A Man Who Made His Mark

By MIKE SIELSKI phillyBurbs.com
PHILADELPHIA — In less than six months, everything around him would be gone. The little man was wearing a black tuxedo and white sneakers, and he had a photograph in his pocket, and he was sitting in the visitors’ dugout of a stadium that soon would be reduced to a smoking ruin.

This was Sunday, Sept. 28, 2003, almost three years ago, the day of the Phillies’ final game at Veterans Stadium, the day Frog had been dreading. Frog — his real name is Mark Carfagno, but no one has called him Mark since the first grade — was 50 years old, and he had worked as a groundskeeper at the Vet since its opening in 1971, tending to the square cut-outs of dirt around the bases and home plate, making sure those thin layers of clay and soil were always smooth and clean. The bases were his responsibility, his reason for rising each morning.

Now, he was watching the Vet’s closing ceremonies, watching Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton and Larry Bowa and Phillies past and present parade around the infield. He watched former Phillies executive Paul Owens, weakened from cancer, ride a golf cart from the right-field bullpen straight to the visiting dugout, just so he could shake hands with the grounds crew, who had donned tuxedos for the going-away party.Over the succeeding weeks, an industrial service company would extract the stadium’s 62,382 blue seats and tear up its artificial-turf playing surface, and demolitionists would place more than 2,500 pounds of dynamite around the building, install close to 3,700 detonators and connect those detonators to five miles of 25-grain detonator cord — all for the Vet’s implosion on March 21, 2004. Sitting there in the dugout, Frog didn’t want the old park to go. Working there was the only full-time job he’d ever had. The players, the people — they all knew him. They had become his friends and extended family, especially one person who wasn’t there that day. Especially Gary Tinneny.

No, Gary wasn’t there to see any of this. But Frog had remembered to slip Gary’s photo into his pocket that morning, so Gary could attend the ceremony in spirit if not body, and he could take solace in one thing:

The place that Frog treasured most, the place where his friend had started a tradition that set this craggy, obsolete edifice apart from any other in baseball, was still standing.

A MAN’S GREAT GIFT

Have you ever known someone who seemed to have a hundred close friends, each of whom could tell a hundred different stories about him, every one of which would close with a laugh or a smile or a shake of the head that said, Damn, wasn’t he something? This is a story about such a man, about how he died, and about the way sports can make something special out of something simple.

It was a whim, really. Everything Gary Tinneny did seemed a spur-of-the-moment decision, going back to when he was growing up in the Manayunk section of Philadelphia, one of John and Helen Tinneny’s seven children. “Anything Gary wanted to try, he did,” his sister Donna Persico says, and that was true whether his choices sprung from deep family love and loyalty, or just from of the urge to have a good time.
His father had joined the Marines after graduating from high school, so Gary finished up at Roman Catholic High in 1970 and immediately enlisted in the Air Force, spending much of his four-year stint playing on the Dover Air Base baseball team. After returning to Philadelphia, he needed work, and he casually mentioned to Donna one day that he might just head on down to Veterans Stadium to see if the Phillies could use another groundskeeper.

“Yeah, right, Gary,” Donna said to him. “You’re just going to head down there.”

She should have known her brother better. Down he went to the Vet in 1976, and back he came with a job. He and Frog would handle the bases, and Gary also manicured the pitcher’s mound, combing it with a rake, with the care of a Hollywood hair stylist, to suit the Phillies’ pitchers — particularly Carlton, the Hall of Fame left-hander and baseball’s biggest diva.

“When Gary was out there raking the mound,” Dave Morris, one of Gary’s best friends, says, “he’d say to Carlton, ‘Come on, Lefty. You’ve got to bear down.’ Carlton would tell him to get the [bleep] out of there.”

These were high times for the Phillies. The greatest era in their history — from 1976-83, they won five division titles, two National League pennants and the franchise’s only World Series — was just beginning. And here, along for the ride, was this groundskeeper with a bushy black mustache and an oval face and no censor for his sense of humor, poking these big-time ballplayers with little barbs, teasing them like … like they were you or me. That was Gary’s great, simple gift: He treated people like they were unique and, at the same time, like they weren’t.

Maybe that was why, years later, after he had left the Phillies and graduated from the Restaurant School of Philadelphia and opened his own catering business, he could lean over a archdiocesan bishop seated at a table during a Confirmation party and say in his bass-drum-deep voice, Your Excellency, let’s go, sit up and eat, and the bishop didn’t swallow his miter.

