Authors note: I spent a few hours with a fire platoon in my area to ask questions and doing some research for a novel I'm writing and the visit turned out to be clear full of surprises. I am hereby inspired to write this short one shot story, the names have been changed because it seems like a good thing to do, there are no innocent to protect.
The Visitor
The men of station 51 had just returned from a morning flag ceremony they had been invited to participate in; Just one of the more pleasant of their non fire fighting obligations. After running through the kitchen for a quick snack and noticing a fresh fruit bowl left on the table, they became aware of voices coming from the dorm area, one of them obviously female.
Captain Stanley was the first to investigate slowing slightly when he recognized the other voice to be that of his superior Chief McConnike.
"So as you can see, the men work very closely with each other while they're here at the station. And the physical fitness demands of our work make this room very important." The good chief was talking as he led his guest around the back of the fire engine.
She was a woman about the same age as the Chief walking with a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other. She was looking over the back of the fire engine and studying it in ways Hank hadn't seen from many of his visitors.
"Oh Hank there you are," Chief McConnike spoke cheerfully, "I'd like you to meet Sally Stewart," Sally tucked her pen in the spiral of her note book and accepted the offered hand for a hand shake as the rest of the crew slowly moved into the bay, "Mrs. Stewart here is an author and she's asked for a tour of a station and some time to visit with some of the men as part of some research for the book she's writing."
"Welcome to station 51 Ma'am," Hank politely responded. "What kind of book is it that you are writing?"
"Well," Sally was clearly thinking her words through, "It's an action story about the healing of a dysfunctional family mostly, but there is a sub plot involving fire fighting written in, my trouble is that the last time I paid any attention to a fire station, it was a volunteer station and well let's just say that Chief McConnike here has already enlightened me to just how different life in an organized station is from what I thought. There's a whole lot more to it than you guys just sleeping at the station."
"Well yes I couldn't agree more." Hank offered a smile.
"You know I started out in a volunteer fire department," Chief McConnike started to ramble, "it was in a small town where my father was working at the time, the main employer pulled most of the men out of town to work and on such unpredictable schedules that the only way they could staff and train a fire department was to use teenagers. Believe it or not you could actually join the fire department as soon as you got your drivers license right around age 16. The man that ran the department was in charge of the local meat market there in town and when the sirens rang he'd just drop everything and go fight a fire."
Hank noticed a surprised look on their guests face as she was taking notes on her paper.
"You mean there were no adults on the fire department there?" Roy questioned in disbelief.
"Well there were two of them. The fire Chief and then one other guy," the Chief squinted in thought, "don't remember his name now but it was Polish with lots of Z's in it"
"Who drove the fire engine?" Engineer Michael Stoker wanted to know.
"Who ever got to the fire station first when the call came in." The Chief answered nodding his head toward the good engineer to confirm his worse fears. "That's probably why the gears were stripped on the older of the two trucks they had back then."
"So what happened if there was a fire during school hours?" Chester Kelly had to know, he always had an ear for a good story.
"Every male in school ran out of class," the Chief answered with a chuckle in his voice. "The teachers never knew for sure who was on the fire team and who wasn't so it was the great get out of school free card. From there we all had to get to the station on our own so we either had to run the three blocks to the station or catch a ride, unless you were lucky enough to have your own truck."
"So tell me," Mrs. Stewart paused her writing and turned her attention to the Chief with a tilted head, "Was your father in Law enforcement?"
"Why yes, well he was," the Chief responded with a puzzled look at the guest with the question from left field.
Mrs. Stewart shook her head and with a giggling smirk, "My maiden name is White, I'm Pete White's daughter. You and I worked on the same fire crew back in the day."
"You're Sally White!" the Chief exclaimed with wide eyes and total disbelief written on his face.
"Yep, that's me."
"How long has it been?"
"I'm not telling."
"Yeah, your right it's best we not delve into that." The Chief agreed then noticing the confused faces of the crew surrounding them. "Sally's father ran the fire department in the town, he convinced his daughter here to join the team and work our pumps for us."
"There was a lot of convincing alright, it took several years, but it wasn't him convincing me, it was the other way around, in fact, between you and me, there was a little bit of blackmail involved."
"Did the teachers try and stop you from leaving school the first time?" Chet was looking at Sally and envisioning her trying to push her way past some of the unmoving teachers he had in his life.
