This is the original full length interview conducted in 2017. Chickie Carroll passed away yesterday after a valiant five year battle with cancer. There will never be another.
Charles "Chickie" Carroll was on the Pawtucket Fire Department for 31 years. Before that, he was a mechanic that loved wrenching on cars. Then he followed his father into the fire service. He spent the majority of his career downtown on Engine 2 and became a revered figure both on the job and in the community. Everyone knew him, and if you were lucky enough to ride around with him on Engine 2, you could hear people calling out, "Hey, Chickie!" as he waved and drove by. His enthusiasm for the job never faded, so he became a mentor and a teacher for all the new guys. He also loved riding his Harley with different crews, even the Hells Angels. One of the last old-schoolers who actually breathed through wet sponges instead of airpacks, all the fire over all the years finally cooked his lungs, so he retired with respiratory issues in 2011. This interview was conducted at Station 4 six years later. This is what he said ... CC- This picture right here, John Seback's garage caught on fire. TT- No shit. CC- Um, on Meadow Street. TT- There's been so many fires on Meadow Street you can't keep track of them all. CC- Yeah, yeah. This picture, this was on Utton Avenue. It was Christmas Eve. I looked for a kid, I went back into that room, the house was fully involved and I looked for a Russian kid and I couldn't find him. He was in the closet under a pile of clothes and it killed me that I couldn't find him. Finally Peter O'Neill and I ran back in there and I actually took off my mask and kept looking. They said he was in there and I couldn't find him until finally Pete O'Neill found him. TT- Wow. Is this a picture of the General? (Dave Langevin.) CC- Yeah, that's the General. You should talk to the General. Me and him together, he was on Ladder 1 and I was on Engine 2 and together that's me and him on the roof. The wires let go and we almost got zapped right off the roof. TT- (laughs) CC- Yup. Here's another picture of it. We were pretty close. TT- Jesus. CC- This is the Leroy Theater. (The Leroy was opened in 1923. Because of its lavish interior and multi-purpose stage, the Leroy was one of the premiere theaters in New England. Its silent movies, vaudeville acts, theatrical and musical performances were among the best in the nation. Built at the height of Pawtucket's prosperity, the Leroy stayed open until the 1960s, when the city's economy began to freefall. It was destroyed in 1997.) TT- Oh yeah. What year was that? CC- Oh God. Uh, I can't really remember. Here's me and Willy. TT- Will Maher. CC- Oh yeah, and this is me and Ronnie Doire. TT- Wow, that's from the ... what year did you get on? CC- 1981, August 1981. TT- Two years after Lemay? CC- Uh, yeah, yes. In fact, I took Lemay's spot when he went over to the rescue because we only had one rescue back then. That was downtown. TT- Right on. CC- So my first fire and death was five days after I got sworn in. Back then, when you got sworn in you didn't have a party, they gave you gloves, a helmet, coat and you got on the truck, you know, so ... TT- No Fire Academy, you just got right on. CC- Just went right on. So you learned from the old guys. I learned from Ray Gilbert and the guys like him. Back then, Ray Gilbert gave me a piece of sponge and he said, "You wet this and keep it in your mouth, kid. Keep it in your coat," he said. "That's how you breathe." So I said, "Ok." That's how I learned how not to eat smoke. So my first fire was a fatal on West Avenue. I was on the job about five days and the house was fully involved and we got into the first floor. I was with Tommy Heaney, and we got in the first floor and found a body on the floor, melted into the floor. And his bones, you could see his intestines and everything. A bottle of Jack Daniels was next to him. So we had to cut the rug and put him into a body bag, and break his arms so we could get him through the door to the kitchen and get him out. TT- Jesus. CC- That fire, we were there all day, that was my first fatal fire and I was on the job a whole five days. TT- What truck were you on? CC- Engine 2. I was in training. Back then they would put you on Engine 2 for two weeks and then you would go to the ladder. I went to Lt. Ryan on Ladder 1. Back then it was a tiller truck. You had to learn how to drive the tiller truck. I was fortunate enough to learn from him and was able to drive it pretty well. It was hard at first because everything's opposing. TT- Now that you mention Gilbert, this was a crew, like they were at the end of their careers and you were just getting on. CC- Yeah, pretty much, yeah, yeah. TT- '81. So you got on, you're on Engine 2, Ladder 1, and you stayed downtown the whole time other than the rescue. CC- Yeah. I used to--what happened was that I ended up getting my EMT. I was one of the first ones, and everybody had to have their EMT to get on the rescue, you know, to run the rescue. And Dick Lemay, we both had our EMTs and we were downtown. I would get transferred for three cycles to the Rescue, so I was with Dick quite a bit. I would go three cycles to the rescue and then come back, one cycle on Engine 2, and then go back to the rescue for three. I was with all them old schoolers--Ray Mathews, Timmy Williams, Meerbott, so that was my first fatal fire. TT- So you were a four-man company back then? CC- Back then, yeah. TT- Wow. Alright, so you were with Lemay, Lemay in the early 80's, was it like the same Lemay that he was in 2010? CC- Yeah, pretty much. They started the cardiac program and Dick was into it. Dick was right into it and I wanted to do my three years with my EMT and get off the rescue, because they couldn't get rescue privates at night. So I would work sometimes my cycle plus a cycle. You know what I mean? If you couldn't get someone to go on rescue--you needed two EMTs. I got stuck there for a little while. I was on the rescue quite a bit. TT- What do you remember about your early rescue days? This is the early 80's, so this is the time of the Cocaine Cowboys ... CC- Yeah, we had cocaine, heroin. Um, one year I remember, the first time I saw it (an OD), it was at 21 Dexter Court. The guy looked like he had pissed himself. TT- What? CC- Back then, they stuffed ice in your crotch if you OD'd. They took a bag of ice and stuffed it in his crotch and that's how we knew it was heroin. Back then, the heroin was 99% pure, so they called it "China White." And me and Dick, you know, you would know automatically when you got there and looked at the guy and know it was a heroin overdose. Narcan was very scarce back then. TT- Did you guys carry it? CC- You know, I think the hospital carried it. We didn't push drugs back then. As the Cardiacs became more seasoned, they started putting drugs on the trucks. TT- Okay. CC- But one night me and Dick, we, uh, he probably told you this, but we had a stabbing on Mineral Spring Avenue and the girl, the knife was right in her heart. We taped it up, got her into the truck, got her vitals and got her over to Memorial. Once we got her there the doctors came in and split her chest open and massaged her heart. But the knife had gone right into her heart. She was dead, but we tried, the doctors tried, but I never seen nothing like that, and you know, that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen, you know? TT- Now, before you got to the Fire Department, what were you doing? CC- Doing cars. TT- So you were fixing cars. CC- I worked for my family in the gas station. TT- Right on. How old were you when you got on? CC- Twenty-three years old. TT- Did you come on with a group? CC- There was four guys. Me, Artie Mintsmenn, Dave Marito, and Felix Ramos. We all came on together. Yeah. We came on the same day. TT- So you're twenty-three, you're on the rescue as a transfer guy, you're on Engine 2. Now other than Lemay, who were some of the other names you worked with on the rescue? CC- Uh, Rocky. Paul Laroque, Rocky. I can tell you a story about him. One day we were sent to Providence for a stabbing at Chad Brown. And we get there and the guy's stabbed in the chest. Now Rocky had diabetes really bad. He always carried a can of soda and candy in his pocket, you know? So I'm in Chad Brown, I'm a kid, I didn't even know where Chad Brown was. TT- The housing project, right? CC- Yeah, the housing project and I'm like, you know, okay we're going to Roger Williams (Hospital.) I knew where Roger Williams was, so we take off. He says, "Rescue 1's on the way to Roger Williams with a stabbing victim." All of a sudden the guy that got stabbed yells out, "Hey buddy, you better pull over, man, your man is on the floor." Well, Rocky was having a diabetic seizure. TT- So Rocky's in the back and the guy who got stabbed told you Rocky was seizing? CC- Yup. Told me to pull over. "Your guy is on the floor." TT- (Laughs) CC- So I cracked a can of Coke and tried to give it to him, but he was flapping around pretty good. So I called Fire Alarm and said, "Listen, the guy in charge, Paul Larocque, is having a seizure. Can you let them know that there are now two patients?" (Laughs) TT- Jesus. CC- So I was on the job maybe two, three months, and Rocky was a very high strung guy. So we got to Roger Williams and they took him out, took out the guy that got stabbed, and I didn't know what to do. Like I'm brand new and I don't know what to do here. So I called Chief Lundegren, back then it was Ralph Lundegren, and I says, "Chief, Charlie Carroll." I says, "Rocky's in the hospital having a