2021 Philly Loves Poetry Interview and Readings Series: Charles S. Carr talks with Tom Garvey, Author of The Secret Apartment: Vet Stadium, a surreal memoir

Watch the live broadcast at Comcast Cable 66/966HD/967 | Verizon FIOS 29/30 in Philadelphia | PhillyCAM TV: https://phillycam.org/watch

Tom Garvey, an Airborne, Ranger and Special Forces qualified officer, served as an A-Team Leader in Viet Nam in 1968 and returned home to mixed reviews about his stability and state of mind. Like many other Viet Nam Veterans, he found few who cared to hear about his time overseas. Now, with his wife Peggy and his wonderful family of five step children and their mates and two world class grandchild, he has finally come home. Life is good. Life is very good indeed.

If I overheard anyone telling this story in a bar or at a party, I wouldn’t believe it either. But I must confess, I’d probably “scooch” a little closer, eavesdropping, unable to walk away. I’d have to find out how this yarn unraveled. Let’s begin an implausible story with a seemingly simple yet complex question. If you were single, never married with no children or dependents, would you, if you had the opportunity, have lived “on the down low” in a secret apartment in Veterans Stadium? In this proposal we have an off the wall South Philly version of “The Phantom of the Opera,” but the larger notion this question begs could easily challenge the inner demons of sports fans anywhere. If you had an opportunity to live in a major sports stadium of a team you grew up loving, what would you have done? In my case: I could, so I did.

“Truth, always strange, is stranger than fiction.”~ Lord Byron

Charles S. Carr, Host