2/23/09: Barnicle recaps the 2009 Academy Awards.
Listen here: https://barnicle.969fmtalk.mobi/2009/02/23/22309-oscars.aspx
“Barnicle’s View”, with Mike Barnicle, Imus in the Morning, Monday-Wednesday-Friday, 6:55a & 8:55a.
7/9/08: Fun Story for the Summer: Alex Rodriguez and Madonna
Listen here: https://barnicle.969fmtalk.mobi/2008/07/09/7908-fun-story-for-the-summer.aspx
“Barnicle’s View”, with Mike Barnicle, Imus in the Morning, Monday-Wednesday-Friday, 6:55a & 8:55a.
Mike Barnicle will kick off the 2008 Geschke Lecture series on July 7, 8 p.m., at the Nantucket High School auditorium. Barnicle will address the theme of this year’s series which is “A Country At The Crossroads: Critical Issues Facing America.”
Barnicle is an award-winning writer and media personality. He is a political analyst for MSNBC and a frequent contributor, and occasional guest host, on the network’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” and “Morning Joe.” Barnicle can also been seen regularly on NBC’s “Today Show.”
A veteran print and broadcast journalist, he has written more than 4,000 columns collectively for the Boston Herald, New York Daily News, and The Boston Globe, where he rose to prominence with his biting, satirical, and at times, heart-wrenching columns that closely followed the triumphs, travails and ambitions of Boston’s working and middle classes.
The series continues with: former Delaware Congressman and Governor Pete du Pont on July 16, NPR political reporter Mara Liasson on July 23, Washington Post foreign relations correspondent Robin Wright on July 30 and moderator of PBS’s “Washington Week” Gwen Ifill on August 2.
Tickets are $25 for each lecture and are on sale at www.nantucketatheneum. org or at the Nantucket Atheneum, 1 India Street.
Mike Barnicle and Tim Russert were friends for 30 years. Mike’s son Timothy J. Barnicle is named for Timothy J. Russert, his godfather. Mike was in Washington Friday to guest host MSNBC’s “Hardball” and spent some time with Tim in the morning. A short time later, Tim was rushed to the hospital after collapsing and died shortly thereafter. He was 58.
Mike shares with the nation his heartfelt remembrances of Tim Russert.
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFITm3J4agA
How did this happen? Was there a specific date, a single event that erased the burden of history and allowed the weight of municipal inferiority to be lifted from the shoulders of every fan in New England who has been witness to decades of humiliation delivered by New York teams?
Think about it.
Saturday, the Patriots play the Giants at exit 16W. They arrive as undefeated favorites, with three Super Bowl championships in four years, the symbol of how a model NFL franchise is run. A dynasty.
The born-again Celtics humiliated the Knicks and Nets each time they met this fall. Of course, the Little Sisters of the Poor could beat the pathetic Knicks, coached by a delusional paranoid and owned by James (Thanks, Dad) Dolan, a soft, spoiled rich guy who inherited wealth, not wisdom.
That brings us to the main event: Red Sox-Yankees. The Yanks have spent billions but they still wear rings tarnished with age while the Olde Towne Team has two championships in the last four years, ‘04 and ‘07, turning Back Bay into Hardball Heaven. A minidynasty.
It’s a mind warp.
Manhattan was where Boston’s dreams went to die after being fatally wounded in the Bronx. Time turned the Hub into a pitiable afterthought as commerce moved from New England to New York in the 19th century. And sports turned our teams – fans, too – into one-liner fodder for anyone from The Rockaways to New Rochelle.
You used to be able to identify Sox fans in Yankee Stadium. They sat, slump-shouldered, with the same panicked expectation nervous motorists have looking in the rearview mirror at the 16-wheeler behind them on Interstate 95 near New Haven.
The inevitability of collapse was genetic. Disappointment was delivered with an October postmark by fringe figures named Bucky (Effen) Dent, Mookie Wilson and Aaron Boone.
Then, something happened in October 2004 in the “House of Historical Horrors” called Yankee Stadium. The Red Sox came back from three games down to beat the Bronx Bombers, leading the Daily News to hit the streets with one of the greatest front-page headlines ever: “The Choke’s On Us!”
That was IT, the single moment that pushed the gravedigger into retirement. It took the loser label off the forehead of every Boston fan.
Now, in a bizarre way, we have supplanted New York as the place where champions reside and the home team is hated by others. The Patriots are loathed as much as the old Yankees. The Red Sox are fan favorites who attract big crowds in every town, annoying local ownership. The Celtics are dominating the way they used to when they were despised in the old Boston Garden. We’ll skip hockey because the NHL was ruined because of a long strike and ludicrous expansion.
