An Amazing Life

By Lt. Harry Smith

An Amazing Life is the story of Lt. Harry Smith's twenty years in the police department, fifteen years as the Director of Corporate Security and Safety for Loews Corp., and twenty years as a security consultant providing expert advice and testimony in security negligence cases. It also covers his very interesting early years, leading up to him entering the police department. Any one of his cases could be a book in itself, but he has condensed them and arranged them into one continuing story that will hold your interest, keep you wanting more, and finally agreeing that he certainly did have an amazing life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644247402

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An Amazing Life

Lt. Harry Smith

Copyright © 2019 Lt. Harry Smith

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2019

ISBN 978-1-64424-739-6 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64424-740-2 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

The Beginning

Ireland

High School

Standard Oil

The Army—Basic Training

The Army—Fort Knox

The Army—Honor Guard

The Army—Germany

The Army—Coming Home

Police Department

The Proposal

The Wedding

The Tactical Patrol Force

The Stolen Car

Foreign License Plates

Our First House

United Parcel

Sergeant

Second House

Lieutenant

Detective Bureau

Manhattan Burglary Squad

Memphis, Tennessee

Loews Corporation

The Counterfeit Watches

Retirement

Our Condo

Looking Back

To my loving wife Bobbi, who has made my life such a wonderful journey.

The Beginning

My lifelong journey began January 17, 1934, in the Bronx, New York City. I was the fourth and last child of my parents, Margaret Mary and Ledger Cowley Smith, being preceded by two brothers and a sister. I can’t imagine what my parents were thinking when they named us kids, but they must have been on something to give us the hideous handles that they did. My sister, the oldest of the four, was named Bernice. A year later came Irving, then two years later Merton, and then finally four years later, me, Harold. I’ve always hated that name and never use it except when required by law. For all intents and purposes I’m Harry Smith. My middle name is Franklin—as in Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was elected president the year before and who everyone thought was going to lead the country out of the Great Depression. I was obviously born into hard economic times, but I was certainly blessed in other ways.

I was given good health and the greatest mother anyone could ever hope for. Mom really set my life’s compass in those early years—not by being strict but with an abundance of love and understanding. She knew how to nudge me towards good decisions, and she always seemed to know best. Looking back, I’m convinced that my mother honed her child-caring skills on my three older siblings, and by the time I came along, she was a genius.

Anyway, I was brought home to our family apartment at 2794 Valentine Avenue, but within a year or two, we moved to another apartment a couple of blocks away at 219 East 196th Street. Ironically, I learned years later that my wife was also born into the 2794 address just about the same time we moved out. Sometime later, her family also moved up to 196th Street, two blocks from my house.

Our new apartment turned out to be a really great location: the public and Catholic grammar schools were one very short block away, and there was a play street between them. The public school also had a big playground, which was open to everyone. The Catholic Church, which I would be married in years later, was part of the Catholic grammar school. We were half a block from the Grand Concourse and the Independent Subway Line, one block from Poe Park (the historic site of Edgar Allen Poe’s cottage), three blocks from Fordham Road (best shopping in the Bronx with numerous movie theaters) and a short walk to the Bronx Botanical Gardens, the Bronx Zoo, and Fordham University campus. I still remember as a little boy, looking out the fifth floor window of our apartment house and seeing the Botanical Gardens (about six blocks away), I thought that must be where the City ends, and the country begins. We also had bus routes on The Concourse, Valentine Avenue, Bainbridge Avenue, Kingsbridge Road, as well as on Fordham Road. Back in those days, no one had a car, and public transportation was the lifeline everyone depended on. Now when I look back, I realize how lucky we were. That neighborhood could not have been any better. In fact, it was perfect.

My earliest childhood memories are only bits and pieces—such as being alone in the apartment with my mother, while she did her housework. I was not yet in school like my siblings, and my father would have been at work. Mom would say she was tired and needed a nap, so we would go into the bedroom and take a nap. But when I awoke, my mother was always gone, busy doing more of her chores around the house. Whether or not my mother really needed a nap, I’ll never know.

