This is later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast More what You Hear Weekday Afternoon's on the Drive. Tom Garmy grew up in Ridley Park. He served as the US Army Special Forces in the Vietnam War, and during his service he became a Green Beret, ended up coming back home and becoming very close with his home team. He's written all about it in a new book called The Secret Apartment and Tom, this isn't about a group of children finding a
secret apartment and secretly restoring it for their wanton and lonely uncle. All that would be the Secret Gardens. What I'm referring to this is not the Secret
Yeah, yeah, yeah it was. It was an old concession stand that I used for storage because I was running all the parking lot and once a year I would get as much as a tractor trailer full of parking tickets to you during the year because we had so many events, and I had an event almost every day of the year, because I worked not only at bet Stadium, but I ran the parking lots, which the adjoining parking lots for
the Spectrum where the Philadelphia Flyers and Sixers and Rock concerts and all kinds of events took place there also, so I had a reason to be in the stadium almost every day of the year. And I just sort of hid in plain sight. I was ubiquitous. All people got used to seeing me. They never thought twice about it. And I hid in plain sight and I got away with it for two years and four months without ever getting caught. So were you using your skills as a green Beret to blend in with the
local camouflage. The government spent a lot of money training me an unconventional warfare and unconventional things. So I knew I could hide. I could hide in plain sight and get away with it. And did you have anything to lose? I mean, I know, I work so much, I may as well set up a cot here at the studio. There was something to lose. I mean, my uncles ran the concessions there. They had a fifteen year contract for all food, drink, and novelties. And that's how I
had gotten the job. And they had picked up the parking concession because something happened in Something happened to the parking concessionaire in the late right around nineteen seventy six or seventy seven and they were summarily fired and my uncle had to take over for the remainder of the contract, which was until nineteen eighty one eighty one. It came up for a competitive bid then and we were outbid by
another firm that wanted to They wanted so badly. They really gave a very very reasonable bid, but they weren't making as much money and I was. If I had gotten caught, it would have reflected on my uncles rather badly and they would have been in trouble. So there was a lot There was
a lot of risk there. The Secret Apartment vet Stadium a surreal memoir Tom Garvey talks about from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty one, he basically lived at work an empty concession stand inside Vett Stadium, and it was some are calling it kind of a kind of a foot a sporting event version of the Phantom of the Opera, except you weren't trying to kill people. No. I didn't ever hear part any hurt or anybody now, so that was my
motive. I was just there for a good time and had bring sneak friends into games, and you know, watch I watched a lot of games. I loved to roller skate around the stadium at night when it was empty. That was beautiful to be in the stadium on a Sunday with sixty some thousand rabid fans in bad weather, and then to be there a couple of nights later was just it was It was like being a cloister. It was.
It was schizophrenic, but it was really good for me. And it was good for a writer to have all that time by himself, and he wrote all about it. In the secret apartment. Tom Garby is with us, so you had access to concessions. You had access I gathered to climate control, heating and cooling inside that stand. It was very comfortable in there,
and the summer it was just cool because it was cavernous. Yeah, in the winter it was warm because because it had to be heated because the pipes were freeze so there were a lot of hot pipes running through there with hot water in them, so they kept the room very warm. It it was really cozy in the winter. Did you sneak into the locker room to take
your showers? I didn't have to go into the Phillies or the Eagles locker rooms because There was another locker room down under the stadium for the city workers, and I was welcome to have a locker there. And I had showers, and I had a couple of lockers there with all my clothes in it, clean clothes, shower things, my jogging things, you know, toilet trees, shaving whatever. I had everything I needed. Laundromat down down the road, maybe not down the road. There was a commissary because they had
a restaurant. They also ran a rest throughout the stadium. I had a key to that to the commissary. I could go in there and use that washers and dryers to clean my clothes. Yeah. I had a little golf cart I could ride around. I had my roller skates for roller skating all around the stadium and or riding my ten speed bike. I had a pickup truck. I had everything a guy would want. It was a man cave, but it was you wouldn't raise a family there, But it was really,
really very comfortable. I had everything you could possibly want along those lines. Tom Garvey, author of the Secret Apartment. Did it interfere with your shall we say social life? No? No, it augmented it. Actually, I was very popular in the city during those those years. I could smuggle anybody I want it into any game at any time, and I did. Tom Garvey it's an amusing memoir called The Secret Apartment, how he lived in Vet Stadium. And then I got to ask, how did it all
come tumbling down? Or did it It didn't tumble down. At the end of nineteen eighty one, on the last of the year, we were done with our contract. So I had moved all my stuff out weeks before and
prepared the place. It was stir all again and another concessionaire came in there and then moved their equipment in and they used that storage Well, they probably didn't have access to that storage area, now that I think about it, they wouldn't have had the same access I did because they weren't tied into the concession in the inside. They just stayed in the outside office. They didn't
come into the inner area where I was. Tom Garvey The Secret Apartment in ve Stadium, where he lived from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty one. He writes all about it in this remarkable book. It'll give you a chuckle, and if you are a sports fan, maybe even give you some things to Hey, that might not be a bad life, and I don't. It doesn't sound like it was. No, it wasn't. It was a good life. It was a good life. And I was single at the
time. I didn't get married, so I was fifty years old. That's the first time and only time I've ever been married. I'm still married to this girl, my dreams and so a year after that, everything turned out very well for me and I've been very happy ever since. Also, but you had to go get a pesky apartment, didn't you. Yeah, I had to go get a pesty apartment with all you know, melling grass and all that stuff, Tom Garvey. The name of the book is The Secret
Apartment. It's available everywhere. Thank you for the story and for joining us today. Thank you very much, Thank you, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation