By Courtney Dentch
Calvin Gooding never forgot his friends and neighbors in the Springfield Gardens community where he grew up.
Now, his friends, family and neighbors will remember him each time they pass the street named in his honor last weekend.
Gooding, a partner with financial services group Cantor Fitzgerald, died in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. He was memorialized Saturday with a ceremony renaming Sloan Street in Springfield Gardens Calvin Gooding Jr. Place.
About 200 people, including gubernatorial candidate H. Carl McCall and area politicians, braved the dreary weather Saturday afternoon to celebrate Gooding, 38.
“It was a wonderful, wonderful day,” said his mother, Marjorie Gooding. “I know he had to be smiling down at all the well-wishers. The whole thing was commemorating his life and what he meant to the community.”
The sign was initially installed upside-down, but some volunteers from the crowd scrambled up a ladder and fixed the mistake. The family laughed it off, saying it may have been one last joke from the good-natured man, said his father Calvin Gooding Sr.
“We found it quite humorous,” he said of the mishap. “Everything was so heavy, we figured he was having one last laugh.”
The street renaming was approved by the City Council in August as part of a group of 71 renamings dedicated to civilians and emergency personnel lost in the terrorist attacks.
Calvin Gooding Jr. Place is located off of Springfield Boulevard, between Eastgate Plaza and 137th Avenue, and is just a block away from his parents’ Belknap Street home.
The street also borders Montbellier Park, where Gooding organized a basketball camp every August to reunite former Springfield Gardens residents and award a local college student a $1,500 scholarship, mostly from his own pocket, Marjorie Gooding said.
“That was one of the things that endears him so much to this community,” she said. “He was dedicated to what was right.”
Gooding was also a dedicated family man, and he lived in Riverdale with his wife, who was eight months pregnant with their second child when he was killed. The family celebrated his new daughter’s first birthday Sunday, Marjorie Gooding said.
“He was big on the children and the family,” she said. “Going to work, that was his crime that day. He went to work to take care of his family.”
Gooding began working on the international desk in the early 1990s, monitoring the stock exchanges in Europe. At the time of his death, he was a partner with the firm and was in charge of the international desk.
But despite his thriving career on Wall Street, Gooding always made sure he got back to his old neighborhood to check on friends and say hello, his mother said. His parents and his wife plan to preserve that legacy by continuing with his annual basketball camp events, Marjorie Gooding said. The scholarship he always awarded will now bear his name, she said.
A second scholarship has also been established in his name at his alma mater, Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Marjorie Gooding said.
Marjorie Gooding hopes the scholarships, as well as the newly renamed street, will help her son’s memory and spirit live on, she said.
“We’re so honored,” she said. “Not only will we never forget, but it’s also the community. Now each time they look up and pass that spot they’ll remember him.”
Reach reporter Courtney Dentch by e-mail at TimesLedger@aol.com, or by phone at 229-0300, Ext. 138.