diabetic seizure what do I do?" He says, "Get back here with the truck and we'll get someone to ride with you." Because I didn't have enough time to be in charge yet. TT- Yup. CC- And another time I was with John Hargreaves on the rescue. (John Hargreaves would later die in a controversial fire at a law firm on Cottage Street in 1993.) We had a child in the back and he was two-years-old, wasn't breathing. We picked him up on Pawtucket Avenue, and as we were going up to School Street, we were on Division Street, and I hit a guy's car. The guy wouldn't move and I kind of side-swiped his car, so I said to John, "John, I side-swiped that guy's car." And he said, "Don't worry about that. Get this kid to the hospital right now." Whew! So we took off. Turns out the guy tried to get me for hit and run. He wanted my job, he wanted my license, the whole bit. TT- Jesus. CC- And the city's law department got involved. Turns out the guy was a senator from Barrington or something. TT- Of course. CC- And all because he wouldn't move. I got a two-year-old kid in the back of the truck, you know, dead. TT- That's crazy. CC- But they did get the kid back, though, they did get the kid back. TT- So Larocque, Hargreaves, who else was on the rescue with you back then? CC- Back then, it was pretty much Dick Lemay, Paul Larocque, and it would be Hargreaves. Once in a while they would take Bobby Parente, he was on Ladder 1 with Buck. They just needed someone to be in charge. Like in other words, it was my truck but-- TT- You didn't have enough time to be in charge. CC- I didn't have time. I was brand new, you know? TT- So Lemay, let's see, he was talking about a lot of the rescue stuff. Cocaine in the 80's, a lot of overdoses ... CC- Yep. TT- There was a lot of violence that came with the cocaine. A lot of shootings, stabbings, the whole deal. Let's talk about some of the shootings you saw back then. CC- I didn't get a lot of shootings. It was Dick Lemay and Bobby Howe who had that shooting on Sayles Avenue and Vale Street. I was on Engine 2 that night. But overdoses, one summer I could count thirty to forty heroin overdoses and probably fifteen or twenty of them died. TT- Wow. CC- I think that's about when they started to give us Narcan. Another time, I was on rescue, one night we get a call, me and Dick Lemay, we get a call for a car accident. A car into a pole on Mineral Spring Avenue. In front of Slater School. Anyway, my friends Roger and Ronnie Alex, they used to run Alex Welding on Pleasant Street. TT- A welding shop? CC- Yeah. And we get there and the car is wrapped around a pole, and Ronnie is up against a fence and he says, "Chickie, Roger is in the car, Roger is in the car." And he was cocked, you know? I go to get Roger and I can't open the door but the windshield is kind of pulled away. I was able to pull the windshield away. Now Roger's a pretty big dude, he was a heavy, big kid. Dick went to Ronnie and I went to Roger. So I climbed in through the windshield and started doing CPR. When Engine 2 got there they were able to get the door open with the Jaws. I kept doing CPR and he was hurting. TT- And this is your buddy. CC- This is my friend, my close friend, and I found out later he survived. Back then, if you were out on the rescue on a Friday night--this was a sailor town. Pawtucket was a sailor town because Quonset Point was still open. So there were bars everywhere and fights everywhere, but I found out later that night that Roger was alive, nice, they saved Roger. TT- That's incredible. CC- They saved him. And you know, his father couldn't believe it. He said, "Chickie, you saved my son, you saved my son." But it was just what I was trained to do. TT- And you were born and raised here, so you ended up going to a lot of people's homes that you knew. CC- Knew, yeah, especially on the West side of the city. Yeah, yeah. TT- Friends. CC- People from the gas station, people from school. Actually both sides of the city, I fixed their cars, whatever. I can remember one night I was with Gene Casavant, who was a really good rescue guy, he was good on the rescue. He was a cardiac. The shift changed, it was about 5:30, and we had just got in the truck. We got a call for a Code 99 at Dartmouth Street. We're going down Pawtucket Avenue and a lady was standing in the middle of the street. Now I'm rolling, I'm rolling, it's a Code 99. And this lady says, "Please, please." We stopped and she says, "Can you please help my son? He's on the ground!" Now, we were always taught that you keep going to where you were dispatched. You call in anything else. So we called it in to send an engine company and an out of town rescue to help this lady. Well, come to find out later on that night, the kid was eleven-years-old, and he got hit in the kidney with a football and he died. He died. And that code we had, we ran a full code on her and she died too. It was a tough call. Do you go for the old person we were sent for? Or do we help this kid? My feelings were yeah, let's help this kid but Gene said, "Chickie, we can't, we gotta keep on going, we've got a Code 99 and it's confirmed." So come to find out later on that the kid did die. TT- That's brutal. CC- It really kind of bothered us. TT- I'm sure. CC- And another time with Gene Casavant, two guys were on one motorcycle flying down Pawtucket Avenue, because they were getting chased by the cops. Well, in the old days, they used to have these "guide wires" on a pole right in front of the Job Lot. They crashed the bike. The guy driving flew through the air and hit the guide wire, cutting off both his legs from the knees down. The guy on the back hit the guard rail and got cut in half and when I got to him, he still had a full face. I will never forget his face. His eyes were wide open like wide open with fear, you know? And his legs were probably, you could see his intestines stretched to his legs which were over by the wall. His torso was on the ground and his head was up and I was like, I opened up his visor, I knew there was no saving him, but to check for a pulse. Nothing. So we-- TT- Jesus. CC- A guy hopped in the rescue. Turns out a Chaplain was driving by. He jumped in and gave the guy last rites. All three guys that showed up on Engine 1 that night--Jack Doyle was one of them--all three retired the next day after this accident. TT- No kidding. CC- I put the guy's two legs into pillow cases, put sterile water on them, and we got him over to Memorial while he's screaming, "My legs! My legs!" Come to find out the guy was from Attleboro and his last name was Carroll. TT- Get out of here. CC- Yeah, yeah. TT- No relation to you? CC- No relation. No, no, no. TT- That's a crazy story. Now when you were dealing with all of this stuff, 'cause there is a lot of stuff going on, you weren't married yet, right? CC- No, no, drank a lot. TT- Right on. CC- Yeah, I did. I did. On my days off I drank a lot, that's why I have been sober for twenty years. TT- It's a lot to absorb just sweeping up people all day all night. CC- All day and all night. You could do ten runs during the day and never see the station. Or you leave the barn at 5:30 at night and come back at 7:00 the next morning to get relieved. It would be that way, you know. TT- Yeah. CC- And Mutual Aid was kicking in back then, so we would go to Central Falls quite a bit. We would be all over the place, you know. But I could tell you one fire that we went to and Dick Lemay was very involved in this one also. It was like a rooming house and two guys got stuck up on the third floor. They went in to get everybody out and got stuck. I was transferred to Engine 4 that night. I was with Steve Johnson and Al McVay. One of the guys was hanging out of the window, and either the General or Ray Mathews ran up the fire escape. The guy was talking to them at the time but his buddy had a death clutch on him. TT- Now the story goes that those two guys were drinking in the bar. Someone said the place next door was on fire and they ran out to help evacuate that building and got stuck. They left their keys, their drinks-- CC- Everything. Cigarettes, beer, everything. I knew the bartender, Rita, I knew her because she used to come to one of the bars that I used to go to. TT- Wow. CC- So Meerbott says to me and Steve Johnson and Al McVay, "Take a line and go up the back stairway and see if you can get to those guys." Okay, so we got up to the second landing and I said to Al McVay and Steve Johnson, "Just keep a (hose)line on me, I'm gonna try to get to the front of the building." So when I got up to the third floor it was lit up just like this, it was bright orange, it was bright, bright orange, and I thought I had a shot. It was a long hallway, probably from here to Ladder 2 (Interview was conducted at Station 4.) It was a long long hallway. TT- That's like sixty feet. CC- I started running and as I did, the ceiling started coming down and the fire, the fire just dropped right on top of me. "Are you alright?" Al came up with the line a little more and we were able to get out. I went back around to the front of the building and I started to go up the fire escape and I didn't have a Scott on and Chief Boisclair started yelling at me, "Chickie Carroll, put your Scott on." And I says back, "Chief, I'm going up to get this guy, I'm going up there." So I went up the fire escape and I was able to grab his arm. As I was grabbing his arm, the flames were so hot, it was so hot. I was pulling on his arm to try and get him free so that the guys on the ladder could get him, you know, and his skin was falling off in my face, I had skin all in my face, my