Joel Cairo/for New York Daily News
Dog owned by Ritchie (the Baker) Krins barks in his Brooklyn backyard. His owner drowned in Hurricane Sandy.
This is a tale of two bachelors — Ritchie (the Baker) Krins, 67, and John Czap, 65 — who lived separately and alone except for their faithful dogs on a narrow backwater street ominously named Dare Court in Gerritsen Beach.
Both wound up on a blind date with a femme fatale named Sandy.
Only one survived that infamous Monday night when the killer hurricane roared ashore with 14-foot swells out of a hidden sapphire called the Gerritsen Inlet and the charming Gerritsen Canal, lined with private backyard docks in this old, predominantly Irish-American fishing village in Brooklyn.
The wind-driven waves rushed down the labyrinth of Gerritsen streets and lanes, crashing into the brick and wood-frame one- and two-family homes, devouring cars and other vehicles and storming the basements where the foul waters rose to the 8-foot ceilings on a crazy spin cycle that swirled furniture, clothing, kitchen appliances, hot water heaters, and everything and everyone in its path into a rampaging night of indiscriminate carnage.
“Ritchie the Baker was a quiet, keep-to-himself kind of guy,” says Paul Sarubbi, an FDNY firefighter whose family owns the popular Tamaqua bar and restaurant and boat marina on Ebony Ave., a sprawling place that was the Gerritsen Village Hall until 1921 when his grandfather arrived from Florence, Italy, bought the place and made it into a restaurant that has remained in the family since.
PHOTOS: HURRICANE SANDY THROUGH THE LENSES OF THE NEWS' PHOTOGRAPHERS
“Ritchie got his nickname because he worked as a baker in Golden Crust bakery off Ralph Ave. here in Brooklyn and lived alone in the basement apartment of the house he grew up in on Dare Court,” says Sarubbi. “He was a regular in the Tamaqua, a really nice, gentle guy who was born with some rare skin disorder that often made him break out in boils and blisters. He was self-conscious of it and probably why he was a bachelor. But he loved a good time, a few cold ones, and the ’80s and ’90s music our live bands play in the Tamaqua.”
On the night of Sandy, the water rushed into the Tamaqua and 20 diehard regulars retreated to the 6-foot-high stage to keep on drinking as striped bass literally swam around the bar. Electricity was restored with the help of Sarubbi’s backup generator.
Ritchie the Baker wasn’t one of them. “The way I heard it from people who saw him that night, Ritchie was really concerned about his dog in the storm,” says Sarubbi.
I ask what the dog’s name was. “Funny, I have no idea, and I used to feed that crazy dog every day when Ritchie was in the hospital for two weeks in the summer when his skin got real bad. The dog is a mixed German shepherd mutt that barked and growled at everybody, including me when I went in to feed him. But the dog was Ritchie’s sole companion in life and on the night of the storm, several people told me they saw Ritchie try to get into a local church where people went for shelter before the storm. But he was turned away because they wouldn’t allow the growling dog in.”
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NydnRss/~3/1rQYg7izIqE/story01.htm
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