A lot of firefighters have second jobs. Vincent Halloran had a nonpaying but extraordinarily rewarding second job in his children. He and his wife, Marie, had five of them (she is expecting a sixth on May 17, their wedding anniversary). Around the firehouse, some of his colleagues would say, "I can hardly handle my two kids. How do you do it with five?"
He would just laugh. He did just fine with five. He had a cool demeanor that left him unruffled if one of the kids was crying while another was running his toy truck over his foot and one of the others had to eat, and eat immediately.
Lieutenant Halloran, 43, who was with Ladder Company 8 in TriBeCa and lived with Mrs. Halloran and the children in North Salem, N.Y., took it all in stride. He ran the house, as his wife put it, like a camp. There was a wide age range — Jake, 15, Conor, 13, Aidan, 12, Kieran, 9, and Declan, 2 — but he arranged activities for all of them.
They'd go fishing, boating, camping, swimming. Crowded as these activities could get, when Lieutenant Halloran took the children camping, he told each of them to invite a friend along. If that wasn't enough, during the summer, the Hallorans welcomed children from Ireland to stay with them, further swelling their ranks. "What can I say," Mrs. Halloran said. "He just loved kids."
New York Times
Published: December 29, 2001