FIFTEEN

Peter J. Ganci: Born to Fight Fires

On the sparkling Sunday of September 9, 2001, just two days before September 11, Peter J. Ganci, who was the Fire Department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, and his oldest friend, Dan Nickola, did what they often did on weekends. They went clamming not far from Ganci’s house in North Massapequa on Long Island Sound. The two men, who met forty-nine years earlier when they went to St. Kilian’s Elementary School in Farmingdale, got to talking about the things men in their late middle age talk about—their grown kids, their fathers, retirement, mortality—especially mortality. Ganci’s father had died of emphysema in 1989, and Pete, as his friends called him, remembered how terrible it was—his father’s unshaven face burned under his oxygen mask. Pete was a smoker too, a heavy one—pack after pack of Winston’s, Marlboro Lights, the occasional cigar—and though he’d tried to give it up many times, he had never succeeded for very long. Maybe that was what was on his mind when he turned to Nickola and repeated one of his favorite phrases:

“I’m gonna die right here, clamming and not collecting moss on the north side,” he said.

Ganci didn’t die clamming, but he didn’t collect any moss either. He died fighting a fire among the men he commanded, which is what had made him one of the most honored—and certainly one of the most decorated—firefighters in the history of the department—the highest-ranking officer in a department of eleven thousand men. And he died because he didn’t leave the scene of the most devastating fire in the city’s history. He told other men, including the city’s mayor, to clear out of the area, and, as chief of the department, he could easily have done the same thing. But he didn’t, and that was not a surprise to the fraternity of firefighters in whose company he spent his entire adult life. To them Ganci was the complete fireman; his bravery was laced with an almost reckless competitiveness, the desire that all fireman have to be able to say later, “I opened up the door first” or “I got to the fire first.” Or, to put this another way, he was known for his instinct to be in front in a fire, to embody the New York Fire Department’s sobriquet—the bravest.

“Firefighters, the good ones anyway, live to do a good job at the right places—that’s all you want to do,” said Angelo Catalano, a firefighter who served in the same company as Ganci when both of them were young. “And Pete hated guys who were skaters.”

Ganci was the kind of guy who seemed to fit into his life like a glove. He moved up but he never moved away. He lived all his life in the town, North Massapequa, New York, where he was born—in 1946. Aside from being a fireman, he was the part owner of a bar and restaurant called Potter’s Pub, which was the kind of local Irish hangout where everybody who comes in seems to know everybody else, and that is emblematic of Ganci himself, the man standing immovably inside his place. It’s not that his life was easy or that he didn’t have other choices, but that he felt naturally rooted, even though he did have his share of early hardship.

His mother died young; a brother, Michael, shot himself by accident; and a cousin was shot while managing a club and bar. Ganci went to St. Kilian’s, where he was in the boys’ choir, and then Farmingdale High School, and from there he worked his way up in life, getting no help from social or political connections. He was an eighteen-year-old driving a turquoise ’57 Chevy when he became a volunteer at the local Farmingdale fire station, where he remained a volunteer firefighter even as he rose through the ranks in the New York City Fire Department. When he was twenty, at a time when a lot of other young men like him were smoking marijuana and protesting the war in Vietnam, he became a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And when he got out of the service in 1968, he became a firefighter with Engine Company 92 in the Bronx.

He still saw some bad luck in those years, some family anguish. After he got out of the air force, he bought a house in Gilbertsville, in Upstate New York, where he invited his father, whose business making redwood bird feeders had gone bankrupt, to start anew by turning a barn on the property into a workshop. The day that the first batch of new bird feeders was to be picked up for distribution to stores in New York and New Jersey, it snowed so hard that the pickup was canceled. That night, a fire broke out and the barn burned down.

Still, Ganci had certain gifts and he was going to do well. “His biggest attribute was that he maintained his composure,” said Rick Kopitsch, another childhood friend. Ganci was naturally gregarious and naturally generous. Kopitsch remembers once casually mentioning to Pete that he needed to put up a partition in his living room at home, and, a few hours later, without telling him anything, Ganci turned up at his house and put up the wall. “I was careful saying things I needed to do in fear that he would do them before me,” Kopitsch said. He had a knack of making people feel comfortable, without being so chummy that, as his responsibilities grew, he lost his authority. His old firefighting buddies talk about how they called him “Pete” when their wives were around but when the boys were drinking alone they called him Chief. It was a sign of respect but also of a certain unspoken distance.

“Some officers who rise in the ranks have never paid their dues,” Catalano said. “You see guys running the show who really don’t understand and don’t belong. But Pete paid his dues.”

