Tommy Morrissey wants to induct Giants quarterback Eli Manning into the Hall of Fame… the Morrissey Hall of Fame.
Morrissey was given a pair of Manning’s sneakers by Manning’s then-fiancé seven months before the Giants won the Super Bowl in 2008. Due to a Reporter article about the exchange, last April, Morrissey reconnected with a sister from Staten Island whom he hadn’t seen in 45 years.
A second sister was still estranged from the family, and now Morrissey has found her as well.
Morrissey tends the hot dog cart by the CVS at Newark and Washington streets and at Pier A Park. The people he sees every day know his story, and often asked how the search was going.
Now he can tell them that he found the last lost family member of the Morrissey clan.
Gotta be the shoes
Morrissey came across the good-luck sneakers when his son’s moving company was hired by the New York Giants quarterback, who lives uptown in the Hoboken Tea Building, two years ago.
Manning’s then-fiancé Abby McGrew was throwing the shoes out when Morrissey asked if he could have them. She said yes, and he wore them every game thereafter until the Giants won the Super Bowl. An article detailing his good luck charm triggered a series of events leading to his finding two lost sisters.
Lost sisters
When the nine children were still very young, the Morrissey family was split up after their mother passed away.
The two estranged sisters moved in with relatives on the maternal side and slowly separated from their other brothers and sisters. Debra was two years old at the time of separation and Donna was only six months old.
Last year, after reuniting with his youngest sister Donna, Morrissey heard from a cousin that the last missing sister, Debra, was married to a police officer somewhere in New Jersey.
Over six months ago, he began making what amounted to over 150 phone calls to various police stations to find a man he wasn’t even sure he had the right name of.
“I told them it might be Heller, or it might rhyme with Heller,” he said. “I was getting a little nervous they were going to show up at my door and ask me why I’m so interested in this man.”
He finally got an Officer Don Heller on the phone from the West New York Police Department – just one town away.
When he got Officer Heller on the phone, he wasn’t sure how to ask the question.
Morrissey said, “I don’t know if you’re going to believe this, but I might be your brother-in-law.”
Making the connection
Heller was Debra’s husband. They were living in Fair Haven, Monmouth County. The news Heller relayed to his wife came as a shock.
“I always thought I would close my eyes [for the last time] not knowing them.” – Debra Heller
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She said she had always told her three children – D.J., Deanna, and Derek – about her eight brothers and sisters. (She had been notified through a distant relative about her brother Jimmy’s untimely death.) “I knew it was part of my life,” she said. “But I always thought I would close my eyes [for the last time] not knowing them.”
It took her three months to call her new-found brother, then another three months talking over the phone to be comfortable enough for a face-to-face meeting.
“It took a while to digest everything in my head,” she said last week. “But by talking on the phone, getting to know him, it really made for a perfect day [when we finally met].”
Meeting in Hoboken
“We walked, we talked, we laughed,” she said of their meeting in Hoboken two weeks ago. “At least a dozen different people came up to ask if I was the sister. Even the girl who does his hair came over.”
She said she recognized Tommy as soon as she saw him. “He looked like my natural father,” she said, referring to her biological father, as opposed to the maternal uncle who raised her and whom she called “Poppie.”
Two of her children came to Hoboken that night and left calling Morrissey “Uncle Tommy.”
Morrissey said after his father and brother died of cancer, he always wondered whether his sisters may have suffered the same fate.
“I was talking to this woman on the street who had a similar situation,” he said. “She had heard the story and started crying because her family member had died [before reuniting].”
On meeting his sisters, Morrissey expressed sincere gratitude.
“It’s great to see they have healthy children and good families,” he said.
Meanwhile, he said he can’t wait to thank Eli Manning.
Timothy J. Carroll may be reached at tcarroll@hudsonreporter.com.