Ironically, we have seen the enemy (the Yankees from DiMaggio to Jeter and Rivera, the once-glamorous Giants of Gifford, Tittle, Huff, Simms and Parcells, the Knicks with Reed, Bradley and DeBusschere, the Jets with Namath) and, incredibly, we have become them.
We have money, swagger, attitude and standing. We’ve consistently won in baseball and football, and we hit the new year with the best basketball record in the NBA. And, given the short national attention span, nobody cares what happened in the 20th century. Life and sports are about the moment.
Oddly, there are thousands of young people from Waterville, Maine, to Waterbury, Conn., who have no institutional memory of a sporting life once filled with apprehension, even fear, who have never endured the depression that accompanied defeat datelined New York City.
But that was then and this is now: Saturday, the victory parade continues and the dominance of area code 212 is diminished, if not dead.
So, how come I’m still up late at night, worrying the Yankees might sign Johan Santana or the Giants might luck out and beat the Patriots by a field goal with less than a minute left in a game where Tom Brady breaks his leg? Maybe it’s because I’m from Boston and haven’t quite gotten used to living with something called success. But I’m getting there.
This time, homicide came to a quiet cul-de-sac in a peaceful suburb, apparently driven by a growing wave of debt built on delusion that collapsed into a despair so deranged that the only escape route Neil Entwistle could allegedly think of was to grab a gun and kill his wife and 9-month-old daughter as both slept in a rented home on Cubs Path in Hopkinton.
The husband’s eyes and appetites, however, in addition to being greater than his budget, appeared to be bigger than his abilities as well.
The district attorney of Middlesex County, Martha Coakley, stood yesterday at a press conference in full command of the facts, unafraid to dispense information, telling the public that the instinct of detectives and prosecutors is that Entwistle could have had suicide on his mind when the nearly incomprehensible occurred in a neighborhood where barking dogs provide the only real noise.
Of course, when that moment of potential self-destruction came – and quickly passed – cowardice overwhelmed the cold cruelty of double murder; Entwistle ran, all the way to the bedroom of the home where he was raised in an English suburb, ran across a whole ocean to the arms of his parents, where he perhaps dreamed that his mother and father could salvage his life from the nightmare he allegedly spawned.
Now, his wife and child dead, Entwistle is handcuffed to a legal system intent on doing to him what he is thought to have done to his whole family – in-laws, parents, everyone: destroy all the years ahead with a conviction for double murder.
But this story is merely at the starting gate because we live in a cable culture where a simple tale of violence is just not enough for many to believe. We think there must be more. We want more. Demand more.
After all, how could a young man do this to the woman he loved and the infant both adored? How could anyone act so irrationally, with such evil, over fear of bill collectors, bankruptcy or the embarrassment of joblessness and admitting failure? What else is there? Another woman? A huge insurance policy?
Unfortunately, the truth is often unsatisfying to those who cannot comprehend the human stories behind nearly every miserable homicide. Murders are almost always darkly interesting, sometimes complex, quite basic and usually sad.
Rachel and Lillian Entwistle are gone. So is the concept of shock and disbelief in American life.
The papers and TV are filled daily with stories that inoculate us all against the trauma of desperate tales. We read and see that four are killed in a basement in Boston, two more shot on a street corner on a Saturday night, children die on sidewalks and schoolyards over a coat, a hat, a look, the wrong word.
Homicide came to Cubs Path. And this morning, Neil Entwistle likely sits in a British jail, fighting extradition for crimes he has been charged with committing. His family is dead. So are their dreams; his too, in a culture where the motive – no money – should not surprise anyone who has been paying attention.
BELFAST — It is a balmy, lemon-yellow evening and I am standing outside a large glass and cement structure called Waterfront Hall, completed last year along the River Lagan in Belfast where people have the capacity to loathe a stranger based solely on beliefs or a baptism. Community input here means a funeral or a fire, yet it occurs to me that in the middle of shootings and bombings they have managed to achieve something that seems out of reach in Boston: They have built a convention center. Earlier, with the town in the grip of unseasonably warm weather, I am strolling White Rock Road in West Belfast, reminded again that a hot sun is truly the full moon for the Irish. Half the men out on stoops are nearly naked, their skin the color of boiled lobster claws.
Here is what you can get in the North: An Armalite-rifle. C-2 explosives. A bazooka. Hand grenades. Flamethrowers. Surface-to-air missiles. A majority voting for peace. And here is what you cannot get: Sunblock.
