I didn’t mingle with the guys that night. With deep sadness, I drove to Queens. I still wore my uniform white shirt with gold oak leaves on the collar and an FDNY patch on the left arm, which made it easier to get through the checkpoints at street closings in lower Manhattan. Seeing military vehicles with a 50-caliber gun on top at each roadblock brought home the reality that we had been attacked.
Arriving on a quiet Queens block, I walked in the back door of my parents’ small house, where I had grown up with my sister, Mary Ellen, one year younger than me, and Kevin. My parents greeted me with tears and hugs and questioning faces. They didn’t want to ask me about Kevin, but I knew they had thought of nothing else all day.
We were a tight-knit family. My parents, Helen and Bill, had grown up in the same neighborhood, three blocks apart, in Queens. They both went to St. Margaret’s Elementary School, the same school we three kids later attended as youngsters. After serving in the Navy as a signalman during World War II, my dad worked as a machinist before joining the U.S. Postal Service as a letter carrier. Mom had graduated from a secretarial high school, worked in New York City’s controller’s office, and then had a part-time job in a local clothing shop. They’d met after the war and he wooed her by writing a love poem: “One night a year ago, when there was lots of snow, I met you at a dance. It was the beginning of our romance . . .”
Family surrounded us. Nobody had much money. We thought we’d hit the jackpot because Dad was a letter carrier. Among factory workers, government jobs meant security. Or so we thought, until the post office went on strike.
My parents lived in a semidetached house that was no more than 600 square feet, with a postage-stamp yard. Eventually, we made the basement into two bedrooms. Two houses away lived my great-aunt Nell and uncle Tom, with my grandmother and my aunt Marie in a house right next to them. As kids, we ran between my aunt’s and grandmother’s houses through doors installed in the adjoining front porches. It seemed like one family.
Other family members lived close by, including my father’s parents, who were three blocks away. My grandfather Nick, my mother’s father, was a boisterous deputy sheriff in Queens County who sat at the head of the big table at Aunt Nell’s at Thanksgiving and told stories about politics. I never saw him in uniform; when he died, I had to turn his gun in to the NYPD.
After school, we played stickball and handball in the streets, not to mention “ring-a-levio,” a game where two groups of kids faced off against each other. A kid on one team would run and try to break through the other team’s line of linked arms. As the older, bigger brother, I’d break through, but Kevin would get stuck. He was often frustrated trying to keep up with me, but away from the playground we were close. For most of my childhood, Kevin and I shared a room together. We’d talk all night, even though we were three years apart.
In the summers, we had no air-conditioning. To escape the heat, our family decamped to Breezy Point, the westernmost beach on the Rockaway peninsula, where my parents, with the help of my aunt and uncle, paid $3,000 to buy a summer bungalow, a small 500-square-foot fixer-upper. A modest beach community run by a cooperative, Breezy Point got its name from the winds off the Atlantic Ocean from the south and west, and the calmer waves on the north side, Jamaica Bay. It had few paved roads, just sand tracks, which kept development modest. If I walked a quarter mile, I’d hit the ocean; the other direction I’d hit the bay.
My parents, the three of us kids, my aunt and uncle, and other family members all slept in the tiny house on beds crammed into every corner. We spent our days walking on the beach, collecting shells, playing beach volleyball, swimming—and for my brother and me, handing tools to my father as he worked on the house. I learned how to paint, sand, saw, fix plumbing and electricity, helping whenever my dad needed another pair of hands. I would have preferred to play, but those skills later came in handy. It was also my daily job to rake shells and broken glass from the sand of our yard.
At the beach, I started swimming competitively. I’d win races; Kevin would try to copy me. In college, I got a job as an ocean lifeguard at Gateway National Recreation Area, at Jacob Riis Park. To escape the city’s heat in the summer, residents crowded Riis Park until 10 p.m.
It was at Breezy Point that Kevin and I caught the bug that would prompt us to become firefighters.
The summer after I graduated from high school, my friend Peter Collins and I joined the Rockaway Point Volunteer Fire Department (RPVFD), the so-called “Vollies.” I continued to lifeguard, but each Tuesday night we had drills and learned the basics of firefighting from the more senior volunteers, who called us the “snot-nosed kids.”
Every summer during college and graduate school, I lived on Breezy Point with my parents, worked as a lifeguard, and responded to ambulance and fire calls when I was off. In the middle of the night, I’d hear the siren—one blast for an ambulance, three for a fire—throw on clothes, and sprint for the firehouse, about a quarter mile from my parents’ house.
