Veteran Says He Lived At 'The Vet' For 2 Years, Was He Good Luck?

PHILADELPHIA — It's where no visiting player wanted to deal with the field or the fans, where Michael Irvin's career-ending injury was infamously applauded and, on a more positive note, where Tug McGraw recorded the final out of the 1980 World Series to give Philadelphia its first baseball title in 50 years.

The legends of Veterans Stadium, remembered by sports fans as "The Vet," keep coming in nearly 17 years after its demolition.

Now, an actual veteran says the stadium was his home for two years from 1979-1981, a brief era that was marked with unprecedented success from the teams that officially called The Vet home.

Tom Garvey, a Vietnam veteran, says he had a "secret apartment" inside the South Philadelphia stadium that was home to the Philadelphia Phillies from 1971-2003 and Philadelphia Eagles from 1971-2002. He makes the claim in "The Secret Apartment: Vet Stadium, A Surreal Memoir," a book published in December.

"If you had an opportunity to live in a major sports stadium of a team you grew up loving, what would you have done?," Garvey asks perspective readers on the book's Amazon page. "In my case: I could, so I did."

Garvey says in the book that he lived in an empty Veterans Stadium concession stand that he secretly turned into his apartment, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. It was his own “off-the-wall South Philly version of the Phantom of the Opera,” the now 78-year-old Ambler resident told the newspaper.

"I was like a kid with a Willy Wonka golden ticket,” he said in the report.

But, given the years Garvey claims he lived at The Vet, was he actually the golden ticket for the Phillies and Eagles?

The Phillies made the Major League Baseball playoffs in the 1980 and 1981 seasons, winning the franchise's first championship on the home turf in 1980. They had a winning record all three years in which Garvey claims he lived there.

The Eagles were playoff-bound every year from 1979-1981, reaching their first ever Super Bowl following the 1980 season. After 1981, when Garvey says he moved out, the team would wait another seven seasons for a return to the playoffs.

During Garvey's years at The Vet, the stadium hosted not only McGraw's World Series clincher but the 1980 NFC Championship Game when the Eagles beat the arch rival Dallas Cowboys to advance to Super Bowl XV.

Garvey's book delves into the hits he would take in an empty Phillies dugout, "not the ones that require a baseball bat," as The Inquirer put it, and his interactions with Philadelphia sports legends among other topics.

Garvey served in the U.S. Army Special Forces in the Vietnam War, returning in 1969. He got a key to the stadium because his uncles had a contract to run the concession and novelty stands at the stadium, according to The Inquirer.

Three people corroborated Garvey's story on the secret apartment, The Inquirer reported, naming all three. Veterans Stadium was demolished in 2004, so no physical proof can ever be found. The parking lot for the Phillies' Citizens Bank Park is what now stands on the spot of the old Vet.

Note: A previous version of this story stated Santa Claus was booed and pelted with snowballs at The Vet. He was not. That was at Franklin Field during a game in December 1968.