Three times McCaffery was admitted to NYU Medical Center, twice to the Burn Unit, with injuries that would have made him eligible for retirement. Each time he was back on the job within months. FDNY Assistant Chief Aleck Wagman acknowledges McCaffery to have been a source of “institutional knowledge.” “Men were anxious to serve under him. Not just the new guys, everyone. Anyone could learn something from Jimmy. He'll be badly missed.”

“At the other houses he worked, he wouldn't let them call him Superman,” Owen McCardle recalls. “Like it embarrassed him. But, tell you the truth, it was always who he wanted to be.”

McCaffery lived alone in a small, spare apartment on West 12th Street and never married. “The Job was his family,” said Ted Fitzgerald, retired captain of Engine 235. “There's always guys like that, every generation. They're the backbone of this Department, and on 9/11 we lost way too many of them.”

McCaffery's heroism on September 11 is by now legendary. Elizabeth Murray, an attorney, made the trip down 28 flights of stairs with others from her firm. Murray, her firm's fire warden, was among the last to evacuate her floor. She spoke of McCaffery's “swift and total” understanding of the tragedy. “There was fire on our floor from the elevator shaft. People were burned, and some had been hit by debris that exploded out when the doors blew open. There was a lot of smoke, and we were cut off from our stairs.” The men of Ladder 62 directed the crowds away from the fire to an open stairwell, assisting the injured and, in the words of another survivor, “defusing the hysteria, everyone screaming and running around.”

“He seemed to know exactly how much time we had to get out,” Murray said of Captain McCaffery. “He said if we didn't panic, we'd be all right. He could have come out with us. We just barely made it. I really think he knew that the tower was going to come down. None of us remotely thought it would, at that time.”