gear, everything I was covered in skin. TT- Unreal. CC- Once we finally got the fire knocked down and put out, Dick Lemay went in the window and got the two guys apart. We got them down the ladder, we took them in the Stokes basket, but there was no way to get to them, you know what I mean? We didn't know if the floors were compromised, we didn't know, back then, you just didn't know. TT- And the place was ripping. CC- The place was roaring, T, roaring. TT- How many people do you think you pulled out of places like this? Like, I mean, four, five, ten? CC- I pulled out three kids and their mother with Kenny Brusso in Central Falls, third floor. TT- What happened there? CC- That house was fully involved and when we got there, I was on Engine 2 that night, and when we got there, Kenny Brusso is yelling, "Somebody, somebody come up and give me a hand, give me a hand I got people up here!" So I went up the ladder. I think I was with Chief Mercer and maybe Tack McGarry, and they went up to the roof, and I said, "I'm gonna go up and help Kenny Brusso, Chief." And he said, "Go ahead." So I went up the ladder and Kenny smashed the window and all you could see before he smashed the window, it was bright orange behind the glass, and you could see three little figures and the mother. TT- Jesus Christ. CC- That's all you could see. The smoke was black. He took the window out and cleaned it enough where he could grab the kids. Well, I grabbed a kid, Kenny gave me a kid, and I went down the ladder, I went back up the ladder, grabbed another kid with my Scott on, back up the ladder and back down the ladder. And then the mother walked down but the kids were very small, they were young kids, five or six-years old and we got them out. TT- It sounds like you got them out with seconds to go. CC- Yeah, the fire was coming right up the back stairwell. It was coming right at them. They had nowhere else to go, nowhere else to go. TT- Now, Central Falls is always a key part of the Pawtucket Fire Department. CC- Big time. TT- Because we go on just about everything they have. Battalion Chief McLaughlin used to say they had some of the best firemen in the state. "Providence and Boston have a hundred guys showing up and C.F. has six." Anyway, they're so understaffed, we go on anything big. CC- Yes. TT- What else did you see over there? CC- Central Falls was, back then in the 80's, Central Falls had six guys on a shift. TT- That's absolutely crazy. CC- And they have four-decker houses, and we became very friendly with the guys from Central Falls. I am still friendly with a lot of them, but I can tell you a good story. We went to Summer Street and it was three-decker with a flat roof. Going good. We went up to the third floor and I hear a guy yell to me, "Hey, S and S (the name of Chickie's garage), you got a Harley?" And I said, "Yeah, I do." And he says, "Me too. Jimmy Gallagher here." And I says, "Hey, Jimmy, I'm Chickie Carroll. I heard about you." And he says, "I heard about you, too." You know, like in the middle of a fire we're doing this, right? So Central Falls, we worked very close with Central Falls back then. Very, very close with those guys. TT- Right? CC- 'Cause they didn't have no help, they had no help. TT- Yeah, they're crazy over there. CC- Crazy. Jimmy and Ricky McDermott and them guys they were good, they were damn good firefighters, damn good, damn good. TT- Now when you look back at some of the other CF fires, because Lemay has a stack of freaking newspapers, so as I was going through them back then there was real reporting. So there are names of guys at fires, descriptions of the firemen and what they were doing. It's almost like a diary entry, but yeah, you were mentioned in a lot of Central Falls stories. CC- Yeah, yeah. I fought a lot of fires with them guys. There was one that myself and Tommy Heaney and Chief Couto, who had just made Chief back then, he was chief and his father had been chief of C.F. for years. I was on Engine 2 and they sent us to Central Falls. I don't recall the street, if it was Illinois or which one, I don't remember, but back then Bobby Tierny was a Central Falls firefighter and he was a little crazy from Vietnam, you know, he was a little, he was nutty. So Chief Couto says, "Would you guys mind going up to the third floor and making sure everybody's out, just check and see what we got?" Back then, we didn't all have radios. Tommy had a radio but we had no Scotts, of course no Scotts, so we go up there with our boots, our three-quarter boots, you know, helmet and gloves and coat only. The second-floor is lit up pretty good, and we got passed the second-floor landing, and we used to call Tommy "Skull" because he was bald, you know what I mean, he was a helluva firefighter. This guy had balls as big as his fucking head, you know, like he was good, and if you learned from him you learned good. So we felt the door and everything and kicked the door and it was fully involved. We didn't have a line with us because there wasn't lines available, but Chief Couto wanted us to make sure that everyone was out and to see what we had, so we could report back to him, and the next thing you know the ceiling comes right down with the bricks, it comes right down. Bobby Tierny, not knowing that we were in the building, hit the chimney with a 2 1/2 inch line and he parlayed the chimney. It fell through the ceiling and it was falling onto us, so I just grabbed Skull by the coat and threw him down the stairs, I threw him down the stairs, and I said, "Skull, we gotta get the fuck out of here," you know? (laughter). So I threw him down the stairs and when we got outside he was so mad, the man was so mad he says to Randy Couto, "Chief, no disrespect, but who the fuck hit us with a 2 1/2?" He says, "We were on the third-floor and someone put the bricks right through the fucking ceiling. I'm gonna kill him. I'm gonna kill this guy. Who the hell did it?" Turned out it was Bobby Tierny, his buddy. (Laughs) So we had to hold Tommy back for a while to keep him away from Bobby Tierny, you know? But that was a real good fire. That thing was roaring. TT- Right? CC- How we didn't die a few times over ... TT- What was the closest you came to like really, like you've described two fires so far where the fire is coming down on your head with the ceiling but-- CC- You know, I've never ever thought of it, I never thought of it never. My mentality, you know because you've worked with me, was grab the line and go in and do what you gotta do. I was the first one in the door, not to blow my own horn, but I was, I know I was. I got to work with my father, I got to work a couple of cycles with my father before he retired and we had a fire. He was worried about me and I was worried about him, you know, and I said, "Dad, dad, I got it. I got it. I'm ok." And once he knew that I was all set, he left in '82 and he retired. TT- How many years was he on for? CC- He was on for twenty-seven years. TT- No kidding. Jesus. CC- Yup, yup. TT- So that's like 1956 he got on. CC- Yeah. It was around then. He got out of high school and was in the Navy for a while before getting on Pawtucket. TT- Now back then, most of the guys on the job ... This is a mill city, so guys were blue-collar guys. CC- And you didn't make any money. When I got married, Laurie found--I had saved my paystubs in a box or something, I don't know why. Somebody told me to do it, you know, and I think we made a buck and a quarter a week. TT- (Laughing) CC- When my father came on it was $30 for six days, you had to work six days. TT- Oh dear God. CC- And you had to wear a uniform to work, you had to cross the kids at the corners for school, and then go in and change into your khakis with a tie and do the housework. TT- No kidding. CC- Yup. And Details (events where a fireman must be present per fire code) paid $2. My old man told me that at the Royal Theater and Strand Theater they did details on Saturdays and had to wear their Class A uniforms. TT- So the nightclubs, theaters ... CC- And Narragansett Racetrack. There were no radios. If you got something, you pulled the box, there were no radios. TT- Were you working the day that place burned to the ground? CC- No, I wasn't on the job then. But we did have horses there. My uncle had two horses there. Thankfully they got out. TT- Wow. CC- That was a bad fire. I can remember one August night we had one, two, three fires. St. Theresa's, Highland Avenue, and Mineral Spring Avenue. Three Code Reds in five hours. TT- Three in five? CC- Yeah, St. Theresa's had a fire in the elevator shaft. They sent everybody because it was a church. From there we went to Highland Avenue, which my friend Phil, a very good friend of mine, his house was fully involved. Central Falls had sent a ladder company because that's all they could send while we were at St. Theresa's. So they sent a ladder company to Highland Avenue and they're screaming on the radio, "Hey! This place is going, it's going!" So we pulled up, I think it was myself, RJ Masse and I think Steve Parent back then. We grabbed a line and Parent says, "I'll keep feeding you line," because it was on the second and third floors, it was going pretty good. So we got up there and the guys from Central Falls were like, "Oh, man, like where you been?" I said we were on the other side of the city, we were at St. Theresa's on Newport Ave. Well, we knocked the fire down and it was kind of like an open stairway to go to the third floor, and I can remember Kenny Brusso, he was brand new, and he's saying, "Chick, we should go up there. We should go up there." And I'm saying, "Kenny, look at these