Huntington Station neighbors mourn fallen fire chaplain

When Richard Holst first became a fire department chaplain years ago, the Huntington Station man had a prescient conversation with his next-door neighbor. They spoke of the rituals of comforting a heartbroken family about a firefighter lost in the line of duty, the neighbor, Constance Lovisa, recalled.

Then, in a tragic instant Wednesday, Holst became such a firefighter, and a department and the community it serves were left comforting the grieving widow of the comforter.

"I can't say enough nice things about him," sobbed Lovisa, 74, Holst's longtime neighbor who learned from a reporter that Holst had died. "God almighty."

In an interview, his widow, Noreen, 59, remembered her husband - her high school sweetheart. He was a retired KeySpan employee who was born in Rockville Centre and grew up in Hempstead. A man who had served in the U.S. Navy during Vietnam in the Atlantic Fleet aboard the U.S.S. Saratoga. A man who followed in his father's footsteps by becoming a firefighter. then became head of the state's fire chaplain association.

"That's an all-consuming passion," said Noreen Holst.

Whenever there would be a fire in the community, Lovisa said, "I'd see his truck pull out immediately," she said. "He always had his beeper on."

The Rev. Kenneth Hesset, executive secretary of the New York State Association of Fire Chaplains and chaplain of the Westbury Fire Department, said Holst was heavily involved in association's training program.

Neighbors said Holst would protect their community even when he wasn't helping with the fire department, by watching over homes while the owners were in Florida. Neighbors said Holst would keep an eye out for suspicious cars and even strategize ways to alternate lighting to fool burglars.

In everything he did, people who knew him said, he was above all else, reliable - even to people who weren't his close friends.

"You can count on him," one of the beneficiaries of his unofficial housesitting, neighbor Wynn Gaylor, 82, said. "He was a good guy."

With Andrew Strickler