Speaker 1: Disclaimer. We'd like to know before the start of this
Speaker 1: interview that the opinions about to be expressed by the
Speaker 1: guest of tonight's Getting Salty Experience Podcast are that of
Speaker 1: the guest and do not directly or necessarily reflect the
Speaker 1: views of the host of the Getting Salty Experience Podcast.
Speaker 2: You're listening to the Getting Salty Experience Podcast.
Speaker 3: Hello, that's right, Hello, look Berg back in the chat,
Speaker 3: Mary don Oyle key to Jess. Oh pee wee regulars QCs.
Speaker 4: This's a new guy in the chat too. How do
Speaker 4: you say that?
Speaker 5: Name? Is Procaccini's husband?
Speaker 3: Correct spoken on the phone of me, missus Procaccini's husband.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, how did he get told? These periods podcasts?
Speaker 3: Do you know which one? Well, we had a guy
Speaker 3: out here a couple of weeks ago says he was
Speaker 3: the fires But this is the only one that brings
Speaker 3: the fire hous kitchen table to you. Guns.
Speaker 4: Yeah, for sure we made that guy's day. Believe it
Speaker 4: or not, you get put.
Speaker 5: He's doing a good job. Yeah, yeah, he's doing good.
Speaker 3: When you'll be filling in for you? What is that trips?
Speaker 3: No trip up soon.
Speaker 6: O x A on the filling now x A on
Speaker 6: the how's uh mikey doing?
Speaker 3: And were on the you know, I remember that guy
Speaker 3: with that who is that.
Speaker 6: Velvet the velvet voice, velvet voice you when you got college?
Speaker 4: I have some I mean we can find him. What
Speaker 4: do we have of of Mike? Yeah, you must be
Speaker 4: out your goddamn man. Oh no, it's a different guy.
Speaker 5: He's too smoking.
Speaker 3: He said that to the drill. He must have said
Speaker 3: that to the drill instructor when the guy told him,
Speaker 3: you know, like the push ups.
Speaker 4: Sweating like a female.
Speaker 3: Sweating like Mike Tyson to the third grade spelling. I
Speaker 3: was heard at work today, Yes, he was. You don't
Speaker 3: even check.
Speaker 5: Into the track.
Speaker 3: He's busy guy.
Speaker 5: He was there.
Speaker 4: He was definitely what the hell is my Uh yeah,
Speaker 4: you're not prepared. No, not prepared.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have a hat on the head.
Speaker 4: Well that's what it. Darn the freeze was saying, no
Speaker 4: guy digging trenches all day today doing trench rescue. A
Speaker 4: little shout out to the yeah, Martin County people.
Speaker 3: Martin County shot out that Mountain County guys out. There
Speaker 3: was a shout back Sabrina company.
Speaker 4: They said they were gonna watch, but I don't know
Speaker 4: what I don't see that. We'll see I.
Speaker 3: Don't see it the shot, we'll see you smoke up yours.
Speaker 3: I don't know, and you didn't. You didn't dig no
Speaker 3: trench today. The chief doesn't dig trenches. Bro, Bro, you
Speaker 3: know I was my hand with a machine.
Speaker 5: Oh by hand? Man what he pointed, pointed the trench went.
Speaker 3: Are you buying out of this? Because I'm I'm calling
Speaker 3: bullshit right here? Bull ship, You didn't dig no trenches?
Speaker 4: No? Oh yes, I did that.
Speaker 5: You used it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you use a nice little back home, buddy, of course.
Speaker 3: You used the back home. You didn't take my hand.
Speaker 4: Nod's still taking it. I'm still digging it.
Speaker 3: Take it by hand? Yes, by hand?
Speaker 5: Ten foot trench. He's gonna dig by hand?
Speaker 3: I said, you didn't dig it by hand? Did you
Speaker 3: use the machine? You said? Of course by hand?
Speaker 4: Well, I want to see whats's paying attention? So by hand?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Really?
Speaker 5: I hope them a motherfucker hands hands? Yeah, this hand,
Speaker 5: this is my hands.
Speaker 4: It's old. You know, it's all the hydraulics.
Speaker 3: You know, what do you hydraulically play? The next commercial? Bro?
Speaker 3: How about that? How about eleven?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 3: Stop?
Speaker 4: No? No, how about what we don't do any of
Speaker 4: that ship all right. Let's look.
Speaker 3: My little Italian Buddies. Commercial bro have a free giveaway
Speaker 3: at Indy, so we'll have details on that once he
Speaker 3: sends it to me.
Speaker 4: Let's see what we get there.
Speaker 7: We go.
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Speaker 5: Oh what does that say?
Speaker 3: The giant dude by a shrip?
Speaker 4: You ain't You ain't fucking kidding? Those sticks are monstrous, man.
Speaker 3: Yes, all right, let's play the next commercial really quick
Speaker 3: and there will be uh right into It'll.
Speaker 4: Be twenty three seconds quick. Here we go go.
Speaker 1: The First Responder Center for Excellence is not a profit
Speaker 1: organization dedicated to protecting the lives and livelihoods of first responders.
Speaker 1: Their education and research initiatives aim to bring greater awareness
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Speaker 3: All right, you have got to believe this tip.
Speaker 4: You're ready.
Speaker 3: This actually does go on though on the fire service.
Speaker 3: I know you guys love the job, right, do me
Speaker 3: a favor, and you're gonna tell me I'm crazy that
Speaker 3: this doesn't never happens. Don't get yourself fixed up or
Speaker 3: have surgery on your own time. You know who I'm
Speaker 3: talking about in general here roof, but there's plenty of
Speaker 3: guys who do it. I can name about five guys
Speaker 3: who go and take care of things on their own time.
Speaker 3: If you get hurt on the job, go out sick,
Speaker 3: get yourself fixed up, and come back. So I'm gonna
Speaker 3: say to you, don't rush things on your own time
Speaker 3: because you don't want to miss the job and you're
Speaker 3: afraid they're gonna put you out or some stupidity like that.
Speaker 3: I don't want to say who did that, but I
Speaker 3: can name of quite a few guys. That's all I
Speaker 3: got said about that.
Speaker 4: That's what you gotta say about that. I'm right, jim
Speaker 4: He's it. And here he goes. He's staring at the camera.
Speaker 4: He's waiting for his shot.
Speaker 5: All right, do it ready?
Speaker 8: Here we go, coming to the stage f d N
Speaker 8: y one fifty four. Jimmy, ammon, there it is an
Speaker 8: opening day for baseball today.
Speaker 5: Just is it? They win?
Speaker 3: That's lost, yank.
Speaker 4: Nobody cares about the Mets.
Speaker 3: I'm about to throw you out right out of here, bro,
Speaker 3: that's what's let's before we jump. Jimmy's a Korea. Good,
Speaker 3: let's do this. Let's say, bro, let's get patriotic.
Speaker 4: You play the two is all right, Here we go.
Speaker 2: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States
Speaker 2: of America and to the Republic for which it stands,
Speaker 2: One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the show. Jim, Jim's got a little he's
Speaker 3: near and the end of my heart roough right, you
Speaker 3: know because he worked with my brother, the rug that's right,
Speaker 3: nearly departed brother. And I'm sure you got plenty of
Speaker 3: rug stories, bro. You also probably work with Steve right, yes,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, I gotta catch it for white sox.
Speaker 7: Uh no, no, he was Uh.
Speaker 3: Maybe he gave you a pass because you knew the Rug.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 7: You never stayed in our house that long because if
Speaker 7: Steve Ferring.
Speaker 3: Was working, oh my god.
Speaker 7: He's working. Your brother just turned around when you said
Speaker 7: what he had to say.
Speaker 3: The left. Well, you must have seen him too, because
Speaker 3: you got there in eighty one. I don't drop in ahead,
Speaker 3: but he was in probably what thirty eight at that time.
Speaker 7: Yes, yeah, so you.
Speaker 3: Got him on the whole lo of like a suck all.
Speaker 3: You got him. He got him as a deputy. Yet
Speaker 3: he was there, he is on c.
Speaker 5: Was like a like a chiaha.
Speaker 7: Sorry, I think your brother would brother find the opening
Speaker 7: shots at Steve and uh at Farring and Steve fired
Speaker 7: right back and part of the whole he was.
Speaker 3: He was, Well, let's go back before that. Let's start
Speaker 3: out where where to grow up? With neighborhood you're from?
Speaker 3: What made you become a fireman? All right?
Speaker 7: I grew up in the town Albertson and went to
Speaker 7: Herek's High school. Uh, volleys, mostly, mostly did gymnastics, did
Speaker 7: a little wrestling my cousin. It's originally my whole life.
Speaker 7: I wanted to be a cop.
Speaker 4: Oh oh, we just we need to stop them.
Speaker 7: But my cousin, my cousin let lived was down, doesn't
Speaker 7: slap chip. So he got me to join the volleys
Speaker 7: with him because would be funny. I joined the volleys
Speaker 7: and I got I got someone in with Tony.
Speaker 4: Sorry, yeah, wow, oh wait, hold on, hold on here, wait,
Speaker 4: let's you mention Tony. We need to do this version.
Speaker 5: We got to this classic sorry teller. Then oh my god, look, wow.
Speaker 4: He's getting ready to go plow some snow.
Speaker 7: Or something else.
Speaker 3: You know. Well, wow, Alan goes back. I wonder if
Speaker 3: he's in the chat today. He'll see this.
Speaker 5: So he was crazy about the job at that time too.
Speaker 5: How you guys were both for the job like right away.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so there's there was a bunch of guys from
Speaker 7: the Elvson Valleys that were in the City City FD.
Speaker 7: So yeah, growing up, I didn't know. I didn't know
Speaker 7: anybody in the fire department. I knew a lot of cops,
Speaker 7: so that's you know, I figured i'd be a cop.
Speaker 7: But once I got in the volleys, it was like, well,
Speaker 7: let me start taking fire department tests.
Speaker 3: And so it was your cousin already on the job,
Speaker 3: but he was taking the test too.
Speaker 7: No, no, he uh he went another way. Yeah, well
Speaker 7: he actually went he actually became a cop, and then
Speaker 7: he transferred over to the fire department in West Hartford, Connecticut.
Speaker 7: Oh so he retired out of West Hartford.
Speaker 3: Oh so he had to slap you. And then he
Speaker 3: went and became something else.
Speaker 7: And then I got I got hired for I said,
Speaker 7: I took civil service tests all over. I got hired
Speaker 7: hired by I'll passo City PD. I turned, I turned
Speaker 7: them down. And at the same time I got hired, well,
Speaker 7: I got uh they were going to hire me in
Speaker 7: Fairfax County Fire and Rescue. But at that time, uh,
Speaker 7: my parents were getting divorced, so I kind of wanted
Speaker 7: to stay around.
Speaker 4: I didn't.
Speaker 7: I didn't want to go out of town until that
Speaker 7: we got settled. So I called up Fairfax and I
Speaker 7: asked him if I can postpone to the next class,
Speaker 7: and they called, it's not proby school down there, it's
Speaker 7: rookie school. So I got in the next class, and
Speaker 7: then uh, then I heard the city fire department was
Speaker 7: starting to hire. My list number was coming up. So
Speaker 7: I got called for Nasau County Corrections and uh, thank heavens,
Speaker 7: that was only a nine month nine month job.
Speaker 3: And how long was there academy there?
Speaker 7: What the Fairfax h Correction Corrections It was weird. They
Speaker 7: split in my class in two and one half did
Speaker 7: the corrections class first, and they put us out into
Speaker 7: the floors working with the regular correction officers. That I was.
Speaker 7: We kind of we kind of learned the job the
Speaker 7: way it's done and not not just by the book
Speaker 7: when you go to the going to school.
Speaker 6: What was that like like doing that being out there
Speaker 6: in the population.
Speaker 7: It really wasn't that much fun. Not many of the
Speaker 7: people in there were actually uh sorry for what, you know,
Speaker 7: they were more sorry that they got caught instead of uh,
Speaker 7: you know, I think I'm only interacted with one guy
Speaker 7: who actually he was in the jew jewvie section that yeah,
Speaker 7: he screwed up, got caught, and it would probably be
Speaker 7: the last time. You haven't he ever did anything you
Speaker 7: know against you know, breaking the law whatever. So but
Speaker 7: everybody else.
Speaker 3: Right, you come in.
Speaker 5: Back all the time, like, uh.
Speaker 7: Well, one there was there was one guy that I
Speaker 7: forgot his name. He was in there for murder. He
Speaker 7: murdered He murdered a girl in a bog with the
Speaker 7: axe and yeah, I hope not at the time californ
Speaker 7: he was also wanted in California for a murder out there,
Speaker 7: and California at the time still had a death penalty,
Speaker 7: and so they they were going to ship him out
Speaker 7: to California. I had a trap. I had to go
Speaker 7: down four flights and an elevator with him and three
Speaker 7: other inmates by myself. So I was I was a
Speaker 7: little I was a little nervous at the time. But nothing,
Speaker 7: nothing happened.
Speaker 3: But you have to slap some wrestler moved down on
Speaker 3: those guys and what not really out. No, it was.
Speaker 7: The one thing you wanted, like you had a routine
Speaker 7: there and they were. They were as a as a privilege.
Speaker 7: They had what was called a late night. So it'
Speaker 7: like there was a basketball game on or a football game,
Speaker 7: baseball game or whatever. They were allowed to stay out
Speaker 7: of their cells for you know, until the game was over.
Speaker 7: So if if you kind of didn't want to have
Speaker 7: have to do that from the offices end, you would
Speaker 7: it was it was, it was kind of it was
Speaker 7: a fun thing to do, but it was it really
Speaker 7: wasn't morally correct. When they went on a movement to
Speaker 7: get down to to you know, for dinner or lunch
Speaker 7: or whatever, you would pull one guy out of the line.
Speaker 7: You know, there's the cell line and uh, you know
Speaker 7: so and so and so whatever it's given given us
Speaker 7: a hard time. You know if you know, if he
Speaker 7: does it straighten out, you know you're gonna lose your
Speaker 7: late night. And you let that guy go, and then
Speaker 7: you pull somebody out of the middle of the movement
Speaker 7: and pulled somebody out of the end. And so now
Speaker 7: you three guys in a group of twenty that that like, well,
Speaker 7: this guy's gonna you know, he's gonna make us lose
Speaker 7: all late night. And uh you know, by the time
Speaker 7: they got back from the movement into the cells, they
Speaker 7: everybody in the cell knows it and they start lumping
Speaker 7: them up. So now there's a fight locked the whole
Speaker 7: the whole cell blockdown. Yeah, you know, you don't have
Speaker 7: to worry about you don't have to worry about the
Speaker 7: late night. From the officer's side, I.
Speaker 3: Kind of think that morals grow out the door as
Speaker 3: soon as you walk into that place.
