Spring 2011 Issue - Lehman College

Lost Boys of the Bronx: The Oral
History of the Ducky Boys Gang
(Authorhouse, 2010). James Hannon.
You could say that James Hannon (B.S., ’89)
was born to write a history of the Ducky Boys,
the much-mythologized Bronx street gang from
the early 1960s. For starters he lived in the
heart of “Ducky” country, having grown up in the
Norwood section of the Bronx (then known, he
points out, as Bainbridge). In fact, he actually
grew up on the same block—Briggs Avenue
and East 196th Street—as Kevin Byrne, who
was not only a Ducky Boy member but also the
younger brother of the twins, Jimmy and Frankie Byrne,
who founded the gang.
Hannon doesn’t glamorize—or condemn—the Ducky
Boys. Instead, he shines a light on a gang whose
notoriety has only grown since novelist Richard Price
fictionalized the group in his 1974 debut novel The Wanderers.
In Price’s Bronx milieu, the Ducky Boys were a gang comprised
of “hundreds of stunted Irish madmen with crucifixes tattooed
on their arms and chests, lunatics with that terrifying, slightly
cross-eyed stare of the one-dimensional, semihuman, urban
punk killing machine.”
In the film version of The Wanderers, which has since gone on to
achieve cult status, the Ducky Boys were a group of mute misfits
who, in the film’s climatic fight scene, decide to ambush a football
game between rival gangs, only to get beaten and run for their
lives. If there’s one thing in the film that all the gangs can agree on,
it’s that everyone fears—and no one likes—the Ducky Boys. Inspired
by Hollywood’s depiction of his Bronx neighborhood, Hannon set
out to tell the true story of that long-ago era of his native borough.
In reality, the Ducky Boys were a lot less dangerous than their cinematic
counterparts, and it’s this discrepancy between the gang’s
popular perception and reality that Hannon attempts to set straight.
For one, they weren’t all short; and two, they weren’t all Irish. There
were hundreds of them, however, and the group was much feared,
and with good reason: in the early ‘60s, a chance encounter with a
Ducky on Webster Avenue could end in bloodshed—probably yours.
Truth be told, the Duckys were, like plenty of other teenagers in
the Bronx and elsewhere, just directionless inner-city kids with
excessive amounts of adolescent adrenaline to burn wandering the
streets. Not particularly dressed up and definitely nowhere to go.
Perhaps the most famous Ducky of them all was a Bronx street kid
who grew up to become Ace Frehley, an original member of the
rock band KISS; however, as Hannon points out, Frehley wasn’t
really “in” the gang, but hung out on its margins.
Hannon calls the Duckys the “Lost Boys” because, as he puts it,
many of them “didn’t make it to adulthood” (of the literally hundreds
of kids who were in the Duckys, less than 25 percent are alive
today). Aside from the fights, rumbles, and pranks—perhaps their
favorite pastime—many members eventually fell victim to drugs
(sniffing glue seems to have been the narcotic of choice), while
some who did grow up got involved in more serious drugs and
crimes. A fair number of the Ducky Boys were sent to Vietnam. The
Lost Boys of the Bronx should probably best be seen as a cautionary
tale of what happens to kids who don’t want to grow up.
When she returned to the U. S. two years later, she moved to
Hawaii and began writing about what she had learned, publishing
her work in magazines, newspapers, and encyclopedias, as well as
in a book, Discovering the Body’s Wisdom (Bantam Books, 1996),
a guide to Eastern and Western body-mind disciplines. During her
travels in Asia, she had learned about non-Western spiritual traditions
and attended a ten-day Buddhist meditation retreat. Although
she did not realize it at the time, those experiences eventually led
her back to graduate school, this time to earn a doctorate in Asian
and Comparative Studies.
The idea for her most recent book, Living This Life Fully: Stories
and Teachings of Munindra, developed in 2004 while she was on
a month-long retreat at the Forest Refuge in Barre, Mass. As she
explains, Anagarika Munindra was a grandfather of the “mindfulness”
movement in the West and taught others who went on to
teach and apply mindfulness in education, health care, law, sports,
and psychology. Though Munindra’s name may not be familiar, his
students include best-selling authors like Daniel Goleman, former
New York Times journalist reporting on the brain and behavioral
sciences and author of Emotional Intelligence.
Collaborating with Robert Pryor of the Antioch Education Abroad
Program in Buddhist Studies in India, Dr. Knaster set about her
research and interviewed nearly 200 people around the world of
different religious backgrounds who had known Munindra. “Their
stories,” she says, “convey what it’s like to embody the sixteen qualities
that make a great human being, no matter what religious path
you’re on. They’re qualities that anyone can practice in daily life.”
This latest book brings together the various strands of Dr. Knaster’s
original fascination with cultural anthropology. “I realize I’ve
become a kind of translator after all,” she says, “not of language
in the literal sense, but of different healing systems, cultures, and
spiritual traditions.”
Dr. Knaster and her husband, Larry Jacobs, live by the ocean in
northern California. Learn more at www.mirkaknaster.com
Lehman Today/Spring 2011 7