Click here for past issues of the Globe Magazine, dating back to June 22, 1997

Letters to the Magazine editor:
Mail can be sent to Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe, P.O. Box 2378, Boston, MA 02107-2378. The email address is magazine@globe.com or use our form.

In the line of duty

Uncle Ned had died fighting a fire, according to family lore. So why was his picture missing from the Memorial Hall?

Above the windows of Memorial Hall at Boston Fire Department Headquarters on Southampton Street in the South End are two rows of framed photographs in black and white. The rows stretch around the room. Each picture is that of a firefighter in uniform, taken when he did not suppose he would die in the performance of his duty.

One sunny morning recently, Paul A. Christian, chief of the department, walked over to one wall and pointed to a spot between two pictures. "That's where he'll go," he said, "right after John Murphy [died March 31, 1937]. The others we'll move over to make space."

Officially, 171 men have died in the line of duty since Boston's professional fire department was organized in 1837. The list begins in February 1852 with John Smith and ends in March 1999 with David Packard. Now there are 172. There hasn't been a fatal fire recently. The name that will be added to the list is that of my great-uncle, Captain Edward S. Humphreys, who died May 17, 1937. After 63 years, Uncle Ned is getting the honor he deserves.

His death was one of those tragedies that every family has. And because it was painful, and everybody in the family knew what had happened, nothing was written down. Decades passed and witnesses died off, until only fragments remain. The mystery of Uncle Ned's death now is as solved as it will ever be.

EDWARD STEPHEN HUMPHREYS WAS BORN IN BOSTON the day after Christmas 1879, the fourth of five children and the youngest of three brothers in a West End family. The eldest was my grandfather, John Humphreys, my mother's father. The younger two, Joe and Ned, at first followed their father and were apprenticed as tailors, but eventually they found more lively and exciting work - as firefighters. Joe was appointed to the department in 1901, Ned two years later in 1903.

Ned's appointment photograph shows him, age 23, proud in his new uniform with brass buttons, his cap slightly cocked. In his other official picture, taken about 1926, he has a milder expression but the same level gaze and same slightly protuberant lower lip. Solidly middle-aged, he wears the single-bugle insignia of a lieutenant. The cap covers his receding hairline. There is no picture of him in his captain's double-bugles, but then he only lived 10 months after his promotion in July 1936.

He was extremely shy, and the only one of his siblings not to marry. My mother, 89, recalls: "My father's sisters said, `Oh, you must be very careful what you say to Ned; he's so sensitive.' But my mother [his sister-in-law] wouldn't do it; she just treated him the same as everyone else. She would even take his arm in the street, and he loved it."

My mother's brother Edward Humphreys, 83 (also called Ned; I'll call him Ned Jr. to avoid confusion), says simply, "He was afraid of women. But my mother could talk to him, and he could talk to her. He would come down to the house every Thursday with a box of candy from Schrafft's, and he always sent out for ice cream. He smoked Lucky Strikes, but he would not smoke in the house. I would sneak them out of his coat and go in the bathroom and smoke."

Since he lived with his two sisters, he had minimal living expenses. He dressed with style and had a car, a Buick touring car with a removable top. He was affectionate and generous, the classic doting uncle. In 1932, he took my mother and other nieces and nephews on a Caribbean cruise, with stops in Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Colombia, Haiti, and Costa Rica. "We'd all be running up and down the deck of the ship," Ned Jr. remembers, "and he would sit in the deck chair. He enjoyed us having fun." My mother remembers asking her father, "Dad, is Uncle Ned rich?" The reply was, "He's not rich, he's single."

Though Ned was reticent in private, he was fearless at a fire. "He was famous for his courage," my mother says, "and not everyone was that way. But he called himself `a real smoke eater.' " Ned Jr. recalls: "He was like John Wayne, the bravest guy in the place. He'd never send his men in; he would always go first. He would laugh at people who wouldn't follow him. They said he was crazy. But he said, `How else can you fight a fire? You have to find it first.' "

In family stories, not much was said about the fire. My mother always said, "It was a chemical warehouse on the waterfront. He breathed some kind of fumes." She wasn't sure of the year. Ned Jr. remembers it a bit differently. He, too, says it was a warehouse, possibly some kind of grain, and that it might have been Charlestown. He and his brother were there. It was night. "We all chased fires in those days," he says. "There wasn't that much else to do. We stood on the bridge and watched it. We saw a big explosion, and we said, `Somebody's hurt down there,' but we didn't even know he was in it.

"He was blown right out on the street with his whole company. The way I heard it, he was burned through the pores of his skin, and it got to the second or third layer of his skin, pulverized and powdered it, then it got into his kidneys. He was dead three days later. I went with my father to see him, way at the top of the hill on Grampian Way [in Savin Hill, in Dorchester]. He didn't look that bad, and the next day he was dead."

