BUFFALO, N.Y. — Somebody had collapsed.

From his chair on the other side of the community room at St. Joseph University Church on Main Street, Jud Mead could not make out who it was. All he could see was a small circle of onlookers standing over what he deduced must have been a body.

“Larry!” those nearest the victim called, peering down at the catatonic figure.

“Larry, stay with us.”

“Larry, can you hear me?”

A collective urgency hushed the room, and for a moment, the five dozen or so people gathered there pondered intervening. The thought moved the crowd with a gentle lurch.

Then, as if with a single mind, everyone seemed to reconsider. They sat back down.

It was around 6 p.m. on Oct. 27, a Wednesday. Organizers had convened the public meeting that night to discuss a proposal to place Buffalo’s University Park district on the National Register of Historic Places.

The attendees were neighbors, and, though unplanned, what unfolded over the next half hour or so was the story of a neighborhood.

One woman, a surgical technologist, checked Larry’s pulse. She couldn’t find one. His eyes were wide, but she felt no air leaving his nostrils. So she began CPR, pushing on his chest.

He gasped. She called his name, as if the word might will him to life.

“Larry.”

He looked around, but didn’t speak. Then, he stopped breathing again.

The minutes that followed seemed to last forever, but really it all happened quickly. A volunteer resumed CPR while the surgical technologist figured out how to work an automated external defibrillator that the parish priest had retrieved from the school next door.

Soon, the machine was issuing instructions in a mechanical voice.

Stand back from the patient, it said.

The body on the floor bounced.

Outside, under a clear autumn sky, sirens screamed as emergency vehicles implored commuters to get out of the way. The firefighters and paramedics arrived and shocked Larry again.

No one knew if he was going to make it. Some believed he had already died.

Organizers called the meeting off, and Mead*, observing the drama from a distance, got up to leave. As he departed, he was thinking of mortality.

Looking back, however, what struck him most that day was not the presence of death in the room, but the words of a stranger, a man fielding questions from the EMTs.

When the medics asked whether Larry had family, the man, a neighbor, gave the response the authorities needed: No. But the real answer followed quickly: “We’re his family.”

LARRY Cohen, 82, was a seaman.

A Wisconsinite, he began sailing in 1944 after leaving home as a teenager. He worked his way up from deckhand to third mate, second mate, first mate and, finally, captain. On the Great Lakes, he commanded 700-foot freighters for American Steamship Company, hauling cargo that included coal, grain, sand, stone, gypsum and iron ore.

Larry and his wife Mildred moved to Allenhurst Road in University Park in 1982.

He retired the next year, and before Mildred died in 2008, before Alzheimer’s disease wrecked her mind, the couple would stroll the neighborhood with their dogs. The two walked every day, stopping to talk with whoever else was out.

Soon, casual conversations gave way to afternoon teas and holiday meals together. Every Christmas, neighbors would receive a box of oranges and grapefruit from the Cohens.

Acquaintances became friends, and, ultimately, something more. Larry and Mildred never had children, and as time went on, they came to consider the residents of Allenhurst as family.

Lisa Stephan-Kozlowski and her husband, Tony, who live next door, surprised the Cohens with a dinner of chicken stew to celebrate the Cohens’ 50th wedding anniversary. After Mildred passed, Mare Koehneke, who lives across the street, would bring Larry meals — vegetable soup or chicken with mashed potatoes, whatever she and her husband Pete were having.

Paul McDonnell, the man who had uttered the words about family that Mead could not forget, said Larry would walk McDonnell’s beagle Kelly on weekdays while McDonnell was at work.

After each excursion, Larry would leave McDonnell with a dated note reporting on how things had gone.

May 4 at 2 p.m.: “Hi Paul. I had a talk with Kelly. Told her how to behave in school to get good marks. I just don’t think she understands English. I think she is part greyhound, she really moves.”

Oct. 1 at 3 p.m.: “Kelly took me for a walk. She showed me how it’s done. She is a good leader.”

On Oct. 27, the day he suffered his heart attack at St. Joseph, Larry took Kelly out at around 2 p.m. In his message to McDonnell, signed “LC & K”, Larry said that he was going home to eat some chili McDonnell had cooked.

