Dr. Michael Browner, Jr.
June 6, 2022 Some people go through life unsure of who or what they will become. Dr. Michael Browner, Jr. is not one of those people. He was a teacher with Newport Public Schools from 1998 until last year when he accepted the position of Assistant Principal at Shea High School in Pawtucket, RI. His passion for education, his students, and their well-being, is all encompassing. We recently sat down for a conversation in his East Providence home. This is what he said … TT- We are sitting here with Dr. Michael Browner, Jr.; Why don’t we start with the basics? Where were you born, raised…? MB- I was born and raised in Newport, Rhode Island. It’s my hometown. I was born there in 1975. My parents are Michael Browner, Sr. and the late Katherine E. Browner; she passed away in 2017. I went to the public schools in Newport, K through 12—three schools, Sheffield Elementary, Thompson Junior High School, and Rogers High School, class of 1993. I went on to Rhode Island College, class of 1998, where I earned a Bachelor’s degree in secondary education and history. Then I returned to my hometown to become a teacher. So right out of college, literally out of the dorms in 1998, I returned to Newport and was hired that summer. I began teaching at Thompson Middle School in September 1998. I once was at Thompson from 1986-1989, when it was still a junior high school; Thompson became a middle school in 1994. I taught Grade 7 social studies at Thompson for 23 years, 1998-2021. Just last June was my 23rd year. I was hired as an Assistant Principal at Shea High School in Pawtucket, RI in August 2021. I returned to Rhode Island College in 2001 and earned a Master’s degree in School Administration in 2004. In 2014, I began a joint Ph.D. Program in Education with URI and RIC, which I completed in 2019. TT- So before you got to RIC, did you know you wanted to become a teacher? MB- I did. I did. TT- How old were you when you knew? MB- I’m glad you asked me that, Tom. I knew when I was a junior in high school, Mr. Kevin Burns was my 11th grade US history teacher, and I knew I wanted to be like Mr. Burns. He was a good teacher. He was good to us—he lectured a lot and I knew I didn’t want to be a lecturer (laughs) but I don’t know, there’s always been something about history for me. Even when I was a little kid, learning about different historical periods has been interesting to me, especially the 1960s. The 1960s has always been my favorite decade to learn about. I’m a big Motown fan (laughs) here’s The Supremes right here (Dr. Browner has black and white photographs around his home, of well-known and inspirational Black Americans as well as members of his family). I remember when I was in Mr. In Burns' class in 1991/92, the film ‘JFK’ by Oliver Stone came out and was very popular. There were a number of new conspiracy theories about the assassination of President John Kennedy that were in the news media as a result of the film. I wrote a history paper for Mr. Burns on the Kennedy assassination and I earned an ‘A’. I was so proud of that paper I later framed it; That paper is now on the wall in my office at Shea High School. I was so proud of that paper because Mr. Burns was not an easy teacher, and to earn an ‘A’ from him meant you had to be doing something right. So I knew in high school, in 11th grade, that secondary education and history were what I wanted to pursue as a career. TT- Now you need to have a graduate degree to teach-- MB- No you don’t. I will say, however, that certification requirements in the state of Rhode Island in 2022 make it extremely taxing for prospective teachers to enter the field of education. I would say it is significantly more difficult, and more of a challenge, to become a teacher now than it was in 1998. This is just me speaking freely with you, but I think that many state educational officials are putting young people through a lot more to become a teacher than is necessary. Because by doing that, it turns off a lot of young people, who at 21, 22 years old, would make great young teachers. It runs them off. Who wants to go through a five-year degree program beginning at age 18 for a $45,000 starting salary at age 23? And then owe an excessive sum of money in student loans because certification requirements caused the need for a fifth year? If you’re starting a teacher out at $85,000, that would be something different. But it took me almost my whole career to make that kind of money as a teacher. It takes ten years to reach the top step in most school districts in Rhode Island over ten years. My starting salary in 1998 was $27,000 and at the time and age 23, I thought I was rich! My first paycheck, when I was 23 years old, was a little over $900; I never had that much money written on a check next to my own name and I couldn’t believe it. By then I had moved out of my mom’s and gotten my first apartment. My mom and I lived in the projects (low-income housing) and I was the last of three boys to leave home, but I was making too much money to be living in subsidized housing. So to start a teacher out at $45,000, in today’s money, that’s not a strong beginning salary for the amount of work that teachers must perform. My soul looks back in wonder at how I made it through. It’s all relative I suppose and with only a Bachelor’s degree in 1998, I owed maybe $10,000 in student loans. That’s nothing compared to what young people are coming out of college owing today: Big money, $50K, $60, sometimes $100K. No young person at 23 years old should owe that kind of money for a Bachelor’s degree. TT- Especially not a state school. MB- No. No. I could see owing that kind of money to Harvard or Princeton, and even those schools often give decent financial aid packages, but young people should not owe that kind of money as a result of attending their state schools or really any schools that are not Ivy League. TT- Now the Master’s degrees for teachers. When did that start to happen? MB- I knew, well I discovered that as a classroom teacher, that in order to buy a house and set myself up for options later, that I would need to get a Masters. I said to myself “if you want to advance beyond the classroom, become a principal, or move into administration in some capacity, you’re going to need a Masters.” So I looked at programs, and RIC is very special to me. Providence College was a little more expensive, and I didn’t want to go to private school for my Masters. I wanted to remain public. So from 2001 to 2004 I worked on my Master’s degree, but after that I still remained in the classroom for another ten plus years. I will reference my doctoral dissertation to you, because it was about what’s known as the invisible tax for Black teachers. In a state like Rhode Island, where the number of Black teachers is very small, our experiences are a lot different. For many years, I was the only Black teacher at Thompson Middle School. TT- So I found an interview you gave after you got the Shea job. And you referenced that, you said it was important for you to remain an example- MB- Let me explain that, Tom, thank you for bringing that up. When I was teaching at Thompson, before I finished the PhD in 2019, at the end of the 2017-2018 school year I decided I didn’t want to be writing a dissertation and teaching 7th grade at the same time. So a dear friend and colleague, Dr. David Byrd, who at the time was the director of the School of Education at The University of Rhode Island, offered me the opportunity to teach full time at URI while I finished my dissertation. He said, “Mike, this is a great opportunity, there is a new class on education and social justice that I really would like you to teach.” Dr. Byrd explained that he wanted me to design the curriculum for this particular course. So he asked if I would be interested in taking a leave of absence from the Newport public schools to pursue this opportunity. So I made a request for a leave of absence and the superintendent and the Newport School Committee agreed to my request. However, when you take a sabbatical from public school, depending on the district, in Newport our contract said if you take a sabbatical you have to give two years back to the district. TT- So it’s a two-year sabbatical for two years owed? MB- No. One year for two years. I knew that going in, but once that year was over, I went Aghh (shivers, laughs) I have to do two more years in 7th grade or serve the district in some capacity. You don’t have to go back to that same job, but there were no administrative vacancies, so I went back to the job that I left. So I taught for two more years, and I hate to say this but it felt almost like a [prison] sentence (laughs) because I had already done 20 years! Plus I earned a PhD, Tom! I didn’t want to go back and teach 7th grade with a PhD! Not that I’m above that position, but I felt like I was now too smart to teach 7th grade. I’m kidding of course but I really was ready to move on to the next level of my career. I went back to teach for two more years because if you don’t go back and give the two years, they can make you pay. When you take a sabbatical, you get half your salary. And if I didn’t go back, they would’ve made me repay over $40,000. I didn’t want that and I didn’t want my name dragged through the mud: “Oh watch out for that Mike Browner, he doesn’t believe in following agreements. You can’t trust him.” I didn’t want to be that guy. I believe in honoring contracts, and so I owed Newport those two years and I went back and taught those two years. It was important for me to honor that commitment, and I also wanted kids to have a teacher with the highest level of education. I wanted them to have a teacher they called “Doctor.” And rightly so, my students called me Dr. Browner. TT-Right? You earned it, right?” MB- On my bulletin board was ‘Mr. Browner’ in red lettering because our school colors are red and white. And so over the years the red had faded. So I put, in a large Ziploc bag, a large red letter “D.” I saved it for when I finished the PhD. And so, come time to return to Thompson, I took off the faded red “M” for mister, and put up the fresh new red letter “D” for doctor. And the kids used to come up to me and say, “Oh look, you got that new fresh letter D up there.” And I was like. “You darn right, it’s Dr. Browner, now.” So a lot of kids who came back when I was Mr. Browner, when they were in my class when I was working on my PhD, they remembered that I had saved that large red-letter D in the Ziploc bag, and they said, “Wow! Wow! Dr. Browner you did it, you did it. We were in your class when you were working on your PhD.” I was trying to use the D as an incentive for them to know that adults have to work hard for things that they get. And the reward was, not just the title of being called Dr. Browner, but I had this degree that would advance my career. So the idea was to get them to see that learning never stops, even at 46 years old, I was saying “Guys, I’m not too old to learn, to achieve something else in my life, and you want to always keep going.” And so I remember the 7th graders that were with me when I was earning the PhD were proud to return and call me Dr. Browner. In the spring of 2021, I applied for the principalship at Thompson, was a finalist but was not offered the position. I then ventured out of Newport and applied in other districts throughout the state, and that’s when Dr. Williams, the Superintendent of the Pawtucket School Department, recruited me for Shea. TT- So this is your first Admin job. What did you find once you finally got there? What is it like to be above the fray? MB- It’s interesting, Tom, because when I left the classroom, I was really nervous because it’s all I had ever known since I was 23-years-old; I had always been a classroom teacher. I spent some time in an administrative capacity in Newport as an interim assistant principal at our school when our principal became very ill, but it wasn’t the whole year. I was not thrilled about being an administrator at the same school where I had been a teacher for so many years. To me, becoming an administrator outside of my safety net was important. When I was hired in Pawtucket, I didn’t realize Pawtucket is as diverse as it is. I did not realize that going into Shea High School, white students would be the minority. Tom, when I was first hired at Shea, and school started that first week of September, I don’t think I saw ten white kids. TT- And we’re talking about 900 kids? MB- Four grades, 930 kids, and I don’t think I saw ten white kids. TT- Is it the same at Tolman? MB- Close to it. I believe Tolman has a few more students that are non-minority, or white students; I don’t like using the term 'minority' because it’s so outdated—but just the same, I was really shocked at that. And I didn’t realize the full contingency of students of color at Shea. And so there were more teachers of color than I was used to in Newport, and so I was kind of taken aback by the number of students of color at Shea. I mean I knew that Pawtucket is an inner-city urban district, but I didn’t fully realize the number of students of color at Shea. So that first week of school, the behavior, um, Tom, I can’t even tell you the use of the “N” word like there’s nothing to it, and I have a hard time with that. A very hard time with that. And hearing that constantly, just kids passing by in the hallway, “My N-word this,” and I had to ask myself, “Mike, did you make the right decision…did you do the right thing by coming to this school?” The behavior was overwhelming. And even now, that was September and it is now June, graduation is this Friday, and I have to honestly tell you that I still question whether or not I made the right decision, in terms of my longevity, because I don’t know how long I will be at Shea. Some of the behavior exhibited by 17 and 18-year-old kids is not what I’m used to. Because remember, I taught middle school my entire career and 12 and 13-year-old kids act like that because they’re supposed to. But when you’re 17 or 18, there’s a certain level of maturity that I thought more Shea kids would have. And to me, that has nothing to do with Covid. TT- Right. Would you say, and it’s hard for me to say because I don’t have kids-- MB- I have one. He’s now 26. Product of East Providence High School. Young people are being raised differently now, Tom, it’s a different time. This millennial age, I had to work on my son with that, he was very self-centered; this new millennial age group of kids in their teens and twenties, they can be very entitled with the mindset of somebody owes them something. I tried to teach my son, “Nobody owes you anything.” I made it clear to him: I did what I was supposed to do as a parent, I fed you, I clothed you, I made sure you understood that if you’re going to continue to live in this house into your early twenties, you have to finish your education, because people who live in this house get college degrees. So if you’re not going to get a college degree, you need to find another place to live. Especially when you’re over twenty-one. Because he finished college this past May, at twenty-four. My son spent some time at PC and then he transferred to URI. I made it clear to him that my father was college educated and it was important to me that I raise my son the same way, with a high level of academic expectation and achievement. But too many of these kids today, these millennials, have this way about them that is very selfish. TT- We see it at work too. You and I are in the same generation. Nobody promised you anything. MB- We had to work hard for everything we had. TT- People had work ethic and you were proud of it. My father used to say, if you’re gonna do something, do it to the best of your ability or don’t do it at all. MB- I have two cars. There’s a Passat in the driveway that you saw, and I have a Cadillac in the garage. I always drove big luxury cars because my parents had Buicks, and my grandparents had Cadillacs, that’s what I grew up riding in. My father and mother each had their own Buicks; we always had a luxury sedan when I was growing up. So if that’s what you see, that’s what you want. And so when I started teaching, I had a Buick LeSabre. Then my second year teaching I said, “this Buick ain’t enough, I want me a Cadillac.” I wanted to be like my Grandpa Browner and drive me a Cadillac. So there I was, 24-years-old, and I went out and bought this big old green 1995 Cadillac Deville. Big old thing. Tom, you couldn’t tell me nothing. I was as cool as could be driving that big Cadillac right up to Thompson Middle School. (laughs) I tried to teach my students that nobody owes you anything. That Cadillac didn’t just appear. You have to work hard for everything that you want, everything that you get. So when I finished the PhD in 2019, it was bittersweet because my mom had passed away two years before, and she couldn’t be there for the commencement and celebration. I only had the Passat at that time because I had gotten rid of my Lincoln Town Car. And I said, “Mike, you need a car that says Dr. Browner has arrived.” That Passat just wasn’t enough, it just doesn’t say “Dr. Browner has arrived on campus.” So Tom, I went out and bought a Cadillac DTS (DeVille Touring Sedan), and I said, “Yes, this is the car that says Dr. Browner is here.” (laughs) TT- What year is it? MB-2008, I’ll let you see it before you go. It’s out in the garage. TT- Let me ask you this, because it’s hard to talk about these subjects because everyone gets all touchy, but coming from the public safety aspect, when we respond to schools for these kids that are out of control and having tantrums and throwing things, and threatening violence—having these psychological issues, and we show up and now there’s five firemen, two cops, a social worker, the school nurse, teachers, everybody’s there, and now it’s almost like we gave the kid an audience, and it’s not all the time, because sometimes the kids are very grateful for the help, but other times it goes in the complete other direction, and the whole time you’re there you’re kind of like “Junior doesn’t need all of this, he needs his parents. Or a parent.” MB-And sometimes they’re the last to show up! TT- Right. Or they show up as we’re wheeling him out. We just got him calm enough to get on the stretcher, and here they come in yelling at us before we even get the kid into the ambulance. So it’s kind of like a double-edged sword. 911 and the emergency services are being asked to do things they were never intended for. MB- I agree. Let me offer this perspective, because before this year I didn’t have much experience with what you’re talking about. And even at Shea, I’ve only experienced it a few times. My experiences in this vein, particularly in this new administrative position is you have to meet kids and families where they are. Newport has its urban elements, but it is not Pawtucket. I’ve learned, even more so now, you have to meet kids and families where they are and bring them to the next level. And so that’s the same thing, when you’re meeting kids in crisis, where a kid has had some psychological issue or breakdown such that 911 or social service have been called; I’ve learned to try to de-escalate the situation. And as more personnel show up, get some of those first responders out. So as members of your task force come on the scene, slowly teachers and administrators need to be backing up and leaving the scene, because you don’t want a kid to be bombarded by twenty people, even though all of them are there for the kid, it’s too much. It’s overwhelming. TT- Do you find—like we discussed it’s an urban environment, and it’s a challenging environment, and the kids, sometimes they don’t even have the things they need, the things they should have, like backpacks and clothes-- MB- Priorities are in the wrong place when students in low income/high poverty areas have on $200 Jordan sneakers and an $800 cell phone. That’s where the breakdown is for me but the point is, you got $200 sneakers on, you’re carrying this expensive iPhone, but you don’t have a book bag filled with notebooks and pencils, and you’re okay with that? And your parents are okay with that? And because of that, sometimes we [school personnel] end up being okay with that, as school personnel, because it becomes such a challenge to change that mentality. You can only work with kids from 8am to 2:30pm. Six and a half hours a day. After that, they’re left to their own devices. TT- So whatever you may have achieved that day-- MB- James doesn’t go to bed in my house. Because if he did, his behavior wouldn’t be what I’ve seen today. He goes to bed in your house. Too often what we have tried to instill in students at school is undone, unintentionally or not, once they get home. I’m speaking about my whole career, not just Shea High School. A lot of what I try to impart on kids as far as behavior, respect, personal responsibility, accountability, during their time with me, I’ve seen undone. But I’ve also seen it work. And many years later, 35-year-old men come back to school or see me on the street or in a restaurant and say thank you. Or, write to me in a letter from the ACI when they’re 24 years old and locked up after I had them at twelve, they write to me many years later and say, “Mr. Browner, I really appreciate what you were trying to do for me when I was in your seventh-grade class. I wish you were my dad because I would’ve listened better to you. I didn’t have a dad. I only had you at school. I wish I lived with you.” TT-That’s gotta kill you though. MB- Two letters. A boy named Anthony and a boy named Carlos. They’re both out of jail now and have become fathers and are doing quite well, but they both spent time at the ACI. I wrote about them in my dissertation because I wanted a true authentic description of what it’s like to be a black teacher. And those were my lived experiences. Getting those letters in the mail at school from the ACI…they both wrote to me to tell me where they were, and that they appreciated what I did with them when they were seventh graders. Tom, I can’t tell you, when I was writing my dissertation downstairs at my desk, and including those stories, I didn’t realize how much it affected me because I was crying while I was writing those parts. And I had to go get some tissues, pull myself together, take a little break, and then go back to writing. Then I would cry again just remembering those things. I hadn’t thought about some of those stories in years, because those kids went to the ACI at 18,19, and were writing to me when they were in their twenties. You don’t think about those things all the time. I had to go downstairs to the basement and find those letters in a box and read them again so I could include them in my dissertation, and it took my breath away because I had forgotten about that. To have a kid write to you and say thank you, from the ACI, thank you for what you were trying to do, and say “if I had listened, I wouldn’t be here locked up.” I can’t even describe the full measure of what that meant to me. It means, Tom, that I had accomplished what I had originally intended to do which was to make a difference. All I ever wanted to do was make a difference. When a child or young adult is writing to you from the ACI, you made a difference. I’ve been invited to weddings, baby showers, and a number of things by former students. My first-year kids were 13 when I was 23 years old; now my first-year kids are turning 37 while I am turning 47. It’s amazing to think that the kids I first had in my first year are 37 years old. I started getting students from my classmates, I started getting their children, and a few years back, I started to get the children of former students. This boy Isiah who's graduating from Rogers, I taught his mother. When the first kid ever said, “Dr. Browner, you taught my father,” I said Oh my God I need to hang this up. (laughs) I’m old. I taught your father? I remembered well because that boy looked just like his father too. TT- In all the years it’s easy to get jaded. I’ve got 13 years on the FD and after a while it mounts up. How have you stayed fresh? MB-I’ve tried to stay fresh and continue to work hard to do so. Teaching was hard. When you get a new crew every September, you want to be fresh and ready for them. I always tried to be that way. But Covid put a wrench in that. We had to adopt a hybrid model where we taught kids on computer and in person all at the same time. That was difficult. It was a nightmare. Because I had this one boy, Brodie, he came to the meet on Google. He and some other kids were being taught through the portal and he came to the meeting with a popsicle. I said, “Brodie, you listen to me right now. You go put that popsicle back in the freezer. Go put that back and rejoin the meet and act like you have some sense. And act like you’re ready to learn. We will sit right here and wait.” I was so mad at him, Tom, that I could hardly see straight. Here he comes sitting there licking on a popsicle like he didn’t have a care in the world. That’s the kind of thing that makes you ask, “Maybe it’s time for me to let this thing go, Mike, maybe 23 years is enough.” (laughs) Because fighting with a kid over a popsicle? I’m sure in his mind he was thinking I’m at home, I can have a popsicle if I want to; I’m not in school, I can have whatever I want. Then I would see other kids with their brothers and sisters who weren’t old enough to be in school, climbing all over their siblings and distracting them. They’re crying, parents are cooking dinner in the background, the dog’s running around, and I was just like, “What has my life become?” (laughs) How am I supposed to educate your child with pots and pans banging in the background. I couldn’t be mad at my students because they couldn’t control that. So Covid brought on a whole new genre of issues. TT- Let me just say this. During the plague, we would be showing up at peoples’ homes at noon and everyone is in bed. The parents, the kids, it was like everybody went to bed for a year. It was really gross. MB- It was horrible TT- What did the kids lose? MB-They lost that camaraderie with each other. The interactions with peers and adults. Naturally, you act differently with your parents than you do with your teachers. So when kids came back to school and started acting like we were their parents, just the respect thing, they lost a lot of that. They lost that ability to interact appropriately with others, especially adults. We are slowly getting it back. And it’s not just Shea. It’s many schools across the state and across the country. Behavior has been very difficult. TT- Are they holding kids back? MB- That’s a difficult thing to do, because so much of the learning loss, particularly for kids with special needs, the learning loss is what we’re trying to figure out and address appropriately. TT- It seems like the kids lost their structure, and then everything came crashing down. MB- Loss of structure. Loss of authority. Getting along with others. Sitting in your bedroom for six months when I’m trying to teach you about Woodrow Wilson and WW1, and you have your game system going, which I can’t see because you have the camera turned away or turned off, nobody is going to say anything because your parents are working and you’re home alone. What am I supposed to do? That was one of the things that really pushed me out of the classroom. It was very uncertain. When is this going to end? Nobody knew. So I just thought maybe this was the time to segue into the administrative side of education. TT- So when you took the job, did you have goals in mind? As far as what you wanted to achieve? Like what is your position? What are your daily responsibilities as an Assistant Principal? MB- It’s a combination of things. I’m in charge of attendance and discipline for Grade 11 at Shea. A lot that entails working with clerks to make sure attendance records are accurately kept, working with an administrative team to make sure we are on top of students as far as getting work done, working with the guidance department to make sure the kids are working on their credits toward graduation, working with our climate and culture staff members to make sure we are getting parental involvement, making sure we are providing kids with opportunities to participate in school activities, it’s a lot. It’s very different from being a classroom teacher. TT- You go from being in charge of a classroom of kids, to a thousand students, right? MB- I am a leader for one grade which is not quite a thousand students but I am an administrator in a school with close to a thousand students. I evaluate teachers and getting out of the office and into the classrooms to see what kind of teaching is taking place is a very enjoyable thing to do. Evaluating teachers is an important part of the job, but my favorite part of the job is getting to know the kids. Getting to know the kids, working with them, and calling them down to my office to see where they are academically and socially. That loss of social time with one another during Covid was something that a lot of kids lost. And we are slowly working with them to getting that back. TT- I’m a history major as well, but my specialty was colonial American, 1760-1790. MB- I taught the 1850s to the 1960s. TT- So me and history have an understanding. I defend the wall when it comes to history. I don’t like when people re-write it for any reason. History is history for a reason. When things happen in modern times, and it tries to effect history, that’s where I put up the wall. I don’t want parts of history to be erased, re-written, because if you allow it once, who’s to say it won’t happen again? And by someone who may not have history’s best intentions in mind? Because it’s more important to know the awful things that have happened, than to make everything vanilla, bland, nothing to see here. The awful things are out there. MB- They are. And we have to address them with kids. For example, I always try to make sure the kids understood that when I taught them about American society in the 1950s and 1960s, I would always begin with Civil Rights. And I tried to always start with the unfortunate death of Emmett Till. He was killed in Mississippi on August 28, 1955. I wouldn’t do a large unit on brutal murder of this 14-year-old martyr but it was important to me to make sure kids knew his name. And that, without an Emmett Till, I don’t believe there would’ve been a Rosa Parks. Even though Rose Parks was a grown woman (at 42 years old) in 1955, a lot of people don’t realize Emmett Till was murdered in August, four months before Rose Parks stance in Montgomery on December 1, 1955. TT- Now Emmett Till, for everyone who doesn’t know, was a 14-year-old black kid accused of an inappropriate interaction with a white woman. Sound right? MB- That is correct. He was from Chicago, Illinois, which is obviously up north and he did not understand the full measure of the extreme racism that existed in a state like Mississippi in 1955. I don’t think his mother, Mrs. Mamie Till-Mobley, realized where she was sending him. Because to be Black in Mississippi in 1955 was dangerous enough. But to be from the north and to travel to Mississippi in 1955 and be 14 years-old, was … TT- A recipe for disaster. MB- Yes. A recipe for disaster. And unfortunately, I don’t think his mother ever fully thought of what could happen even though he was in the care of relatives. TT- True, but who could think monsters like this existed? MB- Because you’re in 1955 and even though most Black folk knew how dangerous the south could be, for Emmett Till’s mother she probably felt that since she had relatives who lived there, who were going to be looking out for him and talked her into his safety, she let him go. And so it’s important that kids understand that before Rosa Parks ever refused to give up her seat in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, there was a boy killed in Mississippi, one state over, for a lie. So that fueled Mrs. Parks’ reaction on December 1, 1955, when she said, “I’m not moving.” TT- “I’ve had enough.” MB- And a lot of people think that Rosa Parks sat in the white section on purpose to start some trouble. That is not the case. She sat in the section designated for people of color, but the law in Montgomery at that time said Black passengers had to yield their seats to the whites if the white section was full. Which it was. She had to give up her seat to a white man even though she was sitting in the section designated for her. So a lot of people think she was sitting in the white section on purpose, so please, Tom, help me get the word out, to fix this. There are too many people in this country who think she sat in the white section and that is not true. We’ve got to fix that with Black folk too, because some think the same thing. It's not true. Mrs. Parks wrote an autobiography called Rosa Parks—My Story, in which she clearly explains that she did not sit in the white section. TT- Even if she did, all of this was inevitable. MB- Even if she did. And a lot of people don’t know about Claudette Colvin, who was a 15-year-old girl who refused to give up her seat in September. Which was four months before Mrs. Parks. Same city. But because Claudette Colvin got pregnant, her actions were not widely publicized and the NAACP did not want a 15-year-old pregnant girl to be the test case for freedom. Instead, there was a desire for a dignified, classy, religious, NAACP member, hard-working woman to be the test case for the city of Montgomery. Because her test case as a dignified member of the NAACP, could change the law and it did, one year later in 1956. TT- Now let me ask you this-- MB- I’m not trying to teach you history, I’m telling you what I always taught the kids so that they would have the power to go out and make people understand that one person can make a difference. That was my only point to them. One person can make a difference. Emmett Till didn’t have the opportunity to live out his life and see what he would’ve become, but his life made a difference, even though it was taken at 14-- TT- It’s a horrific story. MB- Yes, it’s a horrific story. TT- Even 70 years later, the details are freaking horrific. Now let me ask you this. When the movement came, as it should, and it was completely understandable when it did, but when they started taking down the confederacy, the statues that were still in the south, my thought was these statues of these men, shouldn’t be melted down, I kind of thought they should be gathered in a park somewhere so that that evil could be taught and never die. As I said, history shouldn’t be erased. You can’t learn from nothing. MB- I see what you’re saying. If anything, Tom, this is where I stand on that. Give them back to the families. If any members of the families are still around, give it back to them. There’s no need to glorify it in the town square, in 2022, when they were first put up in 1955, in the same cities where you still saw signs that said, “Colored or White Only.” Because we’ve overcome. And since we’ve overcome, we need to start acting like it. TT- Do you think those statues were originally put up as a threat, as a reminder? MB- In some cases they probably were, but they were put up to recognize white men who were glorified for their stance--not for freedom in a democracy, but for division in a democracy. Now I don’t know the stories of every single man whose image was used for a monument, and what they stood for, because I didn’t know them personally, but God knows. TT- They swore an oath. MB- We have a responsibility to teach our young people that anyone who’s immortalized in a monument, should stand for justice and equality for everyone, and if they didn’t stand for that, in my opinion, in 2022, in every city and state, they should not have a monument. Because people that we put on a town square, represent something for this country, for everybody who lives there. And when we put monuments up, we have to be mindful of that. TT- Let me ask you this, because I’m also a big fiction guy. And there’s a whole controversy with “To Kill a Mockingbird.” They want to take out the “N” word, they want to smooth over the book, the rawness of the book, which is really what made it such a sensation. MB- Totally true. In 1962, there were still signs up that still read “Colored and White Only,” in Mississippi, where that book is based. TT- The way times change, and the way our vocabulary changes, when a book is written during a particular time frame, that writer can’t be expected to know the implications a hundred years later. MB- That’s right. To take certain themes or words out of context, when you’re writing in a specific time period, it can cause a text to lose its authenticity. That’s why the book, The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which was written in 2009, still contains certain uses of that word. My feeling, in schools, as educators, as teachers, social studies teachers, English teachers, schools have to be careful not to justify using the word, particularly when reading it aloud. So if you’re the educator, and you’re reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird aloud to your students, you have a responsibility as the adult in the room, not to use the word, period. You don’t know who in your classroom it may offend. We had a teacher in Newport who did just the opposite. Not realizing that a student in her Google meet didn’t want to hear that from her white teacher. And Black students should have a certain level of expectation that their teacher is going to respect them enough not to use that word in their presence. As adults, as educators, we are always modeling for our students. And we have a responsibility regardless of our skin color, to always model for our students. We should not be using words we do not want to hear from them. Even when we are reading from text. You saw the word, we are following along reading, we all see it. You don’t have to read it aloud, because we all saw it. We know what year this book is based in. A colleague who read the word aloud came to me, the only black teacher, and I was glad that she came to me, and I offered her my perspective. First, I asked her if she was sure she wanted to hear my response and she said yes. I tell her she should have known better. And I said to her, “You should’ve known better than that.” You are a seasoned educator, and you know we have all kinds of kids in this district. You have to fix this. You have to put yourself aside, own your mistake and apologize for it. Because you should’ve known better. TT- Was there any blowback from that? MB- There was, but not from the conversation we had. It got nasty, from the parent, the student, and another person outside the district got involved. I went to the principal and assistant principal and I said, “If you need support, I’m well educated on this subject.” Meaning, I’m also experienced, because I’ve had parents use that word with me, and I’ve had to figure out a way to come back at them in the most professional capacity possible. And I was able to do that. Because I know who I am. I have enough self-respect not to be offended by ignorant words. I know who I am and I know who raised me; my father always said: “you cannot control what other people say or do, you can only control how you react.”. So I communicated with the administration and told them that if they needed my support or advice, to help them get ahead of this, please let me help. They never took me up on that and I let it go after that. But I told the colleague that came to me, you need to own what you did, apologize, and learn from the experience. TT-When you hear the N-word being tossed around the halls of Shea, and it’s all in that community, meaning it’s not white on black-- MB- It’s rampant and it’s bigger than me. Meaning so many kids are using it in so many instances, that I can’t do it alone. TT- Do you feel that they are disrespecting each other by saying it? MB- I do. But if I went off every time I heard it, I would be constantly going off. They know that when they are talking to me, they are not allowed to use that word. So please, in this office, my office, my space, they know that word’s not welcome, so either you fix what you’re about to say to me, or you leave my office right now. What’s it gonna be? I have to protect my space. I can’t control what you say when you’re talking to other people, but if you’re talking to me, you can’t use that kind of language. Or else we have nothing else to talk about. And if you cannot refrain from using it, then you and I cannot have a conversation until you can. TT- What’s their reaction? MB- “Alright, mister.” And you already know that I don’t like being called ‘mister.’ I appreciate being called by my name, and my last name is Browner. I earned a PhD, which means you have to call me Dr. Browner. Simple as that. It’s not what people call you, it’s what you answer to. TT- Now let’s talk about your office, because that’s the reason, when I was in there, I’m trying to do my job (a colleague had called 911 and we responded to Shea High School,) but I kept looking around at all the pictures and said this guy must have something to say. And I didn’t have time to really look-- MB- When you said that in your email, I really appreciated that. I really did. TT- I mean we’re talking about the heavy weights, Obama, MLK-- MB- Kennedy. TT- Yeah, it felt like you were in a room of substance. MB- I appreciate that, Tom. That means a lot to me. All of the artifacts in my office came from my classroom in Newport. When I arrived at Shea it was unfamiliar territory. I needed things around me that made me feel like I was at home, that made me feel secure, and that I wanted to tell my story as an educator, and I can’t tell you the number of people that have come into my office, and before they even speak to me, they’re too busy looking around at what’s on the walls. “Wow. Where’d you get those LIFE magazines with Jackie Kennedy and Mrs. King?” I sent away for those things because I wanted the kids at school to see them. I wanted the kids at school to know that Mrs. Medgar Evers, who is also on the wall, lost her husband at the brutal hands of Jim Crow. On June 12, 1963 her husband (Medgar Evers, NAAC Field Secretary, was shot dead in their driveway in Jackson, Mississippi. JFK came on TV earlier the same night to give his address on civil rights. And then on November 22, President Kennedy was assassinated. But he wasn’t the only great American killed in 1963 that mattered. A Black man who had three children of his own, a wife, who was fighting the fight in Jackson, Mississippi, where it was dangerous to just be Black, was killed in his own driveway. His life mattered. And the picture of him, his wife, and son on the cover of LIFE magazine on the wall, is because his life mattered. And this is long before this whole Black Lives Matter. And I’m not saying we didn’t need Black Lives Matter, but our lives mattered before the people who came up with the Black Lives Matter movement were even born. I’m older than they are. My life already mattered. And I don’t like people cleaning it up by saying all lives matter. Yes, we know that. But there have been too many instances lately where Black lives haven’t mattered. That’s where that comes from. Yes, all lives matter, and I believe that fully, but you don’t get to say that to counteract Black Lives Matter. Because Black Lives Matter comes from police brutality, which is consistently rampant throughout the United States, where law enforcement has made it clear repeatedly that they don’t respect Black lives as much as other lives. And when I teach that to my students at URI they say, “Hmm, I never really thought about it like that.” You have to think about it like that. Because when Trayvon Martin was murdered for Skittles, a hoodie, and an ice tea, Emmett Till was not new. Emmett Till was just in another time. But Trayvon Martin shouldn’t have been killed when somebody just took the law into their own hands and decided that this young man didn’t look trustworthy. Who gets to decide that? Before George Floyd was killed, we saw and heard that he was having trouble breathing. Why was it decided to just take him out like that? TT- The George Floyd murder, with Chauvin, who had like 22 years-experience, it’s still mind boggling. The three other cops with him have two and three days on the job, these guys didn’t know anything, and I can only say that Chauvin murdered Floyd and led the other three off a cliff, because, especially in a public safety job, whether you’re a fireman or a cop, in the Fire Academy from day one you are told, “When in doubt, follow the senior man.” That’s drilled into your head. If you don’t know what you’re doing, if you’re in a situation you’ve never seen before, you follow the senior man. Because hopefully he’s been there, he’s done it. So that day, I’m sure those other three newbies were saying to themselves “This is wrong. This shit is going sideways.” And they froze. That being said, at some point they had a duty to act, and that senior man thing doesn’t matter because someone’s gonna die. They couldn’t or didn’t break through to him, and now Floyd is dead and four other lives are totally destroyed. MB- I really had to make sure that I taught the kids at school, because when we returned to school after the death of George Floyd, the heightened awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement and Covid, and I wanted to be very careful in the way that I approached such subjects with seventh graders. You don’t want parents thinking that you’re trying to sway their child’s thinking on political issues. So I would very quietly and calmly ask, do you know what BLM means? Do you want to talk about it? I would ask them if they wanted to talk about it. How many people want to talk about it? Let’s vote. I would let the kids direct the conversation rather than me because my mantra has always been once you become a parent or a teacher, it is no longer about you. It’s always about your kid or the kids. I’ve always lived my life like that. When you have a child or students, it’s not about you anymore. As I mentioned earlier, this new millennial era of entitlement is contrary to that. Kids these days think they’re entitled. Everybody owes you something. You know what? You’re entitled to an education at this school, because by law you have to be here because of your age. But you’re not entitled to come in here and speak to us in any old kind of way. You are not entitled to that. So we don’t owe you anything, except the education you are entitled to by law. TT- (laughs) I’m guessing they don’t like hearing that. MB- They don’t like a lot of things we have to say to them. And we don’t say enough of it. That’s why they behave the way they do. TT- Where are your folks from? Were they originally from New England? MB- My mother was born and raised in Newport. She was a Newporter. My father was born in Cleveland, Ohio. And he came to Rhode Island in the Navy in 1972. Of course he was stationed in Newport, and then he met my mother, and then of course I came along three years later. TT- We grew up in Pittsburgh and Cleveland…God’s country. MB- Oh really? TT- What did he do in the Navy? MB- He went to Vietnam, was drafted after he graduated high school in 1971. My Dad decided not to become an officer. He started going to Salve Regina University in Newport, and then got a job with Raytheon. TT- Was he an engineer? MB- He was. He stayed there until he retired. TT- My dad was an engineer too. He went to school for nine years at night to put himself through school. MB- Ha! So did my father. TT- He sold hot dogs at Yankee Stadium to pay the bills. MB- My father worked at Adams’ Drugs to pay tuition and to raise the three of us; I’m the youngest, I have two older brothers-- TT- Your brothers, are they local? Teachers? MB- No, I'm the only one that went to college. Both of them are in the construction field, my oldest brother, Donald, was born in 1968, which makes him 53, and Russell is 52. I was born in 1975. Russell and his wife live in Fall River, and Donald and his wife live in Bristol. TT- I was in construction before I got on the FD… MB- My father tried to tell them you guys can do construction all you want to, but after a while your body’s not going to be able to take it. Make sure you have something to retire from, and have a decent package so you can live. I was the pencil pusher. I didn’t want to do manual labor (laughs). TT- Let me ask you this. I have no kids, so I’m behind the curve. What’s new math? I hear that term and it makes me kind of shiver. Who’s messing around with math and why? MB- It just means that there have been so many advancements in educational pedagogy, you can educate kids using new ways of thinking, new ways of learning the same thing. TT- So they’re not changing math, they’re changing the way it’s taught? MB- Yes. And sometimes when you change the way something’s taught, it changes the way it is learned. TT- I’ve heard long division is gone. Good riddance (laughs) MB- My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Pauline Barge, make sure you mention her because she is perhaps the greatest influence on my life in education, and you’ll read a little bit about her in my dissertation, she taught in the Jim Crow south, born and raised in Selma, Alabama, and she taught in Selma from 1956 in the thick of Jim Crow until 1968 when she moved to Newport, Rhode Island. She taught at around the time where Emmett Till had just been killed. She taught in Selma from 1956-1968, she knew Martin Luther King Jr., worked with him in Selma and had Jackie Robinson come to her classroom to be a guest speaker. Mrs. Barge moved to Newport in 1968 with her husband who was in the Navy. She taught in Newport from 1968 to 1994 when she retired. When she died in 2006, I played the organ at her funeral. I’m an organist. And I was a speaker at her funeral also. She taught 38 consecutive years, 1956-1994. 38 years nonstop is no small feat. When she retired in 1994 at the age of 70, I spoke at her retirement celebration, and four years later, in 1998 when I started teaching, I asked her to come to my classroom to help me decorate my first classroom. Mrs. Barge was there to help me get started. She was my only Black teacher, and she was very special. Every school day, you would’ve thought she had come out of Ebony magazine. She was so sharp, dressed head to toe, she had such a dignified presence with flawless make up, pearls, necklaces, jewelry, she was so well put together, and she smelled so good (laughs). She was the same age as my grandparents, born in 1924, and of course when you’re nine years old you don’t even think about how old your teacher is. But she was just the consummate educator, the southern drawl, you name it. She was the only Black teacher in the school, like I was many years later, and she just had this aura about her that oozed dignity. She was so dignified. I always carry a little bit of her with me, except for today where I didn’t wear a suit and tie (laughs). Her aura of dignity and pride was beautiful, you just wanted to look at her and be around her. TT- Doc, it’s been great speaking with you. Thank you for taking the time. MB- Take care, Tom. The pleasure was mine.
0 Comments
This is the original full length interview conducted in 2017. Chickie Carroll passed away yesterday after a valiant five year battle with cancer. There will never be another.
