Q: You grew up mostly in Chicago. When did you know this was the work you wanted?
A: It was after the Our Lady of the Angels school fire. December 1, 1958. Ninety-two children and three nuns. I was born just after this in Chicago but hearing many stories for years about this incident. You don’t forget what a fire can do to a school, to a neighborhood, to families who sent their children off that morning thinking they were coming home. I knew pretty soon after that I wanted to be on the other side of it, the people who go in. I didn’t understand all of it then. I just knew I didn’t want to stand on the sidewalk.
Q: People see the trucks and the lights. What did the job actually ask of you?
A: It asks you to walk toward what everybody else is running from. And then it asks you to go home and be a husband, a father, a neighbor like nothing happened. You see burn victims. You see families on the worst day of their lives. You carry people out who don’t make it, and you carry people out who do. After a while you learn the job isn’t only water and ladders. It’s standing with people when there is nothing left to put out.
Q: You became fire chief in 2001, right before September 11. What was that moment like?
A: You take a job thinking about your city, hydrant pressure, training, the next structure fire on a Saturday night. Then a Tuesday morning arrives and the whole country is on fire in a way none of us had trained for. I was responsible for men and women here. We were hundreds of miles from New York, but every firefighter in America felt it in the same place. Those were our brothers. When those towers came down, you weren’t watching a news story. You were watching a fire department get buried.
Q: You have said 9/11 was the worst tragedy of our time for firefighters. Why does it still sit differently than other calls you have seen?
A: Because they went in knowing. After the first tower was hit, they still went up the stairs. After the second tower was hit, they still went up the stairs. Three hundred and forty-three of them. That is not a fire. That is a slaughter of people whose only job that morning was to save someone else. I have seen terrible things in this work. I have never seen anything that large, that deliberate, and that brave at the same time. You don’t get over that. You learn how to carry it.
Q: There is a story you have carried about a little girl who lost her father that day.
A: She was eight months old when her father died in those buildings. She never knew him except through pictures and other people’s voices. She has been in therapy most of her life. When she got to school, other children called her “DD”—Dead Dad. That is what 9/11 left behind that the cameras never stayed on: a baby who grew up with a hole where a father should have been, and a world that sometimes did not know how to be kind about it. I think about her when people say “it’s been 25 years.” Twenty-five years is a whole childhood. For some families, the clock did not stop. It just got quieter.
Q: You have a reputation for carrying families through fires and other tragedies. Where did that come from?
A: From watching what is left when the trucks leave. The fire is the event. The family is the rest of their life. If you have ever handed a mother a blanket or stood in a yard while a house finished falling in, you learn you cannot fix it. You can only refuse to look away. That girl with the nickname at school, that is the same thing. The tragedy does not end at the scene. If you are going to wear the uniform, you have to have room in your chest for that.
Q: You have said those stories changed how you see the world. How?
A: I used to think in terms of calls: this address, this shift, this city. After 9/11 I thought in terms of a brotherhood that does not care what city is on your patch. A firefighter in New York and a firefighter in Phenix City took the same oath. When they die doing it, it is not “their” loss. It is ours. I also became less patient with forgetting. People move on because they have to. That is human. But moving on is not the same as erasing. The world is more fragile than we pretend, and the people who run toward the fragility deserve to be named out loud.
Q: What do you remember about this community in the days after?
A: Flags. Churches. Quiet firehouses. People who had never been to New York standing in line to give blood. First responders here asking what they could do, knowing the answer was mostly “remember them and take care of your own.” That is a small city’s way of showing up. We could not dig in the pile. We could decide that those men would not be strangers on our riverbank.
Q: Not long after the attacks, Phenix City built a memorial along the Chattahoochee, near the amphitheater. You were over the dedication. Why did this city need a stone here?
A: Because if you only remember in New York, you make it someone else’s history. Those firefighters were trying to save people they had never met. That is the job everywhere. We put that memorial where the river moves and people gather so you would have to pass it, on the way to a concert, a walk, an ordinary evening, and be reminded that ordinary evenings are the point. The inscription says it plain: In honor of our fallen comrades who lost their lives while trying to save others at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. “Comrades” was the right word. They were not celebrities. They were the guy on the next rig.
Q: What do you remember about the dedication itself?
A: The sound of it. Bagpipes, or just the river and people trying not to cry in public. Firefighters standing a little straighter than usual. Families who didn’t lose anyone that day and still felt like they should be there. Dedication days are not for the dead, not really. The dead already know what they did. Dedication days are for the living, so we don’t get sloppy with the memory.
Q: A generation has grown up with no memory of that morning. What do you want them to understand when they see this memorial?
A: That 2,977 people went to work or boarded a plane and did not come home. That 343 of them wore the same kind of coat I wore. That a baby grew up being mocked for a father she never met. And that a little city in Alabama thought those facts were important enough to cut into stone by the river. You don’t have to be afraid of the day. You do have to refuse to make it a trivia question. If you are young and you want a measure of a life, start with this: they ran in while the buildings were still standing, and they stayed.
Q: Did 9/11 change how you led a fire department?
A: It sharpened the part of the job that is about readiness and the part that is about people. Training matters. Radios matter. Knowing who is on your crew matters. But so does checking on a firefighter after a bad call, and so does telling a rookie why we stand at memorials. Leadership in this work is half tactics and half not letting the job make you hard in the wrong places.
Q: You went from the firehouse to running the city. What did the fire service give you that you still use?
A: Stay calm when other people are loud. Get the facts before you talk. Take care of the people who take care of the public. And remember that most of the important work happens when nobody is clapping, on a night shift, in a burned-out kitchen, at a graveside. City government is different paperwork. It is not a different responsibility.
Q: If the families of those 343 firefighters were standing here at this memorial, what would you say?
A: I would not try to make it better. I would say your husband, your father, your son, your brother is not forgotten in a town he may never have heard of. We put his kind of courage in writing next to our river. We are sorry the world was cruel enough to need that courage. We are grateful he had it.
Q: Twenty-five years on, what should Phenix City do with this anniversary?
A: Come to the river. Read the words out loud. Teach a child who was not alive in 2001 what the stone is for. Thank a firefighter who still goes through a door without knowing what is on the other side. Then go live a decent life. That is what they were trying to protect, ordinary Tuesday mornings. The highest honor we can pay them is not to waste the ones we still get.