The Fonda Blog

15-Year-Old Cancer Patient Meets Tennis Star Andy Murray

By Laura Rodriguez – Friday, Mar 21, 2014

Kyle Fonda, a 15-year-old battling Hodgkin’s Lymphoma had the opportunity to meet tennis player Andy Murray, thanks to the Make-A-Wish foundation.

Kyle Fonda made a wish and it came true. The 15-year-old with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma met tennis player Andy Murray and also got to practice with the champion on a Sony Open court.  The Make-A-Wish Foundation flew Fonda and his family down from Gloversville, New York, to Miami to make his wish come true.

“It was awesome. To hit with Andy Murray, it was just really cool,” said Kyle Fonda.  The teen was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma six months ago. He is now in remission and was able to make the trip to meet his favorite athlete.

“I hope he has a great day and if I contributed a little bit towards that then great,” said Andy Murray.  Fonda has only been playing tennis for about two years, but Murray says he put on a pretty good match.

“He was better than my hitting partner today, that’s for sure. My hitting partner was making a lot of mistakes. But [Kyle] was good,” joked Murray.  After playing tennis with Murray, posing for pictures, and getting fitted with Fila tennis gear, Kyle received much more than he wished for. The teen also got to watch Rafael Nadal practice and sat in at a press conference with more of the sport’s best players.

“It’s just awesome,” said Fonda.  Kyle also got a tour of the Sony Open Tournament facilities. On Friday, he will have the opportunity to flip the coin prior to Murray’s match.

Wish Granted

His name won’t show up on the Sony Open score sheets, but Kyle Fonda hit some of the most memorable shots against defending champion Andy Murray on Thursday morning.

Kyle Fonda, 15, got to hit balls with his idol, Sony Open defending champion Andy Murray.

Fonda, a 15-year-old from Gloversville, N.Y., has Hodgkin’s lymphoma and spent the day at the tournament through the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Fonda plays tennis for his high school team, and his wish was to attend the Sony Open and meet Murray, his favorite player.

He got to hit with the world No. 6 and attend Murray’s news conference. He also met Federer and Nadal, and attended Serena Williams’ afternoon match. He was outfitted with FILA shoes, shirt, shorts and socks. He will be back Friday night to see Murray begin defense of his Sony title against Matthew Ebden on Stadium Court.

“It was really awesome to meet Andy,” Fonda said. “He took it easy on me. I’ve only been playing tennis for two years, but it’s my favorite sport. When they first told me about this wish being granted, I didn’t believe it. I believed it when we got on the airplane.”

Fonda was accompanied by his father, Tim, mother, Amy, and siblings Josh, 18, and Caitlyn, 11.  Asked what most surprised him about meeting the world’s top tennis players, Fonda smiled and said: “They’re just normal people.”

Consider supporting Make-A-Wish

April 14, 2014 – The Leader Herald

I know a lot of charities are worthy of your attention and contributions, but I want to take this opportunity to tell you about my family’s experience with the Make-A-Wish Foundation. The foundation generously granted a wish for my son Kyle, who is a cancer patient. Kyle, a tennis enthusiast, wished to watch a professional tennis tournament and meet tennis star Andy Murray.

The foundation and its remarkable wish makers and volunteers got right to work on Kyle’s request. They sent Kyle and his immediate family to the Sony Open tennis tournament in Miami. The foundation spent thousands of dollars to fly us from Albany, N.Y., to Miami, put us up in an upscale hotel and give us VIP treatment at the tennis tournament. Kyle not only was able to meet Andy Murray, but actually play tennis with him on a practice court. Kyle also met several other players such as Roger Federer and Serena Williams, and watched several matches with his family. In addition, Kyle played golf at a beautiful golf course and spent an afternoon on Miami Beach, all courtesy of Make-A-Wish.

It’s difficult to put into words how all of this lifted Kyle’s spirits. I am proud to say, on the day Kyle watched Murray defeat one of his opponents and shook Murray’s hand moments after the victory, I realized Andy Murray and Kyle Fonda have at least two things in common: They both enjoy tennis and they both are winners – Andy on the professional tennis tour and Kyle in his fight against cancer.

