Curtis Sliwa is no stranger to adversity.
The founder of the Guardian Angels and longtime co-host of the “Curtis and Kuby” WABC talk-radio show has been shot, firebombed, divorced and suspended (from his NY-1 television show for inappropriate language), and called just about every name in the book.
There is one thing, however, that no one has ever called Sliwa — complacent. Sliwa has built his career on consistently speaking out and taking action to resolve issues in the areas of environment, crime and politics.
In telling his story, Sliwa has a message to all of us: Step up and get involved.
By getting involved in the world around us, we can find a sense of purpose, achieve important goals, connect with others who share our values and make improvements to our community.
Positive psychology theorists have suggested that one of the keys to thriving is the ability to find a “purposeful” life in which one uses his or her strengths in the service of something “greater” than oneself. And many people find purpose through civic engagement which is the extent to which an individual gets involved in community and social activities.
Research has shown myriad benefits of civic engagement – for example, a longitudinal study of 854 adolescent participants found that civic engagement, such as being active in school or religious organizations, predicted higher life satisfaction and educational attainment and lower rates of arrest in early adulthood.
Similarly, a meta-analysis of 17 cohort studies shows that civic engagement in the form of volunteering is associated with improved life satisfaction, as well as lower mortality rates over time. Further, research suggests that individuals with increased sense of purpose live longer.
Despite these long term benefits, right from the start, Sliwa’s path to getting involved in the community was seen as controversial. Sliwa grew up in Canarsie, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y. And the prevailing perspective from his neighbors and extended family was to look out for himself and to not get involved. When I spoke with Sliwa, he gave me a metaphor to describe this perspective, “They wouldn’t even urinate on you to put out the flames if you were on fire in the middle of the street.”
He told me, “We all want to be helpful and all grew up reading about cartoon heroes. And we all feel better in doing good things. And it’s the pressures of others saying, ‘What if you get hurt? Is there anyone at all who’s going to be concerned about you?’”
But Sliwa’s parents were a buffer against this discouragement. “I was basically in a family cocoon of positivity. I was always encouraged to go out there and volunteer with the attitude that my parents had, which is, ‘If you’re willing to do the hard work — no matter how crazy an idea — we will support you. But the day we see you not rolling up your shirtsleeves and doing the bulk of the work and the heavy lifting, that’s it. We’re not going to support the effort.’”
His mother modeled how to give to others. “I’ll never forget my mother first and foremost, Francis, who would volunteer at the Angel Guardian home in downtown Brooklyn and would care for all the unwanted babies. Babies would be crying in their crib, so she would walk them and entertain them,” he said.
“Which is ironic, because I eventually created the Guardian Angels.”
And Sliwa’s mother endured the very type of hardship that caused many to warn him against helping others. “On one of her visits, a baby had vomited on the floor, and she hadn’t seen it. And in order to protect the child she was holding, she took the full brunt of the blow on her back, breaking her back,” he said. “I never heard her complain, and she never regretted getting involved in the process. In fact, she would say, ‘They’re babies. They really need as much help as they can get.’”
And Sliwa’s father, who was a merchant seaman, taught him to empathize with those who were less fortunate. “I was 5, and he took me to the Bowery, at the time, Skid Row. A lot of merchant seamen ended up in the Bowery because they had all kinds of problems. They were dysfunctional, they couldn’t read, they were uneducated and became alcoholics. And he knew some of these guys who had sailed with him,” he said.
“My father would say, ‘There but for the grace of God goes you and me.’”
Sliwa took that lesson to heart. “I was geared up to believe that if you do good things for others, eventually good things will come to yourself and to those that are participating. You just have to have faith that that’s the way this world is.”
Part of what allowed Sliwa to take risks was a philosophy that his grandfather taught him. Sliwa explained, “Everything is a building block. He’d always tell me, ‘In life, there are nine failures for every one success.’ And so I was prepared for that.”
Sliwa’s first foray into civic engagement was gathering junk to clean up his neighborhood. “We lived next to one of the biggest open landfills in New York — Spring Creek — and you could smell it on a hot day and the wind was blowing in your direction. And this was before Earth Day and the recycling era and the green movement. I started collecting massive amounts of bottles, cans, and at that time, the aluminum cans.”
