By Finy Hansen
Lev Barinov kayaking in rough waters
It is 9 on a Thursday evening, and the whitewater kayaking class at Philadelphia Canoe Club has just ended.
One of the instructors, Lev Barinov, comes uphill from the Schuylkill with his kayak slung over one shoulder. A short, energetic 76-year-old man with a gray beard and an impish grin, he speaks with a strong Russian accent.
How did a Jewish immigrant from a coal mining town in the Ural Mountains become an active player in this historic club that began a century ago as a drinking and boating society for proper Philadelphia gentlemen?
Like all Philadelphia stories, it’s not quite that simple. When Barinov arrived in 1975, Philadelphia Canoe Club, in East Falls, was experiencing a sea change. Gone were the days when white males from old families sat around the huge fireplace in the converted mill house, smoking cigars and playing cards. By 1970, women were finally admitted to full membership (rather than being allowed only as guests at special events), and in 1978, the club elected its first woman “commodore.” Diversity had arrived.
Engineer at Fox Chase
Not that Lev Barinov knew any of this when he joined. A graduate of a prestigious technical university in Moscow, he had reluctantly left a good job and emigrated to the U.S. at his wife’s urging. They settled in Philadelphia, and his daughter Irina, who was fluent in English, attended the University of Pennsylvania. Barinov, on the other hand, struggled with the language while working as a city engineer. After a couple of years, he landed a job as director of engineering and construction at Fox Chase Cancer Center, staying for many years.
“But what I really cared about was kayaking,” he said. In Russia, he and a friend had practiced in a fold-up boat. Now he could have a “real” kayak (currently, he has three). In 1977, he joined Philadelphia Canoe Club.
Today, his life revolves around the club, which has elected him an honorary “life member.” In summer, he is one of the instructors and organizes whitewater trips to Maine and Ontario and to the Youghiogheny, “the best whitewater river in Pennsylvania.” Every winter he leads a club ski trip to Vermont and teaches snowboarding at the Blue Mountain ski resort in Pennsylvania.
Barinov is certified as an instructor by the American Canoe Association, and has additional certification to train instructors. “I love to teach, it’s challenging,” he says, “especially difficult students. I love to share my knowledge, my skills. What I enjoy most is when the students get better than me!”
‘Likes to be busy’
In 2001, Barinov retired from Fox Chase but continued working part-time. Now he is fully retired and is “looking around,” he says. “I like to be busy. My friends are all younger, and all work.”
What does he look forward to most in the years ahead? “I want to learn something totally new,” he says. “Maybe canoeing. Maybe ocean kayaking. Maybe French.”
His voice rises with excitement. Reluctantly, he packs his things, puts his kayak in the shed and gets ready to head home. It feels as though he is leaving a place he loves and does not want to go.
She still serves on missions abroad
for U.S. State Dept.
By Kitty Baker
Joyce Marshall with memorabilia
'from countries over the course of my career'
Joyce Marshall, 79, lives in Center City, except for a few months every year, when she is working in distant parts of the world.
Her résumé reads like an adventure story. Born in Pittsburgh, she spent years living abroad with her British diplomat husband and their four children in Britain, the Soviet Union, Finland and Sri Lanka (Ceylon). After the marriage broke up, she returned to the United States.
At 55, after a few years as an education program analyst at the University of California, Berkeley, she shifted gears dramatically, and joined the United States Foreign Service.
Assigned to 9 nations
One assignment was working on the Orderly Departure Program for Vietnamese Refugees in Bangkok, Thailand, and in Ho Chi Minh City. The North Vietnamese had agreed to the transporting to the U.S. of Vietnamese who had sided with the U.S. (and faced or endured years of “re-education”) and the often-despised progeny of U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese women.
At 65, not ready for mandatory retirement, Marshall moved into a new stage of her career. She has received U.S. State Department assignments in nine countries, including Cuba, Holland, Qatar, Vietnam and the former Soviet Union. She speaks Russian and is fond of the people and culture, even though, in 1954, she spent four hours in a Soviet jail, accused of photographing the Stalin Auto Works.
