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They Call Me Baba Booey, by Gary Dell'Abate
Ebook They Call Me Baba Booey, by Gary Dell'Abate
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Review
“Hilarious, sincere, and wrenching.”—GQ“Equal parts amazing and amusing . . . Fans will eat up the mortifying moments of [Dell’Abate’s] twenty-seven-year ride with the wildly popular and influential Stern show. . . . But it is the stories of extreme family dysfunction that give the book surprising heart.”—NJ.com“Dell’Abate [has] pulled back the curtain [and his fans] will be pleasantly surprised.”—Entertainment Weekly “Gary’s chronicle of how he developed the skills to survive a household shaken by both mental illness and the seismic shifts of the sixties, and of how he’s applied those skills to accommodate Howard and the gang, is nothing less than fascinating.”—Dr. Drew Pinsky “Following the simple plan outlined in this book, I lost fifteen pounds and became a happier wife and better mother.”—Howard Stern “If you think your family is nuts, wait until you read this story.”—Joan RiversFrom the Trade Paperback edition.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1I stood on the avocado green carpet of my living room in Uniondale, Long Island. My mom, Ellen, walked out of her bedroom, carrying an overnight bag she had just packed. Our house was a one-story ranch, and I watched her as she inched down the hall toward the living room.She stopped just a few steps from me and bent down, practically kneeling on the carpet in her dress. She always cared about how she looked, no matter where she was going. "Come here," she told me. I was five years old and she wanted to tell me something face-to-face. I walked closer. She hugged me and said, "Mommy isn't feeling very well. I have to go away for a couple of days."I knew she cried a lot. I knew she screamed a lot. And I knew people didn't do those things unless something was wrong. I thought she was physically sick and going to a hospital to get better.My older brothers, Anthony, who was thirteen, and Steven, who was eleven, stood next to her. They knew what was really happening. So did my aunt Maryann, who had come over to watch us that afternoon.When my mom let go of me she stood up, smoothed down her dress, picked up her bag, and followed my dad, Sal, out the front door. They were headed for the psych ward at Syosset Hospital.My parents met in 1947 at Webster Hall, a dance place in Manhattan. He was twenty-two from Little Italy; she was twenty and from Bensonhurst, in Brooklyn. "He walked up to me and asked me to dance," my mom once told me. "I told him, 'I heard about all you fellas from Manhattan. You're all a bunch of gangsters.' And he said, 'Yeah, I checked my gun at the bar.' I thought, how sarcastic. That intrigued me."My friend Anne thought he was so cute-he reminded her of Humphrey Bogart. He had on a pin-striped suit and really did look like Bogart."My mom was stylish, had a big smile, and loved mugging for a crowd or a camera. In every picture I have ever seen of her, from when she was young to today, she looks happy. There was never any sign in her eyes of the trouble behind them. On Saturdays when I was growing up, she'd spend three hours at the beauty parlor getting her hair colored and cut and then would sit with rollers in her hair under one of those huge dryers. She even had a cape and a hat that made her look just like Marlo Thomas in the opening credits for That Girl. She always liked to keep up appearances.That was true when she was growing up in Bensonhurst, too. Her parents came to America from Sicily and Reggio Calabria when they were both kids. They met in Brooklyn and had seven children over fifteen years. The oldest one, Aunt Josie, was nicknamed the General, because she did a lot of the child rearing. My grandmother worked as a seamstress and my grandfather was a construction worker (my aunts and uncles say he helped build the Empire State Building, but I think people say that about every construction worker from back then). My mom was the baby of the Cotroneo clan. The whole family lived together in a multifamily apartment building my grandfather owned.But my mother didn't grow up rich. My mom likes to tell the story about how she wore nothing but hand-me-downs and had to put cardboard in her shoes because the soles had holes in them. She worked at Macy's while in high school and she'd bring her check home and hand it over to her mother, who cashed it and took all the money, except for a couple of bucks she kicked back to my mother.None of the Cotroneos moved out of the building until long after they were married. Newlywed kids lived in one of the building's apartments until they could save enough money to buy a place of their own. Of course, most of them didn't move very far away. I had an uncle who moved to Los Angeles and an aunt who lived near us in Uniondale. Everyone else settled within a quarter mile of each other in Bensonhurst. Growing up we went to Brooklyn at least a couple of Sundays every month for huge Italian family dinners, the kind that began at three in the afternoon and started with three or four kinds of pasta piled with different meat sauces. That's when my aunt Angie, who probably never set foot outside Brooklyn, used to say to us, "Brooklyn is the best place in the world. I don't know why anyone would want to live anywhere else."As close as they were, my mom's family loved arguing. It was like they couldn't stand to be too far away and then couldn't stand the sight of each other. Chaos reigned at those family meals. My father called