Firehouse

John Bowman shook his head when asked how long ago the Po-Mar-Lin Fire Co. began planning for a new firehouse in Unionville. "Thirteen years ago," Bowman, the all-volunteer company's assistant chief, said yesterday. "Everybody says 13 is unlucky. But for us, it's a good number. " After all that time, including six years of fund-raising dinners and private donations, a new $2.6 million fire station, under construction on Route 82 since the fall, is scheduled for completion next month.

For more than eight years, Matt Pappajohn enjoyed life in the stylish bachelor pad he created from a rambling Victorian-era structure - a former firehouse in Fishtown. He turned what had been the firefighters' second-floor dormitory into a living room/ library, adding a fireplace and ornate cherry bookcases that stretched from the floor to the 13-foot ceiling. Out of the hayloft of an adjacent horse barn, he made a master bedroom and bath with Jacuzzi. On the roof, he installed a deck to take in the Center City skyline views.

Although training methods and technology have changed over the centuries, the mission of Union Fire Co. has remained consistent. "We're still doing the same thing. We put water on fire to put it out," said Frank Smith Jr., chief of the volunteer Mount Holly Fire Co., made up of the Relief Fire Company, established in 1752; Union Fire Company, organized in 1805; and Good Intent Fire Co., established in 1850. Each of the three companies serves all of Mount Holly. "Things have changed since 1805," Smith said, "and over the last 10 years for that matter.

The Heenan family's life revolved around the Verga Fire Company in West Deptford. Jimmy Heenan had been a volunteer since he was a teenager. He met his wife there, and she became a volunteer, as well. The couple married in 1984 and raised two sons, now 18 and 20. Jimmy Heenan loved the fire service so much that he wanted to start a business cleaning and servicing fire gear. The night of his death, both were attending a New Year's Eve party at the fire company. The call for the house fire on Atkins Avenue came in about 2:15 a.m. Jan. 1, 2001.

Laura Bush drove home her husband's position on the use of stem cells for medical research, maintaining an all-volunteer military, and keeping Social Security intact at a rally yesterday in Delaware County. "The President is strongly committed to advancing research," she said to an enthusiastic crowd of about 800, mostly women, inside a firehouse in Upper Darby. First responders stood behind the first lady on stage. "But the President also looks forward to medical breakthroughs that may arrive from stem-cell research.

A beautiful draft of acrid smoke and grime blows onto TV tonight, an intimate look into the claustrophobic lives of firefighters that's as compelling as any other current drama series. With Denis Leary's Rescue Me, cable's FX channel has managed to trump its two other wonderful dramas, The Shield and Nip/Tuck, to create a triple threat unequalled elsewhere, even on HBO. Watchdog groups and grandstanding congressmen will probably go after the show, loaded with the kind of base language that must be commonplace at the firehouse.

Some of the city's libraries and firehouses should be closed, tens of millions of dollars should be spent on developing Philadelphia's waterfront, and the city's rules on government ethics should be overhauled. Those were just a few of dozens of recommendations made yesterday by the 21st Century Review Forum, an advisory group assembled by Mayor Street to help him create a blueprint for positive change as he begins his second term. Highlighting the forum's report was a proposal to create a new ethics board - one possibly with subpoena power and an independent, professional staff - to help restore faith in Philadelphia city government.

Fellow Brookhaven firefighters and friends of Christopher Kangas, the 14-year-old apprentice fireman killed while bicycling to the firehouse in response to an emergency call, say they will never give up their battle to properly honor his memory. Although the Delaware County municipality and the state have paid his widowed mother about $270,000 in survivor benefits, the U.S. Department of Justice has refused to similarly acknowledge the boy's death in the line of duty, citing a policy that limits benefits to active firefighters.

Marcus Carpenter grew up in the Sanatoga Fire Company, where his grandfather is a lifetime member. The fire company chose Carpenter to be its treasurer while he was a teenager. Yesterday, Carpenter, 22, pleaded guilty to stealing more than $150,000 from the fire company's coffers. He was sentenced to 11 1/2 to 23 months in Montgomery County Correctional Facility. "He had such . . . promise," Paul A. Bauer 3d, Carpenter's attorney, said. "It has now been ruined as a result of this.

The chief of a volunteer fire company wracked by internal dissension and assailed by Abington officials has agreed to resign amid threats that the firehouse would be shut down, township officials announced last night. David Leary, chief of the McKinley Fire Company since 1991, struck a deal with township officials just one day before the Board of Commissioners was scheduled to vote on an ordinance to decommission the firehouse used by a company that has served the township's Elkins Park section for the last 97 years.