I will try to tell this story accurately without my customary embellishments. I had an uncle, Henry Wise. Called him Uncle Hen. He was married to Aunt Lovey. If you picture Archie and Edith Bunker you’d be spot on, except Uncle Hen was less subtle than Archie. Uncle Hen was one of those guys who liked to harp on how the blacks had ruined baseball. You know, blacks like Jackie Robinson, Henry Aaron, Willie Mays. And do I need to say he didn’t call them “blacks”? They had two kids, Eddie and Herbie. Eddie was a couple years older and Herbie was actually born the same day I was, which also happened to be my mother’s eighteenth birthday. Uncle Hen and family lived in what had to be the weirdest place in Philadelphia – Eastwick, aka the Meadows.
You would have sworn you were in Georgia. Dirt roads for pete’s sake. Only dirt roads I ever saw until we moved to Florida in 1959. They had a big, rambling house with a big, rambling front porch. Funny thing though. This big, rambling house had no toilets. You heard me. The living room alone could have accommodated twenty of them but nary a one. The inmates peed in a big jar at the top of the basement stairs and pooped in an outhouse. I swear I’m not making this up. In those days, Philadelphia was the third largest city in the most industrialized country on the planet but these folks shat in an outhouse.
And was it nasty. The reek, the flies, I didn’t see how anyone could bear to go near the damn thing. But Uncle Hen, for one, would head out there with his Philadelphia Bulletin and catch up on the Whiz Kids who weren’t so whizzy anymore. Hmm. I wonder if that’s in any way related to their being, in 1957, the last team in the National League to integrate. John Kennedy, shortstop. Phils gave him 5 at-bats before ditching him, to the amazement of some dude named Casey Stengel who seemed to think Kennedy was a pretty good shortstop.
Whenever we visited the Wises we’d make sure we were good and empty. Especially in the winter. Cold, frozen, snow and ice, ay caramba. The really flabbergasting part, though, was the Wises didn’t seem to mind. In fact, they acted like they were doing some civic duty by fertilizing the award winning roses Aunt Lovey had planted all around it. I know, you’ll just have to take my word for it.
Amazing as all that is, however, it’s not what I want to discuss. Unlike the Fightin’ Phils the Meadows was integrated. In fact, a black mother with two kids lived right across the road from Uncle Hen and one day when we were visiting she was suddenly running around outside yelling that her kids were dead. Apparently they had fallen through the ice on the nearby creek. While no one outside of Philly has ever heard of the Meadows, everyone knows this creek. It’s the one you don’t want to be up without a paddle.
Said creek being just down the road we all run down there and it’s a scene right out of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” with Eliza and Harry hopscotching ice floes across the Ohio River.
The creek was mostly ice with a few gaps. We had three men: Uncle Hen, my father and some dude we called Uncle Boots. I have no idea who the hell he was. But he, my father, me and my cousins all stop at the edge of the creek. You know, to take stock, to get our bearings. We’re all trying to think what to do. Not so Uncle Hen who leaps right in.
You did get that there was a bunch of ice, right? And that the water, if you could call it that, was, shall we say, unhygienic?
OK, in no time at all Uncle Hen has the boy and is passing him up to my father. Uncle Boots is leaning over the bank hanging onto a tree limb, accomplishing pretty much nothing. The mother enfolds the boy in her ample bosom, but there’s no sign of the girl. Precious seconds go by, Uncle Hen is hammering the ice with his fists, trying to break it up, and damn if he doesn’t manage to move it around enough that a bit of pink dress suddenly balloons up behind him. I can still see it puffed up with air just above the surface. We all shout and point. Uncle Hen immediately dives under the ice. Disappears.
This is a guy who thinks blacks have ruined baseball and God knows what else. And now he’s in icy, shitty water risking his life to save a black kid he probably wouldn’t give candy to on Halloween.
In no time at all he pops up with her, hands her up to my father. I was right there and had a good look at her and if anyone ever looked dead she did. Her eyes had rolled back in her head and she was whatever color black people turn when white people turn blue. Her lips were purple. My father had been in the Navy where I guess he learned resuscitation. They didn’t do mouth-to-mouth in those days, instead he laid her on her belly and, straddling her, started pushing on her back. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who thought it was hopeless, but after a couple vigorous pushes she suddenly upchucked all this nasty liquid and within moments she was like nothing ever happened.
I don’t recall where Uncle Hen was when this was going down, nor do I remember getting back to the house. I do remember some firemen in the living room raving about what heroes the three men were, though it beats hell outta me what Uncle Boots did. For me, I think about what that moment must have been like for Pop. Here’s a regular guy, has a regular wife, regular job, car loan, house mortgage and he literally brings someone back from the dead. As for Uncle Hen, who literally didn’t have a pot to piss in, he laughed at the firemen, had a couple beers and tossed out a few racial slurs just to show success hadn’t gone to his head. How ya gonna figure some folks?
P.S. – Turns out I wasn’t the only one surprised by Uncle Hen’s heroism. To my father this incident was so about his brother-in-law he seemed utterly unimpressed with his own participation. He seemed surprised I thought much of it and had apparently never gave it much thought himself. In fact, he actually felt guilty for having previously disrespected Uncle Hen and felt he needed to make it up to him. As it happened, Uncle Hen had recently been given a watch he highly prized and in his headlong rush into the creek hadn’t removed. This was back when only ritzy watches were waterproof. Pop insisted on taking it to a jeweler and paying for the repair. To my knowledge, that was Uncle Hen’s sole reward, though Uncle Boots got some sort of ceremony back home wherever that was.