Speaker 7: Worry about what was interesting too. There was there was
Speaker 7: actually a full blown riot there when I when I
Speaker 7: was working that the news didn't know about. Never never
Speaker 7: made the news, that the whole the whole place. He said, nothing, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: but any uh any and.
Speaker 4: You do frame stories.
Speaker 7: Zarrow world, it's like world. Some of them. I probably
Speaker 7: couldn't even tell tell on.
Speaker 3: That's crazy job. That's job.
Speaker 6: Hey, Jim, was Frankie Frankie mccotton. You remember it was
Speaker 6: Frankie mccotton work. I remember he was corrections, wasn't he.
Speaker 6: Frankie mccotton was once seventeen.
Speaker 5: Do you remember him. I think he was.
Speaker 7: I don't think. I don't think we were there at
Speaker 7: the same time.
Speaker 5: Oh no, no, no, he was New York. You're right,
Speaker 5: he was.
Speaker 7: It was New York.
Speaker 3: Jim was.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: The one thing, the one thing I do remember, I
Speaker 7: was talking with one inmate. They and they transferred back
Speaker 7: and forth. Plus they're not penitentiaries, so you know, they
Speaker 7: go into court or they may go to the court
Speaker 7: in the city. They had to get transferred over to
Speaker 7: Rikers and the the one inmates said they they'd rather
Speaker 7: be in Rikers Island than Nassau County Jail. We were
Speaker 7: pretty strict with movements and everything like that. With a movement,
Speaker 7: you you know, if they were going from point A
Speaker 7: to point B, every time they went through a gate,
Speaker 7: the next gate didn't open up until the one behind
Speaker 7: them was locked, so if she hit the fan, it
Speaker 7: would be contained in a small area. When we started
Speaker 7: doing uh drills over and Rikers and going through Rikers
Speaker 7: and stuff like that, it scared the ship out of me.
Speaker 7: They had all the gates open. If the inmates wanted
Speaker 7: to go off, they would have the whole building and
Speaker 7: it just I was like, I wanted to get the
Speaker 7: hell out of out of there really quick.
Speaker 4: Doing it.
Speaker 7: It was pretty scary. You know, so you have you
Speaker 7: have hundreds doing it wrong. Yeah, Stephen, but you.
Speaker 3: Get the call o the FD. It must have been
Speaker 3: caught wheels bro right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely, yeah it was. Yeah I could. Yeah, I
Speaker 7: would have definitely would have been divorced if I stayed
Speaker 7: stayed in the I was, I had, I had one.
Speaker 7: And years years later, you know, we were talking about
Speaker 7: my time at the jail and he goes, yeah, you
Speaker 7: know you would, you would turn into a real shithead,
Speaker 7: you know, you would. You know, it was, uh, I
Speaker 7: was actually probably makes you angry.
Speaker 5: You're angry.
Speaker 7: What happens a lot of times what happened is something
Speaker 7: happens in one of the floors. They'll alert all the
Speaker 7: officers and all right, we're having trouble on B floor
Speaker 7: or whatever, and so the extra guys working on the
Speaker 7: floor would go up to that floor to try to
Speaker 7: contain what was going on. So basically you're going up
Speaker 7: there just.
Speaker 9: With your hands.
Speaker 7: There's yeah, you know, there's no you don't have night sticks,
Speaker 7: you don't have anything else. So you're basically going up
Speaker 7: there to fight. And so you know, you're getting ready
Speaker 7: to go fight. So you're getting your adrenaline. Adrenaline up,
Speaker 7: and then you get there and they see this twenty
Speaker 7: or thirty officers there that that got to kick the
Speaker 7: ship out of them and they got to go to
Speaker 7: the hospital. So then they stop. So now you're there
Speaker 7: all hyped.
Speaker 3: Up, you know, and I know you're to beat anybody
Speaker 3: out right.
Speaker 7: And that happens almost every single tour of your work.
Speaker 7: So it's like, you know, you go out to a
Speaker 7: bar and somebody bumps into you.
Speaker 5: Oh man, never liked you, yeah.
Speaker 7: You know, and it's so it's uh yo yo, And
Speaker 7: I asked you. I asked my how come you never
Speaker 7: told me I was afraid. I was afraid you did
Speaker 7: me or something, you know. That was that was I'm
Speaker 7: glad I got to do it. But that's I wouldn't
Speaker 7: recommend that job to anybody.
Speaker 3: I bet you, I bet you appreciate b I.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, b I. We're still trying to figure out
Speaker 4: what that is. We don't really want to.
Speaker 3: We're getting a fist fight tussle with some low life
Speaker 3: uhs thirteen guy, Yeah, eight tear drops on his face. Yeah, Christ,
Speaker 3: you get the call? Uh and what what it was?
Speaker 3: Eighty one?
Speaker 7: Yes, September September fifth, eighty one got swanned down a
Speaker 7: city hall like three. It was like three hundred and
Speaker 7: twenty three or whatever it was.
Speaker 3: In the class any notables, it's.
Speaker 7: Probably a whole shipload of him. Yes, I don't. I
Speaker 7: never really followed the careers of everybody, but uh, I said,
Speaker 7: two guys on my from my squad passed on nine
Speaker 7: to eleven. Jimmy Jimmy a motto. Uh Jimmy motto is
Speaker 7: yeah he was. He was two people down from me
Speaker 7: on my on my left, and then Vinnie Hallerin was
Speaker 7: on on the other side of me.
Speaker 3: He passed fifty four to Jimmy.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well, Jimmy Jimmy came on. When we graduated, five of
Speaker 7: us went to three oh seven one fifty four. So
Speaker 7: I went, I went to the truck. Jimmy Motto, Kevin Kelly,
Speaker 7: uh Ritchie Toshak, and Evan Kelly and Frank Tyrell went
Speaker 7: to the engine. So Frankie Tyrell came over to the truck.
Speaker 7: Eventually Jimmy Motto came over to the truck. The other
Speaker 7: two stayed in the engine.
Speaker 3: And it's so funny as you say they're named, all
Speaker 3: I can think about is this stupid nickname. My brother
Speaker 3: had for them. They all had nicknames over there right.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, I don't have like a tick.
Speaker 4: Oh I was waiting for the time to bring in
Speaker 4: that stash.
Speaker 7: Eighty point star. Yeah, eighties point star.
Speaker 5: That's number to eighty.
Speaker 4: Huh oh wait, sorry.
Speaker 7: That's the thing to eighty.
Speaker 3: Jimmy Jimmy a.
Speaker 7: Models badge number was two seventy seventy eight and on
Speaker 7: on the the list of our graduating classes, alphabetically, my
Speaker 7: name's in front of it is before his, but on
Speaker 7: the listening from proby class his was the head of mine.
Speaker 7: So he got he got I was supposed to get.
Speaker 7: I guess two seventy eight. He was supposed to get
Speaker 7: to eighty. But the way it worked out.
Speaker 4: Uh somebody it wasn't too smart.
Speaker 3: Who took all the bottom.
Speaker 7: But he was The motto was was was blinky right
Speaker 7: because he.
Speaker 3: Had a head.
Speaker 7: He had like a like a TWIGT Kelly was right big.
Speaker 7: Then kil built the final named him the Wrinkler. He
Speaker 7: was like a super villain because everything on him was rink.
Speaker 4: What's fun is man?
Speaker 7: So he would open his locker or he would open
Speaker 7: his locker. All the none of the clothes was hanging
Speaker 7: on the on hangers. It was all just fronted, so
Speaker 7: everything was wrinkled. His money was just shoved in his pocket.
Speaker 7: So he pulled out his money and it was like
Speaker 7: an unwrinkled so.
Speaker 4: Wrinkler that is.
Speaker 3: There was some funny names there, bro, I mean.
Speaker 5: What was yours? What was yours?
Speaker 7: Well, initially before my accident, it was it was it
Speaker 7: was right when the Police Academy movies came out, and uh,
Speaker 7: who's the guy? The guy had the guns all the time.
Speaker 3: That was, oh, oh ship, somebody need a chattel.
Speaker 7: Though, we're talking about the TV show, the movies, Police
Speaker 7: Academy Movies. Berry Tackle Tackleberry tackle Bear the old time
Speaker 7: is nicknamed me Tackleberry for a little while. And I
Speaker 7: was the only one in the in the house that
Speaker 7: actually went you know that hunted or you know, so
Speaker 7: I was big and you know I'm still big into
Speaker 7: the firearms and stuff like that. So they would always
Speaker 7: called me Tackleberry.
Speaker 3: Now, when you guys became the Northern Knights, didn't you
Speaker 3: get all nightly names too? Yeah?
Speaker 7: Well, well my brother no no night names. But uh
Speaker 7: let's say yeah, yeah, your brother with the rug he
Speaker 7: was it looked like like like a Roman like Greek
Speaker 7: Greek god type thing so called. I started calling yeah,
Speaker 7: I started calling him testicles.
Speaker 3: That there after you though?
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 3: Was that he came there after you?
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 7: My brother?
Speaker 3: When he coming like eighty do what is it? Did eighty?
Speaker 7: I got a book here, a centennial book. When did
Speaker 7: Richie come on? That's that's a mansine?
Speaker 4: Okay, dingle Berry's Tackleberry.
Speaker 7: Somebody's been Tackleberry, Tackleberry.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Cubla BITCHI coubla January twenty sixth, nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3: Four, eighty four. He came out there, you go, so
Speaker 3: all right, not too far after you?
Speaker 5: Nope, So how did you get the thumbs? What was
Speaker 5: the story thumbs?
Speaker 7: That was in the volleys? I was on on the
Speaker 7: racing team, and uh, we're doing yeah, well we were.
Speaker 7: We were out of practice and we were doing probably
Speaker 7: the least dangerous dangerous event.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 7: Just hose efficiency. Basically, you start with three uncoupled two
Speaker 7: and a half inch lines and there's a target down
Speaker 7: down range. Quickly connect him and how fast you can
Speaker 7: you get it. I was a hydrant guy back at
Speaker 7: my volley house. That was the first couple of guys.
Speaker 7: So yeah, the idea is you know, you get your
Speaker 7: back twist the hose a little bit so it goes
Speaker 7: together faster. And then when when you get to the
Speaker 7: end of your slack, you took you basically kind of
Speaker 7: turn around to get a straight straight line on the hose,
Speaker 7: so the water goes through faster. And uh the guy
Speaker 7: hit the hydrant and a loop started to come from
Speaker 7: the hydrant towards me, and I was I was holding
Speaker 7: and my hand just went up like that and my
Speaker 7: whole hand went numb. And uh so then when I
Speaker 7: I looked out of my hand, there was I just
Speaker 7: had the bone sticking out of the out of the hand.
Speaker 7: So wal the skin wall the skin popped off off.
Speaker 4: The thumb a little bit of a glove.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's that's a degloving injury.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So they take me to uh Long Ound Jewish hospital
Speaker 7: and they had they had a surgeon come in and
Speaker 7: uh he said, I'm either got to wake up with
Speaker 7: my hand. My hand did a cast that way because
Speaker 7: the piece came off fully intact. Because they yeah, they
Speaker 7: found it because it sailed. It sailed about thirty feet
Speaker 7: or so away from me. But the guys saw something
Speaker 7: something go that way, and so they followed. You know,
Speaker 7: they went over there, they picked it up.
Speaker 3: It's like a scavenger hunt.
Speaker 7: So the doctor said, you'll wake up with your you know,
Speaker 7: you're handing the cast. That means we were able to
Speaker 7: reattach Uh. And then plan B was, you'll wake up
Speaker 7: with your hand attached to your body somewhere. So that
Speaker 7: I woke up, I was, I was attached like this,
Speaker 7: So I got I got like a scar running from
Speaker 7: here to here where they.
Speaker 5: Took the ground, took the skin over there.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so I was in I was like this in
Speaker 7: the middle of summer for over a month. And once
Speaker 7: when they when they cut me loose literally you know,
Speaker 7: well there's there's a thumb. Now the thumb was about
Speaker 7: like that big with all the extra meat. And this
Speaker 7: is the result of five surgeries, how eleven months. That's why,
Speaker 7: that's why I never abused medical leaf, because I you know,
Speaker 7: I took advantage of it. I was, I was off
Speaker 7: for eleven months, no problem, so you know, and a
Speaker 7: lot of I take advantage of it.
Speaker 3: But like I'm when I tell you it's your turn
Speaker 3: to tap out because we need some over time tonight,
Speaker 3: like that kind of ship. That's why I wasn't.
Speaker 7: Light like that, but I said I it helped me
Speaker 7: having having that unlimited set time, and it's probably one
Speaker 7: of the best things we have in the fire department.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So you wouldn't get that fixed on your own time, right, No,
Speaker 3: I knucklehead would.
Speaker 5: Well that was I was I was.
Speaker 7: I was covered under I was covered under their workman's
Speaker 7: camp right.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So I just got off probation when it happened. Whoa, Yeah,
Speaker 7: so you came back and you need Yeah, and that's
Speaker 7: that's how I got the nickname Thumbs.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it's a brutal man.
Speaker 5: I never knew that story, believe it or not. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I didn't know.
Speaker 3: That that racing was lethal.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 3: That used to be like on ABC Sports.
Speaker 5: That racing.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah, yeah. They tried, they tried getting it into
Speaker 7: other states. They used to They used to have drills,
Speaker 7: you know, like show drills in Pennsylvania. You know, they
Speaker 7: go to different places in Pennsylvania to see if they
Speaker 7: can get it started. You know, a bunch of teams
Speaker 7: would go down and have have the full the full
Speaker 7: race race thing and hull. Yeah, never never caught on.
Speaker 7: It's it's expensive. There's not hardly any Well, there's still
Speaker 7: a lot of companies that do it, but it's it's
Speaker 7: big dollars.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 7: Basically, you got you got two drag cars. You got
Speaker 7: to maintain.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna say the fastest backstep you'll.
Speaker 3: Have a be on bro Oh yeah, did you ever
Speaker 3: watch it? Rough? You can find it on YouTube.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the agony feet of the Thumb, The Agony of
Speaker 5: the Thumb.
Speaker 7: That I was at one state tournament and I remember
Speaker 7: it was the c rate going down. I think was
Speaker 7: we see hose and the guy the guy hit his
Speaker 7: first you know, his stop mark for the hydrant. The
Speaker 7: guy in the backstep flew over the rail in front
Speaker 7: of the re attire and the drive of guns and
Speaker 7: runs on the Oh, you didn't get hurt that bad,
Speaker 7: but you know they still took him to the hospital.
Speaker 7: It's fun stuff.
Speaker 6: I gotta ask you this, Jim, this is a question,
Speaker 6: out of the five of you who went to the firehouse,
Speaker 6: who took the pressure off of who?
