Friends’ goal is to keep firefighter’s name alive

Alan Feinberg served
20 years with FDNY,

Alan Feinberg

until Sept. 11, 2001

By mark rosman

Staff Writer

MARLBORO — For Alan Feinberg’s friends in the community, it’s all about remembering what kind of a man he was.

Friends of Alan Feinberg chartered a 50-foot boat and went on a fishing trip in June as a way of paying tribute to Feinberg, a New York City fireman lost in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on America. Proceeds from the event helped Feinberg’s friends donate a large-screen TV to the Marlboro Recreation Community Center.

Feinberg, a New York City firefighter for 20 years, died on Sept. 11, 2001, after he and his fellow firefighters from Battalion 9, Engine 54, Ladder 4, rushed to lower Manhattan, the scene of the terrorist attack on America that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Feinberg’s firehouse at 48th Street and 8th Avenue lost 15 men that day. He served for 17 years with Engine 40 in Lincoln Center and was in his third year of service with Engine 54, Ladder 4.

Feinberg was one of 12 Marlboro residents who were killed on Sept. 11.

More than a year after that awful day, Feinberg’s friends and family members, his wife, Wendy, daughter, Tara, and son, Michael, are still trying to come to grips with what happened.

It hasn’t been easy.

But the one thing people seem to agree on is that Feinberg should not and will not be forgotten in his community.

In June, Feinberg’s friends Gary and Lynne Heimberg and Jack and Carol Katz organized an excursion which they dubbed the "Alan Feinberg Memorial Fishing Trip." They chartered a boat out of Atlantic Highlands and signed up 40 people, who went out for a day of fun.

The only regret, Gary Heimberg said, was that their friend, Alan, who loved to fish, couldn’t be there.

In the same spirit of community that Feinberg showed through his participation in local sports leagues and in his career as a fireman, his friends decided that they, too, should give something back. A collection taken up among people who went on the fishing trip and some who did not raised enough money for Feinberg’s friends to donate a large-screen television in his name to the Marlboro Recreation Community Center, Wyncrest Road, so that people will be able to gather with their friends and enjoy special events.

Heimberg and Feinberg, as it turned out, had a history going back years before they hooked up again in Marlboro in about 1997 or 1998. Until they got to talking, Heimberg said, he didn’t realize that he had worked for Alan’s dad, Harold, and his uncles, Leo and Sonny, in their candy store on Bay Parkway in Brooklyn, N.Y., when he was 16.

"Alan was a great guy," Heimberg said, "and what happened on Sept. 11 was beyond my wildest dreams. He’s missed a lot."

Speaking of the fishing trip, Wendy Feinberg said she wanted to thank her husband’s friends "for doing something he would have loved."

"The trip was wonderful," she said. "It was just too bad that Alan wasn’t there."

Putting the donated television at the recreation center will make it a nice place for people to gather, Wendy Feinberg said, and that means a lot to her.

Feinberg’s friends in the Marlboro Softball League, a loop for men over 30, also wanted to honor a person they cared about, and so this year the league’s commissioner, Alan Friedman, renamed the Commissioner’s Award the Alan Feinberg Memorial Award.

"Alan became a friend of ours and was the only person in our league who died on Sept. 11," Friedman said. "The award represents a person who gives of himself, and this year’s winner was Mike Lisi."

Friedman said the award is a statue of a fireman and will, from this year on, carry Feinberg’s name. The league may also seek municipal approval at some point to name the field that is used at the Union Hill Road park in Feinberg’s memory, Friedman said.

The Marlboro Little League is hoping to honor Feinberg’s memory in some fashion, although plans for how to do that have not been finalized, according to Cliff Radisch, president of the Marlboro Little League. Feinberg was a former manager with the youth sports organization that has fields on Tennent Road in the Morgan-ville section of the community.

Another of Feinberg’s friends, Bruce Berent, a co-owner of Lola’s, a children’s and teen clothing store in Manalapan, made a contribution that will fund an essay contest at the Marlboro Middle School. Entrants in the first contest, in spring 2002, were asked to write about the spirit of volunteerism. The winner of that contest was Yelena Federova, and Stephanie Chio and Valerie Becker were the runners-up.

Finally, the Robertsville Volunteer Fire Company, under the leadership of Chief Brett Boyce, and the Marlboro Fire Com-pany, under the leadership of Chief Joe Chaplinski, saw to it that a flagpole was put up in front of the Feinberg home, Wendy Feinberg said, expressing her gratitude to those organizations.