Denise Foley

A treasured honor: a homemade medal from a child saved.

When the call came over the police radio, Tim Brooks knew it was something big. He could feel it. A boat capsized off Penns Landing. There were survivors in the Delaware.. “It’s not something you hear every day,” says Brooks, a 19-year veteran of the Philadelphia police department and a detective with the bomb squad. “If you’ve been a cop for any amount of time you get some sense of what’s going to be legit and this sounded legit.” And serious.

Brooks was with his partner and an ATF agent at ATF headquarters at Customs House at Second and Chestnut a year ago–on July 7, 2010—when they heard the call. Just a couple of blocks away, a 2,100-ton city-owned barge picking up sludge rammed a stalled sightseeing boat operated by Ride the Ducks with 37 tourists on board, sending the crew and passengers into the murky, fast-moving waters of the river.

That’s what Brooks saw when he and his colleagues arrived at the scene just a few minutes later. He remembers it like a photograph: heads bobbing like buoys in the Delaware, many of them terrified children frantically swimming toward shore, the ravaged Duck boat now sitting at the bottom of the river. “You had to take a moment,” recalls Brooks. “There were so many people in the water. You didn’t know where to begin. It seemed overwhelming.”

But that’s where the thinking stopped and instinct took over. Brooks quickly shed his gun, his wallet, shoes and keys and jumped into the water, his eyes on a woman and three children struggling to grab on to a row of wooden pylons about 20 yards offshore.

“The first one I reached was a young girl, maybe 10 years old,” Brooks recalled. “She wasn’t panicking, but I could see she was upset.” He grabbed hold of her and helped her grasp one of the pylons.

By this time, a Coast Guard boat had reached the group, but couldn’t get close because “if a wave came or the current switched, you could get crushed,” says Brooks. The Coast Guard crew tossed a rope out, and Brooks put the little girl’s arm around his neck and swam her to the boat where she was pulled on board. “Then I went back for the other girls,” he says, “and a group of Navy Seals in a small boat arrived.” Fortuitously, the Seals were visiting Philadelphia from Reston, Virginia, for Navy Appreciation day. Since their vessel was an inflatable Zodiac, they were able to pull alongside the group and Brooks helped pull the woman and the other children out of the water.

There was no room for Brooks in the Zodiac so he swam back to the Coast Guard boat. “I was pretty tired when I got back. Someone told me that I had been in the water for 15 minutes which is a long time to tread water. But I couldn’t have told you how long I was in there—I was a little busy,” he says, laughing.

Medal of Honor winner, Det. Tim Brooks of the Philadelphia Police Department.

Sitting outside the small office of the city’s bomb disposal unit in northeast Philadelphia, the sound of bullets and explosives punctuating the air, Brooks concedes that the case was unusual for him—he’s an investigator whose milieu is fire, not water. But he still considered his actions all in a day’s work. “I don’t feel like I did anything special. It’s my job,” says the tall, affable Brooks, whose family tree, like that of many descendants of Irish immigrants, is crowded with cops and firemen.

But other people thought that what he did was more than special. They thought it was heroic. One of them was Philadelphia Homicide Detective Jack Cummings who nominated Brooks—without his knowledge—for a Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation award. The organization, chartered by Congress in 1958, consists exclusively of recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration given by the US. These same honorees, most of whom risked their lives in combat, choose the recipients of the Citizen Service Above Self Award every year.

“He did it in December and told me in January,” says Brooks. “He said he just wanted to let me know that ‘that was a good thing you did.’”

In March, the Foundation announced that Brooks was one of three people from around the country—including a Boston school crossing guard who died after throwing herself in front of a car to protect a child—chosen to receive the award, which is bestowed at a ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Marine Lt. Col. Harvey C. “Barney” Barnum, who received the Medal of Honor for risking his life to save his beleaguered battalion when they were pinned down by enemy fire at Ky Phu in the Quang Tin Province in Vietnam in 1965, presented Brooks with his award.

“I never in a million years thought I’d ever get something like that,” says Brooks. “I still don’t think I deserve it. Millions of people do tremendous things every day and I’m not one of them. I feel humbled to be considered among them.”

Brooks spent three days in the Washington area with the Medal of Honor winners. “We were throwing back war stories like we were old friends,” he says grinning. He and the other honorees met President Obama at the White House. The days were already fraught with emotion, but Brooks had another reason to be grappling with his feelings. The day on which he received his award was the first year anniversary of his father’s death. “It still gets to me,” he confesses, his eyes watering. “I carried his picture in my pocket. I really think the date was no coincidence.”

Brooks was carrying something else with him too. One of the children he rescued, a little girl named Lily, had surprised him at the ceremony with her own medal—homemade from clay, painted gold, and even inscribed with his name. (See a photo of Lily and her hero here. )  How they met—both the first and second time–was serendipitous. “When the story appeared in the paper, my wife Shannon’s hairdresser told her she was dying to tell her something. She said, ‘The woman your husband saved is one of my clients. She was in here the other day, crying, and she said she was going to contact the police department because they want to meet him.’”

When they finally did meet, Lily’s mother gave Brooks a copy of the letter that her daughter had written to the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation. “I read it and we sat around sobbing like a bunch of two-year-olds,” Brooks confesses sheepishly.