Uncle Ned was 57 and had been 34 years a firefighter. The funeral was at St. William's Church in Dorchester and burial was in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline.

A couple of years ago, I became curious about whether Uncle Ned, having died as he did, was recorded on the honor roll of firefighters killed in the line of duty. However, an inquiry to the Fire Department revealed that he was not. The record said only that he went off duty in February 1937 with burns to his face, head, and hands. I assumed that that was a relatively minor fire, because he came back to full duty a month later, went off again in April with an "old injury," then died May 17. The big fire, it seemed, must have been in May.

Still, if he had died of injuries suffered in a fire, why would that not be in the record, and why was he not on the line-of-duty list? Memory is a tricky faculty. Could it be that both my mother and uncle had it wrong? That Uncle Ned had actually died of some other cause, unrelated to a fire? That seemed hardly possible, and yet the three-paragraph Boston Globe obituary mentioned no fire and no injuries, only that "he died at home following a brief illness." I did no more about the mystery at the time, but it continued to bother me. Recently, I looked into it again.

The obituary also gave the date of death as May 17. Since Ned Jr. had said Uncle Ned had died a few days after the fire, I went to the microfilm in the Globe library to look through issues of the newspaper the week or 10 days before that date, hunting for a big waterfront fire. There was a lot of other news. The Hindenburg crashed and burned. King Edward VII abdicated. And there was one fairly small waterfront fire: in a grain warehouse on Pier 59 in Charlestown. There was an explosion, and a watchman was injured. Could that be it? But wouldn't injuries to firefighters be mentioned?

An important clue would be the official cause of death. I went to City Hall to get the death certificate. For $6, a clerk got out an old book and carefully typed out an official copy on green paper, with a red city seal. Under cause of death, it said, "Acute nephritis. Absorption of toxins. Severe burns of fire 2/13. Hypertensive HT disease."

Acute nephritis is severe inflammation of the kidneys. Apparently my mother and uncle were both right: He breathed toxic fumes, and his kidneys were destroyed. But "fire 2/13"? The fatal fire was the one in which he received "burns of face, head, and hands." It was not a few days before his death, as Ned Jr. remembers, but three months earlier.

I went to the library again, put on the microfilm roll for February 1937, and cranked it to Sunday the 14th. I felt a chill when I read, on Page 1: "Blast Burns Fire Captain. Several Others Bruised in Two Explosions." The story said, "Captain Edward Humphrey [sic] of Engine 37 [actually 39] was severely burned about the hands and face and several other firemen were bruised when an explosion blew them into the street during a four-alarm fire in a two-story wooden business block at 308-312 Congress Street last night.

"Captain Humphrey was burned as he led two details of firemen into the building," the story continued. "His men, who were behind him, escaped the tongues of flame which leaped at them, but were bruised as they fell into the street. ... Captain Humphrey was held for treatment at Haymarket Relief Hospital." The hospital was an emergency clinic maintained by the city on Canal Street.

The fire didn't happen in Charlestown, as Ned Jr. vaguely remembers, but South Boston, at the edge of the Fort Point Channel, exactly where the boardwalk park with the giant milk bottle is now, in front of the Children's Museum. The bridge Ned Jr. remembers is the Congress Street bascule bridge, where the Tea Party Ship, which was built in 1931, is docked. After more digging at the Boston Public Library, the state archives, and the Fire Department, with help from Chief Christian, the story came together.

Engines 38 and 39 occupied one firehouse (it now houses the Fire Department museum) on Congress Street at the corner of Farnsworth Street, only two blocks away from the fire. At about 9 o'clock that Saturday night, District Chief William Donovan was driving across the Congress Street bridge toward District Three headquarters in South Boston when he noticed fire on his left. He struck the first alarm, box 7115 at the corner of Congress and Sleeper streets (the box is still there), at 9:11 p.m.

Engines 38 and 39 were sent, also Engines 7 and 15, Ladders 18 and 8, Rescue 1, and Tower 3. Fireboat Matthew J. Boyle was called from its berth at Northern Avenue.

The 1934 Sanborn Atlas to the City of Boston, a remarkably precise building and insurance survey that was discontinued a few years later, shows the building in detail. It was wooden, two stories, 24 feet high, 100 feet wide on Congress Street, and 300 feet back along the wharf. It was leased from Atlas Terminal Stores by Grasselli Chemical Co. Stored in the building were hundreds of carboys (large glass jugs) filled with nitric acid and sulfuric acid.

Three more alarms were struck in rapid succession: at 9:17, 9:18, and 9:25. Within minutes, there was such a crush of apparatus and tangle of hoses that no more equipment could get across the bridge. There were 21 engine companies (usually two vehicles each, a pumper and a wagon to carry hoses), six ladder companies, a rescue unit, and two tower trucks - as many as 50 vehicles. Fireboat John Dowd came up to assist the Boyle. Six chiefs were present, and 10,050 feet of hose were used.

