Five Floors Up, page 7
“I’m only here working on the boiler,” he’d say. “The lady of the house isn’t in.”
Every now and then he’d invite his old pals Eddie Keeley and Mike Imhoff, also retired, over for a visit. Imhoff would have to take a bus all the way from the Bronx to Jackson Heights. Partly, one might surmise, he made the trip because of the adult beverages his host served. Because William never touched a drop of alcohol, he had no idea of the correct ratio of a mixed alcoholic drink. He’d serve water glasses filled to the brim with scotch. But the men would also spend hours reliving their years together in the firehouse. The large living room in Jackson Heights would fill with laughter, nostalgia, and a kind of love those outside the fire department can’t really understand. And, at least for a few hours, they would recapture the firehouse connection they once shared. When it was time for his friends to leave, William and Catherine would watch from the doorway as Imhoff walked haltingly down the driveway toward the subway. He would always stop when he reached the sidewalk and turn back to doff his cap.
As time went by, William saw his firefighter friends less and less often. There was something wistful about him in his later years, more than the usual feelings of lost youth and aging many go through. Firemen have such a clear mission. Their contribution to society is immediate and can literally make the difference between life and death. The void that is left when a job of such importance disappears can never really be filled. Certainly, there are firefighters who are content in retirement, and it isn’t as if William was unhappy in his later years. But he had lost something that gave as much meaning to his life as anything else. Still, he had it better than some of his superannuated brethren. For the rest of his days, a Feehan would carry his mantle.
FOUR
Kids from Queens
It’s impossible to tell Chief Bill Feehan’s story without telling his wife, Betty’s. They were always a team, called Betty and Bill, or Bill and Betty, never one name without the other. Their romance is sealed in the amber glow of the 1950s—quintessentially New York City outer borough and Irish Catholic, but a universal love story nonetheless. Though, as with his father, the fire department defined Chief Bill Feehan’s life, Betty was his reason for living.
Elizabeth Keegan came from a town called Maspeth in Queens. Newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin once remarked that four times as many people were dead and buried in Queens than there were alive walking around on its streets. Maspeth’s little corner of the borough does little to dispel the newspaper legend’s assessment. A two-and-a-half-square-mile section in the western part of Queens, the town is bordered on three sides by cemeteries, and on the fourth by Newtown Creek, which was once so polluted that there was nothing alive in it either. The house she lived in was just down the block from a crematorium. This is not to say that Betty’s childhood existed under a shroud. Quite the opposite. Cemeteries and crematorium aside, the town in which she grew up was nearly ideal.
The story goes that when Betty’s father and mother, Bernie and Elizabeth Keegan, went looking for houses to buy, Bernie’s rich aunt lent them her car and driver. Being chauffeured around Queens to hunt for houses is sort of like wearing a tuxedo in a laundromat. Still, they might not have found the house on the tree-lined street without it. Maspeth is what is known in New York as a “two-fare zone.” To get to anywhere important, say, Manhattan or downtown Brooklyn, you had to take a bus (a trolley in Betty’s day) to a subway stop in Woodside, Queens. Though not ideal for commuters, or house hunters, the lack of a subway gave Maspeth an isolated, small-town feel. Many of the residences in Maspeth are one- and two-family houses made of wood and brick. Rosemary Feeney, Betty’s best friend from childhood, said the Keegans lived in an “Archie Bunker house.”
Though there were plenty of homes in Maspeth that resembled the one from the 1960s sitcom set in Queens, the description isn’t entirely fair, especially the inside of the house. Elizabeth had a gift for interior decorating, a talent she’d pass down to Betty. Neatly and colorfully, she blended couches, chairs, and rugs perfectly. She also had an inventive way of adding finishing touches. Each summer, Bernie would rent a bungalow in Rockaway. One time, the tiny cottage he leased sat inside the grounds of an amusement park called Playland. Bernie was a steamfitter and worked nights. Alone in the evening, Elizabeth would carry Betty, still in diapers, around Playland until she’d fall asleep. While making the rounds, she got in the habit of stopping at a carny booth where you pitched pennies for prizes. She became so proficient at the game that she won a complete dinner service for eight. The dishes never failed to draw compliments from her guests.
