His latest heroic deed: plucking two toddlers from a smoke-filled home
Copyright 2006 Lancaster Newspapers, Inc.
By CINDY STAUFFER
Lancaster New Era (Pennsylvania)
LANCASTER, Pa. — Name a major emergency in the city and it seems as if Terry Bracken’s been there to carry out the wounded, cradle the dead or put out the fire.
In his 28 years on the job at the city fire department, Bracken has helped to rescue a kid off a rocky ledge, shock people back to life, crawl underground to put out a fire and climb ladders for rescues.
Tuesday, he put on his safety gear and entered the bedroom of a North Franklin Street home that was dead-black with smoke. He felt around in the darkness and found two toddler boys, one the same age as his own grandson, stuck one child under each arm and carried them to safety.
In person, the 50-year-old Bracken looks smaller than the Superman you might expect to meet. At 5-foot-9, 180 pounds, he is compact but muscular with hands that have seen the hard work of a firefighter.
What does it take to be the person who charges in where others shrink back?
Yes, there is both the formal and the on-the-job training, where the veterans teach the rookies the tricks of the trade: how to read smoke conditions, open windows from the top, stay low, rely on the person outside.
But sit down at Fire Station No. 3 on East King Street with Bracken and his blue-shirted co-workers and you learn there is more than just hoses and axes, boots and helmets, that go into making a firefighter.
A city kid, Bracken grew up loving camping, bike-riding and other outdoor pursuits. The middle son of a soft drink sales executive and a Bulova inspector, he knew as a teen he wanted to be a firefighter.
A man in his neighborhood was a firefighter, as was the father of a high school girlfriend. To the young, active Bracken, the job was both steady and exciting.
“Anyone who tells you they don’t like the excitement and danger is only kidding,” he says. “We thrive on that.”
After graduating from McCaskey High School in 1973, he worked at the former Armstrong carpet plant in Marietta for five years, waiting for an opening in the fire department.
Bracken arrived at the department when it was making the transition from old-school firefighting to the more modern, technical approach of today.
He has a foot in both worlds, says Fire Chief Chief Tim Gregg.
“Terry is a throwback,” says Gregg, who has known Bracken for more than two decades. “He would have been a good firefighter in any of the past decades. You won’t find a better firefighter. He’s very aggressive. He’s not going to hesitate to make a rescue. And he’s very mechanically inclined, very technical.”
Over the years, Bracken honed his experience fighting fires and responding to accidents and doing a job that firefighters say they never quit, only retire from.
Firefighters are a brotherhood and a family. In the city, sons follow fathers, and grandfathers, into the stations. At his station, Bracken works with a childhood buddy, Jeff Ressler; another guy, Marvin Kelley, was sworn on the same day as Bracken.
Off the job, the firefighters hunt and ride motorcycles together. On the job, they sleep side by side on station beds with red bedspreads, cook and clean up together and back each other up on triumphant and sad days.
Bracken, a lieutenant, has helped to rescue at least 10 people during his career, including the two toddlers Tuesday. They include two boys who were electrocuted on top of a railroad car, a 12-year-old boy who fell from a ledge in county park and a mother and small child who were trapped by a fire. He also helped to shock two people back to life, including a man who had a heart attack and another who had overdosed on drugs.
Not too many years ago, he ran into the mother of one of the very first people he helped to save, a girl who went through a plate-glass window more than 20 years ago. The woman approached him at a fire call.
“She said, ‘Would you be the firefighter who saved my daughter? I gotta give you a big hug,’ ” Bracken says.
Bracken also was the man who volunteered to go underground and try to put out a stubborn electrical fire that caused a 12-hour blackout in the city in 2001. He had to reach into a tangle of underground wires that he had been told, and fervently hoped, had been disabled.
“I like that stuff,” he said at the time.
Really?
“I do like that stuff. We thrive on challenges. ... It’s my calling. It’s what I want to do,” he says, adding with a laugh, “I feel more comfortable doing that than talking to you.”
But there have been times when Bracken and his co-workers could not do the miraculous. He helped to carry out bodies from two of the city’s most notorious fires, both arsons, one that killed five people inside a Rockland Street home and another that killed four in a East Chestnut Street home.
“Your driving force is to want to save whoever is in that building, take the risk up to the point of risking your own life,” he says. “To us, they are never dead until we have got them out and the coroner says they’re dead.”
Bracken still remembers the exact position of the body of one child he tried to save on one of the calls. Another firefighter remembers the pattern of the kitchen floor.
“That’s the stuff you never forget, the memory you’ll never get rid of,” Bracken says.
Bracken recuperates after a tough call by working harder, by hugging his wife, Linda, two sons and three grandkids.
With 10 years until his own mandatory retirement at age 60, Bracken still sees challenges ahead. He plans on taking the captain’s test this month.
And this year, the younger of his two sons, Daniel, 26, is going to take the test to become a firefighter.
When the day comes for him to be sworn in, the chief, Gregg, might say the same thing to him that he did to the last class of recruits, sworn in the day that Bracken made his last two rescues.
“You ought to identify a role model,” Gregg told the recruits.
“Terry,” he says, “has the reputation. Younger firefighters look up to him.”