A Decade of Hope Read Online Free PDF Page B

My father then worked on the docks, and then in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When the war was over, he was out of work. I remember him shaping up in the New York Times , and then he got a great job as a clerk in the Treasury Department in the IRS. In his fifties he would go to work wearing a suit and tie, something I had never seen previously.
    When I was born we lived at Ninety-first Street and Columbus Avenue, in a five-story tenement that has since been torn down. I went to St. Gregory’s School, which is still on Ninetieth between Amsterdam and Columbus, and when the neighborhood became bad we moved to Queens, where I attended eighth grade at St. Theresa’s in Sunnyside. I then went to St. Ann’s Academy in Manhattan, which was moved to Queens and, though it had existed for over one hundred years, its name was changed to Archbishop Molloy. It’s still a good school today.
    In college I majored in economics, within the School of Business at Manhattan College. In those days you had to have 144 credits to graduate, and so I took many diverse courses—Spanish and history, accounting, psychology—and found them to be interesting and insightful. But it was the School of Business, so statistics and those sorts of courses were in the core of the curriculum. And I also had a big dose of theology.
    I was also working in Macy’s part time. My mother had gotten me a job as a stock boy, but I saw an advertisement looking for college students to do part-time work in a path to become a police officer. Adam Walinsky in the Lindsay administration helped create the police cadet program, which was the first effort on the part of municipal police agencies to bring college graduates into police departments. I had no relatives in the police department, but this advertisement seemed to be a window into this mysterious organization—and I didn’t particularly want to continue as a stock boy. I was in the first class of police cadets, and we were looked at somewhat strangely by the uniformed members of the department, because we were all so young. We went to work in a variety of administrative units. I worked in the lost property section, and then in the communication division, where I would man the switchboard. And I worked alongside other college students doing that. And that’s how I took the test to be a police officer. You had to take the test, and pass it, to remain in the cadet program.
    About a month after I graduated with a commission as a second lieutenant, I went on active duty in the marines. I had three older brothers, all of them in the Corps, so I sort of felt compelled to go into the marines as well. They would bring home Marine Corps paraphernalia and that sort of thing when I was young, so I was fascinated by it. While family environment was very important to me, and obviously, Catholic school provided a sound educational foundation, I think it’s fair to say that my experiences in the marines have also been important. Marine Corps values mean a lot to me, because those core values—honesty, determination, fairness, and courage—stay with you your whole life. You don’t realize it, and don’t consciously think about it every day, but they really do impact on how you approach life, approach problems, deal with people.
    When I left the Marine Corps in late 1966–early 1967 I came back to the NYPD training school. Now I had just come from Vietnam, so chaotic situations were not unusual for me, but we were taken to the range, fired fifty rounds of ammunition, given blue uniforms and guns, and within three days put right out on the street on patrol with a more experienced uniformed officer. This was a highly unusual occurrence, and we would never do it today. I went to Brooklyn, where there were disturbances in East New York and Bedford-Stuyvesant—garbage cans being thrown off the roof and that sort of thing. So we were in the thick of it before we really had any