named the best new magazine of 2000
by the University of Mississippi. In 2001 I was approached
by WBAI News Director Jose Santiago to help Santiago Nieves
produce WBAIs new morning show, a position I held until
2002. Since then I have been Executive Producer of the Gary
Null Show, arguably the best program produced for the
Pacifica network. |
