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Russ Forster reduces last year’s blessed palms to ash using a burner that he designed for the purpose. Palm ashes drop through a grate into a container beneath his invention and will be used on Ash Wednesday at St. Mark Parish.

LINDA REEVES | FC
Russ Forster reduces last year’s blessed palms to ash using a burner that he designed for the purpose. Palm ashes drop through a grate into a container beneath his invention and will be used on Ash Wednesday at St. Mark Parish.

‘Where’s the fire?’

Responder to 911 call gets the 411 on Ash Wednesday.

LINDA REEVES | PALM BEACH BUREAU EDITOR

Published: 02.01.08

BOYNTON BEACH | Last February, a trail of white smoke led firefighters not only to flames and ashes at Russ Forester’s home, but also to a little “fire and brimstone.”

“A lot of smoke was going up into the air,” said native New Yorker Forester, 90, a parishioner of St. Mark, about his annual palm-burning ritual that caused some excitement last year. “The first thing you know, I turned around and there is a fireman.”

Burning the previous year’s blessed Palm Sunday fronds before Ash Wednesday so that the soot can be used to mark foreheads is a Catholic tradition that some parishes still perform. Forester, who retired to Florida in 1984 from Connecticut, burns the palms for St. Mark. He collects them from the church, sets a day for processing them and carefully burns the fronds in a custom-made burner.

That day, a neighbor called 911. The fire department crew sounded the alarm and rushed to the scene.

Forester said he was cool and calm when the fireman appeared in his yard out of nowhere.

“I said, ‘What can I do for you?’ and he said, ‘Where’s the fire?’”

Forester, a former mechanical engineer for an industrial oil burner company, showed the fireman the 12-by-18-inch stainless steel burner that he designed and had made locally. It stands more than 2 feet off the ground on thin, spiral legs.

Forester places bundles of palm fronds in the burner and with the click of a long lighter they go up in flames. The process is clean and no chemicals are used. The ashes fall to a bottom container.

Forester then cools and strains the ashes, which will placed on foreheads on the first day of Lent.

The fireman “asked me what I was doing and I told him I make ashes for Ash Wednesday,” said Forester in his heavy New York accent. “He said, ‘What’s that?’

“I explained to him what and why. Apparently, he wasn’t a Catholic. He said ‘OK, it looks like you have everything under control.’

Forester, a widower with three children, eight stepchildren, 32 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren, suffered a heart attack while attending 5 p.m. Mass Jan. 7 at St. Mark. But a week later, he was on his feet and back at the church. He is doing fine.

“I thank God so much. I never stop thanking him, and never stop telling him I love him,” he said.

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