Speaker 7: We say, let's say the first one again, out of.
Speaker 6: The five guys, five of you guys went five probies
Speaker 6: to the firehouse. Who took the pressure off?
Speaker 5: Everybody was?
Speaker 7: It was good good crew.
Speaker 5: All right, so that's good.
Speaker 7: Then, well you have all completely different personalities, you know,
Speaker 7: so I'd say we were all we were the first
Speaker 7: ProBiS there probably in for like five years, so we
Speaker 7: probably all kind of you know, it took took the
Speaker 7: same you know, it was good that a lot of
Speaker 7: us went there.
Speaker 5: I was going to say that takes a lot of
Speaker 5: ship spread The.
Speaker 7: Ship was spread out amongst five of us, you know,
Speaker 7: just going there. You know one guy and you know
Speaker 7: he gets the pull the ship on him. So but
Speaker 7: it's that Jimmy Model. I forgot when Jimmy and Model
Speaker 7: came to the truck. But it wasn't I'd say maybe
Speaker 7: right after Proby probably, you know, it's Proby period was over.
Speaker 3: So how did you get to go to the truck?
Speaker 3: You know somebody?
Speaker 7: Uh, Well, I had you know, I had the Fairfax,
Speaker 7: the Fairfax County experience. So I had three you know,
Speaker 7: almost three years under my belt from there already.
Speaker 3: So he was there for three years in fairfact.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, from like seventy like March of seventy eight
Speaker 7: to it was like the middle of December of eighty
Speaker 7: I came up. That's when I started the corrections.
Speaker 4: Gig.
Speaker 3: You catch any good work over there a fair fact.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we caught a few good for there was a
Speaker 7: lot of It was weird down there they do when
Speaker 7: you come out of Proby School you were actually an
Speaker 7: E M T also, so they run I.
Speaker 3: Think they do it.
Speaker 7: They do. They do that ambulance things better than New
Speaker 7: York City does, because we took we took that whole
Speaker 7: thing on and it was it's still really not straightened
Speaker 7: out right yet, but down there they h it really
Speaker 7: sucks righting right in the ambulance all the time, but
Speaker 7: there's some guys that really like it. So they authored
Speaker 7: a first promotional range. You saw it as a fire
Speaker 7: Firefighter one at least, I don't know what they do now,
Speaker 7: but it was firefighter one, Firefighter two of the chauffeurs
Speaker 7: and the guys who wanted to be in the ambulance
Speaker 7: all the time. So when they came to work, the
Speaker 7: only rig they wrote on was the ambulance, so they
Speaker 7: were they were like to shifts the MT and one
Speaker 7: of the guys from the fire house would be assigned
Speaker 7: to drive the ambulance, so he would be the second
Speaker 7: empty on the ambulance UH or ambulance as they say
Speaker 7: down there, yeah ambulance.
Speaker 5: Did the guys in what fifty four or what three
Speaker 5: or seven know that you were from Fairfax? Did they
Speaker 5: know that?
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. So uh but now, originally
Speaker 7: I was I was going to be assigned to one seventeen.
Speaker 7: I can't think of that. And the guy that caused
Speaker 7: a lot of trouble in your firehouse ship, but that
Speaker 7: was his name.
Speaker 9: He's the guy.
Speaker 7: He the guy who guy who kicked kicked the one
Speaker 7: guy in the balls and and punched the proby out.
Speaker 3: Or something like that, refractable because he got he.
Speaker 7: Actually got fired from the job eventually, and he's uh
Speaker 7: he was no, no, no Lions Lions.
Speaker 5: Oh oh yeah, Bobby Lyons. I think it was Bobby Lions. Bobby. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he wasn't there when I got there. He was already out. Yeah.
Speaker 7: I had the hook. I had the only firehouse I
Speaker 7: knew was, you know, going to the rock and see
Speaker 7: looking up off the Parkway and see the fire Sawyer
Speaker 7: Boulevard South. And my cousin was a Port Authority cop
Speaker 7: and so I was talking to him, and his partner
Speaker 7: was Flood's son, Captain Flood's son. So my cousin talked
Speaker 7: to you know, you know, talk to talk and went
Speaker 7: to Captain Flood and uh Lions went actually to the
Speaker 7: firehouse and introduced himself, and he was a sports guy.
Speaker 7: He played softball, baseball, that type of stuff. So what
Speaker 7: I'm thinking is that Captain Flood called Captain and Charon
Speaker 7: to do to do a flop, you know, a swift blop. Yeah,
Speaker 7: flip flop, And I wound up there.
Speaker 3: So so the Lions walked in. He says, I'm a
Speaker 3: good softball player in the basketball and you came in.
Speaker 5: And I think he lived.
Speaker 7: He went to the neighborhood, and so it's ah, but
Speaker 7: I think I got the better end of the deal.
Speaker 5: So what did they, Jim?
Speaker 6: Were they Were they running around a lot in eighty
Speaker 6: one when you got there? Were they the winding trucks
Speaker 6: running around?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 5: Not like not like later on.
Speaker 3: No, he's got he's got the numbers right there?
Speaker 7: Rough what Yeah, I got the numbers. Hold on a minute, let.
Speaker 4: Me let me go to the book.
Speaker 5: I had to be doing five thousand.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think the busiest all right here it is,
Speaker 7: uh so eighty one, eighty one twenty twenty five hundred
Speaker 7: perfect that's that's the engine. That's the engine.
Speaker 5: Oh, oh my god, even better.
Speaker 9: Before you see, so if I can find it.
Speaker 4: Steve Weisman eighty one.
Speaker 7: Uh, we're doing thirty thirty eight thirty eight, one hundred.
Speaker 5: Runs in eighty one still a lot, yeah yeah, uh and.
Speaker 7: We got up. We peaked out at uh six thousand
Speaker 7: and seven. Yeah, I was ninety two.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we stayed like I got your one thousand, five
Speaker 7: thousand runs.
Speaker 5: And I think now, I.
Speaker 6: Think my first year there in ninety three, in nineteen
Speaker 6: ninety three, we did fifty five hundred runs. We were
Speaker 6: going you were going to a lot of pull boxes too.
Speaker 6: I mean we were going to but there was a
Speaker 6: lot of I felt like I was catching work. When
Speaker 6: did you feel like in your whole career not to
Speaker 6: jump around? What was the busiest time?
Speaker 7: Well, that that that period in the nineties that we
Speaker 7: were you know, we were doing five.
Speaker 5: It's felt like you were going to work all the time.
Speaker 3: I swear like you guys, we would go to Wolf
Speaker 3: fifty four a lot, man, there was one.
Speaker 5: I remember they were going to a lot of work, man,
Speaker 5: like a couple one period.
Speaker 7: I don't I don't know what year it was, but
Speaker 7: it's start. You know, usually it gets busy, like before Christmas,
Speaker 7: everybody starts putting their heating systems on and putting up
Speaker 7: the candles and all that shit.
Speaker 3: There was.
Speaker 7: There was a stretch from the middle of December all
Speaker 7: the way to the summer where almost every single tour
Speaker 7: you worked, You went to work, you caught a job,
Speaker 7: sometimes two, sometimes three, you know, in a twenty four
Speaker 7: and everybody was catching on one thirty eight, one thirty six.
Speaker 7: You guys won sixty three. So I think that time
Speaker 7: was probably the best time as as a whole, because
Speaker 7: everybody was sharp, everybody, everybody was on their toes. Uh, everybody,
Speaker 7: you know, being that we're you know, going here and
Speaker 7: there for work. You know, we'd work well with one
Speaker 7: thirty eight, were well one seventeen when you know, guys
Speaker 7: were in a good spot man. Yeah, everybody meshed mesh. Yeah,
Speaker 7: it was perfect. Every guy, everybody.
Speaker 3: Job heavily populated over there, mean the Spanish community that is, you.
Speaker 5: Know, I think you think got h all over the place.
Speaker 5: H is they got a building, but they have a
Speaker 5: huge area.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we don't really. We didn't really have any brownstones.
Speaker 7: We had some brownstone types down there at the hospital.
Speaker 7: We didn't really have to have any projects over there, right, No, none,
Speaker 7: none at all, thank Evan's none.
Speaker 5: Right, that's what I said. They don't even have anything.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we did. We had one, I think one building
Speaker 7: over seven stories maybe including the hospital. We had the hospital,
Speaker 7: but really didn't have high rise Left Rock City. We
Speaker 7: went down to Left Rock City a lot, so that
Speaker 7: was that was kind of like a high rise down there.
Speaker 7: But my first job, oh, I had no idea. I don't,
Speaker 7: I don't remember.
Speaker 3: You remember your first job?
Speaker 7: Not really that guy now that was Funker Gear. That
Speaker 7: wasn't even that was ninety five. After ninety five yeah, mhm, oh.
Speaker 5: Wow, you look like a baby dare for God's sake,
Speaker 5: and you already had what happened.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but what was what was nice about that time
Speaker 7: frame was like being we had so much work. It's
Speaker 7: like just coming into work. It wasn't yo, if we're
Speaker 7: going to get a job tonight, it's it's just when
Speaker 7: we're going to get a join. So you're already you know,
Speaker 7: you're already in that in that we're got to catch
Speaker 7: work mode. So you were, yeah, you know, you went
Speaker 7: to work. You made sure your gear was right, you
Speaker 7: went over the rig, you made sure all the tools
Speaker 7: were good. You know what you should be doing anyway,
Speaker 7: But back then it was just it. Yeah, you just
Speaker 7: did it unconsciously because you were going to catch work.
Speaker 7: So make sure all your masks were operating.
Speaker 3: You had to spare a botty timing in ninety three,
Speaker 3: transmitted five second alongs in three months.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and and there you go. He like Dan is
Speaker 7: probably one of the best lieutenants on the job.
Speaker 3: I'll suggesting once it like you guarantee doing a drill
Speaker 3: that night.
Speaker 7: Oh, absolutely, and a big drill.
Speaker 3: Yep. I was sitting at the table reading something. You
Speaker 3: were doing something.
Speaker 7: It starts, the drill starts at A and you're working
Speaker 7: your way to B, but it jumps to Z and
Speaker 7: then it goes to M and then eventually you wind
Speaker 7: up that B again.
Speaker 5: But it's uh, oh boy, office is there?
Speaker 7: And uh when I first got there, let's see, I
Speaker 7: had Lieutenant Howie Kennedy he was, he was a Gordon
Speaker 7: Bennett winner.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 7: I think the year previous when I got there.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 7: Uh, Joe donnad Telly.
Speaker 4: He was.
Speaker 7: He flew in B seventeens in World War two damn yes,
Speaker 7: and then I and it was Lieutenant Goodman. He was
Speaker 7: and his name, his name was a perfect description to him.
Speaker 4: He was.
Speaker 7: He was a perfect gentleman the whole time. And it
Speaker 7: was Captain Cochera. He had old, old old school guy,
Speaker 7: had had twenty years as a captain in one fifty four. Woow,
Speaker 7: he lived in He lived in Corona. That yeah, he
Speaker 7: lived in Corona just about twenty. I think it was
Speaker 7: like nineteen plus years. He lived in Corona. And he
Speaker 7: walked to the firehouse every day.
Speaker 3: So Corona was shit. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 7: It was a big yeah Italian neighborhood, you know.
Speaker 3: So it was yep, wow.
Speaker 7: You know, there were good bosses to learn from.
Speaker 3: And uh, when do you go to show for school?
Speaker 7: Eighty eighty six?
Speaker 4: I believe.
Speaker 7: When eighty six?
Speaker 4: And how'd you like.
Speaker 3: Driving? Is all right?
Speaker 4: I liked it.
Speaker 7: So one of my first first details to drive was
Speaker 7: to one seventeen and.
Speaker 5: Can't be good.
Speaker 4: I was gonna say earning garbage cans involved or anything.
Speaker 4: We always got to bring those garbage cans in here somehow, but.
Speaker 7: We got we got relocated to Manhattan, which I had
Speaker 7: no I have no idea you know the streets of Manhattan.
Speaker 7: But Dan knows almost every street in the city because
Speaker 7: I think he's worked on on pools every place in
Speaker 7: the city.
Speaker 5: So he knows everything. That man knows everything.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and the thing in the firehouse was you don't
Speaker 7: you don't drive Dan, you steer him because he just
Speaker 7: sell you go here. But yeah, him, that's perfect.
Speaker 5: It was good.
Speaker 7: You know, he had He had a certain way to
Speaker 7: get into a story that uh, you know, you're keep
Speaker 7: in your back of your mind all these all these
Speaker 7: maybe they're not short cuts, but a lot of times
Speaker 7: the b q wee was was backed up or was
Speaker 7: shut down for whatever reason. And now if you used
Speaker 7: to go into one, you know, getting to like one
Speaker 7: seventeen the same way all the time you get shut down,
Speaker 7: you oh sure we'll go this, We'll just go this
Speaker 7: way instead.
Speaker 5: So he, you know, it was he was.
Speaker 7: He was a good boss to have.
Speaker 5: You learned.
Speaker 7: You learned a lot of stuff from him.
Speaker 4: Jimmy, what, Jimmy, what were those objects in the rearview
Speaker 4: mirror when you were driving?
Speaker 7: The objects?
Speaker 4: Yeah, what were the objects? And those were the objects?
Speaker 4: What are they? What units? What vehicles? What are they?
Speaker 4: Are they behind you in the rearview mirror.
Speaker 5: Oh second, it was.
Speaker 4: Kindly we after one of our shirts, trying to slide
Speaker 4: it in there.
Speaker 5: But I think he Jim. I remember I worked h
Speaker 5: a detail and uh uh he was working.
Speaker 6: And I think it was at night or getting right
Speaker 6: around maybe seven eight o'clock or something like that. I
Speaker 6: don't know if I said this when he was on
Speaker 6: the show, but like what I remember, we were we
Speaker 6: were driving and like you remember when they they used
Speaker 6: to dig up the road, they used to put those
Speaker 6: metal plates on the roads. Right, something happened where the
Speaker 6: plate was like cock eyed a little bit. I mean
Speaker 6: the hole wasn't open, but it was cock eyed something.
Speaker 6: A truck must have hit it and it bounced and
Speaker 6: it was.
Speaker 4: It was awful.
Speaker 6: Next thing, you know, we were like off the truck
Speaker 6: and got you know again, I would have never even
Speaker 6: thought about that, you know what I mean. I don't
Speaker 6: remember what we did, but we started doing somethinagling to.