Charles "Chickie" Carroll was on the Pawtucket Fire Department for 31 years. Before that, he was a mechanic that loved wrenching on cars. Then he followed his father into the fire service. He spent the majority of his career downtown on Engine 2 and became a revered figure both on the job and in the community. Everyone knew him, and if you were lucky enough to ride around with him on Engine 2, you could hear people calling out, "Hey, Chickie!" as he waved and drove by. His enthusiasm for the job never faded, so he became a mentor and a teacher for all the new guys. He also loved riding his Harley with different crews, even the Hells Angels. One of the last old-schoolers who actually breathed through wet sponges instead of airpacks, all the fire over all the years finally cooked his lungs, so he retired with respiratory issues in 2011. This interview was conducted at Station 4 six years later. This is what he said ... CC- This picture right here, John Seback's garage caught on fire. TT- No shit. CC- Um, on Meadow Street. TT- There's been so many fires on Meadow Street you can't keep track of them all. CC- Yeah, yeah. This picture, this was on Utton Avenue. It was Christmas Eve. I looked for a kid, I went back into that room, the house was fully involved and I looked for a Russian kid and I couldn't find him. He was in the closet under a pile of clothes and it killed me that I couldn't find him. Finally Peter O'Neill and I ran back in there and I actually took off my mask and kept looking. They said he was in there and I couldn't find him until finally Pete O'Neill found him. TT- Wow. Is this a picture of the General? (Dave Langevin.) CC- Yeah, that's the General. You should talk to the General. Me and him together, he was on Ladder 1 and I was on Engine 2 and together that's me and him on the roof. The wires let go and we almost got zapped right off the roof. TT- (laughs) CC- Yup. Here's another picture of it. We were pretty close. TT- Jesus. CC- This is the Leroy Theater. (The Leroy was opened in 1923. Because of its lavish interior and multi-purpose stage, the Leroy was one of the premiere theaters in New England. Its silent movies, vaudeville acts, theatrical and musical performances were among the best in the nation. Built at the height of Pawtucket's prosperity, the Leroy stayed open until the 1960s, when the city's economy began to freefall. It was destroyed in 1997.) TT- Oh yeah. What year was that? CC- Oh God. Uh, I can't really remember. Here's me and Willy. TT- Will Maher. CC- Oh yeah, and this is me and Ronnie Doire. TT- Wow, that's from the ... what year did you get on? CC- 1981, August 1981. TT- Two years after Lemay? CC- Uh, yeah, yes. In fact, I took Lemay's spot when he went over to the rescue because we only had one rescue back then. That was downtown. TT- Right on. CC- So my first fire and death was five days after I got sworn in. Back then, when you got sworn in you didn't have a party, they gave you gloves, a helmet, coat and you got on the truck, you know, so ... TT- No Fire Academy, you just got right on. CC- Just went right on. So you learned from the old guys. I learned from Ray Gilbert and the guys like him. Back then, Ray Gilbert gave me a piece of sponge and he said, "You wet this and keep it in your mouth, kid. Keep it in your coat," he said. "That's how you breathe." So I said, "Ok." That's how I learned how not to eat smoke. So my first fire was a fatal on West Avenue. I was on the job about five days and the house was fully involved and we got into the first floor. I was with Tommy Heaney, and we got in the first floor and found a body on the floor, melted into the floor. And his bones, you could see his intestines and everything. A bottle of Jack Daniels was next to him. So we had to cut the rug and put him into a body bag, and break his arms so we could get him through the door to the kitchen and get him out. TT- Jesus. CC- That fire, we were there all day, that was my first fatal fire and I was on the job a whole five days. TT- What truck were you on? CC- Engine 2. I was in training. Back then they would put you on Engine 2 for two weeks and then you would go to the ladder. I went to Lt. Ryan on Ladder 1. Back then it was a tiller truck. You had to learn how to drive the tiller truck. I was fortunate enough to learn from him and was able to drive it pretty well. It was hard at first because everything's opposing. TT- Now that you mention Gilbert, this was a crew, like they were at the end of their careers and you were just getting on. CC- Yeah, pretty much, yeah, yeah. TT- '81. So you got on, you're on Engine 2, Ladder 1, and you stayed downtown the whole time other than the rescue. CC- Yeah. I used to--what happened was that I ended up getting my EMT. I was one of the first ones, and everybody had to have their EMT to get on the rescue, you know, to run the rescue. And Dick Lemay, we both had our EMTs and we were downtown. I would get transferred for three cycles to the Rescue, so I was with Dick quite a bit. I would go three cycles to the rescue and then come back, one cycle on Engine 2, and then go back to the rescue for three. I was with all them old schoolers--Ray Mathews, Timmy Williams, Meerbott, so that was my first fatal fire. TT- So you were a four-man company back then? CC- Back then, yeah. TT- Wow. Alright, so you were with Lemay, Lemay in the early 80's, was it like the same Lemay that he was in 2010? CC- Yeah, pretty much. They started the cardiac program and Dick was into it. Dick was right into it and I wanted to do my three years with my EMT and get off the rescue, because they couldn't get rescue privates at night. So I would work sometimes my cycle plus a cycle. You know what I mean? If you couldn't get someone to go on rescue--you needed two EMTs. I got stuck there for a little while. I was on the rescue quite a bit. TT- What do you remember about your early rescue days? This is the early 80's, so this is the time of the Cocaine Cowboys ... CC- Yeah, we had cocaine, heroin. Um, one year I remember, the first time I saw it (an OD), it was at 21 Dexter Court. The guy looked like he had pissed himself. TT- What? CC- Back then, they stuffed ice in your crotch if you OD'd. They took a bag of ice and stuffed it in his crotch and that's how we knew it was heroin. Back then, the heroin was 99% pure, so they called it "China White." And me and Dick, you know, you would know automatically when you got there and looked at the guy and know it was a heroin overdose. Narcan was very scarce back then. TT- Did you guys carry it? CC- You know, I think the hospital carried it. We didn't push drugs back then. As the Cardiacs became more seasoned, they started putting drugs on the trucks. TT- Okay. CC- But one night me and Dick, we, uh, he probably told you this, but we had a stabbing on Mineral Spring Avenue and the girl, the knife was right in her heart. We taped it up, got her into the truck, got her vitals and got her over to Memorial. Once we got her there the doctors came in and split her chest open and massaged her heart. But the knife had gone right into her heart. She was dead, but we tried, the doctors tried, but I never seen nothing like that, and you know, that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen, you know? TT- Now, before you got to the Fire Department, what were you doing? CC- Doing cars. TT- So you were fixing cars. CC- I worked for my family in the gas station. TT- Right on. How old were you when you got on? CC- Twenty-three years old. TT- Did you come on with a group? CC- There was four guys. Me, Artie Mintsmenn, Dave Marito, and Felix Ramos. We all came on together. Yeah. We came on the same day. TT- So you're twenty-three, you're on the rescue as a transfer guy, you're on Engine 2. Now other than Lemay, who were some of the other names you worked with on the rescue? CC- Uh, Rocky. Paul Laroque, Rocky. I can tell you a story about him. One day we were sent to Providence for a stabbing at Chad Brown. And we get there and the guy's stabbed in the chest. Now Rocky had diabetes really bad. He always carried a can of soda and candy in his pocket, you know? So I'm in Chad Brown, I'm a kid, I didn't even know where Chad Brown was. TT- The housing project, right? CC- Yeah, the housing project and I'm like, you know, okay we're going to Roger Williams (Hospital.) I knew where Roger Williams was, so we take off. He says, "Rescue 1's on the way to Roger Williams with a stabbing victim." All of a sudden the guy that got stabbed yells out, "Hey buddy, you better pull over, man, your man is on the floor." Well, Rocky was having a diabetic seizure. TT- So Rocky's in the back and the guy who got stabbed told you Rocky was seizing? CC- Yup. Told me to pull over. "Your guy is on the floor." TT- (Laughs) CC- So I cracked a can of Coke and tried to give it to him, but he was flapping around pretty good. So I called Fire Alarm and said, "Listen, the guy in charge, Paul Larocque, is having a seizure. Can you let them know that there are now two patients?" (Laughs) TT- Jesus. CC- So I was on the job maybe two, three months, and Rocky was a very high strung guy. So we got to Roger Williams and they took him out, took out the guy that got stabbed, and I didn't know what to do. Like I'm brand new and I don't know what to do here. So I called Chief Lundegren, back then it was Ralph Lundegren, and I says, "Chief, Charlie Carroll." I says, "Rocky's in the hospital having a diabetic seizure what do I do?" He says, "Get back here with the truck and we'll get someone to ride with you." Because I didn't have enough time to be in charge yet. TT- Yup. CC- And another time I was with John Hargreaves on the rescue. (John Hargreaves would later die in a controversial fire at a law firm on Cottage Street in 1993.) We had a child in the back and he was two-years-old, wasn't breathing. We picked him up on Pawtucket Avenue, and as we were going up to School Street, we were on Division Street, and I hit a guy's car. The guy wouldn't move and I kind of side-swiped his car, so I said to John, "John, I side-swiped that guy's car." And he said, "Don't worry about that. Get this kid to the hospital right now." Whew! So we took off. Turns out the guy tried to get me for hit and run. He wanted my job, he wanted my license, the whole bit. TT- Jesus. CC- And the city's law department got involved. Turns out the guy was a senator from Barrington or something. TT- Of course. CC- And all because he wouldn't move. I got a two-year-old kid in the back of the truck, you know, dead. TT- That's crazy. CC- But they did get the kid back, though, they did get the kid back. TT- So Larocque, Hargreaves, who else was on the rescue with you back then? CC- Back then, it was pretty much Dick Lemay, Paul Larocque, and it would be Hargreaves. Once in a while they would take Bobby Parente, he was on Ladder 1 with Buck. They just needed someone to be in charge. Like in other words, it was my truck but-- TT- You didn't have enough time to be in charge. CC- I didn't have time. I was brand new, you know? TT- So Lemay, let's see, he was talking about a lot of the rescue stuff. Cocaine in the 80's, a lot of overdoses ... CC- Yep. TT- There was a lot of violence that came with the cocaine. A lot of shootings, stabbings, the whole deal. Let's talk about some of the shootings you saw back then. CC- I didn't get a lot of shootings. It was Dick Lemay and Bobby Howe who had that shooting on Sayles Avenue and Vale Street. I was on Engine 2 that night. But overdoses, one summer I could count thirty to forty heroin overdoses and probably fifteen or twenty of them died. TT- Wow. CC- I think that's about when they started to give us Narcan. Another time, I was on rescue, one night we get a call, me and Dick Lemay, we get a call for a car accident. A car into a pole on Mineral Spring Avenue. In front of Slater School. Anyway, my friends Roger and Ronnie Alex, they used to run Alex Welding on Pleasant Street. TT- A welding shop? CC- Yeah. And we get there and the car is wrapped around a pole, and Ronnie is up against a fence and he says, "Chickie, Roger is in the car, Roger is in the car." And he was cocked, you know? I go to get Roger and I can't open the door but the windshield is kind of pulled away. I was able to pull the windshield away. Now Roger's a pretty big dude, he was a heavy, big kid. Dick went to Ronnie and I went to Roger. So I climbed in through the windshield and started doing CPR. When Engine 2 got there they were able to get the door open with the Jaws. I kept doing CPR and he was hurting. TT- And this is your buddy. CC- This is my friend, my close friend, and I found out later he survived. Back then, if you were out on the rescue on a Friday night--this was a sailor town. Pawtucket was a sailor town because Quonset Point was still open. So there were bars everywhere and fights everywhere, but I found out later that night that Roger was alive, nice, they saved Roger. TT- That's incredible. CC- They saved him. And you know, his father couldn't believe it. He said, "Chickie, you saved my son, you saved my son." But it was just what I was trained to do. TT- And you were born and raised here, so you ended up going to a lot of people's homes that you knew. CC- Knew, yeah, especially on the West side of the city. Yeah, yeah. TT- Friends. CC- People from the gas station, people from school. Actually both sides of the city, I fixed their cars, whatever. I can remember one night I was with Gene Casavant, who was a really good rescue guy, he was good on the rescue. He was a cardiac. The shift changed, it was about 5:30, and we had just got in the truck. We got a call for a Code 99 at Dartmouth Street. We're going down Pawtucket Avenue and a lady was standing in the middle of the street. Now I'm rolling, I'm rolling, it's a Code 99. And this lady says, "Please, please." We stopped and she says, "Can you please help my son? He's on the ground!" Now, we were always taught that you keep going to where you were dispatched. You call in anything else. So we called it in to send an engine company and an out of town rescue to help this lady. Well, come to find out later on that night, the kid was eleven-years-old, and he got hit in the kidney with a football and he died. He died. And that code we had, we ran a full code on her and she died too. It was a tough call. Do you go for the old person we were sent for? Or do we help this kid? My feelings were yeah, let's help this kid but Gene said, "Chickie, we can't, we gotta keep on going, we've got a Code 99 and it's confirmed." So come to find out later on that the kid did die. TT- That's brutal. CC- It really kind of bothered us. TT- I'm sure. CC- And another time with Gene Casavant, two guys were on one motorcycle flying down Pawtucket Avenue, because they were getting chased by the cops. Well, in the old days, they used to have these "guide wires" on a pole right in front of the Job Lot. They crashed the bike. The guy driving flew through the air and hit the guide wire, cutting off both his legs from the knees down. The guy on the back hit the guard rail and got cut in half and when I got to him, he still had a full face. I will never forget his face. His eyes were wide open like wide open with fear, you know? And his legs were probably, you could see his intestines stretched to his legs which were over by the wall. His torso was on the ground and his head was up and I was like, I opened up his visor, I knew there was no saving him, but to check for a pulse. Nothing. So we-- TT- Jesus. CC- A guy hopped in the rescue. Turns out a Chaplain was driving by. He jumped in and gave the guy last rites. All three guys that showed up on Engine 1 that night--Jack Doyle was one of them--all three retired the next day after this accident. TT- No kidding. CC- I put the guy's two legs into pillow cases, put sterile water on them, and we got him over to Memorial while he's screaming, "My legs! My legs!" Come to find out the guy was from Attleboro and his last name was Carroll. TT- Get out of here. CC- Yeah, yeah. TT- No relation to you? CC- No relation. No, no, no. TT- That's a crazy story. Now when you were dealing with all of this stuff, 'cause there is a lot of stuff going on, you weren't married yet, right? CC- No, no, drank a lot. TT- Right on. CC- Yeah, I did. I did. On my days off I drank a lot, that's why I have been sober for twenty years. TT- It's a lot to absorb just sweeping up people all day all night. CC- All day and all night. You could do ten runs during the day and never see the station. Or you leave the barn at 5:30 at night and come back at 7:00 the next morning to get relieved. It would be that way, you know. TT- Yeah. CC- And Mutual Aid was kicking in back then, so we would go to Central Falls quite a bit. We would be all over the place, you know. But I could tell you one fire that we went to and Dick Lemay was very involved in this one also. It was like a rooming house and two guys got stuck up on the third floor. They went in to get everybody out and got stuck. I was transferred to Engine 4 that night. I was with Steve Johnson and Al McVay. One of the guys was hanging out of the window, and either the General or Ray Mathews ran up the fire escape. The guy was talking to them at the time but his buddy had a death clutch on him. TT- Now the story goes that those two guys were drinking in the bar. Someone said the place next door was on fire and they ran out to help evacuate that building and got stuck. They left their keys, their drinks-- CC- Everything. Cigarettes, beer, everything. I knew the bartender, Rita, I knew her because she used to come to one of the bars that I used to go to. TT- Wow. CC- So Meerbott says to me and Steve Johnson and Al McVay, "Take a line and go up the back stairway and see if you can get to those guys." Okay, so we got up to the second landing and I said to Al McVay and Steve Johnson, "Just keep a (hose)line on me, I'm gonna try to get to the front of the building." So when I got up to the third floor it was lit up just like this, it was bright orange, it was bright, bright orange, and I thought I had a shot. It was a long hallway, probably from here to Ladder 2 (Interview was conducted at Station 4.) It was a long long hallway. TT- That's like sixty feet. CC- I started running and as I did, the ceiling started coming down and the fire, the fire just dropped right on top of me. "Are you alright?" Al came up with the line a little more and we were able to get out. I went back around to the front of the building and I started to go up the fire escape and I didn't have a Scott on and Chief Boisclair started yelling at me, "Chickie Carroll, put your Scott on." And I says back, "Chief, I'm going up to get this guy, I'm going up there." So I went up the fire escape and I was able to grab his arm. As I was grabbing his arm, the flames were so hot, it was so hot. I was pulling on his arm to try and get him free so that the guys on the ladder could get him, you know, and his skin was falling off in my face, I had skin all in my face, my gear, everything I was covered in skin. TT- Unreal. CC- Once we finally got the fire knocked down and put out, Dick Lemay went in the window and got the two guys apart. We got them down the ladder, we took them in the Stokes basket, but there was no way to get to them, you know what I mean? We didn't know if the floors were compromised, we didn't know, back then, you just didn't know. TT- And the place was ripping. CC- The place was roaring, T, roaring. TT- How many people do you think you pulled out of places like this? Like, I mean, four, five, ten? CC- I pulled out three kids and their mother with Kenny Brusso in Central Falls, third floor. TT- What happened there? CC- That house was fully involved and when we got there, I was on Engine 2 that night, and when we got there, Kenny Brusso is yelling, "Somebody, somebody come up and give me a hand, give me a hand I got people up here!" So I went up the ladder. I think I was with Chief Mercer and maybe Tack McGarry, and they went up to the roof, and I said, "I'm gonna go up and help Kenny Brusso, Chief." And he said, "Go ahead." So I went up the ladder and Kenny smashed the window and all you could see before he smashed the window, it was bright orange behind the glass, and you could see three little figures and the mother. TT- Jesus Christ. CC- That's all you could see. The smoke was black. He took the window out and cleaned it enough where he could grab the kids. Well, I grabbed a kid, Kenny gave me a kid, and I went down the ladder, I went back up the ladder, grabbed another kid with my Scott on, back up the ladder and back down the ladder. And then the mother walked down but the kids were very small, they were young kids, five or six-years old and we got them out. TT- It sounds like you got them out with seconds to go. CC- Yeah, the fire was coming right up the back stairwell. It was coming right at them. They had nowhere else to go, nowhere else to go. TT- Now, Central Falls is always a key part of the Pawtucket Fire Department. CC- Big time. TT- Because we go on just about everything they have. Battalion Chief McLaughlin used to say they had some of the best firemen in the state. "Providence and Boston have a hundred guys showing up and C.F. has six." Anyway, they're so understaffed, we go on anything big. CC- Yes. TT- What else did you see over there? CC- Central Falls was, back then in the 80's, Central Falls had six guys on a shift. TT- That's absolutely crazy. CC- And they have four-decker houses, and we became very friendly with the guys from Central Falls. I am still friendly with a lot of them, but I can tell you a good story. We went to Summer Street and it was three-decker with a flat roof. Going good. We went up to the third floor and I hear a guy yell to me, "Hey, S and S (the name of Chickie's garage), you got a Harley?" And I said, "Yeah, I do." And he says, "Me too. Jimmy Gallagher here." And I says, "Hey, Jimmy, I'm Chickie Carroll. I heard about you." And he says, "I heard about you, too." You know, like in the middle of a fire we're doing this, right? So Central Falls, we worked very close with Central Falls back then. Very, very close with those guys. TT- Right? CC- 'Cause they didn't have no help, they had no help. TT- Yeah, they're crazy over there. CC- Crazy. Jimmy and Ricky McDermott and them guys they were good, they were damn good firefighters, damn good, damn good. TT- Now when you look back at some of the other CF fires, because Lemay has a stack of freaking newspapers, so as I was going through them back then there was real reporting. So there are names of guys at fires, descriptions of the firemen and what they were doing. It's almost like a diary entry, but yeah, you were mentioned in a lot of Central Falls stories. CC- Yeah, yeah. I fought a lot of fires with them guys. There was one that myself and Tommy Heaney and Chief Couto, who had just made Chief back then, he was chief and his father had been chief of C.F. for years. I was on Engine 2 and they sent us to Central Falls. I don't recall the street, if it was Illinois or which one, I don't remember, but back then Bobby Tierny was a Central Falls firefighter and he was a little crazy from Vietnam, you know, he was a little, he was nutty. So Chief Couto says, "Would you guys mind going up to the third floor and making sure everybody's out, just check and see what we got?" Back then, we didn't all have radios. Tommy had a radio but we had no Scotts, of course no Scotts, so we go up there with our boots, our three-quarter boots, you know, helmet and gloves and coat only. The second-floor is lit up pretty good, and we got passed the second-floor landing, and we used to call Tommy "Skull" because he was bald, you know what I mean, he was a helluva firefighter. This guy had balls as big as his fucking head, you know, like he was good, and if you learned from him you learned good. So we felt the door and everything and kicked the door and it was fully involved. We didn't have a line with us because there wasn't lines available, but Chief Couto wanted us to make sure that everyone was out and to see what we had, so we could report back to him, and the next thing you know the ceiling comes right down with the bricks, it comes right down. Bobby Tierny, not knowing that we were in the building, hit the chimney with a 2 1/2 inch line and he parlayed the chimney. It fell through the ceiling and it was falling onto us, so I just grabbed Skull by the coat and threw him down the stairs, I threw him down the stairs, and I said, "Skull, we gotta get the fuck out of here," you know? (laughter). So I threw him down the stairs and when we got outside he was so mad, the man was so mad he says to Randy Couto, "Chief, no disrespect, but who the fuck hit us with a 2 1/2?" He says, "We were on the third-floor and someone put the bricks right through the fucking ceiling. I'm gonna kill him. I'm gonna kill this guy. Who the hell did it?" Turned out it was Bobby Tierny, his buddy. (Laughs) So we had to hold Tommy back for a while to keep him away from Bobby Tierny, you know? But that was a real good fire. That thing was roaring. TT- Right? CC- How we didn't die a few times over ... TT- What was the closest you came to like really, like you've described two fires so far where the fire is coming down on your head with the ceiling but-- CC- You know, I've never ever thought of it, I never thought of it never. My mentality, you know because you've worked with me, was grab the line and go in and do what you gotta do. I was the first one in the door, not to blow my own horn, but I was, I know I was. I got to work with my father, I got to work a couple of cycles with my father before he retired and we had a fire. He was worried about me and I was worried about him, you know, and I said, "Dad, dad, I got it. I got it. I'm ok." And once he knew that I was all set, he left in '82 and he retired. TT- How many years was he on for? CC- He was on for twenty-seven years. TT- No kidding. Jesus. CC- Yup, yup. TT- So that's like 1956 he got on. CC- Yeah. It was around then. He got out of high school and was in the Navy for a while before getting on Pawtucket. TT- Now back then, most of the guys on the job ... This is a mill city, so guys were blue-collar guys. CC- And you didn't make any money. When I got married, Laurie found--I had saved my paystubs in a box or something, I don't know why. Somebody told me to do it, you know, and I think we made a buck and a quarter a week. TT- (Laughing) CC- When my father came on it was $30 for six days, you had to work six days. TT- Oh dear God. CC- And you had to wear a uniform to work, you had to cross the kids at the corners for school, and then go in and change into your khakis with a tie and do the housework. TT- No kidding. CC- Yup. And Details (events where a fireman must be present per fire code) paid $2. My old man told me that at the Royal Theater and Strand Theater they did details on Saturdays and had to wear their Class A uniforms. TT- So the nightclubs, theaters ... CC- And Narragansett Racetrack. There were no radios. If you got something, you pulled the box, there were no radios. TT- Were you working the day that place burned to the ground? CC- No, I wasn't on the job then. But we did have horses there. My uncle had two horses there. Thankfully they got out. TT- Wow. CC- That was a bad fire. I can remember one August night we had one, two, three fires. St. Theresa's, Highland Avenue, and Mineral Spring Avenue. Three Code Reds in five hours. TT- Three in five? CC- Yeah, St. Theresa's had a fire in the elevator shaft. They sent everybody because it was a church. From there we went to Highland Avenue, which my friend Phil, a very good friend of mine, his house was fully involved. Central Falls had sent a ladder company because that's all they could send while we were at St. Theresa's. So they sent a ladder company to Highland Avenue and they're screaming on the radio, "Hey! This place is going, it's going!" So we pulled up, I think it was myself, RJ Masse and I think Steve Parent back then. We grabbed a line and Parent says, "I'll keep feeding you line," because it was on the second and third floors, it was going pretty good. So we got up there and the guys from Central Falls were like, "Oh, man, like where you been?" I said we were on the other side of the city, we were at St. Theresa's on Newport Ave. Well, we knocked the fire down and it was kind of like an open stairway to go to the third floor, and I can remember Kenny Brusso, he was brand new, and he's saying, "Chick, we should go up there. We should go up there." And I'm saying, "Kenny, look at these stairs, there are burn holes in these stairs. I'm not taking a shot at going up there, let the ladder get it from the roof." This is how I learned from the old guys, you know, how to check things and do things like that so no one got hurt. He was kind of pissed at me, you know? "Oh, what do you mean you don't want to go up there." I said, "Look at the stairs, the stairs are charred, they're melted." Afterwards, he came up to me and said that was a good call. He apologized. I said, "Kenny, no problem. I was thinking the same thing you were, but by the same token this house was fully involved in the rear of the building." I says, "We hit everything we could hit." We did go up the stairs at first, but then the stairs started burning, and we had to think about getting out of there. The ladder was there, they could get the third floor. So we came back down to the second-floor, and we did knock it down and put the fire out, but my buddy's dog, they found the dog dead. TT- Now what about the fire dog in Pawtucket? What was her name again? CC- There were two, one came after the other passed. Sparkles and Pepper. Sparkles and Pepper. TT- Now they got rid of the dogs because of what? CC- Well, Sparkles, she would chase rocks. We used to have the clamshell downtown, and there would be water in it, so we would throw rocks in it and she would chase the rock into the water and cool her off, you know? She had her own personality, you know, but Pepper was the dog. Pepper was ... I used to take care of Pepper. I had one guy on every shift who made sure the dog ate twice a day. So the kids at Christmas one year, City Hall put up Christmas trees, and they had the little kids come down and decorate. Well, every time we had a class come down, the kids would just want to see Pepper. They loved Pepper, and she slept with me in my bed and everything, you know she slept in my bed. TT- Wow. CC- In fact, she used to ride on Engine 2 with us. TT- (Laughs) CC- She did. And she would ride the ladder and she knew enough to jump up on the motor cover, and we were going. She would bark and the tail would be going. In fact, she followed us, me and Mike Sholas, she followed us right into a house on Notre Dame, and yeah, "Get the dog out of here before the ..." To make a long story short, the kids put dog biscuits for decorations on the trees in front of City Hall, and she would go over and grab one when she wanted one in the winter, but everybody in City Hall--Chief Boisclair used to go crazy at tax time because the mayor would call up and say, "Get the dog out of City Hall for Christ's sake, people are paying their taxes." So if Pepper wanted a cookie and we weren't giving her one, she would go next door and go get a cookie. TT- (laughs) CC- She knew it. She knew what to do and that was her thing. One fourth of July we did about 200 runs and we never let Engine 3 across the river. And Mike Levesque was so mad. Captain Levesque was so mad. Ralph Dominici was in charge of Engine 2. It was Ralph, me, Bobby Thurber, and I forget who else was with us. Of course we had a cooler, you know Ralph, he always had a cooler. But he never let the 3's cross the river. We did about 200 runs easy, but my wife was at her cousins-- TT- Wait a minute. What do you mean you wouldn't let the 3's come across? I don't get it. CC- To do bonfires and shit, to catch the fires. It was kind of like we were busting his balls. He would say, "Engine 3's in service." "Nope! Engine 2 has got that!" And we were still putting out fires in the street, you know, because everybody used to light bonfires. Ralph would go, "We got that, Engine 3, you can remain in service." But Mike Levesque was fucking livid, he was livid. So anyway, getting back to Pepper, my wife came down that night with a whole side of pig, the leg, everything. They had barbecued all day at her cousins' house, and she left it in the kitchen downtown. Now, Pepper was notorious. If you left steaks on the table, you know, you caught a run or something? You would come back and Pepper would kind of smile, you know she had a dog smile, and the tail would be going and we'd be like, "What did you do?" We lost many suppers to Pepper. TT- (laughs) CC- And she knew she wasn't supposed to go into the kitchen but she did. Well, she ate that whole side of pig. TT- Oh my God. CC- She ate the leg, the whole rear quarter of the pig. The poor dog couldn't even stand up she was so full, you know? And I'm looking--like this is four or five in the morning--and we're beat up. We're just beat, and sure enough, there she is, the tail is wagging and she did what she did, you know what I mean? TT- So what happened to Pepper? CC- Well, eventually she couldn't walk anymore, she got old and couldn't walk, and Ralph Dominici called me up. I went to Stop and Shop because Armando Meats wasn't open at the time. I bought her a T-Bone steak, a big T-Bone steak, and I cooked it on the grill. I cut it all up for her and she ate it and then I put her in the Blazer, we had a fire department Blazer, and I took her to the vet in Warwick. They couldn't find a vein on her so I sat on the floor with her for half an hour until they could find a vein to put her to sleep. TT- Jesus, Chickie. CC- She was like my own dog, you know? I took good care of her. She was a good dog. TT- And after that there were no more fire dogs? CC- No, no. Guys didn't want the dogs anymore. People offered to donate dogs but the fact that Smitty and them guys didn't want dogs, "We don't need them dogs down here." But the kids loved them, the kids loved the dogs. It was a tradition, a major tradition. TT- Part of the department. Now talk about that. I remember when I first got on, I didn't know anything really about Pawtucket. My family went to church here, but I didn't live here and I wasn't born here. I was working with you as a transfer guy one day, and we were out driving around. I was in the backstep, you were driving, and it seemed everywhere we went, or every stoplight we stopped at, somebody yelled out, "Hey, Chickie!" I mean, everybody knew you, like the freaking mayor or something. Guys in gas stations yelled out hello. I mean there was a real sense of community back then, as far as like people knowing each other. CC- Yeah, yeah. And on the job there was a very close, a very, very close camaraderie. There were guys that didn't like each other but you know what? When that bell hit, that was all forgotten, that was all forgotten. You went and did your job. TT- It seems like a lot of this is gone now because guys have got computers and their phones and it's not like one TV in the station anymore. Ricky Slater was talking about that, about how there used to be a lot more time spent around the kitchen table. CC- Oh yeah. Bullshit sessions and shit. A lot of time. TT- Now-- CC- Not to interrupt you, but when I came on the job, you didn't touch the newspaper or sit down and have a coffee until the Lieutenant had his coffee and read the paper. You went out and checked the truck, and you made sure that you had water, because the trucks used to leak because they had stainless steel tanks back then. You made sure the truck was full and your tools were where they were supposed to be. The Jaws back then were in an old army trailer. In fact, Meerbott, who was my lieutenant, we went around the corner at Dexter Street and the trailer flipped off the ball of the truck, and we lost the Jaws. Joe Burns was the Chief at the time and we were going to a car accident, a car versus truck and it was a nasty accident, and Joe Burns threw everything into the chief's car and brought it to us, you know? On his own, you know? We didn't even know we had lost it, and he wasn't gonna waste our time going back to get it. TT- Wow. CC- That was a nasty accident. And I'll tell you about another one that happened in Central Falls right in front of the church on Broad Street. We got a call one day, Will Maher was with me, we had a lady and an eighteen wheeler ran her over. Everybody was running around in confusion, like what do we do? What are we going to use here? Tommy Moore would put anything on the truck that I suggested, like tools, jacks, car-floor jacks, bottle jacks. Frankie Johnson made up some round caps that went on the tops of the bottle jacks. So I grabbed the bottle jack--it was a five-ton bottle jack--and I got under the truck. Bobby Thurber was worried about me and he said, "Chickie, get out of there." And I said, "No, Bobby, I can do this, just get me some cribbing, I need some cribbing." So I jacked up the truck up and we were able to get the wheel off the ground enough to slide the lady's leg out. It was crushed, you know, it was crushed. But Will was with me, Will was under there putting the cribbing up on the frame of the truck just to hold it. And the poor woman, she was an elderly woman, the poor truck driver he was a mess too, you know? TT- Yeah. CC- That was bad one. TT- Now the highway too, right? On Engine 2 for thirty years there had to be a lot of chaos. CC- Yes. A lot of chaos. I'll start off with a funny story. This is a classic. Back when Chief Meerbott was first made (He went from lieutenant of Engine 2 to Battalion Chief of C-Group), I was in charge of Engine 2. I had RJ Masse and I can't think of the third guy who was with us. But anyway, we get a call for a car on its roof and its up in the grass just before the Smithfield Avenue exit. The back window is blown out, so when we get there I tell RJ and whoever the third guy was, "Grab a line, just grab a line in case it catches fire. I'm gonna check inside the car." So I climbed in the car and there's this woman, you know a nice looking black woman well dressed and put together. She says to me, "Honey, I don't know what happened, but a car--now I'm on my roof!" She was hanging upside down. She had her seatbelt on but the seatbelt was crushing her boobs, like crushing her boobs, you know, so she says, "Can you cut me out of this seatbelt?" I said, "I can't, ma'am, we're trying to get some pillows and stuff to hold you up so that you won't fall hard, you know." So she says, "Please, please push on my boobs, please, please, please." TT- (laughs) CC- Now I'm laying on my back, my hands on this woman's tits holding her upright. All of a sudden, Meerbott sticks his head in the back window and says (in Meerboot's classic southern drawl), "Chickie, what're you doing?" TT- (Laughs) CC- And I says, "Chief, I'm waiting for pillows so we can cut the belt and let her down." And she says, "It's alright, Chief, he's doing a damn good job." (Both laughing hard) CC- That was one of the best--she wasn't hurt, she was okay, her car was wrecked but she was okay. And when she got out, we got her out, she thanked me. I said, "Ma'am, I'm terribly sorry." And she says, "No, don't you be sorry, you really took the pain away." TT- That couldn't have felt good, hanging like that. CC- One New Year's Eve, it was snowing a little bit and we get a call for 95 South. A man got hit at the Lonsdale Avenue on-ramp. What happened was the guy got out of his truck to knock his wipers because they were freezing up, and somebody came by and hit him. Sent him quite a ways. So we get to the guy and he was dead. So, okay, it was like an hour into the New Year, you know. We get back to the barn, go upstairs, and no sooner go back to bed and the lights and bells hit again. 95 North behind the U-Haul building for a car accident. Somehow we beat the 5's there, I don't even remember how. I know I was driving, I remember that. We get to the accident scene and a lady had hit a tree and her 80-year-old mother got ejected from the car. When we got to her she was Jello, she was just Jello, you know, she was passed. So we had two deaths on one New Year's Eve directly across the highway from one another. Another time, I'm sure Bobby might have told you about this one, but this was a hard one. (pauses) We had a kid on Coleman Street, a baby like a year old. Old enough to crawl out of his crib. Well, the baby stood up and fell out of his crib, and he landed on the radiator. The mother and father were in the kitchen all doped up. I'll never forget his face. I grabbed the kid and I'm saying to myself, "He's warm, he's warm." You could see blue around his lips but I'm saying, "He's warm." So I started CPR on him and we got the kid into the rescue and I wouldn't let the kid go, I kept doing CPR, and I put a mask on him and kept working him and when we got to the hospital the doc says to me, "Give me the child. Chickie, give me the child." I said, "Doc, he was warm when I got to him, I was doing CPR all the way here, you know, maybe there's--" He says, "No, just look at him. Rigor mortis has already started to set in." His mother never checked him, never checked him. That was one of my worst for a child, you know? TT- Ugh. CC- There was one other occasion where we had a house fire on Christmas Eve on Utton Avenue. Same thing. The Chief ran by, said there was a kid on the second floor, it was a Russian kid, they were a Russian family, very clean, you know, but the kid was in the closet under a pile of clothes. I searched that floor, I searched his bed, I searched under his bed to the point where it was getting a little dangerous to be up there, but in my mind, I wanted this kid. It started coming through the walls and shit and I remember going into the closet, I found the closet, and I opened the door and I pushed but there was a pile of clothes, like a big pile of clothes, and the kid was underneath the pile. TT- He climbed under the fucking clothes to try and protect himself. CC- He climbed under and I must've hit him with my hand and shit and I started to realize it was getting hot and I said I can't find him. I looked, I went through that room, a complete wall to wall search. TT- You didn't find him. CC- I just didn't find him. So once the fire was out, Pete O'Neill went up. Pete was on Engine 5 at the time, and Pete got him out of the clothes, Pete found him. I took that pretty personal for a while, you know, I thought that I had screwed up and you know they all told me, "Chickie, there was no way you would have found him. No way, no way." TT- Now let's backtrack a little bit, because the fourth of July stuff--people who don't live here don't know the history of July 4th, and it went on for seventy years. CC- Yup. TT- Just absolute mayhem. BC Kraweic was telling stories of guys getting the old wallpaper rolls, cutting them up, soaking them in kerosene, tossing them over power lines, and lighting them up. CC- Yup. I can tell you an even better one. The Alex's, my buddy that I pulled out of the car and saved his life, his father, the one who kept thanking me for saving his son's life, he was a little crazy. He used to cut up sticks of dynamite. TT- Oh God. CC- He would cut them up, and they would get an old car and push it down the street and light it up. TT- (Laughing) CC - And M-80s. The whole bit. People would pour gasoline on telephone poles and light them up. TT- (laughing) CC- So the power would go out, you know, and they (the Alexes) had the big yellow house right on the corner, they had a swimming pool and everything. Pleasant Street was crazy. Pleasant Street, Magill Street, Essex Street, Slater Street, all around there. That's where the bonfires were back when I was a kid. The neighborhood would come down to the West Avenue Fire Station (Station 1), the neighborhood would come and bring chowder and clam cakes and food, you know, and one year they had a band-- TT- What? (laughing) CC- God's honest truth, for the guys, you know for the guys. The neighborhood did that for the firemen, you know? It was pretty cool. We would go to a bonfire at like say, two or three in the morning, and I remember I was with John McConaghy and Dave Reed one night and I don't know, we went to the same bonfire probably four or five times. It was like beer time, you know what I mean? And John says to the kids, to all of the people that were out front watching it and shit and he says, "Hey, we're kind of beat up, do you think you could call it a night?" And the people, well, we never went back, we never went back. You know, like they said, "Thanks, guys, we had a great time, can we offer you something to eat? Take some of this back to the station." They wanted to give us food and shit, you know, everything. TT- They also put extra guys on the trucks, right? And extra trucks? CC- Yes, extra trucks and five guys on a truck. Plus during the day they would have an extra guy on every truck. So it worked out that the guys that worked the night before (July 3) would get a little bit of down time, you know? With that extra guy they might say, "Hey, go get a couple hours sleep, take a shower, we'll run without you, we've got enough guys, you know?" Nothing would happen during the day anyway, it wasn't bad, but I can remember doing a good 200 runs on a fourth of July--third and fourth of July, both nights, hundreds of runs. TT- Jesus Christ CC- Yeah, yeah. TT- That's a l-o-n-g night. CC- Yup, yup. TT- What about the big fires? Like when you came on, Star Gas was probably a year after you got on? CC- I was on the job and we were all at the Country Club playing golf, having a golf tournament for the firefighters and everybody was hammered. Everybody. TT- (laughing) CC- So a call came over the loudspeaker for all off-duty firemen to respond. And some of the guys started to show up on-scene and Chief Doire just said, "Go back to where you were." (Both share long laughter). You know, like, I never even got off the golf course, you know what I mean? I knew I wasn't going to work. Even worse, it was a General Alarm fire. Al Scanlon was the one--there's a picture of him somewhere making sure the gas tanks were shut off. That's when Engine 4 burned, Star Gas. The America LaFrance burned up. Yeah, that was a good one, but another good fire was Newel Lumber, Newel Coal and Lumber, that was a real good fire and it was a cold night too. TT- Where was that? CC- That was down on Taft Street. I had another fire, I was with Joe McIntyre at the IGA on Prospect Street. Now, it's a kid's school. Back then it was an IGA. I was on Engine 3 with Joe McIntyre and Albertino Lourenco, he was the lieutenant. He was honest, he was honest. He knew my father very well, Portuguese, a very good cook. So he says to me, "Charlie, I'm not going in but I'll roll hose." So I said, "Okay, Al." Well, this IGA store had an apartment on the second-floor, so Joe McIntyre was pumping. He says, "Charlie, just yell to me, tell me what you need." So I said, "Alright, Joe." No radios, we didn't have them, and I kicked in the door (to the apartment). When I did that, he said, "Watch out for a backdraft!" I had that stuck in my head. I was down low and I got the door open and this one apartment was fully, fully, fully, involved. I mean this place was roaring, completely going, and I had an inch-and-a-half line. That's all we had on the trucks back then. And I'm hitting it, and I'm screaming down to Al Lourenco, "Lieutenant," I says, "we need some help up here real quick, real, real quick." And that night I remember it was cold, like zero that night. It was real, real cold, you know? And I got fire behind me, I got fire down the hall, and I got fire in front of me and I'm trying to hit all three at one time, trying. We were