Absent Friends

“He lost two friends within a year,” said Marian Gallagher, the director of the More Art, New York! Foundation. Ms. Gallagher grew up with McCaffery and now heads the McCaffery Memorial Fund, whose mission is to aid the FDNY's outreach and recruitment efforts. “I think he just felt a need to start over. But he never forgot where he came from. One of the friends who died left a son. Jimmy helped raise him.”

“Definitely, I joined the Department because of Uncle Jimmy,” said Kevin Keegan, 24, the son of Mark Keegan, a close childhood friend of McCaffery's who died at the age of 23. Kevin Keegan is a probationary firefighter at Engine 168 who had been on the job just three months on September 11. His right leg and arm were badly burned by falling debris as he and other firefighters prepared to enter the north tower. Keegan is currently in rehabilitation at the Burke Center in Westchester. “Uncle Jimmy was there the whole time I was growing up,” Keegan continued. “If I was in trouble, or had a problem or something, he'd be on the phone, he'd show up at our door. I could count on him.”

Keegan, the Tribune has learned, is the beneficiary of Captain McCaffery's FDNY life insurance policy. “That's Jimmy. Still taking care of us,” said Keegan's mother, Sally. “No matter where he was, Kevin and I could always go to Jimmy.”

After Ladder 10, McCaffery served with Engine 235 in Brooklyn and then in three other Manhattan companies, including three years with Rescue Co. 1, before being given the command of Ladder Co. 62. From his probationary days at Engine 168, McCaffery's fearlessness stood out. “He wasn't reckless,” said his mentor, Owen McCardle. “Jimmy never made a move until he took the situation in. But sometimes we had to pull him back all the same. One thing you learn on this job: sometimes you have to let something burn. Let something go to save something else. Jimmy never wanted to believe that. Superman, we called him. Save everyone, that's what Jimmy wanted.”

In a Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph from 1984, McCaffery is in midair, leaping the gap from one rooftop to another, silhouetted against smoke and flame. Another picture, taken in 1988, shows him being lowered on a rope to rescue a baby held out the window of a burning third-floor apartment. McCaffery brought the baby up and was lowered a second time to save the mother. He tied the rope around her, signaled firefighters to pull her up, then disappeared into the building in search of another child. He found her crouching in a closet with the family cat. As the fire went to three alarms, McCaffery staggered from the building, ankle badly twisted and with bloody parallel lines of scratches on his face and hands. EMS workers rushed forward and took from him a blanket-wrapped, unhurt child clutching her terrified cat.

There are other stories: a dive into the Hudson in a rainstorm to pull a man from a sinking boat. Using his turnout coat to smother the flames on a man whose clothes were burning. Many stories. And after each act of heroism, James McCaffery—most often smiling widely—thanked well-wishers, returned to his firehouse, and refused all requests for interviews.

Three times McCaffery was admitted to NYU Medical Center, twice to the Burn Unit, with injuries that would have made him eligible for retirement. Each time he was back on the job within months. FDNY Assistant Chief Aleck Wagman acknowledges McCaffery to have been a source of “institutional knowledge.” “Men were anxious to serve under him. Not just the new guys, everyone. Anyone could learn something from Jimmy. He'll be badly missed.”

“At the other houses he worked, he wouldn't let them call him Superman,” Owen McCardle recalls. “Like it embarrassed him. But, tell you the truth, it was always who he wanted to be.”

McCaffery lived alone in a small, spare apartment on West 12th Street and never married. “The Job was his family,” said Ted Fitzgerald, retired captain of Engine 235. “There's always guys like that, every generation. They're the backbone of this Department, and on 9/11 we lost way too many of them.”

McCaffery's heroism on September 11 is by now legendary. Elizabeth Murray, an attorney, made the trip down 28 flights of stairs with others from her firm. Murray, her firm's fire warden, was among the last to evacuate her floor. She spoke of McCaffery's “swift and total” understanding of the tragedy. “There was fire on our floor from the elevator shaft. People were burned, and some had been hit by debris that exploded out when the doors blew open. There was a lot of smoke, and we were cut off from our stairs.” The men of Ladder 62 directed the crowds away from the fire to an open stairwell, assisting the injured and, in the words of another survivor, “defusing the hysteria, everyone screaming and running around.”