Longtime O’side fireman leads charge for recruits

“You can see by the gentlemen surrounding me, there are a lot of gray hairs,” Steven Klein, first vice president of the Firemen’s Association of the State of New York, said last week while standing at a podium alongside fire officials at the Nassau County Firefighters Museum. “We need the blondes and dark hairs to do the work that firefighters have to do.”

Klein, who has served in the Oceanside Fire Department for more than 50 years, helped lead the seventh annual Recruit NY weekend, an initiative designed to increase volunteer membership — particularly among young people — around the state, which has gone down over the last few years.

As part of the statewide campaign, during which more than 450 volunteer fire companies opened their doors and fire truck bays to local residents as part of the volunteer firefighter recruitment effort, Oceanside’s department welcomed visitors to its Foxhurst Road facility on April 30. Local firemen demonstrated equipment and set up apparatus displays.

At 16 years old, firefighters came to take care of Klein’s sick father, marking the first exposure he had to the service. His father did not survive the illness. “When I became 18, I decided it was time for me to step up and do something for the community,” he told the Herald.

Though the equipment was not as advanced when he first joined as it is today, he explained, the pedigree of volunteers has not changed. “The people were the same: dedicated to their community,” Klein said. “For an 18-year-old guy who lost his father at 16, there were some people in the fire service that really guided me and helped me along the way to become the person I have become.”

He served at Oceanside’s Hose Company No. 1 for 26 years before transferring to Hose Company No. 3, where he has been for 25 years, adding last week that he responded to a 3 a.m. fire on Mott Street that morning. Klein was the department’s chief in 1984, a position that his son, Kevin, currently holds.

The older Klein is also a past president of the Fire Chiefs’ Council of Nassau County and The Nassau County Firemen’s Association. He has served on the Nassau County Fire Commission, and is a past chairman of the 2nd Battalion Fire District.

“Steve has been the epitome of dedication,” said Vinnie McManus, a division supervisor in the Nassau fire marshal’s office with OFD roots. “You just can’t find more dedicated people than that father-and-son team of Steve and Kevin Klein.”

A fire marshal since 1990, McManus, 55, became a member of the OFD’s marching band at age 14. He then entered the junior program, and served five years with the department after turning 18, calling Steve a mentor and longtime friend who inspired him to get involved at a young age.

McManus, in the absence of County Executive Ed Mangano, presented a proclamation to Klein in recognition of the event. “My career just came full circle,” McManus said smiling, as he handed it to Klein.

State Sen. John Brooks, an ex-chief of Wantagh Fire Department, also attended the Recruit NY kickoff ceremony, and said that serving as a volunteer firefighter was the most rewarding thing he has ever done.

“It’s a job that’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” Brooks said. “It requires that we get up in the middle of the night, go out in a blizzard, a storm or a hurricane. The pay is nothing, and it’s perhaps one of the greatest jobs anyone can ever serve.”

Klein lauded the opportunities available for young people through becoming a firefighter, including scholarship and tuition-reimbursement programs. After the news conference, Klein, who hopes to be FASNY’s president next year, pointed to McManus, marking him as a prime example of a volunteer making a career in fire service.

“There are a lot of places where [young] people can go wrong today,” Klein said, “and in the fire service, there are people like the ones that watched over me, that are still watching over our young people to make sure they go the right way in life.”