Sliwa explained that his behavior was not exactly welcomed in his community. “And people didn’t know quite how to take it in the neighborhood. Naturally, they were concerned about their property values. I would recruit the other local young people to bring me what they would normally discard in their home trash. And then I started organizing streets to put out their recyclable trash for me to pick up on my big Schwinn Chief bicycle once a week.”
Sliwa described the neighborhood protests as actually turning violent. “Now all of a sudden, the neighbors were getting really upset, and they just wanted me to have the sanitation department take it away and put it in the Spring Creek open-air landfill – the very place I was trying to stop it from being dumped,” he said. “And so they firebombed me. I remember they would come by at night with bullhorns and cars and ‘You motherfucking mutt’ — because I was part Italian — ‘You better get rid of this garbage, or we’ll burn it down.’”
“And then one night, they did exactly what they said. They came by with Molotov cocktails. I must have had two tons of newspaper under tarp. And it went up in smoke, and the fire department came.”
But Sliwa’s father defended his son’s actions. “My father came back on shore leave, he stood with me and he said, ‘I’d rather have you be this kind of a junk man than a junkie.’”
Eventually, Sliwa worked as the night manager at a McDonald’s in the Bronx and continued his quest to clean up the city. “I formed a group of volunteers called the ‘Rock Brigade.’ And I took the people that worked for me and put the arm on them, and I said ‘you’re going to be a volunteer.’ You’re going to give one night a week of going out with me, with the brooms, and we’re going to clean up Fordham Road.”
While trash was a problem, there was another problem, too: The streets were not safe. “I’m still living in Brooklyn, and I’m going back and forth on the mugger’s express, the trains in the wee hours of the morning. People are really more interested in human garbage … the people who are predators,” Sliwa explained. “The people who wait and lurk in the darkness to steal them of the few valuables that they have or rob them of their dignity and pride and keep them in fear.”
So Sliwa began to shift from gathering trash to patrolling to stop crime. One of the techniques Sliwa utilized was the “citizen’s arrest.”
“We’d have no weapons, no special powers or privileges, but we would do physical interventions. We would make citizen’s arrests. Citizen’s arrest is interesting because it goes back to the time of the Magna Carta. It’s built into our penal laws,” he said. “Now they can’t use excessive force and if they grab the wrong suspect, then they end up getting locked up and could be sued. So when I started to exercise the right in the most extreme way, I was really entrapping people who were already out there to rob and mug,” he said.
“And I figured, better me than somebody else, because I’m prepared for them.”
Soon, Sliwa wanted the Guardian Angels to have a distinctive look. But in many ways this look contributed to the assumption that the Guardian Angels were a “gang.”
“I started moving in the direction of forming a group that would be seen, physically noticeable, and came up with the red beret and the T-shirt. And this was at a time when the cult-movie classic came out, ‘The Warriors,’ which was causing so much tension,” he said.
“They looked at us like another gang in the subway.”
And just like when he collected trash in Canarsie, his efforts were not initially welcomed. “I had thought, ‘Boy, I’m going to get the Congressional Medal of Honor for this.’ I couldn’t have been more hopelessly wrong. Other than my mom and father, my one supporter was Father James McNally, at St. Nicholas [of] Tolentine, the church I lived next to up in the Bronx, who had worked for me with the Rock Brigade. Everyone else abandoned me. McDonald’s fired me.”
The lack of appreciation was frustrating to Sliwa, but he remembered his grandfather’s message. “My grandfather said there’d be nine failures for every success. There’d been 900, and I’m still waiting for that success.”
Over time, Sliwa says, people became more accepting of the Guardian Angels. “I think because after a period of time, they began to wonder, ‘What have they done wrong? Who have they killed? Oh, Guardian Angels have been killed in the line of duty. I don’t know of them killing anyone. No lawsuits.’ There were Guardian Angels that had been injured, who had been locked up, but nothing seemed to emerge about anything we had done wrong.”
Eventually, Sliwa’s notoriety landed him an opportunity to become a talk-show host. “I remember the first time I was asked to substitute for Bob Grant, the king of talk radio [in New York City]. And unlike other colleagues of mine, he would always choose substitutes who were different than him, didn’t read from the same mantra.”
According to Sliwa, Grant appreciated Sliwa’s unorthodox style. Sliwa explained, “My language is different than most and the language that I used was immediately rejected by management: ‘Oh, he’s a street thug.’ And Bob Grant said, ‘Oh, no, if you’re ever going to do anything in talk radio, you really should go in the direction of Curtis. Because he knows where all the bones are buried and who buried them, and he’s fearless.’”
