Forty Shades of Green: The Junkman of Brooklyn

By Joan Flynn Beesley

Come with me on a journey across time and space. Across the landscape of today's Denver, Ireland in the mid-1800's and Brooklyn, New York in the early 1900's, to meet the "Forty Shades of Green". Meet Michael Flynn, the frail, coughing 3 year old boy fleeing the Famine and the English in County Leitrim, making his way up to Amity Street from the Brooklyn Harbor. Walk the streets as he and his father collect hawsers from the immigrant ships to sell for scrap. Listen to the sounds of the ships on the East River by his warehouse, the sounds of his horse-drawn wagon as he, now a teenager, collects old pots and pans from his neighbors to sell for scrap. Take a good look at his evolution to a canny Irish businessman, now in a top hat, pin-striped suit and gold watch fob, "intimate" with senators and politicians of The Democratic Brooklyn Ring, equivalent of Tammany Hall, yet equally active and charitable in The Emerald Society, The St. Patrick Day Parade and The Knights of Columbus. Watch the building of the Brooklyn Bridge as he rises from "Junk Man" to wealthy scrap metal industrialist. Hear the humanitarian decision he made during The Great Depression which in turn, made him a millionaire. Watch as he salvages anything metal, from submarines, Brooklyn "L" lines to the Huntington and many other WWI destroyers, even buying, and then selling the Normandy, back to the Navy as scrap for profit. Told by his great-grand daughter, "Forty Shades of Green" is both a biography and autobiographical novel, recounting also the events beyond his death at 88, how the now-stern Irishman, confined to bed with arthritis, moved up to Prospect Park, passing his global aluminum and steel window business along to his sons and grandsons after WWI and WWII. Is the magic, talent and entrepreneurship of the family patriarch passed down through the Flynn family, the "Forty Shades of Green"? No stranger to terrorism, read the touching ending as Michael Flynn alters the destiny of the author herself.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1491274077
• ISBN13: 9781491274071
• Release Date: December 2014
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 338 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"