“See you at 6,” Larry wrote, in reference to the public meeting.

MCDONNELL described Larry as being 5 feet, 10 inches tall, lean, and with sparse patches of white hair around the edges of a bald head. Koehneke remembered Larry as three or four inches shorter. (The correct height is in between: 5 feet, 8 inches.)

In any case, both said they had thought Larry was in great shape the day he collapsed. Larry walked with his back hunched, but he always moved fast and decisively, with his head up.

On Oct. 27, he had traveled to St. Joseph on foot with the Kozlowskis.

The two were seated next to Larry when he rolled off his chair. At first, Stephan-Kozlowski thought Larry might have bent over to tie his shoe.

“Larry! Larry!” she called out.

Then, recognizing that his life was in danger, she stepped back to make room for the surgical technologist, Sylvia Williams Ferguson, who had hurried over from a seat nearby shortly after hearing the thud of Larry’s body hitting the floor.

As Williams Ferguson attended to Larry, Kozlowski prayed. McDonnell, who had helped plan the community meeting, called 911. When the paramedics took Larry from the room, none of the bystanders knew whether he was going to make it.

McDonnell was among the first to find out more. Shortly after he and fellow organizers cleared the room, a fireman showed up at the church to say Larry had survived.

Hoping to get information about Larry’s condition, Koehneke drove to the Veterans Affairs hospital, home to the closest emergency room, after leaving St. Joseph. The Kozlowskis were already there. Employees verified that Larry was still alive.

Williams Ferguson got the news the next day, when she called the office of Buffalo Common Councilmember Bonnie Russell, who had co-hosted the community forum the night before.

A resident of Larchmont Road, two streets away from Allenhurst, Williams Ferguson did not know Larry.

Nevertheless, she tracked him down through neighbors and began to stop by the hospital each Wednesday to see him, joining a steady queue of visitors that included McDonnell, the Kozlowskis and the Koehnekes. Larry’s half-sister, Beverly Trtan, who had reconnected with him that summer after having lost touch for more than 50 years, was also by his side.

As neighbors continued to arrive day after day, nurses who worried that Larry would be alone in a difficult time relaxed; for a man who supposedly had no family, he had a large contingent of loved ones watching over him.

Larry’s story managed even to affect Mead, who described himself as a “thoroughgoing cynic.”

Reflecting some weeks later on the drama that had played out at St. Joseph, Mead explained that what he witnessed was powerful because it wasn’t about faith or miracles.

It was simply about humanity, he said—about the bond that connects each person to every other, about the caring and uncomplicated kindness that bring neighbors together.

EPILOGUE

Larry is fine.

He doesn’t remember his heart attack. He doesn’t remember the afternoon of Oct. 27 at all. But he has pieced together what happened from stories, and he is just happy that he wasn’t at home alone that night.

He has a lot of medical appointments—more than he can count. A pacemaker and defibrillator implanted beneath his collar bone regulate his heartbeat.

But he has moved back into his house, the one with green shingles and the flag by the door.

The neighbors continue to stop by, just like they used to. He calls his street one of the finest in America, saying, “I never dreamed a community could be so close.”

Trtan, 71, has spent much of the holiday season in town, presiding over her brother’s recovery. She has four children, along with grandchildren, and Larry can’t believe how lucky he is—to be 82, with a brand new family.

When doctors asked Larry if he wanted to be resuscitated again if his heart should stop, his answer was yes.

He said he has already been resuscitated twice—once 35 years ago, when an allergic reaction to a bee sting nearly killed him, and once this year at St. Joseph.

Why not a third time?

Before his heart attack, he had purchased a new refrigerator, stove and washing machine. He was thinking ahead with the conviction of a man with many good days to come.

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Mark Anderson, a crime and public safety reporter for the Contra Costa Times in the San Francisco Bay Area, edited this story.

Jannifer Huston, the author, pieced together this account of Larry’s heart attack from interviews with five witnesses present at St. Joseph on Oct. 27. She was not present herself. For full disclosure, she is also well acquainted with *Jud Mead. The two were colleagues at the University at Buffalo until recently, and, as it happens, it was Jud who tipped Jannifer off about this story.

buffalo, community, everything, neighbors, university park Uncategorized