Captain Steve Parent was on the Pawtucket Fire Department for twenty-five years. Having worked alongside the likes of Lt. Tomlinson and Captain Lemay, he earned a reputation as a hard working rescue guy. He was an officer on the rescue before turning in his pins to go back to the line, where he became a fire lieutenant, captain, and finally the Fire Marshal for the city of Pawtucket. After he retired, he got on the T.F. Green Airport Fire Department where he is now a lieutenant on the Airport Fire/Rescue service. This interview was conducted in his office at the airport on 11/15/2017. This is what he said...
SP- So we have four captains, four lieutenants, and eight privates. TT- Four guys on shift, right? So you got sixteen guys. And you run two pieces of equipment with four guys? SP- Three pieces. Two 3000 gallon crash trucks and one 1500. TT- These crash trucks are loaded with foam, right? SP- They contain enough foam ... the 3000's carry 420 gallons of foam. And that's enough foam to make four loads of finish foam. It's 120 gallons to 3000 gallons of water to get 3% foam. So the 1500 gallon truck carries 210 of foam. It's half the size, obviously. TT- So you're mixing foam and water in the trucks like our (Pawtucket) Engine 5 would. SP- Yep. TT- And to put that into perspective, those guys are only carrying 5 barrels on that thing? So we're talking about 25-30 gallons of foam. SP- But that foam that you guys carry in the city is different than what we use here. If I went to Pawtucket on Mutual Aid, I would never take any foam from you. Our foam and your foam don't play together. TT- Your foam is specialized for jet fuel? SP- Our foam is strictly AFFF. TT- What's that mean? SP- Aqueous Film Forming Foam. But our AFFF is military spec. It won't mix with yours. If it did, it would turn into a snotty mess. TT- Really? SP- It would block the metering devices in my truck. Nothing from outside, even if you were carrying your own AFFF, that don't get mixed with mine. All my stuff comes from here. TT- Now you guys are basically set up for crashes, or anything that happens on the airport grounds? SP- Yes. We're here because the FAA says if you do more than five flights of an air carrier aircraft, which is a commercial airliner, meaning people, depending upon the size and length of that aircraft ... you have five categories. A,B,C,D, E. We are an Index C airport, so we take up to 159 foot aircraft. Now, we're starting to get in larger 767's, so when we go up to the larger aircraft, that pushes up to an Index D. Which doesn't necessarily mean people, it means the amount of water that you carry and the amount of trucks you have on duty. All that Index corresponds, like A is the smallest class. You need 500 gallons of water and two trucks. B goes up to 1500 gallons and two trucks. C is two trucks with 3000 gallons of water and the appropriate foam to mix with it. Sometimes we bump up to an Index D, so we have to have another truck available and we usually add another guy. We also have a medical license. We don't do any transports, but we do all medical aids in the terminal. TT- So if anybody's coming in sick on the plane ... SP- Coming in sick on the plane, coming into the airport for departure. A lot of self medication goes on (alcohol.) But we don't transport. Warwick (Fire) does all of the transport. TT- Downstairs when we were going through the trucks, we were talking about Mutual Aid and how you guys get sent out. If you have enough personnel here you can send one of the trucks. SP- Yes. A few years ago we did. There was a big fire at Motiva, in the port of Providence, so we sent our foam trailer and one truck. TT- Are you guys part of the IAFF? SP- No. We're AFSCME. TT- So you're basically working for the airport? SP- Yes. AFSCME has a public safety union within their structure, but we just fall under the envelope of everybody else. I don't know why we could never be members of the state association, but a long time ago one of the Warwick guys was a big State Association guy, so that might have played into the ... TT- Politics. SP- Yeah. They could've had this. Warwick (Fire) could've had the airport years ago but they didn't want it. For whatever reason. TT- As far as your day to day operations, you guys do 24's? SP- Yes. 24 on, 24 off, 24 on, five days off. TT- Now as far as the setup at the airport here, when something goes wrong who calls you guys? Is it the tower? How does the chain of command work? SP- It's changed a little since I got here. The tower still notifies us if an incoming plane has an operational problem. But if something happens on the ground or in the terminal, 90% of the calls go through the police department, which dispatches us. For the most part, everything gets channeled through the police department. TT- Warwick Police runs the airport? SP- No. Airport Police are their own entity. Totally separate from TSA. TSA is Homeland security. They handle bringing people from the unsecure side of the airport to the secure side of the airport. Police, they'll assist them, they have the same powers of any other department in the state. State Police are here too. They still maintain a presence here. TT- Are they 24/7? SP- I believe they still are. TT- How many Staties? SP- I think two. Not sure of the necessity for them with a full department already here. TT- When you guys are training for this stuff, I mean how much fuel is on a 737? A couple thousand gallons? SP- Oh yeah, it's all of that. There's like close to 1300 in the wings, and 4200 in the center tank. TT- Wow. Jesus Christ. That's a weenie roast. 1300 on each wing? SP- Yes. TT- So it's 2600 plus another 4000. You got like 7000 gallons on that thing. What do you guys train for? To get the foam on the engine, the wing, the fuel...? SP- Depends. If it's an engine fire, that's one scenario. We can have wheel-brake fires, there's an APU (Auxiliary Power unit) on the back of the plane that runs the plane, we could have a fire in there. TT- I guess my question would be, obviously it's life safety first, but after that you're concerned with... SP- It's a Catch 22. We're mostly fire suppression because the thought process is the quicker you get the fire down, the least amount of people get hurt. Depends on the situation. TT- Right. With 7000 gallons on that thing-- SP- That's only on takeoff. Obviously, they're burning a lot of that fuel to get here from wherever they're coming from. TT- Do you have training on the engines themselves? SP- Generally. TT- Do you know how to cut the power? SP- Yes. You're assuming the thing's still