John P. Burnside: Struck by Love's
Lightning
It
is 1991. The young woman is in-line skating in Central
Park on a lovely July day. The police officer is standing
on duty outside the park's Summerstage, where Marshall
Crenshaw is playing. She stops to chat. He asks what she
is doing that night. She mentions a bar.
That is how love began between Sandra Endres and John
P. Burnside 10 years ago. "He walked in the door, and I
said that was it," Mrs. Burnside said. "We were like two
old souls. It was absolutely meant to be."
He was a police officer for only three years, while he
waited for assignment to his other true love, the Fire
Department. There, Firefighter Burnside was known as
mistake-free. "When you checked in the morning and you
knew John was working, it was going to be a good day,"
said George Kozlowski, a fellow firefighter at Ladder
Company 20 on Lafayette Street.
The Burnsides lived a honeymoon life in Manhattan,
vacationing often in the Caribbean and on the slopes.
Recently, they started having thoughts of a more settled
life. "But just when you think you're going to get
serious, buy a home and have kids, it gets taken away,"
Mrs. Burnside said. " I'm never going to get that back,
and it stinks." Her husband left Ladder Company 20 even
before the alarm sounded, and died in the collapse of 1
World Trade Center.
Firefighter Burnside was raised in the tightknit
Irish-American world of Inwood. He had an irrational love
for the Minnesota Vikings, wrote poetry and played the
guitar, often in the firehouse. He was so good that
another firefighter once thought his rendition of a Led
Zeppelin tune was coming out of a radio and went inside
to turn it up.
He would have turned 37.
.
