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Stephanie Farr

@FarFarrAway

5 Nov

A Philly community center has an old-fashioned mystery on their hands and they're seeking someone in the Philly area with the knowledge and devices (blow torches? industrial drills?) who would be willing to volunteer their time to bust open a safe (a thread):

Staff at the community center (which for now shall go unnamed so people don't show up at their door with blow torches) discovered the safe in the back of a closet last month. Nobody knows how long it has been there. It'd been turned around so people couldn't see the front...

....so nobody knew it was a safe. They just assumed it was a rusted mechanical device with wheels they couldn't move for many years.

But when a junk removal company came in & a very large man finally got it to budge, the staff realized they had a mystery safe on their hands.

Read 9 tweets

Stephanie Farr

@FarFarrAway

9 Mar

As promised, I'm going to do a thread of some of the amazing things I couldn't squeeze into Tom Garvey's incredible story of how he lived inside an abandoned concession stand at Veterans Stadium for three years. So hold on to your butts, here we go:

inquirer.com/news/the-secre…

While Tom did initially keep the apartment a secret, as the years passed he'd share his story with friends and strangers whenever the Vet came up in conversation.

But very few people believed him.

"If I was telling a total stranger about this at the beer distributor, after a while I could see it doesn’t hold up against reality," he said. "I’d look at their faces & see the incredulity. I get it. I wouldn’t believe it either."

HE WAS TELLING PEOPLE THIS AT BEER DISTRIBUTORS

Read 25 tweets

Stephanie Farr

@FarFarrAway

13 Jan

Adam McNeil, 34, rents out entire laundromats to allow Black Philly moms to do their family's clothes for free, and he gave away 25,000 diapers, 2 fridges and 2 sets of washers & dryers to Black Philly moms in the last six months alone (a thread):

inquirer.com/news/sistatalk…

Here’s the thing about about McNeil's program, SistaTalkPHL: It doesn’t have a fancy executive board or big donors — it’s just got McNeil, his unemployment checks, and donations from people who believe in his grassroots work.

McNeil himself has a hell of a story, having spent nearly a decade of his life in prison and having survived getting into a near-death car wreck.

"I have taken so much in my life," he told me. "Now, I just want to give."

Read 10 tweets

Stephanie Farr

@FarFarrAway

13 Aug 20

@MattRKay

One of Philly's most incredible teachers, @MattRKay, who also founded Philly's slam poetry league for teens, is getting dragged through it on Twitter b/c Fox News picked up on some of his tweets about virtual learning & open discussion of race & gender in the classroom (thread)

Matt's very valid concerns revolve around whether parents may try to listen in on the conversations he has with his students & how that might make the students less likely to open up. Classrooms can often be safe spaces to talk about what you can't talk about at home.

Matt pushes his students to have these conversations about race and sexuality - sometimes conversations that they've never had before.

And you know what - he's eminently qualified to do so. HE LITERALLY WROTE A BOOK ON IT.

amazon.com/Not-Light-but-…

Read 12 tweets

Stephanie Farr

@FarFarrAway

4 Jun 20

(Part II of my thread of my conversation with Herbert Hawkins): Under Rizzo "Police harassment was a normal thing. I think in a lot of cases it was something they felt they was supposed to do. There was a special unit called civil disobedience. We got to be quite personal w/them"

"They knew all of us, we knew all of them. It was very hostile. They didn’t like us. We didn’t like them. There was blacks in the unit. They thought we were anarchists, we thought they were pigs. "

I asked what he thought of this year's protests:

"It gives me some hope but I know there’s so many different ills that plague the black community that police brutality is only one aspect. It might be the most detrimental because they take black lives."

Read 14 tweets

Stephanie Farr

@FarFarrAway

4 Jun 20

@RobertSkvarla

(A thread): Yesterday, I asked whose reaction you wanted to hear about the removal of the Rizzo statute. @RobertSkvarla suggested one of the Black Panthers who were stripped naked & arrested at Rizzo's command in 1970.

This is Herbert Hawkins, 71. He was one of those men.

Here's some background on the totally unfounded, dehumanizing, racists raids across Black Panther offices in the city on that day in 1970 in Philadelphia.

explorepahistory.com/displayimage.p…

Herbert invited me, a stranger, into his Brewerytown home yesterday - during a pandemic - to talk about his recollections, his thoughts on Rizzo and what's going on today for 45 minutes.

Read 25 tweets

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