Life-Saver Gets Thanked Again --43 Years Later

Salvatore Mauriello was forever telling the story of how he had saved a 2-year-old boy who somehow crawled onto the ledge of an apartment building in Brooklyn, N.Y., and fell.

“I caught him,” he’d say. “But you know, I always wondered what happened to him.” What he meant was: how much of a difference did I make?

He was 80 years old by now, still working five days a week at his one-man barber shop in North Hollywood, still regaling his regular customers with his bag of good-natured insults and boasts. (“I am the greatest cook, my recipe will cost you $500.”). He was content in life’s pleasures: children and grandchildren and a great-grandchild on the way. The only thing that seemed beyond his reach was the boy he had saved.

Sal knew his name: Marvin Goldstein. The Goldstein family lived on the other side of Hewes Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. As Sal best remembered, it happened in April, 1948. He was walking home from work when he heard a woman screaming. Looking up, he saw a toddler crawling on a fourth-story ledge. Suddenly, the boy fell. Sal stuck out his arms and caught him. He became a neighborhood hero. Marvin became known for years as “Blanche’s kid who fell out the window.”

Sal moved his family to California soon after. When Marvin was bar mitzvahed, his father wrote Sal to tell him that Marvin’s remarks to his synagogue included a tribute to Sal. But that was the last word. Whenever Sal and his wife, Rachel, would go back to New York to see their families, Sal would comb through the telephone directory. But there were too many Marvin Goldsteins. He always called the wrong one.

A few weeks ago Sal’s son-in-law heard the story about Marvin for perhaps the 73rd time.

“I’ll find him,” he said.

“Nah,” Sal said. “Impossible.”

The son-in-law then launched into one of his favorite lectures on the mystique of newspapers, about how something funny always seems to happen when you put a story like Sal’s in front of a million or so people. It’s like a pebble in a lake, he said. You never know where the ripples are going to go. It’s magic.

The biggest newspaper in New York is the Daily News, a tabloid that loves to orchestrate reunions. The son-in-law wrote the newspaper a letter. Within a week the newspaper published a story about Sal, headlined “Desperately Seeking Marvin.”

The next day the N.Y. Daily News reporter who’d written the story telephoned Sal.

He’d found Marvin. Or, rather, Marvin had found him.

That was how Salvatore Mauriello learned how much of a difference he’d made.

The boy he’d saved had gone on to become a psychologist who has lectured in Paris and Zurich, works as a division chief of a Long Island hospital and teaches at Queens College. He got married and had two sons.

For Sal, that would have been enough. The newspaper had other plans. Two weeks ago, it flew Sal and Rachel to New York to meet Marvin. The paper put the Mauriellos up at a fancy Manhattan hotel, drove them and Marvin out to the old neighborhood and took the whole group to dinner at The Grand Ticino, the restaurant whose name was used in the movie “Moonstruck.”

The reunion cleared up a few details. The rescue occurred in 1945, not ‘48, as Sal thought. And as Marvin pointed out, his old apartment was on the fifth floor, not the fourth. What was once an Italian and Jewish area is now populated by demolished buildings and discarded appliances and rubble. Yet the two buildings where the men lived are still standing.

The Daily News made the reunion its Page 1 picture.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Sal said the next evening when his plane landed in Los Angeles. “The fuss people made over us. It was like I was a star--no, a celebrity. Hey, from now on my autograph will cost you $500.”

He was enjoying himself, but for a minute he sobered.

“Do you know what Marvin’s son said to me? He said, ‘Thank you for saving my father’s life. Without you, I wouldn’t be here.”’