waiting for the 6's to come. Back then it was Jack Doyle, the guy that retired after the motorcycle accident, he wasn't too--you know, like he was just here for the pension and the benefits, you know. TT- Yeah. CC- He had two other guys with him, I can't remember who, it might have been Ray Gilbert. Ray was a bull, he had hands as big as, like this, and he gave me my first piece of sponge to put in my mouth, you know? And he was a damn good firefighter. Ray was good, he could read the smoke, he could tell you what was happening. We finally got some help and Greg Brule was one of the guys that showed up. They were trying to pull us out, they said, "Get out of there, it's coming through the roof, get out of there." I said to Greg, "We can't do no more, there's no more we can do in here." So me and Greg went around back and we found a window and we smashed the window, started hitting it from the outside, you know, because the fire was down into the market by then. It was burning that good. We were there all night. It was so cold they had to get a backhoe to get the frozen hose-line onto the ladder. TT- Wow. CC- We put all the hose on top of the ladder, the three-inch canvas hose, and my gear--like you had ice on you this thick. TT- Jesus. CC- And somebody said to me, "Chickie, can you run the tiller?" And I said, "Yeah, sure." It was the old Ladder 3, old, old Ladder 3, the old Maxim. It didn't have a cab over it, it had nothing, no heat, and I can remember sitting down and my coat just breaking. TT- (laughter) CC- You know, just breaking, and it was so cold, Tommy, we had--they used to give you wool mittens, you know, I remember having them on but it was hard to steer the truck with them on. And all the hose was just stacked on the truck and everybody had to figure out whose hose was whose. But it was really really nasty. TT- That's a long night. CC- Yeah it was. A real long night. TT- Now Hargreaves was a C-Shift guy and you were on C-Shift your whole career, right? CC- Yes. That day I was transferred to Ladder 1 and we were in Fire Alarm (dispatch center) and Al Jack was in charge. For some reason, he never called for us. He never called for us and it seemed like the fire was going and getting worse and we're saying, "Why ain't we going? Why ain't we going?" We could see the smoke from the freaking Alarm room, you know, and ah, he finally says, "This is Battalion 4, send me Ladder 1." Everybody said we should've had two ladders on it right away, you know, but that doesn't--whatever. Al Jack knew his shit. Well, I went in the building and we set up the ladder pipe (the master stream on a ladder truck can pump 1500 gallons of water a minute.) Kurt Richards, he was on Engine 6, and he was at the hydrant. The 6's fed us, Foxy was driving Engine 6, he fed the ladder. We got the pipe up, got water flowing in through the roof. I think it was me, the General, and Bobby Parente. So I told them, "I'm gonna go in, alright?" I was an engine guy, I wasn't really a ladder guy. So General said, "No problem, go ahead." Bobby said, "Go ahead, Chickie." So I grabbed the line off of Engine 4 or Engine 3 and went in and there was no fire in the building. There was no fire when we walked in. TT- That's what Lemay said too. CC- There was no fire (coughs) until you went downstairs and then there was heavy fucking fire. John Hargreaves, what he was doing down there alone I have no idea, no idea, but I happened to come back around the building, I knew there was fire down there, so I went back and grabbed a two-and-a-half inch line. I was going down the stairs and go inside, and I think Greg Brule was with me again at that time but John--I think it was Dave Farris and Duquenoy, they had Hargreaves and he was burning from the inside out. The smoke was coming out of his body and he was as white as this ceiling. TT- Jesus. CC- He was white and I can remember blasting him with the two and a half, but when I saw John--I was kind of friendly with John. He hung around with the scabs (there was major labor strife in Pawtucket in the 1980s, which nearly destroyed the job) but you know, I mean he was alright. He had horses and my uncle had horses, so we shot the shit a lot about the horses. TT- Yeah. CC- I worked with him quite a bit on the rescue. So yeah, that was real, real bad. They sent him to Connecticut to put him in a chamber for a few days but he never made it out. TT- Were you on the job when Rabbit got burned in that flashover? CC- No, I came on right after that. TT- Okay, so that was like '79 or '80? CC- Yeah. That part, what happened was he was going up the back stairs trying to get to a guy trapped. Our guys were in the front with a ladder, a ground ladder, and they smashed the windows just as Kevin opened the door and it backdrafted and just melted him. TT- Unbelievable. CC- Melted him. Completely melted him. TT- I saw his gear. They showed it to us in our fire academy. It's incredible he lived. Now when you look back at your career, I mean the suicides are always tough. But the ones that stick out to me are the hangings, just because the people are intact, it's not like a gunshot, right? CC- I got a good one for you. Again, I was on overtime on Engine 3 and I was with Lieutenant Lourenco. It was shift change, so there were only two of us. Engine 3 used to go to the Heights (housing project) for dumpster fires and lockouts and whatnot. So we got a call for a hanging. Me and Al pull up and Al gives me the keys and he says, "Kid, I'm not going in there. You go in there." So Dave Overt, he was a cop and a good friend of mine, we used to ride dirt bikes together. He says, "You coming in with me, Chick?" And I said, "Yeah, I'll go up with you." I unlock the door and we walk into the guy's apartment and he's got a note. He didn't have much, but the apartment was clean and he left his license, a suicide note, what money he had, his jewelry, he didn't have a lot but he had good clothes on. So I said, "Where the hell is he? Let's go upstairs." When we go upstairs there he is hanging by the pipe over the bathtub in the ceiling and his eyes were popped out and he had broke his neck. So Dave Overt has his license in his hands, the guy's license, and he spins the guy around and says, "Hey, Chick, you think that looks like him?" I was still kind of brand new. He holds the license up next to this poor bastard with the bulging eyes and broken neck and who could tell? After I realized he was kidding, I said, "You're a sick bastard, you know?" TT- (Laughing) CC- And I knew what I was in for after that. TT- But that was part of the humor. CC- It was part of it, yeah, it made it easier. When we had that fire on Dexter Street, where them two guys died in the window, we all ended up with really, really--we were all kind of sick, we were sick, something was wrong. Of course Spike Levesque and some of the old guys said, "Oh you bunch of pussies" and this and that. We had worked our asses off at that fire, Tommy, we really did. But we were sick. Diarrhea, throwing up, just not eating, right? Something was wrong. Well, they sent us to a counselor, they sent all thirty of us to a counselor and we cried, we talked about it, how maybe we could have done it differently, which there was no way. No way. We did what we could do but we just couldn't get to them guys in time. TT- So it helped you. CC- It helped us immensely. We went to the Hose Company afterwards and we got drunk, and it made us feel better to spit it out. And I can tell you one more thing about that fire. When it was all done, and I walked to the bar on the corner, I went in to see Rita and get a pack of cigarettes. She says to me, "Chickie," she says, "Here's the guys' keys, their beers, their cigarettes," the whole bit. She says, "Chickie, are them guys coming back?" I said, "No, Rita, they are both, they're both"--I still had their skin on my jacket. I said, "They both passed, they both passed away." Then she told me they had gone in there to help people get out. TT- Wow. How awful. CC- Well, me and her had two rocks glasses full of ginger brandy apiece, and I got a pack of cigarettes and I said, "Rita, I'm very sorry." She said, "Them two guys were good friends of mine." I said, "We tried, we really tried, but we just couldn't get to them in time." TT- Man oh man. CC- It screwed us up, it really did, and we didn't know why. We couldn't understand why. Back then, these interventions for the guys was brand new. TT- Watching people die in front of you isn't easy. CC- No, no. TT- Now talk about some of the giant mill fires. Greenhalgh Mill comes to mind. CC- I was actually packing up to go to New Hampshire when that fire came in. TT- And you were also, for people who don't know, you also rode motorcycles a lot, you were a biker. CC- I was a biker, yeah. I rode with the Hell's Angels sometimes. TT- So you were hanging with the Angels and some other groups but you weren't ever really affiliated. CC- Because I was a firefighter it wasn't, not that I couldn't have joined, but it wasn't proper, it wasn't proper, but I could ride with them guys any time I wanted, you know, if they were going on a trip or a run I would go for a run with them, you know? And that part was cool. But I never really wanted to be wearing a patch, you know what I mean, it wasn't my thing, that wasn't my thing. I was a firefighter and my buddy--he got out of the Angels because he got Parkinson's Disease--he said, "Chickie, these are your colors right here." And that's, you know, our firefighters, our blue shirts, those are our colors, you know? TT- That's your patch. CC- Yup, yup. TT- So get back to Greenhalgh Mills CC- So, It's a General Alarm. It's all over the TV. "All firefighters are to report downtown to Roosevelt Avenue" (Station 2.) The fire was at three o'clock. I got here at four. I laid on a two-and-a-half inch line on Mendon, right over here, for probably four hours. Just laid on it. TT- Jesus. CC- And the heat was coming up through the bricks, so it was keeping me warm, but it wasn't doing anything. The water was blowing in the wind. But they said, "Keep pouring it on, you're getting the houses, maybe we can save the houses." Well, the houses started to go. And they wouldn't let us go into the houses to put them out. My wife's cousin lost her house. There were four houses over here that burnt. I can remember, this was also the night Lieutenant Joe Bierly had his heart attack. He told me he wasn't feeling good. I was going to grab some equipment and more line. So I says to him, "Go sit in Engine 6. The heat's on. Warm up. Dry up and I'll come get you." They had this whole station (Station 4) full of food, cots, everything we needed. So they would send us to the 4's every couple of hours to get some food and water. This room was completely full of guys. The chairs, everything was a mess, soot filled. Well, I forgot about Dave Bierly. He had a heart attack that night. I mean I had all these houses burning and I forgot about him but he did have a heart attack that night. I can remember at like four o'clock in the morning, me, Steve Small, Dave Reed, Bobby Thurber--Meerbott finally let us go into the last house that was burning. And it had already burned through the roof. So we went in and hit the hotspots. Me and Smally went up this little little stairway. It was like this big (2 feet wide.) We had a line with us. I can remember to this day, the toilet was in the corner of the room. And the pipes had popped and the water's coming out of the pipes-- TT- Like a fountain. CC- Yeah. So I'm looking around. The roof was gone and it was a bright, clear night, clear as hell, and the smoke's everywhere. I'm saying, "Wow." Helicopters were here from the ATF, news channels from Boston, Providence. We're looking around and I take a seat on the fucking toilet, light up a cigarette, and I'm just sitting there. I'm beat up. We were tired, man. So I'm having a cigarette, looking around going, wow. Bobby Howe (EMA director and former firefighter) got 90 trucks here that day. There was 90 crews willing to help us, you know? When it started, I got here, I drove my truck downtown, I had my trailer on the back with my bike, because we were supposed to go to New Hampshire that day. I said to my wife, "I gotta go." She said, "Be careful. Call me when you can." That's how it went. She was good. Laurie was very ... TT- She understood. CC- She knew, yeah, she knew. TT- Now talk about, as far as the fire tips, the tips that got passed on to you, reading the smoke, what this color means, it's kind of scientific, right? CC- Well, the first thing was when they came out with the hoods. The old guys wouldn't wear them. And I was one of them. I didn't like it either because I was always taught that if your earlobes felt hot, get out. Cause it's hot. TT- And through the hood you couldn't feel that. CC- No. The Nomex Hoods make you feel over confident. If you felt your earlobes were melting, you knew you were in a hot situation. It was time to go. It was time to go. And smoke, the gray smoke, if you looked in a window and saw it, that was a potential for a backdraft. You could tell. Yellow smoke was a chemical. White smoke was like if you were getting water on it, extinguishing it, it was making steam. You were knocking it down. Like they'd yell up to you, "You're getting it, you're getting it, keep going. The smoke is changing colors." We had Manoline's warehouse and it was an old train depot, where they used to keep all the stuff for the trains. And it was a huge place. Made from big, big timber. It was built to last forever. And I'll tell ya, I've never seen black smoke like that ever. They had tires, they had all kinds of chemicals--anything automotive they had in there. TT- And the hole place is burning. CC- Just roaring. I mean, when we pulled up with Engine 6, the guy had been welding in the back, and he caught the back of the building on fire. Within, and Ronnie Doire will tell ya, within minutes there was flame fucking everywhere. We got in the side door and you couldn't see a foot in front of you. It was just roaring. TT- That is awesome (laughs) CC- But it was, we got off on it, you know? I got off on it. Loved it. You really did. At least I did. I loved it. TT- There was no place you'd rather be. CC- Guys used to say to me, "Chickie, with all of your seniority, why are you still on Engine 2?" Because I loved it. I never came down that pole pissed off. I never did. You know? I got on that truck and--especially, I knew Bobby Thurber, and towards the end he wasn't feeling too good because of his feet and all the diabetes, but he had that same damn smile on his face, you know? (laughs). "Let's go, kid!" "Alright, Bob, let's go! Let's go do it." I can remember one night on Dagget Avenue, we were all here (at Station 4) because we had a union meeting that night. And I knew exactly where the street was and I knew the house. It was a friend of mine, Porky Burns' house. We got a call for a Code Red, house fire. So Bobby says, "Chickie, you got that?" I said, "I know exactly where we're going. Exactly. To the T." We get there and it's blowing out the kitchen windows, blowing good. We kick the door. Bobby's almost on top of me, like pushing me in trying to get in himself. The floor, Burns was rebuilding the house, so there was some type of chemicals on the floor. Somehow they had gotten into my nighthitch as we crawled, and my knees got burnt. My kneecaps were burning and Bobby's pushing me in there and he's on top of me trying to take the line and I'm like, "Bob, get off of me!" (laughing) "Bobby!" Dave Farris come walking through the front door--it was a kitchen fire--Dave Farris comes walking through the front door like nothing ever happened, you know, and I'm going, "Bobby! My knees are burning, fer Christ's sakes, get off of me!" (laughing and laughing). I can tell you another one about Central Falls. It was Railroad Street. Cubby was on Ladder 2 in charge. I said, "Cub, can you get me a line?" He said, "Yeah, I'll get you a line don't worry about it." We got the line. Central Falls guys were up there. And me and Willy (Will Maher) are up there. We grab the line and we start hitting the rooms, we're hitting rooms, and he'll probably kill me for telling you this, but he was--they had a set of bunk beds. This room was pretty well involved. We knocked it (the fire) down and the C.F. guys are yelling, "Hey, Pawtucket, you guys okay over there?" "Yeah, we're good. you guys okay?" "Yeah, we're good." That's how we used to do it, yelling back and forth. So Willy got up on the top bunk bed to pull a ceiling down. Next thing I know I hear this huge crash. He went right through the bed-slats and landed on the first bed. And I went, "Hey, what the hell are you doing? Taking a nap?" You know? and he's looking at me. He goes, "I think I'm a little too heavy for the fucking bunk beds." (laughing). And we laughed and laughed, still fighting the fire. Thank God he didn't get hurt. I said, "Will, you alright?" "Yeah, I'm fine," he says, "But Jesus Christ, Chick..." It scared the shit out of him at first because he wasn't expecting it, you know? TT- That's funny. Now looking back at your career, I mean you did it the way you wanted to do it, but is there anything you regret? I mean you were an Engine 2 guy and that was it. CC- That was my thing. I enjoyed working for (Chief) Meerbott, we were friends on the outside, and we were friends on the inside on the job. We snowmobiled together for 25 years, I loved the guys I worked, we all worked good together. I knew, especially Buck, Dave Langevin, if it was a street--I knew most of the streets well, and Buck did too. And I'd say to Buck, like say Dunnell Avenue, we'd be going to the trucks and I'd say, "Buck, Dunnell Avenue. Is that Pawtucket Avenue to get there?" "Yeah, you know, where I used to live. Where Miller's convienence store was, right on the corner." "Okay, I got it." And I'd fly out the door on Engine 2 and he'd catch up with me by Pawtucket Avenue, here comes Ladder 1 over the hill with the tiller. The camaraderie was strong. Very strong. We helped each other out, you know? If you had a personal problem, guys would help you out. Talk you down. That's how it was. TT- Guys looking out for each other. CC- Exactly. That's how it was. I mean we spent so many Christmases and Thanksgivings and holidays together. It took me three months to get used to being at home with my wife. Swear to God. And Laurie's a sweet heart, you know her. TT- She is. CC- But it took me three months to get acclimated and out of the mold. TT- Lemay said the same thing. He said, "I didn't know how much I needed to retire until I retired." (Laughs) CC- Yeah. Yeah. You start to sleep, eat normal. I still eat kind of fast. I loved this job. My father said to me when I was about seventeen. I mean I was gonna quit school and fix cars. That was my thing. My uncle had a shop. My cousin quit school and he was driving a brand new TR-6, you know? So my old man says, "Nope. You're going on the fire department." And thank God I did because they sold the place and it's not there no more and I had the best thirty years of my life, you know? On this job. On this job. And I loved every minute of it. TT- Right? They had to pry you out of here. CC- When the doctor told me that I had a lung issue, it broke my heart. Broke my heart. Really. TT- You fought it hard though, you kept trying to get back full-duty ... CC- I tried, I tried. But I just couldn't do it no more. Couldn't do it. My body gave up. TT- You took a helluva beating. CC- I took an ass-pasting. Yeah. I did. (laughs) I loved it. Loved it. That picture of me with that black eye, that was after a whole ceiling fell on my head. And I still stayed in there, you know? Meadow Street, the floor on the third-floor melted. It was gone. And I can remember Will coming up the back stairway yelling. The fire was all in the front. Harry Callahan had to go back and get a Scott. RJ was the training officer at the time and he said, "I could see you hitting it through the windows. You were getting it all alone." I was, until Will came up through the back. And then that picture of me sitting on the windowsill, the ladder was opening up the eaves and I was wetting it all down as they did it ... you know, I just...I loved it. I loved it. Every minute of it. I really did. I met you, too. TT- It's true though. If you can't have fun at a fire, you really shouldn't be here. CC- Exactly. You gotta be careful, you gotta use your head, I tried to tell Matty McMahon, I said to Matty, because he used to ride with us when he was a kid, I said, "Matty, you hook up with a good boss, like John Wallace, if you can hook up with a guy like him you'll be good." I said to him, "Forget about Tiverton, you're in Pawtucket now. You do it Pawtucket's way. You know what I mean? Just because you're a firefighter somewhere else for five or six years, you're in the city now. TT- Right? It doesn't mean nothing. CC- No. No. TT- Joe Cordeiro one time told me, he was like, "I don't care if you were a Battalion Chief on the FDNY, if you're gonna come to Pawtucket, you're gonna do it our way." CC- Exactly. I was told that too. My father, the day I got sworn in, my old man said to me, "Keep these open (motions to his eyes), keep these open (motions to his ears), and keep this closed (motions to his mouth). That's exactly what he told me. He said, "You pay attention, you soak up as much as you can." I was kind of disappointed that I never made lieutenant, but I was in charge a ton, a lot, because nobody ever wanted to be on Engine 2. Another funny story, one day it was Al Jack, Timmy Williams, myself, Bobby Howe-- they all bid off the truck. It was me and the dog on Engine 2. Me and Pepper. I was like, "Do I stink or something? Why did everybody leave?" (laughs). Everybody went somewhere. TT- Now also, the inception of fire departments, it started in this area. There were organized departments in Boston, Pawtucket, Providence ... like the fire department started here. That's a long tradition. CC- Very proud. People, even to this day ... my niece, we'll go to TGIFridays in Warwick. And she'll say, "This is my uncle, he was a fireman for thirty years." People hear that and they thank you. They thank you. You know? You're not a bum. One time on Coyle Avenue, it was the day before Christmas. We had a chimney fire and Meerbott said to us, "Guys, let's kind of go easy." There were presents everywhere. Decorations. We took all those presents and put them out on the porch so the kids would have a Christmas the next day. We took the chimney apart brick by brick so we didn't have to close the house down. And another time, Thanksgiving day. Portuguese people on Star Street. They had a kitchen fire. The kitchen was downstairs. Everything got destroyed. And my friend Myles, he used to own the Riverside Diner, every Thanksgiving he would bring us down a whole turkey dinner. Complete. So I says to Bobby Thurber, "Bob, what do you think? You know?" He says, "Tell that guy to follow us to the station." We gave those people the whole complete turkey dinner. From nuts, to pies, to stuffing you know, we gave it all to those people. They were foreigners, they didn't speak good English. But some people think we're bums, but a lot of people respect what we do. To me, it's the most gratifying, respected job I can think of. I've seen a lot more than I've told you, I've lost kids in my hands, I've had some funny runs, good runs, we had a lot of laughs, and at the same time we had a lot of sadness. You know what I mean? TT- When you knew it was time to go, it seems the guys just walk away. They never come back. It's like they just disappear back into the mist, and those left behind just carry on. CC- It is kind of like that. I haven't been downtown in ...a long time. I didn't know what to do at first. I was like, "Should I go down there and have a coffee with the guys?" But I can remember sitting at the kitchen table and having an old guy come in that you really respected, say Ray Gilbert for instance, he'd come down to see Barbara and poke his head in the kitchen and say, "Hey guys, what's up?" "Hey, Ray, how you doing? You want a coffee or something?" "Naw, I'm gonna go. Thanks. It was good to see you." "Hey, Ray, take care. If you need anything you just give us a holler." And that's the way it was. For me, like I fix a lot of guys cars nowadays, and I'll come to the station to bring the car back, and I'll say, "Hey guys." And off I go. Why it's like that, I don't know. TT- It's weird. It's almost like it just seals over, right? And once you walk out, it's like the nucleus kind of keeps going. I remember Chief Cute, after he retired, he came in for a coffee, and he was like, "I don't even feel like I should be here right now." CC- Yeah. It's like you're bothering the guys. Like if they're cooking or whatever and someone walks in and they have to stop what they're doing and bullshit with you ... You can get a run at any second and be gone for five minutes or half the day. I don't want to interrupt that. I know I'm still part of this job, but in my way. In my head. I'm still part of this job. I'd do anything for anyone of you. I would. But to come and hang and watch a movie or whatever ... naw, that's just not the way it is. TT- It's one of the things that's so surprising but it's true. You're out of the rotation. CC- Exactly. I play golf with Tang (Chief Tanguay) every Monday. I take care of his cars, his father's car, and the guys support me, Tommy, big time. I can't thank the guys enough. And Topper let's me use his shop, and I fix his stuff. But I got a shop. And the guys support me. And I take care of the guys, money wise, because they got families and shit. For me, it keeps me healthy, keeps me busy. Nelson quit, but I called him when he quit and I said, "Nelson, I want to thank you for giving me a life after the fire department." Because he's the one who got me into Topper's garage. He says, "Chickie, you have no idea how much you've helped me." And I said, "Really, Nelson, I mean it." TT- You gotta stay busy, right? CC- I walk my dog every morning, have a coffee, and then I go to the shop. I do two or three cars a day, and if Topper's got something for me to do I fix it, and it works. I can't thank Topper enough. I could tell you about fires all night but I don't want you to have to type all day long. (Laughs). TT- These are the stories people need to hear. CC- Smithfield Avenue, the theater, there are so many. And car accidents and everything. I don't know if Bobby told you this one but it really bothered us for a while. We got a call on Walcott Street. We got a call for car into a pole. There's four victims. So we get there. A Mexican guy in the front seat, two Mexican guys in the backseat, but there was supposed to be a girl too. Well come to find out she got thrown from the car, hit a van in the driveway and died. She was in the driveway. The other three were dead too. The two in the back were just mangled. So, we cut the roof off and me and Bobby climbed into the backseat to check the guys. Now we're sitting there in the backseat. I got this guy's head in my lap. The back of his head was gone. Gone. And Bobby's guy, same thing. His neck was broken. We had to sit there for an hour and a half waiting for the Medical Examiner. We could not move. TT- What? CC- The police froze the scene because of all the deaths. It just so happened that the way they were positioned, we actually had to crawl over the trunk to get into the backseat and check for pulses. Once we got in there, we had to maneuver the mashed bodies to do that, and we became part of the scene. We had them on our laps, we could not move. The M.E. has to come and pronounce them dead, pictures gotta to be taken. So we yelled for someone to get our cigarettes from the truck. So we're smoking cigarettes while we waited. When we got back we took a hose and washed their brains from our night hitches and went to bed. TT- Another day at the office. CC- You know how I met Laurie? TT- No. CC- When the wall collapsed at Stop and Shop, that's how I met Laurie. I dug her boyfriend out of the rubble. Three guys died that day. TT- Lemay told me that story. How awful. CC- It was. One guy was decapitated, the another was cut in half, the third was smushed. TT- Jesus, Chickie, you've had one of the best careers anyone's ever had. CC- I can say yes. I did. I really did. And I loved every second of it. TT- It's been an honor. It really has. December 25, 2009
It had been twenty-three years since anyone committed the cardinal sin of calling out sick on Christmas. Everyone knew a year in advance which holidays they’d be working, so making someone else lose time with their family was considered extremely taboo. In 1986, a lieutenant named Al Raddison called out sick Christmas morning and was promptly re-named “Al-bee,” for “Al-bee Home for Christmas.” This year, Kevin Wilson had been stuck on Rescue 2 for 96 hours. When he finally walked out the door Christmas Eve, he woke up Christmas morning with diarrhea and a 103-degree fever. Another guy, Ray Latanski, was in year two of an ugly divorce. He wouldn’t be allowed to see his kids this Christmas, so he was at the end of a three-day bender when he showed up drunk for work Christmas Eve. The guys at Station 4 drove him right back home and someone else got held instead. But justice was not long delayed. Those on shift Christmas Day promptly labeled them both “bags of shit” and immediately started torturing them by text. The Alert Tone hit at 10:23 am as Fire Alarm announced, “Attention Rescue 2 and Engine 3, Still Alarm. 161 Belmore Drive for a man in need of assistance …” “Sounds like my life story.” Lt. Russel Brodie headed for the truck. He was usually on Engine 5 but got forced to Engine 3 on the day shift between his night shifts. Surviving his third divorce without alcohol was bad enough, but working round the clock was pushing some guys to the edge. He was a tall man with a seven-foot wingspan. His blonde toupee, as always, was as fascinating as it was disconcerting. As he climbed into the truck, he said, “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.” He was only half-joking. “Let’s go, morons.” Useless and Toe-Tag were the usual privates on C-Shift, but Toe-Tag, the worst EMT on the job, had swapped out his Christmas shift. Filling in was Blister, ironically nicknamed because he had no work ethic. He was also a strident Yankees fan, so Lt. Brodie had even more reason to hate him. As far as crews go, Engine 3 on C-Shift led by Lt. Cunty Conti was one of the worst on the job. Lt. Brodie was just hoping to survive the shift without having to rely in any way on either one of the men he commanded. “Jesus Christ.” He angrily pointed. “You just missed Belmore. This isn’t even my fucking district and I know that.” “I always get that confused with—” “Stop talking.” Lt. Brodie said into the mic, “Engine 3’s more or less on scene.” Because of who he was with and what he had just said, he could hear laughter in the background when Fire Alarm answered, “Engine 3’s on scene at 1029.” They circled the block before stopping in front of a single-story cape. It had a long wooden ramp extending off the front porch. There was no snow on it because of the unseasonable forty-degree weather. At the front door, Lt. Brodie knocked and called out, “Hello! Fire department!” A muffled return shout was unintelligible. Lt. Brodie tried the door but it was locked. He heard on his radio, “Rescue 2 to Engine 3. Whaddaya got?” Lt. Brodie answered, “Not sure yet. Still trying to gain entry.” “Roger. Two minutes out.” “Well don’t just stand there!” Lt. Brodie yelled at Useless. “Check the windows, see if we can’t get lucky and find one that’s unlocked.” Useless’ real name was Grant Ungerfelt. He was a cerebral sort with no common sense or intrinsic knowledge of anything medical or mechanical. Even worse, he didn’t care enough to learn. Lt. Brodie saw Blister still wandering around the truck and screamed, “What’re you doing?” “I can’t find the sawzall!” “Sawzall? Are you kidding me?” As Useless half-heartedly checked the first-floor windows, Lt. Brodie cupped his hands around his eyes and looked through the back door. In the center of the kitchen, he could see a man in a wheelchair. “Please help me!” the man shouted. “It won’t move!” “All right! Hang on! You got a spare key hidden out here?” “No!” Lt. Brodie already had a plan in mind. Like deputized criminals, firemen were taught how to break into cars, homes, and all types of buildings, in all types of ways. He pulled a putty knife from the pocket of his night-hitch. Most guys had pockets jammed with screwdrivers, knives, pliers, spanner wrenches, door-chalks, and everything else. He threw open the window and yelled, “Blister! Get over here!” Blister’s real name was Donny Aiello. Somehow, he was the disappointing son of a legendary battalion chief. Considered a big-talker who accomplished little to back any of it up, it was hard for others to take him seriously. Like B.C. McLoud, and even Chief Fishbakke, he was a political creature focused on all the wrong things. Skeptical of anyone that rode the coattails of someone else’s hard work, Lt. Brodie was no fan of Blister. Lt. Brodie knelt down and offered up his knee. “Here you go. I’ll boost you through.” “Me? Useless is the junior man—” “I’ll give you one choice. You can either climb through this window, or I get to kick you in the nuts.” “That’s not really fair. By contract I don’t think you—hey, wait!” Rescue 2 pulled on-scene just as Lt. Brodie’s boot landed squarely in Blister’s crotch, lifted him off his feet, and dumped him to the ground. Lt. Killmoor spit out his coffee. “God, I’m so happy we were here to see that.” “Me too.” Sack threw it into park. “Look. He ain’t even moving.” They opened their doors in time to hear Lt. Brodie losing his mind. “You piece of shit! Get in the truck! You make me sick!” “Merry Christmas, Russ!” Lt. Killmoor cheerily called out. “What’re you guys doing? Auditioning for the next Jackass movie?” “I might as well have come alone!” Lt. Brodie stepped back to the window and knelt again. “All right, Nut-Sack, in you go.” Sack stepped on the knee, grabbed the sill, and pulled himself through. He made sure to land on the toilet lid to avoid the urine-stained floor. Lt. Killmoor shook Lt. Brodie’s hand and said, “Where’s your other private?” “I don’t know. Probably hiding around back? Just look to where there’s absolutely nothing going on and he’ll be in the dead center of that.” “At least he’s consistent.” “Are you trying to send me over the edge, Dave? Cause I’m real fucking close.” Sack threw open the back door. Inside, the kitchen had one dim bulb. A man in a wheelchair was stuck inside its shadows. He was balding but had a ponytail and a look of total desperation. He said, “I’ve been stuck here for six hours. I really tried everything, but it’s a new chair—” “What’s your name?” Lt. Killmoor asked. “Buddy.” “Okay, Buddy. What’s going on with you physically?” “Nothing. I’m officially a quadriplegic but I have enough use of my right hand to steer this thing.” “So we’re just here because the wheelchair doesn’t work?” “You see this?” He pointed to his shirt that said, Not As Lean, But Still a Marine. “I’m a fucking veteran—” “Whoa, whoa. I didn’t mean it like that. I just want to make sure I know you’re otherwise okay. That’s all.” “I got no family left, man, believe me, I tried for six fucking hours—” “Is this the battery?” “Yes.” “You got a spare? Let’s try that first.” Nothing worked. Thirty minutes later, they had booted, re-booted, and gone through the small phonebook-sized manual. Buddy must have realized this because he suddenly said, “Please don’t leave.” “We’re not going anywhere.” Lt. Brodie scoured the manual for contact information. “If we can’t get this figured out, though, we might have to take you to the hospital.” “Please.” Buddy’s long dead legs were shrunken sticks. “I don’t want to go to the hospital on Christmas for nothing.” “I know, dude, but we can’t just leave you here like this.” “Then can you just put me into my bed?” “Do you have your old chair?” “No.” He was crestfallen. “I had to give it up to get this one.” “Where’d you get it from?” “Providence. Some distributor. Should be on the receipt.” “I got an idea.” Lt. Brodie had Fire Alarm contact the Providence Fire Alarm to look up the contact information for Mobility Distributors. He was given three numbers. The first two went nowhere, but the third rang an answering service. A pleasant man said the offices were closed but would re-open in the morning. “That’s not gonna work,” Lt. Brodie answered. “I’m at the home of one of your customers—” “This is just the answering service, sir.” “Be that as it may, I’m a lieutenant on the Sachem City Fire Department, and we’re open twenty-four hours a day. This man is a decorated combat vet—” “I was never in combat,” Buddy quickly said. “I got hurt flipping an ATV in Colorado Springs on leave.” Lt. Brodie shushed him and continued, “I want to be connected with either the owner or a technician or someone who can fix this thing. We’re not leaving a quadriplegic veteran stuck in the middle of his goddamn kitchen on Christmas just because your product is faulty.” “Sir, like I said, this is just an answering service—” “I don’t think you get it. This is not a negotiation.” “Hang on, please.” A series of phone calls finally produced a service technician on the line. Soon after, Buddy was back at full power and pulling celebratory donuts in his kitchen. He said, “I can’t thank y’all enough.” “No problem.” Lt. Brodie stacked the manuals on the counter. “Call back if this thing shits the bed again, okay?” “I really appreciate it, guys, Merry Christmas.” Buddy closed the door behind them. “I can’t believe it’s only eleven o’clock.” Lt. Brodie looked at Useless and Blister warming themselves in the truck. “I’m almost tempted to dump the entire hose-bed and force these two morons to repack every inch of it just for the fuck of it.” “Company drill on Christmas Day?” Lt. Killmoor smiled. “That would turn you into a legend.” “We’ll see how the day goes. At the very least, they’re cleaning all the bathrooms.” “Bring the pain, Russ.” “Yeah, Merry fucking Christmas.” “Fire Alarm to Rescue 2?” “Go ahead.” “Disposition?” “We’re getting ready to clear Belmore.” “Roger, sir. Start heading for 216 Morris Drive for difficulty breathing.” “Roger.” Lt. Killmoor called out to Lt. Brodie, “I’m climbing back into my sleigh! Put out some cookies at the 3’s and maybe I’ll slide down the chimney!” “No offense, Dave, but judging by your waistline, I’d say you’re chimney sliding days are over.” .Captain Robert Thurber
January 5, 2017 Bob Thurber is a man few words, and the ones he does utter are usually screamed directly into your face. He rose through the officer ranks of both the Rescue and Firefighting Divisions. He was at 9/11 by 10 PM that same night, and fought some of Pawtucket’s biggest fires. He taught the city’s Fire Academy where he helped break in the “new guys.” His father was Chief of Department, his brother is a current Battalion Chief, and his son is a private on Engine 1. Tradition runs deep. We sat down at Station 4 two years after his retirement, and this is what he said … TT: Why don't we start at the very beginning, in North Providence. What year did you get on with those guys? RT: Probably around 1980. I went up and joined. I had known a couple of guys that were up there, I was working Costigans at the time my partner was Russ Hayes, Tim Hayes' son. He talked me into it and it was by far the best thing I ever did. So I started at the Marieville Fire Station, and then went to Centerdale and stayed there until I got on Pawtucket in 1987. TT: Were you a Cardiac EMT at that point? RT: I was. I became an EMT in 1975, and I started for a private ambulance service that May. In 1980 I became an EMT-I. I took it at Roger Williams Hospital. Then Memorial offered a class for the Pawtucket Fire Department, so Chief Doire, the old man Chief Doire, asked me if I wanted to go. So I was able to attend the class in 1982. I became a Cardiac and didn't get on Pawtucket until '87. TT: Now, when you were (working) private ambulance in the mid-70s, what were you guys doing? Lemay says in those days (private ambulance did the) transporting, because we only had one rescue. RT: We (private ambulance) did all the transportation. Costigan's Ambulance, located at 220 Cottage Street, which is now the O'Neill Funeral Home, did all the Pawtucket rescue. So we ran rescue 24/7. Most of the guys (firefighters on Rescue 1), as soon as they got dispatched ... they would call for a private ambulance. TT: So the fire department would get to the scene, and then you guys would show up and do the transport. RT: Yup. TT: (That would free them up) for another run if it came in. RT: Yup. There was only one rescue in the City this is 1975 or 76, and of course it wasn't as busy as today's world. But we still saw a lot of bad stuff. TT: So the medical aspect of the job-- RT: There was a saying going around back in all of EMS--"you call, we haul, and that's all." I've had people get hit by cars, electrocuted, and we didn't board or collar them. We picked them up off the street, threw them on the (gurney)--if they were lucky we would put oxygen on them, transported them to the nearest hospital, usually Pawtucket Memorial. No Trauma Centers in those days. TT: So load and go. RT: Load and go. TT: So you got here in '87-- RT: I got a funny story about that. This was the private ambulance days. We get a call, meet the Rescue, Cottage Street and Angle, and we pull in. It's just a little in from Cottage street, and it's a lady in cardiac arrest. Young woman. So the rescue guys--she was driving, they're doing CPR on her sitting up. Or course you get a giggle out of that. So we get her in the back of the truck. And I'm a new kid, like seventeen years old, and I start doing CPR, and the rescue guy comes with me, lights up a cigarette, and says, "Kid, she's dead." So I'm like, all right. So he smokes, and he's sitting in the captain's chair behind the patient. I'm sitting on the bench, and he's smoking a cigarette, and (after) we get to Memorial Hospital, he puts the cigarette on the floor of the ambulance, steps on it, and goes, "All right, kid, show time." (Thurber motions like he's doing CPR as the ambulance doors open). (Laughs) TT: Jesus Christ. RT: This was the shit that happened back then. There wasn't many rules, no State Protocols and you just did your own thing. Like I said, this lady was young, probably in her 40s. TT: But back in the day, they couldn't really do anything anyway right? RT: Well, that was it. You had an ambu-bag, and a lot of times we did mouth to mouth, we didn't even use the ambu-bag, it was just basic CPR and mouth to mouth. There was no airway adjuncts. We were basic as basic could be. TT: When they brought Codes (heart attacks, pulseless people) into the hospital back then, were they using the same kind of drug set up? Like Epi? RT: You know, yes, They would use Sodium Bicarbonate and that was used as a first line cardiac drug, which it isn't today. Even when we did it in 1982, when we started getting into the drugs, it was still sodium bicarb, epi, atropine, there wasn't a time limit like today, most of the time we would do CPR in the home, and do the Cardiac procedures in the truck. TT: So it's '87. You're on the job. Where do you go first? RT: I got appointed November 17, 1987. Of course it was the happiest day in my life. Back then you (worked only) days for a couple of weeks, and then I got assigned to the 4th Battalion. D-Group. My father was the Battalion Chief, so I got lucky because of him, I rode downtown--I think it was maybe a month. (That's where they) just reacquaint you with the fire truck because my school was back in 1985. We did transfers. If the 5s needed somebody, all the young kids would take the transfer. I did Fire Alarm. We didn't have to bid in there at the time, we had civilian dispatchers, so you'd get transferred in there if someone was on vacation or out for any reason. Then my first assignment, after our six-month probation, I got assigned to Ladder 2. I was pissed at my old man for putting me there, but he wanted to keep me on his shift for the holidays (Laughs). And I go, "Well, I don't want to go to Ladder 2!" so I stayed there, maybe four months. TT: Did you catch a fire in those four months? RT: Yeah. Blackstone Landing was being converted into Condos. We had called it Bad Luck Landing? It was under construction, and we had a fire on the top floor that extended into the roof. It was put out quick by the 4s. I was on Ladder 2, so we were on the roof. I was with Dick Parent, John Buchanon, myself. So yeah, we caught a couple of fires. Explanation of bad-luck-landing. They had the fire, they had a major flood that weakened the structure so bad we had details therre 24/7, we had a kid get electrocuted while power washing the building. This is during my first few months on the job. I’m transferred to Rescue 2 with Steve Cleary, Acting Lt. Engine 2 has Jimmy Condon, Mike ZZZ, Joe Bruzzi and Joe Cordeiro. Joe is brand new like maybe a couple days on job. Out of all these guys only Joe and I are Cardiacs. Oh boy! So we pull the guy off the bucket and perform CPR, place on monitor, defibrillate, IV whole 9 yards. All drugs aboard, the guy lives. We save this 22 year old life. We are beyond thrilled--big save. Yes we went to the bar to celebrate after shift. TT: What'd you think about the roof? Did you love being up on the roof? RT: No, I didn't really, that's why I always stayed on an engine company. I mean the Ladder was all right but it wasn't my thing. I wanted to be inside the fire, doing fire suppression and/or search and rescue. The roof thing did not really work for me. Actually I thought it was pretty boring. but yeah, never really liked ladder work. TT: You were an engine guy RT: Yeah. TT: So ladder 2 for how long? RT: I’m guessing four months. And then the bid came up and I bid to Engine 4, B-group. At that time we had no officers, so Tommy Griffin was acting lieutenant. It was Tommy, myself, Mike Fox, and John Robin. Tommy was the veteran, the rest of us were all new guys. We came on around the same time. TT: Now there were no officers because of a promotional thing, right? RT: Yes. The union at that time was boycotting promotions because they were done by politics. So the local boycotted it for a good two, three years. And then finally a new administration came in and they agreed to outside testing, and we promoted 26 guys in one day. Most of them were lieutenants. We didn't have captains back then. So it was probably 20 lieutenants, couple Battalion Chiefs, maybe three Battalion chiefs. So finally we got the officers...and about that time we had another bid, and I bid to Engine 3 with Lieutenant Mike Carter, Tommy Moore, and Bobby Howe. I was friendly with Tommy and Bobby, so we were like the three amigos together. TT: Were you all around the same academy class? RT: We were all in the same academy. 1985 academy. Tommy was the first to go on, Bobby Howe, and then me. Tommy went right on in '85. Bobby went on in August of '87. I went on in November. And I stayed there maybe a year, maybe a little longer--I kind of lost track--and then Engine 2, 4th Battalion opened up. I think Feeley, Tom Feeley, and Dave Pizzo got promoted to rescue lieutenant, so I bid down there. I'd always wanted to be on Engine 2. I bid there, stayed there like six months, and then bid to Engine 2 with Steve Smith, Paul Keenan, Kenny Moreau, so it was a good group down there. TT: Is Steve Smith "Mean Smitty?" RT: Yeah, Mean Smitty. He was my lieutenant, and we were good friends. Oh and John McConaughey was there too. I was the fourth man on the truck. I was always going out the door, we did transfers back then, which you guys didn't have to do when you came on. Transfers--you went all the time, and they were usually for three cycles at a time. Could be Fire Alarm, Engine 5, Ladder 2--every truck had four guys on it and somebody would be on transfer. Somebody was out sick, personal day, vacation day, whatever. Back then you took three cycle vacations. There was none of this day-here day-there. TT: Now Mean Smitty, there's a couple funny stories. Like one day he walked in and was actually in a good mood, whistling,--like one of the few times--and somebody said, "What'd you do? Run over a flock of geese?" RT: There's a lot of funny stories. Everybody called him Mean Smitty and he's not. He's a pussycat, a great officer, I enjoyed working for him. TT: Just a tough dude RT: He was a tough dude. Still is. TT: Most of these guys came out of the mills, blue collar. This Pawtucket job is professional now, meaning there's a lot of guys that might have some college, the young guys, but back in the day that wasn't the case. RT: Oh no, this was definitely a blue collar job--it still is, we do get some college people here but they're all twats. (Laughs) All you College boy’s and Girls I’m only kidding. TT: So guys would have side jobs to make ends meet... RT: Everybody had to work a side job. Everybody had kids. I had two kids, so I worked painting with Joe Gildea and Johnny McConaughey and then I went to Brinks, worked for Brinks for a little while, and then I went to Quinny and painted with him for a while. You had to make ends meet. We were only making a couple hundred bucks a week back then. Maybe like $270, take home $220. TT: So you're on Engine 2 ... RT: I stayed there until 1991. Then I got promoted to Rescue Lieutenant, went to Rescue 1, West Avenue, stayed there--I was with Artie Mintsmenn, and that was awkward because I was only three years on the job, and Artie had like 15. TT: Was he on the rescue the whole time? RT: Yeah. TT: Why didn't he make officer? Just didn't take the test? RT: I don’t know, Never took the test, he was content being a chauffer on Rescue 1. I mean he took the test later but back then there was a lot of competition. TT: Guys were fighting to get over there. RT: Yeah. Tom, Not sure what your getting at here. But people were not flocking to get to Rescue. TT: So you're a lieutenant on Rescue1... RT: Yeah. And I stayed there for the next, I got close to ten years. I got out of there in like 2000. But I mean, back then we did firefighting, so I got the best of both worlds. I hate sitting in the station. I get bored. So, I want to be on Engine 2, that's what I wanted to do, but the rescue, I was content with, I was an officer working OT making money. Worked for some decent Battalion Chiefs, where they didn't bother us, we could go into the fire ... as long as we answered the radios if one of our guys got hurt, we would respond which we did of course. At that time, only the officers carried radios, and I'll get into that story in a minute. But it was just the officers, lieutenants, because that's all we had, so they would carry a portable radio. So you'd listen to it, and if they called for someone hurt, you go out and do whatever you got to do. Of course, I had the experience because of the private ambulance thing. I Saw a lot of stuff. Shootings, stabbings, auto accidents, extrications...lot of serious things. Once, maybe over a year, I had five, six kids seriously injured, they ended up sending me to a councilor...I was starting to act a little bizarre. So they thought it was the that. The Chief at the time, pulled me aside, asked me if I would go and I was like, "yeah, sure I'll go talk to them." But the incidents were very sad, one night me and Bill Quinn, Quinny was my chauffer, and we were at a fire right here on Broadway, and we worked the fire all night, it was a big three-decker, going like a son of a bitch. So it's like 6 in the morning--I forget who the chief was--that's sad, but anyways, they sent us on our way--oh it was Dick Renzi, he was our Battalion Chief. So they said you can go back in service, "Rescue's 1's back in service." FAB sends us right out, "Hey, can you head to Mineral Spring Avenue. Report of a woman down in the basement." So we go with a North Providence Engine, get there, it was a was a women on crack, laying in a vacant basement of a three-decker, and she's slumped over with her heroin needle still in her arm, or whatever they did back then, it was heroin, and she had a little baby with her. She fell on the baby, and the baby smothered to death. So of course it was cold out, very cold, so we did CPR on the baby for show, or maybe for us--she didn't even know--got another rescue to take her, we did CPR on the baby, the baby lived for like half a day. But ended up dying which...the kid died because mom was a drug addict. Then we had a kid, I was with Dick Lemay, it was a Sunday, they couldn't get anybody that day for a callback, so he was in charge and I was driving. We go to the 5s district. The kid was playing in the backyard with the dog, young kid, 2,3 years old, and they had the dog on a clothesline, you know with the chain, chained to the line, and the dog got excited and wrapped the chain around the baby and the baby strangled. And then we catch a run on Lonsdale Avenue, this is like a week after, it's not Lonsdale, it's Main street, Harrison and Main there, that big three-decker we go to all the time. Well a kid fell out of the third-floor window and landed in the parking lot, so we did CPR because the engine company was doing CPR, they got there ahead of us, so we continued, went to Rhode Island, obviously it's a Trauma, the kid died. And as I'm getting the information gathered, I found out it's Dave Pizzo's nephew. Dave was relieving me that night on the Rescue. So he had to ... I had to tell him when he got in, so he had to go home, obviously, it's his brother's kid. And then shortly thereafter I had a fourteen-year-old, up in the 5s district, I forget the street, he's doing that, there's name for it, I can't think of it, but he hung himself masturbating-- TT: Auto-- RT: Auto-erotica. Yep, and he uh, died, a the family was extremely upset, they found him, so they cut him down and laid him on the porch but the cops, you know, obviously, they investigated, and that's how he died. Then I had a tragedy, right down the street from the station 1, corner of West and Randall. Our companies are out at a firecall, and I got the 3s coming, 3s are coming to help us. So we're first in, we go upstairs, I forget who I was with, and there's this big black man, naked and wet, and holding a little baby, I'm going to guess a year or two, and he's like this holding the baby (holds his arms out). So I grab the baby, and it was in cardiac arrest, so we did CPR, I ran down the stairs--you get that tunnel vision we always talk about in the fire school, so I knew the guy was naked, I knew the baby was naked, but I didn't but two and two together and think of sexual content, in my head. So we get in, and Pete O'Neill, Lieutenant O'Neill, he's in charge of the 3s, and so we're working up the kid and he notices the anal opening of the baby was widened, bizarre. Se we knew we had a child abuse case. Turns out the mom was in jail and this clown was watching the kid. So they went and got in the bathtub, he did whatever he did with the baby, and he went to jail. But he pleaded out, so none of us ended up testifying. TT: Jesus Christ. RT: That was a tough one. So, I had those runs and they all came at once, maybe within a year, maybe less than a year, so I start drinking heavily. They noticed at the station, and the chief noticed at different events that we had, and so they sent me to this councilor and all the councilor wanted to do was talk about what we're talking about--things that I've done--so I went twice, said I ain't going back. So anyways, it all worked out. I still drink heavy and life goes on. (Laughs). So that was my rescue years, my EMS years. TT: So after a while, it's enough. The toll of the body count right? You were ready to go... RT: Yeah. I had an MVA, right at the Attleboro/Pawtucket line, Prom night, We had five teenagers killed in a car accident. A few months later we had three killed in a car accident, kids, teenagers, coming this way right at Broadway, going south, So, yeah, that was tragic. One of the kids, we're working on him, trying to get him out of the car--they're dead, we know they're all dead--mass casualty incident, so we had other rescues coming in, we were the first ones there. And we're trying to extricate, and the one that we ended up taking we didn't find her until afterwards, there was a guy on top of her and she was on the floor of the frontseat, all curled up. TT: What did they hit? RT: The jersey barrier and another car, but I mean the car, we had to extricate them. Attleboro had their jaws there, Pawtucket had their jaws, and we had to cut them out of the car. It was a tough scene. TT: By this point, 2000, you've had enough.. RT: Yep. Unfortunate circumstances lead me to get off Rescue, my kids were grown didn’t need the extra money so I got off. Mean Smitty ,or as I would call him Lieutenant Smith, is in training. The Firefighter that was in there was Chief Renzi's brother Russ. He died of cancer. Young guy. So I asked the chief, "I got to get off this fucking rescue. I want to go into training." At that time, the chief assigned you to the division of training. Lt. Smith was in charge and I just wanted to get out of the Rescue. Lt. Smith was out with Injury, so I was still going to make lieutenant's pay, I was going to be the acting lieutenant of training, so he goes--this is a funny story actually--Condon, Chief Condon goes, "Oh no, I think you're good on the rescue. Stay there." (laughs). So I went to Renzi, Renzi was the assistant Chief by then, and I says, "Hey, with the death of your brother I would like to go to that spot, there's an opening, I know there's no bid, but I want to go over there." So he talked Chief Condon into putting me over there. Of course, they sent me to school to be a training officer, 1041, fire service instructor, I became a State Instructor began teaching for the Academy. So it all worked out. I stayed there, I got promoted to lieutenant in 2001, so it was a little more than a year that I was there. I talked the Department into letting me run the Fire Academy which we ended up doing a ton of Academies. Then Engine 2 open for a Lieutenant and I took the Bid. TT: So 2002 you're at Engine 2. RT: 2001 I was there. I took Joe Cordiero's spot. he went to a different shift on Engine 2. TT: Were you 4th Battalion? RT: No, C-group, Dick Meerbottt was the Battalion Chief. TT: So now you're an officer on Engine 2. Talk about some of that stuff. It's downtown, mainly manufacturing, highway, some residential... you must've caught some good jobs. RT: Yep. Great jobs. Obviously, mostly second due engines, or third due, but I had a few first due. Take a right out of the station, go past Fogarty Housing, first left, I forget the name of the street, we pull up, I got Stevie Small, myself and Tommy Moore. Tommy Moore's pumping. So me and Small take a line up and the fire's BLOWING out the roof! So I say to myself, "We're gonna be here all night, man, this is fucking beautiful." So me and Smally are crawling up to the third-floor stairs, we get up there, and we didn't even need a fucking mask. So we turn the water on (motions with the nozzle) and the fire's out. It had multiple-- TT: It had cooked through the roof. RT: Yeah, it had multiple sky lights, it melted them, they were all gone--so it looked like a spectacular fire and it was nothing. It was just a room and contents fire, and we put it out real quick and we just went home...The best fire I had first due downtown, the Subway shop, right on Broad Street, across from Walgreens, there was a Subway, fruit market, residental it was a huge complex. I think this was 2003. Joe Cordiero was on days, I was relieving Joe. I put my shit on the truck, the bell hits, and it's for this address, I forget the number, and Joe goes, "Ah, we just left there. It was a nuisance box."ok Joe, "All right." We get dressed and off we go to this nuisance box on Broad Street, I pull up and it's fucking well involved, Fire in the rear of a 2nd. Hand shop, smoke shooting out of every orifice in the fucking place (laughs), so we worked that and we were there all fucking night. Domino's Pizza was across the street, they sent us over some pizzas. So yeah, that was a good fire. It was me ,Dave Boisclair, and Keith Wildenhaim. TT: Was Keith just down there OT? RT: Yes. And Boislcair was with me. He was on Engine 2 C Shift. You know I busted Joe Cordeiro’s balls the rest of his career about that night. TT: What about some highway stuff? Ton of highway stuff, bodies all over the highway RT: Ton of highway stuff. Engine 2 was on that highway all the time, especially at this time of the year, with the snow and the rain. So yeah, car fires, accidents, we had a little girl, she was like 16, and she got caught on the black ice, spun out, dead on the scene. So we had to extricate. Another guy, coming northbound, at Smithfield Avenue, got ejected, and the car landed on top of him. We had to use the airbags to raise the car up. I’m still on Rescue and we respond to this, it was actually right off the highway at Newport Ave. in Attleboro near the Home Depot? There was a big trash truck making a U-turn in front of Home Depot. It tipped over and landed on the car. We didn't have enough air bags or big enough airbags to raise the truck up to get the people--there was two people trapped. Unbelievable crash the kind that keep you up at night thinking about it. TT: Were they dead? RT: Nope. they both survived with minor injuries. We worked with Attleboro FD and had to call Providence Special Hazards (truck) to come help us. TT: Don't they need a crane for that? RT: We ended up getting one, We didn’t have enough cribbing so Home Depot came over on a tow motor with a bunch of cribbing for us, and the guys on the ladder made the cribbing right there for us. Another story, we had a run for an elderly female in the elderly high rises. A still-box comes in for a mill fire in the 1s. So I said to the lady, "We gotta go now. The rescue will be here momentarily, we'll see you later, good luck." (She says), "But I'm having trouble breathing." "Well here's our oxygen." (laughs). I think I was with Ray Masse and Tim Usher. TT: Yeah, Granny, Code Red. You gotta go you gotta go, right? RT: I ain't missing a fire for someone who can't pee. Another time, we get a stillbox off Lonsdale Avenue, in the 1's district. Three-decker going like a son of a bitch. Kraweic was the Lieutenant, and I was on Engine 2. It was about a 100 degrees out. Lemay had to be there, he was on Rescue. Bobby Howe, he was a lieutenant on Engine 5. So we're crawling up there, me and Chickie, crawling up trying to get to the third-floor. It was smokey, the smoke's banked down to the floor, it was hot, we're having trouble finding the fire. we were working our balls off. Things are getting real hot on the landing, we are trying to make the push into the apartment They put a line in the window. TT: Basically blowing the fire right at you. RT: Right at us… I did some yelling and screaming, and they stopped. Chickie was able to get in there a knock the fire down. (Laughs) TT: Talk about Chickie. there's another guy who did thirty years on Engine 2. He tells stories about the sponge. The days of the sponge. RT: Yup. The old guys, according to folk lore use to keep a sponge in their turnout when Chickie came on, they probably still carried a sponge. The older fire fighters, before the SCBA's came along, they would take a sponge, put it in their turn-out pocket, they would wet it before they went in, and that's what they would breathe off of. Now whether it worked or not, I don't know, and I'm not trying it. But yeah, that's part of the folklore of firefighting before the SCBAs. Funny story with my father. He came on in '57, so let's say in 1960. And they only had one airpack and it was on the ladder. This guy, Ralph Lundgren, who retired as the Assistant Chief, was going into the building. He says to my father, "you crank the air for me." It was a crank. you had to crank it. So every time you cranked it, it pushed the air through a hose (to the mask). So my father's cranking it and his arm gets tired and just stops. (laughs). Well, the mask sucked to Ralph's face and Ralph came out, "You fucking cocksucker!" Here's another good story. They're both on Rescue 1 and Ralph's in charge. They go to call over here on Armistice Blvd. It's a DOA. So they take whatever information they get, and a little while later the police call over to Rescue 1 quarter’s on Main Street and Ralph answers the phone. He says to my father, "Hey Bobby, the police are on the phone and they want to know where the cadaver is." My father looks at him and says, "What the fuck's a cadaver?" So Ralph goes, "It's a like a thing-a-ma-jig. It's a thing-a-ma-jig. So my father goes out to the rescue and looks around. "Yeah, we got our thing-a-ma-jig, it's right here." So Ralph tells the cop, "Yeah, we got the thing-a-ma-jig, the cadaver, right here." The cop goes, "You got the fucking body there?" "Oh, that's what it is? Naw, we left it in the bedroom." TT: Let's talk about awful stuff. you already talked about the kids. The suicides-the hangings, the shootings. RT: I had a shooting at the corner of Weeden and Smithfield Ave. Kelly's Tap? It was a double shooting. The photographers beat us there—I don't know how the fuck that happened--I'm getting out of the rescue and there's a picture in the Times of me getting out and zipping up my pants. (laughs) Back then we wore khakis. So I had two people, shot, maybe 500 feet away from me. This kid looked like he was shot in the head. So Rescue 2 comes, Lt. Steve Parent's on Rescue 2 with Joe Pike. So we start doing CPR, go to intubate and there's nothing but brain matter. Obviously he didn't make it. Then I had this kid, coming down East Avenue and they hit the telephone pole and he lost his leg. Me and Parent, put a real bulky sterile dressing on it. Back then we weren't supposed to use tourniquets but we did. you had to loosen it like every 15 minutes. But we saved this kid's life. The arteries were cut he was bleeding heavily. We took the leg and packed in ice packs from the two rescues. Had another girl, she was riding with her feet up on the dashboard. She went through the window and it split her up pretty good. The most ugliest fucking thing you're ever gonna see. She had a nasty laceration from the A-post. Broke her femur. TT: How about-- RT: Suicides, I always hated hangings. It seems like a preferred way to go because I had a lot of hangings. TT: It's just creepy. RT: Yeah it is. TT: With the body just hanging RT: One of them, I was on Engine 2. Inside of a garage. It's just eerie TT: Just swaying in the breeze. RT: Had a couple of train accidents. People committing suicide by train... TT: Lemay was talking about those as far as vaporization. RT: Yeah. It's gross. Burn injuries are always tough. TT: Talk about some of the grabs you had. RT: I actually didn't have that many. But the few that I did, most of them were intact, so we were able to get them out. This one here, you might've been on the job, Meadow Street. TT: I was there. RT: The firebombing? TT: Oh no. The other fatal. Where Chief Jay was pulling people off the porch roof. RT: I'm sure you were on the job. This drug dealer firebombed this old man's house--except he firebombed the wrong house. The victim got burnt up pretty bad, the fire was nothing spectacular. We had trouble getting in there, the place was locked up tighter then a drum. Ray Masse and a couple of others did the search and found him, they pulled him out. Of course he was not breathing, without a pulse. We did CPR but couldn't get him back. Again on Meadow Street. I was the Captain of Engine 1 back then. We get called to the fire. There was report of people trapped. So we go up the stairway, and there's this big, huge, bull-mastiff dog. We didn't know what it was at first. I forget who I was with. We were coming down the stairs and it was just too heavy. I was on the bottom and it just took me over. We came crashing down those stairs with this large beautiful dog landing on top of me. TT: Was this the Meadow street one where McLaughlin was pulling people off the roof? I was with Cleary on Ladder 2. I was so new he didn’t even know my name. We scaled a fire escape because Keano was trying to hit the roof but it was a tough stick because of the power lines. We did search and rescue on the third-floor for that guy. It was literally like a 1000 degrees up there in blackout conditions. Couldn't see an inch in front of your face. I remember thinking if I lost contact with Cleary neither one of us was gonna have a good night. Then we went to the roof and cut two holes. We did everything you had trained us for in the academy and I used it all in one fire. I think I had like two months on the job. 2009 RT: No. I remember that fire but was not there. Meerbott was the Battalion Chief on this one. The one across the street-- TT: Lot of bad shit happens on Meadow Street, right? RT: Yeah. And for a lot of years, too. TT: Bring up Meadow street and everyone's got a story. Why do you think the 1s has so many goddamn fires. Every district has triple-deckers... RT :Meadow Street has had several incidents over the years. Station 1 is located on the west side of the city. It’s not the best area, I guess a lot of the area is considered ghetto. You know, the houses are balloon framed, they're old. It used to be a beautiful neighborhood and now it's a ghetto. The hard working people of that community live there without choice, absent landlords, indigent people all which make up these neighborhoods. For all these reasons is why Station 1 has a lot of 1st due jobs. TT: It's crazy. First due fires. District 4 is loaded with triple-deckers and huge but it's nothing like the 1s. RT: Station 4 is also the biggest district. The 1s you catch a lot of first due fires. TT: Okay, so then you went back to Training. you were my Training Officer. RT: You were in Rob's school, right? TT: Yes. It was you and Arrighie. RT: Was Bruce Burns there? Did we burn a bus? TT: No. RT: Well anyway, I was sick of shagging rescue runs with Engine 2 and I was getting into training, so I Bid back there. Then I made Captain and had to go right back out. While I was there we were able to do--I'm proud of this--we developed the Mayday program for Pawtucket and rescuing a downed firefighter--we were able to get a vacant house to do drills on how to rescue the down firefighter, proper technique for calling a MAYDAY, Roof operations, and the advantage of advancing the initial attack line for proper placement. We also acquired space in Union Wadding, built the props to simulate trapped firefighters. It was 5 different stations. including crawling up stairs and the floor gives way. Each station was set up to call a MAYDAY, and it turns out Central Falls got wind of the maze and came over to check it out and then put all their guys through it. A lot to be proud of with a lot of help from our most talented firefighters. 9/11 came, I was in Training with Lt. Smith Steve. He was still on IOD status. I was preparing the morning class of recertification for EMT’s. The TV was on the TODAY Show when the first airplane hit. It's something nobody will ever forget, the question quite often asked is where were you on 9-11-01? I’ll tell you I was riding a high because the night before we held the first organizational meeting of the RI Firefighters Pipes & Drums. That was very successful. Of course, I was glued to the TV and the guys were starting to filter in, so when the second plane hit we decided not to hold EMT training. I was back at my desk and got a call from Smithfield Fire. A guy I knew says, "Hey, did you hear they're requesting firefighters?" "No, didn't know that." "It's all over the teletype." "We don't get teletype, I'll have to go next door to the cops." So I did. Went over to the police station, got the teletype requesting firefighters. It came in from New York City Port Authority. I went and talked to Chief Condon and asked if I could bring some guys down there to help out he goes, "Ahhh, no." President of the union Tim McLaughlin talked to him and convinced him to let us do it. Finally, he says I can take ten guys. So I went back to Training and put a call out, and within--after the first couple of guys I called, people just started volunteering, I want to go, I want to go. Ton of guys. So it ended up being 17 guys. We couldn't take anymore. I made sure that we had a Battalion Chief, a Captain, three Lieutenants, and the rest was firefighters. That way we had a chain of command. TT: You guys take a bus? RT: No, they let us take fire cars and Steve Parent had a connection with Cerrone auto. Believe it or not they gave us two vans, two brand new vans, and we loaded up all our shit, SCBAs, all kinds of hand tools, ropes, we didn't know what we were getting into. Took a couple of fire cars and off we went. Left here 6 pm on September 11th, and we arrived there ten o'clock. It was very eerie once you got to the Connecticut/New York line. There was nobody on the streets. Nobody. The highway was open. No cars. You know New York City. TT: I do. Lived in the West Village. Where'd you go first? RT: Well the teletype stated report to the Meadowlands for a staging area. As we got closer we were directed to Fort Lee New Jersey, and it turned out to be a high school. There was all kinds of food there, bunks set up, so we smoked and joked for a little while and then turned in, waiting for the call. Buffalo, New York, was there, a couple of big cities, and then a lot of volunteer guys. So we woke up like 3 or 4 in the morning and said "Fuck this." We piled into the cars and drove to New York City. We stopped along where the Intrepid is, the West Side Highway, and we went into the Command Center and asked what we could do. They sent us to a fire station, took down our names--what we're certified in, rope rescue and collapsed buildings--and we ended up with this ladder company. So I went to the Captain and said we were from Pawtucket, we got 17 guys, you want us to do anything? He says, "A city bus is coming to get us, come on the bus with us, but once we get to Ground Zero you're on your own, I'm not babysitting you." So we went to Ground Zero, Vesey street, and this Battalion Chief was setting up a Command Post, and after he was done making fun of our yellow turnout gear, he asked us to set him up a base camp for his Command Post. So we broke into an office building and took out desks and chairs and set them all up, and our next task, he wanted us to gather up some hose, hook up to a hydrant, and start wetting down that dust. It was just terrible terrible dust. It's killing everybody now. So we did that. We ended up right at the collapsed towers. There was a ton of fire in the buildings--it was unbelievable. Never seen anything like it. All the buildings that were damaged...So we grabbed some hose and started putting out the fires in one of those buildings. Some of the guys were on a dig out line or bucket brigade, and then they started blowing airhorns to evacuate the area, and we actually got yelled at because we weren't running fast enough. He came up to his after, "We blow that fucking airhorn you run!" "Well, what does it mean?" "It means another building's gonna collapse!" (laughs). We stayed, we worked until like 6 that night. We came out, took a break, and a lady who lived in the area, we went up to her apartment and she made us sandwiches and gave us drinks, anything you wanted. We ate, started going back to work, and Chief Meerbott says, "I don't think we should be here." So the group of us, the officers, got together and decided it was unsafe. New York was still unorganized at that time. Of course they had just lost 343 firefighters, and they weren't really accepting us being there. They wanted to rescue--it was still a rescue mission at this time, not recovery. They wanted to rescue their own people. But what was happening, we found out later, they were sending New York companies back to their firehouses to rest and cleanup, and then come back. So they didn't like having these out of town guys working on their mission. Then the funerals that followed afterwards, I personally went to quite a few funerals, traveling back and forth to New York. I had just started the Bagpipe band here, the day before. The first anniversary of 9/11, 2002, they had a big memorial in New York City, and we were able to take the band there and it was like our first performance. It was pouring rain, but we were able to have closure to this horrific incident. Some of us knew guys that had perished. TT: So on 9/11, you worked that full day and after that Meerbottt said we shouldn't be here. RT: Yes. There was too much danger for our guys. I agreed with him. The other guys were pissed. I know Joe Cordiero was pissed off. And again, everything was unstable at that time. They thought buildings were swaying, gonna collapse, and they had their reasons. And plus, they had just lost all of their command staff. They had people in acting positions, and was still setting up or reconstructing their entire command staff. TT: The whole top of the department got decapitated. So alright, after all this, you go back to Engine 2 as a captain? RT: Engine 1. There for four or five months and I got hurt. I was on Ladder 2 overtime and went to CF for a fire and hurt my foot. I was with Bobby Burns on B-group. We were picking up and something snapped in the bottom of my foot, so I was out IOD for a few weeks. Then I bid downtown soon after. Ahh yes, I was the Captain of Engine 2 all set for the rest of my career. I will stay here until I retire. But old age came upon me. I saw the hand writing on the wall. Went to fires and they were kicking the shit out of me. We got a job on Green Street, 3rd. floor first due, so Boisclair and I hump the hose up, get to the landing, smoke is banked down. We kick 3 doors, first two were wrong. My brother Mike and his crew from Engine 4 meet us on the landing, finally we make entry, and I was just spent. I knew my days were numbered on being a fire ground officer. Fire Marshal position came open and I gave a long hard look at it. I knew I wasn’t really the guy for the job (not much for office work). Chief William Sisson asked if I'd take the job and I was like, "Naw, I'm not interested." Then I had a couple more bad nights on Engine 2 and I was like "You know what? Maybe that sounds pretty good." (laughs) I only had another year left anyway. When I got up there I liked it. It was a pretty good job. I was learning things because I'd never had any interest in inspections or investigations. I would get a pay bump to Battalion Chief, so I took it. TT: The arson training must've been killer ... RT: Right, the arson training, learning how to do inspections. Even the (building) code stuff wasn't as bad as I thought. I'm glad I did it now, because now in the chief's position on Prudence, I am responsible for Fire Marshal agenda on the Island. TT: Do you have to do continuing ED for the certificates? RT: Yeah, they do, The State of RI Fire Marshal office trains all of its Deputies. They send us to the required lectures and training. The biggest fire I ever went to was across the street from here. TT: Is this Greenhalgh Mill? RT: Yup. I was on Engine 2. I was working that day, C-group. I was the first due Engine on the second alarm. They told us to go down Kenyon Avenue and protect the exposures. So we get here and I see Engine 4, Ladder 2, Engine 3, over here fighting the main body of fire, and we're on the back side, and it don't look bad, it don't look too fucking bad at all. So I go, "Keep going." So we get down just past Baxter Street. We stopped because that's where the mill ends. Dave Reed laid his own feeder line (from the hydrant to our truck). Me and Al McVay were on the truck. I said, "Al, grab the deuce-and-a-half, and we'll take an inch-and-three-quarter line." And by the time we reached up to grab the nozzles on the truck, the fire was blowing--and they were all cinder block windows? Now it's just blowing these block windows out, from where we were, all the way down to Cottage Street. It was un-fucking-believable TT: Holy shit. It sounds just like a movie. Boom boom boom--Windows just exploding in sequence down the line. RT: It was. And we had this three-decker that we're gonna protect, and this garage. The garage was huge. I tell Al to put the deuce-and-a-half on the mill, I'll take the garage. And that's what we did. Then the waves--that's the only way I can describe it--waves of flames start coming over our head. By this time, Timmy McLaughlin, he was the Fire Marshal, Billy Cullinan, they met us in the back yard. The waves of flame were coming right over us. We had to hit the ground and crawled to side 4 and hid behind the three-decker and took the deuce-and-a-half and pointed it up into the sky to rain on us so we wouldn't melt. TT: Holy shit. RT: And I'm talking just waves and waves of fire rolling over us and we are outside. TT: This was in the afternoon, right? RT: Yeah, three o'clock. So now the mill collapses. So I go, "Okay, time for a breather." I light up a cigarette and then look around the neighborhood and every house from where we are towards Cottage Street is on fire. (Laughs) I go, "What the fuck happened! I thought we were doing a good job!" (Incredulous. laughs and laughs). Then Dave Reed's calling me, "Hey the house across the street, there's fire in the basement." So I'm like, okay, I still got my Scott on. The only one I can see is Tommy Andrew from the 5s but he doesn’t have a Scott on. I go, "Tommy, we got to get in there. If we lose this house, we're losing all of Baxter street." So he goes to get an airpack. So I put my mask on, I start to go down, I fall down the fucking stairs and the fucking cellar's in flames. So I got an inch-and-three-quarter line and I'm spraying it everywhere, make my way into this room and that joint's fully involved, and I just started knocking down fire. Everyone came down, started helping after that. That was fucking scary. You can hear me on the radio telling Chief Meerbott, "I got a helluva basement fire here, I need help!" TT: Jesus. There wasn't even enough people. RT: 31 of us fighting 17 houses and a mill. But then the Calvary came. TT: So talk about that day, because as the day went on, we're talking like 100 engine and ladder companies came from surrounding states, right? RT: Yeah, I forget the exact numbers but something like 26 ladders, 60 engines, 20 rescues... TT: From everywhere. Connecticut, Massachusetts, every town in Rhode Island. RT: Massachusetts sent their big, communications command truck, and that's where Ronnie Doire ran the fire from. That was a scary day. We got there at 3, our first break was like 9 at night, so we were exhausted. Being across from station 4 we had our rehab set up there. Stop and Shop, they started up like a food buffet for us. Huge spread of food. We were able to eat, drink fluids, and rest for a bit. As we come into (station 4) and there's a ton of people here. My mother, father, Dave Boisclair's mother father, everybody who was anybody was here.They were serving us. It was a pretty neat site. So there was no place for us to sit, some of the guys just needed to relax. So they came in here (The TV room) and we just ruined the furniture. Sweat and soot and stink. TT: This shut down the electrical and gas to this entire side of the city. I remember hearing they were afraid this thing might take out the whole east side RT: Well, there was 17 houses well-involved, houses on Darlingdale, Cottage, Kenyon...Kenyon Avenue was like a sea of flames. I told you. At one point that's what they were telling the incoming companies. "Just find a house and put the fire out." (laugh) That was Doire's orders. "Find a fucking house, set up, and put it out." TT: How long did this go for? RT: Two days. The next day, we got relieved at like 3 or 4 in the morning, and I had to be back at 7. So I went home, showered, took a cat nap, and came back. I was downtown, so they sent us back to the scene picking up miles of hose. TT: What other giant fires were you part of. Schoolhouse Candy? RT: Oh yeah, that was a good one. Building behind School House Candy, that was a good fire, Capt. Al Krawic first due gives a code red, calls for a 2nd. Right away. TT: Any CF (Central Falls) stories? RT: Ton of fire in CF. They show up with their seven guys, man... TT: Crazy. What's the closest to death you ever got? RT: Oh, man. There was a union meeting one night and they (guys on his truck) didn't want to go. So I brought my gear. Mike Levesque was a lieutenant on Engine 3. So I throw on with them. The meeting barely starts and bam, still-box comes in. Off Columbus. We're first due. It's a cellar fire in a single-story wood frame. So me and Mike go into the basement. We had an inch and three-quarter line. We're having trouble finding the fire. It was hot, smoky, and it's a divided cellar, lot of partitions. So we're in and out of rooms and the hoseline is all over. Mike runs out of air--back then we didn't leave as a team--he went and changed his airpack. While he's gone, I run out of air. So I go, "Okay, I got to get the fuck out of here." My bell's actually ticking. I knew I waited too long. So I follow the hoseline and I'm in this room, and now I'm sucking face, I can't get no air at all. I start to panic. I can't find my way out, I can't find the stairs. I can't find the fucking stairs and I end up in this other room. I'm in panic mode. I rip my fucking mask off and I knew this was it. I ain't coming out of this basement. I bump into somebody--Thank GOD--it's Dave Farris, and I tell him I'm fucking lost. So he grabs me by my coat and gets me out of the basement, guiding me out of the basement. TT: Sheesh. Good thing you ran into him RT: Yeah. Since then I hate basement fires. TT: You said there was another story about the radio, only the officers had radios... RT: Oh yeah. All you guys now carry radios. Because of the Hargreaves incident. 1993. it was August 22, 1993. The lawyers' building over there on 100 Cottage Street. McBierny Law office. Typical fire, but it was a tough building. Bullet proof glass. No smoke showing except for whatever was coming out of the chimney. John Buchanon was in charge of Engine 2. He's with Bobby Howe and Steve Parent. He goes, "On the scene. Just smoke coming from the chimney. We're gonna investigate." They get down into the basement and obviously have a working fire. He calls the code red, second alarm, third alarm, and Engine 6 comes in on that third alarm. The lieutenant, Kurt Richards, and Mike Fox report to command for assignment. Hargreaves was driving, he stays with the truck. So they cross the street and head in and again, it was just smoke from the chimney, It looked like nothing was going on. I guess at some point he (Hargreaves) decides to meet up with his crew. He makes entry, makes his way into the basement, and at some point gets loss. Acting BC Al Jack called for a roll call, dumps the whole building. They do a roll call and think it's Greg Brule who's missing but he was at his truck switching bottles. TT: Backup. Why did they pull people out? RT: Well back then no real SOP’s were established, not everyone had radios, crews would have a tendency to wander off and work independently. Get everybody out, regroup and do a roll call. Hargreaves ain't there. So now they're going on a mission, we got a team together. At that time we didn't have RIT teams. Only the officers had radios so they couldn't even call John on the radio. So they're getting ready to enter and search, and Hargreaves finds a door on the opposite side of where he went in. Today we would call it side 4. He came out the full staircase and walks out on his own power. You can see, there's pictures from the Times, him coming out, burnt, and they're undressing him. It's mostly inhalation burns, he ran out of air-- TT: Ripped off his mask... RT: Yeah I guess, he gets inhalation burns and that's what ends up killing him thirty days later. Up in Boston. Al Jack and I were the Protocol Officers for the department. We planned and executed the funeral for John. We had a lot of tremendous help during this period, guys really stepped up to the plate. I can name everyone that helped out, but I’ll spare you that. 147 members of the Pawtucket Fire Department made it happen. So anyways, we had a Safety Committee at that time, so we pushed for the radios so everybody'd have a radio. We knew it was gonna cost a lot of money, ($2,000 per radio) so we compromised with the city. Made them buy us all cell phones. So we had cell phones on the truck, so at least the back-step guy would have a cell phone. The officer would have a radio. And that's how we did it until the city was able to muster up the funds. That was a helluva fire. I went there at night, I was on nights Engine 1 , and the fire was still fucking roaring. The fire came in at two in the afternoon. It was roaring. It was because of the construction. We spent hours trying to take out those windows. We ended up taking out the brick underneath it because it was easier to pull the brick than take out the window. The Ladder crews had a rough time trying to open the roof. TT: Holy shit. RT: So that place was basically a kiln. A heated box, just roaring inside and there was no way for anything to get out of it. TT: Was there another near miss story? Where you almost got whacked? RT: Yeah. Another cellar fire. It was the day after the Fireman's Ball. I was hungover, laying on the couch. The bell hits for Patt Street. I was with Bobby Ogle, one of the best firefighters I could have learned from, on the 1s, and we get there, again, the place was fucking roaring, the cellar was packed with shit. And I got lost in there again, I knew I had to get out. I kept an eye--I learnt--I kept an eye on my tank, not waiting for the bell to vibrate, and so I go to Bobby, "I got to get the fuck out of here." So I'm trying to find my way out again, I get lost, start sucking face and I pull my mask off. Finally found the stairs and got out. Both cellar fires, and then that Greenhalgh Mill fire where I fell down the stairs--cellars blow. TT: There's only one way out RT: Usually there is only one way out, but sometimes there are bulkheads This is why these young guys have to go out into the districts and learn what’s there. I can’t stress training enough. It must be constant and structured. Last funny story. We had a funeral home fire, I was on the 6s, so we went on like the twentieth alarm (joking because the 6s are the slowest truck in the city)--the Girl Scouts got there before us--So I'm on the 6s, Jay McLaughlin was the acting lieutenant, Gordon Duquenoy on the backstep. We get there--it's Bellows Funeral Home going good--I'm driving. Now Duquenoy's on the back step and I’m begging him to pump so that I can go in with Jay. Of course, I end up pumping--our instructions are to pick up a hydrant and lay into ladder 2. My Father was the BC that night. So I naturally set the truck up and pump to ladder 2, but I keep sneaking in the building to see what I can do. Rick Slater's pulling out a cadaver, and by this time dad knew what a cadaver was. Engine 6 crew was stretching a line into the building, and I here this loud scream THURBER GET BACK AND PUMP THAT TRUCK…FEW OTHER CHOOSEN WORDS. It’s old man Parent, he grabs me and starts yelling at me for leaving the pump. I know he is right. (laughs) Fuck you, Dick. TT: Right? The only thing worse than pumping is not being there at all. Tom Heaney- October 13, 2019
It is deceiving to interview men in their seventies and eighties, decades removed from their time on the line. Tom Heaney looks like he could be your grandfather, but don’t be fooled. They called him “Skull” because he had a bald head twenty years before they were chic. Like Keenan, Gildea, Masse, Thurber, and others, this generation became the link between the World War II guys and the current department. He is soft-spoken, intense, and, like most of these guys, once they start telling stories, they take great pride in what they did, which was basically survive the 1960s, 70s, 80s, when structure fires were at times a daily occurrence. Recently, he was in town, so I caught up with him at Station 2. This is what he said … TT- It’s kind of amazing that your name keeps coming up in these interviews. Especially with Chickee. He said you had balls as big as your head. TH- Yeah, Chickee is a helluva guy. We were good friends but he was on another shift. Good firefighter, good guy. TT- What year did you get on? TH- April of 1967. TT- How old were you? TH- Twenty-three. TT- Were you in the service? TH- I was in the Navy. TT- How many years? TH- I spent two years active duty, and four more in the reserves. TT- So you went all over the world, right? TH- I was down in Newport, and we went to Cuba for the Cuban crisis. Didn’t go to Vietnam. TT- So you went from the Navy into the fire department. Did you work in the mills at all? TH- When I got out of the Navy, I was working for Fram Corporation when they were still in Pawtucket. Then they moved to a plant in East Providence on Pawtucket Avenue. From there I went to Groton Connecticut to work at Electric Boat. Worked there for a year, but back then I-95 didn’t go all the way. You were on the road for two and a half hours going down, and the same coming home. You had to get off 95, pick up RT 2, and keep on going. From there I worked for Corning Glass. In fact, Paul Keenan worked at Corning Glass. We didn’t know each other at the time, and he had put in an application for the fire department at the same time I did. When I got the call for here, I put in my notice at the glass company and got here in April of ’67. TT- So back in the day, you had an academy like ours, right? The city ran it. No pay, and classes at night, right? TH- Yes. Tuesdays and Thursday nights in the classroom, all day Saturday training, for like ten weeks. TT- Same with us. Fifty years later. Incredible TH- We had two senior firefighters teaching, they were on the list to make lieutenant. Al Renzi, and Ray Murray, Joe Murray’s father. They taught the class with LT. Clifford. TT- So it’s pretty much been the same for eighty years. I know that before World War II they had daytime academies, but it seems like in the 1950s they went to the Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. It’s too bad. I wish we still had it (The Pawtucket Fire Department gave up training its own firefighters in 2016. They are now trained at the State Academy.) When you got on, where did you go? What was the process for you? TH- School ended in November or December, there was ten of us in the class. Paul Keenan, Andy Monahan and myself came on in April, four months after the school. TT- Did all ten get hired? TH- Yes. The first seven got on right away. Ray Massee, Joe Gildea, Dick Ryan, Jack Doyle, Andy Monaghan, Frank Sylvester, myself, Paul ... TT- That’s a packed academy right there. Lot of legendary names in there. TH- Back then it wasn’t the type of job people wanted because when Paul and I left Corning Glass we were making good money. But there was no career. You got laid off in the summer, unless you wanted to work the tank repair, but I’d always wanted to be on the fire department. I grew up in Seekonk, but they were volunteers up there. I used to go down to the fire station and hang out. On Newman Avenue. I did some firefighting in the Navy. TT- Now Ralph Dominci was saying he had six kids, and they paid so little on the fire department that he actually qualified for food stamps. Guys had second and third jobs just to support their families. TH- When I got on, I think gross pay was $67.50 a week. You worked three days, three nights. TT- That’s like 70 hours. TH- No overtime. I don’t know whether guys today understand it, but this is basically considered a semi-military organization. You were on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. You’d have your shift, but many times you’d get home and get a call, there was a two or three-alarmer, or a mill fire, and when you got called in you had to come. That was your obligation. I know things have probably changed now. They finally went to what they call the Kelly Days, it was 56-hour weeks, and you got an extra day off somewhere, and then we created the Fourth Battalion. TT- That was in 1973? TH- Something like that. Two days shifts, two nights, four off. When I came on, I was assigned to Engine 7 (Engine 2) downtown. TT- Who was your boss? TH- Lt. North. Lt. McVay was on Ladder 1. The crew on Engine 2 was Ray Masse, Gerry Gendreau, myself and LT. North. TT- Now Gerry Gendreau’s name comes up as one of those guys who was a great fireman, but I know that stuff at the end where he crossed the picket line messed up his reputation. TH- Exactly. It’s sad, because when I got on, he was on Engine 2, and Lt North had just made lieutenant, and between Lt. McVay and Gerry Gendreau, even with what he did afterward by crossing the line, I cannot—I didn’t like what he did, but I’ll never put him down as far as his knowledge and firefighting skills. Frank McVay taught me a lot. Frank McVay loved to train, he would sit down with us at the round table, and we would have competitions with streets. You’d call out the street and how you would get there. He was big on street drills. He was a man that knew 767 streets. He would leave his house early and drive around and check them. When I was driving a school bus part time, he would say, “Where you driving this week?” And I’d say, “Fairlawn.” “I’m gonna give you four or five streets. Not with the kids on the bus, but after.” Owen Avenue, Samuel Avenue. I’d come in that night and he’d be like, “Did you find them?” “Yeah.” And then he would drill you on them. He would tell you if the bell hits, you better know where you’re going. He loved to train and it was very helpful. We would cross-train. We drove the tiller (truck), the horse, the engine-- TT- What’s the “horse?” TH- The tractor, on the ladder. The tiller was the guy on the back. No cover. TT- No cover on the trucks, right? TH- Right. We had a roof but no back. Totally open air. And if we needed a reserve truck, we got the one from Central Falls, and that thing was convertible—no roof at all. When it rained, you got wet. When it snowed, and you were at a fire, you’d have to come out and brush your seat off before you went back to the station (laughs). I could never understand why they bought a convertible truck in New England. TT- Were you one of the guys hanging off the back? TH- Oh yeah. Engine 7 was a cabover. The 5s’, 6s. 4s, they all had the backstep. You put your arm around the rail and you hung on for dear life. Engine 1 had the Ahearns Fox. You could ride the back, but you could actually enter into the back and you could hang on better. You usually had like a foot or two to balance on. TT- Different day. When men were men. Now let’s talk about this crew. Ray Masse senior… These are legendary guys. So basically the World War II guys taught you guys. TH- Exactly. TT- The 60s and 70s, from the stories I’ve heard, the whole city was burning. TH- When I got on, the city was still going through a redevelopment. I-95 was here but they were still pulling houses down all over. Broadway, down Mineral Spring Avenue, Taft Street, Division Street. Now everybody, like you said, had to have a part time job, because the benefits were there, the pay wasn’t great, but you could see it was gonna get better, because it couldn’t get any worse (laughs). And it was a stable job. Most guys took the job because they wanted to be firefighters. Some nights you’d come in and got two or three vacant house fires. Not every night. But you could. Most nights you’d be at one or two, because they never tore these houses down. It was a battle between the city and the homeowner or landlord about who was going to pay for the demolition. TT- Did they pay these people to just walk out of their houses when 95 was being built? TH- They did pay people. They gave them close to market value. But it was a lot easier and cheaper to burn it down then tear it down. By then, 95 was already through here, but there was all kinds of redevelopment happening. It actually lasted into the 1970s. On the 3rd and 4th of July, it was nothing for this department to do two hundred or three hundred runs a night. You could come in at 5:30, have a chowder—most of the guys’ wives cooked for the 4th of July. Hamburgers, hot dogs, got the grill going, have a salad, chowder-- TT- It was like a party, right? TH- Yes. The ladder wasn’t as busy as us, but they would catch a few runs and keep the grill going in-between. Sometimes we’d ride by, swing onto the ramp, they’d give us some hamburgers and we’d keep going. Lot of dumpster fires, car fires, trash fires, and then the night got later and we’d get the house fires, bonfires, like huge bonfires. In the morning of the 4th, 5th, or 6th, depending on how the holiday fell, if it was Friday Saturday Sunday, you’d leave the station in the morning and the city would look like a war zone. Haze and all you could smell was rubber, burnt wood, trash…the dumpster fires stunk. The bonfires in the street, we’d put them out as best as we could, and then the city would come with the loader and trash trucks to take it all away. If they didn’t, then the people just relit it all over again. TT- Now doesn’t it seem incredible that this went on for like eighty years? It was like a forty-eight-hour arson-fest and instead of shutting it down, it was kind of like a citywide party. Just to burn everything. TH- Exactly. Providence, those guys would do like 400-500 runs. Providence and Pawtucket were the worst. Central Falls was less. TT- Chickee was saying the neighborhood would pay a band to come down and play, and they’d bring food to the station and just watch the fire trucks coming and going. TH- The 1’s was always a party, the 3s had the Pawsox game. And that was the city’s signal. After the Pawsox game on the 3rd and 4th, they always had fireworks. And when those fireworks started going off, that was the signal for everyone to cut loose. They’d go on until four, five, six o’clock in the morning sometimes. They’d burn a building, we’d put it out, and then they would burn it again. Nobody really got hurt, but there were injuries. We had a time there where they would throw rocks and Molotov cocktails at us, but no one died. You tried to talk to them. Like “Hey, you want to start these fires, ok, but you don’t have to firebomb us when we try to put them out.” Especially when you were on the tiller or hanging off the back of the engine, you don’t want to take a rock off the head. Some places you would need a police escort. Like at Crook Manor, when they would light up the dumpsters, car fires, we would wait on the main street for the police to get there first, because Crook Manor, when you went in, there was only one way out. Once you went in you were committed. Like Prospect Heights. Same thing. One way in, one way out. Most of the guys looked forward to the 3rd and 4th of July. And being downtown, not to take anything away from the other stations, but downtown we had the engine, ladder, and BC, the boat, the Jaws of Life with the trailer, all of the equipment was out of here. You trained on all of this stuff. I found it very enlightening to be down there with Lt. McVay and Gerry Gendreau because they were very knowledgeable and good firefighters. McVay would say, “It’s common sense that’s going to keep you alive on this job.” Can you get hurt? Sure. It’s a dangerous job. But you can’t just run into the burning buildings. Is the stairway still there? Is there a second way out? I learned a lot from those guys. As far as Gerry Gendreau goes, he was invaluable with the information he had, but to this day I’m still upset with what he did. We lost a good man. Even though he became a Battalion Chief, unfortunately he had a heart attack. It wore on him. So was it worth it? TT- How long was he the BC before he had a heart attack? TH- Not sure. Year or two. That was when the job kind of…the camaraderie and brotherhood were great back then. TT- Mean Smitty was saying there’d be 40 guys at the bar, the whole shift second-day party. TH- Even after a bad fire, everyone went to the bar. We had a bad fire on Japonica Street, we lost four kids and a mother. Back then there wasn’t a lot of smoke detectors. When we rolled in it was going good. TT- Gildea talked about that fire. Said it was one of the worst things he’s ever seen. TH- I can remember it to this day. Joe and I were going in the front door, we pushed the door open and I started crawling in and Joe said, “Hold it.” And there was the boy. Burnt to a crisp. His mother was over in a chair, dead. Upstairs were four more kids. They succumbed to their injuries. No smoke detectors back then until the late 70’s. Thurber’s father was working at the Celtic. He was retired by then. We called him up and they opened the bar for us. We went up there. Some people used to ask me, “How do you deal with this?” To me and a lot of the guys I worked with, our feeling was you know what you’re getting into when you take this job. Not that you want to see this stuff, but you have to know it’s coming. Our shift caught … TT- Joe Gildea said 19 fire deaths in 20 years. TH- I was about to say 17-19. Seven or eight of those were children. I can still visualize that kid. I mean that poor little guy was like eight-years-old. He made it to the door and that was it. You remember these things, but you can’t take the job home with you. And you can’t let it eat away at you. TT- How long have you been married to Sue? TH- 56 years. TT- So you saw all this stuff and you were able to leave it at the job. You didn’t have to bring it home and make everything worse. TH- She’d ask me, she knew if we had a bad night, we would talk about it. The guys, we’d have a beer in the morning before we went home, but I would have soda. I wasn’t a big drinker. Gave me headaches. That’s the way we handled it. TT- You processed it and that was that. TH- Yes. I’m not saying I’m a special person, but this stuff effects different people in different ways. TT- To put this in perspective, I’ve been here eleven years and had three fatal fire deaths. You guys had nineteen in twenty years. People quit smoking, smoke detectors got mandated, alarm systems were put in place for large multi-unit buildings—everything got safer. TH- Smoke detectors are the biggest thing. It’s something some people still don’t understand. In fact, we’re living in Florida now because my wife hates the winter, I don’t like the heat in the summer but I put up with it. One of the big things down there are the hurricane shutters. You’re supposed to take them down when the storm’s over, but people leave them in and the firefighters have a hard time getting in because they’re metal and locked. TT- You know what’s crazy? I ran into some dude who works in Florida. He was so amazed about basement fires. Apparently, they don’t have basements in Florida. He’s like, “You guys go into basements?” “Well, yeah, if that’s where the fire is.” He says, “That’s crazy.” And he just laughed. It is kind of crazy. TH- They fight fires in 90-100 degree temperatures, and we fight fires when it’s 0 degrees. My wife has a picture on Smithfield Avenue, on the corner of Mineral Spring. It was a big fire and I got called in. I was coated head to toe in ice. They wanted us to go into the coffeeshop and warm up. But if I defrosted, I would be wet and cold. The ice kept me insulated, so I just stayed outside. It’s different up here. TT- That’s funny you said that. We had a fire on Roosevelt Ave with the Central Falls boys and it was like 1 degree. The minute we stopped moving we froze up solid. I mean I couldn’t even get my coat off. I could barely walk. TH- The night on George Street, it was a cold winter night. In the teens. I was on Ladder 1 and we went in. Frank Boisclair and us. We kicked the door in and found a lady on the floor. We were trying to do CPR on her and we couldn’t get her arms to move. We rolled her over and saw her hands were tied. She was murdered. Somebody killed her and lit the place up. We did CPR and told the cops what we had. We went with the rescue to the hospital, and when we got back to the scene thirty minutes later, we couldn’t even drive the tiller. Everything was frozen. We were finally able to swing it enough to get it in the station. TT- What year did you retire? TH- 1988 TT- So you were here for Star Gas. Were you working? TH- No. Ray Masse and I were painting a house up at the end of Cottage Street. Near Attleboro. Ray was on a ladder near the garage and the ground shook. You could see it. We packed everything up and called downtown. They said they needed everybody. TT- I heard these cannisters were landing on freaking Broadway. TH- They were. There was the Winter school right there too. They put us on a line to cool down a train car so it wouldn’t explode. We lost Engine 4 that day. TT- There’s a picture of Brule, Burns, Gildea, on a line shooting a hose directly at the front nose of a railcar. Brule was laughing when he told me the story. He said if that thing had blown up they would’ve been the first ones killed, and then half the city would’ve died after they did. The CF Chief, Couto, he said the same thing. If that tank had exploded it would have killed thousands. Now what’s the closest you came to dying? TH- When you go into three-deckers, as you know, you’re blind. You can’t see a thing. We got stuck in a closet one time. Sounds funny now but it wasn’t funny then. It was early in the night, like eight o’clock. All of a sudden you want to panic, but you know you can’t you gotta find a door, a window, feel for anything to save yourself. We’ve had ceilings fall on us, floors—when the floor has been burnt away—you can end up falling right into your own death. You can kiss your ass goodbye. Chickee and I got caught one night in Central Falls. TT- Oh man, he told me this story. This guy Bobby Tierny was a ladder guy in Central Falls. I heard Vietnam made him a little crazy, and he was up on the ladder with the master stream and blew the chimney apart and sent it down on top of you guys. TH- (laughs) Yup. The chimney came through the roof, we fell down the stairs, and it landed on our heads. We finally got outside and Chief Couto says “I want everybody out.” I said, “Well your crew is still up there in the back.” We had gone in the front. “I don’t know whether they heard you or not.” So me and Chickee go back up and somehow Tierney’s now upstairs and he didn’t want to leave. So we just threw him down the stairs. Seriously. Grabbed him and pushed him down the stairs. (laughs). He wasn’t happy about that, but when the chief says it’s time to go, it’s time to go. TT- You were friends with this guy, Tierny, right? TH- Yes. We all knew one another. TT- It was different back in the day. The Pawtucket and CF guys all knew each other, all hung out together… TH- If they had a working fire we went. Period. And if our fires were big enough, they’d come help us. That’s why I say I was fortunate to be stationed downtown. We went on everything in the city. Everything good. TT- Now this Tierny guy, I heard he was a tunnel rat in Vietnam and came home a little crazy. TH- Yeah something like that. TT- Chickee was funny. He says, “I’ve never seen Skull so mad.” Because after the chimney came down you were pissed. TH- Well, you don’t expect it. Back then, if you cut a hole in the roof, it was to vent. But a lot of guys would get up on that aerial and think it was a good idea to blast the master stream through the roof and push all the fire, heat, and smoke back onto the guys inside. It was brutal. It’s all in the training. I heard they have a state fire academy down in Exeter now? TT- By the way, it’s terrible. They’re not teaching these guys nothing. They show up here and we have to retrain them. I wish we still ran our own academy. These guys show up here and do like five weeks with our Training Division. Kenny Moreau’s over there-- TH- Kenny’s a good man. TT- Sure is. They’ll drop these guys off at the stations and say “Do something with these guys.” So we’ll take them out, go through the district, throw some water around, etc… Otherwise, I’m not impressed. Our academy was way better than the state academy. TH- Like you say, Renzi and Murray did the same. Renzi taught the pumps, and Ray Murray was the medical and firefighting end. They were good. They explained things to you in terms you could understand, versus over your head. You know what I mean? Like I took a few classes down at CCRI, fire science classes. You learn a lot from that, but a lot of those instructors are way up here (he motions above his head.) But I’ll never forget. They called the Breslin Distributor a “Twirly thing.” (the Breslin is a spinning nozzle shoved through floors at basement fires.) TT- Let’s talk about some of the guys. I heard Stretch Tuitt was a real character. TH- He drove the chief for many years. TT- I heard one day he walked into Fanueil Hall, and firemen from New Hampshire were yelling his name. Like that’s how many people knew this guy. TH- He was tall and well known. He drove Chief Monast, who was the last chief with a driver. Then he became a lieutenant on Engine 2. Gildea went on Engine 2 after Stretch retired. TT- Stretch was one of those guys that knew a million stories. Like he had the folklore of the whole department. And he would just tell story after story. TH- Back then it was strange because today the Battalion Chiefs drive themselves. The Chief had a driver too. They also only had one person in Fire Prevention. TT- We got at least four now. TH- But Stretch would be up in the office with Chief and he’d do some paperwork if the Chief didn’t need to go anywhere. TT- It was different back then because there was only one TV in the whole station, right? Guys hung out and talked. TH- Like the newspaper? You didn’t touch the newspaper until everyone senior to you had a chance to read it. Period. You didn’t just come in and grab the paper and coffee. That was an extreme no-no. There was a Lt. Coleman, he was in charge of the house because he was the senior lieutenant. He was strict. Back then, when you walked into the station you had your khakis on, and you had to have your blue service cap. When we used to relieve him, he was on nights. So our first day was his first day-off. And he’d be here. Waiting. Just waiting. You’d drive to work, you might leave your hat in the car by mistake, and he’d say. “Hey, firefighter, where’s your blue cap?” “Oh, it’s in the car.” “Go get it.” And the trash barrel, he wouldn’t say anything in the morning, but since he worked part time at the Pawtucket Times, sometimes he’d stop in, and if that trash barrel wasn’t emptied by noon, he’d go to the senior officer and say, “Your boys forget to do the chores?” But, you know, you respected that. Especially if you’d been in the service. You go in the service, you respected authority. No matter how pissed off you got, they’re in charge. You do what they say. TT- Things were different back then too, right? You had guys who fought in World War Two, Korea, and then the Vietnam guys started coming home. Other than this current generation, that had the 9/11 attacks and subsequent wars, the service aspect is gone. They don’t have that fear. TH- It is gone. They don’t know the respect of authority. They’ll give the lieutenant on the truck a ration of shit, but back then, that never happened. You didn’t have to like him, but you had to respect the pins. It’s like anything else. You have good firefighters, good lieutenants—that’s the majority. But then you have the exceptions to the rule that are only here for the paycheck. You weed them out. I was very fortunate to have some great guys on my shift. 90% of them you could trust with your life, that if you went in with the nozzle, they’d make sure you came back out. If somebody was gonna leave because their tank was running out, they’d tap you on the shoulder and tell you they were going to leave. So you at least knew you would be alone instead of someone just disappearing. We didn’t have the 20-minute accountability. You never had a headcount. You fought the fire from the beginning to the end. There was no break. You might have a coffee after the fire was knocked down and the canteen arrived, but otherwise you were working. Scott packs, when I came on, were in a suitcase in the side compartment. There was two on the ladder, and two or three on the engine, but they were in the side compartment. When you pulled up to a working fire, and usually on a three-decker back then, it was almost guaranteed that someone was going to run up to you, grab you if you were on the first and second truck in, they were going to grab you and say, “Someone’s still up on the second or third floor.” 90% of the time they were wrong and no one was up there. But you never thought like that. You went in to get them. So you didn’t bother with the Scotts because you had to open the door, take the case out, put it on the ground, open it, take it out, attach your mask—it doesn’t sound like a long time, but you just went in. The other crews coming in would the grab the line and come in after you. TT- When did everyone start wearing the packs consistently? I’ve heard the old school guys were like, “We’ve been putting out fires for a hundred years without these things…” TH- A lot the guys, Renzi included, just told us to wet a sponge and put it in your mouth. TT- Were you a sponge guy? TH- No. Never used it. I went my first few years on the job with no Scott. The first ones they put on the trucks were the side compartment. They were up in the rack, high up, so you couldn’t back in, you had to take it off and drop it in over your head. You had to grab it just right to drop it over your head and put it on. Then they put them in the jumpseat, in the back of the seat, which was a little bit easier to put on, but there wasn’t much room. But at least you had, on the way to the fire, the guy in the back and the officer could Scott up. The officers didn’t get them til later. TT- So you guys ate a lot smoke. I’ve heard stories about Timmy Hayes and Gendreau chainsmoking in a fire. TH- Timmy Hayes. The first thing he did was light up a cigarette. I haven’t seen him in-- TT- He just passed away last year. TH- Did he? That’s too bad. He could take smoke. TT- I’ve heard about this guy. There would be guys on the ground puking from the smoke and he’d just be standing there talking like he was having a coffee. TH- He was a smoke-eater. And a great fireman. For sure. As soon as the fire was over, like you said, out came the cigarette. Me, I smoked when I first came on, but I threw them away one day on Conant Street. We had a fire in a mill, a machine. It wasn’t a big fire, but it created a lot of smoke. We had to go up like three of four flights of stairs. And with the Scott, the axe, and everything else we carried, I got up there and was sucking air. I killed that bottle in like ten minutes. You’re not gonna go back down and get another one, so now you just take the mask off and do your job. After the fire was out, we were coming down, and I says, “You know, this smoking ain’t helping. And I took the cigarettes out of my pocket and threw them away. Never touched them again. It was just an incentive to get rid of those things. TT- How old were you when you quit? TH- Twenty-eight. A lot of times, you’re just hanging around the station killing time. Gum and Tootsie-Pops helped. Something to do with your hands. TT- What about Ray Gilbert. TH- He was on Central Ave, Station 6, Hose 6. Leo Masse was up there on that shift. But Ray was on another shift so I only saw him on overtime. TT- What about the Kevin Rabbit fire. Were you working that day? TH- No, he was on the B-Shift. It flashed right over. He got burnt pretty good on the face. His helmet, they had his gear in Training for a while-- TT- I saw it. It was torched. TH- They still got it? He was a good kid. Good firefighter. It was just one those things-- TT- Somebody pops the wrong window and everything goes boom. TH- It’s funny because when you watch these shows on TV, they always show a backdraft, backdraft, backdraft. How many backdrafts do you really see and have? You will have one. We had one over on Main Street. A motorcycle shop. But I don’t even think it was a true backdraft. The motorcycles inside still had gas in their tanks. And when we went in, they all blew up, so we got tumbled out the door. But nobody got hurt. I just think it was an explosion. Igniting. But his was definitely a backdraft. TV shows them every week. TT- Not to mention you don’t usually survive backdrafts, so they would need a whole new cast every week (laughs). TH- He was very fortunate. He only had a few years on the job at the time. He would’ve come back but the doctors said—I remember talking to him because he was working as a salesman at a car dealership. I was in there looking at cars when he said, “I’d love to go back, but the doctors said something could trigger me, and it wouldn’t be fair to the guys I’m working with or myself.” Lose it for a few seconds, you know? It was a traumatic event. TT- I heard the doctors said the skin grafts wouldn’t hold if he took another blast of heat like that. TH- That’s a lot of heat, a lot of fire. That’s 2000 degrees. TT- So you guys had some crazy stories. We’ve been very fortunate. We average a line of duty death every 30 years. TH- We never had a single one. Hargreaves got killed a few years after I left. We had some serious injuries but no deaths. You’re gonna get that in any department. Especially in New England. Snow, rain, ice, guys are gonna trip and fall. Ceilings come down on you, your foot goes through a stairwell…you’re gonna get hurt. You just hope you don’t end up in a cellar, because chances are you’re gonna die down there. TT- Nobody wants to end up in the cellar, man. TH- Dick Ryan, he was a lieutenant on B Platoon Ladder 1. He went through a flight of stairs over on Armistice Boulevard. They were able to grab him and he didn’t get hurt or burnt, but he told me, it was some scary business. And Dick was a big boy. There was a couple of guys there that were able to pull him out. But you know when you got a good crew. Engine 2, Ladder 1, and Engine 3, Engine 4 and Engine 1 on my shift were good crews. Engine 5, depending on the crew, was okay. Same with the 6s. But you have to remember, those trucks are where all the old-timers went. They didn’t do many runs until the rescue business exploded and then they got pissed that they got busy (laughs). But the other crews, you knew who was coming in behind you, and you knew you were gonna have back up. When we had the Olive Street fire, the father was a famous soccer player and his son—we couldn’t get in the front door. It was me and John McDavitt, we were first on scene. We were alone for three to five minutes. We called a Code Red. I was in charge, John got the pump going, he started blasting and I ran around the side to look for another way in. I went up to the second floor and it had been blocked off. You couldn’t get to the third floor. I had to come back down and I said to John, “I’m going in the back.” By then, Engine 4 and them were coming in, so John sent them up after me and that’s where we found the father and son. Upstairs. There was a front door, a side door, and a back door. The side door only went to the second floor. Back door went to the third. So we made it up there – TT- Were they dead? TH- Yes, but you couldn’t tell. At the time, I grabbed the kid and started running down the stairs. Norm Partington (a legendary rescue guy) was coming up and I handed the kid to him. I went back to help the other guys because the father had tried to hide in a bathtub. TT- Now the Dexter Street fire, where the two guys died in the window, were you around for that or already retired? TH- I was gone by then. TT- So you left in 1988. You did twenty-one years, right? TH- I would’ve stayed longer but the politics sucked. (For years, fire department promotions were run by politics instead of being earned. Finally, the union told the men to stop taking the promotions until the city approved outside testing for fairness. This almost destroyed the job. For years, 80% of the officers’ spots remained empty. Desperate, the city finally offered to make anyone who crossed the picket line, which was why Gendreau, Murray, Sylvester and the other four were quickly shunned and treated as outcasts.) And unfortunately, I think that’s what killed my buddy Ray. Ray Masse, at the time, took the lieutenant’s test, passed the test, he went next door for the Oral Board, and it was either this or that. You knew when you walked in if you were going to get it or not, you know? More politics. I can remember one of the times I went over there, we had the foam truck. Engine 2 had the foam unit on it. One of the chiefs at the boards, who was from East Providence, asked me, “Can you come into my city and use your foam truck?” I said, “Yeah, of course I can.” “Oh, you think so?” “Well, why wouldn’t I?” “You can mix your foam and my foam?” I said, “Chief, you didn’t say that. You asked if I could come into your city and use our foam truck.” And another chief who was there agreed with me. (laughs) Then the guy says, “I wouldn’t consider you for lieutenant.” (makes a motion of crumpling up the application and tossing it over his shoulder.) Okay. So that was the way it went. Ray, because his brother-in-law Bob Thurber was a lieutenant, and his brother Leo was on the job, he was a lieutenant-- TT- Did Ray make lieutenant? TH- No. In fact, I retired as an acting lieutenant. So I got the money, but not the pins (laughs). But that’s the way it goes. TT- They had the people they wanted to make, right? The politics is always ugly. TH- Exactly. TT- That’s gross. TH- Then when they went to the outside testing, I said, “This is my shot.” No oral board. So I studied and studied. I passed every test but one during the years I was on. All I needed to get was a 70. With my seniority, that gives me a 90. I gotta be in the top ten, and they were gonna make like fifteen or sixteen guys. Two days before I was supposed to take the test, (the city) put in an injunction against it. They wanted to go back to the old test, which meant politics was coming back. It was like, if I stay, chances were slim that I was gonna make it. And then I’d end up working for a junior guy-- (At this point, the tones hit. Fire Alarm announces, “Attention Engines 4,1,2, Ladder 2, still alarm…” After the address is announced, Heaney looks at me curiously and I tell him Engine 3 is out of service.) TH- I was wondering why the 1s were going. TT- No, I mean Engine 3 is no more. Like it’s closed. The city whacked it.” TH- (Incredulous) You’re kidding. TT- So now we’ve got five engines, two ladders and four rescues. TH- Where are the rescues running out of? TT- Everywhere. The 5s, the 4s, 6s, Station 3 is now the 1s, so Rescue 1 runs out of there. TH- So the crews … TT- We haven’t had a bump bid yet. This just happened like a month ago. The city came to us and asked if we wanted to run with two-man ladder companies, or close Engine 3. We said, “Look, we’re not gonna do two-man ladder companies.” TH- We did that. It sucks. TT- Not only that, one of our guys just had half his leg cut off. TH- I heard that. How’s he doing? TT- He’s great. He’s doing great. TH- I read that they were trying to screw him. I’ll say one thing about McLaughlin, he and I had our differences, but I give him credit, and I would shake his hand. He stood up. It’s sad the chief didn’t, because that’s one of his men. I mean, he did nothing wrong. They only had one ladder there that night. Period, end of story. It’s not the firefighters’ fault that you don’t maintain your equipment. They didn’t maintain it. They could’ve gotten a second ladder (cities and towns loan each other pieces of equipment on a regular basis.) They were doing the right thing. Somebody was trapped, they were moving the ladder to try and get them—No, you back your men. I was glad to see that Jay did that, because it would’ve really sucked. TT- He has a stern reputation around here, but he’s also one of the only guys who’s going to stand up. TH- That’s the way Jay was. They used to call him Cement Head. He was very headstrong. I’ve had my arguments with him at union meetings and this and that. “You wanna take this outside?” (laughs) At union meetings, and Billy Malloy was the president, and he would say, “Come on, guys, come on, guys, calm down.” If you wanna take it outside, we’ll go. One of us wins, one of us loses, I don’t care. So then the meeting was over, and I was standing there talking to Ray or somebody, and he comes over and says, “Can I talk to you for a minute?” “Yeah, outside or inside?” “Naw, naw, naw,” he says, “I apologize. I lost it.” I says, “But don’t ever think, because you lift weights, and you’ve got muscles, I’m gonna back down. I’ve taken punches before, and I’ve been knocked on my ass before. But I’m not gonna back down for you or anybody. After that we got along a little better. He was just that way. He probably would’ve kicked my ass, he probably would’ve stomped me into the ground, he was a big boy. TT- Back in the day he was throwing up a lot of weight. TH- Hey, I’m glad he stood up for the kid, because it’s sad to see something like that happen. He was thinking of retiring too, wasn’t he? TT- Actually, the day it happened, at shift change, I was sitting on the picnic table at the 4s. Sometimes I would work nights for him, because he got a side gig doing electrical work, so that night he came in, it was his last night of his cycle. Me and him sat there and he was like, “Yeah, I pulled my papers. I’m checking my numbers…” He wasn’t officially going, but he was right there. Then seven hours later all hell broke loose. TH- So he’s up and walking around? TT- Yup. He’s moving and grooving. The beginning was rough, obviously, but we just saw him last week. We try to go down every couple of weeks. We were going down every week but I think, as he started to heal up, he didn’t need all of us clowns pounding beers in his house (laughs). TH- Where is he? TT- North Kingstown. He’s doing good. Anyway, switching gears, we’re still getting used to this five-engine model at work. I’m on the 4s, so the 2s and 4s are already busy, we took up some of District 3 after they closed the truck, but Engine 1 and Engine 6 are the ones who have taken over the majority of that district. District 1 is now huge and spans both sides of the river. TH- At least they kept Station 3. Station 1, I can’t even believe that’s closed. That’s a heavily populated three-decker area. When Lynch was the mayor, we had that fire on Olive Street. When that soccer player died. Lynch showed up on the scene, the fire was knocked down, Norm and I, Norm Partington who was on the 4s that helped us bring him down, we were out there because Bannon, he was the Battalion Chief, he said, “ I need you back here to give a full report to the mayor.” So I did. The mayor says, and I’ll never forget it, he says, “I know you guys think I’m gonna take a ladder out of service, I would never do that, especially after something like this. Blah blah blah, I feel bad this happened…” I think it was not long after that we were pounding the streets trying to save Ladder 3. That guy was two-faced. TT- Ladder 3 got killed to create Rescue 2, kind of like Engine 3 being killed to create Rescue 4. TH- When I came on, we had three-man engines and three-man ladders for the most part. But they never replaced if someone was out sick. TT- So this was before minimum-manning dictated 31 firefighters had to be on shift at all times. TH- Right. So, especially on the weekends, a lot of people might be out sick or on vacation, and you’d run with two guys. That’s what happened that night. Ray was on vacation, so it was me and McDavitt, who was driving. It was just the two of us. We pulled in and I mean this thing was roaring. TT- Two guys? Jesus… TH- Two guys. What do you do? You just gonna stand there waiting for another truck? You go in. We couldn’t get in the front door. John wanted to come in. I said, “John, just run the pump and send the next company in behind me.” So I went up that side door and couldn’t get to the third-floor. I mean that’s like three minutes wasted. Who knows if it would’ve made a difference? TT- Incredible that you’re still critiquing that run forty years later. TH- As soon as we got upstairs, I went in that first door and that was the bathroom. That’s where they were. But they were… TT- Yeah, you can’t take that kind of smoke. TH- No. And for him (the mayor) to come over and say that at the spot of a double fatal, and then come back a few weeks later and still take the truck away, you need more, not less. You don’t need them every day, but you just don’t know when you’re gonna need them. Everybody thinks you’re sitting around playing cards and this and that, I mean we used to check our trucks, we used to start the Jaws of Life. Ralph and I and Sholas and Ray, we’d take the small boat and head out towards East Providence just to run the motor. Things like that need to be run. “Oh, just put it in a 55-gallon drum and run it.” No. I don’t think so. Take it out and run it. It was good. That’s why they used to send new recruits downtown. We had the ladder, the engine, all the toys, and we liked to train. TT- The Jaws were new back then, right? Didn’t they come around in the 70s? TH- Yes. Before that all we had was a pinch bar and a spreader. TT- How did you know it was time to go? You got on at twenty-two, you did twenty-one years, so you were like forty-three? TH- Like I said, the politics killed it. I was Acting Lieutenant, the money was there. If I stayed and didn’t make lieutenant, I would’ve had to stay for ten more years, which I wouldn’t have minded, but I knew there were some guys that were gonna make it through politics, that didn’t have experience. TT- Right. You didn’t trust them as a boss. TH- I mean, we always said, you should be allowed to take the lieutenant’s test after you get two or three years on the job. You should be able to take every test you want to take, but you shouldn’t be allowed to make lieutenant before you get ten years on the job. It’s not the knowledge that you have, it’s the experience that counts too. But they wanted to do that. Like you said, you have to respect the officer, but how can you respect the officer if you don’t trust them? You know yourself. There are probably some guys whose opinions you question? TT- There are some people you definitely keep an eye on. TH- They’re book smart. I was in my forties by then. Am I gonna take a test against a guy who’s twenty-two, twenty-three, just got out of school, maybe did some college? TT- We have guys scoring 91 on these tests now. I can’t even compete with that. I took the lieutenant’s test and came out like 22 on the list. Everyone would have to die for me to make lieutenant. (laughs) TH- If you get lucky, they go for years without making anybody, like I think when Ralph made it, he was under me, so when I left he was the senior firefighter, and he passed the test, so he was in the top ten. I think they made like sixteen or seventeen guys. It went that long without making lieutenants, because they just kept putting the senior firefighter in charge. So it’s like, did I want to go? No. I loved the job. When I left here, the Chief in North Cumberland said, “I’ll put you on right now. You don’t even have to go to the school or nothing.” I thought about it and said, “You know, I’m not gonna take a job away from a young kid that might really want the job for a career.” He said, “Will you at least come up as a paid call-man?” I says, “Yeah. On my hours, I’ll go on any call that comes in. But if I have something to do…” he goes, “No problem.” They used to be volunteers and then they started paying them. He said, “When the tones go off, if you could just come to the station…” When I got off here, Cumberland was running five stations from different districts. Station 5 was off of Napierville Highway, they had a brush truck, a squad, two engines and a ladder truck. They only had three guys on duty. One man per truck. You’re on Engine 53, you take the brush truck, you take the ladder. That’s why they needed call-men. (they get paid per call.) TT- So you did that and what else did you do? TH- I was working for the food service, Sedesco, which was actually Marriot at the time. It was actually run by the state first, then they privatized it. Marriot took it over. Paul Keenan, Leo Masse and myself worked for them. TT- So you were driving around food or what? TH- Yes. Delivering lunches to the schools. TT- Oh, I get it. TH- When they privatized it, they went full-time. It worked out great. You guys pay Social Security on here now? TT- No. We are still outside the system. TH- We didn’t either. But my outside jobs allowed me to collect Social Security. I worked almost twenty years, until I was seventy-two, plus the part time jobs I had before, plus the Navy, so I accumulated enough time to collect. I still got burnt because Reagan put in this windfall act that penalized police, fire, and teachers if they had a pension, they couldn’t get their full social security. They cut you like 40% or something like that. Why, I don’t know. TT- I got twenty years out in the world before I got here, so I’ll be able to collect the SS on that at least. TH- The IAFF was supposed to be trying to do something but I never heard otherwise. TT- Let’s circle back, because you keep mentioning Ray Masse Sr. When he died, this was a big deal, right? I heard this affected the whole job. TH- Oh yeah. He was well-liked, he was good fireman, he would’ve made a great officer if they made him. TT- How old was he? TH- Forty-one. TT- Jesus. TH- I don’t know if you know the full story, but him and Bob Thurber Senior, Ray’s son RJ, and Thurber’s son Michael, the kids were very close. In fact they used to play fireman at Thurber’s house on Benefit Street. They had a radio there and the tones would go off and the kids would jump into their little fire cars and respond to the driveway (laughs). They went to the Cape, Just Ray and his kid and Thurber and his kid. Ray took the days off, but worked the nights. He was supposed to be there on a Saturday night. Ray was always here at five o’clock. I’d be here between five and a quarter after. I got here and Ray wasn’t here. Maybe he was late or whatever. 