DEL.ICIO.USSNELLVILLE
James Coleman, 76, spent lifetime fighting fires
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saturday, June 27, 2009
James Coleman fought fires, campaigned for votes and drank coffee with movie stars, but his most remarkable feat may have been wooing a woman to be his wife who was 25 years younger than himself.
“He just had charisma coming out of every pore of his body,” his wife, Jamie Coleman, said of her husband of 33 years. “We just clicked, we were soul mates. What can I say?”
Family photo
James Coleman spent the first half of his life fighting fires and the second half working to try to ensure fires wouldn’t break out in the first place.
Coleman, a championship swimmer in high school from Trenton, N.J., served with the Navy during the Korean War, before mustering out and becoming a firefighter in New Jersey in the 1950s.
“He loved it and he hated it,” said his son Sean Coleman. “He said the worst things he saw was in firefighting. Once a Christmas tree went up and the entire family was killed, and he had to go in and bring the [dead] kids out.”
He moved on to be the state fire marshal for New Jersey and won a commission seat for one of the state’s townships, Mrs. Coleman said.
But all that was before she met him. He had moved on to a second career as a fire-protection engineer at Marsh & McLennan protection consultants in the mid-1970s. “He went into the technical side — the preventive side — to stop a fire before it starts,” Sean Coleman said.
It was at Marsh & McLennan that he met his wife, with whom he fathered three sons. The two moved to metro Atlanta 22 years ago with Hartford Steam Boiler, a global specialty insurer, Mrs. Coleman said.
James Coleman, 76, of Snellville, died Tuesday after a long battle with cancer, kidney disease and a debilitating lung disease. His funeral is scheduled for 11 a.m. Monday at Tom M. Wages Snellville Chapel, and he will be buried at the National Cemetery in Canton. Visitation is set for 2 to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. Sunday.
Mr. Coleman traveled the world, but one of his biggest clients was the company that owned Paramount Studios. “He called me one morning and said, ‘Guess what, Charlie just made me some coffee,” Mrs. Coleman said. “And I said, ‘All right, I’ll bite, who is Charlie?’ And he said Charlton Heston.”
“He met Barbara Stanwyck and said she was a wonderful woman, and he met ‘The Fonz,’ Henry Winkler.”
But cigarettes and firefighting before the era of breathing apparatuses, which caused him to breathe in pollutants from soot to asbestos, took their toll, and Mr. Coleman retired on disability in 1993 with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which makes it progressively harder for sufferers to breathe, which must have been especially hard for a man whose wife said he played semi-pro baseball and semi-pro hockey in the Garden State.
Mr. Coleman concentrated on raising his three sons, Sean, now 32, Chris, now 30, and Kelley, now 24. A fan of the Philadelphia Eagles and New York Mets, he would educate his children on the teams.
“He was a lifelong fan of the Philly Eagles, although they had caused him some heartache over the years,” Chris Coleman said. “From the 1940s, he could name off the players.”
As his lung illness got worse, he also spent a decade fighting prostrate cancer, heart attacks and kidney disease, and six months ago he was diagnosed with lung cancer and doctors found a large aneurism, Mrs. Coleman said. In the last chapter of his life, volunteering at Emory Eastside Medical Center, where he logged 3,000 hours, took up most of his energy.
“His body was shot and he went into the hospice in March,” she said. “But we brought him home, and we were there when he died. Just the five of us were in the room — me, my three sons and Jim.”
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