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Following in Heroic Footsteps

Dennis Duggan

September 15, 2001

Jimmy Boyle, past president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, looks at a photograph of his son, Michael Boyle a New York City firefighter who is missing from the World Trade Center disaster. (Newsday Photo / Karen Wiles Stabile)

"The only standing room you'll find at a firefighter's funeral is out in the street, down the block."

- Dennis Smith

Former firefighter

"Report from Engine Co. 82"

All week long 61-year-old retired firefighter Dennis Smith has worked in the ruins downtown with what he calls the "bucket brigade."

On one of those days he encountered two firefighter fathers, one who was grieving for his missing son, the other who was deliriously happy and kissing his son who had emerged alive from the rubble of the Twin Towers.

One of the fathers is Jimmy Boyle, a past president of the 9,000-member Uniformed Firefighters Association whose son Michael, 37, is listed as missing. The other was Kevin Gallagher, who is the current president of that same union and whose son Kevin was rescued.

I spoke to Boyle Friday. He is an old friend and I told him I loved him. He said he hadn't given up hope but he knew the odds were he might never see his son alive again.

"A natural leader who always wanted to be a firefighter," Jimmy Boyle said of his son.

"I'm not good at sound bites," said Boyle, who took me on my first ride on a fire truck years ago. "But I think my boy would have become president of the

union."

On the floor of Congress Thursday, Rep. Peter King broke down when he mentioned the names of Fire Chaplain My-chal Judge, who will be buried Saturday from St. Francis of Assisi Church, and Michael Boyle, who

has worked on behalf of King's political campaigns for years.

No one in the Fire Department knows just how many sons have followed in their father's firefighter footsteps but they know the tradition stretches back

through the years and they also know the numbers are large.

"I don't know the exact numbers," Manny Fernandez said Friday, "but when I read the names on a list of those missing or dead, a lot of them sounded so familiar."

Fernandez was a young firefighter in 1966 at the scene of what until Tuesday had been the worst fire disaster in the department's history when 12 firefighters died at a West 23rd Street fire.

I told Fernandez that earlier in the week I had stopped by Ladder 18 on West 10th Street where the names of the five men from that ill-starred company who died in that fire were on a bronze plaque. One of

them was Daniel L. Rey.

By coincidence I met Rey's son, Glen, at Chambers Street Wednesday. He was on his way to help search for the missing in the tons of rubble a few blocks away.