Big C ... as in courage: A veteran cop faces his toughest foe

BUCKY'S THE only one who could ever put Officer James Henninger in a box.

At 66, Henninger, a veteran Philly cop, has rescued a woman from a burning car, delivered babies, been in shoot-outs, paved sidewalks, dressed in drag and witnessed a pigeon being stolen from his arms, all while on the job.

Henninger has two metal knees, a metal hip and mostly false teeth. His tales might seem tall, but unlike his teeth, they're real. He has more than 21 commendations to prove them true. And, with 41 years on the force, he's the city's fourth-longest-serving cop.

Last month, he was the third officer ever to be given the department's Medal of Excellence, a commendation for "service over a continuous period of time that exceeds the expectations of citizen and police officials."

He's an officer who defies definition, a man who can't be put in a box by anybody, except Bucky.

Bucky is his funeral director.

The box will hold his ashes.

"I have it already mapped out, the cremation and all that," Henninger said of Burton Decker, of Decker Funeral Home, in Warminster. "I'm joking with Bucky and he says, 'I really didn't want to do this, but you're making me laugh,' And I said to him, 'Well, enjoy it, because the next time you see me I won't be talking.' "

In December, Henninger was diagnosed with stage-4 prostate cancer. He was given six months to two years to live, but he's still reporting to work at the 9th District, in Center City.

"Oh, yeah, I could run my time out at home," he said, "but it's like a second family here."

Henninger's former captain, Dennis Wilson, now an inspector at the Southwest Division, said that Henninger was never one to shy away from work.

"I'd always say, 'Let's go,' and he'd grab his hat, his nightstick and he was up for anything," Wilson said.

But last month, Henninger took dedication to another level when he finished radiation treatment after getting it on his lunch hour for 44 days straight. Those treatments mean that he may have more time.

"I sold a lot of my guns, a lot of my stuff, to get more money for the wife," Henninger said. "It's a shame. I got rid of some good stuff; now it looks like I might be alive a little longer than two years."

He's always been positive, his wife, Barbara, said, even at times when stronger, negative feelings would cripple other people.

"When he goes to the doctor, he always ends up making the doctor laugh, even now," she said. "I have to tell him, 'Let the doctor talk with you.' "

The cancer diagnosis isn't the first time that Henninger's faced death. In first grade, while growing up in North Philly, a priest read him his last rites when he had double pneumonia. In third grade, he was hit with nephritis, nearly causing kidney failure.

For the next year, he was stuck in his house, sitting at a chair by the window, watching the world he was too sick to live in pass by. His father gave him two books that made him believe that there was so much more out there - "John Carter of Mars" and "Tarzan."

"It was those books I read that got me through, when I was sitting there and couldn't go out of the house," he said. "It was like there's another part of life out there that's exciting, you've just got to go out and live it."

At 17, Henninger joined the Navy - his first of two stints in the military, including being called up at 46 from the Marine Reserves in 1990. He wanted to live an adventurous life like he'd read about in those books.

He traveled the world with the Navy for four years and was even washed overboard once off the coast of Spain. But the specter of drowning wasn't as dangerous as one chore on the ship - mixing asbestos with water and plastering it to hot pipes, he said.

Even before the Navy, he had decided to be a cop. But when he got out, his new wife and his mother thought that it was too dangerous and convinced him to take what they thought was a safer job - barreling Agent Orange into 55 gallons drums at Rohm & Haas, he said.

"I was soaked in the stuff," he said of the toxic defoliant used in Vietnam to clear rural forest land. "I was the only one in the building; that's how powerful that stuff is."

Henninger believes that it was a combination of working with asbestos in the Navy and Agent Orange at Rohm & Haas that led to his cancer, but he's not worried about filing any lawsuits.

"I'd probably win some kind of case in three years, but I'll be dead," he said.

Henninger took a 10-cent pay cut when he left Rohm & Haas to become a cop at $2.95 hour in June 1970.

"I just knew that he wanted to do it after a while, and I wouldn't stand in his way," Barbara Henninger said. "And he loves that job. He was made for it."

Henninger's first assignment was at the 14th District, in Germantown, and on his first day he was charged with guarding district headquarters from the Black Panthers, who were fortifying a nearby storefront to prepare for a fight with the cops, he said.

"They had threatened to ride by and throw grenades, so they put me outside the district," he said. "In other words, it was like, 'If they're going to do anything, they'll get him first.' Thank God it was quiet."

It would be one of the few quiet nights of Henninger's career. After just 18 months at the 14th, Henninger transferred to the chaotic 25th District, in North Philadelphia, where he worked for the next 28 years - busting drug dealers, breaking up fights, protecting the peace.

"When you leave at night, you can say, 'Thank God I'm out of here,' but there are still people living down there that are not criminals," he said. "They have to send their kids to school. They have to live with the shootings. So you try to clean it up as best you can."

In fact, it's helping the good people that Henninger remembers best - saving a child with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and delivering two babies, one on Darien Street, the other on Westmoreland.

He learned brickwork, cement work and other trades just by observing and helping people while on patrol, he said. Once, he responded to a complaint of a woman whose newly cemented sidewalk had been trashed by kids. Henninger used a bucket of water and sponge to smooth the still-wet cement to hide the vandalism.

"She told me I did a better job than the guy who put the cement in," he said. "She wrote a letter to the commissioner telling him so, and he said, 'What are they doing a cement job when they're supposed to be patrolling?!'

"Hey, at least the woman was happy," Henninger said.

At one point Henninger was assigned to a plainclothes burglary detail and to the famous "Granny Squad," an undercover unit in which officers dressed as elderly men and women to ensnare would-be robbers.

While in granny mode one night, he dressed up as a homeless person and picked up a pigeon to appear crazy, he said. He was walking with the bird on Broad Street, petting it, when a man ran up and stole the bird.

"I was horrified. You can't even hold a pigeon in Philadelphia!" he said. "I was going to go after him but then I figured, how are you going to lock him up for stealing a pigeon when, really, it's wildlife?"

Of course, it wasn't all "Wild Kingdom" and cement work. He estimates that injuries on the job have landed him in hospitals more than a dozen times.

His two metal knees and metal hip are from being run over by a trolley - he let the "rookie" drive - and he lost teeth fighting with criminals.

He's now in the 9th District, in Center City, dealing mostly with code violations and graffiti. He still goes out on calls when he can, racking up awards for bravery, heroism. He caught an armed bank robber last year and pulled a woman from a burning car at Eakins Oval in 2009.

He keeps most of his awards in a crumpled paper grocery bag.

"I should have had a scrapbook, but I had no idea it was going to go like this," said his wife. "I'd like to frame them all, but where would I put them?"

"He's very respected," said Wilson, Henninger's former captain. "I don't know anyone that don't like him. And, I think it's that way with everyone he works with."

And it'll be that way until his cancer forces him to stop coming to work.

When his time does come, Henninger said, he doesn't "want no funeral."

He wants to be cremated and he wants the box of his ashes that Bucky will hand to his wife to be buried in Washington Crossing National Cemetery, in Newtown, Bucks County.

Or he wants her to buy a $10 cookie jar from Kmart, and throw his ashes in there.

"This way, she could put it on the windowsill, and I could look out at the neighborhood," he said.

Either way, Henninger will go out knowing that he lived a life he could have only imagined when he was in third grade.

"I had a very violent and exciting life, to say the least," he said. "And it was those books I read that made me realize you've just got to live it."