Bald and bespectacled, my father would never have been mistaken for Wyatt Earp. But I’ll always remember a small act of heroism he performed one night in the lawless Wild West that was 1980s New York City.
We went out to dinner, then took a taxi home. As the cab turned left at a light, making a u-turn toward our apartment building, we saw something strange transpiring on the corner.
A group of four or five or six teenagers had surrounded an unoccupied parked car. They were trying to lift it onto the sidewalk. A few yards away, under the building’s awning, our doorman stood and watched, fidgeting.
This was the New York City I grew up in. Even on the hoity-toity Upper East Side, thieves regularly broke into cars to steal radios—to the point where nearly every parked vehicle displayed a handwritten white flag in the window: "NO RADIO, ALREADY STOLEN.” Once, I even heard of a car being vandalized despite bearing such a sign, with someone apparently smashing the windshield and spray-painting "GET ONE” across the door.
As the taxi pulled into the front of the building, my dad bolted out the door and ran toward the corner, shaking his fist and yelling at the band of miscreants, who quickly dispersed, leaving the parked car in the street where it belonged.
Neither my father nor the punks acted “rationally.” Thank God.
Dad could have just gone upstairs to our apartment and called the police. It wasn't in his narrow lane of self-interest to bother confronting the kids. It wasn’t our car. To this day, I have no idea who owned it. Maybe incidents like this were bad for neighborhood property values, but I doubt that’s what kicked him into gear.
Rather, I think he innately grasped an idea that, a few years later, would be popularized by mayor Rudy Giuliani and police chief William Bratton: the broken windows theory of crime. If a city lets “petty” acts of vandalism slide, it causes not-so-petty acts to rise, fueling further disorder.
My father was a lifelong Democrat. In our home, the Kennedys could do no wrong. Still, I bet he would have called this “theory” no more than a bit of common sense.
A bunch of toughs near their physical prime might have clobbered an unarmed, middle-aged man in khakis and loafers, who made his living behind a typewriter, crafting slogans for stock brokerages and instant breakfast drinks. Yet, he showed no sign of fear, only his legendary temper, which (for once) was wholly justified. It scared them off real quick.
Remember in school, when you asked “Can I go to the bathroom?” and the teacher responded “you may”? It’s cute and telling that children conflate permission to do something with the ability to do it. It’s also telling that teachers see no risk in pointing out that technically, students could walk out of class any old time. Even in unruly classrooms, a baseline respect for authority holds things together.
The youths who fled the scene must have retained at least a shred of that respect. They saw an angry grown-up, which, even in that chaotic urban environment, meant they were in trouble. They probably didn’t even notice his pot belly.
I wonder how this episode would go down in an American city today, when law-abiding citizens have every incentive to look the other way at the proverbial broken windows.
Try to stop a shoplifter and the store will fire you. Report a parked car blocking a crosswalk (to the parking authority, not the police) and you’ll get branded a “Karen” and harassed by internet mobs. Kill someone in self-defense while defending a small business from rioters and you won’t just be prosecuted but convicted in the media before the jury decides if you’re innocent. Ditto if you were trying to protect fellow subway passengers from a mentally ill person.
But I’d like to think I’d still follow my dad’s lead. He showed me that you don’t have to be a blond, nude bodybuilder or a small-town country singer to stand for order.
All it takes is a modicum of courage. Or maybe just a little bit of rage.