Robert Picciano marked 50 years of service in the New Hyde Park Fire Department earlier this year, and as he approaches his 80th birthday next month, he has no plans to leave the department anytime soon.
“Like Timex, I just keep on ticking,” Picciano, an ex-chief of the department, said at a dinner in his honor at the Inn at New Hyde Park last Friday night.
Picciano joined the fire department’s Estates Engine Co. 3 shortly after moving to New Hyde Park in 1961. He saw the engine company’s firehouse when he was driving along Lakeville Road one day and stopped to talk to a few of the members. When he found out it was part of a volunteer department, he joined, following the example his father had set for him as youngster in Queens.
“My father was a fireman in the city,” he said.
The fire service soon became a focal point of his life. In fact, he met his first wife of 38 years, Mary, through a friend in the fire department.
Picciano quickly demonstrated leadership skills and rose through the ranks in the company, becoming a second lieutenant, first lieutenant and captain.
After serving 15 years in the company, he noticed there were only 20 members in the department’s Rescue Company and asked Chief George Alloca’s permission to get emergency medical technician training and join the company.
“They were way down in numbers,” Picciano said.
After being certified as an EMT, Picciano went on to receive training as an advanced medical technician so he could administer the highest level of medical assistance to people in need of emergency treatment.
“I could give patients drugs or whatever they needed,” he said.
For Picciano, his mission with the fire department Rescue Company expressed a compassionate aspect of his personality that had long been there.
“I was always out to help anybody, even before I was in the department,” he said.
He said he can’t estimate the number of fire and emergency calls he’s responded to over the years. He said he has also lost track of the number of people he’s saved by administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation and more advanced techniques to revive heart attack victims.
Picciano does vividly remembers the day he responded to a call from New Hyde Park Memorial High School about a student who had collapsed on his way into the building that morning.
When Picciano arrived at the scene, he found the 17-year-old boy in cardiac arrest and immediately got on the phone with a physician in a local hospital emergency room. He followed the doctor’s instructions to apply defibrillator pads to the boy’s chest and finally succeeded in bringing him back to life.
“I shocked him three times and he came back,” Picciano recalled.
After two years in the department’s rescue unit, he said he felt a growing sense of frustration about arriving at the scene where someone who had apparently suffered a heart attack and watching family members standing around doing nothing. So he sought and received permission to start a cardiopulmonary resuscitation course for New Hyde Park residents. He solicited support from local merchants, including the State Bank of New York to obtain mannequins to practice on and other equipment, enlisted other instructors and went to work training his neighbors in the life-saving techniques for the next three years.
“That’s what I wanted to do. That was the way to get it done,” Picciano said.
That initiative is indicative of the way Picciano approached his responsibilities in the fire department, according to four-time Rescue Company Captain Robert Sprance, who worked closely with Picciano over 25 years in the fire service.
“He’s really a consummate professional. He’s a wonderful person to be around,” said Sprance, adding that Picciano’s level of detail was his greatest strength.
Sprance said Picciano is a “solid, solid person” whose energy always seemed inexhaustible.
In 1980, Picciano became fourth deputy chief of the department and follow the natural chain of succession to become chief of the department in 1985.
He retired from his full-time job with the New York City sanitation police in 1989 after 21 years on that job and the fire department became his full-time job.
He recently moved to Bayville with this second wife, Jennifer, to be near her family. But he’s planning on moving back to New Hyde Park soon to resume his duties for as long as he can.
“I want to live to 110 and get shot at by a jealous husband,” he said, smiling.