Speaker 3: Put it back.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's a dan was the perils used to call
Speaker 7: like Perils of Grandma. We'd be we'd be out on
Speaker 7: a run or coming back from a box and yeah,
Speaker 7: we'll go back to the firehouse and all of a
Speaker 7: sudden you go, sorry, make I'll turn here. So you
Speaker 7: turn there just like a street sign that got sheer off,
Speaker 7: you know, and it's about yeah, maybe six They were
Speaker 7: pulled Grandma and tailors. So usually if we had we
Speaker 7: had a junior guy or or proby on on the rig,
Speaker 7: he was the one and kind of make like like
Speaker 7: bets to see how many strikes with them all would
Speaker 7: take him to either push it down completely into the
Speaker 7: ground or want to shear it up at the sidewalk level.
Speaker 7: So but we did that. You know, if you're just
Speaker 7: driving back all the turney. Okay, so it's a grandma.
Speaker 7: You know, we've gotta be doing fixing something.
Speaker 5: You know, I'm doing something right. Yeah, he did that
Speaker 5: a lot. I remember the guys talking about that.
Speaker 3: It was good. So do you remember the first day
Speaker 3: the rug walked into the firehouse?
Speaker 7: Probably not, but I say I just remember a few
Speaker 7: times like when before Richie became a chauffur, and he
Speaker 7: was a good chaulf too. There was there was you know,
Speaker 7: if you had the ov position, you know in the truck. Yeah,
Speaker 7: that was one thing I'd always make sure I knew
Speaker 7: who the Sheaulf is the engine chaufers were in the
Speaker 7: battalion because you know, some guys are better than right.
Speaker 7: And you know, Richie would always get water. So if
Speaker 7: I had the o V, I would have no problem
Speaker 7: going in the floor above and doing a good search,
Speaker 7: you know, staying in there doing a good search where
Speaker 7: some guys you know, you know they're working or certain
Speaker 7: companies are working. The Yeah, maybe I won't go win
Speaker 7: as far, you know, because I don't know if they're
Speaker 7: gonna get water, you know. So Richie, Richie was a
Speaker 7: good shaulf. But before the break, ye before he became
Speaker 7: a shaffer. When he when he went in with the
Speaker 7: nozzle team, you know, we get back to the firehouses,
Speaker 7: Rugg would be all all shift, all shifted around.
Speaker 4: Up.
Speaker 7: It's like, you know, it's all like cock eid his head.
Speaker 9: And it's like.
Speaker 5: He never he never thought it looked bad. That's even
Speaker 5: that's even crazy. Well, I never thought it looked bad.
Speaker 7: The remember when you had Phil tofano on he told
Speaker 7: the story about him and to Shak in the kitchen.
Speaker 7: You know, they were talking about something and Ritchie goes
Speaker 7: something you don't even know what reality is, and goes
Speaker 7: on reality, what that thing on your head? And left.
Speaker 3: Had a good offense, no defense.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, Richie was that place was.
Speaker 5: Tough words with the guys were tough over, funny and
Speaker 5: tough man.
Speaker 3: Phil Bill had a rug too, So it was Phil
Speaker 3: him and one other dude I think.
Speaker 7: Had it was Lieutenant Jimmy Johnson. Uh, Jimmy Johnson had
Speaker 7: had a rug. Phil had a rug. Timmy Walters had
Speaker 7: a rug. So we had like the most rugs in
Speaker 7: the Madonna.
Speaker 5: On the job. Bald was Bald wasn't in then. Bald
Speaker 5: wasn't in then, so everybody was hiding it right.
Speaker 7: With Timmy Walter's rug. He was down in the down
Speaker 7: in the rat hole and uh, you're back. I'm not,
Speaker 7: I'm you know how things were in the firehouse. So
Speaker 7: he was down there sitting in there. The guy comes
Speaker 7: up from the from the basement and he goes, you
Speaker 7: gotta go downstairs and see Timmy. So I go down.
Speaker 10: He's sitting on one of the stools and because they
Speaker 10: lifted up his rug and they put a paper towel here,
Speaker 10: put his rug back so like it looked like you
Speaker 10: know those cartoon quails.
Speaker 3: He had no idea.
Speaker 7: What was the I go, I go into the TV
Speaker 7: room down there, and it's it's uh, I just I
Speaker 7: almost fall to my knees laughing. It's like he goes ja. Yeah,
Speaker 7: it's like I forgot something upstairs. I gotta go back upstairs.
Speaker 7: Almost been making up the stairs. I was laughing so hard.
Speaker 3: There was some funny guys over there.
Speaker 5: Man, dude, there were funny guys there. I mean, all
Speaker 5: of those guys. I could think of so many names. Yeah,
Speaker 5: Johnny c right, Yeah, Frats for TAngelo, wasn't Johnny.
Speaker 7: Remember that Johnny married the girl from the grocery store across.
Speaker 5: Across the street. I remember that. I remember that.
Speaker 7: I remember the grocery store changed owners and he would
Speaker 7: go over get to get the meal sometimes, and I
Speaker 7: guess he got friendly with the one girl working.
Speaker 5: He was too nice for that place too. He was
Speaker 5: one of those guys, too nice. Frats.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Johnny. Johnny was good people. So I mean, I
Speaker 7: think that you know the whole thing with the firehouses.
Speaker 7: I mean there's there's gotta be some people in the
Speaker 7: firehouse you may or may not get along with very well,
Speaker 7: but you still have to work with them. So I
Speaker 7: mean you can have like like Tooshak was very on
Speaker 7: the liberal side. He was very left. Filter final was
Speaker 7: on you know uber right, Oh my god, they would
Speaker 7: they would be going at it fact, but you're still
Speaker 7: working together, and you know, and you know, there's you
Speaker 7: can't hate anybody because you know, you've got to rely
Speaker 7: on these guys to you know, to come and get
Speaker 7: you if if you give him a day, you know,
Speaker 7: or you know you need a hose line real quick.
Speaker 7: You know, you have to be able to work with
Speaker 7: everybody and and put that, you know, that crap to
Speaker 7: the side, and you know that when you get back
Speaker 7: to the firehouse and you can start breaking balls again
Speaker 7: and arguing. But you know, when when the job comes in,
Speaker 7: you gotta everybody's got to pull together.
Speaker 3: So Filter Fattle self proclaimed smartest man on the job, right.
Speaker 9: That's right, that's right. He was.
Speaker 3: He was.
Speaker 7: He was interesting when he got to the firehouse. Yeah,
Speaker 7: I'm you know, he's one of the guys I really
Speaker 7: I really miss tremendously.
Speaker 5: He was.
Speaker 7: He was a great character in the firehouse. Ah and
Speaker 7: I'm probably I'm gonna go visit visit his uh you know,
Speaker 7: his wife and his son. When I'm going down to
Speaker 7: South Carolina visit my son, so I usually try to
Speaker 7: stop by and say hello to them. But uh, Phil,
Speaker 7: I remember, I think he just just about got off probation,
Speaker 7: or maybe he was just store on probably so I
Speaker 7: think he may still had the pumpkin patch on his
Speaker 7: on his helmet. I'm sitting in the kitchen table. He
Speaker 7: comes in from the apparatus floor and he has his
Speaker 7: like skull and crossbones decal on his helmet, and I'm
Speaker 7: looking at him. There you go, let me ask you something.
Speaker 7: You think you have enough time on a job and
Speaker 7: enough experience to put that ship on your helmet to
Speaker 7: look make it look salty. Yeah, and he's he's like
Speaker 7: puts his head down and he goes like noakes. He
Speaker 7: takes it off, but he climb up the Yes he did,
Speaker 7: uh escape.
Speaker 5: I was at that job. I seen him climbing up
Speaker 5: the escape ladder.
Speaker 7: With with the roofsw Yeah, there's there are pictures of
Speaker 7: that man on the job. There's they have pictures of.
Speaker 3: Him going up. So so.
Speaker 7: Lieutenant Dan had some words with him after that.
Speaker 5: I think, yeah, that might be thing.
Speaker 6: I remember a guy saying that might be a never
Speaker 6: there's not there's only a few nevers and that that
Speaker 6: might be one.
Speaker 7: And what what is it that ladder emergency has to
Speaker 7: be emergency all the time and you're going down, You're
Speaker 7: not you're not going up to the bucket with with equipment.
Speaker 7: So but uh, you know, his his his thinking outside
Speaker 7: the box wasn't the right outside the box thinking. He
Speaker 7: made it the chief right, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: He was.
Speaker 7: He was a smart He was a really smart guy,
Speaker 7: right self, smartest guy in the firehouse, but on the job,
Speaker 7: on the job.
Speaker 5: But he took care of me, Philly took care of
Speaker 5: me when I was getting out. He took care of me. Man. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he really did.
Speaker 7: Good good people. That was ah yeah, yeah, all right.
Speaker 3: So I'm gonna tell the story about the plaque now.
Speaker 7: Oh the plaque plaque is awesome.
Speaker 3: To eighty eight has a yellow gold back plaque with
Speaker 3: silver chrome to eight eight on it. We go to
Speaker 3: a job one day over by one fifty four.
Speaker 5: That came off the building that used to be on
Speaker 5: the building.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that was on the used to be on the
Speaker 7: front bumper of the their ring right of.
Speaker 3: Two eighty eight toll ring just a two eight eight.
Speaker 3: But pet Brendan made it into the squad plaque. We
Speaker 3: go to this job by one fifty Before we come back,
Speaker 3: we notice, Jesus, the plaque is gone. Somebody took the plaque.
Speaker 3: Now mind you, I saw firing and Phil and playing clothes.
Speaker 3: They must have been buffing the job. So right away
Speaker 3: my antennis, why was that? I don't know. So plaque
Speaker 3: is missing. We don't know where it goes. Un Like
Speaker 3: I got to say, what eight months later, maybe we
Speaker 3: start getting there. It is the two eighty eight. Uh,
Speaker 3: there it is real.
Speaker 5: We start we.
Speaker 3: Start getting postcards from the plaque. And now it's wherever
Speaker 3: these guys are taking it. They could be in Disney,
Speaker 3: they could be in Germany. It's and the plaque is
Speaker 3: in front of their face and they say, hey me,
Speaker 3: the plaque and New Jersey having a great time. Miss
Speaker 3: you see Sue, you were here, you were here. And
Speaker 3: it travels all over the world.
Speaker 7: I think it went to Japan probably, I think it
Speaker 7: went to I know it went to Canada in Cape Cod.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: It's definitely Disney.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and was definitely Disney. But the best plau is
Speaker 3: how they wrote the post because hey, it's me the plaque,
Speaker 3: really miss, We'll be home Sue.
Speaker 7: And I think there were a few phone calls too
Speaker 7: that were made.
Speaker 3: Yes and the plot. Yeah. A couple of months after that,
Speaker 3: we get a knock on the door. Open the door,
Speaker 3: there's the plat. I guess they're done with it. Put
Speaker 3: it back on the rake. A couple of weeks later,
Speaker 3: now another knock on the door, and there's like an
Speaker 3: envelope in there, and there's a picture of some resembles
Speaker 3: a woman. It resembles a woman because it's got uh,
Speaker 3: her toenails are polished, and she's urinating in the shower
Speaker 3: on the plaque.
Speaker 5: We were all like this. We were like, oh, oh,
Speaker 5: that's that's that might be pushing it a little.
Speaker 7: That was the worst part of its vacation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: So nearly Neary calls the Matt Neary calls over there
Speaker 3: the answer for the seeding man. He goes, you know, guys,
Speaker 3: that was a great great You guys were so funny
Speaker 3: with that. He says, the only sad part is one
Speaker 3: of you guys is probably banging that behemoth.
Speaker 9: That was.
Speaker 5: He did say something like that. I remember, I remember
Speaker 5: him talking about the feet. He was like yeah.
Speaker 6: But then after that we definitely had like a good
Speaker 6: rivalry going with one fifty four, you know, like a
Speaker 6: little bit here and there, and then like whatever we
Speaker 6: were doing, they would chirp us on the radio. We
Speaker 6: would do something today. I'm like, whatever we were doing,
Speaker 6: and then what what happened? Coops at the at the airport?
Speaker 5: We had run?
Speaker 7: Yeah we got all right, you remember that, Yeah, we
Speaker 7: get we got.
Speaker 5: I was going to ask you that that wasn't you
Speaker 5: driving right?
Speaker 7: No, that was it wasn't that. I just saw pictures
Speaker 7: of that. I think I came into like one.
Speaker 6: I forget what they did. You know, they tried to
Speaker 6: cut across like one of the fields or something by
Speaker 6: the by the uh by the airport, yeah, by LaGuardia,
Speaker 6: and they were stuck to the chat like it was
Speaker 6: deep and they couldn't get out. I think they ended
Speaker 6: up having the sanitation the plow guys or something come
Speaker 6: you know whatever, come get them.
Speaker 5: So on Garo, who always had his camera with them
Speaker 5: all the time.
Speaker 6: Garo started like snapping pictures of the rig in the thing,
Speaker 6: and then we started sending.
Speaker 5: Them, Yeah, we started sending them pictures.
Speaker 6: And then I think after that it kind of it
Speaker 6: kind of dropped up a little bit, but it was
Speaker 6: always still fun.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 3: There was another time, another neary story. You gotta love it.
Speaker 3: You know what's gonna involve. He's working at the rescue
Speaker 3: school now at the Randall's Island and who does he
Speaker 3: see one fifty fourth rate there? They must have been
Speaker 3: doing some kind of training, right. He goes in and
Speaker 3: takes a giant ship and the caught we can and
Speaker 3: put it on the engine compartment fifty four rigg. He
Speaker 3: said it was like ninety degrees too.
Speaker 5: Bro, I remember that. I remember that.
Speaker 7: I never heard that's that's the first time I'm hearing.
Speaker 7: I guess the guys who were working that they kept
Speaker 7: that up, kept that on the down low.
Speaker 5: Probably who who is the funniest guy in the firehouse? Jim?
Speaker 7: I would I would probably say like Steve Farring firing right.
Speaker 5: It had to be fairy Steve.
Speaker 7: It was always fun, you know. When him and Glen
Speaker 7: b Ruby got together, and him and Glen ber Ruby
Speaker 7: got they were like.
Speaker 5: It was like.
Speaker 7: Firehouse every it was. It was just so much fun.
Speaker 3: Now, I'll go through the shoes from the You're good,
Speaker 3: uh what he got Big Philly right there in the middle.
Speaker 7: Big Philly, John Nepolitano, Shelley Barocus. I'm not sure that
Speaker 7: the guy on the fall fall right, he wasn't. He
Speaker 7: wasn't at the house that long. But his uh, try
Speaker 7: to take what his nickname was? Was't ha bag No,
Speaker 7: he said he you know, it was something like he
Speaker 7: was always like nah. So I think they nickname his.
Speaker 5: No help?
Speaker 6: What's the guy's name all the way on the left, Jim,
Speaker 6: what's his name? I see him all the time. I
Speaker 6: can never remember George tre Broh the guy. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: he was in three or seven the whole time, right, yes, ladies.