In Arlington, he showed Lily’s medal to Col. Barnum. “We were about to have our official pictures taken and I said to him, ‘Colonel, can I leave this on? He said, ‘If you don’t, I’ll break your arm.’”

Brooks is the only one in the official photos wearing not one, but two medals. It’s hard to tell which he treasures more.

“As you can see,” says Brooks, “I’m really humbled by this whole thing and I’m not comfortable talking about it. But I wanted to speak out because I am a product of the training I got in this police department. In my opinion, this is the most professional law enforcement organization on the planet, though sometimes the media tends to highlight the negative. The truth is, cops from here to Alaska are doing heroic things every day. I didn’t do anything special. I was doing my job. I know that any of my fellow police officers would do the same thing.”

Hibernian Hunger Project volunteers Ed and Pat Costello and friend.

When you’re used to cooking for thousands, dinner for a couple dozen people  is no sweat. Okay, if you’re at the stove, maybe there’s a little sweat. But volunteers from the Philadelphia area’s Hibernian Hunger Project (HHP), a national charitable program of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, didn’t let a little heat drive them out of the kitchen.

On Monday, June 13, they prepared roast beef, mashed potatoes, baked chicken breasts, lasagna, eggplant parmagiana, various veggies, salad, and dessert for the children and families staying at the Ronald McDonald House on Erie Avenue, next to St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children.

Like the Hibernian Hunger Project, which feeds thousands of needy people around the country, the 300 Ronald McDonald Houses around the US trace their roots to Philadelphia and something Irish.

In 1974, a pediatric oncologist at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Audrey Evans, MD, met with Eagles General Manager Jimmy Murray whose team was raising funds to support a player whose daughter was being treated for leukemia at St. Chris’s. Murray reached out to McDonalds which offered the proceeds from the sales of its Shamrock Shake to build a place where families of children being treated at local medical facilities could stay. Children come from all over the country—in fact, all over the world—to Philadelphia which has three children’s hospitals—CHOP, St. Chris’s, and Shriner’s at Temple University.

The first Ronald McDonald House was carved from a seven-bedroom home on Spruce Street near CHOP and a brand new facility, with 18 guestrooms, opened in 2008 at St. Chris’s. It costs families $15 a night to stay at the Ronald McDonald House, unless they can’t pay. Then, it’s free.

As is much of the labor. There’s only a few paid staff and, though St. Chris’s house has a state-of-the-art kitchen that even Emeril would love, all meals are cooked and served by volunteers.

“I had no idea that all the food was donated,” said Donna Donnelly, who serves on the HHP Board, as she popped two trays of mashed potatoes in one of the ovens, alongside bubbling trays of seasoned chicken breasts. “I also didn’t realize that they had somebody different to cook for them every night. I can see where it would be a comfort, after a day of sitting by a child’s bedside, to come back and have a home-cooked meal.”

On the other side of the kitchen, Ed Costello and his wife, Pat, were slicing up the roasts that had been simmering in 50-gallon slow cookers of all day.

“This is making me hungry!” called another volunteer, sniffing the rich aroma perfuming the air.

At another oven, Kathy Gessler and Patty-Pat Koslowski were minding the lasagna, the eggplant parm, and the chicken gravy. “Pass me the cheese,” said Koslowski, who works for a caterer. “I need to put the finishing touches on this.”

The man who created the Hibernian Hunger Project, Bob Gessler, former president of AOH Div. 87, made the connection with the Ronald McDonald House last March, after he saw volunteers serving breakfast to families on St. Patrick’s Day. “I talked to them about having us come in and while we couldn’t do it on St. Patrick’s Day, we decided to do shamrocks for the staff and the families,” he explained. The potted “shamrocks”—actually oxalis plants—are still in all the kitchen windows.

A tribute to the staff’s ability to attract volunteer chefs, the next available time was in June.

Gessler saw the undertaking as a way to involve more people in HHP, which holds regular “cook-ins” during which they make up to 6,000 meals for the elderly and shut-ins served by Aid for Friends, a nonprofit organization in Northeast Philadelphia. All year long, local AOHs collect canned goods or raise money for HHP. They make and deliver food baskets at the holidays. “We’re always looking for ways to get more people connected to HHP,” says Gessler. While the cook-ins draw hundreds who work, assembly line style, preparing meals for freezing, volunteers rarely see the fruits of their labor—the smile on the face of someone savoring the meal.

“I saw this as something that’s on a smaller scale, something they can own,” he says. “People want to help. Sometimes they don’t know how to help. They don’t have to spend any money. We have the money. What we need are your time and talents.”

At 6 sharp, the receptionist at the front desk announced over the loud speaker: “Dinner is now being served by the Hibernian Hunger Project” and the first takers appeared in the dining room and got into the buffet line: staff members, moms, dads, grandparents, children wearing wrist tags identifying them as patients. The volunteers hung back, watching as the food was scooped and piled onto plates.

And, about 20 minutes into the meal, they got their reward. “They’re coming back for seconds!” whispered one. For a volunteer with the Hibernian Hunger Project, that’s equivalent to “my compliments to the chef.”

See the photos from the Hibernian Hunger Projects kitchen duty at the Ronald McDonald House.