stairs, there are burn holes in these stairs. I'm not taking a shot at going up there, let the ladder get it from the roof." This is how I learned from the old guys, you know, how to check things and do things like that so no one got hurt. He was kind of pissed at me, you know? "Oh, what do you mean you don't want to go up there." I said, "Look at the stairs, the stairs are charred, they're melted." Afterwards, he came up to me and said that was a good call. He apologized. I said, "Kenny, no problem. I was thinking the same thing you were, but by the same token this house was fully involved in the rear of the building." I says, "We hit everything we could hit." We did go up the stairs at first, but then the stairs started burning, and we had to think about getting out of there. The ladder was there, they could get the third floor. So we came back down to the second-floor, and we did knock it down and put the fire out, but my buddy's dog, they found the dog dead. TT- Now what about the fire dog in Pawtucket? What was her name again? CC- There were two, one came after the other passed. Sparkles and Pepper. Sparkles and Pepper. TT- Now they got rid of the dogs because of what? CC- Well, Sparkles, she would chase rocks. We used to have the clamshell downtown, and there would be water in it, so we would throw rocks in it and she would chase the rock into the water and cool her off, you know? She had her own personality, you know, but Pepper was the dog. Pepper was ... I used to take care of Pepper. I had one guy on every shift who made sure the dog ate twice a day. So the kids at Christmas one year, City Hall put up Christmas trees, and they had the little kids come down and decorate. Well, every time we had a class come down, the kids would just want to see Pepper. They loved Pepper, and she slept with me in my bed and everything, you know she slept in my bed. TT- Wow. CC- In fact, she used to ride on Engine 2 with us. TT- (Laughs) CC- She did. And she would ride the ladder and she knew enough to jump up on the motor cover, and we were going. She would bark and the tail would be going. In fact, she followed us, me and Mike Sholas, she followed us right into a house on Notre Dame, and yeah, "Get the dog out of here before the ..." To make a long story short, the kids put dog biscuits for decorations on the trees in front of City Hall, and she would go over and grab one when she wanted one in the winter, but everybody in City Hall--Chief Boisclair used to go crazy at tax time because the mayor would call up and say, "Get the dog out of City Hall for Christ's sake, people are paying their taxes." So if Pepper wanted a cookie and we weren't giving her one, she would go next door and go get a cookie. TT- (laughs) CC- She knew it. She knew what to do and that was her thing. One fourth of July we did about 200 runs and we never let Engine 3 across the river. And Mike Levesque was so mad. Captain Levesque was so mad. Ralph Dominici was in charge of Engine 2. It was Ralph, me, Bobby Thurber, and I forget who else was with us. Of course we had a cooler, you know Ralph, he always had a cooler. But he never let the 3's cross the river. We did about 200 runs easy, but my wife was at her cousins-- TT- Wait a minute. What do you mean you wouldn't let the 3's come across? I don't get it. CC- To do bonfires and shit, to catch the fires. It was kind of like we were busting his balls. He would say, "Engine 3's in service." "Nope! Engine 2 has got that!" And we were still putting out fires in the street, you know, because everybody used to light bonfires. Ralph would go, "We got that, Engine 3, you can remain in service." But Mike Levesque was fucking livid, he was livid. So anyway, getting back to Pepper, my wife came down that night with a whole side of pig, the leg, everything. They had barbecued all day at her cousins' house, and she left it in the kitchen downtown. Now, Pepper was notorious. If you left steaks on the table, you know, you caught a run or something? You would come back and Pepper would kind of smile, you know she had a dog smile, and the tail would be going and we'd be like, "What did you do?" We lost many suppers to Pepper. TT- (laughs) CC- And she knew she wasn't supposed to go into the kitchen but she did. Well, she ate that whole side of pig. TT- Oh my God. CC- She ate the leg, the whole rear quarter of the pig. The poor dog couldn't even stand up she was so full, you know? And I'm looking--like this is four or five in the morning--and we're beat up. We're just beat, and sure enough, there she is, the tail is wagging and she did what she did, you know what I mean? TT- So what happened to Pepper? CC- Well, eventually she couldn't walk anymore, she got old and couldn't walk, and Ralph Dominici called me up. I went to Stop and Shop because Armando Meats wasn't open at the time. I bought her a T-Bone steak, a big T-Bone steak, and I cooked it on the grill. I cut it all up for her and she ate it and then I put her in the Blazer, we had a fire department Blazer, and I took her to the vet in Warwick. They couldn't find a vein on her so I sat on the floor with her for half an hour until they could find a vein to put her to sleep. TT- Jesus, Chickie. CC- She was like my own dog, you know? I took good care of her. She was a good dog. TT- And after that there were no more fire dogs? CC- No, no. Guys didn't want the dogs anymore. People offered to donate dogs but the fact that Smitty and them guys didn't want dogs, "We don't need them dogs down here." But the kids loved them, the kids loved the dogs. It was a tradition, a major tradition. TT- Part of the department. Now talk about that. I remember when I first got on, I didn't know anything really about Pawtucket. My family went to church here, but I didn't live here and I wasn't born here. I was working with you as a transfer guy one day, and we were out driving around. I was in the backstep, you were driving, and it seemed everywhere we went, or every stoplight we stopped at, somebody yelled out, "Hey, Chickie!" I mean, everybody knew you, like the freaking mayor or something. Guys in gas stations yelled out hello. I mean there was a real sense of community back then, as far as like people knowing each other. CC- Yeah, yeah. And on the job there was a very close, a very, very close camaraderie. There were guys that didn't like each other but you know what? When that bell hit, that was all forgotten, that was all forgotten. You went and did your job. TT- It seems like a lot of this is gone now because guys have got computers and their phones and it's not like one TV in the station anymore. Ricky Slater was talking about that, about how there used to be a lot more time spent around the kitchen table. CC- Oh yeah. Bullshit sessions and shit. A lot of time. TT- Now-- CC- Not to interrupt you, but when I came on the job, you didn't touch the newspaper or sit down and have a coffee until the Lieutenant had his coffee and read the paper. You went out and checked the truck, and you made sure that you had water, because the trucks used to leak because they had stainless steel tanks back then. You made sure the truck was full and your tools were where they were supposed to be. The Jaws back then were in an old army trailer. In fact, Meerbott, who was my lieutenant, we went around the corner at Dexter Street and the trailer flipped off the ball of the truck, and we lost the Jaws. Joe Burns was the Chief at the time and we were going to a car accident, a car versus truck and it was a nasty accident, and Joe Burns threw everything into the chief's car and brought it to us, you know? On his own, you know? We didn't even know we had lost it, and he wasn't gonna waste our time going back to get it. TT- Wow. CC- That was a nasty accident. And I'll tell you about another one that happened in Central Falls right in front of the church on Broad Street. We got a call one day, Will Maher was with me, we had a lady and an eighteen wheeler ran her over. Everybody was running around in confusion, like what do we do? What are we going to use here? Tommy Moore would put anything on the truck that I suggested, like tools, jacks, car-floor jacks, bottle jacks. Frankie Johnson made up some round caps that went on the tops of the bottle jacks. So I grabbed the bottle jack--it was a five-ton bottle jack--and I got under the truck. Bobby Thurber was worried about me and he said, "Chickie, get out of there." And I said, "No, Bobby, I can do this, just get me some cribbing, I need some cribbing." So I jacked up the truck up and we were able to get the wheel off the ground enough to slide the lady's leg out. It was crushed, you know, it was crushed. But Will was with me, Will was under there putting the cribbing up on the frame of the truck just to hold it. And the poor woman, she was an elderly woman, the poor truck driver he was a mess too, you know? TT- Yeah. CC- That was bad one. TT- Now the highway too, right? On Engine 2 for thirty years there had to be a lot of chaos. CC- Yes. A lot of chaos. I'll start off with a funny story. This is a classic. Back when Chief Meerbott was first made (He went from lieutenant of Engine 2 to Battalion Chief of C-Group), I was in charge of Engine 2. I had RJ Masse and I can't think of the third guy who was with us. But anyway, we get a call for a car on its roof and its up in the grass just before the Smithfield Avenue exit. The back window is blown out, so when we get there I tell RJ and whoever the third guy was, "Grab a line, just grab a line in case it catches fire. I'm gonna check inside the car." So I climbed in the car and there's this