manned, so the pilot is gonna be in control of that. We do train for that. The planes also have their own suppression systems on board. TT- The onboard suppression system, is it like CO? Is it like an extinguisher? SP- Yes. TT- So it's like pre-piped in there? SP- Yes. TT- As far as water goes, you're not gonna throw water on a fuel fire. So this is all foam. No water. SP- We also have dry chemical (extinguishing agents.) All the trucks carry dry chemical. Rescue 6 carries 700 pounds of dry chemical. The other two are 450 pounds of dry chemical. Rescue 7 carries a suppression agent called Halitron. It's a non-corrosive extinguishing agent. That's more for electrical fires. TT- Have you guys had--I mean I know there's been small plane crashes, but have you guys had anything bigger than that? SP- '08 was the last crash. Crash might be too strong a word. It didn't crash and burn, it crashed in the snow and spun off the runway. It didn't cartwheel, but it spun. TT- Like doing a doughnut? SP- Yes. (laughs) TT- It seems like it's a pretty efficient system. You guys a run a tight ship. SP- It wouldn't be good in a state this size to have a considerable crash. TT- People would know all the dead. SP- Yes. TT- Are they expanding the airport? SP- They just finished the runway extension. TT- Is it in service? SP- Yes. TT- So the goal here is they want to get bigger. They want to get bigger planes in here ... SP- And more traffic. The only thing that affects our rating is the size of the airplanes. Like our cargo aircraft are 767's. And that should put us up but cargo doesn't play in. It's all passenger rated. Like we just started getting in Amazon. They're landing cargo in here. TT- What're they landing here? How big are the planes? SP- 767's. But they're cargo, so that doesn't affect our index. TT- And the airport itself, the runways can handle 747's, 777's? SP- Oh yeah. TT- So it's mainly a question of do the airlines want to bring in those kind of numbers. SP- Yes. It's gotta be worth it to them. We got Norwegian (Air) going to Ireland, the Netherlands, and they want to do more. Cabo Verde, they come in from the islands. TT- So why don't we transition to the Pawtucket days. What year did you get on? SP- 1987. TT- And what were you doing before you got here? SP- I was working fulltime for Almacs Supermarket. TT- Oh yeah? SP- Started there when I was sixteen. I was a carriage-shagger. (laughs) Almacs was like a mom and pop supermarket in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. In their day, through the mid-50's, they were coining the term supermarket--from mom and pop sized markets to the actual supermarkets that you know today. When the Super Stop and Shops came along, that's what did in Almacs. They had a hard time adjusting to that. They tried, as they were kind of winding down, to expand their stores, modernize their stores. I started in the Seekonk store. I grew up on Central Avenue, Central and Dagget, so the state line was a quarter of a mile from where I grew up. We used to shop at that Almacs. TT- How old were you when you got on here? SP- Pawtucket? I was 21. I went to fire school in 1987, and got appointed in January. It was kind of funny. It was during a change of mayors. I was on a list from Henry Kinch. Dusty's father. I wanna say they put seven or eight guys on. The first list in 1985 I came out thirty-one. And they only took thirty guys in the school. TT- Ouch. SP- But, number thirty broke his leg before the fire school, so he couldn't go. I figured the way math works, if thirty can't go, and I'm thirty-one, I must be number thirty now. But it didn't happen. I missed the '85 school. Bob Thurber was at that fire school. When they ran the next test I came out twenty-six or twenty-seven. I also worked at Costigan's. It was a private ambulance company owned by the same people who ran Costigan's funeral home. Costigan Private Ambulance ran out of our city. Chick Costigan, one of the owners, was my godfather. TT- So they handled the transports... SP- They handled all of the transports for the city of Pawtucket. They (the fire department) had a rescue truck. They would go, they would assess, I guess they could've transported if they had to but they always called Costigan's. And they transported. So I was also working there. It was me, Bob Thurber worked there, and he brought over Bob Howe, who was working for Rhode Island Ambulance out of East Providence. Dusty Kinch worked there--his aunt was married to a Costigan. And a lot of other guys from our job worked there. Bob Barton, Steve Galuska, Mike Allen ... it was almost like a stepping stone to get on the job. I started there in '85. So I worked nights there. I worked at the supermarket during the day, and worked the ambulance mostly at night. TT- So when you first got on the job where did you go? SP- Well, three guys retired January 1, and I was number three. TT- Wow. SP- Yeah. That's how close it got. They weren't gonna put anybody on, but then they were told they had fifteen days by contract. So it was me, Russ Renzi, Dick Renzi's brother, and this other guy, Steve Poole, who was not a city guy. He came from Seekonk. I never knew what his connection was. So it was the three of us. Poole went out IOD within a year of coming on the job, which I think was his master plan from the start. Russ, obviously passed. he died of leukemia. So I'm the only one left. TT- So Russ died after he retired? SP- No, while he was on. Russ died in '05. I'm pretty sure. TT- I never met him. I got here in '08. SP- Russ was a funny guy. He was a quiet guy. He actually went to the same EMT class as me. He was unbelievably claustrophobic. You know how they used to do the extrication training for EMT-Basic? TT- Yes. SP- We had him just playing a patient and he was freaking wigging out. I used to ask him, "How're you gonna wear a Scott pack if you're this claustrophobic?" Of course, Russ' brother Dick, and his dad, Alfonse, who was a lieutenant, were both on the job. So Russ was a great guy, but he was just a guy in the wrong place. He was scared to the death of getting sick from being on the rescue. Scared to death about catching something. The funny part was he contracted leukemia and died. And that was his biggest fear all along. TT- How did he make out with the airpacks? I've heard his name before, guys have mentioned him, but I never knew him. SP- I worked with Russ up at the 5's, and I remember having a fire at Colfax Packing in a machine, and I can name a lot of guys over the years that couldn't wear a Scott pack, but he muddled through. But he