‘Characters’ make up Hewlett resident’s book

Hewlett resident Kenneth Karcinell has met many unique people in his 80-year life and decided to self-publish the book “Characters” that tells their stories.

The book’s titled was also inspired by a Manhattan business with the same name that Karcinell and his wife, Ellen, saw a decade ago.

“I’ve known a lot of characters and I’ve been in a lot of situations,” Karcinell said. “I thought that I should start to gather some material together.”

Encouraged by his family, he began writing down life experiences for the book three years ago. “As I got more involved, it became a practice of love,” Karcinell said. “I would read the chapters and storylines and I added on. The more I got into it, the more experiences came to mind.”

The book is not typical storybook and can be read out of sequence. “Every chapter represents an episode in my life journey,” he said.

Karcinell’s family lived in the Jacob Riis projects on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. He grew up in subsidized housing in the Bronx. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School, a formerly all-boys high school, also in the Bronx. “Characters” recounts his housing project experience. One so diverse that he said as an adult the notion of multiculturalism was embedded within him.

He attended Ryder College, now Ryder University, in New Jersey and graduated with liberal arts major. He then worked a variety of jobs including waiting tables, chauffeuring and driving trucks, which he says served as pathways to the development of his character.

“I had done truck driving during the college summer vacations, and driven by my father’s blue-collar mentality, not having a profession that I readily entered after I graduated,” he said. “I knew that I had to be self-sufficient.” Truck driving was not going to be his life’s vocation after a truck hijacking experience that deterred him from the field. A story recounted in the book. 

He began teaching in the late 1960s, when school boards were first coming into power and racism was rampant in the ranks, he claims. Karcinell worked for 32 years in school districts in Harlem and the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

He said he never experienced negativity from any of his students and although the school was located in one of Brooklyn’s high crime neighborhoods, his school was mostly free from incident. Karcinell won awards from parent associations and was the second youngest assistant principal, in New York history, at age 25 at Frederick Douglass School.

He retired from the New York City school system schools in 1999 and spent 20 years at the college level. Karcinell taught at Fordham University for 16 years at City College of New York as a supervising field professor for the New York City Teaching Fellows partnership. He wrote his first book in 1999, “I’m Gonna Teach” which described his experience in the NYC school system.

Karcinell says the book has many lessons including that of kindness. “To this day, I can go up Arthur Avenue (in the Bronx), and see the same people I grew up with,” Karcinell said. “I made a point to talk badly about any of them because you don’t know how that will turn out in the long run. The more characters you interact with, the more resourceful you become as a person, and when you go through life you meet and engage with all kinds of folks. They are the characters, that impacted my character.”

“Characters” book can be found on Amazon.