A Special Sort of Blessing

 

Not too long before I called it a day on Saturday night and shuffled down the hallway to bed, I received a news alert on my phone informing me that Dennis Smith had died.  He was eigthy years old.   As a member of the FDNY, Smith was a member of Engine Company 82 in the South Bronx in the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which that house was the busiest one in New York City (and perhaps the world).  His memoir, Report from Engine Co. 82, is an extraordinary read.  

Dennis Smith served the people of New York City as a member of the FDNY from 1963, when he sat for the exam, until 1981, when he retired.  In 1976, he founded Firehouse Magazine.  He was a leading advocate for firefighters and fire departments across the country.   

In 2001, twenty years retired from the job, Dennis Smith responded to the September 11 attacks and spent considerable time thereafter at Ground Zero, taking part in the recovery effort.  Not too long thereafter, his book Report from Ground Zero was published and soon became recognized as one of the seminal accounts of that terrible, trying time in our nation's history.  Whatever condition a book descends into when "dog-eared" no longer does justice to it is the condition in which my copy has found itself for several years.  I have read it too many times to count.  

On the eve of the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, he wrote A Decade of Hope:  Stories of Grief and Endurance from 9/11 Families and Friends, which, too, occupies a place in my library.  It is also a book I have read beginning to end more times than I can remember.  

In 2000, Mr. Smith wrote a piece about the six firefighters from Worcester, Massachusetts killed in the line of duty responding to the fire at the Worcester Cold Storage and Warehouse Company on December 3, 1999, which fire had been started accidentally by two homeless people squatting in the building.    It was this fire that inspired Denis Leary to start the Leary Firefighters Foundation.  Among the six Worcester firefighters killed on that terrible night were Leary's first cousin, FF Jerry Lucey (38 years old), and a childhood friend and high school classmate, Lt. Tommy Spencer (41).  In Mr. Smith's piece, "A Reflection:  Worcester Firefighters - All Firefighters", he wrote: 

I have always thought that being a firefighter 

is a special sort of blessing. 

In the thousands of alarms I have responded to 

and the many hundreds of fires I have fought, 

I have believed that because I was one of a particular group

of people who did something so dramatic, 

so exciting and so necessary, no other endeavor in life 

could have given me such happiness and satisfaction. 

Where would the world be if there were no firefighters, 

I would ask myself, for no one knows like those who battle 

on the periphery of the flames just how fast and deadly

a fire can be.  But, it is like asking where would we be

without the police force or the military 

or even the government, 

for the world needs brave people 

to protect us if the human family is to survive.

-Dennis Smith 

(March 2000)

-AK