While battling a four-alarm blaze just after 4 a.m. on March 8, 1959, Charles C. Kenney Jr. had brought a hose line to the third floor of a seven-story building with two other Boston firefighters “when an explosion surrounded them with flames, blocking their exit,’’ the Globe reported.

“They tried to escape, over ladders, three stories above the pavement,’’ Mr. Kenney’s son John recounted in a eulogy. “The ladder melted and gave way. My father falls three stories, breaking his back, badly burned.’’

At the hospital, John added, “he was in a coma for four days, receiving last rites.’’ The priest arrived 57 years too soon. Mr. Kenney had decades left to live.

He had faced adversity before, serving on a submarine in the Pacific during World War II, and would face it again, becoming a widowed father of six sons when his wife died. But “he was remarkably unsinkable,’’ his son Michael said in an interview. “He was so resilient. At every turn in life, he seemed to get things going particularly well, and he would get knocked down, but he would always get up.’’

Mr. Kenney, who later in life was designated a historian of Boston’s tragic Cocoanut Grove fire, died of complications of prostate cancer Jan. 9 in West Roxbury’s Deutsches Altenheim extended care center. He was 90 and had lived much of his life in Harwich and West Roxbury.

The months of recovery Mr. Kenney faced in 1959 echoed what his firefighter father went through after he was injured battling the 1942 fire at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub. At the time, Mr. Kenney was in training for his World War II duty, and he returned home from submarine school to visit his father, who was recuperating in bed. “He pulled up his trousers and showed me the scratches on his legs where people had clawed at him to pull them out,’’ Mr. Kenney told the Globe in 1992, as Boston observed the fire’s 50-year anniversary.

“After seeing that, after seeing my grandfather suffer as he did, you would think my father would get as far away from firefighting as possible,’’ Mr. Kenney's son Charles of Jamaica Plain wrote in the Globe in 2004.

“But for some there is a near-mystical draw in the job, and my father went on to become a rescue man like his father,’’ wrote Charles, a former Globe reporter who in 2007 published “Rescue Men,’’ a book about the Cocoanut Grove fire.

He added in the 2004 Globe article that Mr. Kenney “never strayed far from the Cocoanut Grove. In fact, he has spent the better part of two decades researching the fire, trying to know it and understand it; trying, in his way, to honor what my grandfather did on that night so many years ago.’’

In 1992, during the 50th anniversary observations, Boston’s fire commissioner appointed Mr. Kenney the unofficial Cocoanut Grove historian. “Flip through this,’’ Mr. Kenney said that year while sharing his research with a Globe reporter and handing him a document with 11 pages of names. “Force yourself to turn every page. It gives you an idea of what the Cocoanut Grove fire meant to Boston. Page after page of names, 492 of them, all dead. It’s hard to comprehend.’’

The oldest of three children born to Charles Kenney Sr. and the former Marie Devlin, Mr. Kenney at first lived in Charlestown. “To say they didn’t have much is pretty standard over there,’’ said his son Michael, who lives in West Roxbury. “He was so proud because he survived that one square mile that’s not an easy place to be.’’

The family moved to Roslindale, where Mr. Kenney finished high school. He was “a whip-smart student, fast reader, quick learner. Worked as a bellboy at a hotel downtown Boston as a 15-year-old,’’ John, who lives in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., said in his eulogy.

After Pearl Harbor was attacked, Mr. Kenney enlisted in the Navy at 17 and served on the USS S-47 submarine from as far north as the Aleutian Islands and south in the Pacific to the Coral Sea, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. Upon returning home, he went to Boston College.

“My father had an interest in becoming a teacher,’’ John said. “I think he would have been a good one, as he loved knowledge and books and ideas.’’

But Mr. Kenney's father suggested he might not have what it takes to pass the fire department exam. He did, and served until the 1959 fire left him with a disability pension.

In the meantime, one day in Roslindale he met “a pretty auburn-haired girl named Anne Barry who worked as a telephone operator,’’ John said. “A girl whose father was on the fire department.’’

They married in 1949, had six sons, and had just celebrated their 25th anniversary in 1974 when she went into the hospital with a cancer diagnosis, dying 26 days later.

When he had finished his firefighting days, Mr. Kenney started a company that recharged fire extinguishers. Later, he became a fire safety consultant and finally a fire marshal at Watertown Arsenal and Otis Air National Guard Base, said Michael, who added: “He stayed with what he knew.’’

Raising six sons alone was no easy task. “It was absolute bedlam,’’ Michael said. “He had a very cool head. He insisted that we be gentlemen first, last, and always.’’

In the late 1980s, when his sons were men, Mr. Kenney married Theresa O’Connor MacCauley, “with whom he found happiness again,’’ John said. “God knows he deserved it. They were married for 13 years. He loved her dearly. Her death rocked him.’’

Mr. Kenney was married a third time, to Christine Connelly. He also outlived her, along with his namesake grandson, Charles F. Kenney, who died in 2012.

Connelly “was kind and protective, a woman who found his jokes funny, even after the ninth telling,’’ Mr. Kenney's son John said. “How do you bury three wives and yet remain so positive? But he did.’’

Charlie Kenney, his sons said, lived a happy life by appreciating what others often overlook. “He took great pleasure in the little things,’’ Michael said.

“A cup of coffee. A sandwich,’’ said John, who added: “He never ate a meal he didn’t love.’’

In addition to his sons Charles, Michael, and John, Mr. Kenney leaves three other sons, Thomas of Hyannis, Patrick of Milton, and Timothy of Boston; 10 grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

A service was held for Mr. Kenney, whose ashes will be spread on the waters of the ocean where he once served in the Navy.

“Fittingly, as per his wishes, it is back to Pearl Harbor, for a burial at sea with full military honors,’’ John said. “This time, the warm waters of the Pacific will be at peace.’’

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.