Speaker 7: Man Keith yep yep, Keith O'Connor next to him, Charlie
Speaker 7: Hoffman behind the pennant, and Steve Carbon up on the
Speaker 7: on the back step.
Speaker 5: Was there a long time too, right Carbon?
Speaker 7: Yep yep. Charlie, Charlie Hoffman and John and Shelley are
Speaker 7: no longer with us.
Speaker 3: So yeah, So Nappy came from one forty one fifty
Speaker 3: four right, yes, and then he went to rescue two yep.
Speaker 3: I think he was driving. When was he driving that
Speaker 3: got him over to two? He was driving the commissioner
Speaker 3: or somebody, I don't know.
Speaker 7: It was he It could have been chief of department
Speaker 7: or maybe the commission I don't know.
Speaker 5: He was driving, don't hurt.
Speaker 7: So he got over there and uh, I don't know
Speaker 7: even happened and that was it.
Speaker 5: So he was really still have all right, So let's talk.
Speaker 7: He would get uh John would get the house. Uh
Speaker 7: you know, he was a volley out and.
Speaker 3: Hot bog.
Speaker 7: Lake Lakeland near Lake ron concu or he would get
Speaker 7: he would get the good flashlights for us. So I
Speaker 7: still have the flashlight that he got for me, do
Speaker 7: you Yeah, I just can't. I you know, sentimental thing,
Speaker 7: you know, it's just uh way of remembering, remembering him
Speaker 7: a little bit, you know, I you know, when it
Speaker 7: was out of my shed.
Speaker 5: Now what was it like working with Richie Schmidt?
Speaker 7: Richie Schmidt was his his his first job. He really
Speaker 7: wasn't even working. We were having a company meeting at
Speaker 7: the change of tours. Uh uh you know, like sixth
Speaker 7: at night or whatever. We got the bakery diagonally across
Speaker 7: the street from the firehouse on eighty Uh it's eighty
Speaker 7: eighty first Street, and he literally he just got to
Speaker 7: the company and I think his first tour was like
Speaker 7: one or two days after after this happened. But I
Speaker 7: pulled pulled the rig out out of the quarters and
Speaker 7: I bring it up to the baker. I put the
Speaker 7: stick up to the roof, and I'm on the pedestal
Speaker 7: and Richie's below the pedestal on the street with a
Speaker 7: Halligan and a mall or an something. Because how many
Speaker 7: stores you want me to open up? How many stores
Speaker 7: you want me to open up? And I said, I'll
Speaker 7: just go down two or three stores open them up.
Speaker 7: And you know, the guy's a machine.
Speaker 3: He's got gigettic cads, right, and.
Speaker 7: Yeah, he's probably one of the strongest guys I've ever
Speaker 7: known in my life. If he worked out legitimately, he'd
Speaker 7: be a phenomenal.
Speaker 3: He used to bust my brother's bulls. My brother be
Speaker 3: there working out, maybe with two plates on benching. He
Speaker 3: come in and he goes, what do you do, rich
Speaker 3: I'll work it out. Put a couple more plates on that,
Speaker 3: put a couple more plates on, he go walk out.
Speaker 7: He told me once that when he was you know,
Speaker 7: he was a uh you know, he was a builder.
Speaker 7: He used to do contracting work and stuff like that.
Speaker 7: But when he was doing roofs, he used to have
Speaker 7: a competition with one of his one of his partners,
Speaker 7: to see how many bundles and shingles you could bring
Speaker 7: up to the roof. At one time he'd bring up four. Yeah,
Speaker 7: they're eighty pounds bundles. So you put two bungles on
Speaker 7: each oulder and up the ladder. And when the the
Speaker 7: iron bars on the windows. He would sometimes just go
Speaker 7: up to him and just just pull him, pull him
Speaker 7: off the window, put his legs, put his legs up
Speaker 7: on the wall, and just like just pull him right off,
Speaker 7: you know, Benjim and toss him over. Guy was, uh,
Speaker 7: you know, he's a super fireman. You know that's that's
Speaker 7: the only way you can describe him. Yeah, he's like
Speaker 7: you know in you know, Lieutenant Dan's Dan Buckeyes class
Speaker 7: and fireman, you know, super super fireman.
Speaker 3: So he went a lot of guys went to rescue for,
Speaker 3: right Charlie Weeman.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Charlie Weeman went to rescue for one of the
Speaker 7: one of the guys at my first class and Proby
Speaker 7: school that I taught. He's over there now, yuh Shoemaker
Speaker 7: if you know him. It was his father was on
Speaker 7: the job to shoot His father was the shoe. Yep,
Speaker 7: all the shoe, the sh we call him, we call
Speaker 7: him Jason Schuemaker. We call him Willy Shoemaker for the
Speaker 7: But the shoe was in two fifty two, right roof.
Speaker 5: But what's that?
Speaker 7: I don't I don't know where.
Speaker 3: I don't know where she was in two fifty two.
Speaker 7: And then uh, we had we had four guys go
Speaker 7: up to rescue three Tommy Tommy forget, Bobby Anderson went
Speaker 7: up there, Danny Barry went up there.
Speaker 5: And uh oh, Bobby Anderson.
Speaker 7: Holy yeah, Scott, I forgot Scott Maxwell. Scott Maxwell went
Speaker 7: up Yeah.
Speaker 3: So it's like the breathing ground for rescues over there.
Speaker 7: Resk you and and a lot of I think two Ruby, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: he went to did you go to rescue one?
Speaker 3: One?
Speaker 9: One?
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's called ready mout mouth.
Speaker 7: That's Richie Schmid. He calls everybody walls. I said, we
Speaker 7: had a lot of the three, three of the four.
Speaker 7: She he's in the four nine battalion from one fifty four.
Speaker 3: So so yeah, this is still all the job was
Speaker 3: he is? He off.
Speaker 7: I don't see when did I see him last?
Speaker 5: I think it's still working.
Speaker 7: I saw him at the Centennial I don't know. He's
Speaker 7: working on that.
Speaker 3: How all goes the centennial?
Speaker 7: What was the data on it? It was in February.
Speaker 7: Oh wow, Yeah, so we had a good turn. Now
Speaker 7: it's like at the house. There's like two hundred people,
Speaker 7: you know, dignitaries and a lot of retired guys showed
Speaker 7: up and we had the the party over the plat
Speaker 7: Deutsch over Flour O'park.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Man, that was that was a fun time.
Speaker 5: So it was good to see what did you see Johnny?
Speaker 5: See was Johnny c there?
Speaker 7: I'm trying to think. I think, yeah, I know he
Speaker 7: was at the firehouse. He was at ceremony at the firehouse. Uh,
Speaker 7: but you know there's just so many people there, you know,
Speaker 7: you try to talk to ye.
Speaker 5: I liked he was a good guy. Man Johnny's team.
Speaker 5: How did your own.
Speaker 7: Little little cocko?
Speaker 4: That was his?
Speaker 7: Uh, because he worked he worked in uh the house
Speaker 7: over and Flushing. I'm not sure if it was one
Speaker 7: twenty nine the ladder on the engine over there.
Speaker 5: I think it was one twenty nine.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they had they had a guy and then he
Speaker 7: went to forty six. He got promote anyway, Yeah, they
Speaker 7: had a guy over there named Big Cocko, so they
Speaker 7: named him Little Cocko.
Speaker 5: He was sure.
Speaker 3: Lieutenant Dance as it was a drill At two pm
Speaker 3: he was reporting from Probie School. I think he's talking about.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I said a lot of how many captains, Oh, captains?
Speaker 5: How many captains did you go through?
Speaker 3: Seven? Seven?
Speaker 4: Wow?
Speaker 7: Yeah was my first and uh, Kenny's ile. Kenny's iel
Speaker 7: was they kind of screwed him or around if he
Speaker 7: had he got hurt of the job. I guess when
Speaker 7: he was a lieutenant years ago and his back was
Speaker 7: given him, he actually went to the hospital. He went
Speaker 7: to the emergency room one night from when he was
Speaker 7: at home. His back seized up and he couldn't. I
Speaker 7: guess whatever nerve uh that was going through the vertebrae
Speaker 7: that helped him breathe kind of seized up. So he
Speaker 7: was I think they had him on a resuscitator for
Speaker 7: a little while. They wouldn't put him give him three quarters.
Speaker 7: I would. I would drive the guy down. You know,
Speaker 7: we're going to a box and I you and you
Speaker 7: see you see a bump coming up or a pothole
Speaker 7: coming up. He would like hold the you know, hold
Speaker 7: the front dashboard and hold the side over here.
Speaker 5: And he's bracing.
Speaker 7: I was afraid I was gonna I was going to
Speaker 7: paralyze the guy hit the bump to what I would
Speaker 7: you know, you know, like the speed you normally come
Speaker 7: back from a job or or or a box from.
Speaker 7: That's how I would drive to the box when when
Speaker 7: he was working, because I was afraid he's gonna I
Speaker 7: was going to do something to his back if we
Speaker 7: had hit anything too hot.
Speaker 4: So he was a good boss.
Speaker 7: I'll tell you.
Speaker 3: We had.
Speaker 7: You know, a lot of a lot of good captains
Speaker 7: come through.
Speaker 3: You have Fifer the engine, didn't you.
Speaker 7: Yes, yeah, he was. I was in Proby school. He
Speaker 7: was in my Proby class. You know, good old little
Speaker 7: Joe Peiffer.
Speaker 3: What about brother used to call my brother had a
Speaker 3: nickname for him too. I can't remember.
Speaker 7: I remember when he when he got promoted to well,
Speaker 7: he bounced to a house when he got promoted to lieutenant.
Speaker 7: And we had a guy, Phil Kelly, came in a
Speaker 7: few years before me. I was in how I was
Speaker 7: at house watching. He was working in the truck for
Speaker 7: the for the day tour. So he was up in
Speaker 7: the the officers seat doing whatever he was doing up there.
Speaker 7: Phil Kelly comes in into the firehouse and looks in
Speaker 7: the looks at the truck, and it starts laughing. Who
Speaker 7: brought their kid to work? It looked like somebody brought
Speaker 7: their kid to work. He was h.
Speaker 4: It was funny.
Speaker 7: So yeah, then then he then he got I guess
Speaker 7: promoted to captain and he got to spot in the
Speaker 7: engine eventually. So he definitely definitely liked.
Speaker 3: The m s.
Speaker 4: Yeah money, he's sleeping.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well we built the he's not not in that picture.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So the guy on the very Mary Carson from the Giants,
Speaker 7: big dude, he would stop it. You bring his son
Speaker 7: once in a while to say.
Speaker 4: Hello, No, I see it's actually did he live near
Speaker 4: by or something?
Speaker 7: He just lived in New Jersey?
Speaker 4: Did he just picked your firehouse?
Speaker 7: Yeah? And he he you know, it's he could probably
Speaker 7: afford any car he wanted. And he used to come
Speaker 7: by in like a like a jeep Cherokee all the time.
Speaker 7: So yes, Johnny Fratts in the in the middle of
Speaker 7: the short day in the middle.
Speaker 3: Right, yep, Yeah, I don't know, he was over there.
Speaker 7: Yeah. And Brian Deary on the far right, he just
Speaker 7: got promoted to deputy chief. Yeah. Fabro Is on the
Speaker 7: on the far left, far right. Excuse me, Trumbley Bruno's
Speaker 7: behind him to shacks behind Harry Carson. Jimmy Brooks is
Speaker 7: between the guy to the left of Jimmy Brooks. I
Speaker 7: think he was from three to sixteen. I think that's
Speaker 7: Joe Dunlevy behind Frats. Just seeing the eyes and top
Speaker 7: of the nose, it looks like Buddha. And I don't
Speaker 7: remember the name of the guy that's between Abbamonty and
Speaker 7: right behind Albamonty.
Speaker 4: Mhm, I have to look that name up. Any A
Speaker 4: couple of guys here, there's some newer picture. This is
Speaker 4: just another day, the same day.
Speaker 7: Yeah, same same guys, different different posey.
Speaker 4: All right, all right, Well to make sure I didn't forget.
Speaker 4: These are too late. Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: There's another one there.
Speaker 9: That one.
Speaker 4: Yep, you're there. Cool, that's the.
Speaker 3: That's the shmow right in the middle, the schmoo.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he came in.
Speaker 7: He got to the house. They had that thing going
Speaker 7: on where uh, if a proby went to a slow
Speaker 7: house and there was a senior guy in another house
Speaker 7: that was thinking about transferring, he could bump they could switch.
Speaker 7: Remember that for ninety days or ninety days, and uh,
Speaker 7: that's how he got who the ship Bob Montgomery from
Speaker 7: the engine he went, he went over to two to
Speaker 7: uh call it white Stone, excuse me, the house in
Speaker 7: white Stone.
Speaker 5: That's how we got named.
Speaker 6: Uh dude, that was the sickest story I ever heard
Speaker 6: guys do to somebody what they did to the shmoo
Speaker 6: with the can.
Speaker 5: So it was there was something with the can. I
Speaker 5: thought you.
Speaker 6: I was hoping you had all the facts because I
Speaker 6: remember hearing it kind of like third hand. Yeah, something
Speaker 6: where he had the can. You remember they used to
Speaker 6: have the can that used to flip down right. You
Speaker 6: guys had the can that flipped.
Speaker 7: Down right like that right on the outside outside.
Speaker 5: So he did something.
Speaker 6: I think there was like a strap or something that
Speaker 6: you had to do to lock it in, and he
Speaker 6: forgot to do it. I don't remember exactly how, but
Speaker 6: there was something where he forgot to do something to
Speaker 6: keep it from falling out right. So supposedly what the
Speaker 6: guys did was they had they saw a cop or
Speaker 6: something down the road, like a couple of streets down,
Speaker 6: and they said to the guy, take this can and
Speaker 6: walk it up. Say that the can flew off the
Speaker 6: rig and hit some and then the girl is like
Speaker 6: in the spital or something. Right, oh, they do this,
Speaker 6: and the cop comes up and he has to come
Speaker 6: running out to the to the you know that. The
Speaker 6: balllls and says, you know that, they're not sure what's
Speaker 6: happening to the girl.
Speaker 5: And again, I don't know all the story. What's happening you?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Oh, Chet looks yeah, you're back.
Speaker 5: So you're gonna have to go upstairs. You're off duty.
Speaker 6: Now you got to go upstairs, get in your class
Speaker 6: a's and then the chief is going to call you
Speaker 6: on the house.
Speaker 5: Watch.
Speaker 6: So this poor basketart go he thinks like he's killed
Speaker 6: somebody or to death. He goes upstairs getting his class a's,
Speaker 6: comes back down supposedly sitting in the house watch like
Speaker 6: he's almost like he thinks his job is gone.
Speaker 5: He's you know, he's tearing up or something like that.
