Runnin’ kid follows FDNY dad’s path
TYLER HICKEY had just learned to walk when he began following in his firefighter father’s footsteps.
At just 15 months old, Hickey was pictured in the Daily News following a procession of firefighters attending a memorial service at Riverside Park in October 1994.
On Wednesday, he will once again be marching in an FDNY procession — this time as a new probationary firefighter.
“I have wanted to be a firefighter forever,” 24-year-old Hickey said Tuesday. “As a kid, the toys I had were fire trucks and fire boats. Everything I have done has led up to this.”
Hickey said he doesn’t actually remember the moment the adorable photo — which still hangs in his mother’s home — was taken, but he’s heard the story many, many times.
“I was a hyper child, and that day I escaped from my dad,” he said. “He was trying to catch me when a photographer asked him if I could run by the procession again while everyone was at attention.”
As a child, Hickey would frequent his dad’s home away from home — Engine 16 in Kips Bay — and hang out with some of the city’s Bravest, he recalled.
“It was the best playground you could ever have,” Hickey said about the firehouse. “It was like you had more than one dad. I used to go everywhere with them.”
Hickey’s dad, Firefighter Stephen Hickey, retired in 2005.
During his summers growing up, the younger Hickey worked as a lifeguard at Coney Island.
He graduated college with a degree in business and briefly interned in the financial sector, but it didn’t take long for him to realize that firefighting was in his blood.
“I couldn’t be sitting in an office for the rest of my life,” he said.
As he waited to be called to the Fire Academy, Hickey became an ironworker, which he felt was “the closest thing to being a firefighter,” he said.
When he finally got the call that he was accepted into the Fire Academy, he was overjoyed — and so was his father.
“I’d never seen him so proud,” Hickey said. “He was more proud of this than when I graduated college.”
After Wednesday’s graduation at the Christian Cultural Center in East New York, Brooklyn — where his proud father will be in attendance — Hickey said he plans to take his new career one day at a time, following his dad’s wise advice.
“He told me to work hard, keep my head down for the next two years and pay attention to everyone around me.”
“This is the perfect combination of the best two jobs in the world,” Hickey said of the FDNY. “You are giving back to the community while at the same time, you receive all the benefits from your brothers and sisters on the job.”