American Notes BOSTON

Manuel Rose, a 68-year-old retiree with an artificial leg, was cheerfully watching a baseball game on television in his second-floor South Boston apartment when a man with a familiar face burst through the door. "What the hell are you doing here?" asked Rose as Ray Flynn, the mayor of Boston, picked him up and hauled him out to the street. What was going on? Hizzoner, it seems, was playing basketball nearby when he spotted flames emerging from Rose's home and rushed to the rescue.

That sort of mayoral derring-do has become routine for Flynn, an athletic 48. Since he was elected in 1983, he has rescued a woman from an office fire, been first on the scene of an early-morning plane crash, and plucked a man from a wrecked car near city hall. Though critics carp that Flynn's heroics amount to headline grabbing as he prepares for a second-term bid this November, the mayor vows that he will continue helping citizens in need. Says he: "I'll do it again whenever a situation arises, and never mind the fallout."