Timothy F Dempsey

Schneid's Timothy F Dempsey

Publisher Marketing: In the mid-sixties, drugs rode the subways from the inner city to the eastern suburbs of Queens, New York, where middle class families would be changed forever. Young men who came of age during that period lived in fear of the draft, as Vietnam took over the national psyche. To cope, some enlisted, some went to great lengths to dodge the draft, even to the extent of harming themselves, and some ran away to Canada. Some didn't get out of the decade alive. Schneid's is a novel that chronicles DAVEY O'CONNOR, a good catholic boy who gets sucked into the vortex of the times and strays from the righteous path his parents had laid out for him. He succumbs to temptations, observes and tries to experience the sexual revolution and even goes to Woodstock. He makes mistakes big and small and learns to survive. "Schneid's" was a real candy store, in Bellerose, Queens, that evolved from a family-friendly respite into a hangout for hundreds of kids, from naive potheads to angry gangsters. It's become a cliche that if you remember the Sixties, you didn't really experience them. Not true for all of us. Personally, I knew three suspected murderers and had more than that number of friends who died of overdoses. But Schneid's is no memoir. It fits within literary and historical fiction. It captures a time and a place, --Sixties' Queens-- as well as tells the story of several friends who struggle to make sense of it all, with very different outcomes for each. You've heard about the Sixties--if you want to know what they were really like, Schneid's will give you a view!"