As Firehouse Sees It: Coming Full Circle

Like many of you, I was first introduced to the fire service by my father, John Matthews. Before I was born, he was a chief with the Glenwood Fire Company in Glenwood Landing, NY, but his passion to serve the community carried on years later when he first started taking me to the station. Within the first few trips, I was enamored by the big red trucks and the men who left their lawnmowers in their yards when the sirens atop the fire station sounded. I even read Firehouse Magazine each month in between homework assignments.

When I was 16, I became a fire explorer in Rush, NY, a rural upstate community. The members of that department spent thousands of hours annually planning and conducting door-to-door fundraising efforts for a carnival, plus responding to and training for emergencies and handling school visits and station tours. In the three years when I was a part of that department, my eyes were opened to an entirely new level of dedication for the concept of neighbor helping neighbor.

I later joined the Glenwood Fire Company where I worked alongside many of my father’s peers and developed some amazing friendships. But it was much deeper than that. I learned about life and death, or good days and bad days, and about commitment and passion. I took all the classes I could because I wanted to understand everything from emergency medicine to taxpayer fires, plus hazardous materials because of the large tank farms in the community.

Decades later, I had the unbelievable opportunity to begin working for Firehouse—a magazine I had treasured since my childhood. I owe a debt of gratitude to former Associate Publisher Jeff Barrington who hired me, along with the late Editor-in-Chief Harvey Eisner. The pair introduced me to an entirely new fire service outside of the communities I lived in. While every community is different and the standard operating guidelines (SOGs) can vary, what I learned at each dinner—whether at a conference or fire station kitchen table—was that the passion was the same. These men and women, from all walks of life, have a deep-seated passion that allows them to stop their life at a moment’s notice to spring into action. At the same time, the challenges we face are often the same, whether it’s budgets, hiring or retention challenges, or finding ways to motivate colleagues to share the same level of passion. 

The opportunities to learn in the fire service are endless, from your in-house instructors to local, state and National Fire Academy staffs who have found a different degree of passion to share what they have learned to make you a better prepared firefighter. They deserve a thank you for the endless hours they spend researching and then developing lesson plans to help your crews be prepared. 

Saying I worked at Firehouse opened the doors to many fire stations, some full of brand new, high-tech apparatus, and others where the chief was working on a broken axle of the department’s 40-year-old first-out pumper while on lunch break from his full-time job. It is still amazing to see the level of commitment firefighters have to get the job done, no matter what resources are available.

So here we are, decades later, and my father continues to serve the community where he retired, and I now serve as editor-in-chief and conference director at Firehouse, working with a truly talented staff to help prepare you to handle the next call or develop your next drill. If you are an officer, our contributors share their real-life experiences with you to help you navigate the tides of change. The authors and speakers we work with are amazing and their level of dedication is equally remarkable.

If you have the time, please connect with me to share what it is that you are looking to learn from Firehouse, whether through Firehouse Magazine, Firehouse.com, or the Firehouse Expo and Firehouse World conferences.