Betty’s independent streak began to appear very early in her life. A supermarket called Bohack’s sat at the bottom of the block the Keegans lived on. When Elizabeth went food shopping, she would bring Betty in a baby carriage. By the time she was three or four, Betty was done with being pushed around in the buggy. If her mother wouldn’t let her walk into the store under her own steam, she’d throw a tantrum.
She inherited some of this self-reliance from her father. In the years before he was married, Bernie was a sport. Handsome and jaunty, he was a familiar face in the clubs and saloons on the Lower East Side. Though he was in “the trades,” as they call the skilled construction industry, he also booked a little action on the side. The story goes that Bernie first took Elizabeth out when she was only fifteen. He was twenty-four. Though they might have drawn judgmental looks from those who saw them together, time would prove those who questioned his motives wrong. On Elizabeth’s sixteenth birthday, Bernie took her to a restaurant and ordered a bottle of champagne. He then gave her sixteen gold coins as a present. Elizabeth, it’s said, went home sick to her stomach from the bubbly but certain that Bernie was the man with whom she’d spend the rest of her life.
It was early in grammar school when Betty began emulating her dad. During World War II, Bernie took a job in Ohio at a factory that made power trains for military vehicles. Once he realized that the job, and the war, would last longer than he thought, he sent for the family. They enrolled Betty into second grade at a local Catholic grammar school. One day the nun teaching her class went around the room asking the students what they wanted to be when they grew up. Betty told her she wanted to be a Rockette. The nun, who presumably wouldn’t know a Rockette from a rutabaga, smiled sweetly and said, “That’s nice, Elizabeth.” During class talent shows, Betty was known to sing the bawdy saloon songs her father had taught her.
After the war, the Keegans moved back to Maspeth, and, as her sister Vera and brother had before her, Betty attended St. Stanislaus grammar school. The late 1940s and the 1950s were the golden era, at least in attendance, for parochial schools. Nationwide, Catholic schools enrolled over five million students. Today that number is less than two million. In 1957, one out of every four children in New York City attended Catholic school. Back in the mid-twentieth century, the church, flush with cash, didn’t need to accept funds from state governments like the Catholic school “academies” of today. They operated autonomously and with impunity from the social movement away from corporal punishment in schools. Catholic schools then were notoriously strict. Girls with rebellious streaks like Betty’s would often find themselves staring up at a red-faced nun. But the sisters of St. Stanislaus couldn’t break Betty’s spirit.
The group of friends Betty made in grammar school would remain close the rest of her life. Back in the day, Stokes ice-cream parlor on Grand Avenue was their headquarters. After school, they would sit sipping fifteen-cent cherry colas while they gossiped and giggled about boys. But from a very early age, Betty sought to break the provincial bonds of her neighborhood. A part of Maspeth sits on a plateau, and on clear days the famous New York City skyline is painted on the horizon. At night it twinkled like a magic kingdom. For Betty, Manhattan beckoned like Oz.
As young as nine or ten, Betty and her friend Rosemary would take the trolley and then a subway into the city. Rosemary says she was actually the ringleader and something of a bad influence on her friend. One time, she was caught skipping school and forged her mother’s name on a note excusing her. Still, when it came to going to Manhattan, Betty was a willing accomplice. They’d stroll the theater district or head to the movies on 42nd Street. Rosemary remembers seeing double features, even a live show and a movie for the same quarter. For a nickel they could buy a hot dogs at Nedick’s and marvel at the ten-story-high Mr. Peanut advertisement, or the one for Camel cigarettes, just as big, with the fellow who blew giant puffs of smoke.
