What’s in a gun? If you’re Bill O’Grady from Midtown South, it’s a chance to reconnect with a grandfather who was wearing NYPD blue before there was a first Yankee Stadium, let alone a refurbished Yankee Stadium or a Yankee Stadium II. It’s also a symbol of what persistence can reap if you have a little luck and the right help from the PBA. As Sgt. O’Grady tells it, he was initially drawn to the Colt .38 after an aunt gave him a mounted nightstick and other objects used by his grandfather, Patrolman John J. Dwyer (shield #1406), on the job for 31 years between 1920 and 1951. Though other items even included Dwyer’s memo books, they did not include the gun he used at Brooklyn South’s 78 Pct. and then for some 20 years doing mounted patrol.

“All I knew was that he had sold the gun back to somebody in the department in the 1970s because he didn’t feel he could keep it secure at home in his retirement,” O’Grady says, explaining what would turn out to be a 10-year quest. “He wanted the gun to go back where it belonged. But he never told anybody who he gave it to, at least that they remembered. The whole thing began nagging at me, especially since everyone seemed to agree that the gun was back in the department. I kept telling myself I was only one phone call away from tracking it down.”

Since O’Grady began his hunt in the late 1990s, he has usually found himself dealing with librarians, range officials and other police archivists who reminded him of the drawbacks of computerization — as in, if it’s not on a screen, it’s not to be seen. Without even a pistol license application to go on, he was tempted more than once to question his own optimism about eventually getting his hands on the elusive firearm. The break came somewhat grimly, when O’Grady’s aunt had a fatal stroke and he was left to go through her papers. In the middle of her other possessions was the pistol license application with the revolver’s serial number on it. As it turned out, Dwyer had brought his weapon around to the 72 Pct. on his 80th birthday, believing that was as good a time as any to remove it from his home. The patrolman who bought it for $50 then immediately turned it over to his partner, Stephen J. DeMuro, for registration. As far as anyone knew, DeMuro still had the gun.

With DeMuro also off in retirement for more than 20 years, O’Grady still had some searching to do, but that was greatly alleviated when PBA Lower Manhattan & Richmond Trustee George Winkler turned out to have once worked with DeMuro’s son. Before he knew it, O’Grady was talking to the younger DeMuro on Staten Island and looking at the gun he had been hunting for a decade. “There was a lot to be choked up about that day,” he says. “First of all, there was DeMuro’s refusal to take any money for it. He kept saying it was going back where it belonged. As long as I did all the paperwork covering transfer of ownership, it was mine. But more than that, of course, was that I was holding something that belonged to my grandfather. He was the one who inspired me to be a cop. If that gun represents anything, it’s a continuity of people doing a job they believe in.”