A Personal Memory - Big Jim Ryan - First Responder

Big Jim Ryan – F.D.N.Y.

First Responder Went Quietly Into the Night Christmas Morning

Maureen Rossi

Click photo to enlarge - Jim Ryan on leftA dozen and half men were gathered in the gym of RJO in Kings Park, they ranged in age from their late 30’s to their late 40’s.  It was a fall night in 2001 and I was the only female present.  We were there to draft our teams for the Kings Park Youth (KPY) organization; it was basketball season.   They called out the names of coaches before the draft.   Rossi – Ryan.   I raised my hand and I looked around to see a big burly Irishman raise his.   Ryan did not look happy – he wasn’t a hard man to read at that exact moment in time.   He seemed less than enamored that he got stuck with the only broad in the room and on top of that, I was head coach.   I wasn’t worried; I knew the game – I had coached about ten different sports teams by the time I was 37 and could probably outshoot just about every guy in the room.

Our first practice didn’t go as smooth as practices I had hosted in the past.   I called the 4^th and 5^th grade boys into a circle, I introduced Mr. Ryan and myself; Coach Moe.   I told the boys we were going to work on fundamentals – dribbling, passing and shooting.   Ryan and I split the boys up and took them to separate courts.  I had his kid, he had mine.    I started passing drills with the boys and I looked over at Ryan he was trying to teach them plays.  What happened to working on fundamentals?  I knew this guy was going to be a hard one to break.  But break him I did.  The first thing on my side was my name, Maureen.  Turns out Ryan had a sister named Maureen.  I was from Queens, Ryan was from Queens.  Both of Irish decent, we were products of Catholic high school.   Ryan began to warm up to me – he even cracked an occasional smile, something I didn’t think I’d get from the pain in the butt all season. 

As the weeks went on Ryan and I got to know each other, it turned out Ryan was on the job – lingo for he was a member of F.D.N.Y.   Coming from a blue collar Irish neighborhood and family, most of the men I knew wore a uniform to work.  I knew a lot guys on the job.  It turns out Ryan was in a house in Bayside with a dear friend of the family – Keith Palumbo.  A neighborhood kid, he had a lot of problems at his house growing up and he was just one of many kids my mother took in.  Palumbo was like a brother me.  Palumbo was Ryan’s best friend.

When I look back at that basketball season and the friendship Ryan and I built immediately following 9/11, more and more is revealed to me.   Ryan never brought the job to our team although he always had a serious look on his face.   I could get him to smile by challenging him to a few shots, dribbling circles around him and then swishing three pointers.  He would look at me and grin.   I never spoke about my Sundays volunteering at the “pile” for the Salvation Army, slinging hash and serving coffee to his brothers on the job.  I never told Ryan that from the first day I went down to the pile in late September I would cough the whole way home to Kings Park.  I would cough, I would think and I would cry – nothing in my life had prepared me for what I saw down there.  I had nightmares for a year – bad ones.  Looking back, I should have sought help but I was a tough Irish mother and a reporter.  I had covered homicides, I had dined with made men, I was tough as nails, I thought.  

Ryan and I had a great time coaching our boys that year – neither one of us bought into the wishy washy parenting mode of many of our peers. Where every kid needs to feel great about every little thing they do and they always need to win.  We were kind and patient with the boys and praised them from time to time.  With each other we would joke that maybe our boys should be selling Girl Scout cookies instead of playing basketball –we got each other.  We spoke the same language; we were cut from the same jib.

It turns out Ryan spent a lot of time on that pile – he was the first guy I knew who got sick.   I ran into him at our boys’ high school track meet – he had been diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer.  He was thin but looked okay and was getting treatment, he was optimistic.   We would sit together at the long uneventful track meets and just talk for hours.  He worshiped his beautiful wife, his two sons and little girl.  He was really a great family man.  We would also talk and joke about Palumbo – sometimes we would call him on the cell and talk to him together on speaker phone and break his chops unmercifully. 

My son befriended the oldest Ryan boy in high school, he knew his dad was sick and he saw the kid was getting picked on in the locker room.  My son was very small for his age, he was an academic but he was also popular.  It was highly unlike his character but he charged and threw the bully up against a locker and said ‘you leave Ryan alone; you never go near him again’.  The bully listened up and kept his distance from both boys.   Young Ryan shared the story with his dad; his father told him to stay close to the Rossi kid, those are the type of people you want in your life, people who have your back.   So when it was time for the Ryan boy to go to college, painfully thin and just weeks before he died, Ryan, his wife and three kids headed up to Cortland to let their son stay with my son (for a real college experience – Ryan’s wife and I agreed we didn’t want to know the details of the evening but we heard it was EPIC). 

It was Christmas morning 2009 and my husband children and I were headed west bound on the LIE when my son’s phone rang.  It was the Ryan boy – he called to say his father had passed away that morning.  It was a very quiet ride, with Christmas carols echoing the background, we all wept for the Ryan family.  I put on my happy Christmas face, because that’s what moms do but it was the saddest Christmas of my life.  The next morning I dropped my son at the Ryan home in Kings Park much to his protest.  “Mom what do I say, what do I do, this stuff makes me very uncomfortable Mom.”   I told him, you must go, he is your friend, I know it’s hard Bryan but death is a part of life and you must be there for your friend.  Take out the garbage, help Mrs. Ryan, answer the door, go to the store for them.  Just be there.  

The funeral was held at Abiding Presence in Fort Salonga. Because Ryan didn’t die on the job, he didn’t get a full-out F.D.N.Y funeral like the guys who died on 9/11.  However, the word went out to fire departments around the region and in addition to the trucks and men the F.D.N.Y. sent, there were dozens and dozens of trucks from fire houses all over Long Island, Westchester, Jersey.  Thousands of firefighters stood at attention, the pipes were playing and with my son holding me up, I cried a thousand tears for Ryan and his beautiful family.

The oldest Ryan boy ending up leaving Cortland after the first year of college and enlisted in the military.   He came to see me, we talked about his dad, I smoked a cigar with him – we laughed, we cried and I told him I was proud of him.   He is scheduled to deploy in the new year. 

(to thank the Ryan family for Jim Ryan’s service – go to his Facebook Page In Loving Memory of Jimmy Ryan and write them a message).