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Heart to Heart

iUniverse, Inc.

Contents

Foreword.........................................................viiAcknowledgments..................................................xiIntroduction.....................................................xvChapter 1: My Story.............................................1Chapter 2: Steve Sobelman.......................................27Chapter 3: Erin Peiffer.........................................46Chapter 4: Hurst Bousegard......................................63Chapter 5: Anita Fox............................................84Chapter 6: Evan Kushner.........................................99Chapter 7: The Reverend James Love..............................112Chapter 8: Mary Maguire.........................................129Chapter 9: Morris Ginsberg......................................143Chapter 10: Neal Gregory.........................................162Chapter 11: Barbara Robinson.....................................173Chapter 12: Larry Harris.........................................186Conclusion.......................................................199American Heart Association Recommended Links.....................201

Chapter One

The pain was intense and unrelenting, and I immediately thought someone had shot me. My hands moved to my chest to put pressure on a hemorrhage that wasn't there. No blood. No hole in my starched, white dress shirt. I tore open the top buttons and pulled at the tie around my neck to get more air. The pain was somewhere deep in my chest, where I couldn't get to it.

My good friend and cameraman, Mike Fox, was driving.

"Damn, turn off the air."

I thought the contrast of the air conditioning in the car with Washington's summer heat and humidity might be causing the problem. Maybe it was just indigestion from the greasy burger I devoured at yet another lunch on the run. The pain pressed on, like a vise tightening my chest.

"Stop the car. Maybe I can walk it off." The news car pulled over to the curb on Stanton Road in Southeast. I knew the area well. I had done stories inside the elementary school that stood in the middle of the block. Shortly after I moved to D.C. from my first TV job in Cincinnati, I assigned myself to the rough Stanton Dwellings Public Housing project with another cameraman and friend, Mike Murphy. We documented the daily twists and turns in the lives of Stanton Dwellings resident Barbara Price and her children.

Walking a few steps didn't ease the pain in my chest. It hadn't moved to my arm or anywhere else. I was worried, but not panicked. After all, I was only forty-two, in good shape, a tough street reporter in a tough town that critics like to refer to as "Murder Capital" of the country. I often took my camera crews into neighborhoods where some cops wouldn't dare go alone.

"Mike, get me to a hospital," I gasped. "Let's go to GW."

George Washington University Hospital is where President Ronald Reagan was taken when John Hinckley shot him in 1981, and it was on the way back to Channel 9. I was thinking, GW saved the president. It can save me too. They could check me out, and I could still make it to the station and get my story written and edited for the 6 p.m. news. Truth was, I didn't want to go to the neighborhood health-care facility, Greater Southeast Community Hospital. I had covered stories about horrible conditions there: uninsured patients, inadequate staff. It was a hospital with multimillion-dollar deficits that was unable to keep its accreditation. I feel bad saying it now, but honestly, if this turned out to be serious, I didn't want them cutting me up at Greater Southeast.

The pain wouldn't let up. Eventually I decided it was time to panic and began to worry that I wasn't going to make it across the Anacostia River through downtown to GW.

Mike had sensed something wasn't right with me all day long. He said I had been complaining most of the day-"bitchin" is the word he used. He said I seemed preoccupied.

The car headed for Suitland Parkway, which would have put us in the direction of GW, still a good fifteen-to-twenty-minute drive away, depending on the late-afternoon traffic. Spotting a firehouse, we both concluded I wasn't going to make it if we didn't stop there.

The car slammed into the drive on Irving Street. I recall my head being jerked backward. Mike threw the gearshift into park and leaped out in one sudden swoop. He raced toward the red brick building, leaving the driver's door open and the motor running.

"I need some help. I've got Bruce Johnson out there, and he's having a heart attack." I could hear him shouting at two people in blue uniforms who had probably already seen their share of life-or-death situations. Heart attacks probably run a distant third to assaults and killings in this part of town.

The fact is, few African-American men anywhere survive the ride to a hospital after having a heart attack. But then, a heart attack for a forty-two-year-old man of any color was still rare.

The paramedics seemed to be processing the information. They strolled out to the car with a stretcher, and once they looked inside and saw me, their demeanor changed. It was as if they thought, Damn, it really is one of those TV guys. They stepped it up after that. I should point out that had my attack come a few years later, I would have been out of luck because by then that firehouse was closed due to city budget cuts.

The paramedics didn't ask where I wanted to go, or if I had insurance. Most of the patients they transport are not covered. I wondered as I lay there if it really made a difference. With sirens wailing and lights flashing, they rushed me to-where else?-Greater Southeast Community Hospital, which was a couple of minutes away.

My pain subsided. Maybe the paramedic had given me nitroglycerin. I really can't remember. "Forty-two-year-old black male, probable heart attack," she reported over the radio.

The ambulance raced back in the direction Mike and I had already covered: Stanton Road, Alabama Avenue to Southern Avenue.... Mike was trailing us in the news car and somehow retained enough composure to do what he had been trained to do: report the story. Keeping his right arm on the steering wheel, he used his left hand to videotape the moving scenes with a 35-pound video camera. Later, he didn't remember doing it. News people-we really are peculiar.

* * *

I had arrived in Washington in 1976 as the youngest reporter ever hired by then-WTOP-TV, which today is WUSA-TV9, a CBS affiliate. I was twenty-five, with a wife and a toddler daughter. I had no health concerns, just a single job concern: to become the best broadcast journalist I could be.

My work was more than a career. It was a vocation, and it didn't scare me that I was arriving in the big city nearly broke, earning but $15,000 a year, slightly more than at my first job in Cincinnati at WCPO-TV. I would have come for less.

Getting to the nation's capital was the kind of opportunity my family members back home in Louisville, Kentucky, just didn't get that often. In fact, I was the first, so my mom and seven siblings were both proud and afraid for me. D.C. was a long way from the Cotter Homes housing projects where we started.

In Cincinnati I had completed work on my...