"No," Sally answered with a thoughtful smile as she leaned against the engine and drifted back in time. "The town we lived in at the time was real small. Around a thousand people in all and a good portion of those lived out side of the town where they worked family farms. There wasn't much that wasn't known by all who lived there and being the only girl on the team, well that was both quickly public knowledge and no real surprise that it was me. I always was a bit of a tomboy and like I said earlier I had spent several years trying to convince my dad to let me join as soon as I was old enough. He made sure I learned the pumps because he thought that was the safest place for me.
"That first fire I left school the teachers just stood in their doorways screaming, "Don't run in the halls!"
Every one was laughing even if they didn't totally believe what was being told, then the Chief added his part. "You should have seen her Dad that first fire drill she attended. He had to give her the general safety orientation and make sure she knew where the equipment was and what it was called. You should have seen how red he got when he was asked to explain how to tell the difference between a male and female hose coupling."
Every father and older brother in the building cringed at the mental picture that was just presented to them.
"Brian, if I remember right you were the one who asked him to explain things in detail that night." Sally gave the chief an even eye.
"Yeah," the Chief was still chuckling, "I think I was but the look on your Dad's face that night was priceless." The crew of station 51 wasn't sure they agreed but then they realized that their Now Chief was then a teenage boy.
"So how did things work," Marco who had never lived in a small town and couldn't comprehend what was being talked about. "No one stayed at the fire station so what happened when there was a fire?"
"NO, No one stayed at the station." Chief McConnike clarified, "In fact the station was nothing more than a brick shed barely big enough to back the engine in."
"In the early days," Sally cut in since she was a little more knowledgeable of the history of the town's emergence services program. "There was a restaurant that catered to the rail road workers. It was the only place in town that was open twenty four hours a day and they were contracted to answer the fire phone. If someone called in a fire it was usually one of the waitresses that would take the call since the cook spoke very little English. Then they would flip this switch that would set off a loud air raid type siren that could be heard all over town. They would test it by ringing it once every night at 10: p.m. as a curfew siren, But if it was a fire they would ring it three times. Then they'd pick up a special phone that was a direct line into the fire station and sit there and wait for some one to get to the station and pick up the phone there so they could tell them where the fire was. The person at the fire station would then write the location on a chalk board next to the phone for any one who didn't get to the station before the fire engine left. There were a few times that they just sat the phone down to wait on customers and lost track of time. When that happened the fire engine would have to go to the restaurant to find out where the fire was but they were good to come out to the truck when they heard the sirens so we didn't have to go in. That's why when they built the new hospital in town they moved the siren switch there."
"So when the siren rang three times everyone who was on the fire department just dropped what they were doing and went to the fire station. Did they have lights on their cars to clear the way? What kind of response times did you have?" Hank was seeing all kinds of logistic problems.
"Are you kidding, there was no budget for turn out gear no way the town council would approve anything like that." Sally gave the shocking answer, "The system was well understood in town. When that siren went off the only cars on the road belonged to firefighters or people who thought they were, unknowing tourists and Old Red."
"Old Red?" Chet asked for clarification.
"Yeah," the Chief was remembering well, "He owned the local newspaper, and couldn't afford to let even a burning trash can get by him if he was going to have enough news for his paper."
"Now come on Brian," Sally at least acted like she was taking offence. All of the men surrounding the two reliving old times were surprised by the Chief being called by his first name. "With out Red we wouldn't have known who in the town had puppies, or when Mabel's grandson the governor's advisor came to visit."
"As I was saying," the Chief grinned at her reply. "And since when was he the governor's advisor? I thought he was just a file clerk."
"Don't ask me I didn't write the paper." The two friends chuckled and then the Chief felt he needed to add something. "But I did hear once that he was asked to choose a tie out of the governor's office closet."
"Of course you have to realize all we ever had to deal with is some burning shed or a haystack some where." Chief McConnike played his involvement down.
"I disagree with that, there were a couple of house fires over the years, and I'm not just talking about the condemned ones we deliberately burned down for practice." Sally was offended this time, "It's true that we didn't have the training you guys here have, nor a tenth of the equipment from what I've seen so far. You guys get more calls in a single day than we ever got in a year, well accept that year we had the arsonist in town. Then it would take you two days to get that many calls.