Everyone we met from Make-A-Wish and the Sony Open were kind, generous and friendly. Everything they did was designed to create happy moments and cherished memories for Kyle, and they succeeded. Kyle beamed with the widest smiles I’ve ever seen him show.

The people at Make-A-Wish are the type who make our world a better place. We didn’t know much about the foundation before our experience with it. It certainly exceeded our expectations. We encourage you to consider supporting this worthwhile organization. Make-A-Wish granted wishes to nearly 14,000 children with life-threatening illnesses in 2012 alone. Its website address is wish.org.

AMY FONDA
Gloversville

written by admin \\ tags: Montgomery Co., New York, Sports

Fonda East Village Opens Next Week

By Florence Fabricant – February 13, 2012, 11:49 am

Roberto Santibañez is replicating Fonda, his three-year old Mexican restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in an East Village space.

Roberto Santibañez is replicating Fonda, his three-year old Mexican restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in an East Village space that is about 50 percent larger, with 60 seats and a menu of well-crafted, richly flavored regional dishes, including Yucatean shrimp, a Guajillo-style burger and chicken from the north with Chihuahua cheese. Crowd-pleasers like taquitos, flautas, braised pork in adobo sauce, and enchiladas suizas are also featured.

Mr. Santibañez said that the Manhattan restaurant, which is to open Feb. 21, will have more bar food and brunch dishes.  “In Brooklyn, this is a neighborhood place, a hangout, and I hope it will be the same in Manhattan,” he said. His commute, on the F train, will be an easy one, too, but he is also depending on cooks who have been with him for years.

Fonda Restaurant, 40 Avenue B (Third Street), Manhattan

“For Mexican food, your prep cooks are the most important,” he said. “They’re the ones who mix the moles and pipians and those are not last-minute sauces. They take time.”  He also plans to feature more mezcals at the bar. He serves only two in Brooklyn, but he thinks that his Manhattan clientele might be more interested in trying them

Fonda, 40 Avenue B (Third Street), (212) 677-4069.

New Fond Glory

Urban Daddy – February 17, 2012

Happy early birthday, George Washington.  Now there was a guy who loved spicy guacamole and hibiscus-infused margaritas.  Wait. It may have been wooden teeth and chopping down cherry trees.  Regardless, we’re sure if he were alive today, he’d want you to have these enchiladas.

A Large Concentration of Enchiladas on Avenue B

Meet Fonda, a Mexican restaurant on Avenue B that has everything you’d want out of a Mexican restaurant on Avenue B. Good queso. Authentic mole. And a big wood bar full of powerful tequila elixirs. And it opens Tuesday.  This place comes to the East Village courtesy of Park Slope (yes, the Yucatán Peninsula of West Brooklyn) and a Latin-blooded chef (the former Rosa Mexicano culinary director) who’s all about the three B’s. Braised meats. Bold salsas. And absolutely no mariachi Bands.

Not that you need an excuse to frequent an establishment that serves slow-stewed duck on soft, warm tortillas, but taking a date here would be a nice idea. See about reserving the lone booth in the house. It’s up front in the red-painted dining room and right next to the bar. Which is key, considering what we’re about to tell you.

These guys do margaritas right. Fresh fruits (guava, mango, pineapple), a touch of orange liqueur and a heavy slug of silver tequila.  Just the way G.W. liked it.

More links: Zagat, Gothamist, Homesite, Menu

written by admin \\ tags: Business, Dining, New York

Ami McKay’s The Virgin Cure

Ami McKay’s debut novel The Birth House was inspired by the former midwife’s home she and her husband bought in Nova ‘Scotia near the Bay of Fundy. Her 2011 novel The Virgin Cure also has a real-life inspiration — McKay’s great-great grandmother was a woman doctor who ministered to the poor in the 1870s in New York’s Lower East Side. Dr. Sarah Fonda MacKintosh was in the first graduating class of the medical school founded by Emily and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first women ever to practise medicine in the U.S.

