Tommy Gibbons | photo © Katharine Gilbert
By Sabina Clarke
Tommy Gibbons has vivid memories of riding with his Dad, Philadelphia’s First Police Commissioner and the City’s Top Cop in Car One, a big unmarked car with a blaring siren and flashing red spotlight. He remembers the time his father and namesake, Thomas J. Gibbons, Sr., suddenly turned a corner at Somerton and Byberry Roads in the Bustleton section of the city, bringing the car to a halt , reaching under the front seat and grabbing the 12 gauge sawed- off shotgun he kept there; taking it out of its holster and tucking it under his coat. Then he locked the car and warned his six- year- old son to “Stay inside and don’t move.” The Commissioner had driven by a liquor store and spotted two suspicious men inside and thought a robbery was underway.
Memories like this would make any impressionable young boy yearn to be a cop-“That’s when I got the bug”, he said, in a recent interview at the Four Seasons Hotel. But his life was destined to take a detour when he took a job as a copyboy at the Evening Bulletin: “The summer after I graduated from La Salle High School in 1962, Dad said,
‘Boy, you’re not going to bum around all summer-you are going to find work.’ So he called in a favor from his friend, Earl Selby, who was City Editor at the Evening Bulletin and I was hired as a copyboy. This was when writers at the Bulletin, an afternoon newspaper, and probably one of the best papers in the country had a stable of the finest writers-maybe even in the world.”
It was before newsrooms had computers. Gibbons painted a colorful scenario straight out of Citizen Kane: “When we were on deadline and when they wrote only about two or three paragraphs on a piece of paper, they would yell “COPY”. There was a big, long bench in a cavernous newsroom filled with copyboys and if you were up next, you would jump up and answer the summons and grab the copy. There were about six copies which you had to distribute throughout the newsroom—to the City Editor, to the News Editor, to the Makeup Page Editor. So, they were reading the story as it was going down to the linotype operator who was setting the story in type. So, sometimes within fifteen minutes, a major front page story would be written and within 45 minutes, the story would be set in type with everyone working as a team. The newsroom was insane with noises, with smoke, with spitting. Some reporters chewed tobacco and spat into spittoons.”
Yet, for a copyboy eager to learn the trade, this crazy atmosphere was a classroom of sorts; a unique training ground that has vanished as surely as the typewriter: “It was a great place for a kid to learn and the best part of this work/education was the rewrite man saying to me, ‘Hey kid, wanna be a reporter? Come and see me when you get some downtime.’ So, I would sit at the feet of these rewrite men. And what better education? These men were better than professors of journalism. They would say, ‘Here’s the way you do it. You see the way I took these notes-now look how I converted it into a news story. I learned about inverted pyramids-the basis of breaking news writing-before they were even being described in textbooks and communications schools. It was a great way to learn the business.”
His last job at the Bulletin, before he joined the police force, was as a Flashcast Editor. The Bulletin had a sign outside their building at 30th and Market Streets that flashed the news. Gibbons’ job, though he was only 19 years old, was to look at all the stories every morning and decide which ones to break down into short sentences and put on the blinking flashboard. He’ll never forget the day in 1963 when he came back from having lunch and a few beers at Cavanaugh’s and told, ‘We have breaking news. The President’s been shot.’ This was, he said, “the biggest story of my career.”
It was with some misgivings, then, that he left the Bulletin in 1965 to pursue a career as a police officer-a decision based on money: “Basically, there was no money in being a reporter. My paycheck was $39 a week and the police department paid $100 a week. Starting pay for the police in 1965 was $5500 a year. When I started with the Police Department, the Bulletin did a story and the headline was, Gibbons’ Son Among One Hundred Fifty-Five Recruits. That first day I started, I got a call from my sister who said, ‘You better duck Daddy. He’s furious that you are in the Police Academy.’ I started out at the 2nd Police District at Harbison and Levick in the Northeast. At that time, we rode in red cars. I was so inexperienced I didn’t know how to answer the car radio. My superior, Sergeant Herschel Cantwell, who was like a father to me, said, ‘You know they were calling you-the 29 car. You can get suspended for not answering a radio call.’ I told him I didn’t hear it.”
His Dad, the Commissioner, was not happy with his decision to follow in his footsteps: “My Dad didn’t speak to me for a year after I joined the police academy. He thought it was a bad decision. He was not thrilled. It wasn’t because of the dangers of the job. He was a Reform Commissioner, appointed by Mayor Joe Clark, to clean up a corrupt Police Department. He had made a lot of enemies in the Police Department and was concerned that his enemies, now that he was gone from the Department, would get back at him through me. Like set me up or something.”
