New book chronicles building the Sandy Ground Project
n BY MITCHELL KRUGEL
When Bill Lavin responds to near-daily requests to
tell stories about the Sandy Ground Project and the work
of the Where Angels Play Foundation that built 26 playgrounds to honor the victims of the 2012 Newtown, Massachusetts school shooting, the retired FMBA President
and long-time cohort of the NJ State PBA, can choose
from many illustrious accounts. And all of them are as
emotional as what transpired on March 1, 2013.
The Sandy Ground Project’s Army of Angels that include many PBA members from Jersey Shore locals, had
gathered at dawn in Sea Bright to begin building the first
playground/tribute to Anne Marie Murphy, one of the six
teachers lost on that Dec. 14 day at Sandy Hook Elementary School. With a large crowd gathered at sunrise on a day the felt
every bit like winter, 20 children and six teachers representing the
victims lined up at a patch of sand where the playground would be
built, each holding a bucket showing a name of one of the victims.
One by one, they each scooped sand in their buckets, marched together to the ocean and emptied their buckets into the waves.
“Hundreds of onlookers cheered, or cried, or both. It suddenly
wasn’t so cold,” wrote Lavin in his new book, Where Angels Live,
Work and Play: The Story of the Sandy Ground Project that he co-authored with his son, Smitty. This masterful work, in which Bill did
the telling and Smitty did the writing, goes on and on and on with
stories of the 26 angels honored, the tribute to the army of firefighters, law enforcement officers, family members and people who got
caught up in the nearly three-year journey and a much-needed
reminder for first responders that is captured by the inspirational
quotation starting the book: “If you threw your problems in the pile
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with everyone else’s, you would fight to get yours back.”
“That quote from my mother that she gave to me as
a 10-year-old reminds us all