Through the Eyes of a Lawman: The Cultural Tales of a Cop, Lawyer, and Intelligence Analyst

By Michael J. Butler

Sociologists and historians can examine and dissect our culture, but only a true eyewitness can offer the details on the ground. In Through the Eyes of a Lawman, author Michael J. Butler presents an insiders look at the people and organizations that have affected the US intelligence services; the modern way law and law enforcement operates and has evolved; the educational deficiencies of the system; and our collective loss of abstract and critical thinking. Through humorous and sober anecdotes, Through the Eyes of a Lawman addresses the issue of whether we have become a make-it-up-as-we-go-along society.

Butlers story begins in the 1950s in Brooklyn, New York, and is told through his perspective as a retired cop, lawyer, former US intelligence analyst, and college instructor. Against the backdrop of his extensive law enforcement experience, Butler paints a portrait of todays society and culture, examines how it has been evolving, and explores what it means for the countrys future.

Through the Eyes of a Lawman goes behind the curtain that separates the people from the law, police, the courts, the intelligence services, and the government to analyze the ideas of heroes, villains, cops, terrorism, trials, classrooms, judges, soldiers, Vietnam, and politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475934502

Michael J. Butler

Michael J. Butler is an attorney and retired police captain. He served in the US Army and has been an intelligence analyst, an adjunct professor, and a New York City transit administrative law hearing officer. Butler and his wife, Betty, live in Greenport, New York. They have three adult children.

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Copyright © 2012 Michael J. Butler

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-3448-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3449-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3450-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012911171

iUniverse rev. date: 8/9/2012

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Beginning

Chapter 2: The US Army

Chapter 3: The Army Security Agency

Chapter 4: The Police Academy—The Fundamentals

Chapter 5: On the Job

Chapter 6: Gee, Boss, I Wish I Had Thought of That

Chapter 7: It’s Lonely at the Top

Chapter 8: Headquarters and the Fifth Precinct

Chapter 9: The Law and Its Principles

Chapter 10: Just Give the Cook the Job

Chapter 11: Terrorism

Chapter 12: Where High School Meets College

Chapter 13: The Drug Enforcement Administration 2009–2010

Chapter 14: Charge to the Sound of the Guns

Endnotes

This book is dedicated to my wife, Betty, and my three children, Rob, Brian, and Reagan.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank the following people for their inspiration, information, and help in creating Through the Eyes of a Lawman.

Jay Scahill, a retired city cop, thanks for your great police stories and your mild sarcasm, so important to developing an attitude before pen goes to paper.

Richie Hellstrom, a retired NYC fire fighter, thanks for your thoughtful questions and clever conversational skills during the development of the manuscript.

Carole Witkover, another great conversationalist, thank you for the important information you provided about the US Postal Police during our long conversations in Catskill Town Court.

Ed Nelle, thank you for your interesting stories and your great history as an Army pilot. You are one of the most absorbing characters I have ever met.

Henri Nelle, Ed’s wife, thank you for being an entertaining advocate and an articulate, informed, and fierce defender of any cause you adopt.

Donna Reilly, of Windham, NY, I thank for being the most competent worker on the mountaintop. Her smooth form of self-motivation and confidence projects the can do attitude one needs to write a book.

Peter J. Cannarelli is a retired NYC detective, an Army veteran, a Brooklyn native, and a licensed private investigator. He deserves my gratitude for being a glamorous gumshoe and an inspiration in capturing the urban police character.

Thanks to Billy Kilgallon for being the most romantic character in the Catskills and a retired New York City detective who regularly held court. He was a first-rate entertainer and source of information who charmed others with his New York manner and accent and his Bronx upbringing.

Eileen Kilgallon, Bill’s wife and partner, thank you for the inspiration you provided after Bill’s death, especially your unselfish service in hospice care.

Around Christmas 2010, Eileen’s sister and her husband, Catherine Reynolds and Jeffrey A. Reynolds, Esq., were inspirational when they held a memorial Sunday afternoon dinner in the name of Bill Kilgallon. Both of these people are so generous and such great hosts that all who attended were deeply impressed and grateful.

Michael Dittmar, I thank for being an inspirational leader.

Finally, a thank-you is due to all the editors and others at iUniverse who helped me transform my manuscript into this book.