wasn't a fan of having to wear it. He wasn't a zero, he was really trying hard. He worked part time as a bartender at Chelo's up in Providence, Spring Street, and that always seemed to be better suited for Russ. He was very traditional to it, the fire service, and he loved the job ... As an instructor, I taught at many academies. You gotta be kind of mechanical, and you gotta work with your hands, use tools. If you're a guy that shows up and can't even work a screwdriver, it's not an easy place to be. TT- No, it's not. There's a lot of common sense stuff you have to have as well. SP- I mean the medical stuff has grown considerably since I got on there. I say it here all the time. The protocol book is like a phone book now. When I started it was thirty pages (laughs). And we still carried it in the truck (laughs). You know, Cardiacs had been established, but it was, when they first started you'd see that old TV show, "Emergency," and they'd carry everything into the house. They'd do telemetry, send a strip to the hospital. that was starting to go away when I started. When I got on, I was lucky. Pretty much everybody ended up in dispatch. But we still had three civilian dispatchers--Mo Barris, Mike McMahon, and Ray Tattaglia. So those three plus the new guys, filled all the spots. On the job, they were still in the middle of this big union thing. They didn't have outside testing for promotions, it was always in house. And the city got involved with playing favorites, so the promotions were always political. The union was really pushing for the outside testing. So they boycotted a promotional test. There weren't a lot of lieutenants. And back then there were no captains at all. They hadn't been invented yet. We probably only had a handful of lieutenants left, maybe less than ten? On the whole job. So there were a lot of guys placed as acting lieutenants. There weren't really bid spots to go to because you had guys that were on trucks acting as the officer. So they would just kind of put you somewhere to be the third body. You didn't really bid to that pot, you were just a fill in. When I went on I got assigned to C-shift, and so did Russ (Renzi). Russ ended up at Station 6. With Kirk Richards, John Hargreaves, and their lieutenant was Frank Boisclair, who later became Chief of Department. Frank, because of seniority and the vacancies, was placed in the Battalion Chief's car on C-shift. So it was Kirk, John, and Russ. Kirk died, John died, and Russ died. And then Eddy Addison ended up over there and he died. All of that crew died. TT- What did Kirk die of? SP- Liver failure. TT- Ugh. That's a bad way to go. SP- Yeah. And Kirk was really in shape and always squared away. TT- Was he boozer? SP- Not that I saw. TT- How did he die of liver failure then... Hep C? SP- Not sure. Might've been a cancer related thing? I don't recall. TT- There was a cancer thing at the 6's. Guys were telling me--you just rattled off a bunch of names. What did Addison die of? SP- Kidney failure. John died in a fire. TT- So where did you go when you first got on. SP- I ended up assigned to C-group as a floater. TT- Nowadays we call them Transfer guys. SP- Yeah. There spots open. But at the time we still ran four man companies, so depending on who had EMT-Cardiac licenses, they went to the rescue. After I got on in January there was another group that came on in April. Rick Slater was in that one. John Karbowski, Gary Gould, and then in June there was another huge group that got on. That was Boisclair, Kean-- TT- As far as the old school guys, there were names that just kept coming up, like Timmy Hayes, Buchanon... SP- Timmy Hayes was on Engine 1. He was an old school fireman, a real smoke eater. Buchanon worked with my dad on Ladder 2. Jack was a great guy. When I got on the job, next door to Cottage Street, where Walgreens is now? That used to be a lumberyard. Diamond Lumber. And Jack worked in the yard over there. The guy that was running the yard, the yard foreman, had retired. So Jack took over as yard foreman. So I ended up going to work at Diamond Lumber. With Jack. Until the day we closed the doors. As a matter of fact, I put the lock on the gate for the last time in 1990. TT- Didn't that place burn to the ground? SP- Right after it closed, Landry and Martin Oil Company bought the property and they were taking some of it down, because there was big timber comprising some of the sheds, and one night we were at the 4s and the doorbell rings at two o'clock in the morning and Mike Fox gets up and answers the door. Now Mike Fox was kind of like the consummate joker. He goes out to answer the door and there's no one there. He looks out the door and right across from the 4s, in the yard, the Insulation shed was on fire. So Foxy comes in the dorm and says, "Come on, guys, we gotta go. The lumber yard's on fire." No one believed him. "Fuck you, Foxy. You're full of shit." But it was really on fire. By the time we hit the ramp, it already went from the insulation shed down a whole city block to where the office was already ripping. It was pretty extensive. I mean we had quite a bit if damage to the houses where John Wallace lives now on Kenyon Avenue. That neighborhood suffered a lot of mills and fires. We burned down Diamond Lumber, which was right across the street from the station, Greenhalgh Mills, which was across the street from the station, everything around that fire station burned down. TT- And Star Gas before that. SP- Star Gas before that. TT- And when these names comes up, like Timmy Hayes, I mean these are well-respected dudes. SP- I worked with Timmy Hayes quite a bit at Engine 1. And he was just one of those guys that you didn't give any shit too. Whatever he said, you did it. And he wasn't a hard ass. He wasn't a freaking mean guy, you just didn't question the guy. TT- Because everything he said carried weight. SP- He had a lot of respect. Dick Meerbott was an actual lieutenant who used to fill in in the Battalion Chief's car, and eventually became the Chief of C-Shift. And there was another guy, Lt. Naughton, he was in the car a lot. He actually ended up going to Florida to become a cop. I think he's back up here now. You had Boislcair, who was moving up to become chief, and Bob Thurber Sr. who was the Assistant Chief, and he was another guy you just didn't question. Of course I knew them all. For me it was a little different. I knew the guys from the job because I grew up on the job. If you go to Station 4, in the trophy cabinet, there's a newspaper article from when the station opened in 1974. In the