At the intersection of White Rock and Ballymurphy, Cian Moran is sitting on a milk crate outside his flat. He is wearing a tight blue Speedo bathing suit. He is a heavy man. It is not an attractive sight because his stomach is at war with the elastic waist of the swimsuit and from a distance it appears Moran might be eight months pregnant as he basks alongside his girlfriend, Claire Corrigan, who, incredibly, is not blind.
“Did you bring any of that Viagra with you from America?” Moran wants to know. “That would do the boys a world of good, wouldn’t it luv? That’s the worst moment of a man’s life, failing in bed. I vote yes for Viagra.”
“Worse moment of your life was when the Park View was shut for repairs,” Corrigan tells him, referring to a bar alongside Milltown Cemetery.
That cemetery serves as sort of a huge community center for a people raised on funerals and sad farewells. The caretaker, Sean Armstrong, talks about it as if he were the curator of a macabre Hall of Fame, pointing out where various people’s remains lie, how they died, and whether they were on “active duty” when they fell in the long fight against England.
“Oh, cemeteries are big stuff in Ireland,” Monsignor Denis Faul points out. “Big stuff.”
So are priests. In the absence of a true, old-fashioned political network, priests are a combination of state reps and city councilors who are wired throughout their parishes. Nothing happens without their knowledge. Not a birth. A death. A fight, a plot, a prayer, or a promise. Nothing!
Back in Holy Trinity Church, Mary Kelly sat with bowed head a few days prior to the biggest event in her life. She is 91 and could barely wait to cast a ballot for the future last Friday.
“Not so much for me but for the younger people,” she observed. “People like my son.”
“How old is your son?” she was asked.
“70,” she replied.
In one day, she sat through two Masses, a First Communion, and a gypsy wedding. The church is actually her second home. It is a quiet haven from the horrors that have stalked the old lady’s neighborhood for at least 30 years, filling the streets around her with an awful sadness and a nearly constant violence that leveled off only in the past three years but now, with a tremendous “Yes” vote, could actually recede to the point where children born today could assume a normal childhood tomorrow.
That sound — laughter — remains the hallmark of a resilient people who have survived a horrible history due, in some small measure, to the safety net provided by their own sense of humor. Their city and country have been mangled by murder and bigotry, but the people are still standing, some of them even hopeful, in a place progressive enough to vote for peace as well as build a convention center that can’t get off the ground back in Boston.
Like most major American cities, Boston is like a layer cake. Some elements are as obvious to the eye as frosting while others remain obscured by simple geography.
Yesterday, for example, a gray Monday, if you walked from the Public Garden to Kenmore Square and back along Newbury Street you could easily think the city was filled by either the young or the wealthy with not many others in between. The eye devours people going to classes along with residents riding a wave of national affluence as well as platoons of out-of-town shoppers — part of a plastic army — arriving in force, ready to toss down their cards as a statement of strength All of it is a distance removed from Egleston, Oak Square, Dudley, Savin Hill, Hyde Park and Roslindale, stops on a transit map to most. Yet even here, fresh paint, economic ventures, and a new broom on old stone sidewalks have delivered the gift of optimism plus an increased sense of security to neighborhoods that not long ago were dark with gloom and fear.
There is the tourist town. And there is the traveled town.
There is the town that swells by day with workers who fill office buildings, insurance firms, and brokerage houses and then depart at dusk. And there is the town where people actually live, pay taxes, put their kids in school, and look to trash collection, public safety, a clean park, a functioning traffic signal, or a visible STOP sign as daily barometers of whether government is indifferent or involved.
Away from the bright lights and the allure of bistros stuffed with symbols of expense account confidence, though, it is hard to escape the conclusion that a majority seems satisfied. As always, the public is smarter and more aware than it is made out to be by a media infatuated with negativism, chronic bad news, and suffering from the infection of cynicism.
Ordinary people don’t require polls to get through their day. They don’t need to put a “spin” on every move. They know that life is not a sound bite. That image is not reality and perception isn’t nearly as important as a paycheck.
One lingering image of Boston — one hashed and rehashed each time the city is mentioned — is that it is extremely liberal, almost abnormally left. But, like the frosting on the cake, philosophy differs once your feet take you away from the center.
There isn’t another state in the union where the biggest city happens to be the center of commerce, media, industry, and education in addition to its political capital. New York has Albany. Pennsylvania has Harrisburg. California has Sacramento. In Illinois, it’s Springfield.
