Angry Smoke: Fire Fights with Chief Joe Tolbert

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, I heard the bell rang. And these guys ran and they fired up that gigantic V-12 engine and literally the ground shook. And then this gigantic man, if it turned out to be years later, I knew it was Neil Murphy, jumped into the tiller seat and they swung that truck around in its lane. And they saw him drive the back of that fire truck and said, I've got to do that before I die.

SPEAKER_04 0:31

Gather around, kids, you are listening to Gramps Just Make Shit Up.

SPEAKER_06 0:35

You should listen to my Gramps.

SPEAKER_04 0:38

In this episode, I'm talking with lifelong friend Atlanta's deputy fire chief, retired after serving 35 years, Joseph Martin Tolbert. Hey, he's celebrating his 70th birthday this month. Yeah, we fought fire together, so listen up. I know a little bit about your history since we worked together on a home that tried to capture the hundred-year history of the Atlanta Fire Department. And of course, your personal collection of photographs and stories went into that and added a lot to it. But what's your first recollection of your interest in even being in public service?

SPEAKER_00 1:33

I had a period of time I lived with my grandmother, and she loved to go downtown because she was a seamstress. We always got off the bus at Spring Street and Carnegie Way, which old Fire Station 8 was right there on the corner. I can vividly remember one day we got off the bus, and that great big American LaFrance ladder truck, which you saw in the junkyard in Douglasville, was still in service. And it was in the traffic island sitting out there and you're in the middle of the street and they were watching it. Well, I heard the bell ring, and these guys ran and they fired up that gigantic V-12 engine and literally the ground shook. And then this gigantic man, who turned out to be years later I knew as Neil Murphy, jumped into the tiller seat and they swung that truck around in its length in the middle of Spring Street and headed toward Fersythe Street. When I saw him drive the back of that fire truck, I said, I've got to do that before I die. The most amazing thing I'd ever seen.

SPEAKER_04 2:24

How old were you at that time?

SPEAKER_00 2:25

Oh, six or seven, a little kid. I had been in the station and seen the truck, but I had never heard it and felt it. And then when I saw him tiller that truck around, I thought, man, that's got to be the life. The rest is history from there.

SPEAKER_04 2:38

Never heard that story. And your grandma, I know you were close to her and your grandpa. What's her name?

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Mine is. Did you used to you live with her for a time or did you stay with them for summers or both, but I lived with her for a time as my mother had several bouts of illness over the years. And uh every time she got sick, I was the one that got partied off.

SPEAKER_04 2:57

Tell me about your brothers, real quick. Who are you the youngest, the middle child, or I'm that troubled middle child. The peacemaker.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 3:04

Although that's not how I've known you. I know both of them have worked in uh public service as well.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

Yes. My older brother went to work for the water department in the city of Atlanta. And he worked there for a couple of decades. He was the superintendent of the Chattahoochee River Pumping Station. And he had a degree in law and a degree in engineering. So he was swayed away from the city by an engineering company named Burford Hald and Smith. He, of all things, began working to restore and refurbish and keep running cotton mills and power plants, steam power, and electrical power and that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_04 3:38

And it's interesting that his work contributed to your work.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

As he used to tell me, without him, I would be useless.

SPEAKER_04 3:45

Brotherly love.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

I never took that for granted.

SPEAKER_04 3:48

I can imagine.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

But pretty much everybody in the family for generations has worked in Atlanta city government. We initially came, I say we, because I guess I'm the DNA part of it. We came to the city of Atlanta in the 1850s. And my great-great-grandfather managed a delivery company. He was a mover, he was a horseman. And because of his prowess with managing teams of horses, he was hired by the Mechanics Volunteer Fire Company number two in the late 1860s. We didn't start out as firefighters. We started out as horse handlers. We were teamsters before, long before we ever got into the firefighting business. And because his son obviously was generational and worked for him in the moving and livery business, he was hired by Tallula Fire Company number three in the early 1870s, once again, to drive the horses and pull to pull the steam engine. They were the only paid people in the volunteer company. The drivers were paid even in the volunteer era of Atlanta. They worked at that for years and years. Obviously, there was no pension, and they moved on after a couple of decades of service. My great-great-grandfather's name was Clint. His son John had two sons. Came on the fire department in the early 1900s. That was Ira, my grandfather, and his brother James. And they were career firefighters in the city. They worked their entire careers in the city. After that, prior to World War II, and I may have never told you this, my dad was a firefighter prior to World War II in the city. He lost an eye in World War II. He was a member of a B-17 crew. And of all things, some shrapnel and some flat got him of all places in the face, and he lost an eye. When he came back to the city after the war because of his disability, the city would not allow him to be a firefighter any longer. So they gave him a position in Atlanta water. So he had a brief time on the fire department. And I'm not exactly sure when, because he would never talk about it. But I'm thinking probably from about 1935 to you know late 42 when he was drafted.