“Gary wasn’t afraid to say hello to anybody, regardless of their stature,” says Mike DiMuzio, who worked on the grounds crew with Gary from 1976 to 1978 and is now the Phillies’ director of ballpark operations. “He treated everybody the same, whether it was the owner of the ball club or someone else.”

Maybe that was why the Phillies’ Dick Allen, painted in the media as a racially conscious malcontent, could connect with Gary in a way he couldn’t with any sportswriter or with many of his teammates, why they could become fast friends, travel together in wintertime to Venezuela to live it up, and stay close through the years. Maybe that was why, after games, Allen and Tony Taylor and other Phillies players started hanging out with the groundskeepers in their equipment room, pushing aside the rakes and hoes and other tools, cooking hot dogs on a hot plate, drinking cans of beer and letting their laughs ring out into the night.

Maybe that was why, one night in 1976, when the crew were throwing back a few cold ones with Allen and Taylor, Gary — spur-of-the-moment — said, “Hey, why don’t you guys sign the wall?”

They did. Allen and Taylor took a black marker and scribbled their names on two of the eggshell-white cinderblocks. Days later, before blues singer Lou Rawls performed the national anthem at a game, Gary persuaded him to sign it, too. One by one, day by day, the blocks filled with signatures: Schmidt, Carlton, Greg Luzinski, Lou Brock, Howard Cosell, Willie Mays, Don Drysdale, the groundskeepers themselves, umpires, singers and celebrities — hundreds of names. Once visiting players learned about the wall, DiMuzio says, they couldn’t wait to be on it.

“Gary didn’t really ask people to sign,” he says. “He went out and grabbed people by the arm.”

Soon, the storage room was transformed into a party cove. Luzinski started stopping at a farmer’s market before games, buying bushels of corn to boil and share. Taylor brought margarita mix. Journeymen such as Rich Schu and Chris James, players who barely made an impression on the Phillies’ organization or in fans’ memories, left their names on the wall. Anyone who happened to enter the room signed it. It was a rite of passage.

“Most of the public never saw the wall,” says baseball historian Rich Westcott, the author of “Veterans Stadium: Field of Memories” and several other Phillies-related books. “But to the people of the team, it was a special thing.”

Throughout the rest of the major leagues, there was nothing else like the wall — the one aspect of the Vet that distinguished it from the rash of “modern” stadiums that cropped up in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Sure, the Phillies were a terrific team at the time, and a night at the Vet could be electric if Schmidt was swinging well or Carlton’s slider was at its sharpest, but the stadium itself had nothing else original about it.

The center-field fountain that the Vet featured in the early 1970s, the one that would squirt water into the air after a Phillies home run? That looked cheap compared to the waterfall in center field at Kansas City’s Royals Stadium. The star that hung in the 600 level of the right-field upper deck, commemorating the titanic home run Pirates slugger Willie Stargell hit there in 1971? Come on. Stargell played in Pittsburgh for 21 years; Three Rivers Stadium had four of those stars dotting its upper deck.

Even the Vet’s Astroturf, that infamous stretch of green that ground ballplayers’ knees into dust and truncated careers, didn’t have any real distinction. Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium was the first field to be covered fully with Astroturf, and the Vet’s playing surface wasn’t even the worst in baseball, not compared to Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium’s sandlot of jagged pebbles and bits of broken glass. Hell, Fulton County opened in 1965 and didn’t have a full-time groundskeeper until 1989. At least the Vet had Frog and Gary and the boys.

And it had the wall. For a city founded by a humble religious sect called Quakers, where haughtiness is regarded as a mortal sin, where there’s nothing more off-putting than believing you’re better than everyone else, Gary Tinneny’s wall was the perfect emblem, the great equalizer — superstars and regular guys occupying the same space.

“It meant a whole lot to me,” Frog says. “It meant camaraderie between ballplayers and groundskeepers.”

A regular guy had hatched the idea, after all, and look at what it had grown into. Gary left the Phillies in 1980, and of course, he signed the wall, too. But really, the wall was his signature. It was his mark, forever … no matter where he went, no matter what happened to him.

HEARTS AND FLOWERS

There. Over there. Dave Morris and Billy Keenan are sitting in C.J. & Eck’s Restaurant in Roxborough on a Friday afternoon, sipping iced teas in the back dining room, not far from the entrance to the kitchen. They can turn around and see the doorway, see the spot inside a corner bar and grill where …

“I remember everything about that day,” Keenan says.

