A guardian angel is remembered

He was just a 9-year-old boy, a fourth-grader at Our Lady of Peace School on Merrick Road in Lynbrook. It was noon as he walked down Peninsula Boulevard, heading home for lunch on this damp and dreary April day.

The boy lived on Irwin Court, a short street just behind Flinch and Bruns Funeral Home, and a very short walk from the busy intersection of Peninsula Boulevard and Hempstead Avenue where the boy would cross to get home.

On this day, as always, the boy was met by the school crossing guard who helped protect the children crossing that busy intersection. The crossing guard greeted the small boy with a smile, took his hand, and began to cross him. They first crossed Hempstead Avenue to the northeast side of the intersection. Then, when the light changed again, and still holding his hand, she took him across Peninsula Boulevard, going south.

This day, however, would be different from all those other days of walking to and from school. It would be a day that the boy would forget for all those years, until recently.

The boy was Joe Calderone, and on this day, April 30, 1963, he witnessed one of Lynbrook’s most tragic accidents, an accident that took the life of the school crossing guard who held his hand just seconds before.

Three Lynbrook volunteer firefighters would also die along with Rosalie Roy at that intersection just moments after Calderone was crossed.

Calderone has never talked about what happened that day. He is now a grown man with his own child. He believes that until recently he blocked the tragedy out of his mind. What happened that day now bothers him, and recently he began thinking about the crossing guard who died. The memories all came back when he saw two crossing guards at an eatery in Franklin Square, and he began to think about Roy, and her own family.

Curious about that accident, Calderone went to the Lynbrook Fire Department website to see what was written about the accident and found the story written by this author. Calderone said he was “shocked how accurate the fire department story was.”

Even though it has been nearly 45 years since that deadly crash, what happened that day is still a vivid memory for Calderone. He knows he was the last person to be with Roy before she was killed.

Calderone sat down with Lynbrook Village Historian Art Mattson and myself to tell his story.

He recalled that while he walked down Peninsula Boulevard toward his home he heard the fire horns blowing. “They were loud,” he said. “The horns at the time were on top of the old Municipal Building on Merrick Road, just opposite the block where he lived. He also remembered vividly the big smile and greeting he got from Roy that day when he approached her. It was the same smile and friendliness that she always gave him and the other children.

He especially remembered how she always took his hand, usually his right hand, and carefully escorted him across the two intersections for him to get home.

On that April day, Roy began to take his across Peninsula Boulevard as the sound of sirens could be heard from further down Hempstead Avenue. Calderone senses as he was being cross that something had caught Roy’s attention, and he looked up at her and then looked in the same directions Roy was looking. There was a fire engine in the distance approaching with its sirens wailing.

Just then Roy turned her head and looked up Peninsula Boulevard towards Merrick Road. There were more sirens coming from that direction. She saw another fire engine approaching from that direction.

Roy had a “look for fear on her face as if something bad was going to happen,” Calderone recalled.

He then looked in the same direction and saw the fire engine rushing down Peninsula Boulevard towards them and the intersection. He remembered there was no traffic on Peninsula Boulevard at that time except for three or four cars waiting in the turn lane.

With fire engines coming from both directions, Roy began walking faster, practically pulling Calderone along. Just before the two of them reached the curb by Flinch and Bruns, Roy let go of Calderone’s hand and shoved him towards the curb as the fire engines got closer and closer.

“As she shoved me to the curb, her only words to me were, ‘Hurry! Hurry!’,” Calderone said.

As he stepped onto the curb, Calderone saw the fire engine coming down Hempstead Avenue. He turned and looked for Roy, who was no longer with him. she had turned around the quickly went back into the intersection. Calderone remembered seeing her put her hands high in the air in both directions.

As the sirens grew louder, Calderone walked into the municipal parking lot. He said he continued to look at Roy with her arms raised as he walked slowly toward home. However, he “sensed something was very wrong” but “didn’t know what I was thinking. I was so frightened and the noise was so loud. Then I heard the crash.”

The two Lynbrook fire engines collided in the intersection with a loud crashing of metal that was heard blocks away. Calderone doesn’t remember seeing the engines collide. He only remembers the sound. He ran as fast as he could home where he was met by his mother at the door.

“She just crossed me across the street,” Calderone told his mother.

Calderone’s mother went to the door to see what caused the loud noise she heard from inside the house. Calderone stayed in the house only for a minute before deciding to go back to see what happened to Roy. As he ran down the block, a neighbor yelled, “Joey! Don’t go there!”

Calderone looked around for Roy but she was nowhere to be found. He doesn’t remember seeing the firefighters that were thrown to the ground after the collision he doesn’t remember seeing the police, an ambulance, or bystanders at the scene. He only recalls seeing the smashed rear of one of the fire engines.

Calderone also does not recall anyone stopping him from looking at the crash. Now he wonders, “Did I see everything, and did I just block everything out all these years?”

Newspaper accounts reported that the fire engines were responding to a house fire on Earle Avenue, one block past Calderone’s street. The newspapers stated that Roy apparently sensed what was about to happen and entered the intersection to try to stop the fire engines.

The impact of the crash threw firefighters to the pavement. Nine firefighters were injured. One firefighter died that day, and two others died the following days. Roy was struck and thrown onto the lawn of the Penbrook Apartments on the northeast corner of the intersection. She died instantly.

The newspapers wrote that the crash was attributed to “the treacherous surface of Peninsula Boulevard” and that the “road surface was slippery with oil and water.” The papers also stated that neither of the fire trucks was reported to have been speeding at the time of the accident.

While the memory of the three firefighters killed in the line of duty are remembered on the Firefighters Memorial on Sunrise Highway, a stone memorial was placed on the lawn of the Penbrook Apartments where Roy died in the line of duty doing her job for the community.

Calderone doesn’t know why he came forward to talk about that day, or why he had never spoken before about Roy or the crash. But now he wants everyone to know that Roy was a hero.

“She got me to safety and then went into the trouble that she saw coming,” Calderone said. “Firefighters run toward the danger, and Mrs. Roy did the same thing that day. I was the last person she touched. I take nothing from the three firefighters that died because I didn’t know them. I knew Mrs. Roy. She was my guardian angel. I will always remember what she did that day.”

— Reprinted from the April 17, 2008 Lynbrook/East Rockaway Herald