The 'Fighting Grandmas': These women over 50 punch, kick and defend themselves

Rodlyn Park isn't the least bit intimidating. She's short — only 5 feet, 3 inches — and weighs just 107 pounds. She's not exactly young, either: she turns 70 in February. But don't be fooled by the Wyckoff resident's small stature or the number of candles on her birthday cake; the blond-haired mother of three and grandmother of four can kick butt with the best of them.

From left: Suzanne Lippe, Rodlyn Park and Maritza Echevarria 

She can hit so hard, in fact, that new classmates at Krav Maga NJ in Ramsey, where she trains three times a week in the hard-core Israeli self-defense art, are shocked at how adept she is, said owner/instructor Tony Racciatti.

"You would have never thought that anybody could talk her into defending herself — but now she'll punch. And it hurts, 'cause she's bony," he said with a laugh.

But Park is not the only woman of a certain age who can hold her own. She's part of what Racciatti calls his "fighting grandmas," a group of women over 50 who train in Krav Maga, which was developed for the famously well-trained Israeli military and combines techniques from boxing, wrestling and a variety of other martial arts with a focus on real-world applications.

"It's not just physical exercise — it's a mental thing for me," Park said, moments after her hourlong class ended on a Tuesday night. "For women, when you get older, your comfort zone starts to shrink. And I don't want my life defined by my comfort zone. I can't stop the physical aging, but I can stop the mental aging."

Suzanne Lippe, an art teacher from Mahwah in her mid-50s, has three daughters and a granddaughter, and began studying martial arts after she was attacked in New York City about 15 years ago. She didn't know how to react, she said, so she panicked and froze. After six years in Krav, she believes it would be different if it happened again.

"At least with Krav Maga, I have a game plan," she said. "You learn to react very quickly and very decisively. And it keeps you completely aware of your surroundings — scanning your environment, making sure no one is following you."

Many women, both young and old, have difficulty with Krav because of the inherent brutality in the techniques — Racciatti often yells things like "Jam your fingers in his eyes!" or "Grab his hair, and then flatten out his nose a little bit!" — but that's what his students are here to learn, he said. (They don't sacrifice safety — all men and women must wear cups at all times, Racciatti said, and many of the most dangerous moves, like eye pokes, are simulated — but the intent is there.)

"The hardest thing for me was learning to actually punch somebody or kick them in the groin," Park said. "For the first couple months Tony would be yelling, 'Rodlyn, kick him in the groin! You can't do the move unless you kick him in the groin!'"

But Racciatti also teaches his students to head off problems before they begin through de-escalation and avoidance by, for instance, quickly getting away from those who invade their personal space.

"Any time you get into a confrontation there's a chance of getting hurt. So we try to avoid them at all costs," he said. "Older women have been around longer, they've seen the stuff that can happen. They don't want bad stuff happening to them, because they know they're a little more vulnerable."

These techniques might have helped Rockland County resident Maritza Echevarria, 54, a mother of two with three grandchildren, when she was kidnapped in the Bronx about 15 years ago. She survived unharmed — the kidnappers meant to snag someone else, she said — but it left quite an impression. She's been doing Krav Maga for the last nine months.

"I was dealing with a man who had a knife," she said. "Knowing what I know today I would have felt much more secure."

As for Park, she's found another benefit: She can share war stories with her 10-year-old grandson, who does tae kwon do.

"Every time I see my grandson, the first thing he says to me is, 'Hey Nana, did you learn any new moves at Krav Maga?" she said. "That's our link now."

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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This Ridgewood chef lived homeless, on the streets of Paterson

Vaughn Crenshaw always loved to cook. It is in his blood, he said — everyone in his family knows how to "put flavors together." But from the moment he saw Emeril Lagasse's cooking show at age 9, he knew the kitchen was his calling.

Four years later, however, he was living on the streets of Paterson, sleeping in an abandoned Volkswagen hatchback on Van Houten Street, hustling and selling drugs just to get by.

"It was a little two-door wagon, a blue joint," he said. "I remember that like it was yesterday. It was hard to stay clean, my clothes were extremely dirty, and I became very upset with anybody who looked at me wrong. I became very aggressive. I felt like nobody wanted me."

His future — if there was to be one — was bleak.

Things are different today. Sporting a shaved head and perfectly coiffed goatee, Crenshaw, 29, is the executive chef at Pearl Restaurant in Ridgewood. He lives in Hackensack with his wife of three months, Erica, and listens to jazz and plays basketball. He teaches conversions — how to use math the way a chef does — at the Paterson Adult and Continuing Education school, and is often involved in food drives in his old hometown.

He swears that cooking is his "savior," and refers to it as "playing" or "dancing." Although he is fond of saying that his is a "typical bottom-to-the-top story," there is little typical about his narrative. His life has always been an uphill fight.

He started out living with his mother, stepfather, and seven brothers and sisters in a tiny apartment next to a crack house on 12th Street in Paterson. At 4 years old, he and one of his brothers were badly burned after a pan of boiling chicken grease and fat fell on them. Third-degree burns covered 70 percent of his body ("The skin was bubbling and exploding"), and he still bears the scars all over his body.

