The Three-of-a-Kind Whalens

When the identical Whalen triplets were born in the Bronx on Oct. 22, 1961, it created quite a local stir, bringing to mind the old Bronx saying, "Three of a kind?blow your mind." Back in those pre-in-vitro times twin births were a rarity, triplets virtually unheard of?so unheard of that Mr. and Mrs. Whalen thought they were just having twins. The doctors went by the heartbeats they could pick up with a stethoscope, and only caught two on the prenatal visits. The doctors also had no idea of the sex of the babies. Mrs. Whalen already had a four-year-old son, Richard, and was hoping for a pair of girls.

"We've been told this story a lot," Charlie Whalen said as he laughed over the family memory. "When the doctor told my mother that she had given birth to triplet boys she was like, 'You mean twin girls?' The doctor had to tell her over and over that not only were we all boys, but we were triplets. And we were identical. It was all a surprise to my parents."

Robert is the only married Whalen triplet, and the father of two girls. "I will tell you," he says, "that my mother is very pleased that there are now two girls in the family. Very pleased."

I'd known the Whalen triplets as youngsters, back when they started first grade in 1967. I met with them two Sundays ago at the Sleepy Hollow Bicycle and Sports Center, which they've owned since 1990. Now 40, they still look alike, but with a little patience you can tell them apart. I had to keep them in alphabetical order?Charlie, John, Robert?as they were talking, and since each one jumps in on the other during conversations, any quote attributed to one could be from another. They laughed when I told them how I remembered them as button-cute kids walking in a line like little ducks while other school kids stared at them in amazement.

"That's funny, I don't remember walking in a line but?" Charlie said.

"?it was a Catholic grammar school, everyone walked in a line," Robert finished the sentence.

A customer came in and Robert helped fix the man's broken spoke. John grabbed an energy bar from the counter and Charlie looked out on the darkening sky. I sat and thought about the natural phenomenon of triplets. Since 1978, when in-vitro methods began, triplet births have tripled, but identical triplets are still rare. The odds of conceiving identical triplets are about 400,000-to-1. They are formed when one fertilized egg splits into three embryos?identical triplets are natural clones of one another. So it's no wonder they stayed as close in life as they were in the womb. In the Bronx, if you looked around for one you found all three.

The boys spent their first 25 years living in a two-bedroom apartment on Creston Ave. off of 196th St. They went to Our Lady of Refuge grammar school, then on to Cardinal Hayes high. They attended Manhattan College together and all received engineering degrees. After they graduated their parents moved to Bronxville, but the boys stayed behind in their Bronx apartment. That ended in 1986 when John was parking his car on Creston Ave. and someone from a nearby building shot him in the head with a pellet gun.

"That did it for me. I never spent another night in the Bronx after that. The pellet is still in there. When I go for an MRI it goes off the charts."

Before they left the Bronx the Whalens picked up a love of bicycle riding.

"Bike riding to us was a means to escape the Bronx," said Charlie. "Every weekend we would be up riding on all the small roads in Westchester County." It was on one of those trips, in 1978, that they found the bike shop they'd later own. The boys worked part-time at the shop in college, getting a crash course on how to fix bikes. As a rule the Whalens are a handy bunch. Their father?he passed away two years ago?made his living in the Bronx as a television repairman.

The triplets joined a bike team out of the Sleepy Hollow bike store and started to race nationally?which they still do. They laugh at how during races they not only look alike but also wear matching uniforms.

"It was like one guy kept chasing and passing [the other competitors] in the race," says John. "They never knew which one of us was which. We look damn similar and we have the same size and shape."

"Riding together as triplets there is no ego, there is no competition between us," adds Robert. "If I don't do as good, at least my brother won. You don't always get that on a team. Plus we know each other so well we use each other strategically."

I asked the Whalens if they could name any differences between them. They just shook their heads. They're each about 5-foot-11 and 165 pounds, and extremely fit from years of bike riding. I asked them who would win if they had a fight. They didn't bite.

"We're all pretty much the same so it would be even, I guess," said Charlie. "We really don't fight. Never have?"

"I think the last time we might have had a fight was in high school, but no one won," says John.

Then Charlie said, "I know a difference. I'm the best at swimming."

John counters, "He's the only one who swims."

Their similarities are endless. They all like the same football team?the Green Bay Packers. "Because you know that Vince Lombardi got married at our church in the Bronx." They all root for the Yankees. They all dig Mac. They listen to the same music. They're all health-conscious. They all became engineers. They even like the same kind of women.

"We all like fit and athletic women?given how active we are they would have to be," said Charlie.

The Whalens all live in and around Sleepy Hollow. Their only other sibling, Richard, lives 100 miles away, out in East Hampton. I asked the boys how they thought Richard liked being the older brother to them. Did he feel left out?

"Richard would probably have some interesting things to say about us, but we have always included him. He bikes and hikes and probably knows more about the history of Eastern Long Island than anyone," Charlie said.

I asked what they did with their engineering degrees from Manhattan. Charlie told me that in 1985 he got hired as an engineer out at Grumman.

"They were ramping up the Defense Dept. back then with Star Wars and new airplanes, and Grumman was busy. My boss asked me if I knew of any other engineers and I said yes, I had two brothers."

The triplets were together again. John Whalen was the first to leave Grumman, for an engineering job at Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford, CT. In due course Robert and Charlie soon followed him there. But at Sikorsky the triplet reign would end.

"I got bored with engineering and went for my master's at Pratt. Now I have my own graphic arts firm, called Whalen Cubed." Charlie showed me some trail and bike maps he produced.

"I looked around at the people I was working with and said, 'Do I want to be them when I'm 65?'" said John. He left his job to take a master's in architecture.

Says Robert, "I stayed because I was doing the hardware end and found it?still do?interesting."

Now the only job they have in common is the bike store. They have a manager to run things during the day, but at nights and on most weekends at least one Whalen is in the store.

It was getting late and the store would soon be closed. I thought about how tight these men are?sit with them long enough and you feel the natural bond of brotherhood they have. So I asked the triplets if they ever experience any of the spooky multiple-birth phenomena, like knowing when another is hurt no matter how far apart they are.

Charlie said, "The closet thing to that is that we think and speak so much alike that we know what's on the other one's mind. I know what my brothers are going to say before they even speak."

They ever pulled any triplet pranks, like one trying to pass himself off as his brother?

"In grammar school once we switched classes, but we never got into that too much," Robert said. "We did it just to see if we could get away with it, and we did. As a triplet you don't realize how much you look like your brothers."

Charlie: "Well, I was just at John's school and all of his classmates were looking at me like why wasn't I saying hello to them. They finally got that I was John's brother, but I was standing next to the professor, talking to him, and he was reacting to me like I was John."

John: "Yeah, then I got next to the professor and started talking. He kept looking back and forth at us with his eyes popping."

I wondered if they'd received any notoriety in recent years. They told me about being on the Montel Williams show a few years back with three other sets of identical triplets.

"Yeah, there were the black triplet boys from Louisiana, and then there were two sets of triplet girls," said Charlie. "One of the sets of triplet girls wound up posing for Playboy. The strange thing was that the black triplets had the same experience as us. They all got along and they all knew and liked each other. The girl triplets didn't get along as well. They seemed to compete with each other more."

When the Whalens got ready to leave I noticed that they weren't big on saying goodbye to one another. I guess they didn't have to. If anything, it will always be "See you later."

[sullivan@nypress.com](mailto:sullivan@nypress.com)