A Legacy of Service

My grandfather was born in 1878 in Watertown Massachusetts.  He started out as a young man working as a plumber but at a relatively early age, around the turn of the century, he began a career as a fireman on the Watertown Fire Department.  Following him, my uncle Jim, my uncle Tom and my uncle John also became life-long members of the fire department.  Two other uncles, Ed and Bill were on the Police Department, housed slightly behind the Fire Department off of Main Street.

 My father's dream as a boy was to also be on the fire department.  He was intimately involved with the doings of the department throughout his childhood.  He went with my grandfather to the Brant Rock fire in Marshfield in the 1930s when a strip of grand hotels along the seawall burned to the ground.  He would even take me as a boy to see the big fires that were happening in town.  But my father was injured as a child and became legally blind in one eye.  He had to return three time to the army recruitment office before someone turned a 'blind eye' and let him in, but even then he was assigned to Graves Registration.  He never could pass the physical for the Fire Department, which he often told me was the greatest disappointment of his life.

Last week on FaceBook someone posted a newspaper clipping from 1940 of several firefighters being injured while searching a burning house for a child they thought was inside.  One of those injured was my uncle Tom, who I only remembered as an old man dying of emphysema in the 1960s.
I also remember my father telling me how one of his brothers had pulled a boy who seemed dead from the Charles river and had worked at resuscitating him long after he was told it was useless.  The boy revived and whenever that boy would walk past the fire station my father said his brother would break into the biggest smile.

Here is the clipping.