lowered on a rope to rescue a baby held out the window of a burning third-floor apartment. McCaffery brought the baby up and was lowered a second time to save the mother. He tied the rope around her, signaled firefighters to pull her up, then disappeared into the building in search of another child. He found her crouching in a closet with the family cat. As the fire went to three alarms, McCaffery staggered from the building, ankle badly twisted and with bloody parallel lines of scratches on his face and hands. EMS workers rushed forward and took from him a blanket-wrapped, unhurt child clutching her terrified cat.
There are other stories: a dive into the Hudson in a rainstorm to pull a man from a sinking boat. Using his turnout coat to smother the flames on a man whose clothes were burning. Many stories. And after each act of heroism, James McCaffery—most often smiling widely—thanked well-wishers, returned to his firehouse, and refused all requests for interviews.
Three times McCaffery was admitted to NYU Medical Center, twice to the Burn Unit, with injuries that would have made him eligible for retirement. Each time he was back on the job within months. FDNY Assistant Chief Aleck Wagman acknowledges McCaffery to have been a source of “institutional knowledge.” “Men were anxious to serve under him. Not just the new guys, everyone. Anyone could learn something from Jimmy. He'll be badly missed.”
“At the other houses he worked, he wouldn't let them call him Superman,” Owen McCardle recalls. “Like it embarrassed him. But, tell you the truth, it was always who he wanted to be.”
McCaffery lived alone in a small, spare apartment on West 12th Street and never married. “The Job was his family,” said Ted Fitzgerald, retired captain of Engine 235. “There's always guys like that, every generation. They're the backbone of this Department, and on 9/11 we lost way too many of them.”
McCaffery's heroism on September 11 is by now legendary. Elizabeth Murray, an attorney, made the trip down 28 flights of stairs with others from her firm. Murray, her firm's fire warden, was among the last to evacuate her floor. She spoke of McCaffery's “swift and total” understanding of the tragedy. “There was fire on our floor from the elevator shaft. People were burned, and some had been hit by debris that exploded out when the doors blew open. There was a lot of smoke, and we were cut off from our stairs.” The men of Ladder 62 directed the crowds away from the fire to an open stairwell, assisting the injured and, in the words of another survivor, “defusing the hysteria, everyone screaming and running around.”
“He seemed to know exactly how much time we had to get out,” Murray said of Captain McCaffery. “He said if we didn't panic, we'd be all right. He could have come out with us. We just barely made it. I really think he knew that the tower was going to come down. None of us remotely thought it would, at that time.”
McCaffery was last seen by Murray heading another way. “He went up,” she said. “He told his men, ‘Get control of this, take these people out of here.' He meant the panic, the confusion. Then he looked around, like he was taking it all in. He said something like ‘The job's up there.' One of the others, another firefighter, said, ‘If you're going, Captain, I'm going with you.' Some of them went.” Murray's eyes filled with tears. “He was smiling when he pulled open that staircase door. I'll never forget it. All the way down, I wondered what made him smile like that. I remember thinking, Well, when this is over, I'll look him up and ask him.”
Deputy Chief Gino Aiello was at the north tower command station when the evacuation order was issued. “Some of the companies didn't respond,” Aiello said in an interview. “A lot of the radios were out, so we don't know if they got the order. But Ladder 62 heard us. Captain McCaffery responded. He was on 44. He said he had injured up there, and he was bringing them out. He had three men with him. ‘We'll be down as soon as we can, Chief. There's a lot of injured.' That's what he said. I don't know how he was planning to bring a lot of injured down 44 flights with three men, but if anyone could talk the injured into getting up and walking—the injured, maybe even the