Job (and Feel Good Story) of the Day: Firefighter

Let’s enjoy a happy story, shall we? The daughter of a firefighter who died in action on 9/11 has now graduated herself and is ready to join the ranks.

Josephine Smith, 34, of Mastic, is one of four women in this year’s FDNY class of 280, and the first-ever daughter of a firefighter killed in the World Trade Center attacks to join the FDNY. Speaking at the ceremony, Smith said she felt “proud, happy, excited… sad that my father couldn’t be here.” Kevin Smith, 53, lost his life when the north tower fell.

Josephine was 21 at the time, and she first heard it on the radio — but her desire to be a firefighter like her father started years before. She recalled “going to work with my dad, playing on fire trucks, even telling my dad how I was going to work with him one day.”

Her mother, Angelina Clay, now remarried, said she never doubted. “I bought her a bottle of champagne before she even started the academy because I knew she’d make it,” she said.

SNIFF. In many cases, it’s a good thing we didn’t end up what we wanted to be when we were kids, but look, she did! She fulfilled her childhood dreams. Now she gets to save people from burning buildings and cats from trees, and delight small children everywhere by waving to them from bright red noisy trucks. Hopefully the girls whose brains are being warped by those turns-out-they’re-awful “Computer Programmer Barbie” books will put those down and read this instead.

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