When he was 9, the family moved to Fair Street, but he was kicked out by his mother at age 13 after arguments about him not caring for his siblings the way she expected him to. He lived in the blue hatchback a few blocks away for a year, he said, and he and his teenage friends became "like [drug dealer] Nino Brown in [the 1991 movie] 'New Jack City.' " But he was always looking for a way out.

"I knew there was more to the world, and I knew that I could do more … I just couldn't get there," he said.

That world opened to him at 14 when his mother, believing it would be better for her son, signed him over to his godparents, who lived in Hackensack.

Teacher helped mold him

Crenshaw wasn't used to being outside a six-block radius of his home in Paterson, and still recalls his incredulousness at seeing a black guy talk to a white girl — in Paterson, that wouldn't have happened, he said, admitting that he was "very close-minded."

"I always had the mean frown face on, because the streets build you that way."

His life changed again when he met English teacher Barbara Caruso at Hackensack High School in his freshman year. When he walked in, he could barely spell, said Caruso, who retired in 2005, but when Crenshaw left four years later, he had "taken off." Caruso admits that she was hard on Crenshaw, and many other kids didn't understand why she was pushing him so incessantly — but he understood.

"He had this tremendous desire to improve himself, to improve his circumstances …. There was a light in his eyes," she said. "I was a tough cookie … but I saw that he was willing to take on what I was offering him."

"She didn't cut me any slack," Crenshaw recalled. "If I messed up, she didn't pass me. Every year she was on my back, and she wouldn't take anything less than 'A' material. If it wasn't 'A' material, she would fail me."

He became captain of the football and track teams his senior year, and scholarship money paved the way to Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island (Lagasse's alma mater) where he could focus on his dream of being a chef.

On breaks from school, he'd work at the Stony Hill Inn in Hackensack, where he was hired in 2005 after telling chef Gregory Sutton that he'd work for free just for the experience. Sutton placed him in the banquet hall, and was impressed with what he saw.

"That kid was just talented as hell," Sutton said. "He had the motivation — and passion. And if you're going to work with food, you've got to have passion."

Crenshaw worked there off and on for three years, and after he graduated (with an associate's degree in culinary arts and bachelor's degree in food service management in-hand), he followed Sutton to the Brick House Inn in Wyckoff and became assistant banquet chef.

A year later he took the head chef position at the Caribbean/soul food restaurant Jacksonville in Paterson, but two years later, still had nagging doubts that he'd assumed the top kitchen spot too soon. So he became executive sous chef at Mocha Bleu in Teaneck, where he learned to cook kosher under the watchful eye of the restaurant owner and a rabbi. Although he couldn't make a good matzo ball, his soups and specials "slapped their heads off," and Crenshaw added another skill to a growing list.

"My thing is this: Closed minds equal limitation. I don't like to limit myself. Period," he said. "I think once you get stuck in how things are supposed to be that's when you become confined, and that's as far as you're gonna go."

A year later, he became executive sous chef at Fort Lee's Khloe Bistrot, where he cooked for celebrities like Ice-T and Tahiry Jose from the VH1 show "Love and Hip Hop." In 2012, he landed on an episode of the Food Network's "Chopped," but got cut in the second round after struggling with the odd ingredients and the show's time constraints. His work was below subpar, he said, and he's still disappointed that he wasn't more prepared.

"It was the wake-up call that I needed. At the time I thought I was pretty good and I was a little full of myself. But this was like, 'Listen guy, you're not as good as you thought you were. So what are you going to do about it?' "

He rededicated himself to being a student of cooking, and spends his time searching for new trends by talking to vendors, subscribing to every culinary magazine he can find, and living by the "Flavor Bible" — a well-known index of flavors and ingredients — in a determined effort to get his flavor "on point."

His enthusiasm has become contagious — Alex Garibian, owner and chef at the New Milford Delicatessen, often cooks with Crenshaw for fun at his establishment

"He's a very entertaining guy," Garibian said. "When the dish is done, he's got this ecstasy, this 'Oh my God! This came out so good!' He's a natural chef."

"Food is art at the end of the day," Crenshaw said. "You can mix colors and manipulate things the way you want to … and I was able to create something of my own. You kind of take over the world through someone's palate."

Reconciled with mother

Dishes like his quinoa chicken and red velvet waffles, which have a bourbon cream cheese drizzle on the top, exemplify his style, which, he said, has grown during his year and a half at Pearl Restaurant. The menu has an Italian flair but changes daily, and includes unconventional dishes like duck prosciutto or duck meatballs. In 2014, he started his own catering company, the Jersey City-based Fre Food Catering and Events, which creates customizable menus for events.

His relationship with his mother has also healed, and he now said that being thrown out of the house was "probably the best thing she could have done for me."

"It made me mature very, very early," he said. "Me and my mom have a very good relationship now. We've put that in the past."

But if, somewhere, there's a 13-year-old kid reading this by flashlight in the back of an abandoned car, Crenshaw offered four pieces of advice: Do the work. Be open to change. Take the help people give you. And keep your eye on the prize.

Ignore those, and life is going to be terribly difficult.

Take it from Crenshaw. He learned the hard way.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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