A Tale of Two Pandemics

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Part One. Dateline: February 15. On this day in 1888 a blizzard befell New York City. Within hours 50 inches blanketed everything under the clouds in high winds that whipped the freshly fallen snow into to 40-foot drifts. The statue of Roscoe Conklin in Madison Square would have been covered had it been there, but it wasn’t yet as a blizzard— this one, as it happens—hadn’t yet killed the beloved Senator. Ellis Island was not yet processing immigrants like the tens of thousands of impoverished Irish fleeing from the decades of ruin wrought by the potato famine. That day the Irish were processed at Battery Park. Among their ranks was one Hannah Sullivan, who also befell New York that day. Hannah had to be pried from the ship the weather was so frightful. By the time of the last pandemic, Hannah had married John O'Leary and had 12:, TWELVE children, including second to the youngest of the dozen, Mary. Mary Agnes who married John Francis, was widowed,moved to Hoboken, NJ with her two children, a girl, Rosemary, and a boy John Dandy, formally John Daniel, oh, and he's me da: John Daniel Plunkett. Snow and pandemic. If my great grandmother with 12 children in tow could weather both, surely I can, her marrow running deep. 

Part Two. Two towns south of Hoboken, Bayonne, New Jersey sits at the southern tip of the peninsula formed when an ancient mountian chain that ran through the supercontinent Pangea began to split and fill with surrounding sea waters. Born were the churning warlike Atlantic, swallower of Titans, the mighty Hudson, the very Dutch-sounding Arthur Kill and Kill van Kull, streams that fueled vast lands of meadows punctuated by the schist I showed you in Central Park, the same found in Morocco where our nearby neighbors landed. These forces echo through the 200 million subsequent years, during the time of the first Jurrasic Park. (Speaking of films, Bayonne hosted the towering presence of Tom Cruise for weeks during location filming of War of the Worlds and in the 21st-century alone the following films used Bayonne as a backdrop: A Beautiful Mind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Wrestler, and Far from Heaven.) Like its eponymous ville soeur, this ‘city of the Bays’ enjoyed a spell as an elegant resort, its lovely golf clubhouse recalling that gentler chapter, perched as it remains to this day atop its solitary hill. But that would end. John D. was coming to town. John D. Rockefeller, that is, who parlayed a few oil derricks into a kingdom. The greasy soot of kerosene was the bane of ths American housewife. A notorious spendthrift, Rockefeller cracked petroleum into increasingly cleaner grades, largely to light lamps but used the dirtier bits as well and luckily, all two seconds before the automobile was invented. The stage for the entire 20th Century was set, and the staging ground were those grounds embraced by the kills, our highways a hundred years ago. a Standard Oil town. And immigrants flocked for the jobs in the refineries and the ones on Bayonne’s docks. That was the heady optimism in the air the day Sergeant Michael Reilly, described here in some fit of journalistic indiscretion, took the comely and significantly younger Mary Clancy as his second wife. Pictured is Michael Reilly in his official portrait as Chief of Police of Bayonne’s Police Department, the buttons on his dress blues having rightly found their way to the possession of my cousin Dan who just retired after a distinguished career as a sergeant with the NYPD, including his final assignment with our crackerjack antiterrorist unit the Atlas Squad. Dan and I are among the couple dozen of Michael’s great grandchildren. And whenever I look at this photograph I see the eyes of his daughter, Margaret, my grandmother, and my mother, whose eyes I havent laid mine upon since the Pandemic began. But Michael Reilly would understand. Chief of Police in Bayonne, NJ from 1915-1921, he saw the city through the worst of that pandemic, and was known for paying particular attention to the health of his frontline workers, his essential workers, his police officers. What I wish I had beyond tbe Reilly eyes, the hallmark of all the lookers on that side: Floating out there somewhere is a photograph of him inspecting his officers as he did every morning, and despite noisy protestations, making sure their masks were covering their noses!