SPEAKER_04 5:39

What theater did he serve in in the military?

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Oh, Europe. He was in the 8th Air Force.

SPEAKER_04 5:44

Wow. This is cool. I had no idea.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

I didn't think you knew a lot of this stuff. We never talked about it.

SPEAKER_04 5:50

I know. We were too busy drinking wild turkey. So that leads us to your father's connection to the fire department and, of course, his service in the military. That's pretty awesome. And I would imagine, uh, just staying with your dad for a moment, that his war injuries led to some a purple heart or some other kind of regalia there. Do you have possession of those items?

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Uh my little brother does. John has. We have his scrapbooks from the war, and we have his Purple Heart and his other awards that I honestly don't remember what they are. No, there was some air service medal or something, combat service awards and this and that. He never talked about his time on the fire department, and he never talked about his career in the middle. Like a lot of veterans of World War II. He never talked about it.

SPEAKER_04 6:34

Yeah, that's unfortunate for those of us that, you know, now are trying to put the pieces of their family puzzle back together.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Exactly. You know, you look at the scrapbooks and you see places he went and photographs and people that he knew. I'm always curious because there were three or four lovely young women that he had photographs of and the letters and everything else that you read, and you just wonder what happened, sort of thing. You know, they seemed awful close and never know.

SPEAKER_04 6:59

Sounds like the seeds of a novel.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

It does. It was it's really interesting because he was in the air, and a cousin that he was close to was on the ground at the same time. He ended up in the third army, landed on uh Omaha Beach D-Day and went all the way across Europe. So uh one in the air and one on the ground for years. But when they would get together, neither one of them would ever talk about it. They just kind of what they talked about was the women.

SPEAKER_04 7:21

That's amazing. So your dad then went to work for the water department, and did he retire from the city of Atlanta there?

SPEAKER_00 7:26

Yes, he did. He retired in 1977. He retired right before the 78 pension, and I kept trying to convince him not to go, but he said he'd had enough.

SPEAKER_04 7:35

And your father's name again?

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Ira Jr.

SPEAKER_04 7:37

And then your um uh older brother, Lynn, and yourself were all working for the city of Atlanta?

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Yes, we were all there at the same time.

SPEAKER_04 7:44

That's about the period that we met back in the early 70s. And again, we were too busy doing a whole bunch of other kinds of things, so we never took time to talk about this kind of stuff, family and all that. But hey, it's fifty years later, but it's not too late. I'm glad we're doing it now.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

Exactly. It needs to be recorded somewhere.

SPEAKER_04 8:00

On the list of questions that I had sent you, the one that created a lot of memories for me is about the most influential captain or lieutenant in your career. Do you recall who that might be?

SPEAKER_00 8:13

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the one that I ran into my whole career was Frank Mann.

SPEAKER_04 8:17

Alvin, when you mentioned that name, the memories are near and dear. Tell me a little bit about why he's so influential with you.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

He was the guy that basically, when I got into the business, he was my lieutenant and I rode his engine. So he was a great influence, uh, you know, initially on what I should do, shouldn't do, and how things were going to be, and how literally how fires behaved, and don't be nervous, don't do this, do this kind of thing. So sort of like a baby dinosaur, you imprint on the first thing you see, and it was Frank. You know, he was an interesting guy. Throughout my career, we kept running into each other. By the time I made battalion chief, Frank was a captain at the station 15 where the chief's car was housed. And I was on the A shift and he was on the B shift. Every morning, Frank brought me coffee in bed. He woke me up every morning knocking on the door. Good morning, baby boy. But what I didn't know until after he retired, and we kept up with each other in retiree luncheons and everything, literally till he passed away, is he told me at one of the luncheons one day, he says, every morning I would fill the cup halfway up. He said, and I would get to your door and I would fill it as high as I could get it till it was almost running over, so I could hand it to you just to watch you spill it in the bed. Oh, that is so frank. I spilled coffee on myself. I still got my blanket, my great grandmother's quilt that I slept under, and it has coffee stains all over it. He was a guy who stayed many years longer than he had to. He stayed almost 40 years and he could have retired years earlier, but he just kind of loved the biz. You know, he was always a good sounding board. You know, he would sit there while he while I spilled the coffee in my lap and we'd discuss the events and the politics of the city and what was going on. He would bring calm to the storm and sensibility to the madness because I have a tendency to overreact.