A Boston Herald story reported: "An explosion of acid ... blew an entire company into the street. ... Captain Edward Humphreys of Engine 39 and his crew of five men, the first to reach the fire, were hurled away from the building as they entered a door." Seconds later, another explosion blew two ladders off the front of the building, "narrowly missing firemen massing outside."

"Strangling fumes hung over nearby streets," the story said, "driving back spectators. Streams of liquid fire poured up as the carboys exploded." Firefighters put on gas masks amid the thick smoke. Thousands of spectators, including Uncle Ned's 19-year-old nephew and namesake, gathered across the channel to watch "the brilliant display as the chemicals burned with many-colored flame."

About 10 p.m., Department Chief Samuel Pope ordered all firefighters out of the building. The tide was high, and water from the Dowd and Boyle, which threw a combined 18,000 gallons per minute, saturated the building. Around midnight, the fire was out.

About a month later, as the record said, Uncle Ned returned to duty, but only for two weeks before going off again, and he never came back. Apparently he was not hospitalized after that first night. What exactly happened, physiologically? My mother says: "I remember the doctor coming to the house [at 76 West Cedar Street] to talk to my parents. I think his name was Rosenbloom. He was a West End doctor. He was very fond of Uncle Ned, as everyone was, and I remember he said to my father sadly, `Someday we'll have something to treat injuries like this. But now we can't do anything for him.' "

I hoped to find some medical records. The doctor, I learned, was Henry Rosenberg, only 31 at the time, who had a family practice on the corner of Blossom and McLean streets in the West End. His son, James Rosenberg of Brookline, also a doctor, says that anecdote sounds like his father: "He was a warm, compassionate man. His knowledge of medicine was excellent. His patients felt he was not only their doctor but their friend." But Rosenberg says his father's records are all long gone.

Apparently, though, the fatal process isn't that much of a puzzle. Dr. Michael Hamrock, medical director of the Boston Fire Department and a former firefighter, notes that kidney failure is a serious risk with severe burns. "It sounds like he had a full-thickness burn," he says, "down to the muscle layer. That is much more likely to lead to complications, sepsis [infection], and renal failure." Also, ingestion of heavy metals or solvents can lead to acute nephritis.

In those days, Hamrock says, doctors took a watch-and-wait approach to burns, "and by then renal function could get worse and worse." Even if they didn't wait, at that time, before antibiotics, dialysis, or kidney transplants, there was little they could do. Even if Uncle Ned's external burns hadn't kept him from trying to go back to work, the progressive internal effects eventually brought him down.

In the end, there was only one puzzle left, the same one I started with: When the cause of death was known to be a fire-related injury, why wasn't Great-Uncle Ned put on the list of those who had died in the line of duty? Wouldn't his brother Joe, who was also a captain with 35 years of service, have insisted on it?

There is no specific answer. But there is a general one. "In those days," Chief Christian says, "you had to die in the fire to be on that list, or maybe if you died the next day." Today, the criteria for honors of all kinds are more generous. But back then, men did dangerous work - fisherman, steelworker, coal miner, firefighter - with fewer safety precautions, and injury was considered a natural part of the job. They weren't coddled and didn't coddle themselves. Hamrock describes an old photograph he saw of a Boston fire company: "One man had an above-the-knee amputation. He was working. They had to work to survive."

But it wasn't only survival. "In those days, men were gung-ho," says George Graney, a retired Boston firefighter who joined the service in July 1937. "Sometimes an officer would have to take a man aside and say, `You see that building? You and I are not going to put that fire out by ourselves.' In many fellows, there was a feeling against reporting injuries. They'd say, `I'll be all right.' "

Though he was gravely ill and had no family to support, Uncle Ned tried to return to duty. In previous years, he had answered several alarms while off duty - even though a duty shift at that time was 84 hours. "The in-town companies would fight one another to get the first water on a fire," Graney says. "We'd feel like 2 cents if the other company stole our fire. The captain would be mad that we missed it."

On August 1, a letter was issued, signed by Chief Christian. "After reviewing the facts in the case of the death of Captain Edward S. Humphreys, Engine Co. 39," the letter reads, "it is officially recorded in the records of the Boston Fire Department that Captain Humphreys died on May 17, 1937, of injuries sustained in the line of duty at Box 7115, four alarms, on February 13, 1937. It is further ordered that Captain Humphreys be accorded the same honors in Memorial Hall, at the Boston Fire Department Headquarters, as other members who have died in the line of duty."

This correction means much to those few who knew Uncle Ned, who remember his bravery, constancy, generosity, and kindness. However, though I never knew him, I have a sense that with his shyness and modesty, he would be embarrassed to have any fuss made about this matter. He would say nobody forced him to lead the charge that night. He knew what he was doing. He could have been a tailor, after all, like his father. But no, he was a "real smoke eater."