That saying was on a plague that his fellow fireman presented to Dad on his retirement. I am kinda cheating by posting clips from Rescue Me. He hated that show. Pretty much wouldn't watch any fireman shows or movies. Not Chicago Fire. Not Backdraft. Certainly not Rescue Me even though he did say they got the basic vibe of the Firehouse sort of right.
He never wanted to watch them because he called them all reruns.
You see Dad was just like the lead of that show played by Dennis Leary. The tough rebellious ball busting Irish guy who wasn't an officer or officially in charge. He was just the guy that everyone followed.
Firehouse 283 did more runs in one month during the 1960's than all of the runs in the City of Chicago did for that year.
When his firehouse friends came over Captain Joe Bono who was a probie in 283 and learned his trade under Jim Kelly said....."I never worried about going into a fire if I was with Jim Kelly. I know I would be safe."
The other fireman that were there all nodded their heads. Even their lieutenant who was nominally in charge. The all had stories of things that Dad taught them.
Dad always said he could never judge anyone in the face of fire. He said you never knew how you would react when the Devil was burning your ass and you thought you were going to die. He often told a story about a fire in Brownsville in 1968. It was a four story tenament and they pulled up and it was burning fiercely. There was a family screaming and waving on the top floor. They set up the ladder and Dad and a Probie went up. There was a father and two kids. A boy and a girl eight and five. The plan was simple. The Probie would grab the two kids and after he was down the ladder the father and Dad could go down safely. Well as soon as the ladder was up the father just climbed down as fast as he could. Leaving his children behind. There was a struggle as he bypassed them going up and it was touch and go. When Dad got to the top the little boy said something that Dad always carried with him. He said "Take my sister first."
Dad always liked to tell that story. And he would add that you should never judge.. Unless you were in that position.
That kid started to come by the firehouse. He eventually went on the job. He came to the wake. In the snow and the bitter cold. He told me the story from his perspective.
I just remember what Dad always said. "You can never judge."
Lead. Follow. Or get out of the way.
7 comments:
The tough rebellious ball busting Irish guy who wasn't an officer or officially in charge. He was just the guy that everyone followed.
Sounds like The Blonde, except she isn't Irish.
Or a guy.
You learn a lot at funerals. People I didn't even know came up to tell me nice stories about my parents.
Is it safe to say that little boy didn't inherit or learn his courage from his father? Great story for sure.
Helluva story.
He's right, you never know what you're going to do in the face of any danger, but I wonder about the relationship that dad had with his family after the danger passed.
In spite of calling myself "Dad" I've never had kids and I've never stood at the top of a burning building waiting to be rescued so, following the lead of Jim Kelly, I'm not judging the father either.
The son eventually forgave his father.
He had seen too many things on the job.
Plus I think Dad influenced him.
Dad had to forgive his own parents for a lot of bad stuff.
You can't judge.
To me the most amazing thing is a little kid who watches firemen and thinks that one day he'll be one of them. The reason I say that is that I can still remember the sense of total awe when they would come to fight a fire near the building I grew up in at 246 Jamaica Avenue. First of all they were all huge with these enormous galoshes and those heraldic hats and giant rain-slick coats and then they were lugging around these huge hoses which were sprawled all over the sidewalks. It was all incomparably bigger and more dramatic than anything in my world and they seemed like another species altogether from me or even the adults I knew. It was simply unimaginable that their world was accessible to me. It was beyond my imagination. Fortunately, for future fire control, that wasn't the case for quite a few other kids.
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