There were some difficult times for the young rookie cop-the son of the Reform Commissioner who was often referred to as the Lone Wolf : “I’ve got to confess, I did have some problems which caused me sometimes, to not wear my nametag-especially when I was transferred to Highway Patrol. We operated throughout the city. If I was going into a strange district, I would sometimes get, ‘Gibbons, I heard his kid was on the job-you’re no relation to that son-of-a-bitch, are you?’”
It is apparent that Gibbons loved being a Highway Patrol Cop–just from the way he talks animatedly about it: “I was on the Highway Patrol Drill Team-the elite of the Highway Patrol. We’re the motorcycle guys –a mobile task force that moves anywhere in the city. We covered the expressways, high crime areas, hold-ups and shootings, felony calls, running escorts. We move in marked cars, unmarked cars, motorcycles, and motorcycles with sidecars. We’re the ‘boot cops’. We wear boots and britches and helmets. There is no better way to clear a corner in a tough neighborhood than the arrival of two highway cops who jump out of an unmarked car with two nightsticks and throw these punks against a wall or who walk into a problem bar-where they would instantly throw their guns on the floor.”
Then one fateful summer night, August 30th, 1970, Gibbons was shot-up badly and barely survived. He and his partner, John Nolen, were on patrol in West Philadelphia. They noticed a brand new car, a Cadillac Eldorado, with a broken trunk lock-a pretty sure indication that the car was stolen. Gibbons was twenty-five; his partner, twenty-seven. Both were in full uniform-boots, britches, helmets, and short sleeved shirts. Gibbons describes the scene that followed: “I’m talking to the driver and looking in the back seat and I hear my partner yell, ‘Look out Tom. He’s got a …and then all I heard was Bam! I looked across the hood of the car at my partner and he’s reeling back, holding his face with blood gushing from his face. And I looked back at the driver and he had a grin on his face and he aimed his gun at me again………The guy on the passenger side had his gun hidden by the Evening Bulletin……..”
One of the bullets ricocheted off Gibbons’ back into his pelvis and came up through his intestine and lodged in his lung. His britches were soaked with blood and the impact of the bullets blew him across the street under a car. His partner, John Nolen, “one of the best shots in the Police Academy,” engaged the perpetrators in a gun battle despite being shot in the head –forcing the driver back into the car and his accomplice on the passenger side to flee on foot-leaving a bloody trail. Then, Nolen radioed emergency dispatch for help. When he couldn’t give their exact location-he crawled to a street sign, 59th and Cedar, and then crawled back to the car.”
The Commissioner, retired for several years, had moved to Florida. He got the call from a police surgeon that he should board a plane immediately to Philadelphia because his son was shot and they were not sure he would survive. When Tom Gibbons, Sr., disembarked from the plane in Philadelphia, he told a reporter, “You know, I have had to deal with this with other people’s sons, but never, in my wildest dreams did I think it would involve my boy.”
After the shooting and a long recovery period with many setbacks and several surgeries, Tommy Gibbons was promoted to Corporal and assigned to the police radio room. Then in 1972, he was called to the office of the Chief Police Surgeon, Dr. John M. Lawlor who told him gently, but firmly that he was only kidding himself-he couldn’t be a police officer anymore because he was right-handed and couldn’t fire a gun. Tom Gibbons was put on disability- his police career was over as was his dream to be the Police Commissioner. He was twenty-eight years old and had spent just five years on the police force before he was shot. The following January, the City Editor at the Evening Bulletin, Sam Boyle, called him up and offered him a job, saying, ‘We could use you as a reporter.’ So, Gibbons returned to his beloved Bulletin and stayed there until November 1981-two months before it folded, when Jim Naughton, the managing editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, called him up and offered him a job as a police reporter. Gibbons had finally found his niche.
Yet, he had mixed emotions about leaving the Evening Bulletin for the Philadelphia Inquirer: “I was caught between two loyalties. We hated the Inquirer. I felt like a rat leaving a sinking ship.” But, stay, he did, for twenty-four years, and proved to be an extraordinary police reporter. A legend among cops and journalists in this town.
When he left the Inquirer in 2005, Tommy Gibbons had a royal send-off. First, there was the surprise party at the Roundhouse with the entire command staff and news media in attendance topped with motorcycle cops lined up outside the Roundhouse ready to escort him to his next send-off at The Philadelphia Inquirer, for himself and 74 other colleagues.
Then Police Commissioner, Sylvester Johnson, drove him to the Inquirer farewell party in Car One with a police escort, lights blinking, and sirens wailing and a helicopter overhead. When he entered the newsroom, dapper as usual, and flanked by about a dozen helmeted highway patrolmen marching behind him in black leather jackets, boots and britches, the Commissioner might have said, “Well done, boy.” He called him ‘Boy’ til the day he died.