That's My Baby

As he perched on the girders of a half-completed traffic ramp on Manhattan's lower East Side one afternoon last week, Louis Sarno, a sinewy construction foreman, saw a big-city tragedy in the making. Directly across traffic-jammed South Street an apartment window stood open. As Sarno watched, a two-year-old boy climbed on the sill, teetered in fright four floors above the sidewalk. Sarno yelled at two gardeners working across the street. They did not hear him. The 41-year-old foreman wasted no more time.

He turned and sprinted precariously along 100 yards of bare girders to the nearest ladder, scrambled down it to the street, dived through the traffic stream and raced 100 yards back to the apartment building. He was below the window just as the boy--Francis Xavier Lamadrid--lost his balance and came sailing down. Sarno braced himself. Frightened women spectators screamed. But seconds later, with the force of his fall broken, the child was safe in Sarno's brawny arms. Astounded passersby, screened from the catch by a billboard, assumed that Sarno had caught the boy.

It was, the New York police announced on hearing the details, one of the most amazing rescues on record. It was also the kind of tale that gives reporters a chance to write of the cynical city's great human heart, and within a few hours Sarno was photographed and interviewed by every newspaper in town. The New York Herald Tribune announced that the boy, on being caught, said calmly: "I haven't got my shoes on." It later turned out that little Francis, a child of Puerto Rican parents, knew only one English word, "Godfrey," and because of the influence of television, thought that it meant "tea bag." But amid the happy hysteria nobody minded at all.

And almost nobody noticed--or remembered--that Sarno ("I always was a pretty good ballplayer") was not the only man who ran to the boy's rescue. Almost nobody, that is, but a New York Journal-American advertising man who happened to be riding on South Street at the time. He was sure he saw a bus driver, standing under the window beside Sarno, actually catch the child.

By the time the Journal-American found the bus driver, one Morris Brower, a day had passed and Sarno was the accepted hero. When questioned, however, Brower said that he had caught the child, who rolled out of his arms, hit the ground and was then scooped up by Rescuer Sarno. Brower announced that he had witnesses to prove his story. Sarno said he had witnesses too.

At week's end it seemed certain that both men had done their daring best to save a child's life, but there was no way at all of really telling who deserved the credit. Meanwhile, incensed Puerto Rican and Italian women in the neighborhood had begun screaming "Dirty Jew" at Brower's wife, and "Jew Lover" at a Polish woman who insisted that the bus driver was the hero. Suspicion settled cloudily over the whole affair. Said Brower bitterly: "My friends tell me I should get a lawyer to clear my name." It seemed like good advice for anyone who even contemplated catching a baby in the litigious city of New York.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.