Barry Farnol, a junkman's son from Poughkeepsie, was an accomplished academic, theater professional and ad agency owner who also wrote fiction on the side. He died at 81 in 1989.
Barry Farnol with his daughter, J. Thalia Cunningham, pose in front of the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. She recently discovered a box full of his stories and published them last month.
BETHLEHEM — The cardboard boxes sat untouched for 32 years in a Delmar basement, alongside “a few desiccated hairballs vomited up by our cats, effluvia from my long-deceased hairballs” and other forgotten stuff.
A flooded basement two years ago led Dr. J. Thalia Cunningham to bring the boxes out of the dank shadows and upstairs into daylight. She made an astonishing discovery: dozens of unpublished short stories and two novels written by her late father, Barry Farnol, who died in 1989 at age 81.
“It wasn’t that it was a secret, but he was busy running his ad agency and I was busy with medical school and residency and we just never talked about his fiction writing,” said Cunningham, 70, who retired in 2010 as chief of emergency medicine at Stratton VA Medical Center to pursue playwriting.
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Cunningham edited and self-published last month a collection of her father’s stories, “The Basement Bar Mitzvah: Twentieth Century American Life Explored in the Collected Short Stories of Barry Farnol” (The Troy Book Makers).
“I think he would be pleased with this book,” Cunningham said. “He didn’t write the stories to get noticed. Fiction writing was something he did to expand his creativity. The stories were his way of exploring his thoughts, the world and his place in it.”
Born Jacob Feinstein in Poughkeepsie in 1908, he was one of nine children whose parents emigrated at the turn-of-the-century from Vitebsk in Belarus........