5:30, 5:45 came and went, so we let the guy who was waiting to be relieved go home. We were gonna run with two men until he came in. Finally, I called Bob Thurber and I says, “Bobby, can you run over to Ray’s house? See what’s up? Maybe he fell asleep?” I knew they had come back from the Cape, and maybe he was taking a nap. Bob went over there, the door was locked. He called back, we were in Fire Alarm, and he said he couldn’t get in. Says his car is here but everything’s locked up. “Send an engine and a rescue, something’s wrong.” So they got in the house and there he was, dead in the bed. We went up with our truck, and Leo was working our shift too. Bob said Ray was fine at the Cape, that it was just one of those things. He had one foot on the floor, Bob said, like he was trying to get up. I heard his son, RJ, recently had to retire as well. TT- Ray Junior got pensioned off from lung damage. A lot of this stuff is new. A lot of the guys who got on in the 1980s, they were the tail-end of the good old days and, unfortunately, as we created more and more of this plastic, toxic crap like cell phones, huge flat-screen TVs, iPads, laptops—the whole house is a toxic shitdump now. Everything in there is cancerous. But no one knew anything about it until these guys started dying. A lot of the 90s guys and the 2000s guys—no one gave a shit about cleaning around here. You know, you probably slept with your boots and nighthitch in the dorm. We all did. But no one does that now. All of this went on until about four years ago. Nobody cleaned any gear, our stuff was as trashed as your gear was, I mean I remember bringing my stuff up here (in the dorm) when I worked with Chickee on C-Chift. Nobody knew what was coming. TH- Boots and nighthitch right next to the bed. TT- And you guys are all alive. That’s the difference. Hell, Timmy Hayes was ripping Marlboro Reds inside a goddamn three alarm fire and he lived until he was almost 90. Keenan, you, Gildea, all alive. But now we got guys in their 50s and 60s dying from cancer. That twenty-year window where they started putting all this crap into the houses, it’s all garbage. The whole house is fake and filled with plastic. TH- Like you said, Joe (Gildea’s) older than me, Paul (Keenan’s)about my age. And what can you say about Timmy Hayes? I don’t ever remember seeing him wearing a Scott pack. Think about that. He was just that type. He would chew the shit out of a sponge, but… TT- And he lived to almost 90. That’s crazy. Now, some of these guys aren’t even going to see 70. TH- The whole job has changed. I laughed, and maybe I shouldn’t have, but I remember a Providence Battalion Chief getting called in a number of years ago, after I was off, and they had had a pretty big fire in Providence. He got called in. They had the building broken up into quadrants. He needed guys, so he found a bunch of them rehabbing, sitting on the wall. He said, “I need ten guys, you ten, you come with me. We’re gonna grab a line.” They said, “Sorry, Chief, we’re on rehab.” He looked at them. “Rehab? What’s rehab?” “Well, we’ve been in there for twenty minutes and now we have to rehab.” We used to fight fires for three or four hours. Rehab was go to the canteen truck, get a drink and a sandwich, and then get your ass back there. TT- Different world, right? We still have some nut-bags that will change bottles and keep going in and out, but you’re right. There’s an awful lot of shepherds (firemen standing curbside with their poles and tools.) There are also guys that don’t want to go in because they’re scared of cancer. TH- Your blood pressure is gonna be high if you’re fighting a fire. As soon as that bell hits and you jump on that truck it’s gonna be high. So when they take your pressure on-scene, of course it’s gonna be high. TT- I’m in-between both sides. I’m old enough to still have contact with the guys in their 50s and 60s, and I’m between the guys in their 20s and 30s, and you can see the generational difference. The guys in their 50s and 60s who recently retired were pretty grossed out about what was happening. TH- It blows your mind. Not to take anything away from these guys, but I don’t think they would’ve been able to handle twenty or thirty years ago. We used to work the same hours as you guys. 5pm to 7am. 730, you headed home. If I didn’t smell like smoke, I’d go right to my other job driving the bus. From there, I’d meet Ray over at Sacred Heart. We did maintenance over there. So you worked from eight o’clock until four, went home, showered, got dressed, then came back here. Like you said, guaranteed, out of the three nights, you’re gonna spend two of them out fighting fires. Especially down here. Here, the 3s, the 4s, you’re gonna get rescue runs, you’re gonna get fires, it’s gonna be busy. I hear guys say, “Oh I had a hell night. I had a rescue run at one o’clock, a car fire at five…” (laughs) You don’t know what a hell night is. You wanna hell night, go to Detroit. They have thousands of fires. Those guys take a beating. Building after building after building…whole neighborhoods. TT- I heard they stopped going in in Detroit. There was no point to risking lives for vacant houses. TH- Not taking anything away from these guys, but a lot of guys take this job for the wrong reasons. The dedication isn’t there. The brotherhood and camaraderie isn’t there. I mean Freddy Fisher was on this job and he was one of the guys who died young. Think it was his kidneys. He was in the process of remodeling his house. Dick Ryan, who was a lieutenant, he worked at Drolet Hardware. He sold Freddy all of his kitchen cabinets. He came into the station one night and he says, “Guys, Freddy’s really doing bad, he’s really sick. He’s not gonna be around too long.” He said he wanted to get a crew together and go over there and rip all of the cabinets out, strip the kitchen right down, and then he’d get a crew to go over and remodel the kitchen for him. There was like twenty-five or thirty guys that showed up there on a Sunday morning. Totaled it. Ripped everything out and threw into dumpsters. I mean it was clean down to the studs, so that the remodel guys could just come in and do the install. I don’t think you’d see that today. TT- No. You might get five guys, you might have ten. TH- Even when we used to have the Fireman’s Ball, at the Le Foyer, we’d have to go back there on a Saturday morning to get the hall cleaned up, because they had weddings there. It had to be cleaned by eleven, twelve o’clock so they could set up for the wedding. At first, we used to have a good crew to go over there, and then all of a sudden it started to dwindle down. There’d be three or four of us that showed up to clean and dump out the beers. That’s when it all started going downhill. TT- I heard that. We’re talking about the late 80s, right? TH- Yes. Just before I got off, basically. TT- Were you born in the city? Did you live here? TH- I lived on Pinegrove, off of Beverage Hill. I got on here in ’67, we bought a house right over there after I got on, and my son, he got hit by a car Memorial Day in 1975, and he was in pretty bad shape. In Intensive Care. He had a fractured skull and everything else, and my wife couldn’t take the sirens all night, going up and down Beverage Hill Avenue anymore. So we moved up to Cumberland in’76. We didn’t move sooner because there was that gray area, where you were supposed to live in the city? That still existed back then. And then they finally loosened up. My only restrictions to her were that the house have gas heat, and was less than a half hour to work. So we moved up to Cumberland, which was a good move. TT- You have any regrets? TH- No. No. I would do it all over again. Like you say, the guys that I worked with, they were great. Not all shifts, you have your good guys and you have your bad guys, But I was fortunate to work with guys who did the job. Like Chickee. He was on a shift with a bunch of good guys. I used to tell Joe Murray, and it used to piss him off, “If you haven’t been on a downtown company, you’re not a firefighter.” “Oh, you guys downtown, this and that…” Anybody that wants to do the job and loves the job, they’re gonna do it. We had a Battalion Chief from Warwick teaching our class. He says to the class, “People out there tell us we’re assholes and we’re stupid.” He says, “Don’t disagree with them.” And everybody looked at him and said what the hell, man? He said, “Stop and think about it. When we pull up to a burning building, everybody’s leaving. We’re going in. So you either gotta be crazy, stupid, an asshole or some combination of all three.” But it’s because it’s a job you want to do. Like when you go to war. You don’t want to be in a war, but you join the service and you do what you have to do. I think it’s sad if guys take the job for any other reason. TT- Kind of like risking your life for all the wrong reasons. TH- Right. TT- Every day you walk in the door could be the last one you ever see. TH- That got proved by that kid with his foot. Who would ever think, you know? Whatever happened, his foot slipped off the rail-- TT- It’s three in the morning, it’s raining, take your pick. TH- Exactly. He didn’t say, “Oh, it’d be a good idea to get my foot crushed in the ladder.” It’s one of those things that just happens. TT- When I was on the ladder, we trained to fly it around with guys on it. You watched your hands, moved your feet. You train for the scenario, right? I get the safety aspect. I do. No one wants to get crippled, so I’m not advocating that, but I can also tell you that if you work with guys long enough, you get to know each other’s skills and limitations. One day on Paul Street, Cabral flew me up to the roof. I didn’t climb a single rung and thought nothing of it. Once I came down, Chief Tanguay just smiled and said, “Old school rail-riding…don’t ever do that again.” But you know what? Even though the hole was cut in like four minutes, it is, it’s different now, especially after what happened to Asher. But even he knows. He doesn’t regret it because the whole reason for our profession being created was pulling people out of windows of burning houses. TH- This job is a combination of wins and losses. A lot of times you go to car accidents and house fires and you get people out, you save them, they live. Bad accidents, bad fires. And then there’s those times, and hopefully they’re very few, when you get somebody out and they haven’t made it, or they end up dying by the time you get to the hospital, it’s sad. And it will affect you, but there’s more better days than there are bad. And if you’ve done the best you can, you can hold your head up, no matter what anybody says. You gotta be thick-skinned. I don’t know where you live, but when I lived in Pawtucket, my neighbor used to say, “What’d you guys do, go to bed all night?” “No,” I says. “We had three car fires and were at the dump all night putting out a fire with rats running all over—” “Rats?” Unfortunately, the citizens see you standing out front of the station and they say, “You guys are doing nothing. You’re probably gonna go inside and play cards.” Well, they don’t understand that you train, you wash your truck, you check your truck, you clean your station—this is your home. You keep it clean, you keep it neat. That’s all you can do. We had guys bitch, “Oh I don’t want to clean the urinals.” Then I’ll do it. I did it in the navy, I can do it here. I do it at home. It’s no big deal. It’s a bathroom. If you keep it clean, it’s not gonna be that hard to clean. And you got somebody here every single day. If it’s washed everyday, how long does it take to clean it? But if you leave it for a month, good luck. It’s gonna be gross. TT- That’s kind of what started to happen around here. The mayor hates us, and he tries to torture us whenever he can. So guys started slipping a little bit, and we were like, “I don’t think so. We live here. We’re not living like this.” TH- Exactly. TT- It doesn’t matter how pissed off you are, it’s not gonna make this place any cleaner. TH- We used to say the same thing. Would we strike? No. Because I couldn’t live with myself if there was a fire and we didn’t roll that truck out the door and somebody died. Because that’s my job. Whether we’re fighting with the city or whatever, no, you work, you put your stuff on the truck and you work. If you want to slack off on doing housework, take care of your truck. If there’s a mechanical problem with it, get it fixed. That’s your job. You’re here to save and protect lives and serve the public. Don’t take it out on the public. Some guys don’t get that. TT- There’s a lot of animosity between the union and City Hall, especially with him closing Engine 3. The 1s are already closed. TH- So stupid, by the way. TT- Seriously. We thought closing Station 1 would be a disaster. The number one fire district in the city, and we haven’t had a true burner over there in a while. When I first got on, there was a first-due fire in the 1s every other week. The city’s gotten so lucky. And for the public, I hope that luck continues. But we all know what’s coming. And once it does, saving money isn’t gonna be too good an argument after people are dead. TH- That’s the land of triple-deckers. Plus high-rises downtown. It’s bound to happen. The response from downtown to there isn’t that long, but it’s long enough, especially if you’re trying to get over the bridges at rush hour. They don’t think it’s ever gonna happen. Did we think Japonica Street was gonna happen? Did we think that Olive Street was gonna happen? TT-They closed Engine 4 a couple of years ago thinking they were gonna do rolling blackouts and save money, and we caught a fire over there almost immediately, a gas fed fire. Needless to say, Engine 4 was re-opened. TH- You can’t…like if you work in a mill you can show how much you’re producing. Like a thousand pieces an hour. So many a day. And that’s making money. You can’t say you’re having X amount of fires because you don’t know. You might go a week or two without one, or maybe even a month, but back in the day that wasn’t the way. There was some type of fire every single day. Somewhere in this city, you had a fire, maybe not a big working fire, but you had one. If you remember correctly—and you’re a roofer—a lot of people were using torches to burn paint off houses. And they would go to lunch. We had a couple of them off Harrison and Main Streets where they would come back from lunch and smell smoke. Same thing happened with that church over in East Providence. They were taking the paint off it and set the whole place on fire. Painters don’t really do that anymore. Mostly scraping and sanding. Buy you never know. People love their candles, especially during the holidays. They used to dip Christmas trees into a vat of fire retardant. We had one at the 3s. From what I understood, and I never got the full story, but the stuff we were dipping into was actually more flammable than the tree. But we were lucky. You never know. People clean out coals from their woodstoves and leave them on a wood deck porch. Bad idea. You can’t tell the city, “We’re gonna have five fires next week.” It doesn’t work like that. TT- You can’t plan a disaster. TH- They don’t get that. We’re the insurance policy for the city. You need insurance for your car and your house, right? It’s a necessary evil. Well, that’s like the fire and police departments. Without them, you have chaos. TT- If the cops can’t arrest it, remove it, or shoot it, we go. On everything. Some lady called us up one night because her neighbor’s AC was making too much noise. People can’t turn off their own water. TH- In Florida, they call our ACs “window-shakers.” I said, “What the hell are you talking about?” Their AC units are usually built into the house. Up north is where people jam ACs into their windows. TT- Back then, you guys didn’t do the EMS runs we do now. Like everything’s been flipped on its head. TH- It started in the 80s. We ran engines only on heart attacks, car accidents, strokes, but now it’s everything. When I came on, we used to call it a bread wagon, because that’s what the truck looked like. Like a big van. With a stretcher. Costigan ambulance did all of the transports. Once the contract with Costigans ran out, we started rolling engines on everything. There was only one rescue until the 80s, early 80s. Now they have four rescues. TT- I’m sure Rescue 5 will be here in the next few years. We’re doing 17,000 runs a year. TH- Is Fire Alarm civilian? TT- Yes. TH- Any retired firemen in there? TT- A couple. Arty Mintsmenn is in there. TH- Oh boy (laughs) Arty? He’s a character. TT- You got that right. TH- Nobody likes Fire Alarm. But some guys don’t like driving the ladder either. Back then it was a tiller. So some guys would be like, “I’ll take the rescue if you drive the ladder.” Seriously? We had Joe Gildea, who used to drive tractor-trailers, so I wasn’t worried about it. Joe was so good that the tiller guy wouldn’t even have to touch the wheel. He drove that whole truck like a tractor-trailer. If he was making a righthand turn, you had to turn your wheel left. It was opposing steering. Then you had to come back. If you swung that wheel three times you had to swing it back three times or you were gonna hit something. Joe was a master. He used to tell me, “when I get ready to back in, don’t even touch the wheel.” (laughs) He would back it in and I wouldn’t have to do a thing. We all took turns in the Alarm Room, but no one liked it. Back then it was the old plug type switchboard. Then they got more modern. Back then, there wasn’t any night-mode either (night-mode goes from 10 pm to 8am. Individual stations will be toned out for runs instead of waking up the whole department for nothing.) So when I would go to the 6s on overtime, I’d get there in the morning and ask how their night was. “Oh, Jesus Christ, downtown went out three times and we had to listen to them (on the radio).” (laughs) You’re part of the Pawtucket Fire Department, it means you know they’re out, so if they call for help, you’re going. But they used to get all pissed off. The contract doesn’t say anything about being able to sleep all night. Remember that story about the murdered woman? Frank Boisclair and I had that run. It ended up being a Pawtucket cop’s grandmother. And they never found the killer. I was retired and Frank was retired. We got letters from the department that we had to go to court years later for this murder. So we came down here and had to find the report and read it. The brother of the kid who did the murder, gave him up because he got arrested for something else. He got popped in Providence, so the Providence cops called the Pawtucket PD and told them what they had. Now this is seventeen years later. Frank and I had to go to court, like three or four days, and they finally made a deal. Guess they weren’t too close as brothers. TT- I’d say not. Can you think of anything else you’d like to say? TH- (he takes one more look around the bunkroom of Station 2 where he was stationed for 21 years.) No, I think I’m good. Interviews for FD edited
Frank Boisclair September 2, 2019 In 1957, three guys got sworn in as privates, and before their careers were through, all three became Chief of the Pawtucket Fire Department. Frank Boisclair was one of them. He was twenty-two-years-old and fresh out of the Navy when he raised his right hand and took the oath downtown. He and his beloved wife Audrey raised two sons that went on to become pillars of both the Police and Fire Departments. We sat down in his basement surrounded by scrapbooks and memories twenty-six-years after his retirement. This is what he said … FB- Let’s go back to the old days. 1957. I was on Rescue 1. They had just been created six months before. TT- So Rescue 1 was created in like 1956? FB- Yes. TT- What was it back then? Was it a station wagon? FB- No. I have the pictures right here if you would like to see it. (The old Rescue 1 was big and looked like an ice cream truck.) The driver’s job was to carry the oxygen tank up to the second or third floor. And by the time you got up there, you needed it yourself (laughs). (He shows me a pic of himself and the original Rescue 1 at a car accident.) TT- Cars back then were all steel and metal, no airbags. That looks like it hurt. So let’s start at the beginning. How old were you when you got on? FB- I was seventeen when I joined the Navy. I did four years, so I was twenty-two or three. TT- Navy for four years? What did you do? Where did you go? FB- All over the world. Korea. I was on an aircraft carrier. TT- What was your job on the carrier? FB- Boiswain mate. TT- What? FB- Small boats. TT- Did you see any action? FB- Our planes did. (There’s a map of the world on the basement wall. Different colored push-pins show where he and his two sons, Mark and Dave, were during their time in the Navy.) I’m in white, my oldest son’s in Red, the one who passed away. And the blue one’s are Mark’s. TT- So you were twenty-two? You got on with Joe Burns, Thurber… FB- About the same time. They were six months after me. They weren’t allowing brothers on the job at the same time. Joe Burns, his brother was on the rescue, and Bob Thurber, his brother was on the Police Department. So they weren’t allowing brothers. TT- Why? Were they trying to prevent nepotism? FB- I don’t know. And I don’t know if anyone’s told you this yet, but the guys used to have to go out and do crossing guard duty for the kids, to and from school. TT- I had heard that. I heard you guys had to show up for work in your dress blues, change into your tan khakis, and then had to change back into dress blues to cross the kids. Did they send out the junior guys? FB- Not always. Anyone up to lieutenant. And details, we didn’t get paid for them. (A detail is when a firefighter will be sent to a public or private event when a certain number of civilians are expected to attend. IE- baseball games, concerts, church bazaars…) If a storm was coming, you stayed over for free. No pay. TT- How many guys were on the job when you were doing the two-platoons system? FB- I got on right after they created the third platoon in 1955. TT- Are we talking seventy guys on the two-platoon system? FB- Something like that. TT- And after the third platoon was created you had to go up in manpower, right? FB- What they did was give you days off, they call them the Kelly Days. Every three weeks you got an extra day off. But they didn’t pay you. If you had a detail on Main Street, that money went upstairs, not in your pocket. TT- When there was two-platoons, those guys worked like 80 hours a week, right? FB- That’s true. TT- I heard they were allowed to go home for meals only. FB- It was four days on, four days off. Straight through. No overtime. TT- So Rescue 1 is 1956. FB- Joe Burns’ brother was on it. And Elmer King. So when I got on, that’s when they started the third-platoon. This is picture of all the guys at Station 2 when I got on. Ray Murray is there…all these guys. This is a pic of my academy class. TT- What was your academy like? What did they do to you guys? FB- We trained with ladders and hoses, plus at the time there was a tower near McCoy Stadium. We trained on that. TT- Was it a part-time, unpaid academy like ours was? We showed up after work two nights a week and Saturday for eight hours. FB- No, this was during the day. TT- Did you go right on after the academy? FB- Yes. I did. Most of these guys went right on. Joe Burns and Bobby Thurber were right behind me, like I said. TT- So basically you went from high school to the Navy to the Fire Department. You never really had an outside job then, right? FB- Wrong. I worked in a mill on the side. TT- Everyone had a job in the mills. TT- So when you got on, they were dispatching Box Alarms…talk to me about the system. Because I’ve heard stories about this guy, Stretch Tuit, who would be able to hear the clicks when the microphones opened up, and he would count the clicks and know which box was coming in? FB- He was downtown, so the Alarm Room (dispatch) was right there. The same place it is today. TT- So the boxes would come in on a ticker-tape? FB- Yes. TT- And they would read the ticker-tape… FB- And that would be in the Alarm Room, and they would set it up and send it out to the stations. TT- They were on radios, right? The stations had them but the men didn’t. FB- Yes. Hell, we didn’t even have air-packs, much less radios. We used to use sponges. TT- We’re gonna get to the sponges in a second. So when you got on it was three dayshifts, three nightshifts, three days off, right? FB- Yes. TT- And for like a hundred bucks a week, right? FB- No. We made $100 every two weeks after taxes. TT- Wow. Fifty bucks a week for 72 hours of work. FB- Audrey (his wife) could tell you that. TT- There was no minimum manning either, right? So if guys were out sick or on vacation, they closed trucks, right? FB- Or you got ordered to stay. TT- They ordered guys to stay for free? FB- Yes. TT- Jesus Christ… FB- (laughs). It’s a different world today. Some of you guys don’t take overtime. That’s a luxury we never had. There was three of us, Thurber, Lundegren, and myself, we all worked for Costigan’s Ambulance. TT- All three of you made Chief, right? FB- Yes, but there’s a nasty story on that one. (laughs) We all studied together, but in my stupidity—my name was Boisclair, so alphabetically I took the test first. And when I went back, I gave all the answers to them. (laughs) And they made lieutenant, they made Battalion Chief, and finally I says to Audrey, “I ain’t giving out no more information.” (laughs). TT- Did they have Captains back then? FB- Yes. My grandfather was a Captain on Hose Company 6. TT- Where did you go once you got on the job? FB- Rescue 1. TT- That was downtown? FB- Yes. Station 2. Which at that time was on Main Street. TT- And how long were you on that? FB- Six years. TT- Wow. And then where did you got? FB- Engine 6. On Central Avenue back then. It was Hose Company Number 6. Now, the fire stations, Station 1 was West Avenue, Station 2 was downtown, Station 3 was on Division Street on the hill, Station 4 was on Broadway, and Station 5 was on Smithfield Avenue. Station 2 was Engine 2 and Ladder 1, Station 3 was Ladder 3 and Engine 3, Station 4 was Engine 4 and Ladder 2, Station 5 had one truck, and Station 6 one truck. TT- So your grandfather was on the fire department, that’s like before World War II right? (Shows me a pic of grandfather on Hose 6.) That’s amazing. Look at those trucks. FB- I went to Engine 1 after the rescue, for a year, and then Hose 6 on Central Avenue. TT- Where did you go after Hose 6? FB- After they built the new Station 4 (1974) they consolidated Hose 6 and the old Station 4 into one station. TT- Did you make lieutenant there? FB- I made lieutenant around 1974. When the new station opened. The Engine 4 Lieutenant there was tough. Boy, was he tough. Frank Aveno. TT- Tough meaning what? A disciplinarian? FB- Yeah, but also some stupid things too. Like we had to wash underneath the truck every day and the wheels, the backs of the wheels. TT- These are the World War II guys, right? FB- Frank was on even before that. When I made lieutenant, and we went down to the new Station (4), I says to him, “You handle your shift and your crew your way, and I’ll handle mine.” TT- Everyone runs their own crew their own way, right? FB- We had a situation down at the 6s. One of the guys and I were very close. We grew up together, his brother grew up with us, his brother went into the Navy with me. He was on the fire department long before me. Ever hear of “The Edge?” It was a big nightclub, a big party place. So the box (alarm) for it came in that night. Actually, we had had an argument earlier in the night. It got a little heated. So the box came in, and I said, “Let’s go to the Edge.” He says, “Which way?” I says, “To the Edge.” “Okay, but which way?” I says, “Take a left, take a left, take a right,” you know, giving him directions even though he knew exactly where it was. We come back to the station, he’s driving, right? I said, “Let’s go.” He says, “To where?” I says, “The Edge.” “Which way?” I says, “Left, left, right.” Well, we did this three times. And the poor guy in the back-step was going crazy, he just wanted to go to bed. TT- So you were just trying to make a point? FB- Yes. Look, if you want to play games, I’ll play games with you. It ended up all right. He just wanted to show me, and I just wanted to show him. TT- Where did you go after the 6’s? FB- I made Chief. I wasn’t a Battalion Chief, either, I was a lieutenant. TT- What year did you make Chief? FB- 1988. I’m 84 years old, so the memory is getting a little slippery. One time, I got into some trouble. We were in negotiations with the city. There was Chief Monast, Lt. Bill Coleman, the mayor and myself. We were talking about different pay raises and all that. And I said, “Oh for Christ’s sake, we can’t even get a pair of pliers or a screwdriver.” That didn’t go over too well. Afterwards, Chief Monast came to the station and rang me up. I said, “Hey, that’s the way it goes in negotiations.” It’s not always pretty. And you have to speak your mind. TT- Were you around for the Hargreaves fire? FB- No. I had just left like a year and a half before. TT- Was Joe Burns the Chief when he died? FB- Yes. TT- Talk about the gear when you got on. We’re talking about tin helmets, rubber waders… FB- Yes. TT- Practically no safety, right? You guys would go in as far as you could and take whatever beating you did. And they gave you a sponge to breathe through. Talk about the sponge. FB- You had a chunk of sponge. If you had a hose-line with you you soaked the sponge, put it in your mouth, and went into the fire. TT- I heard you could only go in so far until the sponge starting heating up and cooking your throat from the steam. FB- It did. Now, on the ladder trucks there were three or four OBAs. That’s a Navy breathing apparatus. They were hooked to two lines. I never saw too many guys use it because it was a real production to get it up and running. TT- So the air-packs come into play in the late 60’s and 70’s right? And not too many guys wore them. FB- After they got used to them they did. TT- I heard a lot of the old-timers were like, “We’ve been putting out fires for a hundred years without them, so why start being a pussy now.” FB- (laughs) There’s a lot of history in these books. TT- There’s a lot of retired guys who have these scrapbooks that you have, and I would love to find a way or a place to store them all. That’s the ultimate goal, in order to preserve this history. FB- Downtown, in the cellar, it was loaded with history. We didn’t know how valuable all of it was. TT- Wasn’t there a flood down there and bunch of stuff got thrown out? FB- We had to get rid of the stuff, clean it up, you know? TT- It’s an oral history that gets passed down from generation to generation. Let’s talk about Star Gas. Were you working that day? (Star Gas was a transfer station where propane railcars were off-loaded into the small portable tanks we all use for our grills. But it was right in the middle of a neighborhood, and neighbors often complained about the smell of gas). FB- No. I wasn’t working, but I went in after everything exploded. I was at the 4’s when they told us not to bring the trucks onto that property for any reason. A crew (from Star Gas) over there took us up on top—it wasn’t the huge tank that was in jeopardy, but-- TT- How many tanks are we talking about? And I’m not talking about the small propane tanks that were exploding, I’m talking about the big-daddys. FB- It was a railroad car that was going to explode. The guys at the plant had told us, they showed us, they trained with us, so we’re riding down the road, my wife and I, and ba-boom! The small tanks were landing near the school and the church. TT- You’re talking about the Winter school, right? Star Gas was on Sabin Street, right? FB- Yes. TT- So these cannisters are landing on freaking Broadway. That’s like a quarter mile away. They’re falling out of the sky. It’s a miracle no one died that day. FB- Yes, it is. So, we didn’t know what to do at first. The guys that run the tanks knew what to do, but they wanted somebody up there to help. So I went up there with a couple of other guys and we shut the tank off. That was it. There was a thing on top of the train tanker that needed to be shut off. TT- So you climbed on top of a bomb, basically. FB- Yes. (laughs) TT- I heard that Brule and Bobby Burns and other guys were on a hoseline in front of the tanker just trying to keep it from exploding. FB- There were so many tanks inside that building, they were just popping off like fireworks. TT- And Engine 4 got melted, right? You said the lieutenant unknowingly drove it in there? FB- It got destroyed. TT- How long were you guys there? FB- All day, oh yeah, it was an all day thing. TT- Were any structures affected? FB- Not really. It was just the tanks taking off like rockets. It was like a movie you never wanted to see. It was scary. TT- I heard that if that railcar had exploded it would’ve taken out half of the city. FB- It would’ve. That’s not an exaggeration. It was also a densely populated area. But they, the Star Gas people, gave us good training. They did. So we had an idea of what to do if this happened. TT- Sounds like a once in a lifetime event. FB- It sure was. (laughs) TT- So 1980 is when Rescue 2 comes in and Ladder 3 gets decommissioned. FB- Yes. TT- So in the 1950s they were building I-95, and it tore the city in half. I heard there were a lot of fires after that. They were burning down everything because most of the houses near the new highway were basically worthless. FB- Yes. They were bulldozing them. And the fourth of July. Anyone ever tell you about that? TT- Oh yes. I heard the Fourth of July was chaos, like hundreds of runs over two days. FB- Once seven or eight o’clock rolled around on July 3 or July 4, you didn’t stop running until the dawn. All night long. People used to pour gasoline down the trolley tracks that ran through the city and light them up. The other side of the city was worse, Woodlawn and that area, but no one slept. TT- This was a city tradition going back a hundred years, right? People would stockpile mattresses and couches and garbage all year just to light it all up on the Fourth. FB- They lit everything on fire. (laughs) One night the Chaplain rode with us. And we were coming over the hill, and I said, “Now pay attention and be careful.” He couldn’t believe it. They were firing rockets at us, this is the truth. Rockets. The Chaplain says, “Oh Jesus!” TT- They had extra guys on, extra trucks on, they were burning everything. I heard the bonfires were stacked up as high as some peoples’ houses. FB- That’s true. Every street had a bonfire. Every street. We put one out and just went on to the next. As soon as the people saw you coming they would get upset that we were about to ruin their fun. But it didn’t matter. They just lit it back up after we left. At like 3 in the morning it would slow down, but it never ended. TT- What was the closest you ever came to dying, other than crawling on the railcar at Star Gas. FB- I fell through a floor on Front Street. We had a big fire over there. Leo Masse, I don’t know how he ever did it, but as I was going through the floor, he grabbed me. TT- So he actually kept you from going through the floor? Wow. FB- That’s what I said, too. Wow. (laughs) Another time there was three or four us that got gassed-- TT- Gassed with what? FB- Never found out, to tell you the truth. TT- Everyone has a couple of moments during their career, right? FB- How many years you got on now? TT- Ten. FB- Well, you’ve had a few too. TT- I had a buddy on the job come up to me. Long story short, he was hanging out with his brother, and they hung out for an hour or two, and they ran out of things to talk about. So the brother left. We were at Asher’s fundraiser, so it was all firemen. He says to me, “As close as I am to my own brother, I can hang out with anyone of you guys, anywhere, for any amount of time, for hours and days, and we all have stories about each other. Like I can point to any guy here and tell you a story about that person at a fire.” Then he says, “Remember West Avenue?” And I didn’t. So he tells me, “Remember when I was on that pencil ladder on the third-floor poking my head into the attic?” Well, the ladder kicked out and he was about to go down the burnt-out stairwell, and by chance I just happened to be right behind him and grabbed his legs before he fell. I didn’t think anything of it and actually forgot the whole thing ever happened. So that day he says, “That’s what I remember about you. You saved me from whatever nightmare was waiting for me at the bottom of that stairwell.” And I had totally forgotten it. FB- Oh, you remember. TT- But it’s true. I can do the same thing and point at somebody and say, “He or she did that, he or she did this …” It becomes your family. FB- The worst time I ever had on the job, on the rescue, we entered a cellar. The door was on an automatic closer but you could still squeeze in. Well, this poor kid went in to get his sled and the door slammed on his neck and killed him. That was the worst. And even worse than that, one night we had a fire where five kids died. I wasn’t working, but it was a real heartbreaker. Japonica Street. TT- Oh, man, I’ve heard this story. Weren’t they on the second-floor and couldn’t get out? FB- Yes. And one time, me and Elmer had a guy hit by a railroad train. We picked him up in baskets and then went out for breakfast. But that’s how you had to be. If you were on the rescue, you saw so much damage and suffering and carnage, you had to be that way. You had to move on. Time to move on. Or it would get you. But that little kid, 60 years later I can still see his face. The door just snapped his neck and suffocated him. TT- The suicides are tough, too. Lot of awful things. I don’t think regular people realize how many people kill themselves every day. A cry for help is a lot different than someone who wants to die. That person steps in front of a train or pulls a trigger and it’s all over. FB- Nasty stuff to see. And the drugs today, if your family grows up and no one gets hooked on anything or dies, you’re ahead of the game. TT- That Fentanyl stuff is so bad now it sometimes takes eight vials of Narcan to bring them back, when it only used to take one for straight heroin. Let’s talk about EMS, because it really didn’t exist until the early 80’s, right? FB- Yes. It’s nothing like it is today. TT- I mean people just sicker and more obese every year. I read somewhere that there are 30 million diabetics now, and 80 million pre-diabetics. Those aren’t good numbers. That’s like a third of the country. FB- I think people started using the rescue in a way they shouldn’t. It’s not a taxi. TT- Exactly. A lot of people tell us, “Well, if I go in by ambulance, I’m not going to have to sit in the waiting room.” Which isn’t true, because the hospitals are so overwhelmed, unless you’re having chest pain or can’t breathe, you’re going right to the waiting room anyway. Calling us or not calling us is not going to save you from the waiting room. Somehow this idea got out there. And the rescue is a charged service. It’s like $500 for the ride, and if we use oxygen or IVs or anything else, the charges just go up from there. Like a buffet of charges. And once the cities figured out they could make money on the rescues, now they can’t put enough of them on the road. They’re a revenue stream. We’re trying to create Rescue 4 right now, and the only way the city has proposed doing it is by either closing Engine 3, which does 3300 runs a year, or going to two-man ladder companies and taking those guys and putting them on Rescue 4. Now, this is four months after Lt. Asher got half his leg cut off in an unfortunate accident. FB- Speaking of the 4’s, there used to be a green table in there. Next time you’re there go find it and look underneath it. There’s a lot of signatures underneath it, a lot of history. TT- I’ll look for it but I don’t think it’s still there. As far as your career goes, do you have any regrets? FB- No. TT- When did you know it was time to retire? FB- I just got to a point. 36 years is a long time. 1993. I’ve been off for 26 years. My son went on in 1988. TT- Dave was 1988? What a great guy. He would literally do anything for anyone. Born teacher, too. His passing was devastating. (Dave Boisclair died of job-related cancer in 2016. He was only 57 years old.) FB- It showed. It showed in his funeral, all the people that came out. When he was in hospice, there had to be seven or eight guys in there all the time. And all of a sudden Dave says, “I would like a margarita.” I don’t who it was to this day-- TT- I know who it was. Mike Dawson. FB- Did he? TT- I think so. I think he’s the one who made the margaritas. Want me to write his name down? FB- Yes. I never knew who it was. TT- Dawson loved Dave. We all did. That was a sad time. I know you don’t want to get into it-- FB- No. As far as I was concerned, the Fire Department, the union, was excellent to my family. I can’t fly, but they sent my wife, my daughter-in-law, and grand-daughter out to Colorado when they put his name on the plaque. TT- There were some Thurbers on that flight too, right? FB- Yes. Young Thurber gave the flag to Laurie. Now, there’s a new organization, The Southern Bikers, they were down the station the other day. When anybody dies on the job in southern New England, they ride their bicycles to the place. They’re excellent. All different fire and police departments too. Excellent. They just gave a check to my daughter-in-law from their organization. They’re great. My family really appreciated it. TT- Chief, thank you for having me in your house. FB- Stay safe. (At this point we start going through his voluminous scrapbooks) He shows me a newspaper picture and story about someone kissing a goat. FB- You ever hear of Spike Levesque? TT- I heard Spike Levesque was a legend. Heard he was a rescue guy that could talk to anybody. He de-escalated most things. FB- Well, he was in the Army and I was in the Navy. There was a bar in the 3’s. Spike ran the bar. We used to bet on the Army/Navy game every year. Well, one year I says, “I’m gonna fix this guy.” Navy won that year, so I got this goat, and had guys with drums and bugles and bagpipes, and we marched up the street with this goat. We brought him into the bar and Spike had to kiss him. Well, the next year Navy lost. Spike gets a donkey and brings it into the bar. I don’t know how anyone didn’t get killed. Now, all the guys in the bar are feeding the donkey booze. TT- The donkey’s cocked? FB- The donkey’s cocked. (laughs). Boy, we had a lot of laughs. A lot of laughs. Chief Joseph Burns. December 12, 2018
In 1957, hula-hoops and Slinky’s were the most popular toys, “Twelve Angry Men” was playing in the theaters, the Russians launched Sputnik 1, and Joe Burns got sworn in as a member of the Pawtucket Fire Department. Recently, we sat down in his Attleboro home twenty-six years after his retirement. This is what he said … TT- What year are we talking about? JB- 1957. TT- When did you retire? JB- ’93. Well, I was forced out, so I got thirty-seven years out of it. TT- Thirty-seven years. That’s incredible. JB- The best part was—you know my two sons, Bruce and Bob, they both did like thirty-two, thirty-three years. So I was just telling you that story. We were going down Sayles Avenue, one of my first runs, and I’m holding onto the back. You know how fast we were going? A kid on a bicycle said, “Where’s the fire?” He was keeping up with us. TT- That’s how slow you were going? JB- A kid on a bicycle could keep up with the fire truck. We had that for truck for a year. It was garbage. See this truck here? (Shows me a picture.) They bought it in ’38 and stuffed into Roosevelt Avenue (Station 2) for ten years. Never used it. Didn’t have the manpower or whatever. That was called, in them days, a super-pumper. TT- When you got on in ’57, did you have a fire academy or did you just come on? JB- Here’s what happened. We were leftover from the school in July. There was seven of us leftover. So what they did was pay us fifty bucks a week to come in and train on the job. We never went to fires. So for a month we sat around, training, we went over to the stadium to put a ladder up, no fire academy. The five that I came on with, four of them are dead. Ever hear of Chief Doire? TT- Yes. JB- He’s still alive. Somewhere. TT- Who else did you come on with? Boisclair? JB- Boisclair was six months before. He and I are just about the same age. There’s guys older, but I don’t know where the hell they’re at. I think I’m the oldest active guy. We have a meeting once a month, the retirees, and as far as I can see, I’m the old man. TT- When you got on in ’57, how old were you? JB- I was twenty-seven. Now, I’m eighty-seven. TT- What did you do before you got on? JB- I had the worst job in the world. I undercoated cars, and greased cars. There was a dealership, Plymouth dealership down in Pawtucket. And my brother-in-law worked there and he got me in. Ninety-cents an hour. TT- Ninety cents an hour, holy jeepers creepers. JB- But, apparently I was a good worker because I nickled the owner to death, got him up to a $1.50 an hour (laughs). And that was what the head mechanic was getting. A $1.50. But nobody knew what each other made. TT- When you got on the fire department, how much were making? JB- $67 a week. In 1955, they were getting $50 a week and working eighty-four hours. TT- Dear God. Did you just say eighty-four hours a week? JB- Yup. TT- For $50? That’s like getting sixty cents an hour. JB- And then they went from the two-platoon system, to three platoons in 1955. TT- Wow. JB- So they added a lot of guys. TT-So in 1955 they went to three platoons-- JB- When I got on in ’57, they went to $67. We had a three-year contract. A dollar a year. It took us three years to hit $70. (laughs) TT- How many guys were on the job? JB- 143. TT- That was in ’57? JB- Yes. Now, it’s 153. No overtime for you guys, right? TT- Nope. We are fully staffed 24/7 until this grant runs out. We have a federal grant that basically keeps us fully staffed for three years. JB- Before you came on, Bruce said two guys at the 5’s lost their houses because they used the overtime to pay their mortgage. TT- The guys that live on overtime when overtime is around are making bad decisions. JB- My goal, when I came on the job, Fire Alarm was civilian. They worked forty hours, we worked fifty-six. My goal was to get 20 years on here and then go into Fire Alarm as a second career. With both jobs combined, I would be basically making what the chief makes. But it never worked out, because I became the chief. (laughs.) TT- Now in ’57, the three platoons-- JB- The hours changed. It was three day-shifts, three night-shifts, three days off. Before that, they worked the 84-hour schedule, which basically gave them one day off a week. It was crazy. But the three three and three didn’t allow for overtime either. I remember one of my first Thanksgivings, we worked with thirteen guys. TT- Did you say thirteen? JB- Thirteen. We had an hour and a half to go home for lunch. It was staggered. But the guys that went home for lunch at 2:30 didn’t have to come back, because by then it would be four o’clock. Six trucks with two men apiece and a captain running the show. TT- So obviously, this is before the inception of minimum-manning. JB- That was in 1972. That’s when we went to 31 men, and increased to four platoons. Now the rest of your life, it should stay like that. Some cities are trying to get it back to 56-hour weeks, North Kingstown, East Greenwich… What’s the pay now a week? TT- Around $1000 now. JB- Mine was $67 a week. And I think the Chief made $150 a week. The union got stronger and stronger, and we kept pecking away. Cranston had the best contract in America. Everybody used Cranston in their own negotiations. Five dollars here, five dollars there, we were always trying to better things. When I retired, my pension was $34,000. My salary was $56,000. Today, the chief gets $88,000. So in 25 years it went from $56,000 to $88,000. TT- Wow. Now who was the chief when you got on? JB- Connolly. He had a driver, and one guy in Fire Alarm. One guy ran the whole thing. Barbara (Pacheco) wasn’t there yet, so we had a male secretary upstairs. Barbara’s been there for like 35 years. When I became Chief, I said to Barbara, “I’m swearing you in as Assistant Chief.” (Laughs) But seriously, if I was mayor, I’d make her the Chief. She knows this job back and forth. She saved my ass so many times. TT- Now-- JB- Not to interrupt, but we had a picket line in 1980. The reason we had this picket line was because they took Ladder 3 out of service, and they had a lieutenant’s test that we wanted changed. In order to take the lieutenant’s test you had to run a mile. One mile. And this guy Ron Sweeny ran the mile and a few days later he died of a heart attack. So the union said, “No more running, this is nuts.” Because we were already fighting with the city over the closing of Ladder 3, and this just tipped us over the edge. I was on Ladder 3 and I loved it. You know why? We went to every fire. We went with Ladder 1 on the West side, Ladder 2 on the East. McCoy Station 3 was built in 1957, the same year I got on the job. That’s where it was. We had one Scott pack in the whole city, it was on the rescue-- TT- So no airpacks for anybody, right? JB- One Scott. The Elks Club bought it for us (laughs). In those days they cost $1200. A couple years later the union made the city buy two more. So each Ladder company now had a Scott. I fell in love with the Scott because I don’t like smoke. The engine company would take the line to the door, and I was like a doctor—I’d put on my Scott and they would hand me their hose line and I went in. I told them, “If I get into trouble, I’m at the end of this hose-line.” I loved it. I got more experience, because the engine company could only go in so far without air. I also smashed out the whole window. Some guys only took out a pane or two, but I took out the whole thing, because back then it was usually a mattress fire from the cigarettes. Everybody smoked. So I would fold up the mattress and smush it through the window. TT- So the cigarettes-- JB- Burnt down everything. We had a lot of fires in Prospect Heights back then. There were no smoke detectors or anything back then, and everything burned. TT- Let’s circle back to the picket line-- JB- Six or seven guys crossed it. Back then, the fire department was very tight. 