Young 'Probies' Come Downtown to Learn Legacy of FDNY Valor on 9/11

In a wreath ceremony at the 9/11 Memorial Plaza, the newest class of FDNY probationary firefighters honor those who were lost. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

You are too young to remember 9/11, but not to “Never forget.”

That was the message to 245 probationary firefighters, or “probies,” who saluted the fallen in a 9/11 Memorial Plaza ceremony on July 28, then smartly filed into the musuem to hear the history and lessons of September 11, 2001. With the passage of nearly 21 years, men and women now entering the city’s Fire Department have no memory of the events that killed 2,753 people in and around the Twin Towers, including 343 firefighters. So for the past few years, the museum and FDNY have partnered to instill the stories of bravery, loss and resilience into each freshly minted class of young firefighters. 

“We knew there would be a disconnect between those who remembered and those who didn’t,” Noah Rauch, the institution’s senior vice president of public programs, told the probies. The goal of the museum, Rauch said, “is to connect you with this history.”

And so it did, during an almost hour-by-hour multi-media recounting of FDNY heroism and tragedy on that day, and from the in-person recollections of two firefighters who lived through it. One of them was retired firefighter Bill Spade, the only survivor of the towers’ collapse among the 12 men from Rescue 5 who responded that day. (And the father of a probie in the current class.) The other speaker, Chuck Downey, is chief of the FDNY Fire Training Academy, and a lieutenant on 9/11 who lost his highly decorated father, Raymond Downey, the FDNY’s Chief of Rescue Operations. Downey spent nine months at the site, first during the rescue operation, then for the recovery, and the search for victims’ remains. His father’s were found in May 2002.

“Amazing things took place that day,” he told the probies. “So wherever you get assigned where you go out, you gotta learn those stories. Maybe you go to a company that lost a whole unit, they lost one, two, but you have to ask. You have to learn. You have to listen. Because it honors and continues their legacies.”