picture is Engine 4 and Ladder 2 parked on the ramp. And at the pump panel of Engine 4 you can see a kid standing there and that was me. And when I went on the job I was driving Engine 4 (laughs). I would bounce back and forth from Ladder 2. Joey, Roy Taylor, who was called Spud, Spud was a great guy. TT- When you were younger, as far as the transformation from the old school to you guys, Bobby Ogle's name came up a lot... SP- Bobby Ogle was a top notch firefighter. He was one of those friggin' Vietnam Vets, a great guy, not a bragger, another type of guy that if he liked you he liked you. You know the rumor mill on the job, and I never worked with him that much but I remember this specifically. I was on the rescue and somehow I ended up on Engine 1. I forget how. I might've been working for somebody. Anyway, I was on Engine 1 and we had a fire. I don't know the particulars, or how he thought I didn't know what I was doing, but I remember Thurber saying to me later, "Oh, you know Bobby Ogle was really impressed how you knew how to run the truck." I was always mechanical, worked on cars since I was twelve. TT- You're a licensed plumber, right? SP- Yea. Master-pipefitter. So I knew the trucks. I used to go as a kid. My father was always on Ladder 2. He got assigned to Ladder 2 when it was on Broadway, and he closed the Broadway Station when they opened Station 4 on Cottage Street (1974). When Ladder 2 got a new truck, it was a '72 Maxim, he used to take us to the plant in Middleboro where they were building the truck. I watched the truck being built as a kid. He knew every nut and bolt and grease fitting on that truck. Unfortunately for him, he always struggled with the promotional tests. But he knew that truck. He used to take an ass-kicking for staying on Ladder 2, but he was there with old man Halpin and he was in a brand new station he helped open, and we lived right down the road at Dagget and Central. He could walk to work. Why would he leave? He was on it when no one wanted to be on it. Ladder 3 was actually the slowest truck. We had three ladder trucks at one time. TT- Was Ladder 3 an aerial? SP- Yes. It was Ladder 1's old tractor drawn aerial. TT- So Ladder 2 was ground ladders only. SP- Yes. Ladder 1 was a '65 Maxim tractor-drawn, one hundred footer (ladder). Ladder 3 was an eighty-five foot tractor-drawn aerial, and Ladder 2 was a '48 Rio. I got pictures of all that stuff. TT- Brule said he went out to Phoenix, Arizona, and they have a museum out there. SP- The Hall of Fire. TT- He said the Haycart's there (one of the country's oldest firefighting apparatus). He said the minute you walk in it's the first thing you see, with Pawtucket right across its side. SP- We have an Aherns Fox that's in an upstate New York museum as well. TT- What about the Flower Pot? SP- The Flower Pot was a hand-drawn, 1800's pumper that used to run out of Engine 3. It's funny because the back of that--they call it the Flower Pot because the back had this big wooden chamber on the backside of it, and on the back was painted the city seal. And somebody sent my father a picture of that painting in the late 70's but I don't know where it came from. And where that truck is now I don't know. It might be in private hands or a museum somewhere. The Aherns Fox which was bought in '37 for the headquarters station, it was the most modern setup of the time. Our Aherns Fox was the only fully enclosed engine they ever built. They built one. TT- Why? SP- Originally I could never understand how the city of Pawtucket ended up with such a unique piece, but I heard from a guy in Seekonk who had a bunch of antique fire apparatus. The story was, at the time, they couldn't determine, because they didn't normally build fully enclosed fire trucks? They couldn't determine the bid price of the truck, so it was kind of an open-ended bid? So the extra money got funneled into the mayor's campaign coffers. They bought an enclosed engine and an enclosed ladder truck because they couldn't estimate the cost of the construction of the enclosed bodies because nobody built them. That was the rumor about why they bought the enclosed trucks. TT- So they could skim off the cost for the campaign coffers. Incredible. That's the one that's up in Buffalo? SP- Middletown. Middletown, New York. Fully enclosed sedan piston-pumper. The piston-pumpers at the time had a great reputation for moving a lot of water. But the City of Pawtucket had a completely operational water system with hydrants. Those piston-pumpers were more designed to draft than they were to be like today's centrifical mounted pumps. So how we ended up with a piston-pumper in a city that had a tremendous well run water supply system was odd. Matter of fact, when it arrived in '37, they didn't have the personnel to open another station. When they opened headquarters, Station 2 was on Main Street where the Senior Center's now. That was headquarters. When they built today's headquarters, that was our seventh station. The 6's now was the eighth station. The 1's was at West Avenue, the 2's was Main Street, the 3's was Prospect Street, the 4's was Broadway, the 5's was Mineral Spring Avenue and Smithfield Avenue. Where the driveway is for the Dunkin Donuts on Smithfield Avenue? That was the ramp for Station 5. Station 5 was the exact same building as the Hose Company on Central Avenue, without the round tower on the end. If you took the round tower off Central Avenue, that was Station 5, the exact same building TT- Now the hose company was just carrying hoses, right? That's all they had? SP- Yes. You had your pumpers and your steamers, and you had to have a hose company to bring hose, because there was no place on the steamer to carry hose. Engine 2 ran the steamer. Engine 1 was originally on the corner of Brown and Washington, and they closed that in 1911 when they finished building the 1's we know on West Avenue. The 6's was Central Avenue. And that was it. Then they built the 7's, which was headquarters, and the 8's, which is where the 6's are now on Newport Avenue, because after World War II that neighborhood started to grow. So that's why that station came into existence. TT- Now the steamer itself, it was obviously run on steam. SP- Just like a locomotive engine, that's what powered it. TT- So if the fire came in they'd have to fire up this steam engine from scratch? SP- They used a coal. There was a coal burner. The whole back of that steamer was a boiler, a regular water boiler like you'd find in any house from that time frame for heat. And it would produce steam that turned the