Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Edward KocheEdward Koche
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 617

my having worked with them. Over a period of a year, when at first we were yelling and screaming at one another, they primarily at me, and then subsequently, as you do when you sit down over a table every Saturday and have coffee, you stop screaming after the first six months. Then they start worrying about if you have a cold, how about a little glass of tea? We became very good friends. And when I ran for the City Council, they said, “We would like to open a store front for you. We can't go and work at the VID because they're a bunch of Communists.” That was their feeling. “But we'd like to have a separate operation for you here in the South Village.” There are ten election districts that are Italian all south of Washington Square Park.

And I thought, “Isn't this wonderful?” And they opened up a storefront or me, Independent Citizens for Koch. Dina Nolan, who is a wonderful woman whom I truly love -- she's sort of an Anna Magnani, and she is Italian; her husband is Irish -- and she ran this operation. She was a Republican, but she was very appreciative of what I had done, and she says -- she'll say it today -- in 1960 he hated my guts because I was for keeping Washington Square Park open for folk singers, and they were against it, and they thought I was terrible, and I probably was. I didn't appreicate some of the problems which they saw then. They were too reactionary, but there was some merit in their position, which I didn't see at all. And they, on the other





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help