SPEAKER_04 9:54

I have a lot of memories of of uh Lieutenant Mann myself. He worked on an opposite shift because I was on the C shift when I first was assigned to 25. But what I do remember is uh there's a couple of things, but one of them is Lieutenant Mann just being a friendly gentleman, always kind. But I also remember that he was quite the vocalist. He was a recording artist in the gospel music. Do you recall that?

SPEAKER_00 10:18

Yes, he was he was a bass singer in the gospel group. And I remember at Frank's funeral hearing the stories from the other people that he sang with. What he did at work was not an act, that was just Frank. Day in and day out, he was a guy that made life interesting, always had that same upbeat positive attitude, and was like you said, happy. He was just a happy guy to be alive. Even in later years when his health failed, and I would see him at the retirees lunch, he had that same attitude.

SPEAKER_04 10:43

I love that story about him waking you up with coffee, baby boy.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

Every morning he did that. And he finally fessed up, and this was just a year or two before he died. I never knew that, but I knew it was always full. And I used to think, well, how in the hell did he get up the steps with that? You know, and I didn't know that the pot was outside my office door, and he just got right there, and he just that was his big thrill every day was watching me spill coffee on myself in the bed. I guess it was payback for all the insanity that I caused.

SPEAKER_04 11:11

Yeah, at Station 25, there was a considerable amount of early onset insanity.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Well, there was just a you know, it was an interesting group, you know, as a whole, and it took somebody like Frank to ride hurt on all of us. You had me and Marvin Latham and Jerry Spearman and people like that. It was a day crack.

SPEAKER_02 11:28

The Brat Pack.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

The Bratt Pack for sure. We came in the door trying to figure out what we could do to each other all day. You know, get just this short of hospitalization. And uh Frank would ride her on all of us in a really good way. You know, he was just he was just Frank.

SPEAKER_04 11:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

The peacekeeper, the peacemaker, and he was a knowledgeable and a really damn good farm. He really was. He was a good fighter. And he taught me a lot about all of that. From line placement to fire attack and everything else, my early training came from Frank.

SPEAKER_04 11:58

Well, the early training in the house was critical because back then we didn't have a lot of training, of you know, formal training at the academy. It was only two weeks long when I went through. How long was it when you went through?

SPEAKER_00 12:09

Two weeks.

SPEAKER_04 12:10

Yeah, by today's standards, it's like, what the hell were they thinking?

SPEAKER_00 12:13

As a matter of fact, last night I attended the most recent recruit graduation, a little kid that I'd helped get on and kind of mentored through the process. Eleven months to get their certifications as an emergency medical technician as a firefighter. Eleven months. And when we talk when I talked to him about it, he said that was a really long time. I said, It is for me. I said, because you figure I went two weeks and I had the weekend off, so my recruit school was 10 days. There's a lot more to learn. We know more.

SPEAKER_04 12:37

Well, the formal education is critical to give the new firefighters uh an opportunity and all of the tools to dip into. We relied heavily, and as you pointed out with Lieutenant Mann, we relied on those people to keep our ass safe.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

Right. And I think they did an outstanding job. When I look at him and I look at chiefs like A.T. Hornsby and Paul DeLimke and those guys, what I still to this day on the fire department call the greatest generation. You know, they didn't have formal training, so they took it upon themselves to do as much informal learning and education as they could, and they just knew so much. Years and years after I made battalion chief, I ran into Rick Roberts at a function as an anniversary celebration of the Lioncoff Hotel. And when he called me chief, yeah, I just didn't feel worthy to have that caliber of individual even refer to me as a chief officer because they were just master craftsmen. They just knew stuff. Don't know how they knew it, but they just did. Their decisions were always spot on, and they just they made it work in an era when a lot of them, if you think about it, may or may not have even had a high school education.