Introduction

During the late summer of 1968, John McGahern and I, a couple of GIs home on a weekend pass from Fort Dix, were in a roadside restaurant at about 1:00 a.m. with two girls we knew from the neighborhood. We had just left a local bar, and we went to the Pioneer Diner for breakfast. We took our seats in a tight booth when a gruff, overweight waitress appeared to take our order. With her hair pinned back in an untidy bun, she pulled out her pad and, with pen in hand, stared at the four of us. John, a little beer-buzzed and trying to be amusing, said, Hey, baby, what would ya do for two bucks?

Cut your friggin’ throat, she said.

I knew at that moment the culture was changing.

This book, I hope, serves to report what I have observed and interpreted during a lifetime of law enforcement and the practice of law. Many will draw different conclusions from what I have written. These recollections and stories are viewed through my eyes, with some help from my family and friends, my memory, and some old records and notes.

In my law school classes, instructors did not use the lecture method. Rather, like most law school professors, they used the Socratic method, a form of teaching that employs questions and debate to stimulate discussion and critical thinking. The method develops ideas, which are subjected to challenges. It actually develops a way of thinking. This book does not use Socratic method to develop points. It would be presumptuous to do so. Socratic method has, however, affected the way I think. I try to test my opinions, premises, and conclusions against the facts, either observed or known, but fair inferences are a necessary part of a perspective too.

I hope that the anecdotes and characters in the pages that follow will stimulate discussion and thought and serve as practical examples of our culture and its evolution.

We’ve seen inexorable changes in our culture over the decades, exemplified in our local courts, local political parties, police procedure, courtrooms, governmental power, and classrooms. We have moved away from abstract and critical thinking into the realm of the practical, emotional, and political. These changes have affected our public policy and the way we administer the law. The changes take place principally, and at the threshold, in our schools—the place where our future is shaped. Precise, deep, and analytical thinking is at the center of our cultural strength—without it, life is a reality TV show.

I am not the story. This book is not about me but rather about what I have observed and interpreted. I am a witness, a reporter. While I have had the honor and privilege to have been a soldier, a cop, a lawyer, a teacher, a political candidate, and an intelligence analyst in three different organizations, this book is not about any of those jobs but rather about the unique people and experiences connected to them. Many of the characters that follow deserve credit for vigorously defending the principles, traditions, and fundamental values so important to our enduring culture. Some do not, but I thank them for the contrast nonetheless.

This book discusses the possibility that, among other things, the era of hard work, intellectual and mechanical, has been replaced by one of relative convenience. Has deep thinking been displaced by soft, emotional thinking, and are we losing our ability to think critically? In the abstract is a guy who paints graffiti on a wall an artist or a vandal? Perspective matters.

Why, critics might ask, do we need to know Marconi invented the radio? While there is some validity to the argument that traditionally students memorized facts in order to learn, we must now face the reality that we suffer from information overload and as a consequence mastery over the facts has become less and less important. A physician will, no doubt, someday diagnose a disease through the use of a handheld device filled with information, a volume of data she could not possibly store in her head. So as a collateral question we must ask, will the doctor become a computer expert with a background in medicine? Will the machine become the doctor and the surgeon a technician?

The question posed might be—is it our base knowledge that may get compromised? And does it matter? A young student using a calculator may find the answer to a complex arithmetic problem on the machine, but without base knowledge, will she be able identify an obvious error?

A large percentage (perhaps 50 percent) of my college students, mostly graduates of urban high schools, had to be taught about the three branches of government, the Bill of Rights, the presumption of innocence, and the limits of governmental power. Did the high school fail, or has technology simply replaced that body of knowledge with the ability to locate facts about civics and other topics when quickly needed? Some of the websites my students used didn’t give the pupils the facts to draw a conclusion—rather, the site drew the conclusion for them. Old fashioned encyclopedias contained a summary of information or facts under a title or subject often used for research to write a term paper. Some students now simply copy and paste critical elements or steal an entire term paper online with the click of a key. Has that changed our culture?

I sometimes reflect on past events. My son’s close friend, a college graduate working in our schools, once described the three branches of government as the House, the Senate, and the courts, I think. I was shocked and befuddled. How can we preserve our rights and traditions if we don’t know what they are?

Has a lack of knowledge manifested itself in many other new ways? I had bosses in the FBI and DEA who didn’t answer procedural questions put to them by subordinates but instead referred the employee to departmental web sites. Has the primary job of the supervisor, to train, been replaced with the idea that this function is delegated to another subordinate, or to some device?

Is the idea of quiet patriotism quickly disappearing? Patriotism is more than love of country; it is also the sense that we are all in this together. It is a form of greater generosity. My father was quietly a proud combat veteran. Has that changed?

