Winter was the worst season for the Rev. Matthew McDonald.
”I remember a fire on the South Side,” said the man who was the Chicago Fire Department`s Catholic chaplain for nearly 20 years. ”Five children had died. I had to baptize them. I went from the ambulance to a pool of water on the ground about 20 yards away. I took out my handkerchief and dipped it in the pool. By the time I got back to the ambulance it was frozen. I had to stand there waiting for it to thaw.”
McDonald won`t be at the mercy of Mother Nature on the job any longer. He will retire Monday, the day he turns 72. Letting go will not be easy, even though there were bitterly cold nights last winter when he went to bed thinking, ”Gee, I hope I don`t get a run tonight.”
”My father was a Chicago fireman,” McDonald said. ”Growing up I was very proud of that fact. As kids my brothers, sisters and I would walk over to meet the streetcar, where my father got off. He would wear his uniform. That uniform, that was something important.
”Now I think that everything he did in that job he did for someone else.”
In a different way, the younger McDonald spent his career doing for others. For two decades he ministered at thousands of extra-alarm fires, comforting victims, carrying children from the doorways of burning buildings, baptizing the dead, giving last rites to the dying.
As Catholic chaplain (there also are Jewish and Protestant fire chaplains) he also received a list of firefighters hospitalized in the city and visited all of them each week. When a firefighter, active or retired, died, he attended the wake and funeral. But the toughest part of his job was notifying the wives and families of firefighters who died on duty. After 20 years and dozens of experiences, the task got no easier.
”I never called them on the phone,” he said. ”I always went to the home, because I thought someone should be there when the news came. I didn`t give a long speech. I just sort of let them get it all out.”
He handled the sad task of telling parents that their children had been burned to death the same way. ”I never said, `I know how you feel,` because I didn`t know,” he said. ”I would say that certainly they had lots of problems and that we all have to face problems. Then, in as gentle a way as I could, I`d say that tomorrow would be a better day.”
Though he served the families of firefighters and the victims of fires, he spent most of his time offering moral support to the firefighters themselves. Sometimes that support involved standing out in 28-below-zero weather, saying nothing, just being there. Other times it required a comforting phrase as it did the day two firefighters fell to their deaths in an elevator shaft while battling a blaze in an office building at Wabash Avenue and Monroe Street.
”After it happened, I saw a fireman crying,” McDonald said. ”He looked very young and embarrassed. I told him, `Don`t be embarrassed. We all feel that way.` ”
McDonald dressed like a fireman and looked the part, a ruggedly handsome figure in long coat, boots and fire hat. Few people realized he was a priest. Once, as he was entering the remains of a burned-out jewelry store at Madison and Pulaski, a kid asked him, ”Would you get me a digital watch?”
More often, bystanders mistook him for a chief, not a thief. Still, he never held a hose or chopped down a door. ”I never did anything heroic. I had no intention of spending my days riding on the backs of fire engines,” he said. Early on he prepared himself for a life of self-effacement. He entered Quigley Preparatory Seminary at age 13, went from there to Our Lady of the Lake seminary in Mundelein and then through a string of pastorates until he landed the fire chaplain`s post.
Along the way, he satisfied himself with the role of servant rather than savior. And in the end that was what his last job demanded. When he heard that McDonald was retiring, one chief said: ”Tell the cardinal we want a priest, not a fire fan.”
Often enough McDonald had to call upon spiritual strength. ”The sight that stirred me most was seeing a body without a head,” he recalled. ”That happened for the first time at O`Hare after a plane crashed into a hangar. Forty-three people were killed. I was going around giving last rites to the bodies, and I found one without a head.”
Catastrophes were his stock in trade. He was at the scene in 1979 after an American Airlines jet crashed at O`Hare, killing 273 people; at the 1972 wreck of Illinois Central Railroad commuter trains in which 45 died; at the 1976 fire that consumed the Windcrest Nursing Home and took 23 lives.
John Cardinal Cody appointed McDonald to the chaplain`s post in March, 1968. He took over for the Rev. William Gorman, who had held the job 42 years. ”I was replacing a legend,” McDonald said.
He didn`t have to wait long to see how he would react. There was an extra-alarm fire in the Loop his first day on the job. ”Somebody from the fire commissioner`s office drove me over,” McDonald said. ”I didn`t have a helmet, boots or coat. I stood on State Street with all this equipment, not knowing what to do. Thank God, no one was hurt.”
A month later, when Martin Luther King Jr.`s assassination sparked riots, he was better versed. At the time, McDonald was also parish priest at St. Malachy`s Church at Oakley and Washington streets, a block from where rioters set their worst fires.
”It was a fearful time,” McDonald said. ”Everything on Madison Street was burning. They called in off-duty firemen. I remember finding a fire behind one building that no one was trying to put out. I told one man, `There`s a fire in the back.` He said, `Father, find a chief, and tell him that.` ”
McDonald left his West Side parish in 1970, after discovering that he couldn`t do two jobs at once. The fire department, he told Cody, had become his first love. He liked the freedom to move about the city. He dealt with different kinds of people. It wasn`t so much exciting as dynamic.
”I decided to treat the fire department as if it was my parish,” he said.
That meant periodically visiting all of the city`s 100 fire stations, plus the department`s administrative offices and training facilities. It meant counseling firefighters and their families through marital problems and other emotional hurts, many having to do with the long hours and stress of the job. It meant consuming gallons of coffee just to be sociable.
That was just as well, because McDonald probably needed the caffeine to keep up with his schedule. He was on call 24 hours a day, six days a week. Wednesday from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. was his ”day” off. Red telephones linked directly to the fire department adorned every floor of the rectory at St. Veronica`s church, where McDonald went to live after giving up the pastorate at St. Malachy`s. A beeper and a short-wave radio kept him in touch when he wasn`t at home.
On a Sunday in the winter of 1983 he spent an entire work day, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., moving from one extra-alarm fire to another.
Not everyone appreciated such devotion.
During the turbulent years of the early 1970s Chicago`s firefighters often were pelted by the very people they sought to serve, and McDonald was no exception. ”Once,” he said, ”I got hit with a roll of toilet tissue.”
One night, at a fire on the North Side, McDonald was called to deal with a Polish woman who refused to leave her house, even though it was in the path of a spreading fire.
”People don`t like to leave their homes,” McDonald said. ”They have all their possessions there. This lady was Catholic. So the firemen figured,
`Get the priest.` Well, I talked to her and told her she ought to leave. She cursed me and kicked me in the leg. I don`t remember if she agreed to leave.”
Another time, on Madison Street, a passing drunk had collapsed in a puddle created by fire hoses. McDonald hoisted him out. ”Someone took a picture of me with my arms around him,” McDonald said. ”The caption read,
`Chaplain helps fire victim.` Actually, the guy was angry. He was trying to slug me, and I had my arms around him to restrain him.”
McDonald took the bitter with the sweet and on balance ended with a very good taste. ”I told the cardinal that I had the best job of any priest in the city of Chicago,” the chaplain said. ”If you really enjoy your job, it isn`t really work. That`s the way I felt about this.”