140 against seven or eight guys. The job was together, but the other seven were not. The four Battalion Chiefs crossed the line. The day they crossed the picket line, there was $25 spread between what the BCs made and what the lieutenants made. And we kept that for ten years. For ten years, we kept that rate (as punishment to the BCs for crossing the picket line.) Even now they are the lowest paid BCs in the whole state. After they crossed the line the union said, “Enough of this.” A lieutenant was making $50 a week more than a private. Now they make over $130 more than a private. But not the BCs. Their differential is peanuts. The union became stronger, too. TT- Now, in ’57, what was your uniform like? JB- Tan khakis. To go to the fire station we had to wear our dress blues. TT- Full dress blues and then change at work? JB- Yes. And plenty of guys had to respond to fires in their dress blues, because if you didn’t change quickly, you could be going out the door. And back then, those dress jackets were heavy. TT- I heard guys had to cross kids at the corner like crossing guards. JB- Yes. It was part of our job. The junior guys would cross the kids, and if the truck caught a run, they would stop and you just jumped on it and went. But that was back in the day. TT- So when you got on you were being trained by the World War II guys, right? That was pretty old school. JB- It sure was. They had different ideas. A younger generation took over. The reason why most of those guys didn’t retire is because they worked 84 hours and never had a part time job. They stayed on until age 65. We had a lieutenant at the 3’s, Lt. Tomilini. They had to throw him out at midnight the day he turned 65. There’s only one guy in history that worked over 65. Chief Monast. You know why? In 1972, we went to a new pension. The old pension was 20 years for 50% of your pay. They changed it 25 years for 60% of your pay. So nobody could get off for five years. Chief Monast was 65, so they kept him until he was 70. Five years. His driver was a private, Farrel Tuit. He had more power, Tuit did, he ran the job. TT- I’ve heard of this guy. Stretch was his nickname, right? JB- I was down on West Avenue Station 1. That was the dump company. TT- What does that mean? JB- My first year on the job, we went to the dump at 5:30 at night, New Year’s Eve, until 8:30 in the morning. And during the night my son Bruce was born. He was a New Year’s baby, and I didn’t know anything about it until I got back to the station that morning. I picked up the phone and they said, “You have a son.” We had no radios back then. No nothing. My nephew upstairs took my wife to the hospital. TT- But what is a dump company? JB- Well, Esten Avenue. That was the old city dump. They were tearing down houses and businesses and throwing them into the dump-- TT- Oh, is this when they built Interstate 95 through Pawtucket? JB- Yes. In the 1950s they were continuing it from Connecticut to Maine. We had fires every single night. Our feeder line from the hydrant used to be a 2½-inch hose. (now it’s 4-inch.) So I worked for this Italian guy, Eddy Zanfrello. He was a private. On each platoon we had three lieutenants and five privates in charge. This guy comes down and yells out the window, “You stupid bastards!” And Eddy said, “What’d he say?” He chased that guy down. Anyway, we were stationed at the dump because they used to light all these destroyed houses on fire. And we’d have to go down and put it out. The next day they would dump more houses and we would have to go down there again. Every night. I used to hate it. So when I found out someone was out sick at the 3s, I went there. TT- Let’s circle back. The guys who crossed the picket line did it to get promoted to lieutenant, right? The city said, “Whoever crosses we will make an officer,” and they took the bait. JB- Basically. Individually, I took each Battalion Chief into a room and asked them why they crossed the picket line. Their answer was, they crossed because one crossed first and they didn’t want him to be the only one who crossed. That was total bullshit. I asked all four of them the same thing and they all blamed each other for crossing first. In the long run, in 1986, I finally made B.C. In 1981, it was between Chief Doire and myself. Politically, it was tricky. He got it over me because I was told I couldn’t be controlled. The only person who could control me, my wife, she passed away last year. Other than that, I couldn’t be controlled. TT- So when did you become chief? JB- 1993. I was Chief for six weeks. (Mayor) Brian Sauralt got arrested in 1992. Frank Boisclair was chief. Chief Boisclair bailed out. One day, I was the Battalion Chief, I came in and by noon I was Assistant Chief, and by four o’clock I was Chief. (laughs). Barbara said to me, “Chief Boisclair ain’t coming back. What’re you gonna do?” I had balls. I went over to see the Safety Director. They didn’t want anymore politics on the job. They said they were going to have an outside test to hire the next chief. No oral board, no nothing. So I went home and told the wife I was gonna leave. They were giving a chief’s test for an outsider. She says to me, “You’re taking that test.” “No, I ain’t.” “Yes, you are.” I knew they didn’t want me. She made me take it. So it was the easiest test I ever took. You know why? Because I knew I wasn’t going to get it (laughs.) I didn’t give a shit, so there was no pressure. Guess what? I killed it. I came out number one. This was in September. Usually in fifteen days they have the results. Well, they kept the results until December, because they were hoping I would retire or drop dead. I was first, City Hall wanted the fourth guy. In those days, they could pick one in the top three, meaning number three could be picked before number one. Number four was Forcier. They wanted him. We had a Chief, Chief Gallant. I went down to his house. I said, “Chief, I heard I was number one.” I found this out only because they made a new police chief, and I was at a party later that day in Central Falls. The guy knew the Director of Personnel in Pawtucket, that’s how I found out. TT- So you-- JB- So I went to Gallant’s house and said, “What do I do now?” He said, “You got balls?” I said, “Test me.” He said, “Go down and tell the mayor, that when he’s ready, I’m out the door. Make me chief, and the minute you want me out I’m gone.” So I did. I went down there and said, “Mr. Mayor, I don’t know where I finished on the list—” which was bullshit because there were only four people who took that test. So as I’m talking to the mayor, he’s just staring out the window. He couldn’t have cared less. But they had to make me. Without the Oral Board, there was only the written test to go by, and I was number one. They could’ve given it to the second or third guy, but the second guy Renzi had just gotten divorced. He couldn’t take it. The third guy, Mike Carter, he didn’t want it. They had to make me if they wanted to give it to Forcier. Boisclair was running out of time and they had to make somebody. As you know, there are time constraints on vacancies by contract, so it was 4:30 on the last day. I was sitting in the office when this girl Kathy says, “Joe, you got any balls?” I said yeah. She said, “Go next door and tell them what’s he gonna do? Shit or get off the pot?” He only had a half hour left to make the new Chief or the union was gonna file a grievance. So I went over there and Mayor Mativia says, “Well, I guess I have to make you.” Talk about feeling welcomed, right? So I finally made chief. I let the job run itself. With Barbara’s help, of course. My only worry as BC or Chief was that if ten guys went into the house, I wanted ten to come out. I don’t care if the house burns down. I just wanted my men to go home to their families. In fact, somebody did die, but that was six months after I retired. TT- John Hargreaves. JB- Yup. He died in McBurney’s cellar. TT- So you were chief for six weeks-- JB- This guy Noonan became Safety Director. He called me over and said, “Sit there.” The chair was in the middle of the floor. I thought he was gonna hit me. He says, “Congratulations. You’ve done a great job. But we want you out.” “Out when?” He says, “Yesterday wouldn’t have been fast enough.” TT- So they wanted you out to make Forcier? JB- Yes. And I also wouldn’t go along with this overtime thing they had going on. So I’m sitting there saying, “They got the wrong guy.” I ended up in the hospital for ten days and sat around for a year and got chief’s pay. TT- So you were chief for six weeks and then went out sick? JB- Yes. I wouldn’t play ball. TT- Let’s circle back. So when they were building I-95, they were tearing down a lot of the city, right? JB- We had a 100 fires from that. Three-deckers, four-deckers, sometimes two a night. They were lighting everything on fire. Talk about experience. We were great firemen back then. When you get on the job, you wanted to go into fires. You didn’t want to sit around the station. I liked fires. I hated watching the dump because it was gross. And I was also afraid of rats. We were down in the dump so much I had a stick to chase away the rats. It stunk, literally. TT- Were you working when Star Gas exploded in ’82? JB- I was not only working, but here—(shows me a picture) This is Bob, my son, and me. If that (railcar) had blown up, Bobby would’ve been killed. We managed to keep the fire away from that massive tank. I was a BC back then. Around 1980, we had a run at 9 o’clock at night on Beverage Hill Avenue. There was a cement place there. We went in there, it didn’t look like much, but right after we left 80 tons of concrete collapsed. We had just left. The roof was on fire and we didn’t know it. We saw a little smoke and had gone back to the truck to get a hose and the whole thing collapsed. Am I lucky or what? TT- You ain’t kidding. JB- I had three chances at dying on the job. Star Gas, the concrete place, and downtown in the Kennedy building, we went in there. I was on Ladder 3. We took a line inside. The hydrant was dead. We pulled the line and Chief Banning goes, “Lay a feeder from the top of the hill.” So we did. We didn’t know it, but below us were three buried gas tanks that heated the building. The cement was a foot thick. Well, the pipes blew up, and the explosion was so big it cracked the floors. It cracked them. Those were my three chances at dying. TT- Let’s talk about your career. You got on in ’57, spent three years on Engine 1, and then went to Ladder 3? JB- Yes. For 11 years. Then I made lieutenant and went to Engine 6. I didn’t like it. The 6s is boring. I spent two years there. I liked working at Station 3 because it was active. Something was always going on. There was the engine and ladder and the baseball stadium was packed, I liked that. But at the 6s it was three guys. I got so lonely I used to invite the female crossing guard in for coffee just to have someone to talk to. (laughs) We had Lt. Farrel. By now he was in Fire Prevention. He used to come by every morning for a coffee. So he’s coming in one morning and the race track comes in for an alarm (Narragansett Race Track was a national horse racing track before it burnt down.) So he goes out, stops the traffic without knowing we had been cancelled from the run, and we left him out there with like 500 cars around him. He was pissed. TT- So after the 6s where did you go? JB- We had no captains back then. So when a lieutenant off Ladder 2 retired, I went there. I liked that. Engine 4, Ladder 2 and Rescue 2 were there and I liked it. Always something going on. I stayed there for ten more years until I made BC. It took me 30 years to make BC. I was BC for five years and then I became Acting Chief. Altogether I spent 37 years on the PFD. I loved the job. You know why? I had a tough wife. She was Italian. And tough. She was so Italian, she had told me, years ago after we went to a funeral in Chelsea, Mass. She pulled me aside and said, “You see Uncle Al there? He’s Whitey Bulger’s right-hand man.” I says to the wife, “If I had known you were related to him, I never would’ve married you.” (laughs). She was tough. But it worked out. I was married 66 years. Bruce (his son) used to come over and she would make him linguica and eggs. That was his thing. He would come over and him and her would talk about plants and cooking. I could do neither. (laughs) TT- Bruce was one of the best cooks on the job. So was Bobby. JB- And Bobby lives right there. (he points out his kitchen window at a house up the hill.) When we first moved here that was all trees. We knocked them down and had that built by a guy on the job, Bruno Maravelli. And the only reason I know I did a good job raising my kids is because they were good firemen. The rest I didn’t give a shit about, but they were good firemen. That made me proud. TT- Talk more about Stretch Tuitt. That guy was a legend. JB- He died early. He was the Chief’s driver before he made lieutenant. Chief Connolly, who went from private to Chief, he didn’t know anything. My brother was his driver. And my brother used to have to drive him to the racetrack. He would sit outside, and if an alarm came in, he would hit the siren to alert the chief. Connolly was hooked on the horses. Galant was after Connolly and he was a party guy. Once Mayor Kinch took over, in 1987, 56 guys retired. We had 56 parties. TT- That was the 70% buy-out, right? To get everyone off the job so he could hire his own guys? JB- Yes. That’s how I made BC. There was a BC named Farris. He comes up to me and goes, “JB. When my son gets on, I’ll get off.” So I made BC. TT- Any regrets? JB- If I didn’t make Assistant Chief, I would’ve stayed three more years. I loved being BC. I have a grandson, Christopher. He used to live right around the corner. I’d pick him up and take him to fires. I enjoyed that. It was so much fun. I had a great platoon. I got them together and said, “Hey. You do your jobs. Only call me if you need me.” These were all seasoned guys who had been through the 60s and 70s. That’s the secret of being BC. You don’t want to micromanage. When Doire went out, we had an Assistant Chief who made Chief for a month. Chief Lundegren, and boy, he hated me. TT- Why? JB- Because I brought him in the room and asked him why he crossed the picket line. TT- Oh, he was one of them. JB- Yes. Bannon crossed and I never talked to him again. On another note, I went to a funeral last month, Norm Partington. On Dunnell Lane there used to be a barrel shop. We went in there one night. We went in, there was smoke everywhere, and he (Norm) was right behind me. As I jumped over a barrel, it caught me. I was going down. And when the smoke cleared the owner said, “That sewer’s 19-feet down and there’s a thousand broken bottles down there.” I would’ve bled to death. The fall wouldn’t have killed me, but I would’ve bled to death because they wouldn’t have been able to get me out in time. So I was at the funeral. You ever hear of Frank Sylvester? TT- Yes. JB- Well, 40 years ago we were friends. Then he crossed the picket line. For 40 years, I never talked to him. But I put all that aside. That day, I took him through the funeral, and he had a tear in his eye. For 40 years I never talked to him because he had looked me right in the eye and said he wouldn’t cross the picket line. That’s what bothered me. He looked me in the eye and then crossed anyway. TT- He was a union guy too, right? JB- He started off working for me back in the day. TT- What rank were you when they crossed the picket line? JB- Lieutenant. I graduated from Roger Williams with Kinch who went on to become mayor. TT- Sounds like you had a great career. JB- I did. The reason I keep going to the retiree meetings is to see the guys. And I’m the old man now. Frank Boisclair too. We weren’t friends then but we’re friends now. TT- Hey, Chief, thanks for sitting down with me. JB- Have a great career. Dave Kelly October 15, 2018
Officer Dave Kelly is the first retired Pawtucket policeman to be interviewed. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan was nearly assassinated, the longest game in baseball history occurred at Pawtucket’s McCoy Stadium (33 innings), Metallica formed in a Los Angeles basement, and Dave Kelly got sworn in as a Pawtucket policeman. He prowled the streets from 4PM to midnight for thirty-seven years and saw the city change in many ways. Other than a year in the Special Squad, he was in his beloved Car 204 for over three decades. This is what he said … TT- What year did you get on, and what year did you retire? DK- I was appointed July, 2, 1981, and my last day of work was June 29, 2018, and I officially retired July 7, 2018. TT- I saw the YouTube video of your last radio transmission. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1881259728561870 After all that time, what’re we talking? How many years? DK- Thirty-seven. TT- It must’ve been hard to walk away from. DK- It was. It was. But you know, like I said on the video. Times have changed, and so has this job. And unfortunately some of the people you work with. It’s a whole different breed of people now. Like your job. You’ve seen how things have changed. For the most part, I had a ball. I loved coming to work. I worked nights. For twenty-seven years, I worked Car 204, the Heights car (Prospect Heights is a government housing complex.) I worked four to midnight. The only reason I switched to days was because I turned fifty and was running around with guys half my age and figured it was time to slow down a little bit. TT- Let’s talk about the process of becoming a cop. How old were you in 1981? DK- Twenty-three. Before that, my dad was a police officer in the city of Pawtucket from 1947 to 1966. He had a heart attack and died at forty-five. I was always interested in the police. Actually, I always wanted to be a fireman as a kid growing up but I was afraid of heights (laughs). I had quite a few friends on the police department, I knew the job, liked the job, and growing up I got to know a lot of people. Their cadet program back in the early seventies, I got involved in that, used to work in the summertime going on ride-a-longs and stuff like that. I did that quite a bit. And when I graduated high school in 1976 I got a job as a traffic clerk and worked in the office for two and a half years. Then a dispatch position opened in 1979. In the meantime I had taken the police exam twice. I took it in 1977 and 1979. First time I took it I was only eighteen-years-old. I finished like fifty-fourth or fifty-fifth. So I had no shot at getting on at that time. The second time I took it I finished nineteenth. I thought they were gonna hire probably fifteen or sixteen people in the next two years, but as it turned out I was the last guy to get hired off that list. I started the police academy on April 13, 1981, and I graduated July 1, 1981. It was twelve weeks. TT- Was it a paid academy? DK- Yes. I think we made $230 a week. And our police academy was down at Davisville, it was at the Sea-bees base in North Kingstown. TT- So it was a state-run academy? DK- State run, yes. The Municipal Police Academy. TT- So for like two hundred years, the firemen in Pawtucket, they all trained under the fire department. In essence we created our own until 2015. It’s too bad we lost that. So was this the case for the police up to a certain point? Or were you guys always trained by the state. DK- No. I wanna say back in the 50’s there was one, because I’ve seen pictures of people in the mid-50’s. Then the state did away with it—the State Police ran it. So the city took over and ran an academy like the fire department would run a school. I think they did that up until 1969. I think it became state law in 1970 that you had to either attend the Municipal Police Academy, the Providence Police Academy, which was strictly for the Providence Police Department, or the Rhode Island State Police Academy, which was strictly for the Rhode Island State Police. I mean nobody ever went to the State Police Academy unless you were gonna be a trooper. TT- So you went down there for twelve weeks. Are we talking 8-4PM? DK- We had to be on the gym floor ready to go at 7 AM. We used to go 7-4. TT- So you would drive down there. You weren’t housed? DK- We used to drive. I remember I used to pick up a guy named George Haddock. He was a D.E.M. cop (Department of Environmental Management). He lived on Clark Avenue. We used to ride together. We used to leave at 6:15 and—now that I come to think about it, we used to do ten-hour days to make a forty-hour week. We went 7-5. And we’d be there until five o’clock and then drive home. The same thing for twelve weeks. Of course, after eight weeks, you had your PT, your running and your calisthenics—you’d knock that off and then you’d do traffic and the range and stuff like that. At the end it became a little less stressful because you weren’t doing all the physical stuff. TT- So the first eight weeks is like boot camp, pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups. DK- Yes. Usually we did PT from 7-9, had a class from 930 to 1130, had lunch, and then you might have two classes in the afternoon. We were out by 4:30-5:00. TT- What were the classes? DK- Oh boy. Let’s see. Criminal Law. Traffic Enforcement. Juvenile Law. Constitutional Law. B.C.I.-- ID work, fingerprints and stuff like that. Domestic Violence, which wasn’t as big as it is today. The Range, driver training, EVOC—Emergency Vehicle Operation. We did that down at Quonset (Point) on the track. TT- That is so cool. What did they do? Turn you loose with a police car? DK- They had instructors. They’d take you down to Quonset for a couple of days, and you take the hubcaps off all the cars driving crazy. They’d set up the cones and you’d just fly around. Basically, you’d lock it up and learn how to control a skid. First Aid, CPR. TT- What were you doing on the gun range? DK- It’s a 40-hour course on how to operate a revolver, which at the time is all we had. We didn’t have the automatics. A 6-shot revolver. They trained you with that and the shotgun. TT- What caliber revolver? DK- We shot with .38’s. Eventually, at some point, we switched over to .357’s, but when we were at the range we were using .38s and 12-gauge Mossberg pump shotguns. TT- The good old standby, the Mossberg. So 40 hours they teach you everything about guns, how to hold them, clean them – DK- Exactly. Clean it, safety, protocols, everything. Soup to nuts. We did day-firing, night-firing, in fact when we were there, the kid I used to ride back and forth with (to the academy,) George Haddock, he was a D.E.M. cop. The Cranston Police ran the gun-range. We were shooting in Cranston. One of the guys was firing a .223 (M-16,) and they were trying to show you how it would penetrate—they had this old cement mixer, and they were firing into the cement mixer. Well, when they fired into the cement mixer, it ricocheted, hit him in the nose, went up, blew the top of his face off, he almost got killed. And the blood came spurting out. We thought he was dead. We all got shrapnel on us. Six or seven of us got hit. TT- What the hell happened? DK- When he fired, the round didn’t penetrate. It ricocheted off the cement mixer and came back and caught him right in the face. TT- He didn’t die? DK- Didn’t die. When it hit him it must’ve hit him sideways, caught his nose and just went up. But the blood was pouring out. Luckily they called the rescue and the Cranston guys got there quick, like two minutes. He never finished. He graduated with us but he never came back because we were like two and a half weeks away from graduation when that happened. TT- And he still became a cop… DK- Yes. D.E.M., and then he was an East Providence cop for a while. Then he got hurt there and went out on a disability. TT- So it’s a dangerous job, right? It is what it is. DK- It’s a lot more dangerous now than it used to be. It’s always been dangerous. You know, when you come on this job, you could get shot, you could get hurt, you could get killed, but today you’re a target. You can be executed. That’s a whole different ballgame. It’s not what it was. It’s a whole different job altogether. TT- That’s an evolution, right? You know it’s turned bad when you can’t even get something to eat without worrying about someone sneaking up behind you and blowing your head off. DK- You’ve got to be aware of your surroundings all the time. Even sitting in the car, you don’t know, someone comes walking up to you, you don’t know. TT- So ’81, you get on. You get through the academy, you graduate. How many people were in your academy? DK- About 30, but I was the only guy from Pawtucket. TT- So this is everyone from around the state. You got guys from Coventry, East Greenwich-- DK- Coventry had two, Warwick had seven, Cumberland had two, Lincoln had one, Woonsocket had two, D.E.M. had five, Westerly had one, one from Newport, etc. TT- So you get on and what happens now? How do the cops do it? When we got on they shoved us into Fire Alarm (dispatch.) DK- I got sworn in on July 2 at nine o’clock in the morning and went to work at six o’clock that night. I worked the overlap, the 6pm-2am shift. TT- Talk about the shifts. Our job’s pretty simple. Two day-shifts of 7am-5pm, two night-shifts 5pm to 7am. DK- At the time you had a day shift, which was 8am-4pm. TT- How many guys? DK- When I came on we didn’t have minimum-manning. So there might be, you know, twenty-five guys on a platoon, but if you split it up into three-day off groups you might have sixteen or seventeen working. But then, you got three or four guys on vacation, a couple of guys out injured, so normally, when I came on, we would go out on the 4-12 shift with, they used to run a Car 1, Car 3, Car 4, 5, 6, 7, a two-man wagon we called Cruiser 8, and maybe a traffic car. So maybe you’d go out with nine or ten guys at four o’clock. Then at six o’clock they had Car 2, Cruiser 9, which was a two-man car, a traffic car, so basically another four guys. Normally, we’d a have a spare car, like a two-man spare car. We’d go out with thirteen, fourteen guys most nights. You probably had nine or ten at four o’clock, and then another five or six came on at six o’clock. Then midnight’s would come on, midnight’s what they would do, depending on how many guys they had working. They would do the same thing. You might have 20 or 21 guys on a shift, but some guys were on vacation or injured. If they were short guys, no Car 2, and maybe no second wagon. But in those days we had cellblock duty. We didn’t have cameras, so if they had a prisoner locked up, someone got assigned to the cellblock. They’d pull a car off the road to sit with a prisoner because we didn’t have cameras. When I first got on, the first year, I was bottom guy on the job, so I lived in there. I was probably there two out of four nights. TT- That’s terrible. So the guys that come in at 4 leave at midnight, the guys that come in at 6 leave at 2am. So there’s another overlap at night, so the busy times-- DK- It was 7pm-3am at one time and then they kicked it back to 6pm-2am. But that was to cover the shift change at midnight, so you’d have extra guys on the road. At three, four, five o’clock in the morning things used to die down—at least they used to, not anymore—so you could run with seven or eight guys after midnight. 4pm-12am was the busy shift. Always the busiest shift. TT- So in the morning is the day shift. How many guys come on at 8am? DK- I can remember, when I first got on, we didn’t have minimum-manning. You’d come to work on a Sunday and might have five guys. TT- How could they not have minimum-manning? DK- Because they didn’t want it. They didn’t want to pay for it. You guys got it in arbitration, years ago you won it, and we tried getting it for years and years. They wouldn’t give it to us. Henry Kinch was the mayor at the time, and they saw what they were paying the fire department and they didn’t want to pay us. We were only trying to get thirteen guys, you guys had thirty-one. We’d go out, many nights when I worked the midnight shift, we’d go out with six or seven guys. TT- When did you get minimum-manning? DK- ’87, ’88? We didn’t get what we got now. It was eight guys—six one-man cars and one two-man car. 4pm-Midnight was seven one-man cars, 6pm-2am was two two-man cars, and midnights were six one-man cars and one two-man, so eight guys. Eventually we got it up to eleven on days, eleven on 4pm-Midnight, and ten on the overnights. And that’s what it is now. Eleven-eleven-and ten. So we run seven one-man (cars,) two two-man (cars on) days, seven one-man, two two-man 4pm to midnight, six one-man, two two-man midnight to 8am. What they do is eliminate Car 2, which is the car roaming this side of Newport Avenue after midnight. Car 1, 3, and 4 cover over. TT- So the Cars are like our engines—everything has a district. DK- The city is broken up into seven districts (fire department has six.) Four on the east side, three on the west side. Car 1, which is everything north of Central Avenue, from the river/Central Falls line to Newport Avenue. Car 3 is everything from Central Avenue to Columbus Avenue, back to the river, Car 4, which I was in for twenty-seven years, is everything south of Columbus Avenue to the East Providence line, back to the river, Car 2 is everything east of Newport Avenue from the East Providence line to the Attleboro line. TT- So Car 2 is basically the rover, all over the east side. DK- Yes. He has a district but yes, he’s all over the place. Then on the West side you had Car 5, Car 6, and Car 7. Car 5 would be Woodlawn, basically everything from Pleasant Street up the southside of I-95 to Lonsdale Avenue, Car 7 is the other end to Lonsdale Avenue, and Car 6 was everything west of Lonsdale Avenue from 95. Car 5 would go to the Providence line. Then you had the two wagons, which were one in the east, and one in the west. They roved. They were on both sides. TT- So you had two-man cars just roving around each side of the river. Like man-power? DK- Yes. We’d always have two traffic cars too. For accidents. One on the east side, one on the west. If you had more guys you threw more cars out. But it’s like everything else. In the summertime, you’re going bare minimum (because of the vacations). TT- When did we get minimum-manning? I don’t even know. (Mandated by contract, minimum-manning is the number of personnel required to be on shift.) DK- You got minimum-manning right before I got on the job, which is probably 1980, ’81. TT- So we were like eight years ahead of you guys. DK- Yes. TT- Now how do your days run? What’s your calendar? We run four-on, four-off. When you start, do they have you on days? DK- No. When I started it was on the 6pm-2am shift. Actually, I was only there for like three weeks. What happened was the class that got on before me got on twelve weeks before me. They moved us all at once, so what happened is, like you guys, they had a bid. They bid the shifts out, so back in the day, no one wanted to work the midnight shift. Anybody who was on midnights would bail off and either go 6-2 am, or 4 to midnight, or, if you had enough seniority, the day shift. We all went on the midnight shift. I went on shift July of 1981, to May of 1983. Then I bid out and got on the 6-2 am shift. May to September I was on the 6-2 shift. When the 4-12 shift came open I bid there in September of 1983 and stayed until January of 2009. TT- No kidding. You loved the night. DK- 26 years, in the same car too, the Heights car. It was crazy. If you look at the books it was frigging nuts (he has multiple scrap books detailing stories and events of the PD through the years. With no more local reporting or newspapers, those days are gone. Like the firemen from this generation, they have thick books filled with newspaper clippings and stories and pictures.) TT- So how many hours a week do the police work? DK- It’s thirty-seven-and-a-half. Basically four days on/two days off. Where you guys advance through the week, we fall back. If I work Saturday Sunday Monday Tuesday, I’m off Wednesday Thursday, then I start up again Friday Saturday Sunday Monday. TT- So you’re on midnights. Night shifts are hard, man, because you’re just trying to stay awake. It’s brutal. DK- Midnight is a horrible shift. You had guys on the midnight shift, the older guys, some of them loved it and stayed there. They’d go bury themselves somewhere for two or three hours—that’s the way it was back in the day. Don’t get on the radio after two o’clock in the morning. (laughs) Don’t be stopping cars, don’t be doing this and that (laughs). The sarge would tell you one thing, the guys would tell you another. TT- So you guys are broken down how? Patrol, detectives-- DK- You had the Patrol Division, the Detective Division, the Administrative Division. TT- How many detectives in the Detective Division? DK- Let’s see. You also had the Drug Unit, which was part of the Administrative Division. Um, there’s probably 15 detectives, and another ten guys in the drug unit. They’re considered detectives too. So that’s 25. Then you have BCI, there’s three guys assigned to that, Juvenile is part of the Detective Division. Administration Division had a captain, lieutenant, or sergeant. Planning and Training you have a lieutenant and sergeant, and a patrolman, a Neighborhood Response Unit that has a Major and two guys. TT- What’s the Neighborhood Response Unit? DK- Like a community police type of thing. They handle complaints. Then there’s six or seven school resource officers that fall under that Response Unit. What they do is they’ll do the school stuff in the winter, then when summer comes they’ll get kicked back to patrol, to fill in for the vacations. TT- To get to detective, what’s the process? DK- You have to take a test, which you can take with three years on, but you can’t get made until you get five years on. If you want to take the sergeant’s test, you have to have five years on but you can’t get made until you have seven years on. TT- So there’s a patrol sergeant and a detective sergeant-- DK- If you want to be a detective sergeant, that’s a different test. Then there’s a lieutenant’s test, a Captain’s test, major’s test. TT- So you have eligibility lists like we do (fire department has lists for lieutenant, rescue lieutenant, captain, rescue captain, battalion chief, and assistant chief.) Guys have taken the test, got ranked, and now just wait on the list. DK- Exactly. They could pick off the top three. They don’t have to pick number one. TT- So two years, like us, until the list expires? DK- Yes. And they can only skip you twice. So if they skip you once, at some point they have to make you. Unless the list expires. TT- Then you have to re-test. DK- Yes. Every two years. TT- In the Patrol Division, how many guys are we talking about? DK- You’ve probably got seventy-five guys in the Patrol Division. There’s like a 130 guys total. We used to be 153 but they cut us back big time. But let’s say there’s roughly seventy-five in the Patrol Division, there’s probably 15-20 detectives. There’s maybe 15 sergeants, six lieutenants, four Captains, two Majors, and a Chief. TT- Now the SWAT Team got disbanded after the budget crisis in the crash of 2008, right? DK- Yes. They let it go. You know, the thing is, they’ve got the patrol rifles now, so if something happens you’ve got the firepower out there if needed. Because if you go to something, like someone barricaded, you can call the State Police if you have to. We’ve got the rifle-cars now, the firepower, probably twenty of our guys went to the rifle school, so there’s probably four or five rifles on the street at any given point. TT- Are you allowed to talk about what’s in the police car? DK- There’s really not a whole lot. TT- Are we talking M-4s? DK- Yeah, the mini-version of the AR-15, the M-4, the sergeants also have shotguns. The two sergeants’ cars have shotguns. TT- The patrolmen don’t have shotguns? DK- No. The sergeant’s cars have them if needed. TT- Why do they do that? Why wouldn’t they let you guys at least have shotguns? DK- The mentality of the city has always been, they didn’t want you to have long rifles, for whatever reason. It took a long time for the city to realize we needed automatics out on the street. You needed handguns with 15-round magazines. Because they (the city) figure it’s not gonna happen to you. It’s the old-school mentality. And you finally got some progressive guys in there who said, “Hey, look, you gotta do this stuff.” It took a lot of talking. We finally got them to run the rifle school. We’re gonna run another one shortly. TT- We’re probably the biggest city that doesn’t have a SWAT Team, right? East Providence has one. DK- Woonsocket has one, yeah. TT- There’s 80,000 people here. Seems kind of crazy to me. DK- You can read between the lines on that one. TT- The Narcotics Squad, are we talking about ten guys? DK- Yes. A lieutenant, a sergeant, six or seven detectives. TT- Are these guys undercover? DK- Yes. TT- So these guys don’t have regular hours? DK- What they do is work a Monday through Friday schedule, but they can come in whenever they need them, like if something’s going down. We usually have a guy attached to the DEA Task Force. And we have a guy assigned to the High Intensity Drug Task Force. TT- That is some kind of name. DK- They work out of the State Police. And they’re F.B.I., D.E.A., Marshals … We always have someone with the D.E.A., because if you get involved in any seizures, you get 90% of the money. So it’s worth your while. Like the Google settlement they messed up on. If we had sent a detective to that we would’ve gotten like $30 million out of that. TT- That’s a lot of money. Now let’s backtrack. You started on the street and stayed on the street? DK- I was in the drug unit for 18 months, didn’t care for it, so I went back on patrol after the chief transferred me back. At the time, Kayla was a baby and I wasn’t making any money. 1989-1990 was when we started making money on this job. All kinds of road jobs around, the radar program started up, we were down there working Monday through Friday and maybe getting four hours overtime a week if we were lucky. I didn’t like it. My wife wasn’t working, I’m looking around saying—it just wasn’t for me. It wasn’t for me. I didn’t care for the work. There was a lot of hanging around, because you had to wait for something to happen, and again there was an old-school mentality down there at the time. Different than it is now. Certain people didn’t want you doing stupid things. I lucked out and came back to the 4-12 shift and stayed there. TT- These undercover guys, are they infiltrating gangs? Or are they observing stuff? DK- Basically what they do is use a lot of informants. Could they make undercover buys? Absolutely. But for the most part they use people, bring people in, they’ll get people, like I said, they’ll work with the DEA, make a buy, but for the most part they conduct an investigation. Confidential informants. TT- Someone gets charged with something, give them only one way out. DK- Right. Flipping people. Use them for something else. I mean we don’t have the big city “Serpico’s” running around-- TT- But you guys know the neighborhoods, so you probably set up on certain houses-- DK- People call all the time. What we’ll do, if we get a call about something, like someone sees something, we’ll go out and take a look and see if it’s worthwhile. TT- Like somebody calls up and says, “There’s been ten cars by here in the last hour.” DK- Exactly. Coming and going. Oh yeah. Basically that’s what happens. TT- Now what kind of gangs are active in Pawtucket? DK- You had the Bloods up Broadway near Benefit Street. You used to have a gang back in the day called “The Prospect Heights Posse.” I don’t think they’re still there. On the West Side you have “The Bucket Boys.” I’m a little out of the loop on that stuff, because I’m not working nights anymore. It exists. They’re out there. Up until 1990-91, we never called out “Shots fired,” or stuff like that. Now, there’s something going on all the time, you know? So is there a big problem in the city? I don’t know if there’s a big problem, but you got a gang problem. You got people everywhere. That’s not just Pawtucket either, that’s anywhere you go. Even Seekonk. There’s people everywhere. TT- Some guys are moving drugs, some are moving guns, who knows what they’re doing? DK- I’m out of the loop. Like I said, When I was on nights we didn’t have that much, but the PHP was a half-ass bunch of nitwits. Basically. They couldn’t even spell Prospect. (laughs). But everything’s changed over the last four or five years. TT- Is there a Major Crimes Unit? DK- That’s the detective division. Say like bank robbery. Say you have a rash of bank robberies going on. I mean, like ten or fifteen years ago, we had a group of guys that were whacking everything. They’ll drag in everybody. They’ll drag the Special Squad in, they’ll get the detectives in, they’ll drag guys out of Patrol, I mean like they did in Providence. You see last week, the Family Dollar Store robberies and all of that, they dragged in everybody. It got to that point. Get everybody out there. Sooner or later somebody’s gonna see something. TT- What’s the Special Squad? DK- That’s the Drug Unit. The Special Squad. They do drugs, gambling, prostitution, anything like that. Any vices. TT- They’re the Vice Squad. DK- Yes. TT- Is there a list to get into that unit as well? DK- No. That’s appointed by the Chief. TT- Really… DK- You pick and choose. Sometimes people don’t—even seniority-wise—people don’t belong down there. Like everything else, you’ve got a few unsavory characters on this job like everywhere else. TT- You’re saying you want the most qualified people down there to do what they gotta do. We're talking about handling drugs, guns, cash... DK- Exactly. Does politics play a part in it? I’m sure. But there’s merit too. If you’re out there doing a good job, doing stuff, and doing the right thing, 90% of the time they’ll grab those guys. You know? The guys who are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. TT- On our job, there are certain positions where, if you take it, there’s nowhere to hide. You’re the man. Rescue Lieutenant is a perfect example. Those guys make more life and death decisions in a four-day cycle than most line officers will in a month. So let’s go back. So when you learn all this stuff about when to arrest people, how to arrest them, you have to know all of the laws, right? DK- Common sense dictates that somebody—if you go to a domestic and the lady has a black eye, stuff like that. If you take a complaint, and the guy’s not actually there, the detectives will follow it up. Say you get assaulted and the guy flees. We take the report, and go out to find the guy. In the morning the detectives will bring him in and if there’s enough to charge him, they’ll charge him. TT- As far as the last couple of years go, like nationwide I’m talking, all of the problems and controversy swirling around the police profession, in Pawtucket we’ve been very fortunate. There have been certain incidents where people have been shot by the police, but nothing like that. We haven’t had protests and riots. The majority of people—black, white, brown, whatever—are kind of old school like that. It is what is. If you pull a gun on a cop, something bad’s probably gonna happen. DK-No matter what you do, there’s always going to be somebody complaining about something. You shoot a guy for this, the cops are always wrong. We’re always wrong, because they’ll say he wasn’t gonna do this, he wasn’t gonna do that, you know what? Don’t point a gun. Don’t run around with guns. Don’t have a gun, you’re not gonna get shot. Nobody comes to work wanting to kill anybody. Nobody wants to shoot anybody. I was involved in a situation where I didn’t shoot the guy, but I was there when a guy did, and the guy got killed, and between the lawsuit and all the stuff you go through, lemme tell you, it’s not fun. Grand Jury. Then you gotta go see the shrink, and you gotta go to this-- TT- An attorney. DK- No, no, no. The city backs you on that. The union backs you on that. You’re fine with that. TT- Sounds like a bloodbath. DK- It is. It is. TT- Now when these things happen, the officer involved shootings, do outside investigators have to come in? DK- The State Police come in. Anytime a gun gets fired, the State Police come in. The State Police and the Attorney General come in. TT- Is that statewide? DK- They all do it together. The State Police will come in and take it over. Like that one we just had on Newport Avenue a couple weeks ago. TT- There wasn’t any question about that guy. He’s on video from different cameras firing first. So any gun, or firing of a gun-- DK- Really any type of use of force where somebody gets killed. Say somebody died in the cellblock. Anything. Any time anybody, any type of death, that gets the State Police and A.G.’s office everytime. TT- They’re considered the independent watchdog. DK- Yes. TT- When you guys do have to use your weapons, and somebody ends up getting killed or hurt, in my ten years on this job, I don’t think there’s been one ruled unjustified. DK- Again. Nobody shoots somebody just to shoot somebody. TT- Let’s go back. What about the wife, and dealing with this stress-fest, did it affect your marriage at all? DK- The job? No. I met my wife on the job. My wife’s house got broken into. And I went to a call over there and-- TT- She lived where? DK- On Oakland Avenue. This is back in ’82. We had a bunch of guys going around breaking into houses. They were cutting windows. They were sticking clothesline poles into windows and stealing pocketbooks out of people’s bedrooms. TT- Are you shitting me? DK- Nope. (laughs). TT- That’s actually sort of brilliant. They didn’t even have to make entry. DK- Think about it. They don’t even have clotheslines anymore. So I was on midnights at the time, and I ran over to Oakland Avenue. I knew her sister from Apex. I used to work the detail at Apex. One thing led to another and we ended up getting married, but my wife’s never busted my chops about this. I mean we’ve had our moments, don’t get me wrong, but as far stressful moments-- TT- So you never brought it home. DK- No. I mean I’d tell war stories and stuff. She knew what was going on, but I never had a moment like that. TT- You do see a lot of horrible stuff. You see the same stuff we do. None of it’s really very pretty. DK- My thing is, if you went somewhere, say you got a guy hit by a train, a guy cut in half, or a guy with his head blown off …ok. Do what you gotta do, then don’t worry about it. We’ll figure it out. Come home, a beer or two later on, you know, no problem. You’re not gonna wig out over it. TT- When these things happen, like train strikes, you’re there documenting that stuff. You don’t really have to deal with the body. DK- No. To be honest with you, I never had anybody hit by a train. The only two things I never had on this job were somebody hit by a train, and somebody burnt beyond recognition. I had everything else in between. I had a guy take his head off one morning. He was sitting in the parking lot on Dunnell Lane one morning, put a .308 in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He pulled the trigger with his toe and it took the whole top of his head off. TT- So the head was laying in the parking lot? DK- The whole top of his head. You know Joe Bruzzi? TT- I know his son. DK- Joe was my best man when we got married. Joe came on the job same time as me. So Joe was on Engine 3 that day with John Delcourt and Mack Qualls. So make a long story short, he’s in the fire school with Ken’s World. So Joe’s telling the story. A week later. He goes, “Oh yeah, Ken was drinking on Delta Drive after midnight. This guy comes walking up no shirt and no shoes on. Asks, “Got any beer?” “Is that a real gun?” BANG! He lets one go. Ken’s like, “Here, take all the beer you want.” (laughs.) Here I come to Dunnell Lane at three o’clock in the morning and this nut’s walking around there with a freaking gun. TT- You see that a lot. Suicides are happening all the time but no one knows. DK- Lot of suicides. You know what? I mean you were a rescue guy. How many dead people have you seen in your career? Think about it. You can’t even count them. And I used to figure it like this. I was in Car 4 from 1982-2009, so I’d get at least one D.O.A. a month. You know, it could be natural causes, it could be this and that, but think back…I remember one time I had a run. A hanging, and overdose, and a crib death three days in a row. The crib death was on Vernon Street, because Billy Malloy and Mike Levesque were there. Had a guy in the trailer park who hung himself in the shed, I mean it never ends. And then you think about it and say, I had this one and that one and this one and holy frig. TT- As many people are born in a day die in a day, right? Normal people don’t see the death but death is happening all around them all the time. DK- I say that all the time. Like I said, it was at least once a month. TT- What was the worst calls for you? DK- The worst call was when Wallace Martins shot the guy. That was probably the worst. When he killed him on Lupine Street. TT- What was that about? DK- We got a call about a guy with a sword. I was doing radar on an overtime shift. I heard them send the cars over. It was like quarter after seven in the morning. So they got a call for a disturbed guy. They sent a couple of cars over there. Next thing you hear is a call for help. “Guy’s got a sword.” So now, I heard them call for help, so I said, “I’m going.” I get over there. It was the middle of February. I shot down Industrial Highway, Central Avenue, and when I get there the house is just in from Broadway. But the police car was way down the end of Lupine Street, near Park Street. So I get there. The house is like an apartment house. There’s two entrances. I walk in the side one and I look. I see the sword on the ground. I see a bottle of ginger brandy on the counter. I walk in the hallway and all I can smell is Capstone (tear gas). I get up there and hear crash, bang. What the fuck’s going on