pump. TT- Wow. No shit. So how long's it take for this thing to fire up? SP- I would have to think they kept something burning, because coal's not easy to light. You have to have a pretty good fire to light coal. So, you either had to keep it--now all of the stations were coal fired too, all of the heating systems. So whether they would grab some hot coals from the boiler, because you couldn't leave it running all the time because where would the exhaust go? How exactly they would light it up on the way to a fire to make enough steam, who knows. TT- What kind of water are we talking about with these trucks? How much did they carry? SP- The steamers? They didn't carry any water. TT- Oh, so they hooked right up and pumped from the hydrant. SP- Yes. Static water supply or drafting. That's why they call hydrants fire-plugs, because before they actually invented a fire hydrant, all it was was a plug in the water line. You just pop the plug out and it would fill where the opening was and you'd put your hard suction line in that. That's where your water source was. Because the water mains were originally made out of wood. You just had a big wooden plug in certain spots. TT- We're talking the 1830's and 40's when they were building the city, because I actually found some documents about how they-- SP- 1870s Union Wadding factory burned down, just like when we had it 140 years later. The other thing that was big in Pawtucket was that we had a chief get killed. Collyer. That's the monument at Collyer Park. He got killed when his Chief's cart tipped over and killed him. That was 1886? That was still fresh in the minds of guys as the 1900s came up to motorized apparatus. They always pushed for the department to go motorized, to get away from the horses because the horses were a lot to keep, to maintain, it was cheaper to run a fire truck. I think our first motorized truck was 1910. It ran out of Engine 2. And then the 1's got a truck. You know, it was always a myth that there was horses at Station 1. There were never horses at Station 1. It was actually one of the first stations built in the state of Rhode Island that housed motorized, modern apparatus. TT- So the pre-Station 1, before 1910, that station had the horses? SP- Yes. That was at Brown and Washington Streets. When they knocked that down, I have no idea. There's a house there now and the house is pretty old, like from the 1920's. Then the other Station 2, where the senior center is now? If you look across the street there's a building called Coyle Appraisal, that's the original Station 2. That building was the same architectural design as Station 1 at Brown and Washington Street. TT- Let's switch gears and talk about the Hargreaves fire, because you were on C-Group, right? SP- I was the first truck there at the Hargreaves fire. I was on Engine 2. I was the chauffeur. It was a sunny, warm, August afternoon, beautiful day. If memory serves me right, the first call came in from a cell phone, which was still kind of in its infancy. TT- Yeah, right? This is 1993. SP- Somebody on I-95 called it in. And the building was brick, kind of square, flat roof, had a chimney on the west side, and somebody called it in because there was smoke coming out of the chimney. Which, you know, I can remember coming up Exchange Street, and of course you have to go around Underwood to get around the highway, and John Buchanon was the lieutenant, Bobby Howe was in the backstep, and as we're turning the corner it was just a little whiff of smoke coming out of the chimney as if it was a boiler backfire. We didn't know the building had gas heat. So that's how it got called in. TT- You were driving, so you're pumping? SP- Yeah. TT- I hate pumping. You don't get to break anything. SP- As we pulled up there was a hydrant right in front. No Knox boxes at the time, or very few, so we smashed in the glass front door and there was a tremendous amount of heat. Their windows were smash proof, bullet proof, you couldn't look in any of them. I remember the guys going in and being down there through one bottle and they never really found any fire. But it was like, you would walk down the hallway and you'd feel heat, and then no heat. And then heat, and no heat. And nobody could really understand why that was going on. But it was because the fire started in the kitchenette in the basement. There was a big open conference room, and there was a kitchenette and a utility room where the heating system was. And the fire was in the kitchenette and it was feeding into the boiler room and it was a forced hot air furnace. It was feeding into the duct-work. Every place you walked by and felt heat was because the heat was coming out of the vents in the ceiling. TT- Jesus. SP- So they had no visible fire. Lot of heat and smoke but no fire. And then of course all the other trucks started showing up. And then I guess, Hargreaves, who was on the rescue quite a bit, before he ended up at the 6's, he was on Rescue 1 with Doc Lennon for a long time. He ended up at the 6's and I'll be honest with you, I don't know what he was doing in there because he wasn't one you'd find in a fire that much. Just how it was. TT- And freelancing on top of it. SP- Yeah, well, it was a lot different back then. There wasn't all this accountability training. We didn't even have enough radios. The officers had the radios. So, it wasn't like the building was ablaze, because no one could even come up with where the fire was. And on the opposite end of this conference room was a stairway that went up the back of the building. It was a concrete stairway, you know, poured down. It was open from the outside, and when you walked down it there was an exterior door at the bottom. And that's the door he came out of, but the only thing anybody--because nobody knew what happened. Nobody ever talked to him after he got injured (John Hargreaves died at Mass. General two weeks after suffering severe inhalation burns.) It was kind of like a split-level building. You came in the front door and you weren't on a floor. You had a couple of steps to go up to be on a floor, or a couple of steps to go down to be in the basement. But at the main entrance you were not on the floor. And down at the bottom of the basement stairs, around behind it, was the door to the kitchen area. And the only thing they came up with was that he was down there doing whatever, and opened that door to the kitchenette. And when he opened that door, he gave it a breath of fresh air, and off it went. Because when we went back to the scene later, the next day, that door was burned off. So like, when you opened the door, the door was burned off the top like you could see where the flames had been shooting out of the door. Now, if that door was open when we got there we would've known it. It had to have been closed. Nice big solid wood door. And the fire was in there, feeding into the heating system, so that's why the smoke was coming out of the chimney. And when he opened it up, it just took off. TT- Now I heard from a pretty reliable source, because when we went over this in our academy, it always struck me as being a really strange thing that this law firm had bulletproof windows, a double roof, all kinds of physical security, what kind of law were they handling, who were their clients, why was that building so protected? SP- There was a rumor that they had had some kind of death threats. From some case they handled and, you know, this is going back to the day when the mob was a little more involved with what's going on then it is now. Of course he was a senator, McBurney, and we never really got a great story as to why that building was constructed the way it was. My personal feeling, and it's always been since the day it happened, was that they burned that building on purpose. That was an arson fire, it wasn't an accident. The whole theory was that there was a toaster in the break room, and that it overheated, because it did burn through the countertop. The countertop was burned through. But what kind of electrical system would allow a toaster to draw enough juice out of a breaker panel to get hot enough to burn through a countertop before it would pop a breaker? You know most toasters, if the thing's on the way out, when you push the lever down it will instantly blow a breaker or a GFI outlet. This thing stayed on, sucking enough juice to get hot enough to burn through a freaking countertop. And of course, one of the relatives of the McBurney's was an electrician. TT- Someone else was saying that they had never seen a building, especially one involved in a line-of-duty death, be torn down the day after. SP- Two days after- TT- I heard the next day. SP- Well, within a week the building was completely gone. TT- Gone. Packed up and shipped out. And that was it. There was no investigation done-- SP- Well, there was a very limited investigation. Steve Johnson, who was in Fire Prevention at the time, you know, Steve was a pretty smart guy. And he had his theories of what went on there but if that fire happened today, that building never would've come down as quickly as that building came down. TT- Right? And there was also another rumor that I had heard that actually one of the lawyers was seen at the scene that day and went through the police lines and was trying to access the basement or something. Or he opened a door and flashed the place over... SP- There was a rumor that there was a guy who was friendly with one of the McBurneys, I don't know what his role was, but he wasn't an attorney. He was supposedly in the building that day. And he supposedly said that he was the last one in the building that day, and that he was the one that had used the toaster. I personally think he was the guy that set the fire. But nothing ever ... TT- Nothing. Isn't that crazy? SP- Because, I think their theory was that on a Sunday afternoon, that if they lit that thing, as tight as that building was, it would've burned down before we even got there. It would've been a surround and drown since nobody would've been in there. But it never really took off. If they had left the door open to that break room--I think they closed it--that was their fatal mistake. Closing the door choked it off enough. TT- So it just sat there cooking and steaming. SP- Right. TT- Dick Lemay told a story about that day where Al Jack was acting B.C., and Buchanon came out of the basement and was switching bottles, and Al Jack was just trying to get a handle on what it was you guys were seeing and finding in the building, and he went up to him asked, "What's it like in there? Do we have a shot?" And Buchanon--this is directly from Lemay--Buchanon turned around and said to Al Jack, "The Devil's in that fucking basement and he's gonna kill somebody." SP- Because they couldn't find the fire. Jack (Buchanon) was a good firefighter. They just couldn't find the fire. The place was smoking and choking and puking and you couldn't even open the building, couldn't vent it. The only vent was the freaking door we went through. TT- Did they end up putting the ladder through the wall? SP- No. It was still the old Ladder 1 at the time. That frigging thing couldn't knock down a rumor much less a wall (laughs) TT- Now as far as the job goes, like, everybody has near misses. Brule was telling the story about Star Gas when he was on a master stream pointing at that rail car-- SP- He must've been brand new if he was at Star Gas. TT- Brand new. This is like his first six months or something. But, they had him manning the master stream on the nose cone of the tanker railcar that was getting ready to blow up. (laughs) He was like, "I thought we were all gonna die that day." Then he brought up the Hargreaves fire where he got lost in the basement... SP- Yeah, actually the funny part about the Hargreaves fire was that he came out that stairway, Greg (Brule) did, before John. The theory was that he (Greg) opened the door (to escape,) and when it lit up, Greg must've just went out, and whether he (John) saw the light of the door being opened, and then headed that way--because that's the door he came out too--but of course when he came out of it this place was ripping. He walked right through this thing venting out--that was the freaking vent hole, the opened door. So he (John) went through a ton of heat. Now, by this point he wasn't wearing his Scott. He didn't have his mask on. The thing nobody could figure out was did he run out of air and take his mask off? Did he panic and take his mask off? Because, obviously, if he didn't hit the regulator, the bottle would've emptied. TT- Right? SP- There was no explosion or back blast, or any of that type of thing, so that theory of it blowing it (the mask) off his face, that didn't happen. TT- So they didn't even examine his gear afterward? SP- The biggest problem with outlying, not too busy companies, was that they were not well-versed in wearing an airpack. There wasn't a lot of training back then. Guys didn't understand enough about how it operated, and slower companies that didn't have a lot of fires didn't have a lot of experience wearing airpacks. And that might've been some of the