"No matter how you look at it a fire is a fire and burns just as hot no matter how much training or equipment you have, and a brush fire spreads just as fast when we were fighting them in our day as it does now."
"You have a point there," the Chief conceded.
"The equipment we had or the lack there off dictated how my Dad taught us to fight fires. And don't you for one second believe that he wasn't very aware that his crew was a bunch of kids. If ever any one was to go inside a building for any reason it was always him and only him. If there was a risk to take he took it. And I don't think it was just during the time I was on the team."
"You're right, he did, our training was heavy on how to keep the fire from spreading and how to protect the surrounding area, and your father taught me well how to hold a line. There was once we were instructed to save a wooden fence just three feet from a house that was a total loss. We did it to.
"Now that I think of it your dad took a lot more risks that we do here. Back then the rest of us didn't know how to back him up like each and every one of the guys here do. He didn't even have an air mask to protect him from the smoke."
"Yes he did," Sally defended, "The department had two of them even then. Dad never wanted us to know about them because he didn't want any of us to try and be heroes and use them."
"If your Dad told us once he must have told us a hundred times, 'buildings and things can be replaced you can't," McConnike remembered and from the look on his face he remembered fondly.
"So I understand your Dad went on to work wild fires on the state lands, I even heard rumors that you worked a few with him."
"Yep," Sally answered with a smile and an affirmative nod, "there were a lot of lightning strikes we hiked into together some hot most not so hot, but I always knew they were their smallest because we made sure of it."
"Did you ever want to join us big boys?" the Chief asked as he gestured to the equipment and firemen around him.
"Yeah, there was a time I did, but this is not a profession that mixes well with motherhood and I wouldn't have traded my children. I had my day and the only regret I have is that I didn't always take things as seriously as maybe I should have, I wish I'd have had a little more confidence in what I knew back then. And you," Sally pointed her finger at the chief, "I don't remember you being one of the most dedicated members of our team. You missed as many drills as you attended."
"Your right, football and basketball practice was more important to me back then." There was obvious remorse on his face as he looked to the floor at his feet. "Maybe if I'd attended a few more drills I might have been able to do better in those after drill water fights."
"I doubt it," Sally spoke quickly.
"Why do you say that, I have you know I was top of my class at the academy."
"Yeah, well back then you never seemed to realize that if you wanted to win the water fights you needed to be nice to the person running the pumps regardless of their gender."
Mike Stoker was the first one to slightly snicker but his captain wasn't far behind; he probably was only second because he didn't want his Chief to hear him laugh first.
"Yep, It was the smart ones on the team that knew who decided the winner of the water fights, and you weren't one of them."
The chief was about the same color as the fire engine he was standing next to but as he thought back and looked down he couldn't deny the accusations. He attempted to change the subject.
"So what's your Dad doing these days?"
"He's retired, he and Mom are currently working with a group that is helping troubled youth learn some good life skills and job skills then helping them find gainful employment."
The Chief looked at Sally one more time then smiled warmly, "you know, he taught us guys on the department those same skills in addition to teaching us how to wrestle a hose."
The tones of the station sounded causing Sally to jump slightly but the rest of the group just turned their attention to the call.
Station 51, Motor Vehicle Accident with injuries south bound Ventura Boulevard.
"Now that's something we never would have dealt with back in the day."
The Station moved into action and the Chief and his guest watched them go. "Nope, that was way beyond us back then."
Author's notes: My name is not Sally but this is very autobiographical. This is my story, and Pete, although not his real name is my father.
There are thousands upon thousands of volunteer fire departments through out this country and you'll be hard pressed to find two alike. Some are trained and equipped as well as the full time departments in the big cities, others less so. The example given above is not the worst by a long shot. The biggest factors in the type of department is the dedication of the men on it, which does tend to be influence by how often they are called out, as well as the support of the community leaders. Not to mention a hundred and one other factors including what the people have to do to make a living.
As rag tag as my first team seems I know of many communities who have nothing. For my story the community I grew up in has grown, voted in new leaders, attracted new employers and now has an all adult fire team along with several other advancements since my day. But, in our day, we did the best we could with what we had to work with and what we had in us even if we were just kids we were undeniably also firefighters.