Ganci had a steady rise in the Fire Department. It was a rise that made him as much as any fireman in the city an emblem of the firefighter’s culture. “We like to go to fires because we are action-oriented people,” he said once. And although at the time he was talking of the need to learn how to prevent fires from happening as much as putting them out, he did love to go to fires. The fireman’s calling is to save people, whoever and however they can, and the chief’s duty is to save people while losing none of his own. Firemen run into burning buildings and up smoky staircases with air tanks and masks and fifty pounds of hose over their shoulders because that’s the honor and the glory. There is a code. You do everything you can to save people. You never leave another firefighter alone in a burning building. If you’re not willing to take the chances firefighters have to take, you should have gone into another profession. A newcomer has to fit in and prove himself, or he will find the rest of the company or squad putting him in for a transfer—to some company or squad where there aren’t very many fires. Pete was in this sense the fireman’s fireman. He backed you up if you were a tried member of the club; but he’d sign the transfer request if he thought you weren’t up to the job. He was the kind of chief who would never send men into places where he wouldn’t go himself.

“He had a knack for making you feel comfortable,” Catalano said. “He never got angry. No, wait, the only time he would get angry was if a young rookie didn’t show any respect for the job. You know, the know-it-all that has no experience. That would get you immediately transferred.”

Just two weeks before September 11, the Gancis and Kopitsches and two other couples went canoeing on the Nissequogue River at King’s Point on Long Island. After a day on the water, on the way to a restaurant at night, Kopitsch noticed that Ganci’s Fire Department uniform was in a plastic bag on the backseat, and there were so many medals for bravery on it that he quipped he would have to start pinning them on the back. A lot of those medals were for pulling people out of burning buildings.

A firefighter, Peter McCarthy, who served with Ganci at Ladder Company 124 in Brooklyn when Ganci was a young lieutenant, remembered a fire thirty years ago that illustrated Ganci’s stuff. It was a time in early 1972 when, for some reason, there were a lot of fires in New York, and a fireman could show up for duty in the morning expecting to be called to several fires, maybe even six or seven of them in a day.

“One night we got a call about a fire on the second story of a three-story building,” McCarthy said. “Pete tells me to go check the basement just in case. I go to the basement and everything was okay, so I came back up to the first floor and I hear yelling. I couldn’t tell who it was or what they were saying but it was yelling. So I got to the second floor and see that Ganci isn’t there. That’s when I knew the yelling was from Pete. He was already up on the third floor without any backup.”

Any fireman knows that the worse place to be is the third floor of a building where the fire is on the second floor. A fireman doesn’t want to get caught where the heat and fire are likely to rise.

“So I went up there and you couldn’t see one damn thing with all the smoke,” McCarthy said. “I hear Pete yelling and we were both on our hands and knees on the floor looking for each other and we eventually slammed our helmets right into each other. He said, ‘We better find a window,’ so it took us a while but we found one. You see, Pete was up there by himself in a situation where it normally calls for four guys. Nobody was hurt, but I think all we rescued was a dog.”

That was Ganci during his thirty-three years in the department, during which he went from ordinary firefighter, to lieutenant, to captain, to battalion chief, to deputy division chief, to deputy assistant chief in charge of fire investigations, to assistant chief of operations, to chief of the entire Fire Department, with an office at headquarters in Brooklyn. He was a man who always combined the love of the action with plain good sense, and a big part of his legacy was the stress he put on prevention, training, improved firefighting equipment, and technology. There were a lot of tough moments, but one that he remembered and talked about shows the kind of man he was. It was at a fire in 1979, also when Ganci was at Ladder Company 124.

“One of my people was trapped, with fire coming out over his head,” Ganci told a reporter for an in-house fireman’s newsletter. “I thought for sure he would come out the window. But the aerial ladder got to him in the nick of time. It may not sound that dramatic, but I’ll never forget it. My heart still races when I think of it and it made me realize what an awesome responsibility an officer has on this job.”

One of the things that other firefighters liked about Ganci was his utter lack of pretension, his regular guy-ness. No matter how high he rose in the Fire Department, he always told people who asked him what he did that he was, simply, a fireman. He liked to go to the fire stations and drink beer in the kitchen with the men, or share one of the meals they used to cook for each other. That might sound like a cliché, an effort to foment a legend—the chief who loves to hang out with his men—but it was true in Ganci’s case. He put in eighty-hour weeks. Once a group of firefighters were eating wee-hour pizza at a place called Patsy’s under the Brooklyn Bridge when Ganci saw they had left their truck—their “rig” in fireman’s lingo—in the middle of a dead-end street, blocking everything. Ganci got out of his car and saw that the keys were in the ignition, so he fired up the rig, made a professional three-point turn, and began driving away, just slowly enough for the men in the pizza joint to notice him and to come out running after him in a panic that the truck was being stolen.

