Decades Before 9/11 Attack, the Date Marked One Firefighter’s Death

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times A plaque left of the door of the Engine 319 firehouse in Middle Village, Queens, is dedicated to Firefighter Daniel Sullivan, who died on Sept. 11, 1954. Firefighter Sullivan was killed when he fell off a fire truck as it was responding to a fire.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times A photograph of Firefighter Sullivan hangs at the firehouse where he worked.

Well before 2001, Sept. 11 was a painful date for the family of one New York City firefighter. His name was Daniel Sullivan and that was the day he died in the line of duty, in 1954.

His death did not involve planes or terrorism or even a fire. Instead, Firefighter Sullivan died when he fell off his engine company’s fire truck as it rushed to a car fire in Queens.

Once again on Wednesday, the 12th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center, the calendar turns to Sept. 11 for the families of the 343 firefighters who died at ground zero.

Many of them are following a pattern that was long familiar to Firefighter Sullivan’s widow, Helena, who raised their three young daughters on her own in their one-bedroom apartment in Jackson Heights. Almost as if to avenge his death, the family flourished over the years. His daughters bore him five grandchildren, who in turn bore him four great-grandchildren, including a girl born last month.

That makes a progeny of 12 - and a granddaughter, Kathryn Dunkelman, is four months pregnant.

Despite the passage of the years, Ms. Dunkelman said her grandfather has hardly been forgotten by the ensuing generations of his family.

“None of his grandchildren ever got to meet him, but we grew up knowing how he lived and died and being proud of that,” Ms. Dunkelman, 33, said.

Offering words of hope and comfort to members of the 343 families to whom her family is connected by a quirk of the calendar, she said they “should know that I never met my grandfather and I still know about him â€" his legacy lives on in our memory.”

Her extended family, she said, most of whom live in and around New York City, is planning a 60th anniversary commemoration of Firefighter Sullivan’s death next year at his old Engine 319 firehouse, a two-story building wedged between one- and two-family houses on 67th Road in Middle Village, Queens.

The rolls of firefighters has turned over several times since Firefighter Sullivan’s death, but even the younger members of his fire company know his name and how he died. There is a metal plaque just inside the door, alongside a photograph of him standing at attention, smiling and slim in his dress uniform. The plaque notes that he was “admired and respected by all.”

He was 48 when he died and in his 17th year on the job. He was standing on a step in the back of the fire truck, holding on to a metal handle overhead - standard practice at the time - when the rig swerved to pass a parked truck and sent him tumbling to the street.

He is the only member of that firehouse ever to die in the line of duty, several firefighters said as they gazed at the plaque on Monday. (The firehouse responded on Sept. 11, 2001, to ground zero; its members all survived). They had recently had lunch in the firehouse kitchen with the oldest of Firefighter Sullivan’s daughters, Eileen Sullivan.

“Most of them weren’t even alive when my father died, but they knew he died on Sept. 11,” said Ms. Sullivan, whose mother died in 1999. Ms. Sullivan learned more details of her father’s service and death this week thanks to a neighbor of the firehouse, Doug Marra 59, a self-described fire buff who has hanged around Engine 319 since he was 5.

Some 20 years ago, firehouse officials discarded the 1954 firehouse journals, following Fire Department guidelines on keeping records. But Mr. Marra rescued them from the trash and saved them all these years. During Ms. Sullivan’s visit, he gave her the account of the fatal accident.

Ms. Sullivan said she was a 12-year-old girl playing outside her building when her father’s co-workers showed up in their uniforms asking for her mother.

“I knew right away, this is not good,” she recalled, adding that she had the same feeling 47 years later while working in the Woolworth Building in downtown Manhattan and hearing the first plane, and then the second, hit the twin towers nearby. She was immediately aware that the day was Sept. 11.

“It was especially shattering to me that 343 fireman died that day â€" the date got more significant for me,” said Ms. Sullivan, now 71 and living in Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan.

Ms. Dunkelman, who works as the communications director for United States representative from Massachusetts, John Tierney, is a daughter of Firefighter Sullivan’s youngest daughter, Patricia Prael, and grew up in Jackson Heights. She called the Sept. 11 date “a terribly sad coincidence,” but one that somehow had strengthened her family’s ties to New York City.

Marian Fontana, 47, of Staten Island, whose husband, Firefighter Dave Fontana, died at ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001, said their son, Aidan, 17, will soon be heading off to college. Seeing him grow up with many of his father’s mannerisms and qualities has been bittersweet and somewhat healing, she said.

As is true for the family of Firefighter Sullivan, Sept. 11, Ms. Fontana said, will remain an inescapably poignant calendar date. But the date is not the way she wants to define her husband’s memory.

“We’re trying to keep his memory alive,” she said, “not in the way died but in the way he lived.”