Jack McNamara was 2 years old when his father died. On Sept. 5, he climbed the equivalent of the World Trade Center’s 110 floors inside Dallas’s Comerica Bank Tower wearing his dad’s old FDNY turnout coat, which finally fits him now that he’s grown. His father, FDNY Firefighter John F. McNamara, worked about 500 hours at Ground Zero after the Sept. 11 attacks before dying of cancer tied to that exposure.
More than 400 firefighters, police officers, and EMTs took part in the 15th annual Dallas 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb, which began with a ceremony at Main Street Garden Park before climbers completed three legs inside the 60-story tower to reach the 110-floor mark, according to CBS News. Participants carried symbolic badges of fallen first responders as they climbed, the outlet reported. Jack, who now volunteers as a firefighter with the White Hall Volunteer Fire Department in Kentucky, told The Dallas Morning News that he cried when taps played near the 48th floor.
A Father’s Fight Became a National Cause
John McNamara was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in 2006 and died Aug. 9, 2009, at age 44. Before he died, he spent hundreds of hours in Washington and Albany lobbying for passage of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, the federal law that established health monitoring and financial relief for sick 9/11 responders, according to the same Dallas Morning News account of his advocacy. He also co-founded the NYC Firefighter Brotherhood Foundation to assist sick responders while he himself was fighting the disease.
Jack described his father as a jokester who put others before himself, even while he was sick — a man who worried about people around him even as he battled the cancer that would kill him, per the article. After his death, Jack’s mother, Jennifer McNamara, established the FDNY Firefighter John F. McNamara Foundation, known as the Johnny Mac Foundation, which has since provided financial assistance to sick emergency personnel. The foundation also fulfilled one of his final wishes: a list he left in his hospital bag requesting a teen community space be built at the Bayport-Blue Point Library in New York, according to the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation…