The guys that worked with Dad were truly a band of brothers. He was quite ill but we decided to have a party for his 80th birthday on the 22nd. A bunch of his brothers came to see him with their wives. You see the bond was not just the fireman. Their families were all really tight too. They were always having picnics and fishing trips and events where they would get together and drink beer and eat potluck and let the kids run around and play.
That really hit home after 911. You see Dads guys were all long retired but their sons and grandsons were all on the job. And a lot of them died on 911. Dad was going to funerals all over the city and Long Island and Jersey. My wife knew a lot of them from when they were kids and we went to a few. It is still a scar that we carry.
All of the guys who came to the party had a story to tell. One of them told me a story of when he was a probie. They put him on the nozzle because they always threw them into the deep end of the pool. They were in this warehouse fire and went into this room. It was smoldering pretty good and the was about to walk forward. Dad stopped him and had him hose the whole room...especially this big sheet of cardboard that was on the floor. When he did and it washed away he saw that it covered a big hole in the floor. They had booby trapped it to catch and kill some fireman. Just the first of several booby traps in that factory. They did that all the time. The wanted to kill the fireman. He told me he could have died that day and he never did anything at a fire that Jim Kelly didn't approve from that day forward.
That was how he lived to a ripe old age and is still able to go to fireman picnics with his great grandson.
3 comments:
That seems to be always the way it's always been with the Micks, be they soldiers (especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries), gandy dancers or trainmen on the railroad, cops, or firemen.
It was something that stayed in the blood. The boys followed their fathers and uncles and grandfathers and even great-grandfathers. The girls married into other families of the same profession.
One of the hoity-toity feminine writers based in Gotham couldn't get over, after 9/11, how many Irish and Italian names there were among the dead, injured, and missing cops and firemen.
The story of america.
PS Troop, did you ever look at the Amber Reunion blog kept by TOP's old bud, Irene? The family's from Russia and Lithuania and Germany and it shows what the Old Country was like before the Czar fell and the Nazis came and then Stalin and, later, how they got here and worked their way up.
Like what you're writing.
America.
Louis L'Amour started a series of books about 3 families (one of them the Sacketts) through their generations in this country and how they got here. What you're writing and what Irene wrote before she died is the same thing.
Keep these vignettes someplace. They really shouldn't be lost.
Thanks Ed.
I am sure we all have family stories to tell.
I hope some of us will share them as well.
Good times, thanks for taking us back.
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