Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Three, Two & The Rescue-

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2003 10:01:56 -0400

April 25, 2003

With Fire in Their Eyes Buffs Find Passion in Chasing Sirens

By ROBERT F. WORTH

By day, Ira Rubin takes care of his ailing mother and works as a production manager at a
matzo factory in Jersey City.

At night, he flicks on the police scanner and enters a lurid world of fires and disasters.

If he hears the dispatchers call in a serious fire, he will often jump into his Mercury
Marquis and race to the scene to watch. If
not, he may simply monitor the nightly mayhem by two-way radio from the renovated
19th-century firehouse where he helps run a canteen service for firefighters. On weekends,
he often puts on a gray kilt and Glengarry hat to play the bagpipes at fire and police
department events.

In short, Mr. Rubin belongs to that quietly eccentric band of people known as fire buffs.
Their ranks include lawyers, salesmen,
doctors, locksmiths, even an heiress or two. All of them seem to share a single
experience: at an early age, they heard a siren and saw a bright red fire engine bolt
past. They have been chasing fires ever since.

It is impossible to say how many fire buffs there are in the New York area. There are
about 100 subscribers who pay $100 a
year to help support Citywide Radio, a channel that buffs use to communicate about fires
and other disasters (461.225 megaherz on the dial). But many prefer to keep their habit
private, tuning in to police scanners or pagers and devouring Fire Department bulletins
and industry magazines. Some belong to groups like New York's Fire Bell Club, or canteen
services like the one Mr. Rubin helps run, the Gong Club of Jersey City.

When asked about their hobby, some buffs get a little defensive.

"It's not about pyromania," said Doug Kahn, 39, a night assignment editor at Channel 11
who got his first scanner at age 15. "It's about watching what the firefighters are doing.
I hate to make it sound like a spectator sport, but it's kind of like watching guys fight
a battle and rooting for them."

Some buffs take pictures at fires and then donate them, negatives and all, to the
department, which then uses them in training.

"Buffs are very good for us," said Vincent Dunn, a retired fire chief who spent 42 years
on the job in Manhattan and the Bronx
and has written three books about firefighting. "Some of them know more about the fire
service than we do, and they help get
our point across."

Most buffs are also quick to point out that their passion has a distinguished history.
Gov. Alfred E. Smith chased fires in Lower
Manhattan as a boy in the 1880's, and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia would often speed to
the scene of a major fire. Buffs claim the well-known photographer Weegee, who often slept
in his car with a police radio on during the 1940's and 50's, as one of their own. And
during the 1970's, when the almost nightly fires of the South Bronx could be seen from
miles away, large crowds would often drive up from Manhattan to watch.

"The scene of a fire in those days had the strange quality of a social event," recalled
John Miller, now the chief of the
counterterrorism bureau at the Los Angeles Police Department, who grew up in Manhattan
running uptown to photograph fires
in the Bronx. "They'd all stand around talking, swapping notes about the big one they saw
the other guy missed, how fast they
got there, and which engine came first."

But many buffs now say their hobby is dying. There are far fewer fires to see than there
were 20 years ago, largely because of
improvements in building codes and fire prevention, along with the surging economy and
dropping crime of the 1990's, which
helped to reduce arson.

"Thank God there isn't the kind of urban blight there was in the 60's and 70's," said
David Bookstaver, who grew up in
Manhattan with a scanner taped to the handlebars of his bicycle. "But there's not enough
now for a young kid to get interested
in."

On a recent Saturday evening, Mr. Rubin, 49, sat for several hours under the Gong Club's
dusty tin ceiling, lamenting the
passage of the great age of fires. Every now and then the radios on either side of him
would emit a sudden burst of voices, and
he would tilt his head back slightly, listening to the dispatchers. None of the fires was
big enough to be worth chasing.

Mr. Rubin serves as the archivist of the Jersey City Fire Department. He talks about fires
of the past with a kind of melancholy
nostalgia, like a Harold Bloom of the fire buffs' world.

Mr. Rubin was still talking about the lost romance of fire buffing when a group of
visitors from Boston arrived at the Gong Club
door. They were members of the Sparks Club, Boston's largest buff group. They had just
come from a two-alarm fire on
Wooster Street in SoHo, and they soon got into a vigorous discussion of comparative
firefighting methods with their Jersey City
counterparts.

The terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, had a powerful effect on fire buffs. Many say the
attacks taught everyone else what they
already knew about the heroism of firefighters. But there is a new uneasiness, too. In the
past, buffs would often say goodbye
with a traditional phrase: "I'll see you at the big one." Not anymore.

"It was enough to make the whole thing seem morbid," said Mr. Bookstaver, who is now the
spokesman for the State Office of
Court Administration.

While some buffs may have grown away from the habit, others have developed it into a
career in journalism (Mr. Kahn) or
public service (Mr. Bookstaver).

And starting in the early 1970's, a few began using their expertise more directly as a way
to make money. It was then that John
Delventhal was coming home one morning when he happened to see a Cadillac spin out and
strike a building on Houston Street.
He caught the whole thing on videotape, sold it to a network, and a business model was
born. He and a friend formed a
company called Action Movie News, which was soon followed by another, the Broadcast News
Network.

Their successor today is the Breaking News Network, a 24-hour pager service that condenses
breaking news for journalists and other clients. It is run by Robert and Steven Gessmann,
identical twin brothers and lifelong buffs, out of a small suite in an office park in Fort
Lee, N.J.

The Gessmanns spend their days listening to fire and police radios; they take calls from a
network of freelance buffs from
Maryland to Connecticut. They type up each item as it comes in and send it out on the
pager, a constant diet of fires, suspicious
packages, car chases and false alarms for their 2,000 paying subscribers, who pay amounts
ranging from $8 a month for
individuals to $300 a month for commercial accounts.

But some buffs look down on the Gessmann brothers for mass-marketing their pastime. "To me
it's not a business," Mr. Rubin
said.

Some buffs, in fact, speak of their hobby as though it were a kind of cult, complete with
its own relics and sacred texts. On a
recent afternoon, Barry Gintel and Marty Schwartzberg gave a tour of the Bell Club's
office on East 23rd Street. (The room, as
it happens, is a bit of a fire hazard: no windows and no sprinklers, with the exit sign
not lighted.) The club owns a chunk of the
B-25 bomber that crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945, and a piece of the
Hindenburg. There are countless plaques
and photographs, century-old leather fire buckets, helmets and a massive, old-fashioned
alarm bell.

With all this hero worship, why do buffs not take the final step? Why are they not
firefighters? For some, the answer is simple:
they failed to pass the rigorous physical exam. Others say they prefer the role of the
spectator. Still others chose a career that
was seen as more lucrative, but have been haunted ever since by a parallel life, one they
will never live.

"Would I have been able to walk into a burning building?" Mr. Schwartzberg said. "Do I
have that intestinal fortitude? I'll never
know."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/25/nyregion/25BUFF.html?tntemail0

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Get A Free Psychic Reading! Your Online Answer To Life's Important Questions.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/O10svD/Me7FAA/AG3JAA/61FxlB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/