Hero Fireman

Kirsi asked me about the baby in the photo entitled "Hero Fireman" in my previous post. Unlike the images in my fireman car wash post, the images in my recent post were just grabbed off the web. (And for Merkin and Steve - some of them were from the UK.) Even though "Hero Fireman" didn't completely fit with the other photos, I just had to use it.

Excerpts from an April 19, 2005 CBS report commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing follow.

Like all disasters, certain images stick in our minds as illustrations of their magnitude. And in Oklahoma City, a photograph of a fireman holding a child became one of those iconic images.

The photographer, Charles Porter, won a Pulitzer Prize for the photo, and the instant, caught in time, has changed the lives of both the firefighter (Chris Fields) and the baby's mother, Aren Almon-Kok.

It was 1-year old Baylee Almon who died in the blast, and she became a symbol for the American innocence lost in that act of domestic terrorism.

Below is an excerpt from BBC news, an interview with amateur photographer Charles Porter, who captured the photograph.

One is that the fireman has taken the time to remove his gloves before receiving this infant from the policeman.

Anyone who knows anything about firefighters know that their gloves are very rough and abrasive and to remove these is like saying I want to make sure that I am as gentle and as compassionate as I can be with this infant that I don't know is dead or alive.

And the second image is of this fireman just cradling this infant with the utmost compassion and caring.

He is looking down at her with this longing, almost to say with his eyes: "It's going to be OK, if there's anything I can do I want to try to help you."

He doesn't know that she has already passed away.

As Paul Harvey would say, that is the rest of the story.