By Mary McCarty
Updated 1:30 AM Thursday, December 31, 2009
Like most 7-year-old girls, Michaela Dunkman believed that “Daddy was
invincible.”
On Sept. 30, 1951, she learned the hard truth.
Michaela and her mother, Elizabeth, had been attending Mass when Dayton police
officers came into the church to tell them that Clarence Irvin Dunkman had
been severely injured in a warehouse fire started by four young boys. “I
remember riding in the police car to St. Elizabeth Hospital, but by the time
we got there he already passed away,” recalled Michaela Dunkman Lanter, now
65, of Beavercreek. “My mom went into hysterics and they told her she
couldn’t go in there, but she went flying and broke in anyway.”
Elizabeth Dunkman was left to raise the couple’s five children on her own. The
youngest, Paul, only 11 months old at the time, has no memories of his
father but “he has always been present in thoughts, words and actions.” Now,
Dunkman’s two surviving children feel proud his name will be part of a
public sculpture being planned for Stubbs Park in Centerville to honor the
58 Miami Valley firefighters who have died in the line of duty.
Retired Dayton firefighter Rod Longpre said the Miami Valley Firefighter/EMS
Memorial Association he co-founded is “very, very close” to beginning
construction after nearly 20 years of fundraising. Before noon on Dec. 24 —
the day the Dayton Daily News published an article about the memorial
— a local company called Longpre with the promise of a $5,000 matching
grant. Later that day Houser Asphalt & Concrete of Dayton offered to
donate the concrete and gravel.
“It makes me feel very humbled that people in the private sector would want to
help us,” Longpre said. “All this time the firefighters were doing it on our
own, and it turns out all we had to do was ask.”
Fallen firefighter’s children still ‘family’
It is nearly 60 years since her father died, battling a warehouse fire in the
Oregon District, and Fire Station 4 doesn’t look anything like the
turn-of-the-century firehouse that Michaela Dunkman Lanter visited so often
as a little girl.
The location at Main and Monument remains the same, but everything else has
changed. Yet when the Beavercreek woman visits the firehouse with her
brother, Paul Dunkman, 59, there’s an immediate sense they’re among family.
The only surviving children of fallen firefighter Clarence Irvin Dunkman are
treated like visiting royalty. Lanter can point out the spot where her
versatile father once cooked for the other men, and where he would repair
their uniforms.
Brother and sister talk shop with Lt. Robert D. Cockayne, whose father,
retired Capt. Robert C. Cockayne, served with Dunkman at the time of his
death in 1951. “Firefighters are very tradition-based,” Cockayne said, “and
when someone passes away, that’s part of our family. They’re never
forgotten.”
The firefighters at Station 4 want the rest of the community to remember, too.
That’s why they’ve supported the 19-year quest of now-retired Dayton
firefighter Rod Longpre to build the Miami Valley Firefighter/EMS Memorial.
“Rod is passionate about this,” noted Assistant Fire Chief Jeff Payne. “Ever
since I’ve know him, he has put in his own time and money.”
Steve King, spokesman for the memorial association, said he is dumfounded by
the response to a Dec. 24 Dayton Daily News article. “Nobody had any
expectations for immediate results,” King said. “We hoped it would help our
fundraising.” King said the firefighters need to raise $10,000 to $15,000 to
begin construction; they won’t be far from that goal if they can meet the
matching grant. In addition, they need to raise $20,000 endowment for the
sculpture which will be installed at Stubbs Park in Centerville. Celebrated
Yellow Springs artist Jon Barlow Hudson has won the commission to create the
sculpture he will call “Fire Wall.”
Jane Black, director of the Dayton Visual Arts Center, served on the jury that
selected Hudson. At first, Black felt disturbed by Hudson’s model: “I think
my initial comment was ‘I wouldn’t walk into that, it feels
hot, referring to the plaza he had proposed. However, I awoke in the middle
of the night, having had a clear vision of being in that space, looking at
the light shining through the cutout of the firefighter in one of the
triangular uprights. It was as if I was in a burning building — trapped,
hot, terrified — and had just seen the person who would save my life. And
suddenly, that memorial seemed exactly right.”
It’s a fitting tribute, in other words, for the men and women whose loss sends
ripples through the generations. “I was just a baby when he died, and I have
no memory of my father,” said Paul Dunkman, a grocer who owns the Anna
Market. “But I don’t feel cheated. The kids who are cheated are the ones who
don’t know who their fathers are. I knew who my father was.”
Dunkman’s widow, Elizabeth, taught him to cherish his memory. She heroically
worked every imaginable job — from seamstress to baker to pizza maker — to
hold her family together. “She never wanted to marry again,” Lanter said of
her mother, who died in 1997. “They fell in love when they were young, and
she couldn’t deal with the thought of loving another man.”
Dunkman wishes he could talk to the four young boys — now senior citizens —
who started the fire that killed his father. Not for retribution, but quite
the opposite: “I want them to know I don’t hold anything against them.”
Concurred Lanter, “They did not mean for that to happen. They were just kids
being kids.”
Lanter believes her father would have felt the same way: “He was kind and
gentle and very giving to anyone who needed it.”
This is one story among 58. Yet the story of Clarence Dunkman is the story, in
microcosm, of the firefighters’ memorial.
For his spirit clearly lives on in his children, in his fellow firefighters,
and in the community he died trying to protect.