issue. We had newer gear, not the best gear, but better gear than when I got on, but the back of his (Hargreaves) gear, because I was on the Safety Committee back then, his gear was all heat damaged, like his back was to the fire. He must've opened that thing and she must've lit off right behind him. It must've lit off at the ceiling. I think he opened the door and it just got that breath of fresh air and rolled out across the ceiling. He panicked, got disoriented, because normally you'd go out the way you came in. But Greg came out that stairway ... It was really starting to charge with smoke. So they started to evacuate the building, pull everybody out, so Greg comes out and then the next thing you know Hargreaves is coming out. TT- He was cooked. Brule said he doesn't even know how he himself found that door. He was down there, his vibe alert went off, got panicked, was trying to find the way he came in but found the other one instead. SP- Those were the only two ways out. The stairway we came down, and the one they came out. Because you're in a basement. Yeah, he found it by accident. But he still had his pack on. Now, if Hargreaves had his pack on going up that stairway-- TT- They don't even know if he had it on. They don't even know if he had air in his bottle, they don't know nothing. SP- Well, that was what happened. And that's how he ended up getting those inhalation injuries because he walked up through this super-heated air. So he had his pack on, but was he not wearing it because he panicked and took it off, or did he run out air--technically I think in the time frame he should not have run out of air, might've been tight, but he shouldn't have been out of air. I think he might've panicked and pulled it off. My theory. TT- It's a mystery. Every theory counts. SP- I didn't get to see a lot of that because I was pumping Engine 2. I got an ass-kicking because there was somebody there with a videotape, which we didn't have a lot like today where everything's videotaped. Back then, it was odd to have a videotape, so I'm on scene the whole time with no helmet on. TT- (laughs) And you're pumping too, I love that. SP- They were all flipped out that I didn't have a helmet on. Well, the reason I didn't have a helmet on was because John Karbowski showed up on Engine 3 with no helmet. It was back in the station. So I gave him my helmet so he could actually go in the fire (laughs). TT- What the hell do you need a helmet on if you're pumping? SP- Normally, I would've worn it. But he didn't have one. This is how shit gets blown out of proportion. "Oh, he didn't have his helmet on." "Well, he didn't have it on because he gave it to somebody else." (laughs). That was a fucked up year because I had just left Rescue 2 and went back on the line. TT- Now you did five years on the rescue? SP- Yeah. I was a driver for a couple of years and then I was an officer for three. And the biggest problem with that at the time, and it's still a problem today, it's a dead end job. So if you want to move forward and learn the fire end of it, being a Rescue Lieutenant, the only way I could get off the rescue and become experienced enough to become a Fire Lieutenant, was to give up my officership on the rescue. Turn in my pins. So that's what I ended up doing. TT- Who was your boss when you were chauffer. SP- Tomlinson. TT- Oh yeah (laughs). Seems like he and Lemay trained half of the job. SP- Dave Tomlinson. You know what the funny part was when I rode with Dave Tomlinson? I was the Cardiac. He was an I (intermediate). He wasn't a Cardiac. I would drive him to the scene and then I would ride with the patient in the back and he'd drive because I was the more higher-level EMT. I liked working with Dave. He was a good partner. I had a lot of good times with Dave. Then he ended up--see what happened was they couldn't get guys, you had to be a Cardiac to take the test to be rescue officer. And those guys weren't Cardiacs--Dave Tomlinson, Tommy Feeley, John Smith, they let them take the lieutenants test because we had such a big turnover, there was such a big group of guys that were Cardiacs, like me, and those twelve that came on, we were all Cardiacs but we didn't have three years. (Pawtucket requires three year minimum to be in charge of any apparatus). So the guys that had three years were the '85 group, which was the Tomlinsons and all of those guys, Smitty. So they let them guys take the test without being Cardiacs and then they let them get it afterwards. So that's how Tomlinson became a Rescue Lieutenant. TT- In your career, you saw enough fire. Was there ever a particular fire where you got jammed up? SP- There was a couple. When I first got on the job we had a highrise fire downtown, 10 Goff Ave. TT- Meerbott told me about this. Was this the one where you guys rescued 65 people? SP- Yes. So, I'll never forget it. I had literally walked in the door from Cardiac school. I was in the officer's room talking to Al Deroche. It came in. And it was a big deal to have an actual high rise fire. The thing that was a benefit for us was that the fire was on the first-floor. So hauling shit up to the upper floors wasn't necessary. The smoke had spread throughout the building. Of course Fire Alarm was getting inundated with phone calls because everybody in the building was calling. I remember being brand new on Ladder 2 and Meerbott telling me to vent all the upper windows, to smash them out. And I remember saying to myself if I start smashing all them windows on the upper floors there's gonna be a lot of glass falling. When I went up the ladder to the first one, they were big giant sliders. So I slid the window open and then went around to each apartment, sliding windows open rather than breaking them. I remember taking a lot of people out of there. It wasn't so much a dangerous fire, but we didn't train a lot on highrise operations. We started to after. But the benefit of it was that the fire was on the first floor, so the ability to attack it--not on upper levels using standpipes--they could use the line off the engine to reach it. It made it easier. But the worst one I think I had was that year I was on Engine 2. We had Hargreaves, and then, just before Christmas, we had just switched from the bigger Scott bottles to the smaller ones we use today. Literally just switched. It was about 11 o'clock at night. Vale Street. Engine 1's first due. Lot of phone calls. It was a second floor building fire. And a lot of radio chatter on the way over. A lot of confusion stuff. Engine 1 was Al Jack, Brule, Lemay was on Rescue 1, Conroy