In a moving ceremony this past October, former Greenport firefighter George Matthias, who was killed in the line of duty in 1972, was added to the New York State Fallen Firefighters Memorial.
On August 20, 1972, Mr. Matthias, at the time a 50-year veteran of the Greenport Fire Department, responded to the alarm for the last time. He suffered a fatal heart attack while directing traffic around a car fire on Third Street in Greenport.
Nearly two decades later, the New York State Fallen Firefighters Memorial was dedicated by then Gov. George Pataki. Two other fallen firefighters from the Greenport department’s 180-year history, Edward “Bruce” Bellefountaine and Richard Sycz, have previously been memorialized.
But a few dedicated firefighters, especially the late Halsey Staples and current member Bernie Purcell, thought Mr. Matthias deserved to be honored as well. “We got to talking last year about it. Every year we had a thing in June, and Halsey says, ‘you got to do something. We got to do something someday.’ I said, ‘Hals, I know. So let me make some phone calls.’”
Once Mr. Purcell obtained the list of memorial requirements, he set about gathering the necessary documents. One of the most essential was an account of what happened. Fortunately, Mr. Staples was able to provide an eyewitness account, since he was also a firefighter on the scene fighting the car fire in 1972. The letter announcing that Mr. Matthias would be added to the wall came in June. Mr. Staples passed away in August.
Mr. Matthias’s daughter, Louise Young, remembers her father’s dedication to the firehouse and his service. In the days before cell phones or even pagers were in widespread use, the fire horn would generate a specific code to let firefighters know the location of a fire. “We lived on Carpenter Street, and the five star hose Fire Company was down at the foot of Carpenter street. When my father was home, and would hear [the alarm] he would take off running, and he would get to the firehouse before the trucks left. And that always used to amaze me, because he was not a young man.”
Ms. Young recalled her father as a hardworking, dedicated provider who believed in caring for his community. “He really devoted his life to the people of Greenport. He cleaned a lot of their buildings, and he worked in the Oyster Company, and he was a Mason and in the fire department, so he did a lot in the community.”
Todd Matthias, Mr. Matthias’s grandson, attended the firefighter memorial ceremony in October. What began as an act of remembrance evolved into a touching tribute to the solidarity of the firefighting community. “It really started to get very emotional for us, because we realized that there were so many of these people, their relatives that had passed away recently. We had 50 years of dealing with the bereavement of my grandfather, so it was a little different for us, being in the crowd,” Mr. Matthias said. “It was a beautiful process from start to finish, and I was very proud that New York State and Greenport could actually put something like that together.”
Mr. Purcell is at a loss as to why it took so long to honor Mr. Matthias. “For some reason, the paperwork, I don’t know, they just never got it done. And when the Fallen Firefighters Memorial came around, no one put it together, to pick up the phone, to put him up,” Mr. Purcell said. “He’d been here for 50 plus years. You know, he was old. And that’s probably the only reason I can figure out.”
Mr. Purcell is now working on having Matthias’s name added to the national firefighters memorial in Emmitsburg, Maryland in May.