For FDNY Firefighter Robert Thomas and his three sons, fighting fires and saving lives has become a family affair.
All four are city firefighters stationed throughout Brooklyn, joining a growing number of the department’s black “legacy” families, where children follow their mothers and fathers into the FDNY. “It’s an incredible feeling knowing that they’re following in my footsteps,” Robert Thomas, 61, told the Daily News Wednesday. “Being in the FDNY is truly a family experience anyway. Over the years it meant more to me than I originally thought it would and I know it would be the same for them too.”
Thomas took the test for the FDNY in 1982. When he got accepted, he first turned it down, deciding instead to take a job with an insurance company, the Brownsville native remembered.