Speaker 5: It's just like it was horrible for the guy, you
Speaker 5: know what I mean.
Speaker 6: And they let him go for a while, and then
Speaker 6: I think they called him on the phone or something
Speaker 6: and uh and let them off.
Speaker 5: And I remember when I heard that, I'm like, holy shit, man,
Speaker 5: I guess I'll never forget to lock them. Yeah tough.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that went on in the house.
Speaker 3: You know, were you part of the thing that I
Speaker 3: remember that guy? Were you part of the thing that
Speaker 3: they did with my brother's Cadillac. You know he had
Speaker 3: the big yellow catallact.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, I hit I hit that with the with
Speaker 7: the with the truck.
Speaker 3: Oh digit no, what what they did? They hit with
Speaker 3: his window? Were you there at that time?
Speaker 7: I don't think so.
Speaker 3: We used to park. You know, the fourteenth Division had
Speaker 3: the bay next to it.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, yep.
Speaker 3: My brother when he was a c guy thought he
Speaker 3: was whatever. He would park his yellow Cadillac in there,
Speaker 3: so they governed there. One day they rolled down the
Speaker 3: window of the Cadillac and take a bunch of glass
Speaker 3: and they throw it on the seat like it's like
Speaker 3: a window bro.
Speaker 7: Yeah, okay, yeah, that's coming back, yes.
Speaker 5: All the you know what it is.
Speaker 3: I think they moved it out of there first and
Speaker 3: moved it on to the sidewalk outside, and then they
Speaker 3: did it. So he was pissed at his car was
Speaker 3: out and he thought somebody broke the window. He brought
Speaker 3: it to the glass place. The guy goes.
Speaker 7: Talk a man, Yeah, I clipped the front bump or
Speaker 7: the driver's side front bumper while was coming up eighty
Speaker 7: second Street, and he was parked tight to the corner
Speaker 7: and I just put a put a nice little wrinkle
Speaker 7: in the bumper. Oh no, did the house took care
Speaker 7: of it. You know, we laid out for the body
Speaker 7: work and all that stuff like that. He was he
Speaker 7: was I think that the day he died, he was
Speaker 7: still pissed at me.
Speaker 3: That was that was his baby, big yellow pimps car,
Speaker 3: the yellow banana, the yellow banana.
Speaker 5: Where is that carbs?
Speaker 3: My father took it. What happened was my father took
Speaker 3: it from Richie, and then when my dad died, Richie
Speaker 3: took it back. And I don't know what the hell
Speaker 3: happened after that. Man, I don't know who got it.
Speaker 3: But I had to drive that car home many a time. Well,
Speaker 3: my father was in the cups. I used to have
Speaker 3: to drive that car with him.
Speaker 4: Minute you talked about a Cadillac, what was it kind
Speaker 4: of call?
Speaker 3: Was it Cadillac?
Speaker 5: It's huge?
Speaker 7: Was it was a Cooptaville, right?
Speaker 3: Coop?
Speaker 5: Yeah, Cadillac eighties, early eighties, seventies.
Speaker 3: No, And I was a little older, I was a
Speaker 3: little new with any like eighties it was.
Speaker 7: It was an eighty something caught.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yep. Oh the rug of stories, so many stuff.
Speaker 3: So I have a ship, no ship moment where you
Speaker 3: thought you were gonna buy it at a job.
Speaker 7: Cut me off that.
Speaker 3: Your inside it's going it out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, You're ship's a little blacky today.
Speaker 3: You have got a job where you thought you were
Speaker 3: gonna buy it.
Speaker 7: Probably there was like three jobs that I came Probably,
Speaker 7: I would say I came close. So first the first
Speaker 7: one was it's just I think it was just off
Speaker 7: of probation. We had it. We had a job down
Speaker 7: ninety fourth Street, three seven Avenue, Sunday morning, about four
Speaker 7: o'clock in the morning. It was a It was a
Speaker 7: weird setup because the we came down ninety fourth Street,
Speaker 7: so that was the the entrance to the place was
Speaker 7: on diagonal, so there was like a nightclub in behind
Speaker 7: all these these little rowers stores on the street side
Speaker 7: and the avenue saw and uh, what happened? Well, I
Speaker 7: think it was a back draft, but the Lieutenant buck
Speaker 7: I thinks it was a cock loft explosion.
Speaker 3: But it was.
Speaker 7: It was the first time that I actually thought somebody
Speaker 7: from the company died at a fire. We Uh yeah,
Speaker 7: we get down night, you know, almost a three seven,
Speaker 7: the smoke going across. Uh. The guy who was driving
Speaker 7: our rig was from Rescue four. So he put the
Speaker 7: he put the stick up, you know, one story, one
Speaker 7: story taxpayer put the stick up.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 7: Norman Sebisi went up on the roof. Uey Daugherty was
Speaker 7: the o V. He went to the got the round
Speaker 7: to the rear.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 7: Lieutenant Donald Telly, me and Georgie Call were the forced
Speaker 7: Blanchry team. So we started to open up the stores
Speaker 7: and we get to about the third roll up and
Speaker 7: and this this is what was kind of weird about it,
Speaker 7: Georgie asked me later on. Basically something happened and I
Speaker 7: guess we all noticed it at the same time, and
Speaker 7: we turned around and started going for the street and
Speaker 7: the building blew up. So I remember being it basically
Speaker 7: had picked me up and I was between two part
Speaker 7: cars and when I hit the hit the round, I
Speaker 7: figured I get and that my head was in like
Speaker 7: a fireball. And I remember like hearing stuff go past
Speaker 7: my years and you see like a rock in the stream,
Speaker 7: how the goes around the rock and the streaming around
Speaker 7: my head.
Speaker 5: Describe it.
Speaker 7: And I hit the I hit the street, and I'm
Speaker 7: on my knees and elbows and I want to go
Speaker 7: to the to the cars to protect but there were
Speaker 7: flames were going underneath the cause, so I go, Yeah,
Speaker 7: the flames were underneath the cause, going about five feet
Speaker 7: out past the cards into the middle of the street.
Speaker 7: So I just kept going and when I turned around,
Speaker 7: the roof was on fire, and guys from one thirty eight,
Speaker 7: I guess I think they may have borne up our
Speaker 7: aerial or got put up by the bucket, but I
Speaker 7: remember seeing them silhouetted against the flames coming back to
Speaker 7: our area to come to get off the roof, and
Speaker 7: so I it's like, you know, roof roof man Norman
Speaker 7: was up there, and I yeah, that was before we
Speaker 7: all had radios. So I yelled over to Lieutenant Donald, Telly,
Speaker 7: you see you check on Norman. Call Norman, and I
Speaker 7: think he tried getting in touch with him, like twice
Speaker 7: he didn't didn't answer. Third time he answered uh. And
Speaker 7: after the whole thing was all the he said that
Speaker 7: he was going to vent the skylight and guys from
Speaker 7: one thirty eight were coming up and he said stay
Speaker 7: at the parapet and then he vented the skylight and
Speaker 7: instead of the ship coming out, it sucked in and
Speaker 7: he dropped his tools and he went to the next parapet,
Speaker 7: to the next building, and the building blew up and
Speaker 7: it sent him across to the next building. Wow, you know,
Speaker 7: And Georgie call asked me later, he said, how do
Speaker 7: you know, how do you know how to turn it?
Speaker 7: You know, to turn around? Look, because nobody said anything.
Speaker 7: Just you know, hand to God, just you know, you
Speaker 7: guys turn around so I don't get hurt. But the
Speaker 7: guy from rescue, I found out later, he was looking
Speaker 7: down at us when the building blew up and he
Speaker 7: thought we were dead because they we just got engulfed
Speaker 7: by the by a fireball coming out of the out
Speaker 7: of the taxpayers. So that was his last last fire.
Speaker 7: He went to he put his paper in after that.
Speaker 7: Really yeah, yeah, we go see, Yeah, he's done. So
Speaker 7: you know, he had over you know, he had twenty
Speaker 7: years on the job. So he said, that's it I'm doing.
Speaker 3: So I don't know it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that was you know, I had like a sunburn,
Speaker 7: sunburn on my face, you know, going you know, we
Speaker 7: had the mass on but we didn't have pieces on
Speaker 7: our face. But that was that was a fun job.
Speaker 7: We got to use the only time in my career
Speaker 7: that we actually set up the ladder pipe and used
Speaker 7: the ladder pipe. You're going to say that, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: we turned it, We retracted it all the way, put
Speaker 7: the ladder pipe on, turned into the buildings, went right
Speaker 7: into the taxpayer with it, and then it extended it
Speaker 7: to the back and opened up the line. So it
Speaker 7: was it was, that was an interesting experience. What about
Speaker 7: one O three and thirty four? Do you remember that job?
Speaker 3: What what was that? Daniel Buckeye says, one O.
Speaker 5: Three third Street between Northern and thirty four.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I gave That was the job I gave
Speaker 7: my first may Day at Durray Smith from one thirty six.
Speaker 7: You know him, yeah, yeah, he he felt through a
Speaker 7: light aaron light shaft you know and close that job.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So that yeah, that where the where the shaft was,
Speaker 7: there was there was not even if it was just
Speaker 7: like the tower, the tar from the roof just kind
Speaker 7: of came up to the hall. There was no no
Speaker 7: parapet around that that shaft way and uh, the way
Speaker 7: the buildings were set up, the fire building had like
Speaker 7: a garage and back that all the cars were on fire,
Speaker 7: so there was a lot of smoke, and the wind
Speaker 7: was blowing from like Northern Boulevard to three four Avenue
Speaker 7: and exposure to exposure three, well, no, it's excuse me,
Speaker 7: exposure two. It would be two two A to B.
Speaker 7: I forgot how the exposures go. It's been a while.
Speaker 7: But the build we were on a two story. The
Speaker 7: building next to that one was a three story. So
Speaker 7: the smoke was coming up off the job. The wind
Speaker 7: was taken it to that three story and it was
Speaker 7: just circulating, circulating back on on the roof, and basically
Speaker 7: I was on with Bobby Whalen, was the roof man.
Speaker 7: So I was up between the evented skylight and the
Speaker 7: scuttle and we were cutting a hole between those two,
Speaker 7: and I guess the back of that building started to
Speaker 7: come down, so we all all left the roof and
Speaker 7: everybody basically went to that build, that uh three story building,
Speaker 7: because I had the area right up, you know, so
Speaker 7: the three story building was here, the two stories here.
Speaker 7: I had the area right up next to that three
Speaker 7: story building, and uh so the guys who went thirty
Speaker 7: six went there and Derry Smith just follow the three
Speaker 7: story building to the aerial, went right down the hull.
Speaker 7: So he's lucky to get you.
Speaker 4: Hi.
Speaker 3: He brought both of his I think both of his legs.
Speaker 7: But yeah, well it shotted both both of his heels.
Speaker 7: I think were screwed up. But that's right. When we
Speaker 7: changed the the may day procedure, you do that, you know,
Speaker 7: may day, may day, may day. You know a lot
Speaker 7: of one, five, four show for the command may day
Speaker 7: that I did that three times and nobody answered me.
Speaker 7: Now that's before we had the the new radios with
Speaker 7: the alert button. So I gave it three times and
Speaker 7: nobody answered me. So I went, I figured, okay, I've
Speaker 7: gotta go down. I'll get the roof rope, we'll send
Speaker 7: somebody down the shaft to help him out. And I
Speaker 7: get I get to the aerial. There's a battalion chief
Speaker 7: in an age right below the aeriel, and I'm yelling
Speaker 7: at the guy and nobody's looking up. So I have
Speaker 7: my haligan in my hand and I'm like, all right,
Speaker 7: I'm going to drop the haligan right next to these
Speaker 7: guys to get their attention. And then the age finally
Speaker 7: looked up and I think, uh it was either rescue
Speaker 7: or squad. I think when I get him at the shaft, right.
Speaker 3: I found him in the shaft, and then Nicky Corrado
Speaker 3: and uh Chris Karanji came in with Matt Carles and
Speaker 3: we got him out of the shift.
Speaker 7: Okay, yeah, I wasn't sure if it was you guys
Speaker 7: are are rescue rescue for? But guys got him out,
Speaker 7: and so that was. I don't I don't know how
Speaker 7: he didn't get hurt.
Speaker 3: More than I did get killed because there was a
Speaker 3: lot on his feet.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there was a lot of junk on that shaft too,
Speaker 7: but he had his mask on, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: I actually that was That was the only job I
Speaker 7: went to. Uh that it was on the roof that
Speaker 7: I went through a whole bottle of air, so comptly
Speaker 7: drink my bottle up.
Speaker 3: I think Jimmy Mesmer was a roof man, Jimmy jim
Speaker 3: Jimmy Jimmy Mesmer.
Speaker 7: Because I remember pulling pulling down that coming off at
Speaker 7: three four, heading towards northern and you couldn't you couldn't
Speaker 7: see in front of the rig. Eventually I had to
Speaker 7: creep into the smoke and eventually, you know, I saw
Speaker 7: the rear three sixteen. They were they were the first
Speaker 7: two engine there. So that was that was a good job.
Speaker 7: And I think that the way the building was set up,
Speaker 7: they kind of messed up on the exposures. Like when
Speaker 7: we first got there, everybody knew, you know, the two
Speaker 7: story and the one story were the same with the
Speaker 7: same building. I think when command got there they thought
Speaker 7: this the one story part of the building was a
Speaker 7: separate building. So they kind of messed the exposures up
Speaker 7: a little bit confused, confusal to some people. But that
Speaker 7: was that was That was an interesting job. It was
Speaker 7: the middle of the day too.
Speaker 3: Yeah. You never had a go to a rescue. You
Speaker 3: what is that? Never had the inkling to go to
Speaker 3: a rescue? Never wanted to?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I kind of wanted it once once the guy
Speaker 7: I got over it.
Speaker 5: Did you ever want to study?
Speaker 7: I actually took I think I took two lieutenants. You know,
Speaker 7: I did the whole fire the fire tech thing. I
Speaker 7: did really well. You know all the the the practice
Speaker 7: tests they give you a fire tech. Yeah, I was
Speaker 7: getting I was getting the nineties nineties on him. When
Speaker 7: it came to the real deal, I froze up a
Speaker 7: little bit. I don't know it just whatever in my
Speaker 7: head does left, you know.
Speaker 3: So he did a Swanee River nor.
Speaker 7: I think God puts you where he wants you, and
Speaker 7: God didn't want me to get promoted to lieutenant. And
Speaker 7: like the first the first lieutenant's exam I needed. That
Speaker 7: was that was the exam where they had like eighteen
Speaker 7: double answers.
Speaker 6: Yeah, sick double answers yeah or whatever it was, and
Speaker 6: that it was like you didn't get any I didn't
Speaker 6: get any of them.
