July 21, 2010
Bill McCabe, Sanitation’s Perfect Man, Is Dead at 90
By DENNIS HEVESI
He wasn’t more powerful than a locomotive or able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. But when 19-year-old Bill McCabe passed what later became known as the “Superman test” to become a New York City sanitation worker 70 years ago — with a perfect score of 100 — newspapers jumped on the story. The headline in The New York Times on June 13, 1940, said, “Civil Service Finds the ‘Perfect Man.’ ” And The World-Telegram, in a play on Mr. McCabe’s boyhood in Harlem, said, “Great Outdoors of East 147th Street Produces the Perfect Specimen.”
Mr. McCabe, who got the sanitation job but soon moved on to become a police officer and later a firefighter, died Saturday at his home in Bethpage, N.Y., his son Kevin said. He was 90.
Sanitation-man, then a cop and then a firefighter? Quite a string of jobs.
He was one of 68,000 men hoping, in those tough economic times, to become what was then called a street cleaner, at $35 a week. Calling his score “a near-Olympic record,” The Times said that “cautious examiners, who are seeking to weed out as many men as possible in selecting men for the 2,000 jobs available, seemed astounded at McCabe’s perfect performance.”
To nail that 100, Mr. McCabe lifted an 80-pound dumbbell in each hand and hoisted a 120-pound trash can to a 4-foot-6-inch ledge. He lay on his back and lifted a 60-pound barbell placed behind his head. He broad-jumped 8 feet 6 inches after a 7-yard run, dashed an added 10 yards and jumped a 3-foot hurdle. Continuing a 10-yard run over and around obstacles, he ran another 10 yards on a straightaway and climbed an 8-foot fence. Beyond the fence, he vaulted 4 feet 6 inches and then ran 5 yards to the finish line. The time for the entire run was 10.8 seconds. After a 15-minute rest, he ran 120 yards with a 50-pound dumbbell in each hand in 25 seconds.
“I’m not sure Charles Atlas would pass that test,” Vito A. Turso, a Sanitation Department spokesman, said on Monday, adding that by the time it was modified in the early 1970s it was known as the “Superman test.” No records still exist, he said, to determine whether anyone else ever achieved a perfect score. “We still have a very strenuous test, but it is not like the one Mr. McCabe took,” Mr. Turso said. These days, applicants race the clock, pick up weighted bags and place them into bins “as high as the truck hoppers,” he said, “but there is no more scaling walls and racing with dumbbells.”
Mr. McCabe’s run as a sanitation worker — lifting garbage off barges into landfills — was short. Within a year he was a police officer, and eight months later — like four other family members — a firefighter. He retired from the department in 1962 and became an airline cargo loader. But William Joseph McCabe was no Goliath. Born in the Bronx on March 31, 1920 (the family later moved to Harlem), he was the youngest of four children of William and Nora McCabe. His father was a construction worker.
“Dad was 5-8 and weighed like 147 pounds,” Kevin McCabe said. “He went to the Y to lift weights. His father trained him in lifting technique.”
Besides his son Kevin, Mr. McCabe is survived by his wife of 64 years, the former Margaret McSweeney; two other sons, Thomas and William; two daughters, Peggy Hobi and Eileene Bordt; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. McCabe stayed in shape. “He played semipro baseball, tennis and golf,” Kevin McCabe said, “and racquetball twice a week until he was 82.”
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