I remember that living on the top floor had some serious disadvantages. In the summer time the heat radiated down from the black tar roof and was compounded by the sun coming in every window. The combination created a perfect oven. Prior to World War II, the superintendents installed canvas awnings on apartment house windows for the summer and removed them in the fall. It made an unbelievable difference. Without them the heat was unbearable. In the winter time, snow and water would accumulate on the roof, and there was a constant problem with leaks in the ceiling. I can remember three and four pots on the floor catching the various drippings. And maybe worst of all, there was never enough heat. We slept in our underwear because we didn’t have pajamas, and I had only one blanket, which was not enough. My mother allowed me to use my father’s old overcoat as a second blanket, but it still wasn’t really warm enough. However, the extra weight of the overcoat did provide some psychological comfort, and I was able to fall asleep.

When I was five years old my aunt Mary Anne won second prize in the Irish sweepstakes for $75,000. That may not seem like such a big deal now, but back in 1939, during the depression, $75,000 was a huge deal. She was not married and was staying with us at the time, so all the newspaper people came to our house for the story and photos.

There were so many news people, everyone had to go up to the roof for some elbow room. All the papers carried the story and photos the next day, including one picture on the front page of the Journal American showing me sitting on my aunt’s lap. She went back to Ireland to collect her prize, so she paid nothing in taxes—the same amount she gave her sister (my mother)—nothing. We never stayed in touch with her after that until I visited Ireland on my own nine years later, and we became good friends.

I remember the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. I would have been almost eight years old at the time, and was downstairs riding my bicycle on the sidewalk when I started to get the feeling that something was wrong. I noticed people were running and acting strangely. So I put my bicycle away and went upstairs to tell my parents. But they were acting strangely too. They were huddled around the radio and would shush me every time I tried to talk.

I went to Our Lady of Refuge Catholic School until I was about eight or nine years old. I don’t remember much about the time I spent there, except that I was always in fear of the nuns. They were unbelievably strict and would smack you in the blink of an eye. We worried about them even when we were not in school. The nuns had strict rules about not patronizing the Jew candy store which was located directly across the street from the Catholic school, and they told us that they kept a strict lookout from the school windows to make sure we followed their instructions. We made sure not to go anywhere near it, even though it was like an oasis in the desert.

I remember the day my mother told me she was transferring me and my two brothers over to the public school; my sister was already in high school. My brother had gone to school with a bandaged arm, because it was stitched up due to an accident he had over the weekend.

His nun, who was severely cross-eyed and famous for carrying an eighteen-inch ruler, which she wielded as a weapon, cracked him across the bandaged arm and caused the stitches to open and start bleeding. She claimed it was an accident, and a couple of classmates said she was trying to hit another kid when she hit my brother accidentally. Supposedly collateral damage was not uncommon in her class room, because of her poor eyesight. But my mother wouldn’t hear any of it and took the three of us across the street to the public school. I felt like I had been freed from prison. It was a long time before I could write on the blackboard without looking over my shoulder, because in Catholic school, if you made a mistake on the blackboard, the nun would bang your head against it. Moving over to PS 46 was one of the happiest days of my life, and a very positive step in developing the person I became. It taught me how to get along with people of different backgrounds and beliefs and to appreciate those differences.

I also remember, during the war years, my parents having friends over the house. At the end of the evening, my mother would put out a spread of cold cuts, salads, and desserts and everyone would sit around the table smoking and talking. Everyone smoked in those days.

The conversation inevitably would turn to the war, and it always seemed to me that the Germans and the Japanese were winning, which they were for the first year or so. I can recall looking at the door of our apartment, which had two separate locks, and wondering if it would be strong enough when the Germans come and try to smash the door down with their rifle butts. I had seen enough in the Newsreels, the Nazis goose stepping through Paris in their black uniforms to be afraid of them.

It was frustrating for most young boys my age who were too young to be in the military but old enough to wish we were. We had military ribbons and patches sewn on to our clothing and wore them with