By high school, the discussions at Stokes ice-cream parlor became strategy sessions about meeting boys. Rosemary tells stories about how the girls would dash around the corner after school to roll up the waists of their plaid skirts. That way, they could show off more of their youthful legs. Though Betty was something of a late bloomer when it came to dating, once she started, she made up for the lost time. Witty and unpredictable, she had an engaging and magnetic personality. She and Rosemary went to St. Joseph Commercial High School in Brooklyn, an all-girls Catholic school. The “commercial” part of the school’s curriculum prepared students for careers as secretaries and stenographers. She’d begun dating a Polish boy in secret, as such a mixed coupling was strictly forbidden by her father. Though the crush on the Polish boy would fade, Betty’s propensity for going against accepted social norms only became stronger.
It was while at St. Joseph’s that she began to think seriously about becoming a journalist, specifically writing for magazines. For a young Queens girl from that era, hers was an ambitious goal to say the least. Still, if you asked anyone who received a letter from Betty, they would tell you she certainly had the talent to be a professional writer. And in high school, where she wrote for the school paper, Betty showed a good reporter’s indomitable spirit. No story, it seemed, was too big for her.
Her time at St. Joseph’s coincided with McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee. For Betty, the “Red Scare” was page one material. One day, she and Rosemary cut school and headed to the Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper with headquarters near Union Square. The plan was to get an interview with a real live commie. At some point, the intrepid reporters realized they might not be wearing the most appropriate outfits for the mission. The green jumper and tan cap of St. Joseph’s seemed more suited for marching in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Like most good journalists, however, Betty was resourceful. At her behest, they stopped in a fabric store and bought ribbons of red material, which they pinned to their uniforms in the hope that the color would make them seem sympathetic to the Communist cause. They did manage to talk their way into the building. Once inside, however, the plan began to wobble. Though cordial to them, the Communists showed no interest in giving interviews to a high school reporter.
Bill’s and Betty’s paths would converge in Rockaway, which is no surprise. For a particular generation of native New Yorkers, at least those of Irish and Jewish extraction in the outer boroughs, romance in the beachside community in Queens was a rite of passage.
In one way, the moment was preordained. Father Jim had arranged a summer job for Bill working for the New York City Parks Department. The fire department wasn’t the only agency in which the good father had influence, which is a nice way of describing the pressure he could exert. Jim Feehan remembered one instance when Father Jim had sent him to nearby Calvary Cemetery in Maspeth for a summer job. At first the foreman seemed uninterested in hiring the young man. But when Jim mentioned his uncle’s name, a helpless expression fell over the man’s face.
“When can you start?” he said with a shrug.
Though Bill was happy for the work, the job wasn’t exactly convenient. A trip from Jackson Heights to Rockaway took well over an hour and spanned the entire width of Queens. In those days, you had to take the Long Island Railroad, a local train that made dozens of stops. Bill took the trip so often that he memorized the order of the stops the conductor announced and would recite them for years afterward to entertain his children.
Still, with the sunshine, ocean spray, and pretty girls, he couldn’t have asked for a better place to work.
As luck would have it, Betty, too, had taken a job with the parks department in Rockaway. Bernie had done well enough in the trades to send his family to Rockaway for the entire summer. In those days, it wasn’t that large of an outlay of cash. Now known as the Irish Riviera, the Rockaways was not exactly the Hamptons. Still, the Queens beach was a whole lot better than Maspeth in July and August. One night, right after Betty graduated from high school, Bernie held a party at the bungalow he’d rented. The revelry stretched deep into the night. Betty was starting her new job early the next morning. At daybreak, with little sleep, she dragged herself up to the boardwalk. She thought she’d caught a break when she ran into a coworker who told her the supervisor didn’t make his rounds until later in the morning and that he was never on time. With the sun rising over the glistening Atlantic, Betty curled up in a ball for a little catnap on a bench. As fate would have it, Bill was filling in for Betty’s supervisor, and Bill was always on time.
Look at the shape of this one, he thought to himself as he passed Betty on the bench.
