Has it really been 20 years?

I suddenly think back and ask myself this question: has it really been 20 years?

I was working for one of my more forgettable employers at the time, having graduated a few years earlier from Temple’s school of communications and theater with a journalism degree, thinking I was ready to bust loose and show this small, highly cliquish and ultimately incompetent Department of Defense consulting firm in Willow Grove how well I could write proposals to help them win government contracts, not realizing I would be sabotaged some months later when my management mentor bailed out. While some of these thoughts knowingly and/or unknowingly swam in my head, one of my co-workers told me that there was a standoff between the Philadelphia police and MOVE at a home on Osage Avenue in the Powelton Village section of the city. My first reaction was “Good. Now they’re going to deal with Ramona Africa and all of these other characters who have been disrupting their neighbors by shouting through megaphones from the rooftop of that place at 3 AM in the morning, dumping garbage everywhere and drawing rats and all kinds of other animals, etc.� It all started around mid-morning, as I recall.

I didn’t hear anything about it for a little while, maybe an hour or so, when my father called me on the phone after lunch and asked me if I’d heard about the fire (we were living in Philadelphia at the time). I said no, I hadn’t heard anything. He continued and told me that, apparently, the police had tried to shoot their way into the house to apprehend some of the MOVE people (using the term "people" loosely, regarding the adults anyway) since the cops were trying to serve them a warrant and they resisted, with the MOVE people having fortified their house with bunkers, guns, and ammunition. While the cops engaged MOVE on the ground, a chopper flew overhead and dropped some C-4 explosive onto the roof, which eventually set off an explosion when it combusted with the stores of ammunition inside the home.

(By the way, I’m trying to be especially careful about how I explain the original explosion. I worked with a conservative years later who became enraged when you mention MOVE because he said that the TV stations deliberately edited the footage to make it look like the explosive caused the explosion right away, when it reality it took longer to combust with what MOVE had in their home already, and that the way they edited the film showed liberal bias against the police – yeah, you’re right; the guy was a total nimrod).

When the fire started, our illustrious former mayor, W. Wilson “Wife Beater� Goode watched it unfold on TV and thought the fire was snow on his television (I swear, I don’t think “The Simpsons� could make up stuff like this). He, managing director Leo Brooks and police chief Gregory Sambor decided to let the fire burn.

By now, word was starting to spread around the office that the entire city block was becoming engulfed, and no one in the city administration was doing anything to stop it. I checked back with my father for periodic updates to confirm this - he had started watching live coverage on TV (which, on the local CBS affiliate station, ran all day) the moment he heard that there was a police shootout going on, and it was truly riveting TV. This was so partly because local news reporter Harvey Clark arrived on the scene and started reporting back to local TV news anchor Larry Kane in the studio. Clark reported for hours and hours, talking to everyone he could find in an effort to piece the story together (he would later receive a well-deserved Emmy award for his coverage – it was a career-defining moment for him). Eventually, somebody at work found a TV and put it into one of our human factors testing labs (and I’m using that term very loosely also, since it had been the “brown bag� room a few days before), and people stopped in and out to watch an entire city block in West Philadelphia burn (the overhead helicopter shots from the local TV news stations left me dumbstruck in a way that I hope I never have to experience again).

Eventually, fire commissioner William Richmond interceded with his crew and I don’t know how many other companies to put out the blaze. I think it took two days to extinguish it. I believe he testified to the MOVE Commission during the hearings later that he acted on his own without any authorization because he couldn’t stand it any more, but I’m not sure. Between Goode, Sambor, Brooks, and Richmond, the fire commissioner was the only one who showed, to me, any competence or understanding of what it was that was going on.

We would find out other stuff in the coming days and weeks that made Wilson Goode look historically incompetent, such as the fact that, if the city had paid any attention at all to what the neighbors were trying to tell them, they would have known that MOVE had a pattern of how they came into and left the home, and the police could have gotten into the home and rescued the children (five of whom died) before they raided the house. It also came out later that the decision was made to drop the C-4 and let everything burn so the police could avert a lengthy shootout with MOVE, since the cops had clashed with MOVE in 1978 and Officer James Ramp was killed.

It was truly a surreal experience to watch “The Bombing of Osage Avenue� unfold and witness the subsequent aftermath (when I got home from work, along with my mom, I immediately started watching the coverage). For this and other reasons, I believe Wilson Goode should be made to wear ashes and sack cloth and never show his face in public again.