Riverhead Fire Department honored 75-year member Marty Montag Saturday night at a dinner at its headquarters.
Montag, 98, joined the department on Feb. 28, 1950 and is a member and ex-captain of the Fire Police Patrol. He served as secretary of the Riverhead Firefighters Association for 32 years and also served as secretary of the fire district from 1988 to 2008. Montag was a member of the Iron Men Drill team from 1950 to 1954 and served as its captain for a year.
At the dinner Saturday, Montag was fêted with proclamations, plaques and
certificates from the fire district, fire department, the Suffolk County Volunteer Firefighters Association and elected officials.
In a phone interview today, Montag said the thing he enjoyed most about being a volunteer firefighter was the camaraderie and companionship of fellow volunteers.
“Mostly there were a lot of nice people in there,” he said.
One of his most vivid memories as a Riverhead firefighter was fighting the Sunrise Fire in Westhampton, the massive wildfire that scorched 5,000 acres of pine barrens. Montag was on a brush truck, surrounded by burning woodlands. “And a helicopter came over the top of us and dumped their water right on top of us.” The only way out was to drive through a wall of fire, he said.
His daughter Pam said she doesn’t remember, when she was a young person, “a birthday or Christmas that Dad wasn’t at a fire at some point.” The radio would go off and they would respond, she said.
Montag is now living in Waxhaw, North Carolina, where he moved with his wife Joyce to be near family after she became ill with breast cancer. She passed away at age 94 last February, less than two months before the couple’s 74th wedding anniversary.
A World War II veteran, Montag met his future wife while he served in the military, when he accompanied a buddy in the Army Air Force home on leave in Riverhead. He was working as a code breaker in Washington, D.C. at the time and Riverhead, New York was a much more do-able trip to take on leave than his hometown of West Bend, Iowa. He grew up on a farm there, the second-youngest of 17 children born to his parents, Henry and Luna Montag.
“We always joked that they raised their farm help,” Pam Montag said.
“I spent my 21st birthday in Tokyo and my 22nd birthday in Washington,” Montag recalled. He would see President Truman every day when the president took his daily walk around town, he said.
Montag married Joyce Seebeck on April 2, 1950 and settled in Riverhead, where he joined the fire department and built a life. He took a job at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1952 and worked there for 42 years until his retirement. The couple raised two daughters, Pam and Sandy and had three grandchildren.
RiverheadLOCAL photos by Emil Breitenbach Jr.
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