Thank you to the volunteers who have served

Over the past few months, newsrooms across the Shaw Local News Network have been interviewing, filling notebooks and assembling stories about the first responders who serve cities and counties throughout northern Illinois.

Police officers, sheriff’s deputies, paramedics, dispatchers, doctors, nurses and firefighters – all of them are represented in today’s Thank You First Responders project.

It hits close to home for my family: My late brother-in-law, Terry, was a longtime Fulton volunteer firefighter and had served as fire chief. My brother-in-law, Joe, has served on Morrison’s fire department as a volunteer since 1984 and also has been chief. His brothers’ involvement led my husband to join Morrison’s fire department in 1988, about six months after we got married.

I always knew he would follow in their footsteps as a volunteer firefighter. I remember the family interview we sat through at our house in early 1988 after he put his name in to be considered for selection.

Two longtime Morrison firefighters sat with us at our dining room table. They asked John why he wanted to be on the department; they then asked me if I understood what he [and we] would be getting into – the training sessions, maintaining the building and equipment, meetings, and fire calls that could come at any time, last for hours and would be followed up with cleaning the equipment at the station. It would be a huge time commitment, not all of it fighting fires.

No, I didn’t know what I’d be getting into, but I knew he wanted to be part of it.

In April of that year he was selected and given a helmet and fire coat that had No. 30 on them and became a truck operator, or as some would call him, a “wrench.” He’d drive the trucks, set up equipment and fill water tanks at the scene. He also was known to be the guy who would [and did] rescue a cat.

Those are the things I knew about.

What I didn’t know was he was the guy who stood on the top of a heavily smoking three-story building trying to vent the roof, in the dark, with an axe. Or that during a mutual-aid call at a house fire in Fulton, he was standing on an icy ladder, again swinging an axe, this time over his head. I learned about that from a reporter who saw him at the scene. My husband would neither confirm nor deny such reports.

It’s been 36 years since that dining room discussion, and as of April of last year, firefighter gear with the No. 30 on it now hangs in our garage as a symbol of the many years he served.

I did learn a few things over those years, such as when the tone goes off, many times it’s volunteer firefighters who respond to calls for help. Those calls could be anything from an ambulance assist to a car accident with entrapment to a house fire, and they can and do come at any time, be it noon on a 100-plus-degree day or midnight when it’s 20 below zero.

There are many out there like him, the ones who are retired, but still listen to the scanner. They’ve seen a lot of things; sometimes what they’ve seen has to do with people they know. They lock those memories away.

They are the ones who heeded their communities’ calls for help, saved lives over the years and helped train and lead the newest generation of volunteers.

This goes out to them: Thank you for responding.

• Charlene Bielema is the editor of the Sterling Gazette and the Dixon Telegraph.