And, as is often the case, people are not necessarily as they are portrayed by polling data or even election results. They are, at their root, sensible rather than confrontational; not much different than others from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Austin, Texas, to Battle Creek, Michigan.
Sometimes, the view through a prism of pre-ordained judgment and instant observation isn’t simply flawed; it’s flat out inaccurate: Boston, the Kennedys, Harvard, McGovern in ‘72, hopelessly, romantically and nostalgically liberal.
You might want to keep this in mind while watching a tremendous two-part documentary that began last evening on PBS devoted to the life of Ronald Reagan. Scorned in places like Back Bay and Beacon Hill, Reagan will find more favor in history than the fellow who occupies the White House this morning.
Maybe because, like a lot of average Americans, Reagan — admire him or not — had beliefs. He had an internal compass, a bit of character, and a life apart from politics.
Oddly enough, he seems not to have been consumed with ambition. Not ever. Always, he was comfortable with himself, happy with whatever part he played. And — a huge asset — he had the ability to make others comfortable, to soothe rather than supplicate himself or seek sympathy.
Sure, he presided over the Iran-Contra scandal, the arms-for-hostages debacle. But then, he went to the country and apologized for not being fully engaged and admitted a mistake. How different!
He did something not many politicians, other than Roosevelt, managed to do: Change how people think about government — that it actually might be too large, might truly play too powerful a role in the everyday life of ordinary Americans.
Like a city, Reagan’s life and presidency had layers that were not always obvious or appreciated. Turns out, the man was more than just frosting on a cake.
It is Friday night. I am in a hall filled with a thousand other admirers who have driven through snow and sleet to salute a wonderful woman, Eileen Foley, who was born in February 1918 and was mayor of Portsmouth, N.H., longer than anybody else. And, because the room was packed with political people, I kept returning to another evening nearly six years ago, when New Hampshire helped pull Bill Clinton’s candidacy in off the ledge he had walked onto, hand-in-hand with Gennifer Flowers.
Then, as now, the charge was reckless infidelity. Then, as now, Clinton, a skilled semantic contortionist, confronted it with the language of lawyerly loopholes in a tortured effort to put forth some preposterous claim that he was answering the questions and telling the truth “It’s like he’s accused of robbing a bank,” Eileen Foley’s son Jay was saying. “And he gets up there and says, `Absolutely not. Those allegations are untrue. I did not rob a bank.’ Later on, when he gets caught, he tells us, `You don’t understand. I didn’t lie. I never robbed a bank. It was a savings and loan.’ “
Initially, some felt a weary sadness upon hearing that the president may have had sex with a 21-year-old intern. Now, frustrated and angered by his inability to issue a flat-out denial devoid of linguistic tricks, the crowd lives with the uneasy knowledge that they have a terribly flawed man in the White House whom they trust with the economy but not with their own daughters.
But you can hear the inevitable assault coming from Washington, the attack on the former intern. Within a week — either by innuendo or off-the-record “briefings” — she will be described as an emotionally insecure girl, a flirt, a delusional coed with a crush, someone who, clearly, should have been carted off to an asylum, rather than allowed to work in the White House.
This is the predictable pattern with this president, a man of tremendous gifts and abilities: His public life too often involves a forced retreat from the truth. Isolated from reality, surrounded by power, obviously under the impression that he is both invincible and invisible, Clinton always turns himself into the victim. His battlefields are littered with the remains and shattered reputations of former friends and old lovers.
He succeeds because he is smart enough to know he can make today’s culture complicit in his conspiracy. Apart from his wife, the women who swirl around him are of a type: They are young or vulnerable or ill-equipped to deal with the klieg lights of propaganda and publicity. They are interns, state workers, widows, or fortune seekers.
Class dominates our society. The rich, the powerful, the connected and the pretty know how to get the benefit of the doubt. Brass it out by pointing a finger at an accuser who has big hair, nervous eyes, a temp’s credentials or only one story to tell. Surely, you can’t believe them!
With Clinton, you’d need a platoon of psychiatrists to even approach the problem. Raised without a father, he has probably never been told to sit down, keep quiet, admit the truth and accept the consequences. For 50 years, he has — all by himself — been the man of the house; charming, smart, handsome, glibly articulate and ferociously ambitious, his very own role model.
When you think of that late winter six years ago, the arrogance is breathtaking: The draft, the women, the marijuana, all of it explained away with a wink, a nod and an eye toward a trapdoor knowingly built with evasive language.
Six years later, in a room where citizens assembled Friday night to salute a magnificent woman, it was clear that the country is fine and will survive any assault that has its origins in a sad episode of a man’s own self-destruction, assembled with the assistance of a pathetic inability to control himself.
