"Mike Wagner, city fireman," he says.

Squaddies picked their way over it gingerly, helping city firemen with their thermal-imaging sensors.

His father was a sheet metal worker and city fireman.

The bar was owned by a group of city firemen who served drinks and cooked when they were off duty or retired.

"I couldn't care less about New York," Al LaBook, a retired city fireman, said the other day at City Hall.

The suburban volunteers would back out and the city firemen would go in to dig because "they wanted to take out their own," he said.

Mr. Finley, 46, a third-generation city fireman who has never run for public office before, became the first to try to parlay his experience of 9/11 into a political career.

He was a mill worker who became a city fireman when the mill closed down, a smiling, joking man.

All of them were rescued by passers-by and city firemen.

Eight city firemen were dead or missing.