Bishop Fulton Sheen lived in my building for several years. The building was built in 1964 so my guess is that he was an original tenant. He & his staff of three priests lived in the tower section,. Alas, I lived in a lowy wing as I was attending college here, starting in 1976.
His immediate neighbors were Rodney Dangerfield, Alice Cooper (old rock star you may not remember), Dr. Rubin (author of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex), and, for a very short time, Xaviera Hollander, aka, The Happy Hooker.
This place is a total mix of everyone from students to bishops to ____, well, all different sorts. 850 apartments makes it almost the United Nations sometimes.
Can you just see Rodney Dangerfield knocking on the Bishop's door to borrow a cup of sugar or milk?
One day, I was in the deli downstairs and I started chatting up a really hot guy when the nice Jewish lady who ran the deli immediately took me aside. She informed me that the guy was a priest and I had better behave myself!
lol, he was wearing jeans, how could I have known? But I was very careful after that!
The Bishop was a very dapper man, always friendly and smiling at anyone at all and seemed to be very well liked by everyone here. The doormen would hold the door for him and then he would hold it if there was someone behind him. Very much a people's person, that's probably why he had such a huge following apart from the religious aspect, of course) I've read that he may be considered for sainthood. (sorry, I don't know the technical term for that)
I remember the night he died because I was sitting on a sofa watching TV and I could see the ambulance in the circular driveway. About 20 minutes later, there was a newsflash that Bishop Sheen has died.
Sad, yes. And also sad because both of my grandmothers thought that he kept me safe in the big bad city! Fortunately, I got married two years later and their worries were over. They thought