Do real heroes call themselves heroes? And what is a hero? When I worked in the intelligence/security complex at the National Counterterrorism Center outside Washington, DC, in 2005 and early 2006, I witnessed dedicated men and women who were at war with terrorists every day. Is that patriotism, heroism, or just doing one’s job? What about a cop who dug through the debris at ground zero looking for survivors? How about soldiers serving in the rear?

Should we pay people based on the danger they face at work? Should we pay a patrol officer more than an artilleryman in combat or a Navy SEAL? Should we pay a lawyer more than a fireman or a professor more than a deepwater fisherman?

I am basically a cop and a lawyer, and because of that I have extensive experience in police work and the law, but that just isn’t enough. I gained my greatest insights from the other jobs I held. It is the composite experience of college, the police academy, police work, police promotion, supervision, law school, intelligence work, criminal defense, a political campaign, teaching, and the military that allowed me to capture a broad segment of our society from several perspectives.

Allow me to finish this introduction by noting that, in deference to the work the NYPD anti-terror officers, FBI, and DEA analysts and agents do, I have chosen not to use any full names or other identifiers in detailing my experiences with those agencies. I will occasionally use a first name in order to give the reader a context within which to understand an anecdote, but too much personal detail doesn’t really serve any literary end. In the case of DEA supervisory IA James Weeks and DEA legal instructor Tony Beeler, I have used false last names.

Chapter 1:

The Beginning

Life is filled with reflection—as a young boy in Brooklyn I was immersed in the culture of the World War II veterans. I knew them and their antics intimately. Years later, in my early twenties I was surrounded by the next generation of warriors, and I discovered they weren’t very different at all. Robert Bob Hayes was career military, a multilinguist, a Bronze Star recipient, a Vietnam veteran (having served there twice), and an Army sergeant first class. For the kids of the late ’60s and ’70s, Bob’s wartime service seemed less dramatic than that of World War II veterans. Robert, like many of the returning military, might tie one on occasionally when he came home from overseas. One late night we were at a local Irish pub called Katie Daly’s to celebrate Bob’s recent retirement. Somehow he lost his grip on the bar rail, and as he leaned back on his barstool, he fell backward from the barroom through the swinging wooden doors into the kitchen, where his momentum was halted by the hot grill and the stunned cooks. Reversing direction, he stumbled forward, arms in the air, back through the swinging doors, landing neatly and unhurt back where his short journey had begun. Kieran, the Irish barkeep, visibly angry and trying to make sense of the event, yelled at me, Michael Butler, don’t you ever bring a goddamn stuntman in here again!

In kind, I replied, He’s no goddamn stuntman. He’s my uncle, and he can only do those tricks because he’s goddamn drunk!

While now predominantly Asian and Spanish, in the 1950s, Sunset Park was working-class Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Swede, and Spanish. It had a certain combination of order and grit. The area along the dark brown waterfront was industrial, with docks and long warehouses. The centerpiece was a complex of industrial buildings called Bush Terminal. The streets away from the docks were tidy and clean, with attached two- and three-story buildings, some in the fashion of brownstones, others called railroad apartments. Railroad apartments were narrow residences that required passage through one room into the next. Generally, there was only one hallway on each floor, and the layout might have a bedroom next to the living room, or parlor. It was something like walking through a railroad car with connected rooms on one side.

I was brought home to 734 Fifty-Eighth Street, a railroad apartment building owned by my grandparents, Mary Winifred Winnie and Michael Mike Butler. My grandmother, a tall, very thin woman with long black and gray hair, was a native of Sag Harbor on Long Island. Grandma was a woman with a somewhat stern manner who would get down on her knees and pray for and receive anything for which she asked.

Winnie had a smooth, quiet voice with, surprisingly, an ever so slight Irish accent. Ah now, don’t you know it’s time to go to bed, boy? By and by we’ll talk again.

Mike, also religious, was an Irish immigrant with a thick brogue, deep voice, and erect posture. He had a large, balding pate and was lean with reasonably broad shoulders. My grandfather had won his US citizenship through his Army service in World War I. He had seen combat in France and was a proud veteran and a proud American. There were family rumors that held he and an old friend, Patty O’Flynn, had fought the British in the Irish Republic before arriving in America. Nothing was ever proven, and my recollection was that Mike was closed mouth about the whole matter.

John Hayes and Mary Irene Hayes, my maternal grandparents, were lifelong New Yorkers of Irish extraction. They were a bit more secular than Mike and Winnie.

