HOLYOKE -- It was a split-second rescue that has lived on, frozen in time by the late photographer James "Ziggy" Sears: a child dangles five stories above the ground as a firefighter, perched atop a ladder, clutches the boy by his ankle. Thick smoke surrounds them, pouring from an invisible building only inches away.
The firefighter in the photograph is Christopher J. Reynolds, who retired from the Holyoke Fire Department earlier this year as a deputy chief. At the time of the blaze, on Nov. 10, 1992, he was a 37-year-old lieutenant.
Sears, a long-time photographer for the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram and The Republican, died Oct. 18 at the age of 83.
The 1992 fire at 349 Chestnut St. killed three children from a single family. Reynolds, along with firefighters Francis "Ricky" Knightly and Thomas Dziok, were credited with saving two other siblings: the boy in the photograph, 22-month-old Luis Arnaldo Lopez, and his brother, 12-year-old Edwin Delvalle, who is barely visible in the frame as he lies on the ladder under Reynolds.
"It happened so fast, I didn't even remember too much of it," Reynolds said in an interview Thursday, when asked to share his memories of the photograph.
The fire broke out around 7 a.m. Reynolds was a member of the arson squad at the time, and stayed at the scene into the afternoon as his unit investigated the fire's cause -- eventually determined to be a child in a first-floor apartment who set a mattress ablaze while playing with cigarette lighters, the flames spurred on by a seven-year-old sister who used a can of hairspray in a failed attempt to put out the fire.
By the time Reynolds returned to the station, the day's edition of the Hoyoke Transcript-Telegram had hit the streets.
Reynolds said he remembers seeing himself on the front page of the newspaper that day and thinking, "Christ, when did that happen?" Later, he added: "I didn't even know it happened. I'm telling you, when I saw the paper, I was shocked. I really was."
The rescue came after Dziok, working on the ground, guided the aerial ladder to a window where the children were spotted. Reynolds went up the rungs first, with Knightly following.
In the fire's aftermath, Reynolds offered this account of the rescue to a reporter for the Union-News:
Knightly, in the same interview, added: "[Reynolds] handed me one child. As he handed it to me, it gasped for air. The kid was small. I just held it in front of me, in my arms, and I just shimmied down the ladder."
As the firefighters made their way down, flames blew out a hallway window between the third and fourth floors, engulfing the ladder.
"I thought we lost them all," Deputy Fire Chief Douglas Moran told a reporter. He continued: "How they saved that baby is beyond me. I thought that baby was going to fall. If it weren't for Dziok's experience, those two lives would have been lost. It's an act of heroism. I just can't describe it any other way. I've never seen anything like it in my time."
The next day, Reynolds said, he returned to work at South Holyoke's Station 2 at Main and Sargeant streets.
"The phone and doorbell didn't stop, all day long," he recalled, as people who had seen the photograph called or visited to wish him and his colleagues well. In addition to the Transcript-Telegram, the picture appeared on the front pages of the November 11 editions of newspapers around the region (including the Union-News and the Boston Herald), and across the country.
The Indonesian Observer ran the photograph on November 14.
"Firefighters do great things all the time," Reynolds said Thursday, explaining that many acts of heroism go overlooked because they happen inside the buildings at fire scenes. As firefighters crawl through black smoke in search of victims, the work can become invisible: without a witness, the story may stay with the firefighter.
And, in the chaos of a fire, those at the center of the action don't always have a clear picture of what's happening.
"If Ziggy wasn't there, there would be an article saying two saved, three dead," Reynolds said. "And that would have been the end of it."
The dozens of letters and cards began arriving shortly after the Sears photograph appeared in newspapers around the the world.
"I got letters from people all across the country," Reynolds said.
One piece of mail came from a firefighter in Orlando, Florida, who photocopied two images that appeared in the local Sentinel: the Sears photograph of Reynolds holding the child, and a photograph of then-NBA rookie Shaquille O'Neal holding a basketball high above his massive frame.
The firefighter's accompanying note reads:
On December 4, 1992, Reynolds retrieved his mail and found a thick envelope full of letters from a fifth-grade class at the Vintage Hills School in Pleasanton, California.
The children were about the same age as the older boy rescued from the fire.
One student wrote: "I am really glad you risked your life to save those two children. I am a child, too. I'd really like you to save me if I was in a fire. [...] I've heard of daring rescues but that takes the cake."
"It's good to know that there are people like you doing good things for other people," wrote another. "What you did is know[n] all around the United States. For the courage that you have in saving those children."
Reynolds keeps the mementos in a plastic storage box at his Granby home.
Every few years, he said: "If I have a bad day, I read through them and get my spirits up."
The photograph's impact has endured in other ways. When Reynolds was young he played sports but was never a standout athlete; he was never the smartest kid in school. "So you always have that kind of self doubt about you," he said.
That doubt persisted in his early years as a firefighter. At one point, he turned down a chance to take the exam to become a lieutenant. When the test was rescheduled, he reconsidered, placed sixth out of 33 applicants, and eventually earned the promotion.
The publication of the Sears photograph -- a rare opportunity for Reynolds to step outside himself, and view his work from a third-person perspective -- was another turning point in his career, and in his life.
"After this," he said, referring to the photograph, "I really haven't had too many days in my life where I've had self doubt. Now I'm not cocky, not over-confident -- but, after this, I've always said: 'If I try, and work hard enough, I can get it done'."
What Sears couldn't capture in a single frame is the teamwork involved in the rescue.
It is a point Reynolds emphasized in the immediate aftermath of the fire, and one he continues to make today.
"Team effort," Reynolds told the Union-News reporter in 1992. "It was a team effort."
It's hard to do anything at the top of a ladder outside a burning building, fifty feet in the air, if you don't have faith in the colleagues behind and below you, he explained Thursday.
Two weeks after the rescue, Reynolds and Knightly were awarded the Scott Medal at the city's annual Fireman's Ball. The award, established through a trust fund in 1922 by city resident Walter Scott to recognize courageous acts by Holyoke's firefighters and police officers, had only been given to 16 others. Dziok received a plaque honoring his professionalism.
When Reynolds was recognized for the rescue in October 1993 at the Massachusetts Firefighter of the Year ceremony in Boston, it was also as part of the team: he, Knightly and Dziok took home the top award for company merit.
Several other frames Sears shot during the rescue hang in a hallway at Holyoke Fire Headquarters on High Street. In a nearby conference room a plaque presented by the Springfield Indians hockey team in February, 1993, hangs by a window.
"You made the 'save' of a lifetime," the plaque reads.
An early version of the plaque named Reynolds and Knightly only; Reynolds said he asked the organization for a version that instead named the Holyoke Fire Department.
"Anything done at a fire department is a team effort," Reynolds said Thursday. "It wasn't just me."