Sliwa eventually entered talk radio with his now ex-wife Lisa and eventually was paired with liberal lawyer Ron Kuby for “Curtis and Kuby,” which still airs today. But Sliwa noticed that getting involved with the community through the airwaves was different than his work with the Guardian Angels. “So, I’ve been a veteran of talk radio, and I’ve had a lot of successes and a lot of failures. But what I had to learn the hard way is that you’re not going to change one person’s point of view out there” he said. “People who listen to talk radio already made up their minds. So, you’re there to entertain and most importantly convey messages that maybe they hadn’t thought about.”
And that is OK, because radio provides Sliwa an opportunity not only to speak his mind, but to fund his passion, the Guardian Angels. He explained, “If I didn’t have this fabulous income, I’d be destroyed. It would be almost impossible for me to continue on and devote so much time to the Guardian Angels.”
“I think the bottom line is what my parents said to me, ‘Do good things, and you’ll get good things in return.’ I get to do the thing I love most, the Guardian Angels. And I earn my income from the thing that I love to do most, which is talk radio.”
Through his experience with the Guardian Angels and radio, Sliwa now thinks that our country needs to move away from being individualistic to more community-oriented. “Individual success … Americans love that. And it is a part of the American success story, but it’s also a part of the greed. It’s part of why other people have not done well, and this concept that we’re alone in this thing called the world,” he said. “That we can do what we want when we want and how we want it and be abusive of Mother Earth and not pay a price…with global warming and climate control.”
“We’re all stuck in the same situation because some people have been pigs.”
And Sliwa thinks that the self-help mentality he learned from his parents is the answer. “I look at my father and my mother and the many jobs that they worked to support our family. They did it out of loyalty, out of responsibility to the family that they created. They didn’t expect somebody else to do it for them,” he explained. “So that’s part of that old-school mentality that I breathe into the Guardian Angels — self-help. We’ve got to basically scrape the barnacles off our backs and get our rear in gear, and get out and deal with this problem.”
He emphasizes that starting small is not only not bad but perhaps the best way to get going. “Clearly, people have to think in small ways in getting involved. Everybody feels that if their contribution doesn’t make a big difference it’s not a contribution at all. They have to know that it’s the very small, insignificant things that end up leading to bigger change in the way people think and the way they react. So attending community meetings and fighting over a traffic light and the planting of trees — it begins that whole process.”
And he encourages people to step up and get involved. “I would always tell them, ‘Today is the luckiest day in your life.’ And they’d say ‘Why?’ I’d say, ‘You’re going to work harder as a Guardian Angel than you’ve ever worked in anything in your life. And you’re not going to be compensated. Your paycheck is, people are going to thank you. And you’re going to a feel like a million bucks after that.”
And just like his parents, Sliwa wants to lead by example. “One thing that I was always taught was, whatever you say, set the example first. You have to exemplify what you are asking other people to do, 10 times more than them, and you have to stay true to it. For instance, in the Guardian Angels, everybody patrols. I patrol; everybody patrols. This way, you keep everyone at a same level, even though you have a bunch more responsibilities as leader.”
Sliwa is very skeptical, to say the least, that politicians can help in this cause. “We need to pull back from the political process. We need to take more responsibility. It’s the politicians, regardless of what sector they represent, who crush great ideas. They try to co-opt it and neuter it and water it down,” he said.
“And we are all suckers when we get wined, dined and complimented by the politicians because they’re only looking to see what they can co-opt. But they’re not actually looking to do it, because if they teach people how to become more self-supporting, more in charge of their group destiny and their individual destiny, we’ll be less and less dependent on politicians,” he said. “And I don’t care if they are Republicans and conservatives or liberals and Democrats, they don’t want that, they want us to be totally dependent on government.”
Ultimately, Sliwa is optimistic, and with good reason. His radio show is going strong. And there are now more than 130 Guardian Angels safety-patrol chapters throughout the world. And Sliwa has been recognized for his efforts with the Courage of Conscience Award.
He wants others to be optimistic as well. “You have this huge force. You have skill levels out there. You have all this energy, this drive, you have this idealism and that’s what I tell people: Never lose that idealism that you have,” he said.
“The moment that you’re no longer idealistic, you’re dead,” Sliwa added. “It’s ‘us and we,’ not ‘I and me.’”