woman, you know a nice looking black woman well dressed and put together. She says to me, "Honey, I don't know what happened, but a car--now I'm on my roof!" She was hanging upside down. She had her seatbelt on but the seatbelt was crushing her boobs, like crushing her boobs, you know, so she says, "Can you cut me out of this seatbelt?" I said, "I can't, ma'am, we're trying to get some pillows and stuff to hold you up so that you won't fall hard, you know." So she says, "Please, please push on my boobs, please, please, please." TT- (laughs) CC- Now I'm laying on my back, my hands on this woman's tits holding her upright. All of a sudden, Meerbott sticks his head in the back window and says (in Meerboot's classic southern drawl), "Chickie, what're you doing?" TT- (Laughs) CC- And I says, "Chief, I'm waiting for pillows so we can cut the belt and let her down." And she says, "It's alright, Chief, he's doing a damn good job." (Both laughing hard) CC- That was one of the best--she wasn't hurt, she was okay, her car was wrecked but she was okay. And when she got out, we got her out, she thanked me. I said, "Ma'am, I'm terribly sorry." And she says, "No, don't you be sorry, you really took the pain away." TT- That couldn't have felt good, hanging like that. CC- One New Year's Eve, it was snowing a little bit and we get a call for 95 South. A man got hit at the Lonsdale Avenue on-ramp. What happened was the guy got out of his truck to knock his wipers because they were freezing up, and somebody came by and hit him. Sent him quite a ways. So we get to the guy and he was dead. So, okay, it was like an hour into the New Year, you know. We get back to the barn, go upstairs, and no sooner go back to bed and the lights and bells hit again. 95 North behind the U-Haul building for a car accident. Somehow we beat the 5's there, I don't even remember how. I know I was driving, I remember that. We get to the accident scene and a lady had hit a tree and her 80-year-old mother got ejected from the car. When we got to her she was Jello, she was just Jello, you know, she was passed. So we had two deaths on one New Year's Eve directly across the highway from one another. Another time, I'm sure Bobby might have told you about this one, but this was a hard one. (pauses) We had a kid on Coleman Street, a baby like a year old. Old enough to crawl out of his crib. Well, the baby stood up and fell out of his crib, and he landed on the radiator. The mother and father were in the kitchen all doped up. I'll never forget his face. I grabbed the kid and I'm saying to myself, "He's warm, he's warm." You could see blue around his lips but I'm saying, "He's warm." So I started CPR on him and we got the kid into the rescue and I wouldn't let the kid go, I kept doing CPR, and I put a mask on him and kept working him and when we got to the hospital the doc says to me, "Give me the child. Chickie, give me the child." I said, "Doc, he was warm when I got to him, I was doing CPR all the way here, you know, maybe there's--" He says, "No, just look at him. Rigor mortis has already started to set in." His mother never checked him, never checked him. That was one of my worst for a child, you know? TT- Ugh. CC- There was one other occasion where we had a house fire on Christmas Eve on Utton Avenue. Same thing. The Chief ran by, said there was a kid on the second floor, it was a Russian kid, they were a Russian family, very clean, you know, but the kid was in the closet under a pile of clothes. I searched that floor, I searched his bed, I searched under his bed to the point where it was getting a little dangerous to be up there, but in my mind, I wanted this kid. It started coming through the walls and shit and I remember going into the closet, I found the closet, and I opened the door and I pushed but there was a pile of clothes, like a big pile of clothes, and the kid was underneath the pile. TT- He climbed under the fucking clothes to try and protect himself. CC- He climbed under and I must've hit him with my hand and shit and I started to realize it was getting hot and I said I can't find him. I looked, I went through that room, a complete wall to wall search. TT- You didn't find him. CC- I just didn't find him. So once the fire was out, Pete O'Neill went up. Pete was on Engine 5 at the time, and Pete got him out of the clothes, Pete found him. I took that pretty personal for a while, you know, I thought that I had screwed up and you know they all told me, "Chickie, there was no way you would have found him. No way, no way." TT- Now let's backtrack a little bit, because the fourth of July stuff--people who don't live here don't know the history of July 4th, and it went on for seventy years. CC- Yup. TT- Just absolute mayhem. BC Kraweic was telling stories of guys getting the old wallpaper rolls, cutting them up, soaking them in kerosene, tossing them over power lines, and lighting them up. CC- Yup. I can tell you an even better one. The Alex's, my buddy that I pulled out of the car and saved his life, his father, the one who kept thanking me for saving his son's life, he was a little crazy. He used to cut up sticks of dynamite. TT- Oh God. CC- He would cut them up, and they would get an old car and push it down the street and light it up. TT- (Laughing) CC - And M-80s. The whole bit. People would pour gasoline on telephone poles and light them up. TT- (laughing) CC- So the power would go out, you know, and they (the Alexes) had the big yellow house right on the corner, they had a swimming pool and everything. Pleasant Street was crazy. Pleasant Street, Magill Street, Essex Street, Slater Street, all around there. That's where the bonfires were back when I was a kid. The neighborhood would come down to the West Avenue Fire Station (Station 1), the neighborhood would come and bring chowder and clam cakes and food, you know, and one year they had a band-- TT- What? (laughing) CC- God's honest truth, for the guys, you know for the guys. The neighborhood did that for the firemen, you know? It was pretty cool. We would go to a bonfire at like say, two or three in the morning, and I remember I was with John McConaghy and Dave Reed one night and I don't know, we went to the same bonfire probably four or five times. It was like beer time, you know what I mean? And John says to the kids, to all of the people that were out front watching it and shit and he says, "Hey, we're kind of beat up, do you think you could call it a night?" And the people, well, we never went back, we never went back. You know, like they said, "Thanks, guys, we had a great time, can we offer you something to eat? Take some of this back to the station." They wanted to give us food and shit, you know, everything. TT- They also put extra guys on the trucks, right? And extra trucks? CC- Yes, extra trucks and five guys on a truck. Plus during the day they would have an extra guy on every truck. So it worked out that the guys that worked the night before (July 3) would get a little bit of down time, you know? With that extra guy they might say, "Hey, go get a couple hours sleep, take a shower, we'll run without you, we've got enough guys, you know?" Nothing would happen during the day anyway, it wasn't bad, but I can remember doing a good 200 runs on a fourth of July--third and fourth of July, both nights, hundreds of runs. TT- Jesus Christ CC- Yeah, yeah. TT- That's a l-o-n-g night. CC- Yup, yup. TT- What about the big fires? Like when you came on, Star Gas was probably a year after you got on? CC- I was on the job and we were all at the Country Club playing golf, having a golf tournament for the firefighters and everybody was hammered. Everybody. TT- (laughing) CC- So a call came over the loudspeaker for all off-duty firemen to respond. And some of the guys started to show up on-scene and Chief Doire just said, "Go back to where you were." (Both share long laughter). You know, like, I never even got off the golf course, you know what I mean? I knew I wasn't going to work. Even worse, it was a General Alarm fire. Al Scanlon was the one--there's a picture of him somewhere making sure the gas tanks were shut off. That's when Engine 4 burned, Star Gas. The America LaFrance burned up. Yeah, that was a good one, but another good fire was Newel Lumber, Newel Coal and Lumber, that was a real good fire and it was a cold night too. TT- Where was that? CC- That was down on Taft Street. I had another fire, I was with Joe McIntyre at the IGA on Prospect Street. Now, it's a kid's school. Back then it was an IGA. I was on Engine 3 with Joe McIntyre and Albertino Lourenco, he was the lieutenant. He was honest, he was honest. He knew my father very well, Portuguese, a very good cook. So he says to me, "Charlie, I'm not going in but I'll roll hose." So I said, "Okay, Al." Well, this IGA store had an apartment on the second-floor, so Joe McIntyre was pumping. He says, "Charlie, just yell to me, tell me what you need." So I said, "Alright, Joe." No radios, we didn't have them, and I kicked in the door (to the apartment). When I did that, he said, "Watch out for a backdraft!" I had that stuck in my head. I was down low and I got the door open and this one apartment was fully, fully, fully, involved. I mean this place was roaring, completely going, and I had an inch-and-a-half line. That's all we had on the trucks back then. And I'm hitting it, and I'm screaming down to Al Lourenco, "Lieutenant," I says, "we need some help up here real quick, real, real quick." And that night I remember it was cold, like zero that night. It was real, real cold, you know? And I got fire behind me, I got fire down