As the FDNY’s “keeper of the legacy,” Lt. Joseph LaPointe has been to hundreds of department ceremonies, scores of firefighter funerals and nearly two dozen 9/11 anniversary commemorations.
This Thursday’s will be his last one.
Days after the last victim’s name is read at the annual 9/11 Ground Zero memorial service in Lower Manhattan, LaPointe will retire after more than 20 years running the FDNY’s Ceremonial Unit and more than 35 years in the department.
Later this month, LaPointe turns 65, the mandatory retirement age for the FDNY. He noted that he is retiring a year before 9/11’s 25th anniversary, a ceremony he has been a part of every year.
“If I had my choice, I would have probably stayed one more year,” LaPointe said. “I have a feeling I’ll be there in some kind of capacity.”
As the FDNY’s longtime master of ceremonies, LaPointe has coordinated everything from department graduations to line of duty funerals.
Never was LaPointe’s role more sadly on display than in the weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001 when 343 firefighters perished in the rubble of the World Trade Center towers that were struck by hijacked planes.
By LaPointe’s estimation, there were about 25 funerals a day in the weeks after the city’s darkest day. LaPointe didn’t go to all of them, but he went to more than most.
He has been to dozens more since, often planning out the ceremonial details, literally holding survivors’ hands from the moment they learn the awful news at a hospital until the dirt hits a casket at a quiet cemetery.
“We’re honored to be able to take the worst day of their lives and make it a little better,” LaPointe said. “I never said, ‘Oh, we gotta do this again.’ This is what we do. The mantra of the fire department is to never forget and always remember. That’s not just a bumper sticker or a t-shirt. We really mean it. The mayors and the mayor and the fire commissioners come and go, but it’s up to the members of the FDNYto remember that promise.”
LaPointe said he lost a lot of friends and co-workers on 9/11, but, remarkably, no one from what he considered his inner circle was killed.
He didn’t suffer that kind of loss until 2008 when FDNY Lt. John Martinson, 40, died after he became trapped in a smoky blaze at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field Apartments.
Martinson, like LaPointe, was a Staten Island native — and a former cop.
LaPointe said that when he became a firefighter after two years as a correction officer and six years with the NYPD, he had a hard time making the adjustment.
“I liked being a cop,” said LaPointe, who worked a plainclothes detail driving a yellow cab in Times Square in the 1980s. “For a long time I was a cop in a firefighters uniform. Eventually you make the transition.”
It helped that LaPointe’s father had been a firefighter.
LaPointe worked his way up the ranks, and in 2001, he was promoted to lieutenant, assigned to Ladder 114 in Sunset Park. He was off duty in Staten Island, where he lives, when he saw the plumes of smoke rising from the Twin Towers. He connected with a local rescue unit, and went to Lower Manhattan on a ferry.
“As we were going over, that’s when the towers were coming down,” he said. “It was total mayhem.”
Since 2007, LaPointe has been the Commanding Officer of the Ceremonial Unit, organizing every wake and funeral of all FDNY firefighters & EMS personnel and all those who’ve died from 9/11 related illnesses.
“In one way it seems like forever ago,” he said. “And then it feels like yesterday.”