Speaker 7: I needed like three, and I would have I would
Speaker 7: have passed.
Speaker 5: Who said Bobby Austin said the same thing last week.
Speaker 7: But my yeah, my my wife and my wife goes.
Speaker 7: You know, you know, maybe that's you're lucky because if
Speaker 7: you got promoted and uh, you know, wherever you would
Speaker 7: land could be anyway, nine to eleven happened, and you know,
Speaker 7: I could have been a brook House in Manhattan house
Speaker 7: and maybe not.
Speaker 3: Be absolutely so if you would have went the rescue,
Speaker 3: I think it happened. Yep, you know you were you were.
Speaker 5: Hey, listen, there's another fire. Geh.
Speaker 6: Lieutenant Bucket's saying another fire eight four in northern jim
Speaker 6: got dog bit.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, yeah, that was that was interesting. Yeah, it was.
Speaker 7: It was just you know, the sixth story m D
Speaker 7: right right down and down the road from the firehouse.
Speaker 7: I had the O V and uh it was I
Speaker 7: think it was the second the second floor. The apartment
Speaker 7: on the second floor I got. I got to the rear.
Speaker 3: And the window.
Speaker 7: It was the summertime, so the windows were open in
Speaker 7: the apartment. There was a there was a cat and
Speaker 7: a puppy on the window sill, you know, and smoke
Speaker 7: is coming out of the window and everything like that,
Speaker 7: and you know, I hear him forcing the door on
Speaker 7: the inside, and you know the noise, you know, the
Speaker 7: engine comes in. I hear him bleed the nozzle and
Speaker 7: he opens the nozzle and the cat and the dog
Speaker 7: fly out and they push him out off the window sill.
Speaker 7: The cat hits the ground runs the dog.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: It was kind of right below the entrance to the basement.
Speaker 7: They had a railing and the top of the railing
Speaker 7: had ward iron spikes. The dog landed like the rear
Speaker 7: leg of the dog landed on a spike. So I
Speaker 7: went to pick the dog, picked the dog up, walk
Speaker 7: the spike, and it just you know, turned around and
Speaker 7: you know, lopped onto my hand. So I had to
Speaker 7: go to the medical you to get in the shots.
Speaker 7: That the h the raby shots.
Speaker 4: That was fun.
Speaker 3: The worse you could have been the dog.
Speaker 7: Yeah, right there, the dog.
Speaker 5: The dog.
Speaker 7: They put the dog down. They they took somebody. It
Speaker 7: was too it was like six months older, not not
Speaker 7: even that. So, but that was that was a fun.
Speaker 7: Mat me right on the right on my good thumb.
Speaker 3: Actually, I think the son of a bitch, he got
Speaker 3: you on the good thumb. He could even get you
Speaker 3: on the meady thumb, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I know, yeah, but that was It was a
Speaker 7: lot of interesting jobs. Let's say the uh another probably
Speaker 7: the well, the second joy was I think two thousand
Speaker 7: and six, there was a big call you uh, they
Speaker 7: don't call him calling his mansions anymore.
Speaker 5: Right, there's uh clutter or something or other.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So this this was over and its side well
Speaker 7: along that it was woodsts right off of Queens Bully
Speaker 7: Queens Boulevard. It was I think it went to like
Speaker 7: a third or fourth. Yeah, I was back down to
Speaker 7: the lobby that way, and the literally the only part
Speaker 7: of that apartment that didn't have junket it was where
Speaker 7: the front door swung open. I was at that jump too, man,
Speaker 7: all right, so we're so that's that's where I got.
Speaker 7: I made I made the Close Call List, the National
Speaker 7: Close Callalist on that that job. That one sixty three
Speaker 7: had their bucket up to the window of whatever the
Speaker 7: wound up being being in the kitchen. We didn't know
Speaker 7: it was the kitchen. So we they were rotating guys
Speaker 7: into the bucket, and there was a portable ladder next
Speaker 7: to the bucket so they wouldn't have to move the
Speaker 7: bucket up and down. So and then there was a
Speaker 7: wall next to where the port of the ladder ladder was.
Speaker 7: So we're our crews in the bucket and we rotate
Speaker 7: two guys into the window and we just start shoveling
Speaker 7: ship out the window. And then it got to the
Speaker 7: point where you know, it's like an angle going up
Speaker 7: to the ceiling. And now now this looks like the
Speaker 7: top of kitchen cabinet. So it's working our way down,
Speaker 7: working our way down. Eventually we get to where the
Speaker 7: door is and we get to the top of the door,
Speaker 7: and now we start getting smoke and fire coming in,
Speaker 7: so we rotate out and it's like let's you know,
Speaker 7: we should probably get a line up here. So one
Speaker 7: guy goes off to the portable ladder. Then I go
Speaker 7: off to the portable ladder. I'm coming down the port
Speaker 7: of the ladder. John Diatoma every time he saw me
Speaker 7: after this job, because he was he said, you wish
Speaker 7: he had a video camera to videotape it. He always
Speaker 7: gave me a hug because I thought you were going
Speaker 7: to die. I thought you were going to die. So
Speaker 7: I'm coming down the port of the ladder and I
Speaker 7: just noticed a movement right over here, and then all
Speaker 7: of a sudden, the bottom of the towel ladder basket
Speaker 7: hits me on the head, drives my head into the
Speaker 7: wall over here.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, dude, I never heard this story.
Speaker 7: I actually had to hold the port of the ladder
Speaker 7: and squeeze my head out of the helmet and I
Speaker 7: got I got down to the ground and it's like
Speaker 7: my head's pound like I got hit by a towel
Speaker 7: out of basket and I'm holding my head like that.
Speaker 7: I have blood on both pairs of gloves and uh,
Speaker 7: my helmet wound up on the building. They had they
Speaker 7: had to go up and pull my helmet off the building.
Speaker 5: This helmet, No, no, the the.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the did you guys get the pictures of I
Speaker 7: sent three pictures of a picture of my three helmets
Speaker 7: the other day.
Speaker 4: I didn't get that one.
Speaker 7: Okay, So this is the this is the one with
Speaker 7: the impact liner and uh, the safety confiscated it. So
Speaker 7: you know, I had to go get a brain scan.
Speaker 7: This is the X ray in my head.
Speaker 6: So he just stopped in time. Uh, I mean, he
Speaker 6: just stopped in time. What people yelling like, what do
Speaker 6: you remember? You don't remember anything like that?
Speaker 7: The show for on the turntape and was talking with
Speaker 7: somebody down on the street, so he didn't see it.
Speaker 7: There was a tree that was the guys who were
Speaker 7: in the bucket. I think that the boom actually got
Speaker 7: stopped a little bit on the tree.
Speaker 4: Ah.
Speaker 7: But supposedly the land the lanyards for the lieutenants flashlight
Speaker 7: was tangled with the you know, the joy trigger the trigger,
Speaker 7: but I don't believe that. So yeah, but I'm not Wow,
Speaker 7: that's yes. So that that actually you know, they have
Speaker 7: the you know, the Line of Duty book that comes
Speaker 7: out every year for everybody it dies on the line
Speaker 7: of duty. They have a close call book and say
Speaker 7: I made that. No, that would make the light of
Speaker 7: duty one. I'm glad you're here. Yeah, so John, Yeah,
Speaker 7: John Diantas. Every time I saw John de'etoma, he come up.
Speaker 3: Give me a big because it was like, I think
Speaker 3: they wound up actually breaching the wall put that fire out,
Speaker 3: didn't they.
Speaker 7: Yeah? Well, I remember they tried breaching the ceiling well
Speaker 7: the floor of the apartment above and they pulled that
Speaker 7: and I was junk all the way up to the
Speaker 7: to the ceiling. And then they tried breaching a wall
Speaker 7: and it was a wall of junk.
Speaker 3: In front of him. I've never seen an apartment that
Speaker 3: had that. That wasn't even college's mansion. That was floor
Speaker 3: to ceiling junk everywhere. Yeah.
Speaker 7: I think they had like like three or four forty
Speaker 7: dumpsters moved the debris out of the place.
Speaker 3: I'm not hiding you this. The smoke was banked down
Speaker 3: to the lobby, like bank down to the lobby.
Speaker 7: Didn't didn't the battalion chief try to do that pressurizing
Speaker 7: with the fans.
Speaker 3: I don't remember that.
Speaker 4: Sorry.
Speaker 7: Remember every time every time the fans got engaged, it
Speaker 7: got worse.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it did.
Speaker 7: It didn't really work.
Speaker 3: I was working with Evans that I can't believe I
Speaker 3: remember that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that was that was. That was an interesting job.
Speaker 7: I still I got the helmet. The helmet was. The
Speaker 7: helmet was in custody of the Safety Battalion till about
Speaker 7: five years ago. And then one of the later you know,
Speaker 7: I became a peer with the with the Counseling Service unit.
Speaker 7: One of the chiefs that worked worked down there as
Speaker 7: as a peer counselor and I gave I gave him
Speaker 7: the information and retrieved.
Speaker 9: It for you.
Speaker 7: He's like, oh, yeah, it's been in his box for
Speaker 7: twenty you know, twenty some years.
Speaker 3: Still need counseling. Oh yeah, yeah, we're gonna do a
Speaker 3: show from Friends of Firefighters on mental health again.
Speaker 7: Yeah that's uh, Casey plead he actually got me. You
Speaker 7: work with Casey Palidi, right right, Louis, Yeah, one three, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 7: he got me into it. I got invited to the
Speaker 7: you know, we have the Counseling service. You know, it
Speaker 7: puts on the breakfast every second Tuesday of the month.
Speaker 5: I see that.
Speaker 7: And I went it was it was a great time.
Speaker 7: So I figured, you know, I know Casey, I know
Speaker 7: a few of the other guys. So I went the
Speaker 7: next time, I went early to help cook and I
Speaker 7: kept I just kept going. You know, I was part
Speaker 7: of the cooking crow when Casey got me into the
Speaker 7: bea counseling and it basically it saved my retirement.
Speaker 5: I was.
Speaker 7: The first year I retired really really was totally yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: because you go, you know, you go from the from
Speaker 7: the firehouse to what do I do now? And it's
Speaker 7: just kind of you know, I was drinking a lot.
Speaker 7: It was. Yeah. There was a guy in my in
Speaker 7: my hunting clubs. He retired from the City p D.
Speaker 7: He did like thirty eight forty years, and then he
Speaker 7: asked me how my retirement was. And I was like,
Speaker 7: and he goes, you feel lost, don't you?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 9: I go yeah, yeah, So you know I.
Speaker 7: Became a pit counselor. It's yeah, I go around, we
Speaker 7: go around, we talk about certain things. Uh, every few months,
Speaker 7: there's a certain like suicide is a big thing. You know,
Speaker 7: we you know, to waste the alcohol of drug addiction
Speaker 7: and all that stuff like that.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 7: And it doesn't have to be my firehouse. It's any
Speaker 7: any firehouse. Sitting around the kitchen table having a cup
Speaker 7: of coffee, talking with the brothers. And that's that's the
Speaker 7: you know, when you're retired, that's that's really what you missy.
Speaker 7: You don't you don't miss the commuting back and forth
Speaker 7: to the firehouse.
Speaker 4: You don't.
Speaker 7: You know, you don't miss the manhole covers that you
Speaker 7: got to sit.
Speaker 4: In the middle of the winter hours.
Speaker 5: I don't miss that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you really miss right. And let me ask
Speaker 3: you a question. Do you have the dream that everybody
Speaker 3: has you got to run and you can't find your
Speaker 3: bunkert yet?
Speaker 7: Absolutely? That's or your your your helmets missing.
Speaker 5: Helmets delayed delayed.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I can't tell you how many retired
Speaker 3: guys have that dream?
Speaker 7: Man, that's we talk about that at the Retired Guys Breakfast.
Speaker 7: Almost every single person's had that dream.
Speaker 3: I got.
Speaker 4: Look, you haven't had that dreamy coops.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it still Jimmy, I I was gonna say that.
Speaker 6: Uh, when when I was in the fire house, like
Speaker 6: the last couple of years they had started with the
Speaker 6: counseling unit guys, you know coming to the firehouse, like
Speaker 6: you just said, like coming into the kitchen, and it
Speaker 6: was always cool to know, like you know, a lot
Speaker 6: of times in the middle of the day you had
Speaker 6: stuff going on and you're running around and doing all
Speaker 6: the ship you want to go to fire. You know,
Speaker 6: you didn't want to sit and have to talk about that.
Speaker 6: But when the when the guys came up and they
Speaker 6: were from the job, right, whether you knew the guys
Speaker 6: or you didn't know the guys, but if they were
Speaker 6: from the job, they knew the deal. It was cut
Speaker 6: to the chase. Everybody good. You know, if anybody you
Speaker 6: know reached out to them, here's my card. You know,
Speaker 6: one of those things I'm sure you know. You know,
Speaker 6: every once in a while you get somebody where you know,
Speaker 6: you really feel like this guy needs to talk to somebody.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I always.
Speaker 6: Felt like that was a big thing, is to have
Speaker 6: the guys from the job do that, because it just
Speaker 6: smooth that smooth out the rough edges there, you know
Speaker 6: that makes any sense.
Speaker 7: It's you know, for me, what's what's great. You know,
Speaker 7: my time on the job. I know I know a
Speaker 7: lot of the senior guys or you know what everybody yeah, right,
Speaker 7: the guys who are cheaps now or captains of houses,
Speaker 7: and you know, my last three years on the job
Speaker 7: I did. I tought seven prov classes, so almost I
Speaker 7: go to Yeah you weren't your instructor in Proby school, Yeah,
Speaker 7: something like that. It's you know, so it's a there's
Speaker 7: a connection. So it helps a lot, you know. And
Speaker 7: and I think, you know, old the old school guys
Speaker 7: that like broke me in. It was just like get
Speaker 7: all you know, like my father World War two that
Speaker 7: you know, just you just get all right, Yeah, that's it,
Speaker 7: you know. But now I think now it's it kind
Speaker 7: of started after the happy Lands fire up in the Bronx.
Speaker 7: You know, the guys, guys were crawling all the bodies. Yeah,
Speaker 7: it was you know, you know, and Lieutenant dan uh was.
Speaker 3: Up there for that.
Speaker 7: I think he was. He was in two ninety two
Speaker 7: and they called to ninety two up there to help
Speaker 7: help remove remove a lot of the bodies, and he
Speaker 7: was he was telling the stories going back to the
Speaker 7: firehouses that you know, guys were you know, you know, crying,
Speaker 7: they were, you know, they were all shook up from
Speaker 7: being exposed to that much.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 4: I guess that you want to call it that.
Speaker 7: And I think that's kind of when the counseling service
Speaker 7: units started, you know, and then it then it started
Speaker 7: really you know, rolling after nine to eleven happens.
