To understand how Chick Donohue could venture on his extraordinary journey to track down his buddies in combat, it helps to know the time and place from which they came. Urban planners would do well to study and replicate its attributes.
Chick and his buddies had the good fortune to grow up in Inwood, the unspoiled northern tip of Manhattan island, in the 1950s and early 1960s. Children played wild, free, and unattended, in virgin forest, in two rivers, and in all the streets between, yet it was New York City. With Big Nature only steps from the elevated subway, it was a magical place in a more innocent time, at once rural and urban, an oasis that Inwood native John F. McMullen, host of the online John-Mac Radio Show, has called “our end of heaven.”
“We grew up at the entrance to Inwood Hill Park, where there were Indian caves,” says Rick Duggan, who was twenty when Chick found him in combat in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1968 and who went on to become a New York Police Department (NYPD) lieutenant. “My mother used to tell me stories about an Indian princess who lived there when my mother was little.”
Indeed, a Native American, Princess Noemie, lived in a cottage next to the three-hundred-year-old tulip tree the Lenape Indians considered sacred. A plaque today identifies it as the spot where Peter Minuit made his $24 deal of trinkets to buy Manhattan. (Generations of schoolchildren thought Minuit ripped off the Indians, but recent historians have postulated that it was Minuit who was scammed: he consummated the deal with Canarsee Indians chief Seysey, but it was the Lenape cousins, the Weckquaesgeeks Indians, who controlled that land.)
According to Cole Thompson’s fascinating, picture-filled website My Inwood (myinwood.net), Princess Noemie taught Indian beadwork to the neighborhood children and hosted tribal gatherings as large as six hundred every September. In a neighboring cottage, Aimee LePrince Voorhees, daughter of Louis LePrince, the man who filmed the first moving image, also lived in the park. There she worked in her Indian-artifact-inspired Inwood Pottery Studio. Developer Robert Moses chopped down the sacred tulip tree and evicted Noemie and Aimee, but the spirit of place to which they contributed remained strong.
Inwood Hill Park had something you could find nowhere else in New York City, and still does: 196 acres of pristine old-growth forest, shading the ancient Native Americans’ caves and the salt marsh they’d once fished. At the southern tip of the park stretches another sixty-six acres of nature called Fort Tryon Park, home of the Cloisters Museum and its unicorn tapestries. John D. Rockefeller Jr. created the park out of old estates, gave it to the city, and, for good measure, bought the Palisades across the Hudson in New Jersey so that kids playing in the woods of Fort Tryon would see nothing but forest on the other side of the river as well.
To the north is Spuyten Duyvil (Dutch for “Swirling Devil”) Creek; to the east, the Harlem River; and to the west, the mighty Hudson, all deemed swimmable by the children then. It was like living in an enchanted forest in the middle of the nation’s biggest metropolis—an urban paradise worthy of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Like that band of lads, Inwood kids stuck together.
“There were also baseball fields, even an Irish soccer field,” recalled Tommy Collins, who was a military policeman (MP) when Chick found him in Qui Nhon and who became an NYPD cold-case detective after he came home. “We would play sports in there, run around, explore. It was a great place to grow up.”
For those who found it hard to believe the Inwood scene in the 1995 movie version of The Basketball Diaries—in which Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg jump off a cliff into the Harlem River—doubt no longer. Collins recalls:
“We used to get the old inner tubes out of the gas stations, and if the attendant was nice, he would fix one for you. There was one fellow on 218th Street off Seaman Avenue who’d patch them for us. And we used to jump into the river and float across where the day liners used to come in.”
A predominantly Irish and Jewish neighborhood, it produced such talents as basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then known as Lew Alcindor; The Basketball Diaries author and punk rocker Jim Carroll; and Henry Stern, the commissioner and champion of New York City parks.
Like other parts of New York City at that time, Inwood was a neighborhood where large families lived side by side in small apartments, sharing celebrations and children’s milestones, and looking out for one another whether their luck went up or down.
Eponymous restaurateur and Citi Field tavern owner Steve (Pally) McFadden, whose brother Joey was on Chick’s list, said: “What I think made Inwood unique is that socially, everybody’s family made the same amount of money. There was no ‘rich’ section, no ‘poor’ section.
“There was no outside pressure to wear or have expensive things you couldn’t afford, like today,” adds McFadden. “There was no pecking order. It put fewer pressures on people, so they could converse together. You could develop friendships with anybody.”
“All the mothers hung their laundry on the roofs, next to one other,” says Joe Reynolds, who served in Vietnam, and whose family owns historic Pete’s Tavern in Gramercy Park.
Younger children, with mothers and neighbors watching from the windows or stoops, played skelly or ringolevio freely and safely for hours. When they got older, it was stickball or handball or team sports.
“There was no such thing as babysitting,” says McFadden. “Older kids watched the younger kids; mothers put the littlest ones next door for an hour if they had to.”
“Mostly, we all walked everywhere in the neighborhood,” says Reynolds. “Mrs. Sullivan and her mother, who lived above the Blue Bakery, would put pillows on their windowsill and watch all the comings and goings. We’d yell up, ‘Hey, Mrs. Sullivan, did you see Bobby Burns?’ And she would say, ‘Oh yes, Bobby went up that way about a half hour ago.’”
Families with six, eight, ten kids were not uncommon. You played with kids your age; your younger siblings and cousins played with their younger siblings in matching stair steps. You looked out for your friends’ kid brothers and sisters as you would your own. You didn’t have money, but you had one another.
As Seamus Heaney wrote, “If you have a strong first world and a strong set of relationships, then in some part of you, you are always free; you can walk the world because you know where you belong, you have some place to come back to.”