Soul of a Hero

A rescue, phone call, new job

As the subway roared into the 14th Street station to take him back to his sparsely furnished Harlem walkup, Reginald Andrews, 29, was deep in thought. Except for occasional work unloading produce, the father of eight had been unemployed for a year, and he was not optimistic about the job interview he had had that morning at Jamac Frozen Foods, a Manhattan food-delivery company.

Suddenly someone else's troubles grabbed Andrews' attention. Trying to board the train, David Schnair, 75, blind from an injury suffered in combat during World War II, was tapping a metal cane to identify an open door. But when he mistook a space between two cars for a door, he toppled onto the track. The train was about to pull out. "My mind left Jamac and Christmas for the kids," recalled Andrews. "I knew what I had to do."

Andrews jumped under the train and dragged Schnair, bleeding from a gash in his head, to a narrow cubbyhole beneath the platform out of the way of the wheels. The train began moving, but then screeched to a halt when a screaming bystander implored the conductor to stop the train. Andrews and Schnair huddled in the crawl space until the power was cut off and they could be hoisted to safety.

President Reagan, after reading a newspaper account of the rescue, telephoned his congratulations. "At first I thought it was Rich Little," said Andrews, who took the call in a storefront church next door because his own phone had been shut off for nonpayment. No less startled was Jamac Frozen Foods Vice President Edward Marbach. He also received a phone call from Reagan, who wanted to put in a good word for Andrews with a Jamac official. "I told him I'd already given him the job in my mind," recalled Marbach. (Andrews will report for work for his new $10,500-a-year truck-loader's position as soon as his knee ligaments, torn during the rescue, are healed.) Three days after the incident, an anonymous donor sent Andrews a $3,000 bank check to wipe out his debts. Andrews has a special sympathy for the blind; his sister lost her eyesight in a New York City subway robbery over four years ago. "If it had been my sister there," said Andrews, "I wouldn't want anyone to just stand around." Said Philip Mottley, a friend of Andrews': "It was not his body that saved that man's life. It was his soul." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.