Five Floors Up, page 8
Purely from a practical standpoint, it makes sense that Betty would wait for Bill. After all, he was hardworking, wasn’t a big drinker, and was a guy you could count on. Besides, how realistic was it for Betty to stay footloose and fancy free? Catholic girls who came from Queens then didn’t finish college. A popular saying of the day was that girls went to college to get an M.R.S. degree. It wasn’t only Queens that felt this way. The marriage rate in the 1950s in the United States was at an all-time high and many young women married right after they graduated from high school. Still, nowhere was the societal pressure of the day more prevalent than in the blue-collar borough across the East River from Manhattan. In Queens, if you were a young woman like Betty and single at twenty-three, friends and family were already applying pressure on you to get married. By the time you were twenty-five, they might even start to whisper about you becoming a spinster—a fate worse than death.
Still, saying that the culture was the only reason for Betty wanting to marry Bill discounts a considerable body of evidence to the contrary. The stories of Bill’s wit, charm, and storytelling prowess abound. He had a self-deprecating sense of humor that put people around him at ease. There was also his reflexive desire to help others that nearly propelled him to become a priest, and was the main reason he became a fireman.
In Korea, Bill fought with the 7th Regiment, a unit that saw more action than any other. In his division alone, over two thousand soldiers were killed, with nearly nine thousand more injured. He saw heavy combat and was awarded several commendations. If he talked about his time in Korea, however, it wasn’t to his family. Even career-long fire department friends would later say that he never discussed his time on the battlefield. Years later, after he’d climbed the fire department ranks, a poster hung on his office wall in headquarters. It featured a photo of an Army grunt patrolling a lonely road in Korea. “The war took Bill’s boyishness away,” Betty’s older sister, Vera, remembered.
The fighting in Korea came to an end in July 1953, but Bill wouldn’t return home until April of the following year. In the Army’s convoluted way of showing appreciation for bravery on the battlefield, they sent him to Fort Dix near Trenton, New Jersey, to train recruits. But at least it was close enough for him to come home on the weekends.
It was on one of those weekends that he proposed to Betty. At the time, she was working as an executive secretary for Little, Brown and Company, an old, staid publishing house in Manhattan known for such classics as Little Women, the poems of Emily Dickinson, and a slim novel by J. D. Salinger called The Catcher in the Rye. Betty loved the job. She was an avid book reader and at Little, Brown she would meet Salinger, Gore Vidal, and the founder of Random House, Bennett Cerf, among other literary lights. Her dream of being a journalist was running out of steam, but a job in the book business was a pretty good second choice. Though she was able to break into publishing, the glass ceiling she encountered wouldn’t crack. A manual at the time, Lady Editor: Careers for Women in Publishing, suggested that women trying to enter the field should pursue a position such as secretary, assistant, or stenographer. For the more ambitious gals, it advised, perhaps something in the children’s book department. The manual also warned that publishers only hired females “who are pleasing, who possess tact, sincerity, enthusiasm, courtesy, and loyalty.” It said successful applicants had to look like a million dollars on the smallest kind of salary and must learn to work with men. “She must learn not to be over-sensitive, not to brood outside of her job. And she must not be too emotional,” the manual cautioned. However, even if you did check all the manual’s boxes, there were few editorial opportunities for young women. Vassar and Radcliffe grads filled the ones that did exist.
Only ten years later, writers Helen Gurley Brown and Betty Friedan would help start the women’s lib movement in America. It was then when the idea of women “having it all” became part of the national discussion. Betty’s prospects might have been much different had she come along a decade later. Although the mores of the day were stacked against her, it wasn’t as though she hadn’t any support. The friends that Betty made in school, the ones who pined after boys in Stokes, all thought she had the talent to write or work in the book business. Rosemary, who would go on to have a career as a librarian, was an especially encouraging voice. The support from the Queens girls, however, was little help in the publishing towers of Manhattan. Though she never talked about it to her family, it’s easy to imagine that Betty secretly lamented the missed opportunity. Instead, she neatly folded her dreams, locked them away, and followed the well-worn path taken by nearly all the other young women of her ilk.
