The patriarch of one of the FDNY’s largest Black legacy families is calling it a career.
Firefighter Robert Thomas will be marking his last tour at Engine Co. 205 in Brooklyn Heights on Monday when he reaches 65, the department’s mandatory retirement age.
“I wanted to make sure I gave them everything I could,” Thomas joked. “It’s been an incredible experience. I just can’t believe that 40 years went by so quickly.”
But the Bravest never leave the Fire Department, especially if they have family members still on the job. Thomas’ three sons, all Brooklyn firefighters, will be keeping him abreast of what’s happening.
They’ll also be riding in the firetruck with him on his last tour.
“He really loves [being a firefighter],” his eldest son Jason Thomas, 32, told the Daily News. “He’s definitely going to miss it. That’s for sure.”
Thomas took the test for the FDNY in 1982. When he got accepted, he first turned it down, deciding instead to take a job with an insurance company on Wall Street, the Brownsville native remembered.
But members of the Vulcan Society, a fraternal group of Black firefighters, encouraged him to join the academy — and he’s never looked back, he said.
“It’s been an incredible career,” he said. “I’m more than thankful for the FDNY and what they have done for me and my family.
“I had no idea what I was turning down the first time, but I know I wouldn’t do it again!” he joked.
But being a Black New York City firefighter in the 1980s, when the FDNY was almost exclusively white, wasn’t easy.
“It was tough coming in from Brownsville to the Fire Department, it was a completely different culture,” he told the Daily News in a 2020 interview. “It was a challenge going in, but I think I changed a lot of hearts and minds by doing the job and they helped me become a better firefighter. A level of respect grew between us.”
The number of Blacks in the FDNY never rose above 650 in a force of about 11,000 until…
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