Eileen Foley’s family spoke of their mother with humor and affection. And then, Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska stood to tell the crowd he was not in Portsmouth because of February 2000, but because of February 1918, the month and year when Eileen Foley was born, “the year of the Great War when men from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard stood in the frozen snow for the idea of freedom,” Kerrey said. “She is a woman of honor and courage whose life tells us the wonderful story of America.”
We might end up limping through three years of a government headed by a kind of Joey Buttafuoco with Ivy League polish. But on a night when a terrific 80-year-old woman heard the applause of heartfelt gratitude, two things were obvious: It’s Clinton’s legacy, but it’s our country.
Hong’s incredible journey began on the day 11 years ago when he sat confined to the dust of his fishing village near Can Tho in Vietnam and suddenly heard someone mention America. Of course, Hong did not actually hear what the person was saying because he has been deaf since birth. But he sure did understand the primitive sign language being employed and his heart soared at the thought of all the possibilities that might be available to him in a land of endless dreams.
“They said something about America,” he recalled the other day, “and that was enough for me. I left on a small boat from Nha Trang, and after a long time on the ocean we got to the Philippines “I was in a camp four years. All the time, trying to get here. After four years, my wish came true.”
His name is Hong Ngoc Nguyen. He is 37 years old and he stands today as the ultimate rebuttal to anyone attempting to trash this country through handwringing editorials or pathetic talk-show whining, so much of it aimed at having people think we are all merely part of some cowboy culture filled with constant violence and obnoxious vulgarity rather than the brightest star in the world galaxy.
Hong spoke through an interpreter, Hannah Yaffe, outside a first-floor classroom in the DEAF Inc. offices on Brighton Avenue, a block from Union Square in Allston. He was among several hearing-impaired immigrants present the other afternoon who come to DEAF daily to learn both signing and English so they can live a better life in a land of promise.
Cathy Mylotte was assisting Ms. Yaffe with interpretation because she knows Hong quite well and absolutely knows what he has had to endure. She too is deaf. She arrived in the United States from Galway, Ireland, in 1970 and has dedicated nearly every day since to helping others like her succeed at things so basic they are taken for granted by the rest of us: grocery shopping, driving a car, catching a bus.
“There was no education for me in Vietnam,” Hong said in sign language. “I came here because I love the word `America’ and I knew there was school here. As soon as I come 11 years ago, I work hard to be good American.”
“Where do you work?” he was asked.
“First job,” he reported with excitement, “was in grocery store. I stack shelves. Good job.
“That was in the day. At night, I help sand floors. That was good job, too. Weekends, I work with my brother at fruit store.
“Now, I work for medical equipment company in Braintree, the CPS Company. Wonderful job.”
His hands seemed to somehow share the smile that creased his face as he used them, flicking fingers back and forth with tremendous speed, to tell Hannah Yaffe and Cathy Mylotte about his marvelous new life. He told them he could remember feeling vibrations from air raid sirens and artillery rounds as a child, growing up with his parents, three brothers, and three sisters in the Mekong Delta where the entire family lived meagerly off the land and the water.
He told them about being helped by Peace Corps workers and American Maryknolls in the Philippines. About his older brother, Bau Nguyen, who is 42 and accompanied Hong through the camps and across the sea to Boston and is employed today as a case worker for the state welfare department. Then, he happily informed everyone in the room that he finally returned to Vietnam in February to marry a woman from his village and hopes that she will be able to join him here soon.
“We had a huge banquet after the wedding,” Hong declared. “It was very expensive. I paid.”
“What makes you proud?” Hong was asked.
Without hesitation, Hong told Hannah Yaffe: “On July 3, I became a citizen. I stood in a big hall and was made an American. I studied very hard for the honor. I have pictures that were taken that show me being a citizen.”
Now, Cathy Mylotte placed her hand on Hong’s shoulder, and both people beamed with a fierce pride born out of incredibly hard work that the hearing world cannot begin to comprehend. We are surrounded by so many who constantly complain and understand so little about our history and heritage that these two deaf citizens symbolize with their positive, refreshing testimony what this place — America — is truly all about.
“Ask him what he wants to do,” Cathy Mylotte was asked.
“I want to do everything,” he laughed.
“I was driving the chief,” Walter Cobe was saying. “We got there just as Engine 48 pulled up. It was maybe three or four minutes after the alarm was sounded. I jumped out of the car and one of the people standing outside said there was kids still inside so I went right up the ladder.”
