Of Conspiracy, Respect, Poetry, and the Last Hurrah!

Kasey Cox

Before the popularization of the Internet, before the phenomenon of The X-files, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was Andy Winiarczyk, of “The Last Hurrah Bookshop”. Nearly twenty years ago, Andy Winiarczyk (pronounced “Win - AR – zik”) began amassing books and selling them to interested customers via mail-order. The books now fill the Williamsport location he calls home and store, and many of his customers find him by Internet and national reputation.
Andy’s collection focuses mainly on American history and politics from the 1950’s through the 1970’s. Specifically, Andy’s customers come to him – from all over the country – for books, media, and information on assassinations, the Kennedy family, the history of the American Intelligence community, conspiracy theories, Cuba, and organized crime.

If you google Winiarczyk or “The Last Hurrah”, you will see that many people meet Andy at conferences on the JFK assassination, in Dallas or Washington, D.C.; or on Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis; or RFK in Los Angeles. He regularly has a booth at these conferences, where he is known as a fantastic resource for the sheer amount of books that have been published on these subjects, the historical era surrounding them, and the people involved. The presenters at the conferences may show excerpts from a new documentary on the members of the Warren Commission, or read from a paper discussing the community of Cuban exiles in the U.S. in the early 1960’s. Andy himself has spoken on the reasons the JFK assassination continues to have such a hold on the American mind, and why it was such a turning point in the way Americans looked at their country.

What do these people have in common? Not as much as you’d think. As Andy tells me in his often quite poetic manner, his clientele are “not the kingdom of the lonely and the paranoid”. They include historians, college professors, forensic scientists, authors, filmmakers, journalists, librarians, and genealogists. He does regular business with retired members of various intelligence agencies, and has helped provide books for the library that the FBI maintains. The people who seek Andy as a resource – whether they are professional scholars or folks who work at the grocery store and read history passionately in their spare time – share what Andy calls “a fever at the core”.

So what’s the difference between Andy’s colleagues and our local Pennsylvania Bucktail re-enactors? Certainly, both have a passion for history. Andy and I mull this question a little, and he suggests it has to do with the point in time when “current events” become “history”. Other factors are how people feel about the government, and how much they trust the sources of the stories they are given. We talk also of the “history in both directions” of the events of the 1960’s. Andy speaks knowledgeably on the roots of the CIA, (the Office of Strategic Service, formed during WWII), and the books coming in now about 9/11.

For my own curiosity, I ask Andy the question every bookseller and bibliophile wants to know: what are you reading now? “The books I most recently finished and enjoyed were two Gary Trudeau books about the injured folks coming home from Iraq,” [“The Long Road Home” and “The War Within: One More Step at a Time”] he answers. “I found them thought-provoking and respectful.” I would say the same of Andy Winiarcyzk.


Contact info, location for “The Last Hurrah”

Andrew “Andy” Winiarczyk, proprietor
937 Memorial Ave
Williamsport, PA 17701
Phone/FAX: (570) 321-1150
http://www.lasthurrahbookshop.com/



Info on Kasey Cox, journalist extraordinaire (ha, ha!!), fledging writer for “Mtn Home”
Co-owner of “from my shelf books”, 87 Main St, Wellsboro, PA 16901
Phone: (570) 724-5793 email: from_my_shelf@yahoo.com