South Brooklyn Profiles: Henry Stella

Henry Stella
I'm always amazed at ways city people adjust to their straitened circumstances, partaking in activities usually reserved for the hearty people of Oregon or Montana. In New York we have men and women who kayak on Buttermilk Channel, climb rocks at the Chelsea Piers; Rockaway Park surfers. (The two canoers I once saw on the Gowanus Canal seem simply foolish). In our neighborhood, Henry Stella is a worthy example of this urban ingenuity. Henry rides his bike, a metallic banana- seated affair, around the neighborhood. Instead of hitting the heavily trafficked Brooklyn streets Henry, meticulous and slender with white wavy hair, takes advantage of his proximity to Carroll Gardens Park, an asphalt-covered city block with basketball courts, a baseball field (the two run together like the living-dining rooms of 1970s house design), playgrounds, bocce courts, and benches. Gardens border the little park that could arguably be called the center of that part of the neighborhood. Henry himself is a regular feature of the park, mounting his two-wheeler and repeatedly circling the basketball-baseball zone, oblivious to children playing. After a while, he slides out of the park, up the block, and back again for another few BMX laps.
Henry and his wife Clara care about music, deeply. When WQEW was still on the air, Henry would listen carefully, occasionally going to events sponsored by the station, the only New York-area outlet for what the station called "popular standards," Tin Pan Alley masterworks. We've talked at length about Rosemary Clooney, Vic Damone, a few other singers less well known, the loquacious deejay Jonathan Schwartz. Henry, in fact, has a kind of Perry Como calm as he sits on his stoop or cleans the sidewalk in front of his house, which he often does. We frequently return to our great shared subject, Frank Sinatra. On a visit to California once, Henry and his wife, Clara, went to Frank's grave site. It was just a few months after Sinatra's death and Henry willingly supplied me with as many details as possible: the simplicity of the site, its nearness to Sinatra's parents.
Clara, from a town near Naples in Italy, has lived in Carroll Gardens since she was a teenager. In fact, the very house she lives in belonged to her parents. She and Henry travel a lot: they recently took an Alaskan cruise and they go to California once a year when possible. During the Korean War, Henry, an airplane mechanic in the Marines, had hoped to be sent to a base in El Toro, California for more training. "If not there, then I wanted a cruise on a Navy ship that had Marine planes. My third choice was North Carolina." He got sent to North Carolina because the marines didn't want to have to pay for his trip back to New York after his tour was done.
He and Clara's son, Robert, is an airplane mechanic too. Henry still can't believe that his son chose a field he himself loved so much. "I'll never forget one time. I felt such a sensation in my body, I guess. I went out to LaGuardia and I saw him out there pushing a plane out, and he had the headphones on and he was talking to the captain, and I was so....I couldn't believe it! I was looking with binoculars and I said, 'Clara, look, it's Robert!' He didn't know we'd be there. I couldn't believe my son was directing this huge plane, such a big responsibility. Then I started worrying if he was doing it right."
Although Robert, who lives on Long Island, shares his father's love of planes and Sinatra, he has taken up fishing, a sport too slow, and perhaps too rural, for Henry's taste.

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This project is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Development Fund of BAC/Brooklyn Arts Council, Inc., which is made possible with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.