Keenan, like Morris, grew up with Gary. The buttressing neighborhoods of Manayunk and Roxborough, with their antique row houses slanting up and down the streets’ steep hills, are like that — places where the friends of one’s youth are the friends of one’s adulthood. Where, as one writer put it, “you can still get credit with only character as collateral.” Everyone knows everyone in Manayunk and Roxborough, and everyone knew Gary Tinneny.

After starting his catering business, Gary seemed intent on cooking for every person — family member, friend, stranger — he encountered. He worked as a chef at a rectory, worked for Billy at the Roxborough restaurant he owns, Keenan’s Valley View Inn. He would, without warning, drop by Donna’s house in Andorra around dinnertime and finish preparing the meal for her; her husband, Rich; and their four daughters.

“He was wild, crazy, about children,” Donna says, so much so that he turned what figured to be the lowest point in his life into his purest joy. In 1996, he was diagnosed with heart disease, his condition so severe that he needed a heart transplant to survive. Fearing that his new heart would never come, he asked Donna to help him plan his funeral Mass, and he wrote a letter to his family, insisting that no one — not Donna, not his longtime girlfriend, Kathryn Stolzer; not Kathryn’s son, Jason, whom Gary had regarded as his own flesh and blood — open it until after his death.

But the doctors at Hahnemann Hospital found him a donor, and the operation went smoothly, and once he was well enough, Gary started showing up at Hahnemann’s children’s wing regularly, his arms loaded with candy and toys and coloring books. On one Easter, he dressed up as the Easter Bunny as part of a fundraiser at his parish, St. John the Baptist, and when he attended Mass that day, he accepted Communion while still wearing the fuzzy, pink outfit and the floppy ears. He created and coordinated an annual tournament at Walnut Lane Golf Course to raise scholarship money for a high school senior to attend Saint Joseph’s University, and he’d stay at the course all day, selling or even giving away flowers to whoever wanted one.

It was there, in the spring of 2000, that a woman remarked how lovely Gary’s flowers were. He offered her a few. An innocent, friendly gesture. She accepted. But when she returned home, her husband demanded she tell him who had given them to her.

‘THIS IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK’

Newspaper reports have said James Passalacqua spent time in a mental hospital before he began stalking Gary Tinneny. But relatives of Passalacqua, while acknowledging he did attend Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as a teenager, have said those reports are false.

What cannot be denied is that, whatever the reason, the 48-year-old Passalacqua, convinced the flowers meant his wife and Gary had developed some sort of relationship, became obsessed with Gary, and with delivering undeserved vengeance upon him. He telephoned Gary, followed him, threatened him. Police arrested him on Oct. 27, 2000, charging him with simple assault, terroristic threats and harassment by communications, but because no weapons were involved, he was released on bail.

“He wasn’t afraid of Jimmy Passalacqua,” Donna Persico says. “He pitied him.”

On Jan. 10, 2001, Passalacqua trailed Gary to a Laundromat, where, according to Donna and Gary’s friends, he walked in, put a gun to Gary’s temple and said, Tonight’s the night. Only another customer’s sudden entrance kept Passalacqua from pulling the trigger. Gary reported the incident to police and filed for a restraining order.
“One time, at the golf course, he pulled in right behind us,” Dave Morris says. “I said to him, ‘Why do you keep following this guy? He’s no threat to you.’ All he could say to me was, ‘My problem’s not with you.’ I said, ‘Your problem’s not with him, either. Whatever you have in your mind, get it out of there. This is not what you think.’ ”

On the night of Jan. 18, 2001, Gary told Donna’s husband, Rich, that he had bought a gun. He had never owned one before.

The next day, he went to work at C.J. & Eck’s. He had been hired as the chef there in the spring of 2000. “He loved it,” Morris says. Gary was 48 years old now, and he had finally found a place he could settle down.

In the aftermath of the Laundromat incident, police had issued a warrant for Passalacqua’s arrest on multiple charges, including simple assault. They expected him to surrender on Friday, Jan. 19.

Instead, early that afternoon, he went to Keenan’s Valley View Inn, where, two weeks earlier, Billy Keenan had told him he was no longer welcome.

From the kitchen, Keenan’s brother Walter saw Passalacqua sitting at the bar with a drink in front of him. Billy went out to talk to him. He noticed that Passalacqua’s right hand was in his pocket and his left hand was resting atop the bar.

Trying to be diplomatic, Keenan said, “Hey, Jim, how are you doing?” He extended his right hand.

