A rescue and (45 years later) a reunion
Man works to track down firefighter who saved him and his sister from smoking triple-decker in Dorchester
The photograph is a moment of fear frozen in time.
At its center, a firefighter bears his teeth with exertion as he hoists a 9-year-old girl to his left shoulder and carries a 3-year-old boy encircled by his right forearm. Behind the trio, another firefighter races into the burning Dorchester three-decker they have fled.
The girl’s brow is knitted with concern, her mouth open in shock, while her younger brother, wrapped in a blanket and wearing a T-shirt but no pants, holds a harmonica in his left hand and looks downward.
The image was captured by Globe photographer George Rizer and appeared in the pages of the Boston Evening Globe on Dec. 26, 1978.
On Wednesday, the little boy — now a 48year-old man — and his mother met the firefighter for the first time at Dorchester’s Florian Hall to express 45 years of gratitude.
Silvia Fox, the children’s mother, greeted retired Boston firefighter Joseph Gilmore with a hug and a cluster of balloons bearing the message, “Thank you.”
“Oh my God, you saved my kids,” Fox, 70, told Gilmore, who was a Boston firefighter from 1971 to 2009. “I’ve been waiting 45 years to say thank you.”
She embraced Gilmore for a long moment as tears welled in her eyes. A short time later, her son, Umar Fox, entered the hall to smiles and laughter.
“Little Umar isn’t so little anymore,” Gilmore said as he approached him for a hug.
The two-alarm fire at 63 Torrey St. was reported about 11 a.m. on Dec. 26, 1978, while Umar Fox and his sister Lisa were home from school for the holiday break and their single mother was caring for other children at the day care center where she worked. Lisa Fox Daniel was unable to attend Wednesday’s reunion because of illness.
Gilmore remembers the rescue, he said, but it didn’t seem noteworthy at the time — just part of a firefighter’s job. After he carried the children down from the home’s front steps to a waiting ambulance, he went back inside and continued fighting the fire, he said.
Umar Fox, now a father of three and stepfather of two, is a school bus driver who is responsible for transporting about 65 young children and teens to school each day, he said.
He’s heard the story of his rescue time and time again but always wanted to meet the man who saved his life. About 10 weeks ago, with the help of a friend, he was able to track down Gilmore using social media.
They also invited Rizer, who was a staff photographer for the Globe from 1973 to 2009, to participate in the reunion, and Rizer brought copies of his photograph of the rescue for both
‘Oh my God, you saved my kids. I’ve been waiting 45 years to say thank you.’
families to keep.
In an interview after the event, Rizer downplayed his role in the drama of that day.
Rizer, who was 33 in 1978, said he photographed the Dorchester fire after working at another blaze in Chinatown earlier that morning, and it was among many hundreds of fires and rescues he covered in his long career.
“The worst thing you can hear on the police scanner or fire scanner on the way to any event is, ‘children trapped,’” he said. You don’t want to hear that, but if you get there, you want to [see] them, God willing, be rescued like this. . . . We go to bad stuff looking for happy endings, hopefully.”
Rizer said anytime he captured a dramatic rescue, it was “pure serendipity,” the result of simply being in the right place at the right time with his camera in hand.
On that morning, Rizer was nearby when the fire was reported and raced to the scene, parking his car quickly and running over to photograph the rescue, he said. Then he ran back to his car and drove to the Globe’s headquarters then on Morrissey Boulevard, where he developed and printed the photos in time for the evening edition.
“If I spent four minutes at that fire, it’d be a miracle,” he said, adding later that he probably shot less than one roll of 35mm film there.
“Joe did the heavy lifting — pun intended,” Rizer said of Gilmore. “Media people, we just capture history, we don’t make it.”
At the reunion, Umar Fox and Gilmore attempted to recreate the pose in the photograph, with Fox standing on a chair while Gilmore put his arm around Fox’s legs, as both men laughed.
Looking at Rizer’s photo, Umar Fox joked that it captured two of his favorite things: his harmonica and not wearing pants.
He said he never liked to wear clothes, especially underwear, when he was a little boy.
The laughter paused for a moment as he told Gilmore, “If it wasn’t for you, my kids wouldn’t be here.”
Later, standing with their arms around each other, Gilmore told the Foxes he was grateful to be in the room with him.
“Forty-five years after this incident, who would think we will all still be here to be able to talk about it?” Gilmore said.
Umar Fox said that Gilmore’s life-saving efforts had enabled him to save lives many years later, rescuing a drowning child when he was a teen and talking two people out of suicide while working as a recovery coach.
“What you did, in turn, saved other people’s lives and brought more into the world,” Fox said
As they prepared to say goodbye, Umar Fox said he “wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
“You didn’t just do your job,” Silvia Fox told Gilmore, insisting that he is too humble. “You did it well.”