Mary Marchone never imagined giving nearly 50 years to the fire service when she was hired as an office assistant for Montgomery County, MD, Fire Rescue in 1969.
But over the course of nearly 50 years, that office assistant educated herself on fire safety and prevention and eventually became one of the most well regarded training specialists in the country.
"It was never on my radar," Marchone said Thursday -- her first day of retirement -- about her career trajectory in an interview with Firehouse.com.
The moment that changed everything came in 1973 when she read "America Burning," a report written by the National Commission on Fire Prevention and Control appointed by President Richard Nixon. The primary findings of the report stated that fire prevention and safety education for the public were critical to reducing losses associated with fires and that firefighters themselves needed more education to better perform their jobs.
"When 'America Burning' came out, I got very interested in public education," Marchone said. "I was with a pretty progressive fire department, so they started allowing me to go out and give presentations. And I had a wonderful fire marshal come on around 1977, Jim Dalton, who reclassified me to a public fire education specialist."
Marchone, who believes she was one of the first in the country to receive such a designation, went on to work on a wide variety of educational projects in Montgomery County, including smoke alarm campaigns, home safety surveys and a slew of task forces all centered on safety and prevention.
Her efforts were directly related to Montgomery County becoming the first in the U.S. to enact a retroactive smoke alarm law which went into effect in 1978.
Marchone left Montgomery County in 2000, and many would offer congratulations and a handshake on what would have been an admirable career had it ended there. However, she was not content to simply be among the pioneers in the area of public fire safety education.
"I never thought when I left Montgomery County that I wasn't going to do anything," she said.
Along the way she became a contract instructor for the National Fire Academy (NFA) in 1987, and after leaving Montgomery County moved from Maryland to Michigan, where she became a risk watch field advisor for the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA).
"We had a risk watch program in Montgomery County that I thought a lot of, so when I went to Michigan and the NFPA called and asked if I'd like to be a risk watch field advisor responsible for eight states, that appealed to me."
During her time with the NFPA, Marchone continued working as a contract instructor and on course development for the NFA before joining full-time as a training specialist in 2008. Over the course of the last 10 years, she was responsible for the fire prevention management curriculum and also took over public education when that position opened. She was also instrumental in the hiring and evaluation of instructors.
One of the biggest successes Marchone points to in her time with the NFA are curriculum such as the Executive Fire Officer program and Executive Analysis of Community Risk Reduction (CRR).
"I don't think a lot of fire departments understood what (CRR) was and how they fit into it, so I think we've opened up a lot of hearts and minds along the way. The last couple of years we've established our Managing Officer program, so there's also a course in risk reduction for them. I think that's opened up a lot of people at the station level to their ability to affect change."
"I just think that the National Fire Academy has been at the forefront of this culture change in the fire service in helping people get involved in community risk reduction."
Efforts in public fire safety education since Marchone read "America Burning" have played a large role in the dwindling number of structure fires in recent decades, but when it comes to community risk reduction, Marchone knows there is still a great deal of work to be done.
"The whole idea behind that is that we need to protect things before the event," she said. "We seem to get all caught up in response times and we become so paranoid about how fast we can get to something once its happened.
"A house fire, you get there, you mitigate it, you put it out, but the event's already occurred. Over my career, I've been trying to push people back to make them look at the pre-event stage. All the opportunities they have to keep these things from happening in the first place and the responsibility the fire service has to do that."
The key element for Marchone as the fire service moves into the future is risk assessment. She says that sometimes fire isn't going to be the major risk in a community, giving way to things like "slips, trips and falls."
It was another nationally commissioned report in 1985 entitled "Injury in America" that opened her eyes to how much more a fire department can do to serve the community and save lives, saying that the report was to the personal injury world what "America Burning" was to the fire service.
"I remember picking it up and the first sentence said 144,000 Americans die from injury every year. I'll never forget reading that. It just rocked me that here I was concerned with, at that time, 10,000 fire deaths, but here are 144,000 Americans dying from drownings and falls and gun injuries, so that's our place. Fire is just a portion of it."
As departments nationwide continue adjusting to the fact that EMS runs are taking up a huge bulk of their work, Marchone hopes it will be embraced and that the next generation knows what their careers have in store.
"We can't hang our hat on fire anymore. It's just not where it's at. That's why we need to be focusing our attention more on EMS. I know that's hard for the fire service because I know a lot of them come into it wanting to fight fires, but I don't know if we're being truthful enough with our rookies when they come in about all the fire they're gonna fight, because they're not."
Marchone says some of the best ways a fire department can be successful with community risk reduction is evaluating and improving training programs and doing a better job with outreach. If falls are a problem in a community, fire departments shouldn't hesitate to reach out to people and organizations with expertise in that area.
"But the most important thing that we have to do is better data entry and data analysis. If 40 percent of our calls are unknown in the fire service, that's disgraceful. We can do a lot better with our data.
"We need to take the time. I don't think our people understand that our departments are going to live and die by their data entry. So when you incorrectly classify something because you want to take a shortcut, you're really doing you and your department a huge disservice."
The one thing Marchone says she would love to see in the future is each individual fire station undertaking a comprehensive risk assessment, but when it comes to the past and any regrets, there aren't many other than a desire to have spent a little more time with the firefighters in Montgomery County early in her career.
"I was pretty concentrated on the public back then, so I went to a lot of events and speaking engagements, a lot of homes. If I could relive my life, I would go back and spend more time in the stations educating our firefighters. It's just amazing how many I did eventually have some contact with that really inspired them to get interested in prevention. I could have brought even more of them along back then if I had spent more time with them."
And now with the beginning of a well-earned retirement, Marchone says she wants to spend more time with her 97-year-old father; her partner of 30 years Ken Gaiser, who is a retired fire chief; and with her two sons and four grandchildren.
"At my retirement party they laughed and said, 'Advocates never go away,' so I'm not planning to go completely away from the fire service, but it'll be great to have a little bit more time to do the things I like to do."
"And I don't want to get up at 5:30 in the morning anymore," she added with a laugh. "That's the biggest thing."
