By Phil Fairbanks
The Buffalo News
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Years from now, Angie Heusinger will sit down with her grandson and show him pictures of Sunday’s tribute to his father.
She will point to the hundreds of people who filled three floors of the Pearl Street Grill & Brewery in celebration of a man who lived for his kids and died fighting a fire.
She will tell Jon, now only 7 months old, that the people who came that day in mid-April of 2010 were there because his father, Jonathan S. Croom, was a hero.
“There’s lots to tell him,” Heusinger said of the infant grandson who never met his father. “I’ll show him the photos from this event and all the other events we’ve been to. What better way to show him his father’s spirit and his love of life and people?”
Talk to any of the hundreds of people who knew Jonathan Croom and showed up Sunday and you’ll hear those same words — spirit and love — over and over again.
You hear it from his boyhood friend Jay Hall and from his former captain at Ladder 7, John Murphy.
“Pick the 20 nicest people you know and bring them here,” Hall said in a kind of mock wager, “and I’ll bring Jonathan Croom, and we’ll see who lights up the room.”
Hall, one of the organizers of Sunday’s benefit, spoke of their time together at the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts and of the lifelong friends they made there.
“It started out as something small,” Hall said of the benefit for Croom’s son and daughter, 22-month-old Joanna. “And then Pearl Street offered the whole building, and I said, ‘I’m going to fill it.’ ”
They called it “The Gift at the Pearl,” a way for Croom’s numerous friends and family to remember him and a fellow firefighter, Lt. Charles W. “Chip” McCarthy.
The two men died Aug. 24 while fighting a fire at an East Side deli on Genesee Street. Croom raced inside the burning building when McCarthy sounded a “mayday” call for help. Like McCarthy, he fell into the basement and died.
Sunday, their brethren, many of them clad in blue Buffalo firefighter T-shirts, were out in force.
“If he was here, he’d be having the time of his life,” Murphy said of Croom.
Like Hall and so many others, Murphy spoke of Croom’s love for life and, even more so, his two children.
“He was always about his kids,” he said.
The kids and the family Croom left behind are what his mother often talks about. At one point Sunday, she took the microphone to introduce her brother’s band — one of 15 to perform at the benefit — and told the crowd that at least once a day her brother calls to remind her that he loves her and that Jonathan did, too.
“My son would be so overwhelmed by this,” she said of the benefit and the more than 1,000 people it expected to attract Sunday.
And then with a big smile, she said it was the perfect venue to celebrate the son she called “Sim.”
“My son loved music, beer and people,” she said. “He would have loved this.”
People interested in contributing to the fund that will benefit Croom’s two children should contact the Riverside branch of M&T Bank.
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