Not that marriage was a consolation prize. By then her love for Bill was unquestionable, and on some level she knew she would find no better life partner. Still, somewhere in the deep recesses of her soul, there was always a quiet voice that wondered, what if?
Meanwhile, Bill began to chart a path to the FDNY. When he came home on the weekends, his father would have the latest fire department magazine and flyers given out by the department. Those periodicals listed civil service exam dates and other pertinent information. Together the two would pore over the material. Still, Bill becoming a fireman was far from a sure thing. Troops were home from Korea, including many returning members of the FDNY. Opportunities for appointment were tight and competition keen. The entrance exam would draw many applicants. As a just-about-to-be-married man, Bill knew he needed to make contingency plans. In the months before the fire department test was given, he took the New York City Police Department test, followed by an exam for a position as an investigator for the Department of Welfare, now known as the Human Resources Administration. When the FDNY test finally came around, he did extremely well on the written portion, scoring in the mid-90s. He also received five points for being a veteran. The Army had kept him in great shape, so the exam’s physical portion did not pose a problem. All he needed was to pass the eye examination, and he’d be on his way to fulfill his dream. There was only one little problem. Bill’s eyesight was poor at best. He’d already failed the eye test for the police department after he’d passed the cops’ entrance exam. He needed a miracle, and when he walked into the examination room, he thought God had answered his prayers.
Part-time examiners from the city’s Department of Personnel administered the eye exam. The fellow who was about to give Bill his was the track coach from St. John’s University. For a few minutes, it was like old home week. The coach greeted him warmly, and they reminisced about their time together at the college.
Then Bill pressed his face against the eye test machine and began reading the Snellen chart. The last line of letters on the chart looked to him like blurry blobs. Big deal, he thought. With his pal the track coach, the exam was in the bag. Bill took a guess and leaned away from the machine, confident he was about to receive good news.
“Sorry, Bill,” the track coach said in the same friendly tone he had greeted him with. “You fail.”
So much for the alma mater.
FIVE
The Holy Ghost
The date is July 7, 1956. The wedding is captured in fading black-and-white photos with scalloped edges kept in plastic-bound folders and a grainy 8-millimeter film. In one photo, we see Betty and Bill standing on the steps of St. Stanislaus Roman Catholic Church. The bride wears a white gown that billows at the bottom, the fashion of the day. A delicate veil falls over one shoulder. Her hair is dark and cut short, a style that flatters her smiling round face. Though not classically beautiful, she’s striking in the way that Judy Garland was, her daughter Liz would later remark. She’s just twenty-two and holds the bouquet with both hands, seemingly for dear life. Friends say she had cold feet the night before, undoubtedly because of the independent streak Betty always had.
The groom is dressed in a morning coat with tails. Bill’s shirt has a wingtip collar and is adorned by a striped ascot tie. Just back from the Korean War, he has dark hair worn Army short. His mischievous smile shows a set of slightly crooked teeth. His dark, handsome eyes hold a piercing gaze.
It’s impossible, of course, to see in the faces of the just-married couple what was to come. In Betty’s, we see none of the health issues, both physical and emotional, that would eventually consume her. There is no indication of the loneliness and worry she would endure. Her smile shows no hint of the tragedy that would befall her, the worst a parent can imagine.
Bill’s smile, too, belies what was ahead for him. There is no sign in his expression of the hundreds and hundreds of fires he would fight. We see none of the overwhelming sadness that accompanied the sight of young widows and children at the scores of firefighter funerals he attended. The handsome face shows no indication of his meteoric rise to the uppermost echelon of the FDNY, nor of his heroism and ultimate sacrifice on the FDNY’s darkest day.
No, in the moment captured by the photo, there is none of that darkness, only the light of a future filled with possibility.