the hall, and I got fire in front of me and I'm trying to hit all three at one time, trying. We were waiting for the 6's to come. Back then it was Jack Doyle, the guy that retired after the motorcycle accident, he wasn't too--you know, like he was just here for the pension and the benefits, you know. TT- Yeah. CC- He had two other guys with him, I can't remember who, it might have been Ray Gilbert. Ray was a bull, he had hands as big as, like this, and he gave me my first piece of sponge to put in my mouth, you know? And he was a damn good firefighter. Ray was good, he could read the smoke, he could tell you what was happening. We finally got some help and Greg Brule was one of the guys that showed up. They were trying to pull us out, they said, "Get out of there, it's coming through the roof, get out of there." I said to Greg, "We can't do no more, there's no more we can do in here." So me and Greg went around back and we found a window and we smashed the window, started hitting it from the outside, you know, because the fire was down into the market by then. It was burning that good. We were there all night. It was so cold they had to get a backhoe to get the frozen hose-line onto the ladder. TT- Wow. CC- We put all the hose on top of the ladder, the three-inch canvas hose, and my gear--like you had ice on you this thick. TT- Jesus. CC- And somebody said to me, "Chickie, can you run the tiller?" And I said, "Yeah, sure." It was the old Ladder 3, old, old Ladder 3, the old Maxim. It didn't have a cab over it, it had nothing, no heat, and I can remember sitting down and my coat just breaking. TT- (laughter) CC- You know, just breaking, and it was so cold, Tommy, we had--they used to give you wool mittens, you know, I remember having them on but it was hard to steer the truck with them on. And all the hose was just stacked on the truck and everybody had to figure out whose hose was whose. But it was really really nasty. TT- That's a long night. CC- Yeah it was. A real long night. TT- Now Hargreaves was a C-Shift guy and you were on C-Shift your whole career, right? CC- Yes. That day I was transferred to Ladder 1 and we were in Fire Alarm (dispatch center) and Al Jack was in charge. For some reason, he never called for us. He never called for us and it seemed like the fire was going and getting worse and we're saying, "Why ain't we going? Why ain't we going?" We could see the smoke from the freaking Alarm room, you know, and ah, he finally says, "This is Battalion 4, send me Ladder 1." Everybody said we should've had two ladders on it right away, you know, but that doesn't--whatever. Al Jack knew his shit. Well, I went in the building and we set up the ladder pipe (the master stream on a ladder truck can pump 1500 gallons of water a minute.) Kurt Richards, he was on Engine 6, and he was at the hydrant. The 6's fed us, Foxy was driving Engine 6, he fed the ladder. We got the pipe up, got water flowing in through the roof. I think it was me, the General, and Bobby Parente. So I told them, "I'm gonna go in, alright?" I was an engine guy, I wasn't really a ladder guy. So General said, "No problem, go ahead." Bobby said, "Go ahead, Chickie." So I grabbed the line off of Engine 4 or Engine 3 and went in and there was no fire in the building. There was no fire when we walked in. TT- That's what Lemay said too. CC- There was no fire (coughs) until you went downstairs and then there was heavy fucking fire. John Hargreaves, what he was doing down there alone I have no idea, no idea, but I happened to come back around the building, I knew there was fire down there, so I went back and grabbed a two-and-a-half inch line. I was going down the stairs and go inside, and I think Greg Brule was with me again at that time but John--I think it was Dave Farris and Duquenoy, they had Hargreaves and he was burning from the inside out. The smoke was coming out of his body and he was as white as this ceiling. TT- Jesus. CC- He was white and I can remember blasting him with the two and a half, but when I saw John--I was kind of friendly with John. He hung around with the scabs (there was major labor strife in Pawtucket in the 1980s, which nearly destroyed the job) but you know, I mean he was alright. He had horses and my uncle had horses, so we shot the shit a lot about the horses. TT- Yeah. CC- I worked with him quite a bit on the rescue. So yeah, that was real, real bad. They sent him to Connecticut to put him in a chamber for a few days but he never made it out. TT- Were you on the job when Rabbit got burned in that flashover? CC- No, I came on right after that. TT- Okay, so that was like '79 or '80? CC- Yeah. That part, what happened was he was going up the back stairs trying to get to a guy trapped. Our guys were in the front with a ladder, a ground ladder, and they smashed the windows just as Kevin opened the door and it backdrafted and just melted him. TT- Unbelievable. CC- Melted him. Completely melted him. TT- I saw his gear. They showed it to us in our fire academy. It's incredible he lived. Now when you look back at your career, I mean the suicides are always tough. But the ones that stick out to me are the hangings, just because the people are intact, it's not like a gunshot, right? CC- I got a good one for you. Again, I was on overtime on Engine 3 and I was with Lieutenant Lourenco. It was shift change, so there were only two of us. Engine 3 used to go to the Heights (housing project) for dumpster fires and lockouts and whatnot. So we got a call for a hanging. Me and Al pull up and Al gives me the keys and he says, "Kid, I'm not going in there. You go in there." So Dave Overt, he was a cop and a good friend of mine, we used to ride dirt bikes together. He says, "You coming in with me, Chick?" And I said, "Yeah, I'll go up with you." I unlock the door and we walk into the guy's apartment and he's got a note. He didn't have much, but the apartment was clean and he left his license, a suicide note, what money he had, his jewelry, he didn't have a lot but he had good clothes on. So I said, "Where the hell is he? Let's go upstairs." When we go upstairs there he is hanging by the pipe over the bathtub in the ceiling and his eyes were popped out and he had broke his neck. So Dave Overt has his license in his hands, the guy's license, and he spins the guy around and says, "Hey, Chick, you think that looks like him?" I was still kind of brand new. He holds the license up next to this poor bastard with the bulging eyes and broken neck and who could tell? After I realized he was kidding, I said, "You're a sick bastard, you know?" TT- (Laughing) CC- And I knew what I was in for after that. TT- But that was part of the humor. CC- It was part of it, yeah, it made it easier. When we had that fire on Dexter Street, where them two guys died in the window, we all ended up with really, really--we were all kind of sick, we were sick, something was wrong. Of course Spike Levesque and some of the old guys said, "Oh you bunch of pussies" and this and that. We had worked our asses off at that fire, Tommy, we really did. But we were sick. Diarrhea, throwing up, just not eating, right? Something was wrong. Well, they sent us to a counselor, they sent all thirty of us to a counselor and we cried, we talked about it, how maybe we could have done it differently, which there was no way. No way. We did what we could do but we just couldn't get to them guys in time. TT- So it helped you. CC- It helped us immensely. We went to the Hose Company afterwards and we got drunk, and it made us feel better to spit it out. And I can tell you one more thing about that fire. When it was all done, and I walked to the bar on the corner, I went in to see Rita and get a pack of cigarettes. She says to me, "Chickie," she says, "Here's the guys' keys, their beers, their cigarettes," the whole bit. She says, "Chickie, are them guys coming back?" I said, "No, Rita, they are both, they're both"--I still had their skin on my jacket. I said, "They both passed, they both passed away." Then she told me they had gone in there to help people get out. TT- Wow. How awful. CC- Well, me and her had two rocks glasses full of ginger brandy apiece, and I got a pack of cigarettes and I said, "Rita, I'm very sorry." She said, "Them two guys were good friends of mine." I said, "We tried, we really tried, but we just couldn't get to them in time." TT- Man oh man. CC- It screwed us up, it really did, and we didn't know why. We couldn't understand why. Back then, these interventions for the guys was brand new. TT- Watching people die in front of you isn't easy. CC- No, no. TT- Now talk about some of the giant mill fires. Greenhalgh Mill comes to mind. CC- I was actually packing up to go to New Hampshire when that fire came in. TT- And you were also, for people who don't know, you also rode motorcycles a lot, you were a biker. CC- I was a biker, yeah. I rode with the Hell's Angels sometimes. TT- So you were hanging with the Angels and some other groups but you weren't ever really affiliated. CC- Because I was a firefighter it wasn't, not that I couldn't have joined, but it wasn't proper, it wasn't proper, but I could ride with them guys any time I wanted, you know, if they were going on a trip or a run I would go for a run with them, you know? And that part was cool. But I never really wanted to be wearing a patch, you know what I mean, it wasn't my thing, that wasn't my thing. I was a firefighter and my buddy--he got out of the Angels because he got Parkinson's Disease--he said, "Chickie, these are your colors right here." And that's, you know, our firefighters, our blue