them the Fighting Cotroneos.His family was different. He grew up in a railroad flat in Little Italy, on the corner of Mott and Hester. His family was quieter and a little sadder. When my dad was small-"Too small to remember all the details," he once told me-he had a one-year-old brother who died from a throat infection. The funeral was held in his parents' apartment.My dad was always in great shape and kind of looked like a low-level hood. There's a great picture of him and my mom from their wedding in 1951. They both have ink black hair-hers is down to her shoulders and his is slicked black. He's got on a double-breasted black tuxedo with a white tie-he was a dead ringer for Yankees shortstop Phil Rizzuto. They were both rail thin, but my dad had butcher's hands. Thick and strong.He wasn't afraid of a fight, either. There was always tension with the Chinese where he lived because Chinatown and Little Italy are basically right on top of each other. One night he got into a fight with a kid from across Canal Street-which separates the two neighborhoods-and beat the crap out of him. A week later my dad saw the kid again, only this time he was in the back of a police car, pointing at him. Two cops got out, picked my dad up, and arrested him. He ended up spending the night at the Tombs, which is what they called the jail in lower Manhattan. It deserved the nickname.My dad was pretty smart. A junior high teacher recommended him for Stuyvesant High School, one of New York City's top public schools. "But I was always goofing around with kids in my neighborhood, so I dropped out. Never graduated. You weren't supposed to know that," my dad once told me when I interviewed him for a family history video.He wasn't a thug-but he lived on the periphery of the mob that ran Little Italy. And he liked to gamble. Even though he grew up on the Lower East Side, my dad loved the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1951, when Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants hit a game-winning home run to beat the Dodgers for the National League pennant, my dad lost a shitload of money. He was listening to the game on the roof of his building and was so upset he threw the radio over the edge.Years later, I was signing autographs at an event and Giants hero Thomson was there, too, right next to me. I told him that story so he signed a picture for my father, which read, "To Sal, Sorry about the radio, Bobby Thomson."My dad knew enough about gambling and the guys running the rackets in his neighborhood to know it wasn't the life for him. When World War II started he had just dropped out of high school so he decided to join the army. For more than a year he moved through the United States, training at Fort Dix in New Jersey, then in Illinois, and finally in Hawaii, "for jungle training," he said. When he finally shipped out to fight in the Pacific he thought he was headed for the Yap Islands, but the officers on the ship announced that plans had changed. They were headed for the Philippines.My mother later told me that when the two of them went to see Saving Private Ryan it was harrowing; it put my dad right back in the war. He was seventeen when he landed in the Philippines. Unreal. When I was seventeen I was reading album liner notes trying to figure out who played horns on a Bob Seger record. My dad told me, "It was just like that movie. Guys were puking as they bounced around the waves. Then the front of the boat comes down and we run into the water and it's just every man for himself, guys were being killed right next to me on the beach."He spent his war on the front lines as a medic, even though he hadn't even graduated from high school. It didn't matter. He wasn't doing battlefield surgery. His job was to patch someone together quick so they could stay alive long enough to get attention from the real doctors. Medics didn't have the option of ignoring it when one of their guys was screaming. No matter how bad the gunfire, they had to get low and go. And they were constantly under attack. "Banzai attacks," my father called them. They happened at night. "You don't hear them. It was hand-to-hand combat with bayonets. Every hill, every village was a battle."There was one firefight he remembered that went on for two straight nights. They were under heavy attack, and my dad was in a foxhole when he heard someone yelling, "Medic! Medic!""We were dug in and the Japs were dug in and we were shooting at each other," he said. "Our men were hurt in the middle of no-man's-land and the officer called for me. I crawled out there, bandaged them up, gave them sulfur, and dragged one guy back at a time. I couldn't stand up because fire was coming constantly. It's all luck, who lives."For that he earned a Bronze Star. Not that he wanted to discuss it. Ever. I remember when John Kerry was running for president my dad saw him on TV and said, "I don't like that guy." I asked him why and he said, "Because he's always talking about his medals." This was when the Republicans were claiming Kerry hadn't earned his Vietnam honors. I said, "Dad, he's being attacked. I thought if anyone would be on his side it would be you." But my dad said, "I don't care. You don't talk about it. Talking about it is wrong."Later in the war, while in Okinawa, my father's unit was under fire and an artillery shell exploded above his head. A piece of shrapnel pierced his backpack and became embedded next to his lung. They shipped him out to a hospital, performed surgery, let him recover for a month, and then shipped him back to the front lines. "As they were giving us new w...