Bernie, always the sport, spared no expense on the reception. He hired out the Victoria House, a nearby upscale restaurant, to cater the event. By all accounts, it was a lively affair. Betty’s mom ended up on the floor when she missed her partner’s hand doing the Lindy. Betty, too, had a dancing mishap. The hoop skirt of the wedding gown came loose during a polka. The bride just stepped out of it, kicked it to the side, and continued to dance in her petticoat.
The next day, the newlyweds flew to New Orleans for the honeymoon. It was a rather extravagant trip considering their financial situation. How they paid for it is anyone’s guess, but one can image that Bernie kicked in. In New Orleans, Betty wanted to tour the French Quarter and Bourbon Street, while Bill was most interested in looking at the local firehouses.
When they returned from the honeymoon, they moved into a tiny apartment in Rego Park, a predominantly Jewish section of Queens. Vera remembers Betty making the apartment into a “doll’s house.” She had the trait all good interior decorators possess, spontaneity. For their first apartment, they shopped for furniture at Macy’s, where they purchased a contemporary set. However, a colonial set in the store’s window caught Betty’s eye on the way out. They went back in and changed the order.
“She was twenty years ahead of her time,” Vera said.
She was all that, in a lot of ways.
Bill was crestfallen about failing the eye exam of the fire department test. The department’s entrance exams are given about once every four years. But as a newly married man, he didn’t have the luxury of feeling sorry for himself. He was offered and took the job at the welfare department, working in Harlem investigating fraud and abuse of the system. He enjoyed the sleuthing aspect of the job, but he didn’t want to make a career out of it. Luckily, he didn’t have to.
On one of the weekends he’d been home from Fort Dix, he’d read a story in a fire department magazine about the New York Fire Patrol. Privately employed by insurance underwriters, the patrol was charged with minimizing water damage from fire hoses during fires by spreading rubber tarps called “covers” on insured equipment and stock. They also removed valuables when possible. The story had piqued Bill’s interest.
“Gee, I wonder how you get that job?” he asked his dad.
“We’ll find out,” his father said.
He took and passed the Fire Patrol entrance exam as a fallback. When the patrol offered him a position, he left the welfare department and took the job. It wasn’t the FDNY, but it was the next best thing.
From its formation in 1867 to when it was disbanded in 2006, the Fire Patrol was intimately linked with the FDNY. Many of the patrol’s members either once worked as New York City firemen or, like Bill, were hoping to someday get appointed to the city job. At one point, the patrol was, administratively at least, part of the FDNY. During World War II, the New York City fire commissioner was given control of the private agency, ostensibly to bolster the depletion of department manpower due to the draft or enlistment. When Bill joined the Fire Patrol, the chief of the agency was Joseph J. Scanlon, a former deputy chief in the FDNY. Fire patrolmen dressed like firemen—in Bill’s day, with rubber coats, boots, and leather helmets with the extended rear brim—worked the same chart as firemen (9 a.m.–6 p.m., 6 p.m.–9 a.m.). But there were differences too. Fire patrolmen wore red helmets, and firemen wore black. And the patrol’s equipment wasn’t nearly as elaborate, nor did it pay as well or have the same benefits as the department. In a way, the Fire Patrol was like Triple-A baseball compared to the Major Leagues of the FDNY. Still, fire patrolmen took much of the same risks firemen took, including working above the blaze. Bill would find out just how risky his new job was on Valentine’s Day, 1958.
Today, with its fancy shops and restaurants, cobblestone streets, and celebrities living in expansive lofts, the real estate south of Houston Street is some of the most expensive in the world. In the 1950s, however, the area was known to the fire department as “hell’s hundred acres,” a moniker hung on the neighborhood by William Feehan’s nemesis, Commissioner Cavanaugh. The hundred-year-old loft buildings that lined the streets, the ones artists would soon inhabit, lay empty, as did makeshift factories housed in wooden firetraps. The Elkins Paper and Twine building, a six-story wood and brick structure at 135 Wooster, was one such edifice.