“Hey, anyone can drive one of these things,” he shouted.

“He loved the young guys,” his son Chris said. “He was never a bureaucrat. He was more like an ambassador or a diplomat. All these guys would crowd around my father, and would be so captivated by his fire stories.”

Ganci was the kind of guy that all the other guys wanted to be photographed with. His old colleagues at Ladder 124, where he first made his reputation, had bragging rights because they had served with “the Chief” when he was a mere lieutenant. When Ganci went to national fire chiefs’ conclaves in other cities, he was treated like a movie star. “It was as if God himself walked in the door,” Catalano said. The Fire Department is an epicenter of what it’s common to call “male bonding.” Firemen eat together; they sleep in the same room; they spend long days and nights waiting together; they play on the same sports teams together; they drink together after hours; above all, they face danger together and they all know that they might die together. Firemen see their ladder and engine companies and their rescue squads as their families. “You’re close when you fight a fire,” McCarthy said. “You’d rather see yourself hurt than the guy next to you, honestly.” And Pete, in this sense, was the perfect family man, the one who wanted to be the best player on the best team. It’s not too much to say that the other men loved him. The story is told of the time he was sitting at a bar frequented by firefighters, and somebody was speaking disrespectfully to him, picking a fight. Ganci didn’t rise to the bait. He just sat there and nodded. But another fireman, hearing what he thought were insults to the chief, came over and rendered the offensive person unconscious with a punch to the jaw.

Samples from a kind of “Quotations of Chairman Ganci” were repeated around the department. One of them was “When you walk out the door in the morning, don’t let your wife see how happy you are to go to work.” And another: “Never tell your wife how good the station house food is. If she asks, tell her you had hot dogs.” At a medals ceremony in 2000, Ganci, who was giving awards this time, not receiving them, said, “Wherever needed, we go. While a dangerous and difficult job, firefighting is still the best profession of all.”1

In 1972, Ganci married Kathleen Koster, a hometown girl whom he had known for a very long time, since she was fifteen and Ganci drove her to her junior prom with her date, who happened to be Ganci’s younger brother. Years later, Ganci went into the bank in Farmingdale, New York, to cash some unused traveler’s checks—he had been to the Octoberfest in Germany—and Kathleen was a secretary in that bank. “It was quite a whirlwind romance,” Kathleen said. In a few years they had three children, Peter 3rd, who is also a firefighter, Chris, and Danielle, and that meant that Ganci himself had to supplement his income with other jobs.

The truth is that a fireman with a wife and three kids doesn’t make enough money to live comfortably in Manhattan, even if he puts fires out there. Firemen live in Queens or Staten Island or, like Ganci, in Nassau County, “out on the island.” For a while he moonlighted as a bartender at his friend Dan Nickola’s restaurant in Farmingdale; then, in 1990, he, Nickola, and another partner opened Potter’s Pub, an Irish bar and restaurant. He took carpentry jobs, built extensions on homes, even washed windows. He was also a very good Sunday golfer, an avid fisherman, a boat owner, the opposite of a homebody, and there was a cost to that.

“As a kid I hardly saw my dad,” Chris said. “Because he worked so hard, he would also go out with the guys a lot for beers. My mom would be so mad, wondering why he hadn’t called to tell her when he would be home after work. And he used to say, ‘Why would I call, when I know I would be yelled at twice, once on the phone and once when I got back, for not coming straight home from work.’ But I think we all became very independent because he was so busy. I like that, and we supported him.”

Still, busy as he was, there were family vacations—at Lake George in Upstate New York and at Busch Gardens in Virginia. The Nickolas, with four children, and the Gancis with three took their families together to Niagara Falls. Ganci was the one who stayed with the children, taking them for rides on the roller coaster, or, back at home, he chaperoned trips to museums in New York City. He was a Little League coach, famous for not giving preference to members of the team who were his own two sons.

Looking forward to his retirement, Ganci and Kathleen bought a condominium in Florida and they expected to begin using it soon. Ganci planned to play a lot of golf at the nearby East Lake Woodlands Country Club. But up to September 11, Ganci, busy as always, had never once visited it. On that Sunday when he went clamming with Dan Nickola, he was debating with himself about the future, knowing that he wanted to keep going as a firefighter a bit longer, while his family wanted him to retire. But two days later, on September 11, he was up early, as always, and off to work.