Marshall remembers, with pride, serving as temporary consul general and acting deputy consul general. Not all assignments are ego trips. There’s “grunt work”: interviewing visa applicants or notarizing documents for American citizens. Sometimes it’s helping U.S. citizens cope with misfortunes — illness, death, or lost or stolen passports or valuables.
Assisted in adoptions
One favorite job was helping Americans adopt children from Kiev and Hanoi. There were visits to Vietnamese rice farmers to check claims, usually specious, they had found abandoned infants who were eligible for adoption.
Keeping up with Joyce Marshall’s assignments over the years requires an atlas. As a Foreign Service officer (1985-94), she served in London, Leningrad and Bangkok. For 14 years since mandatory retirement, she has served as a “consular officer” in St. Petersburg, the former Leningrad; Ashgabad, Turkmenistan; Vladivostok, Russia; Moscow; Kiev, Ukraine; Havana, Cuba; Amsterdam; Bucharest, Romania; Hanoi, Vietnam; and Tbilisi, Georgia, where she fell and fractured two bones in her wrist and hand.
Fully recovered, she is raring to go on another assignment, but only after visiting York, England, for a daughter’s wedding in late August.
Vet has fond memories of ‘The Waffleman’
By John Oliver Mason
Joe 'Bag-a-Doughnuts' Sbaraglia in the Melrose Diner: 'Things had changed.'
Just about everyone in South Philadelphia knows “Joe Bag-a-Doughnuts.”
He writes a nostalgia column, “The Waffleman,” in the weekly Philadelphia Public Record, and has written a series of books on what South Philadelphia was like “way back when.”
A neighborhood block captain and judge of elections, an enthusiastic Freemason, an adult leader of Boy Scout Troop 248 and usher at St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church and a member of the Fourth Police District Advisory Board, Joe Sbaraglia attends about 20 meetings a month in the neighborhood, sometimes as many as three a day.
Sbaraglia visits sick and homebound fellow-Masons, and “never arrives with empty hands.” When one friend’s daughter announced a visitor with a “bag of doughnuts,” that became Sbaraglia’s nickname.
For 18 years, Sbaraglia has been donating blood. “A friend’s son had blood cancer,” he recalls, “and had a transfusion. He’s still alive. People live because I donate — it’s as simple as that.”
Recalling the waffleman
Born 69 years ago and raised near 11th and Mifflin Sts., Joseph Sbaraglia graduated from South Philadelphia High School in 1957. Three days later, he joined the Air Force and worked “here, there and everywhere” in a career that spanned 12 years, including two in Vietnam. Then he joined the Air National Guard, retiring as a master sergeant. For 26 years, he was a switching technician for Bell Telephone Co., working out of the building at Broad and Passyunk before retiring in 1996.
“When I came home from the Air Force,” he says, “things had changed, and familiar places were gone. I started writing notes to myself, such as ‘There used to be a movie theater here.’ One day, at a party, I told someone about the waffleman, who came to the neighborhood making waffles, then put ice cream on them for kids to eat.
“Someone at the party said, ‘I never heard of all of this stuff, why doesn’t somebody write a book about it?’ That started my career.”
In print and on the air
Eight years ago, Sbaraglia began his nostalgia column for the Public Record. He has also appeared on radio and TV, has written for the South Philadelphia American, and has spoken about the old days in South Philadelphia at schools, Masonic lodges, restaurants and senior centers.
Do younger people want to know how their grandparents lived?
“That’s why I wrote the books, not for me,” says Sbaraglia, a widower who has three sons and nine step-grandchildren. “Things I knew and enjoyed and recall, I hope young people will read about, and say, ‘Wow, that must have been great.’ “
Sbaraglia has published five volumes of the “Waffleman” series. The first came out 14 years ago, Sbaraglia says, “and I’m still selling them.”
You can order a single copy ($7) or the entire set ($25) by contacting Joseph A. Sbaraglia at 1815 S. Watts St., Phila., PA, 19148-2124.