Virus: A new generation of heroes

You ever walk into a room and forget why you went in there?

OK, probably not the bathroom.

I started today’s column about the moves, some life changing, one makes during life because in my mind I had a connection to the Great Isolation, the pandemic we are now fighting.

As sometimes happens, the connection was broken.

But I think there’s a lesson in here anyway. 

Among the dozen moves I made in my life, only two were life-changing: My 1966 move from New York City to Philadelphia, at a time when no one was moving to Philadelphia, especially from New York, the center of the universe.

The other significant move was in 1957 from a tenement in the South Bronx to the Marlboro city housing project in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, and that’s quite a scary name for a community. Gravesend and neighboring Bensonhurst were home base for Mafioso before they moved up and out to Long Island.

That trauma of my move was intense. Although it was still in New York City, the distance between the Bronx and the ass end of Brooklyn, just outside Coney Island, was so great — two hours by subway — it discouraged visits from Bronx friends. 

So I lost them, and because the project prohibited pets, my parents were forced to give away the dog of my youth. Having to surrender her to strangers when she was past her prime brings tears to my eyes today, 60 years later.

It’s hard to explain why. 

The two benefits of the move: I got my own bedroom for the first time, my sister got hers and my parents no longer had to sleep in the living room, which was common in the South Bronx.

The other thing: I would be a Dodgers fan, as I had laid down my allegiance to the New York Yankees, the Bronx Bombers, after they had mistreated some of my heroes.

But just as I moved to Brooklyn, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and I have hated them with furnace heat ever since then. No team had been so attached to the community as the Dodgers, known as the Bums,  a team of heroes that had integrated the majors a decade earlier with the immortal Jackie Robinson, backed by players like Pee Wee Reese, Carl Furillo, and Duke Snider. 

But I digress.

It was a sad, four-year wait until the New York Mets were launched in 1964, insanely supported by reflagged Dodger fans who could never bring themselves to cheer for the Yankees. 

In 1966, I left my beloved Mets and my beloved New York to take a job in Philly and turned to the wretched Phillies enterprise. Three years after I left, in 1969, the Mets won the World Series. By coincidence a Met, Tug McGraw, led the Phillies to its first world championship in 1980. About 10 years later, McGraw threatened to sue me for calling him a deadbeat dad, which he had been. The suit went nowhere. 

Between 1966 and today I have lived in Philadelphia except for my first year here when I rented a house in Yeadon. The best thing about that was that I got to be a volunteer firefighter with the excellent Yeadon volunteer fire department.  

At the time, my father-in-law was a lieutenant in the FDNY and he was stunned that Yeadon’s equipment was better than what he had in his Brooklyn firehouse, Engine 255.

I spent a weekend living with 255 for a big spread I did for the local weekly newspapers. That’s where I learned that breathing smoke is almost like drowning. Every boy wants to be a firefighter sometime in his youth, so I lived my dream for a weekend.

With the pandemic we are living through, I think a new generation or kids will idolize medical workers, the soldiers on the front lines of our Great Isolation. They are our new heroes.

And I guess that is where I wanted this column to go.