John was slightly above average height, with a thin build and thinning hair. Pops, as we called him, was a union printer with the New York Journal American newspaper and worked mostly nights in downtown Brooklyn. After each work shift, he took the Fourth Avenue BMT local toward home and stopped at a local tavern, Mannix’s, on Fifty-Seventh Street, where he would drink beer and meet with friends to discuss politics and current events. John presented himself well and was a bit formal in his manners and speech. Pardon me always preceded any interruption.

John, like most men at the time, wore a suit and tie to and from work. After a late night and perhaps a few too many at Mannix’s, Pops grabbed a jacket on his way out of the bar. While close in color to his suit pants, it was actually a lighter brown. For months after, when he wore the outfit, he graciously yet reluctantly accepted the compliments he received for his flashy two-tone suit, saying wryly, Thanks, I just got it.

My father, with thick, curly black hair, light blue eyes, and heavyset build, resembled a young Jackie Gleason. He was named after his maternal grandfather, James Slowey. Like his father, who was an infantryman in World War I, Jimmy was a proud combat veteran of the next great war. Mike and Winnie sometimes called him Juney, short for junior, based on his namesake and grandfather, James. Jimmy served in Europe and North Africa, mostly as a tech corporal machine gunner, for more than thirty months.

He had attended Army basic training at Camp Edwards, Massachusetts, and shortly after completion was sent into combat. The day he left, Grandpa Mike walked Jimmy, as he was known outside his immediate family, to the subway station to say good-bye and tell him how proud he was of him. Winnie prayed for my father throughout his tour of duty. His infantry company, commanded by Captain Stevens, suffered a casualty rate of almost two-thirds. Except for a broken finger, Jimmy came home untouched. My father’s and his contemporaries’ service in WWII was revered by a generation of kids who watched army movies on TV and played guns for outdoor entertainment.

My father’s closest friend was Charles Gathercole, known alternately as Charlie and Gatch. Thin and standing just over six feet tall, Charlie had classic good looks—a distinctive mouth with narrow eyes and a confident gait—a bit like John Wayne. He was articulate, always concluding a conversation with See my point? He graduated from a Catholic high school in Brooklyn, where he had been an exceptional baseball pitcher. He was a smart and tough competitor, yet he wrote poetry.

After high school, like most of my father’s friends, he joined the Army. He was invited to attend Officers Candidate School (OCS) after basic training. His one desire was to serve overseas, but his high marks in OCS earned him a job as a stateside trainer. Charlie eventually married Mary Peters, a registered nurse who had graduated from Kings County Hospital. Ironically, Mary got to serve overseas during World War II as a commissioned officer.

After the war, Charlie maintained his reserve commission and began selling insurance in the city, but he was unsatisfied with the business. At the time, the subway systems in the city were changing, and Grandpa Mike, as a motorman, was a frontline observer. Immediately following World War II, transit police were considered railroad patrolmen and of a lesser status than city police. My grandfather discovered that the transit police were to be designated New York City Transit Authority Police and that the new force was to expand and professionalize. He convinced Charlie to take the test for the new police department and take advantage of the growth and promotion opportunities presented by a new agency. Charlie accepted and went on to become a patrolman, a plainclothes investigator, a sergeant, a lieutenant, and a captain before retiring at the rank of deputy inspector.

Charlie’s most interesting story was when he wounded a berserk former marine who attacked him on a subway platform in downtown Brooklyn late one night. Charlie was off duty and on his way home. The attack was unprovoked—the guy just saw Gatch and went after him, and at one point the two combatants were wrestling over Charlie’s gun. Charlie shot the marine in the back of the upper leg, right in the ass, he later said, and the fight was over.

Charlie Gathercole always projected a sense of calm. He was hard to rattle. In the mid-1960s, we were celebrating a birthday at my family home on Long Island. Charlie was of course invited to the family affair, and as usual he arrived wearing an expensive, well-tailored suit, having just left work in the city.

At that time, sheet cakes with icing were popular party staples. My mother had placed the large flat, rectangular cake with thick icing on the coffee table in the crowded living room. Charlie, with drink in hand, was holding court with the crowd, and began to back up to sit on the couch as he continued his presentation. He felt the back of his long legs hit the coffee table and, figuring that it was the couch, he sat down directly on the cake. Without betraying any indication of his error, he continued to talk and slowly wiped the vanilla icing from the seat of his pants, never once acknowledging the event. Everyone in the room held back a smile but nonetheless stood agape.

