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Local Octogenarian Has Songs And Poems In Her Heart
No stranger to music, Wakal was a member of the Canarsie Reformed Church choir for more than a decade during the 1950s and 60s. For six years she performed with the Brooklyn chapter of the Sweet Adelines, an international organization of women singers and one of the world's largest singing organizations, which sings a cappella to old-fashioned barbershop tunes. Wakal sang with the group at area nursing homes and participated in competitions with other regional Sweet Adeline groups. She was also in charge of costumes, for which she won awards. The climax of Sweet Adelines years came in 1983 when the group performed at the Brooklyn Bridge Centennial celebration. It was Wakal's costumes that got the Brooklyn chapter the invitation to participate. Wakal's family moved here from Rochester when she was three and has been living at the same East 96th Street house ever since. In 1946 she married Joseph Wakal, a native of Indiana, who worked as a ship steward on an oil tanker and was at sea for months at a time. The couple met earlier when his ship was docked at the South Street Seaport. After the ship sailed, the two wrote each other letters and eventually married, and lived at her Canarsie residence. They operated a deli - Joe's Store - in the front of their house from 1947 until 1978. Joseph also worked for a couple of years as a cook at Ebbets Field for the Brooklyn Dodgers. For a time before her husband died, a week before 9/11, Wakal found solace in writing poems, some of which were published in a book, "Meditations in Rhythm and Rhyme." After he died, Wakal received $1,000 insurance money from his union. Knowing that she would use the money to pay bills, her son implored her to "get something for herself," so she purchased her first computer. Though he lived with his family in Pennsylvania, her son taught her how to use the computer by phone and it ended up helping her songwriting. When Wakal was with the Sweet Adelines, she took a course in arranging four-part harmony, which led to her writing song lyrics and copyrighting them. One song, "Turn It Off," a mix of country rock with a bluegrass flavor, was subsequently purchased by HillTop Records and included on the newly-released, Proud to be an American album. HillTop then asked Wakal for a Christmas song, but she missed the record company's deadline.
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