Passalacqua reached across and shook it with his left. His right hand stayed jammed in his pocket. That fact didn’t occur to Keenan until later in the afternoon.

Jimmy, Keenan said, what are you doing here? You know you’re not supposed to be in here.

I just thought I’d stop and get a drink.

Do me a favor, Keenan replied. Drink your drink, and please leave.
Passalacqua finished his drink and left.

Twenty minutes later, as Billy and Walter listened to the radio, KYW (1060 AM) reported a possible homicide at the corner of Pechin Street and Shurs Lane in Roxborough — C.J. & Eck’s address.

Three times, Billy tried to call the restaurant. Three times, he got a busy signal. He drove there, and when he arrived, he could look down a sloping street and see several police cars parked outside.

“Nobody had to tell me,” Keenan says. “I knew what had happened.”
Tom Flaherty, a bartender at C.J. & Eck’s, had been preoccupied with customers in the front of the restaurant when he saw James Passalacqua come in and walk directly to the kitchen. He heard a noise like a firecracker. He thought Gary had blown up something in the microwave. He was wrong.

At around 1:20 p.m., James Passalacqua fired three bullets into Gary Tinneny’s body, including one into his head. Then, he shot himself.

A PICTURE AND A MEMORY
As Veterans Stadium’s closing approached, more than 2½ years after her brother’s murder, Donna Persico had a thought. She didn’t know what the Phillies would do or had done with the groundskeepers’ wall. If there was a chance she could get her hands on Gary’s block, the hunk of the wall that he had signed, she could use it as his grave marker.

That was it, though: What were the Phillies going to do with the wall? With all those autographs decorating it, imagine its value on eBay, for example, or at a memorabilia show. Would they put it up somewhere in the new stadium, Citizens Bank Park? This was no easy question. Besides, as Mike DiMuzio points out, the wall was stained from 33 years worth of mud and crud and spit. “It didn’t look good,” he says, and if the Phillies had tried to clean it, they might have washed away some of the signatures.

So, what did the Phillies do with the wall? According to Westcott, nothing. They managed to cut it into large blocks and remove it before the stadium was imploded, but apparently, members of the Phillies’ organization say, it couldn’t be preserved.

“The wall came down and was going to be relocated at the new ballpark,” Westcott says. “Either the wall had deteriorated, or they never found a spot for it — depending on who’s telling the story.”
Frog — who left the Phillies in 2004 and has since filed a lawsuit against them, claiming he was the victim of age discrimination during his final months on the job — is incredulous that the tradition he and his friend began didn’t survive. Gary would have made sure that wall got over to the new park, Frog insists, if he would have had to do it himself. On the day Gary died, Gary’s brother Kevin had called Frog to tell him the terrible news, and long before he wore that tuxedo to the Vet, Frog was wearing black to St. John the Baptist Church, joining Dave Morris, Billy and Walter Keenan, and Dick Allen to carry Gary’s casket. And only last week, Frog found himself tucking Gary’s picture into his pocket again, because … well, he couldn’t quite say why.
At C.J. & Eck’s, they still talk about Gary from time to time, especially when Dave Morris and Billy Keenan come by. “To have all that on one wall,” Keenan says, “where you could say, ‘There’s so-and-so,’ and know that they all sat in this mop closet and had beers with this …”
He pauses.

“… goofball, and for that reason and for posterity reasons, it should have been saved.”

Somehow, it wasn’t. And so there’s no hint of the wall at Citizens Bank Park, open almost three full Phillies seasons now. And Gary Tinneny’s body lies in an unmarked grave, buried in the same cemetery plot as his father. Now that she knows the wall is gone, Donna says, she will have to purchase a marker for her brother.

In a way, though, she already has one. A Catholic-school teacher, Donna keeps a scrapbook devoted to Gary — photos of him, notes of sympathy she received from her students, articles about the murder. Nestled on the book’s third page, behind a sheet of cellophane, is the letter Gary had written before his heart surgery, the letter Donna had promised not to open until after his death. Maybe there, in those words, is her solace, her proof that her brother had indeed left his signature on the world — that a man who lives a full, generous life doesn’t need even the simplest of monuments.

In black ink on a piece of lined notepad paper, the letter reads:

To my family,

God has blessed us with each other. Please stay and love each other the same way we did when we were kids and didn’t have anything but each other. Please teach your kids to love each other. … I love and will miss you all. Please remember me always.

Love,
Gary

Mike Sielski can be reached at msielski@phillyBurbs.com.
September 24, 2006 2:54 PM