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Dec. 19--Ron Fisher focused on the grieving family while other onlookers watched a blaze consume the town of Campbell house.
Two young children didn't survive the fire they started on that spring day in 2004. Home alone because their grandmother had to work, it was a family's worst nightmare.
They were sobbing and distraught, digesting the awful news in front of strangers. Fisher retrieved his RV and offered it to the family.
"You can meet in here," he remembers telling the inconsolable group.
"I always wondered who in our community was so compassionate," Campbell Fire Chief Nate Melby said. "But when I found out he was the person who did that, I wasn't surprised at all."
Seven years later, Melby led Fisher to his position as the department's first fire chaplain. Now it's Fisher's job at fire scenes and other emergencies to tend to those affected by tragedy.
"When people are having the worst day of their life, they don't need to be alone. It's that simple," he said. "There's not a lot we say or do, but we're there."
Fire chaplaincy, Fisher said, is a calling.
"Chief Melby found me a home," he said.
Fisher was only 6 years old when he found himself in an orphanage for fatherless boys in Denver, Colo. He had lost his father to heart problems, and his mother searched for someone to fill the role.
He lived at the home until turning 17.
"As I look back, it was one of best things that happened to me," he said. "It gave me structure. It gave me father figures."
He joined the Navy in 1969 and worked as a fire control technician in California until discharged the next year when his mother was injured in a car crash.
Fisher tried college in Kansas and Colorado after the military but dropped out when he got mixed up in alcohol and drugs.
He met his wife, Janet, at a dance club in 1971 when she vacationed to Denver. They married the next year and moved to Colorado, but they drove back to Minneapolis that Christmas when Janet got homesick.
"I say she won," Fisher said.
He found a job as an engineering draftsman and enrolled at St. Cloud State University for a degree in engineering technology. But the only classes offered his first semester were for aspiring teachers.
"Fine. I'll be a teacher," he thought.
At the time, he and Janet were raising three children in a small apartment on the GI Bill. He tackled 25 credits a semester to earn a bachelor's degree in technology education.
Fisher taught shop class in Eden Valley, Minn., for six years while earning a master's degree in technology education and a master's and specialist's degree in educational administration.
"Teaching was a real match for me," he said.
Fisher also in those years served as a drug counselor, drawing on his own struggles to help others. This year he celebrates 31 years of sobriety.
He served as a high school principal in Osakis and Houston, Minn., before returning to an engineering position at G. Heileman Brewing Co. in 1988.
Fisher switched back to education seven years later as a part-time shop teacher at La Crescent and Onalaska middle schools until finding a home as an engineering teacher at Holmen High School in 1997. He retired in 2010.
"More than anything, I enjoyed working with kids," he said.
Fisher in retirement said he felt a calling to be a support system but couldn't find a home. He became a pastor at Olivet Beacon of Light Lutheran Church but had to leave his ministry in summer 2010 during a bout with anxiety and depression.
"It was a tough time for me," he said.
Earlier this year, Melby asked if he ever considered being a fire chaplain. The fire chief said he witnessed Fisher's compassion and comfort as a first responder.
"I said I didn't know what a fire chaplain was," Fisher said. "But I researched it and I felt it was God's call. It's a sense of purpose for my ministry."
Fisher paid his own travel and training expenses for his non-denominational chaplain certification training in Louisiana and joined the volunteer 35-member department in August.
He's there in chaos for victims with comfort and steadiness. Sometimes it's a warm blanket. Sometimes it's a shoulder.
"I am the liaison between hope and recovery," he said.
He's also there for support when officials must tell families a loved one has died, and he serves as a confidential counselor to firefighters struggling with the job.
The chaplain already has reached out to firefighters who have battled tough fires and has made efforts to connect with all the members and their families, said Jeff Neillander, a firefighter who also taught with Fisher in Holmen.
Fisher attends fire trainings to understand the stresses of the trade, the chief said. He made congratulatory cards for a recent promotional ceremony and is creating a memorial to honor every Campbell firefighter who has died since the department was established in the 1940s.
"He fills in the cracks," Melby said. "Everyone has so much respect for him."
