One

On a chilly Friday afternoon just before Christmas 1986, Donny Herbert kissed his young wife, Linda, on the forehead, bear hugged his three toddler sons, and set off for his first-ever shift as a Buffalo firefighter. For the twenty-five-year-old Seneca Street kid, this was one of the proudest days of his life. Donny might not have gone to college, but he was the first member of his family to join the department. The written and physical tests, months of limbo waiting for a slot, eight difficult weeks at the Buffalo Fire Department Training Academy--all of it had led to this moment. Donny intentionally took his time putting on his official uniform--navy blue button-down shirt, navy blue pants, black dress shoes. He packed his '84 Chevette hatchback with his personal set of BFD turnout gear and waved good-bye.

"Good luck," Linda called from the front-porch doorway of their rickety Spaulding Street duplex, the shouting of the children drowning her out. Don Jr., a happy-go-lucky St. Agatha's kindergartner, was particularly amped up. "Daddy's gonna ride on the fire trucks!" he yelled as his younger brothers, Tommy and Patrick, parroted him, the three youngsters popping up and down like a set of firing pistons.

In a few days Donny would start an official four-day tour as a member of the department's second platoon, which meant a rotating schedule consisting of two nine-hour day shifts (eight A.M. to five P.M.) and two fifteen-hour evening shifts (five P.M. to eight a.M.), followed by four days off in a row. He was being thrown into the mix midcycle, starting with an overnight stint. Donny was assigned to Ladder 6, housed along with Engine 21 on the corner of Best Street and Earl Place in one of the worst of Buffalo's East Side neighborhoods. No matter; Donny looked forward to life at that firehouse, a two-story hilltop outpost of red brick. "The Hill," as it was known in the department, was more than a century old and located one block east of War Memorial Stadium, an unused concrete monolith nicknamed "the Rockpile." Donny embraced his new career with his usual enthusiasm, setting out for work more than an hour early. Donny had made roughly the same money, around twenty thousand dollars a year, at his old job, as a machinist at a Ryder manufacturing plant. But cutting steel and fashioning parts was brutally tedious work and not what Donny saw himself doing for the rest of his life.

As Linda turned to go back inside, she, too, was excited for Donny, though she realized suddenly that his being gone all night would take some getting used to. One thing she was not, however, was worried.

About fifteen minutes later, Linda was debating the expediency of fish sticks versus Hamburger Helper when a Channel 7 Eyewitness News bulletin flashed across the bottom of the television screen: St. Mary's Church on Buffalo's East Side was ablaze and had just gone to a third alarm. Outside, Linda could hear sirens. If fire trucks from South Buffalo were heading over, then this could be a five-alarm fire, she thought. Linda had absorbed a fair amount of information about the department during the past two months while Donny was at the academy. Now she was getting her first real lesson in what it was like to be a fireman's wife.

Built of timber and limestone by German immigrants and consecrated in 1859, St. Mary's Redemptorist Roman Catholic Church was, in a city noteworthy for its architecture, a remarkably beautiful structure. Though hardly a cavernous cathedral at just 186 feet long and 81 feet wide, the church nevertheless became a striking component of the ever-rising nineteenth-century Buffalo skyline. Indeed, St. Mary's 240-foot steeple tower on the...

 

"[A] gripping true story."

 

"The carpe-diem message resonates clearly in this moving, bittersweet account of another of life's mysterious miracles."

 

"An excellent biography that reads like a novel, with a plot recording the events and a subplot delving into whether Herbert's sixteen-hour return to consciousness was a miracle."

 

The Day Donny Herbert Woke Up by Rich Blake
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