Thomas P. Holohan A Solid Rock Who Guided His
Family
He never knew his grandfather, a fire department
battalion chief who died the year he was born. But Thomas P. Holohan
of Engine Co. 6 grew up in Little Neck hearing his mother and
grandmother repeat Chief Martin Sheridan's stories about his Hell's
Kitchen childhood in the days when horses still pulled fire engines,
or the lucky Saturday in 1945 when an Army B-25 crashed into the
Empire State Building. Lucky, because the weekend left the building
nearly empty and just 14 people died. Sheridan had been there
and taken pictures to show what a plane can do to a skyscraper.
When Holohan's extended family gathered at his mother's home in
Little Neck for Christmas, they turned their minds to all the
wonderful things Sept. 11 cannot take from them. "We just want
to be together," said his mother, Iris Holohan. "I have five children
- I still have five - one just isn't with me." The firefighter's
wife, Colleen, is giving a Maltese Cross pendant with his badge
number to each of their children: Thomas P. III, 7; Caitlyn, 5,
and Liam, 1. And she is giving them an angel to hang on the tree
at their home in Chester, N.Y., "because that's who their daddy
is." Holohan, 36, was a quiet man, his mother said, one of those
people who showed their intense feelings through steady action.
He was a rock for his four siblings, the one they turned to for
guidance. "My son's famous saying that we always laughed at is,
'There's two ways to do things, the easy way and the right way
- guess which way we're going to do it?'" said his mother, who
leaned on him when her husband died nine years ago. "How many
parents can say they learned from their children? He taught me
to face things."
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