It Happened in Hoboken: Comic Tales from the Waterfront City

Author's Biography Eugene C. Flinn has more than a passing acquaintance with Hoboken. His wife, Patricia, also a writer, was born and grew up there; her father, Mick, served with distinction as a heroic Hoboken fireman for many years; and the proprietors of two Hoboken restaurants, Amanda's and The Elysian Café, are Joyce and Eugene O. Flinn. Besides the 21 comic tales in this volume Flinn is the author of well over a hundred short stories published in literary magazines in most of the 50 states, Canada, Ireland, England, and Australia. He also wrote for Life, Good Housekeeping, Facts on File, and Simon and Schuster, and was a Broadway first-night drama critic for six years. He currently teaches Creative Writing and The Short Story at New Jersey City University. In It Happened in Hoboken: Comic Tales from the Waterfront City by Eugene C. Flinn we meet horseplayers who unknowingly come upon two Monet originals and try to peddle them for a few bucks in Hoboken's Fish Alley; an elderly pianist who plays the deceased's favorite song on a toy piano at a funeral home before the music is interrupted by a gun fight; an actress with a very prim mother who gets a last-minute assignment to open in an off-Broadway play and discovers in reading the script that she will be performing in the nude; a proprietress of a Hoboken boarding house who rents the best room in the establishment to a handsome young bachelor with the hope of matching him with her young daughter, only to receive the shock of her life; a 76-year-old rabbi working out in a gym to improve his physique and his chances of finding a nice Jewish woman; and Sister Brunhilda Nibelungenlied, a saintly nun who falls from godliness when she is asked to drive the 1978 Ford truck owned by her church, Our Lady of Perpetual Virginity, through Hoboken's narrow, traffic-lined streets. Hoboken, on the west side of the Hudson barely a long forward pass from Manhattan's skyline, is the home of these and other colorful characters in Flinn's 21 stories set in a city known for the first organized baseball game (on June 19, 1946), fine restaurants, and stately brownstones.Flinn, Eugene C. is the author of 'It Happened in Hoboken: Comic Tales from the Waterfront City', published 2006 under ISBN 9781419621239 and ISBN 1419621238.