When Bill arrived for his night shift, he was fighting a bad chest cold, and the weather wasn’t cooperating at all. The forecast had the night turning bitter, with a likelihood of heavy snow. Fire Patrol 2, his unit, was housed in a redbrick building with a single bay door on 3rd Street between Thompson and Sullivan, just north of SoHo. He climbed the stairs to the second-floor bunks. Undoubtedly, he was hoping for a quiet night.
The alarm rang twenty minutes after he arrived. Someone pulled the box on the corner of Wooster and Prince Streets. Simultaneously, workers on the first floor of the Elkins building saw reflections of the flames above them in the windows across the street and called the fire department. Bill slid down the pole to the bay and climbed onto the apparatus with the rest of his unit. The truck looked like a large pickup truck with an open cargo bed. They arrived on the scene minutes later. The fire was only four blocks from his firehouse.
Later, investigators determined that the blaze had started on the first floor, most likely by a discarded cigarette butt. The flame found its way into the air shaft, which blew like a fiery geyser up to the fifth and sixth floors. Bill remembered that fire was blowing hard out the windows of the top stories. His unit arrived just moments before Engine Company 13 and Hook and Ladder Company 20 from nearby Mercer Street. The firemen placed an aerial ladder against the building, and several of them climbed to the roof. Others ran hose lines into the building. Captain John J. Mullin, the commander of Fire Patrol 2, ordered his men to carry covering tarps to the third floor. He looked again up at the fire. He knew they were going to need help. In those years, the Fire Patrol didn’t have two-way radios. He used a phone in a nearby building to call for more units.
Inside the building, the heat felt to Bill like it was melting his skin. Fire patrolmen didn’t have self-contained breathing apparatus. The odor surrounding him was a toxic blend of burning rope, wood, tar, and chemicals. The room he entered contained heavy machinery, large bales of paper, and eight-hundred-pound rolls of twine. The air seemed alive with waves of heat. Fire Patrolman Feehan took his covers and climbed the massive roll of twine. At the top, he was only a foot or so from the ceiling. He could see the smoke seeping through from the room above.
After he finished covering the bale, he went down for more covers. By then, the street was filled with rigs and firemen. Hoses snaked into the building while water cannons fired at the top floors. On the roof, firemen used axes to hack holes for ventilation. Thick black smoke poured out of the openings they made. In less than half an hour, the blaze had progressed from one alarm to four. Ten minutes later, it would go to five. Meanwhile, the temperature outside began to plummet. Snow blew in icy gusts.
At Captain Mullin’s beckoning, Fire Patrol 1 arrived and was sent into the building. Bill went up and down the stairs two more times. He felt a searing pain in his chest from the smoke. As the young fire patrolman started down again, a fireman was standing on the third-floor landing, putting on a mask and blocking the stairwell. When he saw Bill, he stepped out of the doorframe.
“You guys go ahead of me,” he said.
The next thing Bill heard was a cacophony of wood snapping, bulbs popping, walls falling, and things crashing to the floor. Then came a deafening thunderclap. The last thing he remembered was the floor beneath him falling away. The rush of air caused by the collapse lifted him and blew him down the stairwell. Screams from inside the building were so loud people on the street heard them.
A forty-five-minute subway ride away, Betty, pregnant, lay in the Murphy bed under doctor’s orders. Betty’s first pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage. When she miscarried the second pregnancy, she began to believe a surgeon’s prediction who had operated on her in high school for a gynecological issue. He had said her chances of getting pregnant were slim. Her family physician, Dr. Kelly, however, told her to keep trying, that there was no reason she couldn’t have a child. He had known Betty for her entire life, and had treated her numerous times. When she got pregnant again, she took every precaution. Dr. Kelly ordered bed rest, and that’s where she stayed.
