Ralph Cipriano: Requiem For An Old-School Pol, South Philly's Jimmy Tayoun

Veteran journalist Ralph Cipriano offers a piece at Bigtrial.net on the late South Philly politician, former federal prisoner and newspaper publisher James “Jimmy” Tayoun.

He was, at various stages of his long life, a Daily News sports writer, a restauranteur, a state representative, a City Councilman, a felon, a newspaper editor, a raconteur, always a true character, and above all else, an old-school politician.

Jimmy Tayoun died yesterday at 87, after collapsing in front of his home, apparently after suffering a heart attack.

As a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, I visited Tayoun back in 1993, when he was a guest at the Federal Correctional Institute, Schuylkill, in Minersville, PA. It's a sleepy minimum security prison located on a foggy mountaintop where the deer run free, about a 2 1/2 hour drive northwest of the city. At the time, Tayoun was doing 40 months after he got nailed by the feds for paying and taking bribes.

There was a basic honesty about Tayoun that shown through his prison whites, and his circumstances.

"OK, I'm not going to say I'm innocent," he told me. "I'm obviously guilty. I pleaded guilty and I'm here." Tayoun told me how the prosecutors got him to plead guilty. They did it by showing him the indictment they planned to file against his wife.

Tayoun demonstrated how he stuck out his two arms, as if voluntarily agreeing to be handcuffed. "You got me," is what he told the feds.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.bigtrial.net/2017/11/jimmy-tayoun-appreciation.html#more

Note: I ran into Jimmy Tayoun many times over the years while covering South Philly in my column for the South Philadelphia American and earlier while freelancing for the South Philadelphia Review. I agree with Ralph Cipriano’s view of the late politician. He was a character.

You can read my Crime Beat column on crooked Philly politicians via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/07/politicians-dubious-prison-sentence-bug.html 

Mark Twain House Comeback

Carole Goldberg at the Hartford Magazine offers a piece on the Mark Twain's House & Museum in Hartford.

It took a little ice cream, some beer, a lot of visiting authors and a staff eager to try new things in a city that clings to old ways.

And it worked. Over the past five years, the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford has built on its foundation as a National Historic Landmark home to become a literary center of innovation and renown, presenting talks by writers as varied as Judy Blume and Stephen King.

Twain, who lived in the house on Farmington Avenue from 1874 to 1891 and wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and other classics there, loved to entertain writers and would surely approve.

Authors certainly do. "It very much is holy ground," says David Baldacci, a best-selling writer of thrillers and a member of the board of trustees.

"I first visited the Twain House with my wife and very young daughter ... I wanted a career as a novelist, as Twain had. Now that I've been back many times, the lure and attraction and electricity I feel never lessens," Baldacci says.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.courant.com/hartford-magazine/hc-hm-mark-twain-comeback-20140228,0,4563437,full.story

I visited Mark Twain's house some years ago and wrote about it in my old column in the South Philadelphia American.

You can read the column via the below link:

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/MarkTwainHartford.jpg