Nova Scotia writer Amy McKay says she is always looking for women’s stories from the past. (Ian McKay)

Her graduating thesis was on syphilis in young girls and she moved directly into residency at the Blackwell sisters’ infirmary for the poor in Manhattan. The Blackwells’ infirmary was the only hospital that would accept a woman doctor at the time — the medical field considered too crude for ladies. At the time, that part of Manhattan was home to waves of immigrants and destitute people of all backgrounds, and the hospital would have dealt with waves of diphtheria and cholera that killed the very young as well as venereal diseases that blighted the lives of those not much older.

McKay models her character Dr. Sadie on the women doctors of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, but the crusading doctor doesn’t make an appearance until half-way through her new novel. The Virgin Cure is essentially a young girl’s story — of what it was like to grow up poor in a Manhattan teeming with homeless children. McKay told CBC she tried writing about this time, just after the Civil War, from the point of view of her great-great-grandmother. But the voice that emerged was not of an educated woman with a mission among the poor, but an almost illiterate girl who has grown up without love or care.

Portrait of Dr. Sarah Fonda MacKintosh

“I tried writing from a first- or third-person perspective and even from her point of view primarily, and it just … wasn’t hanging together the way I really wanted,” McKay said in an interview in Toronto. “I thought about her role in all of this and how selfless she must have been and then, when I started to think about what role would she want to take in telling this story, I realized the stories she was chasing after in her own life were of these children.”

‘We hear that and it’s in sub-Saharan Africa and it’s around AIDS and we think it’s far from ourselves — it’s easy to dismiss it. But I found it’s part of our history as well.’ —Ami McKay, author of The Virgin Cure

The protagonist is Moth, who is sold into domestic service by her mother the year she turns 12. Cruelly treated by her mistress, she is warned by the kindly butler Nestor to leave the house before the return of the master, who has a taste for young girls. Nestor helps her steal and fence some jewelry, but once the money from that has run out, she is wholly desperate. McKay gives a vivid picture of life on the Lower East Side — the packed tenements, the filth on the streets, the gangs of toughs hanging out together and the complete lack of options for abandoned children.

Moth — her name is from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost — is used to being hungry, to fending for herself and to innovating in the face of want. But she’s also a child, prone to daydreaming of a better life, charmed by pretty things or fascinated by a dime museum of freaks and oddities. She knows she will eventually have to barter her body, though she’s far from sexual maturity, but is content to live in the present, postponing that day as long as she can. Her bleak predicament is offset with short selections from ladies’ magazines and etiquette guides, highlighting the fashions of the day and expected demeanour of young ladies. The picture of the all-American girl created by these excerpts contrasts with the paucity of Moth’s life.

Selling young bodies big business

She falls into the hands of an “infant school,” a brothel specializing in selling off the virginity of young girls. The madam invests both time and money in feeding her, dressing her and teaching her comportment and it is a reputable house, where the gentlemen are checked for disease before they are allowed access to the girls. Moth meets other young girls in training, though she doesn’t seem to make close friends as one would expect with a child so starved for affection. As loathsome as the business seems to modern readers, it was in fact spelled out in great detail in travel guidebooks of the period, which McKay found in New York archives. “It was a big machine in the city at the time. Everyone worked to keep it going — the age of consent was 10, that is astounding to me — that doesn’t change for another decade,” she said.

New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children and Women’s Medical College

The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay is the story of a girl raised in poverty in 1870s Manhattan. The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay is the story of a girl raised in poverty in 1870s Manhattan. Which brings us to the virgin cure — the title of the book refers to the belief, prevalent at the time, that intercourse with a virgin could cure syphilis or gonorrhea. Moth is aware of the bodies of young girls found in poorer parts of the city, raped and killed. Belief in the virgin cure leads to one of the climactic scenes of the book, and helps set the course of Moth’s life. It’s a sordid and wrenching subject, and not even Moth’s matter-of-fact point of view makes the scene easy to read. McKay is forcing readers to face an unpalatable fact of 19th-century life that she herself discovered by combing through archives of the period.