Walter Cobe is 53 years old. He is a firefighter. Saturday afternoon, he was driving Jack Brennan, a deputy fire chief, when flames and smoke swallowed a house on River Street between Mattapan and Hyde Park and killed three children. This is his story:
“I got to the third floor, the attic, and I saw the house had thermopane windows, replacement windows, and I said to myself, `This is going to be a bitch.’ Replacement windows are thick and they hold all the heat in.
“I wasn’t wearing my helmet and facepiece. Just a mask. Air mask, and I had to take that off to get inside the attic because the window was so narrow.
“I got in and dropped to the floor right away. The smoke was tremendous. The visibility was maybe 6 inches. I put my unit back on and went to the wall. You stay close to the wall. You crawl on the floor on your hands and knees along the wall and feel for an opening. Maybe it’s a closet. Maybe it’s a bedroom. If you go in and feel clothes hanging, you know it’s a closet. You want to be able to get back out. You think of that. You don’t have a string attached to your back, you know.
“I met Tommy Blake inside. He’s from Ladder 16. He had come up the stairs. He was on the floor with me. It was like crawling down the lane of a bowling alley because I didn’t know if we’d ever get to the end. I said to Tommy, `Follow me.’
“I felt a bed and I turned my light on. The light is attached to your coat. Tommy and me, we felt on top of the mattress to see if any kids were on the bed. Sometimes kids go to the bed, hide under it because they think they’ll be safe, but there was only clothes and blankets on it.
“I said to Tommy, `We gotta get the mattress off. Help me flip it.’ We flipped it over. We couldn’t see anything at all, the visibility was so bad.
“I took my facepiece off so I could see better and felt the floor under the bed. I felt a hand and I said, `Tommy. I’ve got something here.’ At first I thought it was a woman, but it was two little children. They had been hugging each other, holding on to each other. I said, `Tommy. This is a kid.’
“Tommy got the hands and I took the feet. I said, `Tommy, can you handle the baby?’ and he said he could. He grabbed the child and went to the window where {Ladder Company} 28 had thrown up a 35-foot ladder. Tommy was doing mouth-to-mouth, then he handed the baby to Hansy, Hansy Rigueur. He’s Haitian. He was at the top of the ladder.
“Tommy’s air had run out. They say you have 15 minutes in a bottle but when you set your mask to `Purge’ and you’re really working, the air can go in five minutes. You know it because the vibra-alert in the mask goes off. You can feel it and hear it.
“When Tommy went to the window, I felt around some more and I felt a foot, a small one, then a little leg. I shined the light on it and I saw it was one of the boys. I still had my mask off and I was starting to get woozy. My oxygen had run out.
“I picked him up, stood up and went for the wall because I knew there was a stairway out there somewhere and I wanted to save the boy. Bobby Driscoll was still in the room. He’s from the Tower Unit. He kept on looking. You have to keep looking.
“There was a crib, a bed, some clothes piled up in the corner. That’s about all, but you have to go through everything. I carried the boy on my shoulders and started for the stairs. I felt this was the quickest way out, back down through the fire. Vern McEachern from Engine 53 was on the stairs and I said, `Vern. I’ve got a baby here.’
“Vern took his mask off and gave it to me. He grabbed me by the front of my coat and he started yelling, `Move out. Move out. We got a kid. We’re coming down.’ He never let go of my coat. I said, `Vern. Take the kid. I’m losing it. I don’t want to drop the kid.’ Vern pulled me down the steps and made sure we didn’t trip on any of the hoses or anything.
“We got outside and I gave the boy to the EMTs. Right after I came out, a policeman came running by me holding the boy Bobby Driscoll found. I think the policeman was either Mike Linskey or Kevin Welsh. They did a tremendous job.
“The boy was 4 feet from the other two kids. I think one of the boys took his sister out of the crib and dragged her under the bed. But you couldn’t see, the smoke was so thick. I feel badly they died. God knows, we tried to save them.
“Outside, I got treated for the smoke. The EMTs gave me some air. I laid down on a stretcher for five minutes. Then I got up and went back in, went back to work.”
According to the Fire Department, the fire was sparked by crudely installed illegal wiring in the basement where there was an illegal apartment. There was no smoke detector in the cellar. None could be found in the first-floor kitchen. The second-floor detector had dead batteries and did not work. On the third floor — the attic where the children lived — the detector functioned, but two boys, 5 and 2, died along with their sister who was 7. Twenty-seven people had been living in the house. The record shows the Boston Fire Department responded in less than four minutes.