At the time, Bill was enrolled at Cathedral Preparatory High School and taking classes at Cathedral College in Brooklyn. He had set his sights on becoming a Catholic priest, or, rather, Father Jim had set his sights for him. “He didn’t have much of a choice,” Bill’s brother, Jim, remembered. “Our uncle was grooming him to be the next cardinal. The school adhered to a strict regimen of academic and religious study. A portion of the students were enrolled in a minor seminary for the Archdiocese of New York. The school sequestered the wannabe priests, like Bill, from the rest of the study body. It was only on Wednesdays that the seminary students were allowed to mingle with the other students. It was also on Wednesdays that the cloth of Bill’s calling began to fray. Jim remembers seeing his brother escorting several young ladies around Jackson Heights at the time. Bill himself would later admit that the idea of becoming a priest evaporated when he realized the girls in nearby Bishop McDonnell High School were more interesting than Gregorian chants.
Though family stories here get somewhat convoluted, one narrative has it that Bill continued seminarian studies when he enrolled in St. John’s University in Queens. By sophomore year, however, the path to the priesthood was behind him. In college, he majored in American history, a subject of which he would remain a devotee for the rest of his life.
The next time Bill ran into Betty was at St. John’s. She had enrolled there, ostensibly, to follow her dream of writing and journalism. According to one family story, she’d received a scholarship to attend Columbia University, but the principal at St. Joseph’s told her she’d lose her faith if she went there. How much time Betty actually spent at St. John’s, however, is now debated in the Feehan family. Some say she completed two years of study, while others insist she left before her second semester. What we know for sure is, she was at the school long enough to experience her second encounter with her future husband.
At the time, Bill was a senior and the manager of St. John’s basketball team. Though he was a pretty good athlete—he played baseball in high school—he wasn’t good enough to compete at the level played at St. John’s. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the university’s basketball team was as popular as the New York Knicks. Hardwood legends such as Al and Dick McGuire starred on those teams. Even practices were well attended, including by a segment of the coed fans.
It was at one of these practices where Bill noticed a girl who seemed vaguely familiar. When it dawned on him where he’d seen her, he found himself thinking that she looked a whole lot better than the morning he had found her asleep on the bench. He also realized then that he knew her older brother, and that was information enough to start a conversation.
“I know you,” he said to Betty. “You’re Bernie Keegan’s kid sister.”
As opening lines go, Bill’s wasn’t exactly movie dialogue material. In fact, it didn’t impress Betty at all. She was a college freshman, for goodness’ sake. She was going to be a journalist. She didn’t want to be known as anyone’s “kid sister.”
“Thanks a lot,” she said, and left in a huff.
Given her independent streak, Betty’s initial reaction to Bill wasn’t surprising. Still, one has to believe she was at least a little interested in the team manager. Photos of him then show a handsome, athletic young man with eyes that seem to gleam. He was popular, an important part of the basketball team, and a senior! So when Bill asked, chances are she quickly agreed to go out with him. One date, as these things go, led to another, and soon they were a steady item. By then, Betty’s friend Rosemary had married a soldier and moved to Texas. Betty introduced Bill to her via a letter and enclosed a photograph of him wearing a bathing suit and T-shirt, sitting on the railing on the Rockaway boardwalk.
“She was effusive,” Rosemary remembered of Betty’s description of Bill. Her view of her new boyfriend had progressed a long way from that first, awkward encounter.
The budding romance, however, would have its challenges. The biggest of these was an event seven thousand miles from Queens. The Korean War and Uncle Sam had left Bill with only two choices: Enlist or get drafted out of college. Almost immediately after he graduated from St. John’s in 1952, he found himself in a U.S. Army uniform shipping off to the Korean Peninsula.
Once again, stories as to how the romance withstood the separation diverge. Some friends say that Betty—beautiful, independent, and social—wasn’t one to sit at home and wait for her soldier boyfriend to return and remember her dating other guys while Bill was away. Others, however, insist that Betty changed when Bill went into the Army. This camp points to the letters she wrote to him every week. Betty would make notes all week long of things to include. When she sat down to write, she would spread the notes onto the table and weave them into a story.
