Francis Larkin and the important things

By Felix Carroll

The fire got so hot, the windows blew out and threw Francis Larkin halfway across Main Street. They were loading him into the ambulance when he reached out to his wife and daughter.

“Here,” he said, “you better take these. I don’t want to lose them.”

He handed them a pack of Marlboros and his false teeth.

Francis Larkin always managed to pay mind to the important things, even when he was a bit scuffed up, such as he was from the blaze in the 1980s at Jack’s Country Squire in Great Barrington.

A fireman for more than 50 years and a family man till the moment he died of a heart attack in 2004 at the age of 71, Francis Larkin is being remembered this week, especially.

On Saturday night, the Great Barrington Fire Department will host "Casino Night" to benefit the new Francis E. Larkin Memorial Scholarship Fund, which will support Monument Mountain High School students.

The event — one Francis would love — begins at 7 p.m. at Berkshire South Regional Community Center.

So who was Francis Larkin? Famous for his affinity for a good joke and a good drink (and if you were a son of a bitch, he’d let you know it), Francis was a lot of things to a lot of people.

“When I was a little kid,” recalls Ed McCormick, “I can remember him throwing a ball up in the air until I couldn’t see it anymore.”

To this day, Francis’ leather helmet and coat remain hung on a gear hook at the fire house. No one would dare remove them.

“Francis’ picture should be under the word ‘volunteer’ in the dictionary,” says Chief Harry Jennings.

To Kevin and Cathy Larkin, Francis was the father who never missed an event of theirs, no matter how trivial.

“It’s hard to talk about my father and not make him sound like Mr. Wonderful,” Kevin says. “But you know, he really was wonderful.”

Lois Larkin remembers the first time she encountered her future husband. She was in second grade. He was in sixth. “I was sitting there in the old Bryant School doing my work, and I hear the teacher say, ‘Young man, what are you doing?’ Well, it was Francis.

He had slid down the banister. The teacher read him the riot act and told him he had to stay after school. But he told her he really couldn’t do that because he had a paper route.”

Duty called, and nothing could get in the way.

Years later, in 1957, she saw him on Main Street. He asked her if he could call her sometime. “I said, ‘Sure.’” Three weeks later, he took her to see Louie Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald — or both — at the Music Barn in Lenox. It was a wonderful time. Did she like Francis immediately?

“Yes, I did,” Lois said this week, blushing, sitting in her kitchen on Pine Street. “He was the only one. He knew how to make the most of life.”

She had a photo beside her of their wedding day in 1960. He never really did ask her to marry him. He just sort of handed her a ring and said, “Here.”

“That was it. A man of few words,” Lois said, laughing.

Francis, a Korean War vet, worked as a plumber for Mort Cavanaugh. As his grandfather and father did before him, he joined the fire department, and it became his “first love,” Lois admits.

He experienced more than his share of difficult emergency calls. The one he never quite shook happened more than 35 years ago when he had to knock on the door of a home and tell a mother that her boy had died in a car accident. “Every once in awhile he would bring it up,” Lois said.

Each September, Francis would work at the Barrington Fair. He loved the horse races.

“He would carry this stick with a pointer at the end,” says Ed McCormack, a deputy fire chief. “He’d use the stick at the fair to pick up garbage bags worth of betting tickets, and during the winter he would go through these, ticket by ticket, looking for winners.”

“He had a year to collect on any winning ticket,” Kevin explains. “He was looking for the ‘big one.’”

Now, about that fire on Main Street — Francis was brought up to Fairview Hospital. “He made such a stink because they put him in a room without a view of the fire downtown,” Kevin recalls.

The hospital staff eventually moved him. They had to. After all, down below were his fellow fire fighters, his family, his community. He sat there by the window keeping an eye on it all because Francis Larkin always paid mind to the important things.