Memorial Muslin Orono firefighter honors New York’s bravest in murals

After the tragic events of Sept. 11, Dennis Bean knew he had to do something to memorialize his fellow firefighters. So he picked up his paintbrush and went to work. The Orono firefighter has been creating murals on bedsheets to help others recall the bravery of those lost in New York City and Washington, D.C. So far, he’s created eight of these paintings, which have found homes in Hudson, Glenburn, Corinth, Portland and Patten, and has orders for five more. Proceeds will go to a fund for family members of the lost New York City firefighters, along with a special banner Bean will paint.

“A lot of families were devastated by the [family] members they lost,” said Bean, 28. “That’s the family I lost – my brothers and sisters in the New York Fire Department.”

To better comprehend how Bean feels, it’s necessary to understand where he’s coming from. He bleeds fire engine red.

His dad, Derwood, was a firefighter in Glenburn. One of Bean’s fondest memories as a child was getting a ride home on the firetruck so that the family could wash, wax and polish it on a Saturday afternoon.

He joined the Glenburn Junior Fire Department at age 14, and he’s been a firefighter ever since. When he’s not working in Orono, he’s a volunteer firefighter in Hudson, where he lives.

His twin brother, Dan, and his brother-in-law, Richard Doughty, are both firefighters in Old Town. He estimated that a dozen relatives work in various volunteer fire departments throughout the state.

That’s what made the events of Sept. 11 strike home especially hard for Bean and all other firefighters. On that day, he was at the Bangor home of the parents of his wife, Marisha. They had said goodbye to her sister, who was driving back to Ohio.

“I turned on the TV just after the first plane hit,” he recalled. “I saw the size of those buildings and thought about how far those firemen had to travel up. Her sister had forgotten something and came back, arriving after the second plane hit. Her drive would have taken her through New York City. She ended up staying a couple extra days, because she didn’t dare to drive home.”

Later that day when Bean, his wife, and their newborn daughter Kaitlynn arrived home, the house was festooned with the huge stork sign that he had created the week before to celebrate Marisha and Kaitlynn’s arrival from the hospital. That gave him an idea.

“It celebrated a new life coming into the world, but so many [lives] had ended during the tragedy,” he explained. “I thought about what I could paint to represent the mourning people were going through.”

Bean has a small sign-painting business, housed in a shop designed like an 1800s fire station. Eventually he wants to build a bigger shop in order to display the firefighting memorabilia he has collected.

Bean is Orono’s fire prevention officer, and he first employed the idea of airbrushing art onto sheets while creating landscape sets for a fire-prevention play he presented to Asa Adams School third-graders last year.

He created the first queen-size sheet banner for his house, then created a two-sheet mural for his parents, Derwood and Julia Bean of Glenburn. Since then, people have been stopping by and calls and orders have been filtering in. Each of the designs is a little different, and the murals take 11/2-2 hours to complete.

Bean plans to finish the orders he has, but isn’t looking for more. There’s a new baby to help take care of. He’s also working on two firefighting-related paintings to be auctioned off at the Pine Tree Burn Conference, Oct. 19-21, the proceeds of which will go to the burn unit of the Shriners Children’s Hospital in Boston.

The painting helps Bean exorcise some of the images from Sept. 11.

“I traveled to Worcester [Mass.] for the memorial service for the six firefighters [killed in a 1999 warehouse fire], and that seemed like a lot,” he said. “I can’t even imagine the hundreds that were lost.”