shirts, those are our colors, you know? TT- That's your patch. CC- Yup, yup. TT- So get back to Greenhalgh Mills CC- So, It's a General Alarm. It's all over the TV. "All firefighters are to report downtown to Roosevelt Avenue" (Station 2.) The fire was at three o'clock. I got here at four. I laid on a two-and-a-half inch line on Mendon, right over here, for probably four hours. Just laid on it. TT- Jesus. CC- And the heat was coming up through the bricks, so it was keeping me warm, but it wasn't doing anything. The water was blowing in the wind. But they said, "Keep pouring it on, you're getting the houses, maybe we can save the houses." Well, the houses started to go. And they wouldn't let us go into the houses to put them out. My wife's cousin lost her house. There were four houses over here that burnt. I can remember, this was also the night Lieutenant Joe Bierly had his heart attack. He told me he wasn't feeling good. I was going to grab some equipment and more line. So I says to him, "Go sit in Engine 6. The heat's on. Warm up. Dry up and I'll come get you." They had this whole station (Station 4) full of food, cots, everything we needed. So they would send us to the 4's every couple of hours to get some food and water. This room was completely full of guys. The chairs, everything was a mess, soot filled. Well, I forgot about Dave Bierly. He had a heart attack that night. I mean I had all these houses burning and I forgot about him but he did have a heart attack that night. I can remember at like four o'clock in the morning, me, Steve Small, Dave Reed, Bobby Thurber--Meerbott finally let us go into the last house that was burning. And it had already burned through the roof. So we went in and hit the hotspots. Me and Smally went up this little little stairway. It was like this big (2 feet wide.) We had a line with us. I can remember to this day, the toilet was in the corner of the room. And the pipes had popped and the water's coming out of the pipes-- TT- Like a fountain. CC- Yeah. So I'm looking around. The roof was gone and it was a bright, clear night, clear as hell, and the smoke's everywhere. I'm saying, "Wow." Helicopters were here from the ATF, news channels from Boston, Providence. We're looking around and I take a seat on the fucking toilet, light up a cigarette, and I'm just sitting there. I'm beat up. We were tired, man. So I'm having a cigarette, looking around going, wow. Bobby Howe (EMA director and former firefighter) got 90 trucks here that day. There was 90 crews willing to help us, you know? When it started, I got here, I drove my truck downtown, I had my trailer on the back with my bike, because we were supposed to go to New Hampshire that day. I said to my wife, "I gotta go." She said, "Be careful. Call me when you can." That's how it went. She was good. Laurie was very ... TT- She understood. CC- She knew, yeah, she knew. TT- Now talk about, as far as the fire tips, the tips that got passed on to you, reading the smoke, what this color means, it's kind of scientific, right? CC- Well, the first thing was when they came out with the hoods. The old guys wouldn't wear them. And I was one of them. I didn't like it either because I was always taught that if your earlobes felt hot, get out. Cause it's hot. TT- And through the hood you couldn't feel that. CC- No. The Nomex Hoods make you feel over confident. If you felt your earlobes were melting, you knew you were in a hot situation. It was time to go. It was time to go. And smoke, the gray smoke, if you looked in a window and saw it, that was a potential for a backdraft. You could tell. Yellow smoke was a chemical. White smoke was like if you were getting water on it, extinguishing it, it was making steam. You were knocking it down. Like they'd yell up to you, "You're getting it, you're getting it, keep going. The smoke is changing colors." We had Manoline's warehouse and it was an old train depot, where they used to keep all the stuff for the trains. And it was a huge place. Made from big, big timber. It was built to last forever. And I'll tell ya, I've never seen black smoke like that ever. They had tires, they had all kinds of chemicals--anything automotive they had in there. TT- And the hole place is burning. CC- Just roaring. I mean, when we pulled up with Engine 6, the guy had been welding in the back, and he caught the back of the building on fire. Within, and Ronnie Doire will tell ya, within minutes there was flame fucking everywhere. We got in the side door and you couldn't see a foot in front of you. It was just roaring. TT- That is awesome (laughs) CC- But it was, we got off on it, you know? I got off on it. Loved it. You really did. At least I did. I loved it. TT- There was no place you'd rather be. CC- Guys used to say to me, "Chickie, with all of your seniority, why are you still on Engine 2?" Because I loved it. I never came down that pole pissed off. I never did. You know? I got on that truck and--especially, I knew Bobby Thurber, and towards the end he wasn't feeling too good because of his feet and all the diabetes, but he had that same damn smile on his face, you know? (laughs). "Let's go, kid!" "Alright, Bob, let's go! Let's go do it." I can remember one night on Dagget Avenue, we were all here (at Station 4) because we had a union meeting that night. And I knew exactly where the street was and I knew the house. It was a friend of mine, Porky Burns' house. We got a call for a Code Red, house fire. So Bobby says, "Chickie, you got that?" I said, "I know exactly where we're going. Exactly. To the T." We get there and it's blowing out the kitchen windows, blowing good. We kick the door. Bobby's almost on top of me, like pushing me in trying to get in himself. The floor, Burns was rebuilding the house, so there was some type of chemicals on the floor. Somehow they had gotten into my nighthitch as we crawled, and my knees got burnt. My kneecaps were burning and Bobby's pushing me in there and he's on top of me trying to take the line and I'm like, "Bob, get off of me!" (laughing) "Bobby!" Dave Farris come walking through the front door--it was a kitchen fire--Dave Farris comes walking through the front door like nothing ever happened, you know, and I'm going, "Bobby! My knees are burning, fer Christ's sakes, get off of me!" (laughing and laughing). I can tell you another one about Central Falls. It was Railroad Street. Cubby was on Ladder 2 in charge. I said, "Cub, can you get me a line?" He said, "Yeah, I'll get you a line don't worry about it." We got the line. Central Falls guys were up there. And me and Willy (Will Maher) are up there. We grab the line and we start hitting the rooms, we're hitting rooms, and he'll probably kill me for telling you this, but he was--they had a set of bunk beds. This room was pretty well involved. We knocked it (the fire) down and the C.F. guys are yelling, "Hey, Pawtucket, you guys okay over there?" "Yeah, we're good. you guys okay?" "Yeah, we're good." That's how we used to do it, yelling back and forth. So Willy got up on the top bunk bed to pull a ceiling down. Next thing I know I hear this huge crash. He went right through the bed-slats and landed on the first bed. And I went, "Hey, what the hell are you doing? Taking a nap?" You know? and he's looking at me. He goes, "I think I'm a little too heavy for the fucking bunk beds." (laughing). And we laughed and laughed, still fighting the fire. Thank God he didn't get hurt. I said, "Will, you alright?" "Yeah, I'm fine," he says, "But Jesus Christ, Chick..." It scared the shit out of him at first because he wasn't expecting it, you know? TT- That's funny. Now looking back at your career, I mean you did it the way you wanted to do it, but is there anything you regret? I mean you were an Engine 2 guy and that was it. CC- That was my thing. I enjoyed working for (Chief) Meerbott, we were friends on the outside, and we were friends on the inside on the job. We snowmobiled together for 25 years, I loved the guys I worked, we all worked good together. I knew, especially Buck, Dave Langevin, if it was a street--I knew most of the streets well, and Buck did too. And I'd say to Buck, like say Dunnell Avenue, we'd be going to the trucks and I'd say, "Buck, Dunnell Avenue. Is that Pawtucket Avenue to get there?" "Yeah, you know, where I used to live. Where Miller's convienence store was, right on the corner." "Okay, I got it." And I'd fly out the door on Engine 2 and he'd catch up with me by Pawtucket Avenue, here comes Ladder 1 over the hill with the tiller. The camaraderie was strong. Very strong. We helped each other out, you know? If you had a personal problem, guys would help you out. Talk you down. That's how it was. TT- Guys looking out for each other. CC- Exactly. That's how it was. I mean we spent so many Christmases and Thanksgivings and holidays together. It took me three months to get used to being at home with my wife. Swear to God. And Laurie's a sweet heart, you know her. TT- She is. CC- But it took me three months to get acclimated and out of the mold. TT- Lemay said the same thing. He said, "I didn't know how much I needed to retire until I retired." (Laughs) CC- Yeah. Yeah. You start to sleep, eat normal. I still eat kind of fast. I loved this job. My father said to me when I was about seventeen. I mean I was gonna quit school and fix cars. That was my thing. My uncle had a shop. My cousin quit school and he was driving a brand new TR-6, you know? So my old man says, "Nope. You're going on the fire department." And thank God I did because they sold the place and it's not there no more and I had the best thirty