Neither Jimmy nor Charlie had great taste when it came to booze. Price trumped quality every time. One Saturday, years later, Dad was preparing for a visit from Gatch and he and I went up to the local liquor store to stock up. Choosing a scotch at a lower price, Jimmy proudly asked the clerk for a quart of Clan MacGregor. With a slight smile, the clerk said, Bad case of athlete’s foot, right?

My mother was the oldest in a family of three children. Her brother Jack, keeping in step with cultural custom, served in the Navy in the late fifties. Jack was a tall character with a sharp wit. He was bright, liberal, secular, and urbane. Later in life, he distinguished himself by his shaved head. Mom’s other brother, Bob, was a decorated career US Army sergeant, and an occasional stuntman in Katie Daly’s pub.

My mother was a petite woman of exceptional good looks, with blue eyes and dark hair. She was well proportioned and a talented singer. A graduate from a Catholic girls high school in Park Slope, Brooklyn, she met and married Jimmy in 1948 after a brief courtship. She was a secretary by training but an actress and singer by desire. Her looks drew attention to her wherever she went, and she was an articulate advocate for whatever cause she adopted. She was a master at assigning fault, and her efforts were aided by the proclivities of a guilt-ridden Irish Catholic family. She represented an emerging modern mother of the times—always with a job of some sort on weekends and at the same time a dedicated housewife. Perhaps she helped set the path in some sense for the evolving working woman, a different version of the stay-at-home mom.

The parish where we grew up was filled with WWII veterans. It did not have a regular conventional church but rather a basilica, a large ornate house of worship that resembles a cathedral. The grammar school included Irish, Italian, and Spanish children, both boys and girls. The high school was a girls’ academy and served the local area. Both schools existed as part of the large Our Lady of Perpetual Help (OLPH) complex, which encompassed a square block in a densely urbanized area. All these people shared certain common traits. They were members of a traditional family. While some were religious, some secular, and some ambivalent, they all had been exposed to the Catholic religion. Such exposure may not have provided a capacity to worship, but it always seemed to provide a sense of ethics—not black from white, but right from wrong. Although plenty fallible, each was equipped with a moral compass and the innate need to provide for and serve family, community, and country. Relativism was a foreign concept.

The men and the families from our neighborhood thrived on service and kindness. Our friends and our family belonged to the Knights of Columbus, the military reserves—they were cops, nurses, firefighters, priests, nuns, brothers, and church ushers.

My father believed in two fundamental ideas, among others. He believed that the icon of the Fighting Irish was not a myth. Jimmy believed that the Irish, particularly Irish-Americans, were a tough, honorable, and courageous yet somewhat bellicose people who always fought on the right side, or at least in defense of it (despite the fact that Ireland was neutral and maintained relations with the Nazi government during WWII). Additionally, if you were born Irish Catholic, you were always Irish Catholic. An Irish Catholic who converted, fell away, or renounced remained Irish Catholic for life. You couldn’t separate those two elements any more than you could separate the Irish whiskey from the cup of coffee in which it was mixed.

When I was a youngster, perhaps seven, one early evening my father brought home a book he had captured—probably from a colleague at work. With the bound volume in hand he sat down with me on our large couch. The book was about those who had earned the Medal of Honor. My father read from the pages as they told the story of the enormous courage exhibited by each recipient in each of those brief moments of greatness. He read the individual stories with emotion and said to me afterward, These men are what make America great. In a brief exhibition of bias he couldn’t resist pointing out all those with Irish surnames listed in the tome.

My brother Jay, who eventually became a New York City cop, was born in November of 1953 and joined the household on Fifty-Eighth Street.

In a somewhat strange coincidence many years later in an event similar to Charlie’s, Jay, also an off-duty New York City officer and returning home after work one night, was accosted by two men. Like Charlie—looking for no trouble—he had a problem to solve. He similarly found himself suddenly involved. As he approached their vehicle, which was blocking the roadway, he began to suspect the two might be in a stolen car. Jay identified himself as a police officer. The men became agitated and irate. It was a cold and clear night, and my brother’s efforts to get to his car trunk, where his service gun was stored, were complicated by the icy road. As he opened the trunk, he was attacked by the men. He fell, and the light within the trunk illuminated the gun for all to see. Although the two assailants probably didn’t actually see the gun, Jay couldn’t assume that important fact. One of the men kicked Jay in the face just below his eye, while the other punched and kicked him all over his body.

Jay finally took control of the weapon and shot one of the men in the chest. The other, in a provident sense of self-preservation, stopped the attack and raised his hands compliantly. Jay was appalled at the lack of assistance from the residents, who watched from their windows but did nothing to help, even after he identified himself and called out for assistance.

