Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [0]
“A real fireman and a writer of great and graphic talent, who explains to you and me firefighting as it is—the excitement, the horror, the tedium, the mysteries. A fine achievement.”
—William F. Buckley, Jr., New York Magazine
“A blockbuster of a book. Read it.”
—Newsday
“For the first time, a fireman tells it like it is.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“A moving profile of the people who keep America’s big cities from falling apart or burning down.”
—John Callaway, CBS Radio
“Straightforward, graphic… unsentimental, funny.”
—The New Yorker
“A crackling book that captures the firefighters' camaraderie, heroism, and extraordinarily tough life.”
—National Observer
“A terrifying, absorbing book.”
—Minneapolis Tribune
“Has the urgency of a five-alarm fire.”
—Washington Post Book World
ALSO BY DENNIS SMITH
A Song for Mary: An Irish-American Memory
Final Fire
Glitter and Ash
Firehouse
Dennis Smith’s History of Firefighting in America
The Aran Islands: A Personal Journey
Steely Blue
The Little Fire Engine that Saved the City (for children)
Firefighters: Their Lives in Their Own Words
Copyright
Warner Books Edition
Copyright © 1972 by Dennis Smith
Introduction copyright © 1999 by Dennis Smith
All rights reserved.
This Warner Books edition is published by arrangement with the author.
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2142-1
Contents
PRAISE FOR REPORT FROM ENGINE CO. 82
Also by Dennis Smith
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
To the memory of all those firefighters in the
United States who have given their lives to protect us—
more than 3,500 since the day I took the oath of office.
This book seems to be about a particular group of firefighters working in the South Bronx, but the incidents described here tell the story of all firefighters working in this country. The problems in Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles are the same, only the names change.
Introduction
A book can develop a life of its own, and this is certainly true of Report from Engine Co. 82. When, almost thirty years ago now, I began keeping notes on my everyday experiences as a firefighter in the South Bronx, there was no way of knowing that I was creating a book that would be translated into a dozen languages, go through five editions and sell over two million copies.
Because of a letter I’d published in the New York Times Book Review about the poet William Butler Yeats, a savvy editor of True magazine asked me to write an article about the life of a modern-day firefighter. While most beginning authors dream about ways to meet editors and literary agents, perhaps at school seminars, lectures, or weekly writing groups, here I was, never having met a person in the publishing industry, being invited to write a story for an important national magazine. What luck! It wasn’t the only great good fortune I’ve had in my life.
The events recounted in Report from Engine Co. 82 were something like a wartime experience, each day offering a new set of challenges. I remember thinking that the heroic men with whom I worked deserved a better chronicler than I—Tolstoy, perhaps, or Crane, or Remarque. I was just a neophyte, and the challenge of writing about great men was almost as frightening as that first time I pushed a hose line into a burning building. Yet, I knew I could do no more than my untested best.
Above all, finding the time to write required me to be innovative in scavenging time from my already busy days. While logging forty hours a week as a back-step firefighter, serving as father to three, working a side job as a limo driver to help pay the bills, and plugging away on a master’s degree at New York University, I somehow found furtive moments to record what I saw each day amid the turbulence of the