Page 27 - In Command Volume 18 - Ohio Fire Chiefs Association

The Old Man
Comes Clean
By: Retired Chief Paul Hemmeter
Okay, okay! You got me. That testy curmudgeon, the guy Human beings may be born with tremendous potential, but
who used the Old Man to pollute the letters section of
InCommand for all those years, that arrogant, combative grouch... That was me.
Why the Old Man? Specifically, I don’t know. Or can’t recall. At some juncture, the publications committee, of which I was one, decided InCommand needed something livelier, possibly humorous, with an on-going column that would personalize the magazine and make it more fun to read.
Hence, the Old Man. Beyond that though, I can recall none of the specifics of the Old Man’s birth. (I mean, Bunky, can you recall the details of your birth?) At any rate, by the time the Old Man came along, I had already worn out my welcome at two Ohio fire Departments, retiring from Dayton after 25 years and then from Beavercreek after seven years as chief.
When I joined the Dayton Fire Department in 1967, after abortive attempts at teaching and newspaper reporting (Ohio State and the Dayton Daily News respectively) that good depart- ment staffed only two EMS units---ambulances then ----and placed precisely zero emphasis on EMS. Oh, but we had fires; every day we had fires. This was a time of civil unrest and population shift. The concomitant unrest provided fuel for fires on nearly every shift. As a grunt on the back of Dayton’s busi- est engine for four years, I learned my craft the hard way and became an expert (or so I believed) in fighting the inner-urban fire. So willy-nilly, we became firefighters; it was all we knew and all we were. It was enough.
As I went through the ranks, that early experience left me with an abiding interest in fireground tactics, which I turned into (with much plagiarizing from Brunacini) DFD’s first comprehensive tactics manual.
That seminal experience in Dayton, filtered through the writer’s skeptical take on the world, views, underlay the atti- tudes and values of the Old Man. The good nuns at Guardian Angels School had drummed into my head concepts of original sin, human fallibility and free will. The everyday realities of life, of birth and death, of manual labor, of getting and spending, chased away in our farm town all fuzzy notions of utopian nirvana, of human perfectibility and of the Hollywood hero.
that potential, the Old Man came to realize, lay dormant and untapped for the most part until it was actualized in commu- nity, with the individual becoming his best self only with other human beings helping him along. The narcissistic ME as the center of human achievement was foreign to a firefighter totally dependent on his team for real accomplishment.
The new and the novel also failed to impress the Old Man. He’d lived through mini-maxi, PPV, management by objective and a host of other panaceas for whatever ailed the fire service at the moment. The adherents of utopian tactical systems always, the Old Man thought, made more of their new toy than reality could bear. Moreover, the true believers let their enthusiasm blind them to the faux analytics on which their utopia was based, and routinely underestimated both the costs of their new systems and the unintended consequences of implementing nirvana. (Recognize a Democrat here, Bunky?)
That was the lens through which the Old Man examined the fire service in the early years of the 21st century. But anyone who’s stayed with him this long will recognize how time has changed our focus. Our lens remains as caustic and uncompro- mising as ever, but the microscope we’re peering through has focused on a whole new set of problems, stuff like community paramedicine and data mining, stuff reflecting the shift to EMS and computerized information systems and away from firefight- ing itself.
Moreover, our entitled, caring, PC culture no longer responds as it once did to guys like us. Too skeptical, too willing (even eager) to offend, vociferously non-pc, absorbed in fireground tactics, valuing hard-headed realism over any theory, too demanding of individual excellence in team accomplish- ment...
Nope. Out of his age now. Time for the Old Man to go.
The Old Man most sincerely thanks the members of the publications committee. Had he been the King of Siam, the Old Man could not have asked for a better, more dedicated and congenial group. (Though what the King of Siam would do with a publications committee, I can’t imagine.) But the Old Man and I have enjoyed every blessed minute of it. u
APRIL/MAY/JUNE 2017 • www.ohiofirechiefs.org I n C o m m a n d 27