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Shortly before 7 p.m. Sunday, doctors treating Edward McGee Jr. at Sisters of Charity Medical Center, St. Vincent's Campus, tested the 28-year-old Elm Park man for brain activity and found none. 

McGee had been in the same condition since he had been rushed to the hospital from the Amateur Softball Association ball field in Travis Friday night. Machines had forced air into his lungs and pumped blood through his motionless body since that time. 

McGee had been playing right field and running for a fly ball when he crashed into another player during a game at the field. The collision caused a cerebral aneurysm to rupture, which in turn caused fatal brain damage. 

Edward McGee Jr.

By Sunday night, a crucial moment had come. If any of the hearty, athletic young man's organs were to be used to save someone else's life, they had to be recovered immediately, packed for shipment and taken to hospitals where desperately ill people were waiting. 

But before the grim doctors even broached the subject with McGee's already grieving family, his parents spoke up and told them they had already made the decision. Take them. 

His father, Edward McGee Sr., said he had slowly come to the conclusion over the past several days. Doctors and social workers had dropped hints. But mostly he thought about what his son would do. 

"He was always helping people," he said. "He'd come home dead tired from work, and someone would call and he'd be out the door." 

Over the next six hours, a team of specialists from the New York Organ Donor Network worked on McGee, taking his heart, liver, pancreas and kidneys and sending them for implantation into bodies where there was still hope of life. 

The elder McGee yesterday said everyone kept telling him that his son would live on in the lives that his organs had saved. Noting that his son was an avid sports fan, McGee said, "There are five people out there who will be tossing a ball around. That's the way I look at it." 

Jeralyn Lanere, a spokeswoman with the organ donor network, said the heart, liver, pancreas and a kidney had all gone into patients in the metropolitan area. The remaining kidney was used in a patient in another part of the country, although she did not know where. 

As McGee spoke with the Advance yesterday, he said his thoughts were focused on the past three days. He had been impressed by the hospital which had provided a rotating crew of social workers to help them come to grips with what had happened. 

"They gave us access. They gave his friends access," he said. 

And during that time, McGee and his wife, Lillian, watched the junior McGee's companions come and stand watch over the friend they knew as Spider. 

"Around the house, he was always quiet Eddy," Mrs. McGee said. "But listening to them, we found out he was the life of the party. Everyone loved him." 

McGee said he learned from listening to friends all the secrets that his son had kept from them, none of them shameful. 

"He never said anything to us (his parents), but he was always there to help out a friend, whether it was to help them fix a car or just listen to them talk about a personal problem," he said. 

That devotion was seen in interviews with the pals he had made on the softball team sponsored by Buddy's Wonder Bar, a Port Richmond tavern. 

On Saturday a tearful friend, Robert Anger, talked about Edward McGee Jr.'s love of sports. He not only played softball for the tavern-sponsored team but other sports as well. 

He was a lifelong Elm Park resident. 

McGee was a certified automobile technician at the DeFeo Auto Mall in Jersey City for the past four years. Previously, he had worked at three other garages on Staten Island. 

A graduate of Port Richmond High School, he had been captain of the track team. 

Besides his parents, he is survived by a brother, Dennis, a first lieutenant in the Army; four sisters, Maureen F. Vandusky, Lillian K. Langiulli and Marie and Nancy P. McGee; and his paternal grandmother, Mareli McGee. 

The funeral will be Thursday from the Meislohn-Silvie Funeral Home, Port Richmond, with a mass at 10:30 a.m. in St. Michael's R.C. Church, Port Richmond.