We had brush fires and a few blazes in the little wooden bungalows. We’d get a hose on the fire until FDNY firefighters arrived and took over. They had full jurisdiction but allowed the beach communities to have small volunteer departments because their big rigs couldn’t run on the sand tracks.
Besides learning firefighting, I took first aid classes and was certified as an EMT, a certification I would keep for twenty-seven years. I even competed on the RPVFD First Aid team that went up against other ambulance corps in New York State, winning the state championship year after year.
With all that first aid knowledge, I went on more medical calls than fires. But no amount of training would prepare me for my worst ambulance call. In the middle of the afternoon, the siren sounded for an accident on Breezy Point: a little girl had been struck by an electric-utility van. I worked on her desperately to save her in the back of the ambulance as we swerved through traffic to the hospital. She didn’t survive. The Vollies didn’t have any counseling at the time. Not knowing what to do with the reality of her death, I just pushed it aside.
Kevin didn’t become a lifeguard, but he did first aid on the beach. We ended up working in the same spot. Kevin also joined the Vollies as soon as he was old enough.
One year, after a hurricane, Kevin saw a damaged Hobie Cat in the surf off Riis Park. He swam out and pulled the eighteen-foot catamaran to shore. When the owner couldn’t be located, the boat was going to be junked because the damage was too extensive for it to be sold. It would have cost a couple of thousand dollars to buy a new one, which we didn’t have. So my brother repaired it.
My father thought we were crazy to take on major boat repairs, which required replacing almost all the rigging. But since he had served in the Navy in the South Pacific during the war, he secretly was proud of his sons, especially Kevin, who was motivated to tackle such a huge project.
Then we had to learn to sail. The Hobie Cat had two pontoons and a huge sail, and in certain conditions was very fast. We’d take it to the “Avalanche” sandbar off the Rockaway peninsula and surf waves with the catamaran sailboat in the middle of the ocean.
One day we were sailing with my brother at the tiller. He worked the mainsail while I worked the jib. We had twenty-mile-per-hour winds and were tightening the sails when one of the pontoons started to lift out of the water on our side. We were sitting in the trapeze harnesses attached to the mast, with our feet on the edge of the pontoon, yelling at the top of our lungs, going so fast we were passing motorboats.
Kevin was more adventurous than me by far. I was trying to dump wind so we didn’t flip over. He was shouting, “Sheet in—go, go, go!” He loved speed.
He later bought a Trans Am and also owned a one-propeller Cessna with several friends. After taking lessons and earning his pilot’s license, he’d fly it from Republic Airport on Long Island to Block Island. It was a five-hour trip by car and ferry, but only a half hour in the plane. I was hesitant to fly with him; by then, I had little kids and didn’t want to take unnecessary chances, one of the few areas in our lives where we diverged.
Through it all, our parents accepted the risks we embraced, though I know they worried about us. They never tried to squelch our desire to be firefighters or Kevin’s ambition to fly.
When firefighters died in the line of duty, Kevin and I told ourselves privately, That will never happen to us. The idea that I’d have to be the one to tell my parents that Kevin had died was inconceivable. But here I was, standing before them, struggling to maintain my composure.
My parents and I huddled in the middle of the living room, dreading the next moment.
“We’re not going to find Kevin,” I said. “Kevin is gone.” Shattered, my parents looked at me with disbelief and held each other’s hands.
“Are you sure?” my mom asked softly. My dad said nothing. But I could tell they both were heartbroken. All of us stood there in a sea of emotions not knowing what to do.
I knew my mom would now tell her sister, my aunt Marie, and then my sister, Mary Ellen, in emotional phone calls. Our private sorrow would become part of public grief. There would be no escaping the endless newscasts of the WTC collapse, the attacks, the hunt for the perpetrators. But through the sadness, we found unbelievable kindness. Though my parents never really recovered from the heartbreak, the coming together of family, friends, the Fire Department, and people throughout the world became our strength.
Now I had to go home and tell Ginny and our children that Kevin was gone. When I walked in my front door, Ginny saw the pain on my face and knew that I had broken the news to my parents. Somehow, I got the words out.
Ginny later told me she felt numb, but she could see my pain and sorrow, knowing I had lost my best friend. Our kids got very quiet, in disbelief over losing their favorite uncle. The events were just unimaginable. For several weeks, they believed he might walk in the door at any moment.