Speaker 3: So who was that Irish guy who was in charge
Speaker 3: of the council a long time ago?
Speaker 9: It was.
Speaker 3: He got an Irish name crying out.
Speaker 7: That was probably before my time. So yes, I got in,
Speaker 7: I say, I retired in twenty sixteen, so probably I
Speaker 7: got into the council.
Speaker 5: I got.
Speaker 3: Malachai or something like that. His name was Malichi, I
Speaker 3: think that was his name. Malachi could be Malachi. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he was like he was only one guy with the
Speaker 3: whole council unit. One guy. Now look out where it
Speaker 3: is down because we need it.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, it's it's uh yeah, it's the big thing
Speaker 7: just not not the dwell on a lot, but the
Speaker 7: big thing with the fire department is nation wide.
Speaker 5: They did it.
Speaker 7: They did a study the top ten fire departments in
Speaker 7: the country. They looked at their records the line of duty,
Speaker 7: line of duty desk compared to suicides and department and
Speaker 7: it's for every one line of duty, there's three suicides.
Speaker 7: Real suicides is actually taking more more of us out
Speaker 7: than line and duty jobs.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 7: So that's that's like a big thing. We go and talk.
Speaker 7: You know, it starts talking about it. But you know,
Speaker 7: there's there's a few guys that since I've you know,
Speaker 7: since I've been doing this, have actually killed themselves, you know,
Speaker 7: and it fucks the house up, you know. So you know,
Speaker 7: we we we talk about this, how to maybe recognize
Speaker 7: maybe something's happening to from one of your brothers, you know.
Speaker 7: We yeah, so basically almost every firehouse together and we
Speaker 7: talk about that and then then we start talking about
Speaker 7: fun stuff after that.
Speaker 5: But it's kind of it's.
Speaker 7: Kind of depressing, but uh, that's that's something that we
Speaker 7: do as peer counselors and hopefully it helps.
Speaker 4: So just having a general conversation helps me. You're not threating,
Speaker 4: you know, that's a big part of it. Don't make it,
Speaker 4: don't make an official and formal you know, kind of
Speaker 4: create a conversation. Just just just shoot the ship man.
Speaker 4: It doesn't help.
Speaker 3: I use these two idiots, but you.
Speaker 7: Know, you know, I go out with Case and one
Speaker 7: or two other guys, uh yuh, you know, and we
Speaker 7: all sit at different parts of the kitchen and you know,
Speaker 7: sometimes I were done. We'll see you guys later. Have
Speaker 7: you know, have you know, have good lunch or whatever,
Speaker 7: and you get out onto the apparatus floor and somebody
Speaker 7: will come over your tap. I talked to you for
Speaker 7: a second, you know, because they got you know, they
Speaker 7: may have it may be inconsequential problem, but to them
Speaker 7: it's big, you know. Or so it's it's uh, it's
Speaker 7: beneficial to everybody.
Speaker 3: So Gus Day was Malachi Corrigan if you remember him.
Speaker 3: I knew was an Irish name.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I say, I was way before, way before my time.
Speaker 3: No, because it was he was there when we first started.
Speaker 3: So the counciling unit was nothing. It was this guy
Speaker 3: and a couple of other people.
Speaker 7: That was it.
Speaker 3: Now it's God, it's it's it's it's what it is today.
Speaker 7: Uh Yeah, Drew Drew Kane is in charge of it now,
Speaker 7: so he's he's doing well at it. It's a tough
Speaker 7: it's a tough job. He gets the guys who run
Speaker 7: this thing, I mean they get phone calls, forty phone
Speaker 7: calls a day sometimes, you know, because yeah, the guys
Speaker 7: from my fire house call me sometimes and you know,
Speaker 7: I'll you know, with with whatever, and I'll have to
Speaker 7: call him to say a lot of times it's it's
Speaker 7: just maybe just talking with somebody, you know, I you know,
Speaker 7: I see one guy for lunch every once in a
Speaker 7: while we talk about ship that's going on with him,
Speaker 7: and uh, it helps. So it's a it's a it's
Speaker 7: a good you know. It keeps me connected to the job,
Speaker 7: which is nice coffee, yeah you say, And having a
Speaker 7: coffee at the kitchen table is like the best, the best.
Speaker 7: That's the best therapy for me.
Speaker 6: You know, you don't realize how helpful to ship coffee
Speaker 6: at the kitchen table that works.
Speaker 7: I went, I went into I went into a house
Speaker 7: on the time, and the head, you know, it's like
Speaker 7: almost to let like the bottom heard of the coffee
Speaker 7: pot was it was probably got throw that out.
Speaker 3: I love. I love.
Speaker 5: Brings back memories of the worst coffee ever in the drive.
Speaker 3: Yep, get to the bottom of that dream, Roffy. We're
Speaker 3: gonna get to the bottom of my dreaming.
Speaker 5: That was it? That's what was it?
Speaker 3: This one?
Speaker 4: That's exactly what it looked like, that's exactly are you shooting?
Speaker 3: And had the saddle brown interior, But that's what it
Speaker 3: looked like.
Speaker 4: The ship because I thought it was this one, but
Speaker 4: I was like.
Speaker 3: Actually that's we'll go back to that that that's the
Speaker 3: one that looks.
Speaker 4: Like yeah, because then it was the there was this one.
Speaker 4: I was like, man, which found that my father had
Speaker 4: this one.
Speaker 5: Look at the part of that car tank, bro, these things.
Speaker 4: Man, yep, we cut up a few of them.
Speaker 3: Every once in a while, I can dream by.
Speaker 5: Me and started driving.
Speaker 6: Kevin was driving his there's uh brother in laws car
Speaker 6: was a seventy seven, like I don't even know bonavill
Speaker 6: a month in Polla.
Speaker 5: Dude, the front of the car looked just like that,
Speaker 5: like we could we were two little kids. We couldn't
Speaker 5: even see seventeen years old. We couldn't even see.
Speaker 6: Over the dash he was. We would hit the gas
Speaker 6: in that thing. You would have to hang on, bro,
Speaker 6: it was eating the ground. Put your seat, yeah, it
Speaker 6: would put your back in your seat, man, no ship.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's the big difference now with the like yeah
Speaker 7: we had we we hardly had any parking at a
Speaker 7: fire house. You know, you had to park on the street.
Speaker 7: When when my first few years there, we got probably
Speaker 7: two or three four casts stolen every every year. Yeah,
Speaker 7: you go out on a pull box or a run
Speaker 7: or something like that, you come back cause missing. But
Speaker 7: now now you know, we always had the ghetto cruises.
Speaker 7: Now now everybody has a luxury cause and it's like, yeah,
Speaker 7: why I am doing good? Yeah, the Procachina, BMW's and
Speaker 7: you know, big wood trucks and everything like that.
Speaker 3: So I think it's about that time.
Speaker 5: It may be that time.
Speaker 4: But before we do so, I just wanted to point
Speaker 4: it out before I forget. Steve Weisman from your Fairfax
Speaker 4: says hello, I want to make sure. Yeah, he's in there,
Speaker 4: so I didn't want to be that. I will save that.
Speaker 4: But anyway, okay, yes it is.
Speaker 7: I hope. I hope he looks as old as I will.
Speaker 4: All Right, So Coops, is it that time? Lou?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I believe So Okay, that's fucked up. I don't know.
Speaker 4: He keeps skipping in it out, Yeah, lose a little
Speaker 4: skipped up. Anyway, here we go.
Speaker 5: It is time for.
Speaker 7: Oh hey, all right, old school tip of the day.
Speaker 7: I've been you know, watching watching the show. Most of
Speaker 7: the guys leave, you know, probably everything I would say,
Speaker 7: you know, a good tip of the day thinking about
Speaker 7: it to two small tips of the day would be
Speaker 7: size up. That's something I think everybody should practice. Uh,
Speaker 7: you know it size up doesn't start when you get
Speaker 7: to the firehouse. It starts when you leave your house.
Speaker 7: But carry that over to your off duty time and
Speaker 7: size up every you go to a restaurant. When you
Speaker 7: go into a restaurant where you sit down, look look
Speaker 7: for the secondary means of egress. Look look for maybe
Speaker 7: where the fire extinguishers are, or or or something. Anywhere
Speaker 7: you go movie theater, sides up the movie theater, and
Speaker 7: just that gets you in the habit of becoming better
Speaker 7: at it, and it may get your ass out of
Speaker 7: a jam on the outside knowing where everything is. The
Speaker 7: other small tip would be learn how to force the
Speaker 7: door by yourself without any assistance. If you're if you're
Speaker 7: the O V searching floor above, and you have and
Speaker 7: you get trapped maybe and there's there's nobody to swing
Speaker 7: them all for you, learn learn how to force the
Speaker 7: door just with the alegant and all by yourself. Even
Speaker 7: a metal frame door you can do by yourself if
Speaker 7: you do the technique right. So all that does is
Speaker 7: you just need to do. You know, when you're when
Speaker 7: you're after a job or whatever. In the metal frame doors,
Speaker 7: you know that that could be a drill for for
Speaker 7: you or your company. Everybody try to force the door
Speaker 7: by themselves, and once you get the technique down, you
Speaker 7: should be good. You know, it's always better with with
Speaker 7: everybody else. If if your rabbit tool breaks, you're still
Speaker 7: got to have to go conventional old school way. So
Speaker 7: learn learn how to use the alegant and you'll be
Speaker 7: you'll be good to go. And that should be it's all.
Speaker 4: Right, excellent. You know, it's funny. We teach her regularly.
Speaker 4: Now we teach the guys how to force the door
Speaker 4: by themselves. We're short staff down here. We're not rolling
Speaker 4: heavy like I always say.
Speaker 7: But you know, you know in pro Probay School they
Speaker 7: have that together the inward outward opening door that they
Speaker 7: take around for drills to the firehouses, and it's always
Speaker 7: always a two person operation. When I was when I
Speaker 7: was teaching at the Rock, I go up there with
Speaker 7: the hallick and I do it by myself, and the
Speaker 7: guys are like, how do you do that?
Speaker 3: Is this? Well?
Speaker 7: You know, I got I got the You know, you
Speaker 7: have to learn how to do it. You know, it's
Speaker 7: you're not gonna have somebody with you all the time.
Speaker 3: You know, you tell them, how do you get the
Speaker 3: car to you hall practice, practice practice man.
Speaker 4: Get in those reps. Bro, you gotta do it.
Speaker 3: Yep, God, let's do our last thing before we go.
Speaker 9: Yea, here are you ready? It is?
Speaker 5: Here, It is.
Speaker 3: It's a Roofie and I for the fifty third annual
Speaker 3: Fire ex Bowl hosted by Lancaster County Fireman's Association. The
Speaker 3: fire x Bowl showcase more than two hundred and fifty emergencies,
Speaker 3: servious exhibits featuring the world's leading manufacturer of fire, emergency,
Speaker 3: medical services, rescue and public safety equipment, and T shirts
Speaker 3: with me and Roofy There. Fire Expo not only has displays,
Speaker 3: exhibits in a lot of demonstrations, but also provides training
Speaker 3: from Cumberland Valley Volunteer Firefighters Association, Penn State, Hershey Life Lion,
Speaker 3: Critical Care Transport, Middle Creek Search and Rescue PA, Office
Speaker 3: of the State Fire Commissioner. Full training descriptions and details
Speaker 3: are available on the website www dot LCFA dot com.
Speaker 3: Backslash Fire Expo. So it's May sixteenth and seventeenth, nine
Speaker 3: to five. Come out and see me and Louis down
Speaker 3: in Harrisburn. Have a cocktail with us.
Speaker 7: So maybe yeah or three are you buying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hell yeah, hell yeah yeah, Bro, come on down.
Speaker 4: Wants to know how the pizza cuta is doing? Whoa
Speaker 4: as well?
Speaker 3: It's selling, it's selling.
Speaker 6: I got something I gotta I gotta shout out go
Speaker 6: with a kid. So I had sent this to the
Speaker 6: guys h this past week. This was from Aaron Burns
Speaker 6: Lee on Facebook. She sent me a message. I forget
Speaker 6: if it was a Chief Burns or Captain Burns on
Speaker 6: the job. She said, thank you you got my dad
Speaker 6: through his suffering. He had nine to eleven illness and
Speaker 6: watched you guys most days. It made him feel close
Speaker 6: to the job by hearing the stories. You do so
Speaker 6: much more than you think. God bless that's great.
Speaker 3: Broad job of the world. Makes it worth seeing you
Speaker 3: guys every week, doesn't it. Man?
Speaker 4: We know we were making a difference.
Speaker 3: Bro. Don't forget April first week. April will be out
Speaker 3: in Nindy. Yeah, it's out there. John'sill just coming right.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I'm gonna bless you with my presence.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Jim.
Speaker 4: Did you know when Andrew levin Zeno I think I'm
Speaker 4: pronouncing it right L A V E and Z. I.
Speaker 4: You know eleven Zeno one of our regulars was asking
Speaker 4: about earlier. Just figured out, don't recall he's a captain
Speaker 4: of Newton in a jersey with them with him Stevie
Speaker 4: pee Weee, mister peewee, who's Jesus? Very regularly on nine
Speaker 4: to eleven?
Speaker 3: Not Laredo, it's a orto. Don't make I did anyway?
Speaker 3: You got you're right, Kevin Brown. Kevin Brown says, now
Speaker 3: Jim's got a boat ride coming, Yes you do. August second, Jim,
Speaker 3: all of our past guests from this year, we take
Speaker 3: you out on a fireboat to John J. Harvey. We
Speaker 3: cruise around Manhattan. We threw some drinks down our trucks
Speaker 3: and some uh, some food works for me. Invitations will
Speaker 3: be going out shortly.
Speaker 7: At the firehouse, saying if it's a free oh it's
Speaker 7: for me.
Speaker 3: Hey take it away. That's what I say.
Speaker 5: My name is Joe. I never say no wow wa
Speaker 5: you pull name. Take anything you can give me, you
Speaker 5: give me.
Speaker 3: There you go, all right, fellas. So next week we
Speaker 3: tried to get a show together next Thursday for the
Speaker 3: one hundredth centennial of Rescue two. Try to get you
Speaker 3: guys from Rescue too. They got a great hotcovered book
Speaker 3: from the same author as Day Save New York. It's
Speaker 3: a great book. We'll go through the book, the pictures
Speaker 3: and the history of Rescue two with a couple of
Speaker 3: evers of Rescue two. But until then, you know what
Speaker 3: I say, stay low and go.
Speaker 5: Damn. It was a pleasure all those years running away.
Speaker 5: You enjoy your retirement.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 4: Everybody all right, guy, Remember we're out rolling heavy yourself.
Speaker 4: Good night, yes, good night everyone,