ELEVEN-year-old Angela Meyran yesterday showed she had inherited all the courage that blessed her father.
In a sterling ceremony honoring fallen firefighters Curt Meyran and John Bellew, Angela’s tribute was simply all true grit.
Reciting a poem called “The Last Alarm,” she looked out on a sea of blue uniforms and read:
“My father was a fireman. He rode in a big red truck.”
Her little voice cracked just a tiny bit as she spoke the word fireman, but on she went:
“And when he went to work he’d say, ‘Mom, wish me luck.’
” . . . Then my father went to work one day and he kissed us all goodbye.
“Little did we know that next morning we’d all cry.”
And many of the tough firefighters, who packed the firehouse of Ladder 27, Engine 46, had to battle their own tears.
It was one of the many misty-eyed moments at a plaque-unveiling ceremony commemorating the one-year anniversary of that terrible “Black Sunday,” when six firefighters were forced to jump from a blazing Bronx building, leaving two dead.
Eileen Bellew introduced a stunning video presentation of her late husband, describing him as a father and a hero.
“When you think of John and his family, give thanks we have an angel looking over us,” she said.
Mayor Bloomberg told the huge crowd, which spilled from the firehouse to under the Cross-Bronx Expressway:
“They weren’t heroes just that day, they were heroes every day.”
But it was Jeanette Meyran who left us all with a chilling reminder of what it is like to be a firefighter’s wife, who fears constantly for that knock on the door.
“I’m certainly not the first line-of-duty wife to address others [in situations like this] and I’m realistic to know I won’t be the last.”
And that’s sadly the awful truth of it.