years of my life, you know? On this job. On this job. And I loved every minute of it. TT- Right? They had to pry you out of here. CC- When the doctor told me that I had a lung issue, it broke my heart. Broke my heart. Really. TT- You fought it hard though, you kept trying to get back full-duty ... CC- I tried, I tried. But I just couldn't do it no more. Couldn't do it. My body gave up. TT- You took a helluva beating. CC- I took an ass-pasting. Yeah. I did. (laughs) I loved it. Loved it. That picture of me with that black eye, that was after a whole ceiling fell on my head. And I still stayed in there, you know? Meadow Street, the floor on the third-floor melted. It was gone. And I can remember Will coming up the back stairway yelling. The fire was all in the front. Harry Callahan had to go back and get a Scott. RJ was the training officer at the time and he said, "I could see you hitting it through the windows. You were getting it all alone." I was, until Will came up through the back. And then that picture of me sitting on the windowsill, the ladder was opening up the eaves and I was wetting it all down as they did it ... you know, I just...I loved it. I loved it. Every minute of it. I really did. I met you, too. TT- It's true though. If you can't have fun at a fire, you really shouldn't be here. CC- Exactly. You gotta be careful, you gotta use your head, I tried to tell Matty McMahon, I said to Matty, because he used to ride with us when he was a kid, I said, "Matty, you hook up with a good boss, like John Wallace, if you can hook up with a guy like him you'll be good." I said to him, "Forget about Tiverton, you're in Pawtucket now. You do it Pawtucket's way. You know what I mean? Just because you're a firefighter somewhere else for five or six years, you're in the city now. TT- Right? It doesn't mean nothing. CC- No. No. TT- Joe Cordeiro one time told me, he was like, "I don't care if you were a Battalion Chief on the FDNY, if you're gonna come to Pawtucket, you're gonna do it our way." CC- Exactly. I was told that too. My father, the day I got sworn in, my old man said to me, "Keep these open (motions to his eyes), keep these open (motions to his ears), and keep this closed (motions to his mouth). That's exactly what he told me. He said, "You pay attention, you soak up as much as you can." I was kind of disappointed that I never made lieutenant, but I was in charge a ton, a lot, because nobody ever wanted to be on Engine 2. Another funny story, one day it was Al Jack, Timmy Williams, myself, Bobby Howe-- they all bid off the truck. It was me and the dog on Engine 2. Me and Pepper. I was like, "Do I stink or something? Why did everybody leave?" (laughs). Everybody went somewhere. TT- Now also, the inception of fire departments, it started in this area. There were organized departments in Boston, Pawtucket, Providence ... like the fire department started here. That's a long tradition. CC- Very proud. People, even to this day ... my niece, we'll go to TGIFridays in Warwick. And she'll say, "This is my uncle, he was a fireman for thirty years." People hear that and they thank you. They thank you. You know? You're not a bum. One time on Coyle Avenue, it was the day before Christmas. We had a chimney fire and Meerbott said to us, "Guys, let's kind of go easy." There were presents everywhere. Decorations. We took all those presents and put them out on the porch so the kids would have a Christmas the next day. We took the chimney apart brick by brick so we didn't have to close the house down. And another time, Thanksgiving day. Portuguese people on Star Street. They had a kitchen fire. The kitchen was downstairs. Everything got destroyed. And my friend Myles, he used to own the Riverside Diner, every Thanksgiving he would bring us down a whole turkey dinner. Complete. So I says to Bobby Thurber, "Bob, what do you think? You know?" He says, "Tell that guy to follow us to the station." We gave those people the whole complete turkey dinner. From nuts, to pies, to stuffing you know, we gave it all to those people. They were foreigners, they didn't speak good English. But some people think we're bums, but a lot of people respect what we do. To me, it's the most gratifying, respected job I can think of. I've seen a lot more than I've told you, I've lost kids in my hands, I've had some funny runs, good runs, we had a lot of laughs, and at the same time we had a lot of sadness. You know what I mean? TT- When you knew it was time to go, it seems the guys just walk away. They never come back. It's like they just disappear back into the mist, and those left behind just carry on. CC- It is kind of like that. I haven't been downtown in ...a long time. I didn't know what to do at first. I was like, "Should I go down there and have a coffee with the guys?" But I can remember sitting at the kitchen table and having an old guy come in that you really respected, say Ray Gilbert for instance, he'd come down to see Barbara and poke his head in the kitchen and say, "Hey guys, what's up?" "Hey, Ray, how you doing? You want a coffee or something?" "Naw, I'm gonna go. Thanks. It was good to see you." "Hey, Ray, take care. If you need anything you just give us a holler." And that's the way it was. For me, like I fix a lot of guys cars nowadays, and I'll come to the station to bring the car back, and I'll say, "Hey guys." And off I go. Why it's like that, I don't know. TT- It's weird. It's almost like it just seals over, right? And once you walk out, it's like the nucleus kind of keeps going. I remember Chief Cute, after he retired, he came in for a coffee, and he was like, "I don't even feel like I should be here right now." CC- Yeah. It's like you're bothering the guys. Like if they're cooking or whatever and someone walks in and they have to stop what they're doing and bullshit with you ... You can get a run at any second and be gone for five minutes or half the day. I don't want to interrupt that. I know I'm still part of this job, but in my way. In my head. I'm still part of this job. I'd do anything for anyone of you. I would. But to come and hang and watch a movie or whatever ... naw, that's just not the way it is. TT- It's one of the things that's so surprising but it's true. You're out of the rotation. CC- Exactly. I play golf with Tang (Chief Tanguay) every Monday. I take care of his cars, his father's car, and the guys support me, Tommy, big time. I can't thank the guys enough. And Topper let's me use his shop, and I fix his stuff. But I got a shop. And the guys support me. And I take care of the guys, money wise, because they got families and shit. For me, it keeps me healthy, keeps me busy. Nelson quit, but I called him when he quit and I said, "Nelson, I want to thank you for giving me a life after the fire department." Because he's the one who got me into Topper's garage. He says, "Chickie, you have no idea how much you've helped me." And I said, "Really, Nelson, I mean it." TT- You gotta stay busy, right? CC- I walk my dog every morning, have a coffee, and then I go to the shop. I do two or three cars a day, and if Topper's got something for me to do I fix it, and it works. I can't thank Topper enough. I could tell you about fires all night but I don't want you to have to type all day long. (Laughs). TT- These are the stories people need to hear. CC- Smithfield Avenue, the theater, there are so many. And car accidents and everything. I don't know if Bobby told you this one but it really bothered us for a while. We got a call on Walcott Street. We got a call for car into a pole. There's four victims. So we get there. A Mexican guy in the front seat, two Mexican guys in the backseat, but there was supposed to be a girl too. Well come to find out she got thrown from the car, hit a van in the driveway and died. She was in the driveway. The other three were dead too. The two in the back were just mangled. So, we cut the roof off and me and Bobby climbed into the backseat to check the guys. Now we're sitting there in the backseat. I got this guy's head in my lap. The back of his head was gone. Gone. And Bobby's guy, same thing. His neck was broken. We had to sit there for an hour and a half waiting for the Medical Examiner. We could not move. TT- What? CC- The police froze the scene because of all the deaths. It just so happened that the way they were positioned, we actually had to crawl over the trunk to get into the backseat and check for pulses. Once we got in there, we had to maneuver the mashed bodies to do that, and we became part of the scene. We had them on our laps, we could not move. The M.E. has to come and pronounce them dead, pictures gotta to be taken. So we yelled for someone to get our cigarettes from the truck. So we're smoking cigarettes while we waited. When we got back we took a hose and washed their brains from our night hitches and went to bed. TT- Another day at the office. CC- You know how I met Laurie? TT- No. CC- When the wall collapsed at Stop and Shop, that's how I met Laurie. I dug her boyfriend out of the rubble. Three guys died that day. TT- Lemay told me that story. How awful. CC- It was. One guy was decapitated, the another was cut in half, the third was smushed. TT- Jesus, Chickie, you've had one of the best careers anyone's ever had. CC- I can say yes. I did. I really did. And I loved every second of it. TT- It's been an honor. It really has.
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10/12/2021 03:35:23 am
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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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