Sunday Rerun (from July 2020): Life's Path

 It's 1983, December, and Deirdre Taylor is 4 years old, living in a loft apartment in the SoHo section of New York with her mother. When a fire broke out in the apartment, a man on the street hollered to a firefighter who was doing one of the side duties the Fire Dept handles - checking water pipes in buildings for adequate pressure.

That firefighter ran up to the apartment and found Taylor's young mom, who was screaming for help to save her baby. He was Vincent Pugliese, who served the city of New York for decades before retiring 24 years ago. He remembers that day vividly, naturally.

Deirdre today

He ran up to the sixth-floor apartment and rescued Deirdre's mom, who gasped that her daughter was still inside the smoke-filled apartment.

"She kept screaming, 'My baby!' so I went back in and found a young girl who was unconscious," says Pugliese, recounting that he gave the child rescue breathing until she came back to consciousness.

Deirdre told CNN recently, "I always knew I came close to losing my life that day. Without him, I wouldn't be here. I had a second chance at life, thanks to him."

Fast-forward to 2020. Remember how, when New York City was hit so hard by COVID cases this spring, nurses and doctors from all over the nation came to help them out?  Deirdre Taylor is an emergency room nurse in Alexandria, Virginia now, and she was one of those volunteers.  Before she left to fly to NYC, she took along a tattered old newspaper about a firefighter who saved a little girl there a long time ago.

Along life's path, Deirdre met her husband, and they have two kids. She always wondered about that brave fireman who save her life, but found nothing about Vincent Pugliese online.

Vincent today

She spent two months doing valiant service at BYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn, and found out a secret, which is that firefighters either know everybody who ever was in the fire department, or they know someone who knows someone who does. She asked a firefighter whom she met in the hospital, and he called the captain of FDNY Ladder 20 in Manhattan, and that led her directly to her hero.

She called him and was glad to make the connection! "I wondered about him on 9/11 and hoped I would get the chance to thank him, and I finally did," said Taylor.

Pugliese is 75 years of age now, and says she was "on cloud nine" when he got that call from Taylor.

Vincent has had that same newspaper article, framed, hanging on the wall of his home in Spring Lake, NJ, for all these years as well. "The two of us just sat there crying on the phone," he told CNN. "She turned out to be a remarkable woman with a magnificent life."

Taylor was just a tot when Pugliese saved her, so of course her memories are sketchy, but he says, "I didn't see her ever again after that, but I always wondered about her."

He was awarded the Walter Scott Medal for Valor for his rescue of Taylor, who joined the Army on her 17th birthday and became a National Guard helicopter pilot before she started her family.  Military service is something else the two share; he was a Marine in Vietnam before joining the FDNY.

"On top of that, we're both die-hard Yankees fans!" said Taylor, proving that no one, no matter how heroic, is perfect.

They haven't met up, but they do chat on the phone, and have made plans to go see a Yankee game with her family. This year, that might just take another miracle, but we'll see.