For several hours at the hospital, the seriousness of Jay’s eye injury was unknown. The greatest fear was that he would lose his eye or sight in the eye. The story was all over WCBS Radio in New York that Saturday morning, with conflicting details as to what had occurred.

I spoke to Jay and his wife, Pat, that morning by telephone and asked Jay if he was comfortable with the fact that one assailant was seriously wounded.

He should be dead, he said.

The city later ruled the shooting justified. Only in litigious New York could the right become wrong. The man survived and eventually sued New York City and received something significantly more than a nuisance settlement.

*   *   *   *

In the summer of 1956, my family moved to 200 Beacon Avenue in Lindenhurst on Long Island. I was almost six, and my brother Jay was almost three years old. My father, who had briefly attended Brooklyn Poly Tech for some engineering courses, changed companies, leaving the Brooklyn Union Gas Company for the relatively new Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO). Long Island was expanding rapidly as the World War II veterans returned home, and many of their houses, my father rightly believed, would need gas heat.

My father’s work at LILCO introduced him to many new people, many of them characters in their own right. Tom Kenny, a LILCO gas salesman, was a large, heavy man with a shock of light brown hair. He was a Navy veteran who had seen serious action in the Pacific. He had a deep voice and took the opportunity to sing on any occasion. He was active in the Boy Scouts of America and in his parish church. A humble man, he would sometimes apologize to my father for not having served in the infantry.

George Twigg was also a heating representative in LILCO. He served with the US Coast Guard in the treacherous waters of the North Pacific during World War II. Using a phrase popularized earlier in the war, my father referred to George’s service in Hooligan’s Navy. George was a small, handsome man with dark hair. He was married to a taller, attractive woman named Ann. She and my mother became close friends and shared an interest in cold beer and menthol cigarettes.

Right on time, Mary Beth was born in August of 1956, and after her arrival home from the hospital, my mother placed her bassinet in the master bedroom right off the dining area. Mary Beth was a healthy, average-size baby and was fed bottled baby formula. Breastfeeding was not a popular activity in the family at the time. Like all babies, she smelled of powder, baby lotion, and formula. It was perhaps the formula that attracted the mice. At some point, the baby woke up crying. My mother went to fetch the child and discovered her bassinet filled with several mice—some crawling on the baby’s face. The term nervous breakdown does not adequately describe my mother’s reaction. She was horrified and probably sick to her stomach. She frantically checked to make sure Mary Beth had not been bitten by the rodents. Satisfied that the baby hadn’t been bitten, she stopped screaming and vowed, looking to the heavens (like the scene in Gone with the Wind), As God is my judge, I will get those mice. Now Pat, along with my father, was going to solve the mouse problem. In fact, they declared war on the little gray critters. Predictably, Pat and Jimmy purchased numerous mousetraps. I can recall viewing television in the living room and watching mice continually scamper across the darkened kitchen floor two rooms away. The traps couldn’t keep up with the population of mice. Although they continually caught mice in the traps, there were always more mice to catch. It was our landlady who recommended a cat. But not just any cat. It had to be a mouser, she said.

I’m not sure where the cat came from, but it was definitely a mouser. The feline looked older and was grayish with bold dark stripes. Watching this animal operate restored my family’s belief that cats are indeed related to tigers. It was a pleasure to watch her hunt down these pests, mouse by mouse, hour by hour, day by day. The cat would capture a mouse and lay the lifeless critter at my mother’s feet, proudly displaying the evidence of her prowess.

After several days, there was nary a mouse in the house. Our landlady expressed the belief that the scent of the killer cat, from which mice flee, had the greatest effect. My mother and father believed the cat had simply killed all the mice within a ten-mile radius. We never learned nor cared about the reason, but we were intoxicated with the results. We lived at Beacon Avenue while the house my parents bought was being built on Prairie Lane in Lindenhurst, and the thought of escape always provided strength as we battled the great gray menace.

One Friday night that summer, my father went to a local Italian restaurant for pizza. As was his custom, he had a beer or two at the bar while waiting for the pies to be prepared. The bar was L-shaped, and my father sat near the ninety-degree turn at the center of the bar. From that vantage point, he could look down the length of the bar from each perspective. As he looked to the end on his right side, he saw the familiar face of a man leaning on the countertop. It was his World War II buddy, Freddy Blind, whom he hadn’t seen in several years.

Fred was about eight years older than Jimmy. The two had served the whole time overseas together