The parallel with the myth, circulating in the developing world today, that sex with a virgin can cure AIDS, is one of the touchstones of McKay’s story. “We hear that and it’s in sub-Saharan Africa and it’s around AIDS and we think it’s far from ourselves — it’s easy to dismiss it,” McKay said. “But I found it’s part of our history as well.” McKay said she herself refused to believe the practice was so prevalent in the 1870s, until a doctor at the downtown hospital that replaced the Blackwells’ infirmary pointed out the significance of the title of her own great-great-grandmother’s thesis. McKay has no diaries or letters from Dr. Sarah Fonda MacKintosh, nor does she have the thesis itself, only the title. If the crusading doctor had been writing about congenital syphilis, she would have studied both boys and girls, and if she had been talking about prostitutes, her title would have been syphilis in young women. But Dr. MacKintosh wrote about syphilis in young girls — girls used and discarded and faced with a bleak, unhealthy future because there was no cure.

Pot-boiler of a read

As in The Birth House, McKay uses spritely storytelling to draw readers into this world. Her dialogue is true to the period and her description enough to quickly paint scenes without an excess word. The Birth House became a best-seller by word of mouth — passed from mothers to daughters to grandmothers and snapped up by book clubs. The author says that success bought her time to write this book. Despite its gruesome subject, The Virgin Cure is a quick pot-boiler of a read and will appeal to the same audience — people interested in the real world of women 140 years ago.

McKay said she is fascinated with women’s stories from history. “There are so many accounts of men’s lives, men’s work. There are accounts or diaries and you can find them easily. Whereas with women’s lives, I felt a real sense of having to track them down and then I found there are a lot of missing pieces. That’s where fiction came in, filling in those gaps,” she said.

Links: Find-A-Grave

written by admin \\ tags: History, New York, Professional

I was back east last month (September 2009) and I took three days to go cemetery hopping in Upstate New York, taking as many photos of Fonda gravestones as I could.  I hit 11 cemeteries in 5 counties and shot about 150 gravestones of Fonda’s, most of which have not been taken before, to my knowledge.  Here is the list… if you would like any of these images I would be glad to forward a high-res file, or you can wait until I get them all posted on Find-A-Grave in med-res within the next month (now done).  I have about 110 Fonda gravestone photos already posted there from various sources.  I appreciate all those who have contributed to this collection.  Special thanks to Adrienne Buckland Knight who accompanied me at the Caughnawaga and Evergreen cemeteries and to Darlene and Larry Nielsen who pointed me in the right direction in Albany.  Here are a few of the nicer gravestone photos which I just took:

[Show as slideshow]

written by admin \\ tags: Cemeteries, Fonda Family, New York

excerpt from The Story of Old Fort Johnson:

Many tales are told of that dreadful night, when the unsuspecting inhabitants of the Hill were aroused from their peaceful slumbers to seek safety in flight from the Indians and the equally cruel Tories (whose fiendish natures had been aroused in this cruel partisan war by the example of the Butlers and Johnsons), or to meet a cruel death by tomahawks and scalping knives in the hands of these ruthless marauders. A story is told of the subsequent part of this raid, which was continued up the valley. Having destroyed the residence of Col. Fisher, who was scalped and left for dead, and his two brothers, John and Herman, killed, they proceeded to the house of Adam Fonda, which was pillaged and destroyed, and Mr. Fonda captured. Before the house was burned one of the Tories stole a large and massive copper tea-kettle, which he filled with butter and hid in the water under the bridge near by, expecting to return that way and get it, but the militia gathering in the rear of Sir John Johnson forced him to return by the way of Johnstown. After the war this kettle was found, and returned to the family of Adam Fonda, and is now in possession of the family of his granddaughter, Mrs. John. H. Striker, of Tribes Hill.

The Jelles Fonda Copper Kettle. A Revolutionary Relic.

It was for the purpose of obtaining a photograph of this interesting relic of the times that tried men’s souls that we made our visit to Tribes Hill.

written by admin \\ tags: History, Montgomery Co., New York, Revolutionary War