Thread by @FarFarrAway

As promised, I'm going to do a thread of some of the amazing things I couldn't squeeze into Tom Garvey's incredible story of how he lived inside an abandoned concession stand at Veterans Stadium for three years. So hold on to your butts, here we go:

inquirer.com/news/the-secre…

While Tom did initially keep the apartment a secret, as the years passed he'd share his story with friends and strangers whenever the Vet came up in conversation.

But very few people believed him.

"If I was telling a total stranger about this at the beer distributor, after a while I could see it doesn’t hold up against reality," he said. "I’d look at their faces & see the incredulity. I get it. I wouldn’t believe it either."

HE WAS TELLING PEOPLE THIS AT BEER DISTRIBUTORS

As he details in the book, the first time Tom visited the Vet (well before he lived there) he snuck in and wound up with a marching band in the middle of the field before a game.

"That was wild," he said.

It was just the beginning.

Tom & I talked a lot about him working the parking lots, and what a thankless job it was.

"There’s no respect for it," he said. "And everybody in the world seemed to gripe about the price. It was $1 when I started and $2 when I left."

He talked about having to work late to clean up the lots, especially when the Grateful Dead were in town for a show.

"The stuff people used to leave out in the lot afterwards was incredible," he said.

I asked: "What's the strangest thing you found?"

Tom: "Probably people."

Most of the furniture in Tom's secret apartment came from an Eagles player who had a suspicion he was going to cut from the team and, instead of signing a lease, asked Tom to hold his furniture for him in the storage room.

When the player got cut, he told Tom to keep it all.

"This was a man cave. This was not a place to raise a family. I had a stationary sink, fridge, complete long room divider with stereo, Mr. Coffee, hot plate, toaster oven, I had a living room area with an AstroTurf carpet. Most of the furniture was from the Eagles player."

"It was really pretty cozy. It was never cold in the winter and it was never hot in the summer. I had some space heaters. It wasn’t a place you’d walk around in your bare feet but I made it comfortable."

I asked if he ever worried about getting caught:

"Absolutely. It was a thought in my mind but not anything I really dwelled on. I was kind of oblivious, I didn’t care. I’m not proud of that, my uncles would have gotten some real flack if this would have come out."

Once, he came close to getting caught:

"One night when I was in there I heard this noise and it was a key in a lock, and I heard the lock click. Then the light switch went on and turned on the lights in the front. I’m on the other side of the boxes....

"...and I could hear somebody start to come in so I started to make a growl like an animal. I heard the person freeze and then they took another step and then I said 'Who’s there?' and the person ran away. Whoever it was had a key and wasn’t there for good reason."

"I never saw them the never saw me. I had the lock changed up after that."

He managed to get the lock changed and after that, he had the only key to the secret apartment.

On how many people knew at the time: "It was an open secret in the parking area from the beginning. There were a couple city workers who knew about and would make reference to it. But nobody in authority who would come down on me got wind of it. That was the magic of it."

Some of his friends even sent postcards to Garvey at the stadium as a joke, addressed simply to "Tom Garvey, Vets Stadium, 19148."

"Most of the mail I got there was from friends," he said. "I wasn’t getting bills because I didn’t have any."

There was even a working phone in the concession stand and if someone called the City Hall operator and asked for that three-digit extension, the call would ring directly to Garvey's secret apartment.

While Garvey would often watch the games when he lived at the the Vet, sometimes he’d retreat to his secret apartment during them and listen on the radio while he read a book.

“And if I heard the bases were loaded, I’d put the book down for a while and go out,” he said.

Once, when he was roller skating around the concourse late at night, he had an encounter with Dick Vermeil.

"I had come back from JC Dobbs, too hammered to go to bed. I’m having a great time, I thought I’ll go all the way down the ramps to the underground, take the elevator...

"I come flying around downstairs, I think nobody was in the building. As I come around and I head for the elevator door, the door starts to open, as I’m approaching the door at full speed, I fly in there and Vermeil is there with a bunch of film canisters...

"I hit the back wall and he dropped the film canisters. He’s looking at me with eyes the size of silver dollars. He would often sleep overnight in the office in his couch. He was alarmed and I was alarmed, the door to the elevator closes and starts back up on its own...

"When we got at the fourth level, the doors opened and I nodded and said 'Good night coach.'"

"I drank with Tug (McGraw) at Rembrandt’s at times. Tug said if my uncles had ever caught me they’d have fed me to the hot dog machine and my coffin would be a hot dog roll. He thought it was so funny he couldn’t get the words out."

"At the top of the 700 level, there was a walkway all the way around that was 8 feet wide. Once upon a time you could walk all around the stadium up there. I took my bike up there a couple times and my roller skates. And I slept up there once or twice. It was really cool."

I asked how he felt when the Vet was demolished in 2004.

"I was sad because I realized there were probably some cats in there. I’d see security guys put out bowl of water for cats. That's what I thought about."

Finally, Eagles Hall of Famer Bill Bradley, one of the people who saw the secret apartment and corroborated Tom's story for me, would like to offer this final thought:

"And by the way, the Cowboys still suck."