David Pechefsky: Green Candidate for City Council, 39th District

[From: Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn. David Pechefsky's campaign web site.]

Breakfast-of-Candidates (39th Edition): David Pechefsky

title="pechefsky" src="http://www.pechefskyforcitycouncil.com/images/david_pechefsky.jpg" alt="pechefsky" width="300" height="438">When I walked into Purity Diner on Seventh Avenue, David Pachefsky, the Green candidate for the City Council in the 39th district, waved me to the back, where he was sitting. The most casually dressed of the candidates, he was wearing a comfortable looking brown sweater and a scarf and ordered "two eggs over easy. Isn't that a style? No meat."

David, age 40, an extremely disarming and likable person is also fun to talk to. He told me that he grew up in my neck of the woods, the Upper West Side (110th Street and Riverside Drive). As a kid he had a keen interest in the work of garbage men; he and his dad, who was a professor of literature at CUNY, would follow them around the neighborhood. His mom, "a farm girl from Eastern Kansas, studied literature in graduate school, and worked as a copy-editor and substitute teacher."

When he was 5, his family moved to a house in Patchogue, Long Island, where his mother grew strawberries and David remembers catching toads. His father, who was Bronx-born with a thick Bronx accent, never learned to drive and grew to dislike the suburbs after losing his teaching job during the CUNY budget crisis of 1975.

At Duke University and Hunter College, David studied international politics and became obsessed with the idea of fairness in the world. "Why are some countries poor? Why are some people poor?"

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