was with Lemay, and Bruno Maravelli was on the 1's with Greg and Al. They got jammed up in a stairway because the old school, when they had the old Scotts, you'd only crack the bottle. Well if you crack the bottle on those new 4500s, they ice up. You get no air. So they're in the stairway, they got no air, they can't get out of the stairway. Their Scotts aren't working. So we're supposed to be the water company. Engine 2's second due. So I hear Jack Buchanon yelling back to me, "They're calling us to go to the fire! We're not laying a line." So we pull up and it's burning out of the front living room--venting, ripping out the front. He says, "We're gonna stretch a line down the driveway and go up the back stairway." I'm not brand new, I got five years on the job, and I was a rescue officer before that. I'd gone to fire school on my own through the state because we didn't have 1001 class run for us so I went on my own. So I'm stretching the hand-line down the driveway and I'm looking up and saying, "Well, at least it's vented, so I'll be able to see." It's in the front corner and I'm coming up behind it, so I can push it out. And of course we're also looking for a seven-year-old. I get up to the apartment and I get in the apartment and I get fucking hit with this fucking huge wave of heat, smoke, like I'm on the kitchen floor. Now I'm alone, because Buchanon's at the bottom of the stairs feeding line to me, so I'm by myself. And my mind's going, "What the fuck is going on here?" This thing was just free-burning a minute ago. It was already vented. Why am I getting killed up here? Am I in the wrong apartment? Now, I got hot water coming back at me. I'm searching around, I find the kid, bump into him, so I go to bring him down and Meerbott meets me at the bottom of the stairs. The two of us--now Rescue 1's jammed up. It was right around the corner from the 1's, so they came with Engine 1. Rescue 2, Tomlinson's truck, is two blocks down the street because the street's filled with fire trucks and apparatus. And Vale Street was tight. So we run down the street with the kid. As I come out the front, there's Ladder 1 with the master stream pouring into the apartment. Meerbott had Ladder 1 knock the fire down and almost killed me. And probably killed the kid. Because the heat, it was already venting, you wouldn't have had a lot of heat building up. I think it would have been survivable if he hadn't had all that heat and nasty smoke blown back on him. So that was pretty shitty. But I was always of the attitude, "I'm just a firefighter. I didn't light the fire." I felt bad the kid perished in the fire, but it's part of the job. It happens. It's gonna happen. It was shitty but what're you gonna do? That was 1993. 2001 I was in Fire Prevention with Jeff Johnson. And we had another one in the 1's where a kid died in a fire on Pawtucket Avenue. Same age, like six blocks away. That was a fucked up fire too. The mother came home, it was a rainy night. She had one of those gas on gas stoves? It was a heater and a stove. She hung her coat on the stove and the night got cold, the thermostat on the stove came on, the heater came on, and lit the coat on fire. It set off the smoke detectors. She gets up, she takes the coat, she had one of those plastic trash barrels, and she throws the coat into the trash barrel, then throws a pan of water on it and goes back to bed. The kid's in the room with her. Like a half hour later she wakes up and finds the kitchen ablaze because the coat was still burning. So, she panics. There's a fire escape right by her window. Instead of putting the kid on the fire escape, she runs through the fire. Maybe she thought she was gonna put it out or something. But the kitchen was ripping. She gets burned, severely, and now is trapped on the other side. TT- Oh man. And the kid's in there. SP- He cooked. It was fucked up because she couldn't talk. Finally, when she started to come around, she was afraid that she was gonna be arrested for the fire. She wouldn't talk. So I ended up going down there and she ended up telling me the whole story. Because we could not figure out how this fire started. We had the can that was burned down to the floor, we had the kitchen burned, there was nothing from the stove, meaning nothing cooking on the stove, she wasn't a smoker, and you could see the fire started in the trashcan but nobody knew how or why. She told me the whole story. And then, she had some mental issues to begin with, so I'm in a Dunkin Donuts seven or eight years later and she still knew me. TT- Wow. SP- "You're Lt. Parent from the fire." I couldn't believe it. TT- Jesus. SP- It was crazy. I mean there she was. TT- What an awful story. There are so many. Thank you for taking the time to sit down. SP- No problem.
1 Comment
Charles "Chickie" Carroll was on the Pawtucket Fire Department for 36 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. 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. It lasted three hours and this is barely half of it. 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- That's 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 Lundgren, 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. 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." And it was just what I was trained to do. 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!" 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- 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 Tanny 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 Tanny, 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 Tanny, his buddy. (Laughs) So we had to hold Tommy back for a while to keep him away from Bobby Tanny, 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- 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 Massee 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) 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- the funny stories are funny, but the bad ones never leave, right? CC- Well, 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- 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. 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. 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- 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- Talk about the adjustment to retirement CC-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." 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." 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. |
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
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