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Product details
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau; First Edition edition (November 2, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9781400069552
ISBN-13: 978-1400069552
ASIN: 1400069556
Product Dimensions:
5.7 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
Average Customer Review:
3.9 out of 5 stars
245 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#35,980 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
As a superfan of the Howard Stern Show, I read every book every staff member writes. I moved to a new city and didn't have a library card, saw this book CHEAP on Amazon and just bought it. It's ok. It hits the highlights of Gary's life and career....tells how he got the job at the HSS, talks about the infamous first pitch, the love tapes and all that stuff that die hard Stern fans will remember. However, it seems to lack any real depth. He jumps from topic to topic, which are not even related to one another...and even skips around with time. You'll be reading a chapter about something that happened at the HSS, and the next chapter he's talking about being back in college....just weird.The part about his brother dying of AIDS was heartfelt and I could feel the pain of losing his brother. I'm sure that wasn't easy to talk about. Also, you come to find out his mother was just kinda "out there" from his early childhood. It's a good peek inside the inner circle of Baba Booey...I just wish it had been better written to flow more smoothly from childhood>>adolescence>>young adult>>adult>>Stern Show.
I never really knew much about "The Man Behind The Booey" but after reading this book I have a greater appreciation for him. Great stories about his childhood, family and love life (some pretty embarrassing) and a great understanding as to how he is able to work with the way that Howard Stern treats him.
Obviously I am a huge Stern fan. I think you would have to be @ least a long time follower to enjoy this lighthearted book. However it has moments that could seriously bring a tear to your eye. Yes, he does have silly lists of songs etc. etc......but that's what makes him Baba Booey! It does have moments about his dysfunctional family (And I mean dysfunctional). The one thing you will learn that Gary Dell'Abate is a very fortunate man to have survived his upbringing. I am not ashamed to say that I enjoyed this book because you will laugh your ass off & realize how loyal Howard Stern is to his employees. The front he puts on is misleading. He has been loyal to Gary, Fred, & Robin & knew he had the chemistry he wanted. I have personally spoken to other producers that rave about Gary & his kindness & that he is very good @ his job. Buy a used copy for a penny & give it a read.
Let me put my review in context. I'm a casual Howard Stern fan, having always found him (and the rest of the gang) funny but having also not listened to them in years. Love the movie Private Parts, but not in the diehard fan camp. Maybe that's why I was happy to read this book in its own terms and didn't need it to be more about the show than it was. I feel there was a fair amount of time spent on the show, but this was more a story of his family, growing up, and how he ended up working for Howard.A great deal of the book was about his mother's bouts with mental illness and how it shaped him, as well as losing his brother to AIDS. I think you have to come to this with compassion in order to enjoy it and with an understanding that what happens on the show isn't real life. Anyone who comes to this wanting it to be about the show, will only be sporadically happy, but I found it pretty interesting. The co-writing, Chad Millman, did a nice job making it sound like Gary's voice, or my understanding of his voice over the years. While I wasn't blown away, I felt that the book accomplished what the author(s) set out to do. Gary comes across as a pretty sincere guy.Parents who are degrees of crazy are familiar to a lot of people. Growing up, even in a good home, is necessarily about being at the whims and moods of your elders and their ideas about child-rearing and so I almost always sympathize with stories about growing up. It started with Mommy Dearest and still persists. I also see why he's had a job so long on a show in which mood swings make for good radio when other people would have slipped out the door.The cover is pretty funny, but I almost wonder if it mislead people into thinking it was going to be a different type of book, along with perhaps some preconceptions. I found it to be an entertaining and interesting read. I also thought the note of "be careful what you wish for" concerning perfect parents at the end was well-handled and relatable to a lot of people.4 stars.
I really enjoyed reading "They Call Me Baba Booey," although it does often feel like a final draft more than a finished product. Blame for this could be placed on Chad Millman who really does not seem to make a consistent effort to put Gary's words into actual prose. A lot of the writing literally feels like a computer program simply reciting what Gary is saying as opposed to a writer trying to fine tune it. In this case, Gary should've just written it himself and had a really good editor step in and improve it. Otherwise, Millman should've stepped up a little bit and made it a smoother read.That criticism aside, there is a lot to like in this book. Gary has an interesting story growing up with a mentally unstable mom, a stoic italian world war II vet father, an older rebellious brother, and another brother who contracted and died from AIDS before the world really knew what the disease was about. In addition to those parts of the book, Gary's recollections of starting out in college radio, working various jobs on Long Island, and eventually getting the NBC job that would lead to Howard are all very entertaining. His recollections of the disastarous Mets picth in 2009 as well as the love tape he sent to his ex are really worth the price of the book. Those two sections are pretty perfect. It's the more mundane stuff that seems to come off as sloppy writing that is too casual for its own good. Again, not a huge complaint, just a shame that a little more time was not spent on the editing.A listener of Stern since '89, this really is a must for any fan...even with all those stupid, pointless lists!
great book about a great guy - as a fan of the howard stern show i of course want to know everything i can about anyone involved with the show - this was a well written book and it has added so much to the show that i will forever be thankful that gary wrote it
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