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Joined: January 12, 2010 12:56 PM
Bruce Frankel was born prematurely in Miami Beach on Jan. 2, 1950 after his mother defied orders for bedrest and went dancing on New Year’s Eve with his father, a women’s clothier. During a boyhood lived in Hollywood, Florida, Curacao, N.A., and Long Beach, N.Y., he dreamed of becoming Benny Goodman, Fred Astaire, and Pee Wee Reese. He graduated from Franklin & Marshall College, lived in Italy and France, and worked as a waiter, caddy master, psychiatric aide, and English teacher before becoming a newspaper reporter. He wrote his first story for the Gannett-owned Reporter Dispatch in White Plains, N.Y. about people betting on the number “7” on August 7, 1977 (7-7-77), and went on to win several state Associated Press Association awards, including for spot news, columns and depth reporting. In the late 1980s, he served as a senior editor for Children’s Express news service, trained reporters, ages 7-13, at bureaus in Harlem and Chelsea in Manhattan and in Newark, and edited When I Was Young I Loved School, a book about high school dropouts reported by teen editors. From 1989 to 1996, he was the New York-based national reporter for USA Today and wrote cover stories about politicians, plane crashes, tax evaders (Leona Helmsley), mobsters (John Gotti), and terrorists (Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric who inspired the first World Trade Center bombing). He next worked as a senior writer for People magazine, where he was the deputy editor of the news section, wrote news profiles and penned farewells to the likes of Roy Rogers, Barry Goldwater, and Mother Theresa. After co-writing the New York Times bestselling World War II: History’s Greatest Conflict in Pictures, edited by Richard Stolley and published in 2001 by Little, Brown & Co., he re-invented himself and, at 53, received an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. He has three sons: Alex, half of the Nu-disco duo Holy Ghost!; Zachary, a chef in Manhattan, and Isaiah, a high school sophomore. He lives in New York, where he has begun work on his next book and is studying the tango.