Harold Brown, 73, was walking up River Street with his two great-grandchildren Saturday afternoon when he saw the first truck arrive from Cleary Square. Yesterday, he said: “I saw one fireman jump off the truck when it was still rolling to a stop. He didn’t even have his coat on yet, but he ran up and crashed right through the door into the fire because people were yelling kids were inside. I was in awe. I have never seen such bravery in all my life.”
Walter Cobe, 53, has been on the job 21 years. Saturday, with no questions asked and not a moment’s hesitation, he was one of many who crawled through thick smoke and fire, on hands and knees, without air, looking for lost children. Last week, his take-home pay after deductions was $377.
It’s the Fourth of July weekend. A time when much of America marches and sings and stops to do all sorts of different things for all kinds of reasons.
Where are you today? At the beach? On the front step? Down the Cape? Up in Vermont? Just sitting around the house hoping the sun will clear that clutter of clouds and provide you with the gift of a fine summer’s day? What are you doing? Making plans to have a cookout? Looking for your bathing suit? Cranking up a lawn mower? Sleeping late? Working maybe? Still talking about the parade or the fireworks that shattered the night sky? Monitoring kids as they move through the kitchen like troops on maneuver, all the while ignoring your questions about what they’re going to do and where they’re going to go?
Maybe you’re alone? Maybe you’re far from that particular place you might call home? Maybe you’re simply looking for a quiet spot where the breeze blows for you alone and the heat can never wound or stifle?
That’s where I live, in a sanctuary of private peace. A place that proves what life merely hints at: Death is the ultimate democracy, and all of those who are here with me this morning died, in a sense, for the Fourth of July.
Make no mistake, there are all kinds of people here with me. And they come from every part of the land you walk today: From the hill country of Tennessee, from the big industrial cities of the Midwest, from Boston, from Valdosta, Ga., and Culpepper, Texas, and Bellflower, Calif., Brooklyn, N. Y., too.
We are black and white and brown, and mostly young forever. That’s because we died during the permanent season of youth. We fell at places such as Okinawa and Anzio, by the Bay of Masan in Korea, along rocket-scarred ridges at Hill 881 South, looking through the mist toward the Laotian border, and in Grenada and Beirut as well.
We died for the Fourth of July!
It’s funny, but more than Memorial Day, more than November 11th, we always hope that who we were and what we did will be recalled at this time of year. Perhaps that’s because it is the lush edge of summer, a time when wounds seem remote and the concept of death is a stranger.
Shut your eyes for just a second and you’ll be able to see us, to hear us, too. We come from your hometown. You knew us. And, if you think about it for a minute, you can easily remember.
See that fellow over there? Well, on the Fourth of July, 1943, he was playing sandlot baseball in Clinton, Massachusetts. One year later, he took up residence with us because he had been claimed by a sniper’s bullet as he walked a hedgerow in Normandy.
Do you recall the fat kid who always made you laugh by turning on the hydrants and getting the cops mad during that hot summer of 1950 when the temperature was an unyielding adversary? He’s here. Been with us since Inchon.
And those boys who graduated from high school with you? Those kids with long hair and dreams of a decent future lived in a land that asked where Joe DiMaggio had gone and turned its lonely eyes to him? All those young men? They’re here, too.
They came over the course of a tortured decade, in a long proud parade — in numbers that never seemed to quit — from the A Shau valley, from Con Thien, from Camp Carroll and other miserable places that were quickly shuttled off to the shadows of history because America had chosen to become a land of living amnesiacs. But we remember.
We remember the hopes and dreams we had. We remember the families we left behind and the families we hoped to have someday.
We were poets and shortstops, schoolteachers and longshoremen, storekeepers and firemen, husbands, fathers, sons, lovers. Some of us were born rich. Some poor. Some knew glory before our last zip code was carved in stone. Some knew abuse and prejudice and the strictures of class.
Yet none of that matters now because there is no hate here. No unreasoning racism. No fits of temper, outrage or revenge. Not even much memory. Here, summer is forever.
Don’t feel badly for us, though, because we are the lucky ones. We don’t worry about the world ending in a single flash of agony caused by ignorance and unreason. We don’t have to be concerned about the steady tide of poverty, the ocean of drugs, all the lost sense of history or the victory of money over the elements of compassion and justice.
We are beyond all of that. Above it really. Because we are all dead now. And we died for the Fourth of July.
Baseball is a game of memory, and it returns tomorrow to a place where grass has not yet given way to a carpet. It comes home to a green haven filled with reminders of both heartbreak and happiness, a ballyard called Fenway Park where the cargo of past athletic time refuses to yield to sports’ current themes of greed and arrogance.
