HEROES: Rescue

One night last week a man standing on a subway platform in Brooklyn slipped and fell on the track, unconscious, just as a train roared into the station. A woman screamed. The motorman threw on the brakes, but he knew he could not stop in time. Two men waiting for the train jumped down on the track, grabbed the unconscious man by his shoulders and feet and slung him under the shallow overhang of the platform. They crouched there with him, while three cars of the train ground past.

The motorman, white-faced and trembling, fearing he had killed not one man but three, raced back. The platform was a bedlam of pushing, screaming people. A voice, embarrassed and gruff, came up from the tracks: “We’re all right. Get the train out of here.” Inch by inch the train was pulled out, the two rescuers heaved their charge, unconscious but barely scratched, to the platform, then they tried to sneak off into the crowd, found they had to leave their names with the police. One was Frank Serrano, a short, husky longshoreman. The other: William O’Dwyer, 33, unemployed. They had never seen each other before. Both got sore, and at first refused to give their names; for a time it looked as if the rescue would end in an arrest. To reporters, clamoring for a “statement,” neither had anything to say. “Hero?” said Mr. O’Dwyer, glowering at a reporter who had had the bad taste to use the word. “What do you mean, hero? All we did was get the man off the tracks.”