SPEAKER_04 13:40

Well, that's true. That was the only thing necessary when we came on into the 70s, and I I think it's probably still only required as a high school education. So a lot of them back in the 40s and 50s and uh sixties in particular, they probably didn't need one.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

The year that a high school diploma became mandatory was 1968. You didn't have to have a even a high school diploma to become a firefighter. My grandfather, Ira senior, uh, he could not read or write. And I've still to this day I cannot imagine how did he know where to go when an alarm came. You can't read a street sign. How do you maneuver the city of Atlanta? But he did. And you know, he had a way to do it. That's one of the millions of questions I wish I had had sense enough to ask. How did that work?

SPEAKER_04 14:25

How about battalion chiefs?

SPEAKER_00 14:26

Beyond a shadow without A.T. Horns. I had an opportunity to drive him a few times right before he retired. And I got to know him very, you know, when you're a when you're a chief's aide, it doesn't take long. You you know everything pretty much about who you're driving and everything else. No matter what the incident was or what was going on, he was the calmest, most direct, most focused individual I've ever seen. I'll never forget it was a fire South Olympian Way off Cascade, working fire in a you know, 1200 square foot house. And I was his aide. You know, then the aides obviously, you know, you had the radio and the chief had a radio, and you just literally ran back and forth between the chief and whatever orders he wanted to give to whomever. You know, my usual self bouncing off the walls. And at one point during the fire, I was doing something, and he called me over. And he said, you know, he called you if you weren't in trouble, he just called your son. If he called you by your name, you were in trouble. But he said, Come here a minute, son. Yes, sir. And I'm bouncing, you know, I'm waiting to see what he wants next. And he said, uh, do you own this house? No, Chief, I don't own it. I don't I don't own it. Do one of your relatives own it. No, no, chief, I don't that no, no, no. Do you even know the people that live here? No, Chief, I don't know. He said, Well, son, then you just need to calm down and let's put the fire out. I never will forget that story because you know I was ripping and running, ready to go. And he was just so calm about that. It was a pretty silly, you know, it was it was one of the through the roof in the attic kind of thing. So it wasn't a simple hit it and quit it. I never will forget that. He was just as calm and kind to me in the middle of all my insanity. You know, I was a 20-something-year-old kid.

SPEAKER_04 15:52

Yeah, we're just babies.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

Yeah, and and I remember how he handled, I heard the stories of how he handled the Well Street incident, which was really nasty and big, tremendous fire over Well Street. Everybody was still talking about it. You know, you talk about a big fire after you know for months after that. And they were just talking about how the thing would have been so much worse if he had not handled it the way he did. And you know, and I kind of peeled back the layers and learned everything he did because I knew there was knowledge in there. I never saw him upset the whole time I ever knew, no matter what. Calm, cool, and collect. A lot of people don't realize this, but you know, after he came on the fire department, he went ahead, and back then it was a big deal. He had an associate's degree.

SPEAKER_04 16:29

That was unheard of.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

Yes, it was. It was absolutely unheard of. He was one of the first chiefs on the fire department to have anything past high school, just a super guy.

SPEAKER_04 16:36

I remember his retirement party. I was part of the team that cooked for that thing.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Right, yeah. You were cooking and Freddie was cooking with a wig on. Freddie Cochran. Yeah. Yeah, fat Freddie was back there cooking and he had a women's wig on for some reason. I have no idea why.

SPEAKER_04 16:54

Because he was Freddie.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Yeah, it was Fat Freddie, so he just doing what Fat Freddie did. I remember that dinner very well. He they gave him a shotgun.

SPEAKER_04 17:02

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

The thing, too, is, and I know you don't know this, years later, he had a granddaughter that worked in the uh fire communications center. And his son-in-law, Alan Bryan, was a guy that built the 800 megahertz radio system.

SPEAKER_04 17:15

I do remember Alan.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

Well, that was Hornsby's son-in-law, Hornsby's daughter, and he had a daughter that after he passed away came on and worked in the 911 center.