there? I get up there and there’s this freaking guy, had to be 350-400 pounds, he’s laying on the floor bleeding from the face. He’s naked. All of a sudden he gets back up and starts going after the cops. He got this guy Wallace Martins—I guess before I got up there he had grabbed him (Martins) by the jacket and almost choked him (Martins) to death. When I got up there and came walking in, he charged again and Wallace shot him. You know, he figured he was gonna kill him if he didn’t. It happened that fast. It happened that quick. TT- Were you up there when he got shot? DK- I had just walked in the apartment. I was in there maybe ten seconds because I was in there long enough to call for a rescue. The guy was bleeding. I called for the rescue and he gets up and charges Wallace and boom-boom. It happened that fast. TT- Two shots? DK- Two shots. It happened that fast. TT- 2009? DK- 2008. TT- That was right when I got on. DK- I went on days shortly thereafter. February 2008. I was there when it happened, so I got put on administrative duty, had to go see the shrink, had to go talk to this one and that one. TT- So how long-- DK- I think it was two weeks. They carried us injured on duty. We had to go talk to the psychiatrist a few times. TT- What happens to the guy that fires the shots? Is he off until he’s cleared? DK- Out until the Grand Jury. TT- Months? DK- Normally they try to get it in as quick as they can. I don’t remember how long it was. TT- Is that standard procedure though? That the guy who shoots has to stay out until the Grand Jury convenes? DK- It’s up to the psychiatrist. If she feels you can go back to work, you can work. But normally the shooter or shooters won’t be allowed back on the street until they’re cleared by the Grand Jury. There were four of us. Only one guy shot. TT- He got cleared, right? DK- Yes. TT- Like you said, this isn’t something people want to do. DK- No. No. No. Believe me, you do not want to go through that. I never second guessed this guy, because I don’t know what happened prior to my arrival, but for whatever reason, he had good reason to do what he did. TT- If you’re gonna get choked out by a 400-pound guy, you’re worried about your own life, right? DK- This guy was out of control. TT- The one thing I don’t think people understand is that at some point, this situation has to be resolved. We can sit and talk to somebody for an hour. We can have firemen and cops and everybody’s talking, but at some point we got to put companies back in service and resolve the situation. DK- You have doctors and lawyers saying you could’ve done this, you could’ve done that, but you know what? At the time it wasn’t an option. You know, you can sit back two years later and talk about it but at the time it wasn’t an option. TT- At some point we have to take people to the ground. Whether it’s mental, psychological, whatever their problem is, it has to be resolved. DK- At some point enough’s enough. What’re you gonna do? You’re going. If it takes one guy, two guys, six guys, or eight guys, you’re going. But for me, the job was never really the same after that. Thinking about the next time, depending on what the results are, you could be going to prison. If you’re the shooter, it could be for murder. I thought about my wife, thought about my family, you have to. You sign up to do a job, and this job sometimes requires action, and those actions have ramifications across everyone who knows you. TT- Let’s talk about people. In the last ten years I’ve never seen so much anxiety. These people are locked up in their houses, on their stupid phones or iPads all day, have everything delivered—there’s no more human interaction. We don’t know our neighbors, don’t care to, and don’t help anyone out. DK- You never had this when I was growing up. You never had all this EDP (Emotionally Disturbed Person) stuff. EDP, I couldn’t even tell you what it meant the first ten years I was on this job. But even these kids. Think about it. You go on a rescue run, where are you working now? TT- Engine 4. DK- My wife is the clerk at Curvin McCabe (School.) You go for a seven-year-old kid out of control. Really? Cops and firemen? TT- It’s true, there’s like eight people in the room and all this kid needs is his parents. Which is what 911 has been turned into now—everybody’s parent. Nobody wants any responsibility for anything. DK- It’s everybody else’s fault but theirs. TT- It wasn’t designed for this. And I tell people that as far as the hospital crisis we have going on right now, the hospitals weren’t set up for this either. They weren’t designed to be a catch basin for everyday problems. DK- Go to your doctor. Take care of yourself-- TT- Not even that. How about the drunks-- DK- Back in the day the drunks got locked up. TT- Everything goes to the hospital, which is why they don’t work anymore. Wait times at Miriam are a routine 6-8 hours. Imagine that? So other than that shooting, what runs did you hate the most? For us, it’s the kid runs. DK- Domestics, depending on what they were, could be tough. Probably the worst call I ever had wasn’t a domestic, it was a D.O.A. The lady had been in the house for six and a half weeks. TT- Oh dear God. DK- We get a call for—it was on Paul Street, just in from Byron Avenue. Right there. It was a Friday night. It was October 28 or something, cool, like this time of year. We get a call. “Go meet a guy, he hasn’t seen his neighbor in a couple of days.” So I go driving over there, get there, and he’s standing outside. “Oh yeah, I haven’t seen my neighbor in a few days.” I look at the house. I know this house because an old lady lived there and she’d been ripped off. She had a lot of money and a bunch of kids from Broadway broke in there the year before and stole all kinds of money and stuff out of the house. I go walking over there and the mailbox is freaking-- TT- Jammed. Never a good sign. DK- Right? It goes back to September fourth. (laughs) And I’m like, “This ain’t gonna be good.” I go, “Send me a rescue.” Here comes Engine 6. Chris Cute, Counoyer, and John Kelly. Now it’s a little four-room ranch house. You went in, and the door’s right here, it’s a straight shot. They kick the freaking door in (laughs) and Ralph and Chris made it like ten feet inside the house before they turned around and puked. (both laughing) DK- I’m shining my light from here to like the door over there (fifteen feet.) And all I can see is all this shit moving around. TT- Oh no. DK- Oh yeah. It was maggots everywhere. I go, “I ain’t going in there.” So I called for a supervisor. Mike Nastari comes up. He could smell it from the outside. Mark Force comes up, he’s the BCI guy, he comes up and says, “She’s got to have been here for six or seven weeks.” At one point I had to go into the house. This fucking smell. I got the Vicks smeared under my nose. It didn’t do anything. An hour goes by. The M.E. shows up. These frigging guys in the meat wagon come up. It was so bad they had to put boots on, get a shovel, and put her in the bag (laughs). TT- Oh God. DK- So we get her all squared away, get done at like ten or ten thirty. I gotta go for a beer after this one. I go over to the FOP (the police have a union hall/bar), I walk in the frigging door and everyone goes “Where the fuck have you been?” It was still in my nose, the smell. I got up the next morning and couldn’t get rid of it. That was one of the worst runs of my career. TT- For people that haven’t smelt it, it’s beyond anything describable, right? Like a donkey shoved into a dumpster in August. DK- Another night I got a call for Kennedy Manor. This new guy was on the job who had never done a DOA before. I go over to help him out. I took the elevator up to the 7th floor and as soon as I got out of the elevator—BAM. There was that smell. My stomach turned. TT- Let’s get back to the protocols you guys run by. If Car 4 sees something-- DK- If we get a call, like for someone with a gun, they hit the Alert Tone and send everybody. Three or four cars, anybody not tied up on something else. You can always cancel guys if you have to. Any time something big happens, start everybody. If you cancel them, you cancel them. You’re better off having everybody show up than not enough. TT- So if it’s for a domestic-- DK- They send two cars. The district car and a wagon. If the district car is hung up, they send the next district car. Anything involving weapons or fights is a two-car minimum. Like a vandalism, larceny, assault with no suspect on-scene, that’s one car. TT- Do you fill out reports for every run you do? DK- No. What they do now, everything’s by computer. You just put notes in there, you know, “Responded to 25 Crest Drive for a noise complaint, spoke with complainant …” TT- So as far as paperwork, car wrecks-- DK- Accidents, domestics, every call like that. Domestics have a form that has to be filled out for the state. If you don’t, it will come back to bite you. I’ll give you an example. A couple of years ago, remember the guy that killed his wife and dog and then cut his own throat on Meadow Street? TT- I was working that day but we didn’t go. I think that was Thurber, Cute Jr., and Babul. DK- Well, she had come in like three or four days before that making a complaint against him. TT- Oh no. DK- She documented everything but we just couldn’t find him. It was an active investigation. TT- Wow. He stabbed and cut up everything over there. Babul said when he saw the cops arrive, he shoved the knife into his own neck and cut his throat so badly his head was flopping around as they carried him out. Now, everything else, if you guys can’t—the police handle one aspect, and the fire department handles the other stuff, like we’re garbage men for people. We sweep up the messes people make. DK- They make the mess. We clean it up. That’s exactly what it is. TT- So when a dead body’s found, you guys call the M.E.-- DK- If you find a dead body you call for your supervisor. Supervisor shows up with a detective and B.C.I. and the M.E. You secure the scene. Basically, you do what we call a Base Report. You state what you found when you got there and what you saw. It could be a couple of lines or a couple of pages. Was the body clothed? What position it was in, any wounds on it. Anything suspicious around it. You do your report. The sergeant approves your report. Your supervisor approves your report, and it’s turned over to the detectives and the detectives will take it from there. They’ll investigate witnesses, evidence. TT- You got on in ’81. Were there bullet vests back then? DK- There was. It had just started. Like the late 70’s. I had a vest when I came on. They were a lot heavier and bulkier than the ones we have now. A lot of guys didn’t wear them. The old school guys. None of the old guys did anything new. It’s just like you guys. TT- Yes. Like the air-packs. A lot of the old schoolers didn’t wear them. They hated them. DK- Things changed in 1988-89, when crack really hit. That’s when everything changed on this job. I mean we had a shooting every now and then, and there was still stuff going down at Crook Manor, but from 1988-89 that’s when all the guns came out. We’d be getting calls every day, “Guy with a gun.” “Kid with a gun.” I mean back in the day the kid would end up having a BB gun. Not after that. The guns were everywhere. Now we started getting the “Shots fired” calls. 3,4,5 a night. Some were unfounded but the majority were not. Now every time we turn around there are gun calls. That’s when all the gun stuff started. This stuff was real. That’s also when we went from the revolvers to the automatics. The Heights was out of control until they did the place over. It was nuts. TT- I heard the fire department couldn’t go in there without the police. DK- It was crazy. Everybody was selling dope. TT- How did it stop? DK- They cleaned the place up. Everybody got evicted. But people were selling by beepers, and cell-phones were brand new. Think about that. It used to be you had a guy standing on the corner with a Dunkin Donuts cup. Drugs were in the cup. Now you had beepers and cell-phones. So you didn’t have to stand there with the drugs. You could still buy direct off the street, but why would you now? They also put up the fences and gates around the whole Heights. They put the security booth in there to screen anyone coming in. On a Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, we’d start stopping cars at 4 o’clock. New Bedford, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Bellingham, Foxboro—every car you stopped with Mass plates had a druggie in it. It was nuts. And the later the night got, the busier it got. It never stopped. All night long. And everybody got paid on Friday, so that’s when you’d really see it. TT- That’s what Lemay said. He said it was the days of the cocaine cowboys. Everything just lit off. DK- He’s exactly right. It was nuts. And we were making such good progress over there, one of the gangs threatened my life. TT- What? Was it valid? DK- Valid enough that they wanted to pull me off the street. Some kid was running his mouth at the House of Pizza. But I didn’t want to sit in the office, so they doubled me up instead. TT- What’s that mean? DK- They gave me a partner, so someone could watch my back. They also sent a police car by my house like every hour. I’m not kidding. The people I worked with were really great. TT- How long did this go on for? DK- They were supposedly gonna kill me at Octoberfest. Whether or not that was ever gonna happen, Octoberfest came and went and I’m still here. I think it was like three weeks. TT- That’s pretty unnerving. Now let’s talk about traffic stops. When you pull someone over—I mean I’ve never been on the other side of walking up to a stranger’s car wondering if they’re gonna shoot me. It’s probably one of the most dangerous things you guys do. DK- You never know who you’re stopping. TT- What are you gonna find in the car, how is this gonna go…as you walk up to the window, what’s running through your head? Are you watching his hands? DK- You watch to see what’s going on, you know? Keep the light on so you can see what’s going on in the car. The secret is for people to stay in the car. Don’t get out of the frigging car. If they jump out, I draw down on them immediately. Period. I tell you to stay in the car, stay in the car. You’re gonna get yourself killed jumping out of the car. I don’t know what you got. Guns, drugs… I’d watch them buy drugs. They’d go up to a car, exchange something, and I could always come up with something to stop them. Tail light out. Head light out. License plate light not working. You can always find a reason. TT- But does that allow you to search a car? DK- The smell of marijuana. If things don’t look right-- TT- It’s a tough job, right? They want you to get all this stuff off the streets but at the same time, it’s a fine line. DK- You could always stop and frisk somebody for a weapon. You could always do that. If you find something on them then you can toss the car. TT- Were there women on the job when you got on? DK- There was Melva Ward and then Doreen Tomlinson came on the job in like 1984. She got killed six months later in a car accident. TT- I heard that. Both Lemay and her brother Dave said the same thing. Dave was my boss on Rescue 2. As a matter of fact, he was in Fire Alarm that night and dispatched Lemay to the car crash that killed his (Tomlinson’s) sister. So she was the second woman on the job? DK- Yes. TT- In the whole history of the department, two women. I see more women cops than that on nearly every run now. DK- Right? After Doreen died, Linda Stafford came on, and we didn’t have anybody for a while after that. TT- Is there a physical test everyone needs to pass in order to apply? DK- Yes. I don’t know what it is 37 years later. You used to have to do so many push-ups, so many pull-ups, bench press 85 % of your weight, broad jump, but everything changes. I think now it’s push-ups, sit-ups, mile-and-a-half run, 100 yard dash and some other stuff. TT- It’s different for you guys because you’re not living with the women. It’s more transformative on our job because you have sleeping quarters-- DK- But they had to create a woman’s locker room because all of a sudden they were hiring a lot of women and they’re getting dressed in the frigging men's locker room. See, this is stuff the city never thought about. TT- Absolutely. You can’t expect the women to change in the men’s locker room. DK- Again. It took forever for the city to figure this stuff out. Old school. TT- Now, as far as bad calls, anything involving a kid freaks me out because I don’t have any and don’t know the first thing about them. DK- Every night it was something different. You could start off the shift with a stolen bicycle and end up with a murder. It was soup to nuts every frigging night. Domestic, drunks fighting, loud party call, fireworks call, every night it was different. TT- One of my old bosses, Dirty Harry (Callahan), said every time the garage door rolled up he pretended he was watching a movie. Every run was a new movie. DK- You guys have your same repeat houses all the time. Your frequent flyers. So do we. 444 West Avenue. 107 Mineral Spring Avenue. When those two places closed down the police and fire departments must’ve lost 500 runs a year. (laughs) Other runs were brand new. Summer nights were always busy. Cold winter nights you’d have fires and rollovers on the ice. TT- I don’t if it’s true, and I don’t even know if you can comment on this, but I heard there was an undercover group of policemen that can move from town to town. Rhode Island is tiny. Everybody knows everybody, so new faces allow fresh eyes-- DK- That would be like the High Intensity Drug Task Force guys. D.E.A. TT- They’d be switching guys out-- DK- They’re all over, oh yeah, they’re all over the state. They’re all over the place. We don’t even know who they are. They’d bring in guys from Providence if needed, Woonsocket. You can bring in anyone you need. TT- So they can cross jurisdictions. DK- The drug units can. Especially if you’re assigned to the DEA task force, you’re a federal agent, you can go all over the country. TT- I would think you would need fresh faces because everyone’s watching everyone. You’re watching the bad guys, the bad guys are watching you-- DK- They’re making buys and stuff, but you still have the guys from the city overseeing everything. They’re making a controlled buy. TT- Do you have any regrets in your career? DK- Not one. I had a frigging ball. It was the greatest job in the world. Like I said, the last six months there was some internal bullshit, a couple of frigging idiots down there, and I was gonna stay another year but I said, “You know what? I’m all set.” I looked around, I made the right decision. I’m working (traffic) details now, I come to work there’s no bullshit. I had the greatest job in the world. I went to California four times because of this job. New York City. I’ve been to Police Week in D.C. a dozen times, I met people from all over the country and had a frigging blast. I got no regrets at all. Fire Department’s the same thing. I go back to Chief Thurber, Chief Boisclair, Stretch Tuit, those guys were the greatest guys in the frigging world. They were all friends of my father’s back in the day. TT- Stretch Tuit is a name that keeps coming up. I never met him-- DK- You never met Stretch? That’s a shame. TT- His reputation is so crazy-- DK- He was. He was a good guy. TT- I heard everyone in New England knew this fucking guy. He walked into Fanuiel Hall up in Boston one day and a bunch of firemen from Lynn or somewhere called out “Hey, Stretch!” He was a legend. DK- They called him “Hollow Leg.” (laughs) TT- I heard that too. I heard Stretch enjoyed a drink or ten. DK- This has got to be from the 90’s. Jesus Christ. Bob Thurber, the old man, fell down the stairs and broke his ribs. He was all fucked up. So we go over to see him one day. Stretch goes over, Tommy Griffin and Bobby Thurber junior were on the engine, Engine 4. So I’m over there with Frank Boisclair and Stretch comes rolling in. So he’s sitting there and he says, “What does a heart attack feel like?” All of a sudden he pukes and goes unconscious. So Frank (Chief Boisclair) gets on the radio and says, “Get the rescue to Thurber’s house!” Of course, Bobby was in the station, heard the address, and goes flying over there on Engine 4 with Tommy Griffin. Come to find out Stretch was painting something, fell off a ladder, broke two ribs, and was bleeding internally. He almost frigging died. We thought he was dead. But he was a real character. TT- When did you guys become a full department? What year? DK- Had to be 1800’s. TT- We were officially formed in 1876, when the east and west sides were incorporated as the City of Pawtucket. Before that there were individual fire companies stationed in neighborhoods. Like 1801 is the formation of Engine 1. I think 1808 for Engine 2. They amended the city charter to create them. And then the neighborhoods kept getting bigger and banded together until the city just took over and united everyone. DK- They got pictures going back to the 1890s. I’m not really sure on the date. TT- The public library downtown has a locked room with a ton of police stuff, but not much fire history, which is too bad. Talk about the Line of Duty Deaths. DK- We’ve had how many cops get killed … lemme see. Slocum, he was killed in the early 1900s, another guy killed in the 1900s, you had Truesdale and Newberg, they got shot on Pawtucket Avenue, they got killed by some nut on Pawtucket Avenue, that was in the 1950s. Then there was Charlie Therault and Richard Dently—you see that yellow house right there? (points out his window.) He—Therault—lived there. He got killed in 1952 by some bankrobber from Providence. I never knew he lived there until they showed his house on Pincecrest Drive. Right across the street from me. Doreen got killed. I was working that night. There was a back-hoe on Power Road. She wasn’t sent on a call, but witnesses said they saw the lights go on for ten or fifteen seconds, then she hit the back-hoe, spun around and hit the pole. People were saying she was chasing a car, a big white Lincoln, or white Cadillac, but they never figured that one out. TT- She was the last death? DK- Yes. We had an East Providence cop get killed in Pawtucket. A guy named Caruso got killed in 1958 in front of Prospect Heights. My father was involved in that one. They chased a car into East Providence, lost it, East Providence chased the car back. The guy came around the corner from Prospect Street onto Beverage Hill Avenue, where the mini mart is now? Hit a pole. There was no inter-city (radios) back then, so they’re going back and forth on the phones. East Providence cop got out of the car, walked up to the car, the two kids in the front said they were hurt, he looked in the back seat and this kid Andy Ginitus shot him three times in the face. Killed him. So they all took off into the Heights. There-- TT- Was it a drug thing? DK- No. They stole a car. What happened was, they stole a car from somewhere up on Broadway, four guys in the car, and they were riding around all night. They broke into a store near where Apex is downtown. If you go up on the left, there’s a parking lot where Stanley Krazic’s pawn shop used to be in the 50s. It had guns in the window. They stole the guns out of the window. I guess my father was coming around the corner, heard the alarm going off, and a car pulled out and screwed down School Street. They chased them into East Providence but lost them. So this is like six o’clock on a Sunday morning. I guess this guy Jimmy Caruso picks the car up and starts chasing it back into Pawtucket. It hit the pole and they ended up shooting him. But there was a cop, he’s retired now, Wally Stewart, he was fifteen-years-old and living in Prospect Heights and he saw the whole thing. He lived in the 9 building and saw the whole thing. Saw them shoot the cop and head into the Heights. TT- Wow. So Doreen was the last Pawtucket cop killed on duty. I don’t want to jinx anybody but that’s like thirty or forty years ago. DK- I know. We’ve been lucky. We’re almost overdue. And you hate to say something like that. TT- Same with us. Last line of duty death was in 1993. DK- We’ve been very lucky. And I hope it continues. TT- Do they talk to you guys? I mean because in the last five years your job has become exceedingly dangerous. It was always dangerous but now it’s just—do they just tell you to be more careful? DK- We go to the range. Be alert. Be aware of your surroundings. If you(’re in uniform and) go to a restaurant, sit with your back to the wall facing the door. Always watch what’s going on. TT- That’s a tough way to live, especially when you can be assassinated at any second. DK- If somebody wants to get you, they’re gonna get you. Unless you react fast enough you don’t realize what’s coming at you. TT- When you guys have these chases back and forth across communities, do you have the power of arrest in other communities? DK- What you do is you call the other departments and they’ll come with you. If you go into Massachusetts, they have to grab him because that’s a fugitive from justice. You can’t bring a guy back over the state line. Say you chase a guy into Attleboro and you grab him. They arrest him and charge him as a fugitive from justice. They go to Attleboro court, and if he doesn’t want to waive extradition, they hold him for a hearing if he doesn’t want to come back. TT- But he has to be extradited. DK- Exactly. If he says, “Okay, I’ll go back,” they’ll release him to us. If not, he has to be extradited across state lines. TT- Say you chase someone into North Providence. DK- Normally what they’ll do is turn him over to us on the scene. TT- They make the physical arrest? DK- If we’re there we’ll do it. Usually, as long as he didn’t do anything in North Providence and there are no charges, he’ll be handed over to us. But say he hits two people in NP and it’s a hit and run, they’ll keep him and charge him with that stuff. What happens is the guy will be in court tomorrow morning. We’ll come in with our stuff, North Providence will present theirs, and any other affected city. Say it’s like five different cities involved, everyone will come in with their stuff and look to jam him up. (laughs) TT- (Laughs) Good luck, buddy. As far as meth and stuff, we had an incident two weeks ago, other than that, it’s not really around, right? Lemay said the coke dealers kept it out of here. DK- They probably were. I’ve only been to one or two calls involving meth. We went to West Ave or Mulberry Street one night for a call but other than that I don’t recall seeing much meth. TT- It’s amazing how they’ve kept it out. DK- Coke and heroin. That’s the meal of choice. TT- Let’s backtrack. I want to firm up this High Intensity Drug Task Force. DK- The State Police run it. The D.E.A., the F.B.I., and anyone else—Homeland Security, The Marshals.. TT- And they can go anywhere. They have jurisdiction everywhere. DK- Yes. They’ll link up with Mass, the Mass Staties if necessary. TT- It seems like we’re living in an increasingly violent time. DK- It’s the amount of guns, the money, the drugs. The drug thing is out of control. Heroin addicts have no choice. They need money to pay for their drugs or they get sick. That’s why you see all the robberies. All these bank robbers are usually addicts. They score a quick couple thousand dollars. Remember the Bearded Bandit in East Providence? Robbing all those banks last year? He was a heroin addict. That’s what a lot of it is. TT- Let’s talk about the crime scene. If BCI shows up to process the crime scene, are they running that scene? Or are they just working it and leaving? DK- BCI works the scene. When the detectives show up they are in charge of the crime scene. If it’s a murder, there will be a lieutenant or sergeant in charge of the scene. They’ll assign one or two detectives as the primaries, and the rest will help them. They’re in charge of the scene until they hand it back to Patrol. TT- Talk about your dad’s time. He was on from 1944 to 1966? DK- They only had four cars back then. The rest were walking beats. I think they had ten or twelve walking beats. The wagon ran out of the station. The call box brought the wagon. Of course, they didn’t have anywhere near the call volume we have now. They had traffic guys, motorcycle guys, but that was it. Downtown had five walking beats. Imagine that? The businesses were everywhere. All of Broadway was packed. From Manning/Hefrin all the way down, all the stores. From Apex down that was all stores and businesses. You came across the bridge, Roosevelt Avenue, High Street, Exchange Street—it was bustling. TT- That was before the bad time. DK- ’67 is when they started tearing everything down, urban renewal, and it was never the same after that. TT- 95 came through and ruined it all. Who were some of the guys you looked up to when you came on. DK- Dave Obrych, Joe Montiero, Tommy Anderson, Paul Hockwater, Joe Roy, Chief of Police. Milton King. Teddy Dolan. They were the older guys who had been around for a while. As a matter fact Teddy just died. Milt was a great guy. TT- These are the guys who broke you in? DK- Yes. TT- Is it like the fire department? There’s a certain level of new guy ball busting? Like chores, cleaning. DK- We don’t really have chores to do because we don’t live there like you guys. But they’ll bust your balls going on calls. “Don’t touch the radio.” Or “Keep your mouth shut when we get inside.” You learn the job from them. When I came on there were guys on the night shift who had done 20 years. They loved the night shift. Now, you got nobody with any time on nights. Louie Reed, Paul Hubert, they were on nights 14, 15 years. Not anymore. The midnight shift was different back in the day. Midnight to 3 was always busy but then everything died down after that. Til 6. TT- When I was on rescue it was the same thing. I’ll take my beating until 3 am but then I would like a few hours sleep. Doesn’t always happen, though. We have guys on our job that are kind of legendary guys. Lemay, Chickie, Chief Thurber … DK- Joe Corey. John Seabeck. Those are the cops’ cops. Teddy Dolan. Herbie Collins. Those were the guys. Seabeck is still alive. He’s a cop over at Johnson and Wales. I used to laugh, because I used to tell Joe Corey, “The only guy who should be in jail longer than John Seabeck is Joe Corey.” (Laughs) Kidding of course. They were no nonsense guys. That’s what they were. TT- You think these guys would talk to me? DK- Probably not. TT- Can you think of anyone who would talk to me? DK- David Malkasian might. He would have some good stories. TT- Chief Jay was talking about you back in the day. Said you used to carry a .44 magnum. DK- I did. Had a .44 Ruger Red hawk. We could carry anything we wanted. I shot a raccoon one night. TT- Did you ever fire your weapon on a run? DK- Nope. Shot a raccoon and a couple of skunks. TT- 37 years and you never had to fire your weapon? That’s amazing. DK- I could’ve. I had a kid come running out of Douglas Drug. On Pawtucket Avenue. It was the Sunday night between Christmas and New Years. 2003. It came in as a hold-up in progress. Quarter after seven. I’m sitting under the Division Street bridge. No traffic. Cold winter night. They hit the Alert Tone and send a bunch of cars. I start over there. I take a left on East Avenue. I’m flying. Bang a right onto Pidge Avenue. I pull in the parking lot and there’s one car in the lot. Something didn’t seem right. I pulled up, maybe halfway. All of a sudden I see this guy running through the store. He’s leaving. He’s got a Halloween “Scream” mask and a huge automatic pistol. He runs through the door and I scream, “Freeze, police!” He sees me, falls down, the money goes flying in the air, he falls to the floor. Meantime ten different police cars come flying in. He had a BB gun. 16-year-old Cape Verdean kid. Came real close to killing him. It looked real, and I would’ve been justified in shooting him, but no one wants to live with that. TT- No one. You’ll never sleep again. DK- I had another one. We had a guy. We called him the Tool Man. He was robbing Providence, Central Falls, Pawtucket. He’d have an axe, he’d have a crowbar, he’d have a hammer—every time you turned around he was robbing something. We had a big snow storm. December. Alert Tone goes off, I’d just finished working a radar detail and was coming home. I’m coming down Armistice Boulevard. I’m in my old blue Ford Explorer. Dispatch says, “Hold up in progress. First Fed Savings on Newport Avenue.” Next thing you know he takes off. “Cape Verdean male. Wearing a black sweatshirt and an afro. Wearing sunglasses and driving a green Honda.” I turn my truck around and who’s sitting at the red light? (laughs). I’m in my own car but I’m talking on my lapel mic. I catch up to him, a few cars behind him, it was snowing and gross. I got up on him and he could see me talking on my radio. He gets up to Bellevue Avenue and hangs a sharp right. Just as I turn, I saw Chris LaFort in Car 3. The kid blows the stop sign at Vine Street. Gets to the corner of Carter Ave and misses the turn. Smashes into a snowbank. I’m not afraid of him, I’m afraid of wrecking my personal car or having him back into me! (laughs). Wasn’t even worried about getting shot. I put the gun on him, he puts his hands up. His fingers are all scotch-taped. TT- No fingerprints. DK- Chris rips him out of the car. Turns out he had $5,000 on him. He was wanted for like six bank robberies. He was a drug dealer who owed his own dealer money. No gun because he was the Tool Man. TT- What is the rifle school like that the cops now get sent to? DK- I couldn’t really tell you about that because I didn’t go. Basically, you learn the weapon. We trained on pistols at the Cranston Police gun range, but the rifles I don’t know. Maybe a gun club? It was a 40-hour week-long course. TT- What’s the relationship like with the State Police? Does everyone get along? DK- We see them on the highway but as far as patrol goes we don’t have much interaction with them. The detectives and the Special Squad are a different story. TT- You guys do respond to the highway on occasion. DK- If the Staties are tied up we’ll take an accident report. But if it’s a fatal, the Staties own it. We used to take everything on the highway. TT- Glad you don’t have to go out there anymore. We have guys on our job that say responding to the highway is more dangerous than a house fire. DK- I’d rather be chasing a guy with a gun through Prospect Heights than sitting in the S-curves after midnight. TT- Right? I think that’s all I got. It’s been a real pleasure, Dave. You know what else is funny? You were so diligent on the radar, I heard that after you retired the city noticed a precipitous drop in revenue. (laughs) DK- That’s true. TT- That’s great. DK- Radar was twenty-thirty hours a week. TT- You made them a lot of money. Take care, Dave. DK- Be safe. July 24, 2009 “Jesus Christ!” Psycho Sal braced against the dashboard. “What did I tell you about the fucking brakes?” “I’m sorry, Sal.” It was only Yoda’s second day on A-Shift as chauffeur of Rescue 1, and he had almost just crashed into the car in front. His boss, Lt. Salvatore Giametti, was easy to read since he pretty much existed on the edge of a perpetual meltdown. Yoda knew all of the stories, how Sal, formerly known as “Straightline Sal” because of his attention to detail, had his rescue career blown apart after a string of horrendous runs he could no longer process. There was the single mom stabbed forty-nine times, the ten-year-old girl that hung herself in her own closet, two dead babies, and a carful of teenagers turned into ground beef when their car hit a bridge abutment at 70 mph. This was over a two-month period in 2005, and after that he was never the same. But Yoda was determined to stay positive. He said, “It’s kind of incredible how poorly these trucks are maintained.” “Welcome to the Rescue Division.” Psycho Sal lit a cigarette. His disheveled black hair and chiseled cheek bones would have made him attractive, but his eyes ruined everything. They were always bloodshot and filled with a blatant skeptical hostility. “Hope you enjoy getting your nuts punched in all day long.” “How old is this truck?” “2006.” “What? It’s only three years old?” “I thought you were supposed to be some kind of genius? Guess your big brain can’t wrap itself around the fact that these trucks run day and night.” “Guess that’s true.” “Besides, the Receiver shit-canned most of the mechanics.” “Fire Alarm to Rescue 1.” Psycho Sal grabbed the mic. “Rescue 1, go.” “Start responding to 516 Cantwell Street for a possible overdose.” “Roger.” Psycho Sal turned to his new partner and said, “Ten gets you twenty we play Jesus and raise the dead.” “No bet. Sounds like you’ve been there before.” “And we’ll be going back again. Place’s a total shooting gallery.” Fire Alarm hit the Alert Tone and announced, “Attention Rescue 1 and Engine 1, Still Alarm. 516 Cantwell Street, apartment 2, for a possible overdose …” Yoda fired up the lights and sirens while fumbling with his phone. Mobile GPS had just been made available to the public, and he had no idea where Cantwell Street was. “Are you kidding me?” Sal puffed on the cigarette. “Put that phone down before you kill us both. Take a right.” “I’m sorry—” “You better learn your goddamn streets, newbie. This ain’t Fire Alarm.” Yoda tried not to be discouraged. Despite hitting every IV and three flawless runs so far today, he felt all of it had been erased in the last two minutes. He tried not to cough through the fog Sal’s chain-smoking produced. “Take a left.” Sal leaned forward, scanning the block. “Just passed 421. It’s gonna be on your side.” Yoda’s pulse was pounding. He tried avoiding parked cars on either side of the road while hunting for the address. “I think that’s—” “Watch out!” A police car responding to the same call blew the stop sign. After Yoda slammed on the brakes and sent Sal into the windshield, his cigarette exploded in a burst of sparks. “He’s not even using his siren!” Yoda struggled to maintain his composure. “That was close.” Sal had his door open before they even stopped. He went straight to the cop’s window and said, “That was some great driving, superhero, you almost killed us!” “Don’t be so dramatic—” “Didn’t you hear our siren?” Yoda grabbed the First-In bag, which was a backpack stuffed with an oxygen tank and every conceivable breathing attachment—nasal cannulas, non-rebreather masks, bag-valve masks, nebulizers and steroid ampules for treating asthmatics or anyone with COPD. There was also a glucometer for diabetics, oral glucose, stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, pulse and SpO2 gauge, epinephrine for allergic reactions, narcan to reverse opiate overdoses, and various sized needles to administer both. 516 Cantwell was a bombed-out triple-decker in the worst part of District 1. Home to the city’s open-air drug market for cocaine, heroin, and crack, there were whole blocks of foreclosed triple and quadruple-decker homes. Built a century before to house thousands of workers that had once flooded the mills, these massive houses were now vacant hellholes filled with the worst things people could do to themselves and one another. Zombie junkies and tooth-grinding meth-heads scavenged for cash doing whatever needed to be done. Female addicts transformed into bedraggled prostitutes that stepped out of shadowy doorways. Nicknamed the “Kitchen,” this ghetto straddled the border of both the “Knock Out Kings” and the “Fifth Street Vatos.” They shared a fortified DMZ along Claiborne Avenue where atrocities, traded in an endless cycle of provocation and retribution, were only a part of doing business. As Psycho Sal and the cop argued, Yoda shouldered the First-In bag and the AED, a dictionary-sized portable cardiac defibrillator. He took the stairs two at a time. There was no front door, and the dark hallway was strewn with garbage and used diapers ripened in the July heat. “Fire Department!” Yoda banged on the door to number 2. The stench was overpowering. “Hello! Open the door!” “Hello?” He tried the handle. “Fire Department!” He slowly pushed open the door. A white man and woman sat at a filthy table in a fetid kitchen. Their arms were bruised pathways tattooed by the needle. The woman was barely awake and had a long drool oozing from the corner of her mouth. The man, a lesion-filled mess, cackled loudly at her expense. He had leaky brown eyes inside hollow and emaciated sockets. He was thin and wearing dirty boxers and a stained T-shirt. He said, “I woke up first and thought she was sitting there dead!” He laughed again. “Guess I was wrong.” “Sir.” Yoda did not know where to begin. “Have you both been using drugs today?” The man laughed even harder. “Naw, she’s all right. She’s a tough old goat. But I won’t let her shoot no more today.” “Ma’am. Can you tell me what day it is?” She turned her head as the long drool let go and splashed across her deflated breast. “Tuesday?” “Long as you’re here …” the man jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “It’s been awful quiet. I think there’s something wrong with the baby.” “What baby?” Yoda was confused. “There’s a baby here?” “Yeah. She’s in that room right there. She’s been sick.” Convinced the man was just high, Yoda kicked aside beer cans and trash. He pushed open the bedroom door. He saw the empty crib and stepped closer. “There’s no baby in here.” “You’re a funny guy. No baby …” The guy laughed. As Yoda left the room, something in the bathroom across the hall caught his eye. He took another step and then dropped the backpack and AED, screaming, “Sal!” “Who’s Sal?” Yoda dove at the tub and pulled out a toddler. “Sal! Oh Jesus.” He desperately searched for a pulse. “Come on, kid. Sal!” “What’s going on?” The junkie appeared in the doorway. “Oh no. Oh shit! Linda was gonna take a bath—” “Get out of the way!” Yoda was doing CPR on the still warm child. He ran out the door and straight for the truck. “Sal!” Sal and the cop stopped threatening each other long enough to register the panic on Yoda’s face. Then Sal blinked. “Was that a baby?” Inside the truck, Yoda laid the kid on the stretcher, doing CPR while hooking up the defibrillator pads. He turned on the monitor as Sal jumped in and said, “What the fuck is going on?” “I don’t know, man! There were two junkies just sitting at the table and the kid, the kid was in the tub—” “Gimme that.” Sal hooked up the pads in case the monitor called for an electric shock. “Stop CPR.” They both watched the screen and saw the rhythm was P.E.A. The monitor’s soothing voice said, “No shock advised. Continue CPR.” “Fuck me, man.” Sal ripped open the IV drawer. “Keep going with the CPR.” “We should be able to get her back if she just drowned, right?” “Do you know how long she was down for?” “No. That junkie—” Psycho Sal turned to the cop. “Go in and get that fucking guy.” The cop was all cop and tore off for the house. Sal, reminiscent of the gifted medic he used to be, somehow found a tiny vein and sunk the IV while CPR continued. Yoda, pumping away, was in awe. “Where’s the epi?” Sal spun for the med-drawer, drew up the appropriate pediatric dose of epinephrine, and had it going into the IV-line thirty-seconds later. Next, he cranked back the kid’s head, intubated her in one shot, and hooked up a bag valve mask, pumping pure oxygen into her tiny chest. “Where the fuck is the engine?” “Didn’t you have your radio on? They called responding from Lester Street. They were on a Box Alarm.” “Of course they were.” Sal drew up another dose of epinephrine and toggled his mic. “Rescue 1 to Engine 1.” “Engine 1, go.” “Approximate fifteen-month-old, Code 99. Expedite.” “Roger that.” “I don’t think so …” Sal pumped the bag-valve mask every ten seconds. “That’s not how this is gonna go down, little lady.” Engine 1 tore around the corner. Three men jumped down and ran for the rescue. Lt. Walls got there first. “Whaddaya got, lou?” “Looks like a drowning. I need one man back here with us to run the code and one to drive. Like right fucking now.” Lt. Walls said, “Bugsy, you drive. Finn, do what you do.” Kevin Finnegan was no ordinary twenty-year guy. The first five years of his career had been spent on Rescue 1 working for Capt. LeClaire, and the next five he partnered up with Lt. Killmoor to learn the other side of the city. Since he was taught by both department pioneers in EMS, Finnegan was widely regarded as one of the best rescue guys on the job. But one day at 135 Eddings Street finished that for good. A mother shot her three kids in the head and then herself. At the time, Finnegan had two small kids of his own and bid off because he knew he was drowning in the ghosts. He said, “What do you need, lou?” “Can you get another epi ready?” Sal pumped the bag-valve mask. “Talk to me, Finn, what’re you thinking, bro?” “Nothing, man. You got the line, the tube, the epi, the CPR … I can’t think of anything else except some good pavement medicine.” “Bugsy!” Sal screamed. “Let’s roll, dude!” “Roger that!” Sal toggled his mic. “Rescue 1 to Fire Alarm.” “Fire Alarm’s on, Rescue 1.” “Advise St. E’s we’re coming in with an approximate fifteen-month-old found face down and unresponsive in a bathtub. Unknown on time. She’s currently P.E.A. We have a twenty-four gauge IV in the left AC, two rounds of epi are on board, and we’re about to drop a third. Kid’s intubated, CPR’s in progress, we’re six minutes out.” “Roger.” Rescue 1 was barely parked before its back doors shot open. Yoda hopped out and grabbed the stretcher while Finnegan continued CPR and Sal pumped the mask. Ideally, they knew Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence would have been better suited to handle this situation, but state protocol called for all pulseless people to be transported to the closet Emergency Room. The ER doctor on call at St. Elizabeth’s wore an expression that seemed to reflect this, that he was about to become the wrong man in the wrong place at the worst possible time. “Doc, we got an approximately fifteen-month-old female found face down in a bathtub.” They wheeled her into Critical Care Room 1 where an army awaited. Sal continued his report, “She’s been P.E.A. the whole time. Don’t know how long she’s been down. Four rounds of epi on board. No vomiting of water or stomach distension, twenty-four in the left AC.” The nurses motioned that they were ready for the transfer, so they moved the child from the stretcher to the bed. As they did so, the mask moved. The doctor approached. “Halt CPR.” “What?” Finnegan was pounding out a steady rhythm. “Look at this.” The doctor pulled away the mask and pointed at her blue lips. Then he motioned toward her mottled skin. “Lividity has not yet set in but it’s close.” “She was still warm! Blue lips could mean she’s hypoxic!” “Sal …” Yoda tried to step in. The anxious room did not know what to do. “You ain’t calling it.” Sal made it sound like a threat. “You haven’t even done anything!” “I’m sorry, lieutenant. Our protocols are pretty explicit.” “You’re a piece of shit.” Sal seemed to think of it. “It’s a little girl, man.” “Lieutenant—” “You ain’t even gonna try?” Finnegan said, “I’m continuing with CPR. Screw this guy.” The doctor said, “The water probably kept her warm, guys. You don’t even know how long she was down for.” “So you just …” Sal deflated. “A little fucking girl, man.” He shrugged. “I’m all filled up. This one’s on you, med-school.” Then he left the room. |
AuthorTom Trabulsi was born in the Midwest, attended high school in Rhode Island, and graduated from Boston University with a degree in American History. He was a bike courier in Boston and New York City, worked construction in the mountain west and east coast, and is currently a firefighter in a northeast city. Archives
August 2022
Categories |