Baseball is a mood, a suggestion of sunshine and subway stops that all seemed to lead to Section 16. Once, it was truly the city game, truly America’s pastime and certainly the one sport that bound generations together. Fathers sat with sons and daughters and shared the mellow remembrances of other Opening Days played in earlier, easier afternoons before night stole the game. Then, the shadows of history and reality could be shuffled effortlessly around like so many boxes filled with relics of youth on moving day.
And the stories never had to be anchored in fact. As the calendar moved forward, hits, runs and errors became less important. Mood and memory prevailed.
There, right over there behind the dugout, is where Teddy Ballgame’s bat landed after he threw it in disgust and it hit Joe Cronin’s housekeeper. And do you see the first-base coach’s box? That’s where Dick Stuart bent down to pick up a hot dog wrapper and got a standing ovation because it was the only thing he ever picked out of the dirt with his glove.
The park still rumbles with the aftershock of visions long since gone: Shut your eyes and Joe DiMaggio is still making his last appearance in Fenway. Jimmy Piersall is still squirting home plate with a water pistol. Tony C. is down in the dust, and the crowd’s deathly silence still makes a noise in your mind.
Don Buddin can reappear at any moment. Within your own personal game, Rudy Minarcin, Matt Batts, Jim Mahoney, George Kell, Billy Klaus, Jerry Adair, Clyde “The Clutch” Vollmer, Rip Repulski, Mickey McDermott and Gene Stephens can be the components of your bench.
Baseball is part of history’s menu. It is filled with small slices of youth, adolescence and adulthood, and anybody can order a la carte.
Baseball is not the present ugliness, where rich men called players argue with richer men who are owners over decimal points and deferrred payments. Baseball is not agents or options or no-trade clauses.
It is not whining athletes who play only for themselves and their bank accounts. It is not the corporate set interested in owning franchises merely because of the benefits accrued under the tax code.
Baseball is a passport to the country of the young. It is Willie Mays chasing down Vic Wertz’s long fly ball in the Polo Grounds. It is Lou Gehrig considering himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. It is the Brothers DiMaggio. It is Jackie Robinson and Number 9. It is the magic of Koufax, the consistency of Seaver, the toughness of Catfish Hunter and the grace of Jim Palmer.
It is a double play turned over in a cloud of dust and metal spikes. It is Captain Carl fouling off the last pitch of a play-off game that started on a splendid October afternoon and ended in a long, cold winter as soon as the ball was firmly nestled in Graig Nettles’ glove.
And Opening Day is a time for all those trophies of the mind to be taken out and dusted off. Opening Day, especially the home opener, means the newspapers once again provide box scores, and life contains one sure sanctuary from the grimness and terror of daily headlines.
It does not matter that this present collection of 24 men in a Red Sox uniform are not truly a team. It does not matter that they lack chemistry, consistency, speed and a fundamental ability to hit the cut-off man or get a runner in from second base without depending on the thunder of a 34-ounce Louisville Slugger.
The moaning of crybabies and players who perform with salary arbitration first in their minds can not drown out the collective noise of generations of fans who love the sport while despising its present state. After all, it is still the best game ever played by men anywhere.
What other sport has planted itself so firmly in the nation’s psyche? What other sport draws people to the radio — one more relic of yesterday — to sit and listen to the long innings of slow summer nights? What other sport plays itself out in front of a fan as clearly as baseball?
You can see who made the error. You can see who got the hit. You can marvel at the clothesline throw the right fielder makes to the catcher, and watch the runner dueling with the pitcher for a slight lead off first.
Football is as predictable as roller derby and as anonymous as a gang fight. Basketball is a spectacle of tall men on a court in a contest where only the last five minutes seem to count. Hockey is brawling on skates. And all of them are played at the absolute mercy of the clock.
But baseball is timeless, and so, too, are its memories. Like the players themselves, scattered about the diamond in position, the memories of baseball can be isolated and called up on a mental Instant-Replay whenever the mood or moment summons: Do it today. Do it tomorrow. Do it 10 years from now, and all the detail, drama, symmetry and scores will tumble out.
Each new start to baseball’s timeless seasons, each Opening Day, provide a fresh chapter in life. The first pitch, the first hit, the first double play or home run become another page in a volume kept by the generations.
So, years from now, long after the disappointment of having no strikeout pitcher in 1986’s bullpen has faded, when all the home runs and dents in The Wall have been rendered meaningless by a lack of base-running ability and an incredibly poor defense, the sad failures of this year’s edition of our Red Sox will not matter.