SPEAKER_04 17:22

So the next question top three incidents burned into your memory.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

One of my granddaughters for Father's Day gave me a coffee cup with a bullet shot through the glass. That was one of the other things you probably don't know about me. Many years ago, I got shot. No, I don't remember. What the hell? So, anyway, I got a I got a hole in my right leg before I got shot in the cast. Obviously, he shot me in the leg because I was running like hell. Who in the hell shot you? They were shooting at somebody else, and I just got caught in the crossbar. The next four or five, got damn. I've got this shot glass now with a 30 caliber round melted literally into the side of the glass. And on the other side of it, it's called it says bulletproof dad.

SPEAKER_04 18:11

That's right, on. If I recall some of the incidents and responding certain fires, there were shots fired a few times as well. But maybe that's part of the list here, brother, of top three. And we can talk about 10, but uh I would imagine there's probably one, two, or three that are like literally burns, no pun intended, into your brain and your history. So, what do you what do you got for us?

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Lou, what's really interesting, and I thought about this when I read that list, uh, and there are four incidents that stick out in my mind vivid. What really, really, really registers in my brain is the fact that I was not supposed to be at any of them. Something always happened in my career that put me in those places. You know, so I don't know if it was fate or or whatever it was, but every one of those incidents, something happened prior to the incident that made damn sure I was there. And you may not know this, but obviously the first incident would be the Baptist Towers in 1972.

SPEAKER_04 19:06

I do remember that one.

SPEAKER_00 19:07

But what's interesting, I was not initially assigned to 25. The day that they assigned me, they assigned me to station 10. And I reported to station 10. Everett was the battalion chief, Chief Everett. You remember Mighty Mouse, the little guy. And I walk in and, you know, this is to introduce firemen, such and such and so forth. And he looked and me and he says, Hell, I don't need anybody. So I didn't know. Does this mean I don't have a job or what? So he he called Bobby Etheridge on the phone. And first he asked him if he could count 12, and uh then, you know, uh chewed him out a little bit, and then he says, Well, you go to 25, they got a vacancy there. Because what Bobby had forgotten to record was a fact, and you were probably remembering he had assigned Jeff SQ to station 10 about two weeks before that and had failed to take that vacancy off the list. So that's how I got to 25s to even be at the Baptist Towers. And every incident that I'll speak of, he's one, but something happened to put me there. So I go to 25s, you know, B shift, second night on the fire department. You know, the Baptist Towers comes in. I hadn't been to the academy yet. I didn't go to the academy for about three months. So literally, the academy was afterthought. I knew everything the academy taught me and more. I can vividly remember I went to 25s and and you remember Ronnie Sims was the truck driver on the B shift. And Ronnie scared me to death, you know, day one, because he walked me around the truck and he called me little buddy. He said, Well, little buddy, this is the way it is. If I can get my fat ass in this truck and get it started before you get on it, I'll leave you every time. Which means you won't have a job by the end of the ship. So I was terrorized, you know, to make sure I got on the rig. But Ronnie was driving, Captain Wright was the captain. Arthur King was on one side of that old purse ladder truck, and I was hanging off the other side. And we were the first piece of equipment at the bed at this time. Because I remember pulling up. When we pulled up, there was a lady hanging out the window on the eighth floor on the top of the T side of the building. And then when we pulled around, all you could see was flames coming out the window. So Captain Wright told Ronnie pull the truck over because it's useless, because we could not reach her. Him and Arthur went somewhere and he told me and Ronnie to start doing a search on the floor above the fire, which is where the lady was hanging out. And he told us specifically make sure that that lady doesn't jump. Well, you know, I'm a brand new kid with some somebody else's worn-out turnout gear on, climbing those steps, wondering, what in the hell do you say to somebody to keep them from jumping out of a window when there's fire right below them and the smoke's filling up their floor, too. I stayed with Ronnie and we kicked in every door on the floor above the fire and searched it out and got some people out of it. And I can remember looking out the window when Seven's Aerial Ladder pulled up and Randall Aiken raised it, and E.O. MacDonnell stood literally on the tip of that ladder and got that old lady off. I was certainly relieved. Number one, she survived, and number two, that I couldn't have to go back downstairs because I was scared to death Captain Wright, because he looked too serious all the time.

SPEAKER_04 21:49

All the time.

SPEAKER_00 21:50

All the time. I can just remember the tremendous heat and smoke and everything else because nobody had nobody wore breathing apparatus. Because first day on the job, I asked them when they showed me the compartment. Had the BAs in there. I said, When do you wear those? And they said, When the captain tells you to. Well, Captain Wright never told us to. Not ever, not never did we ever do that. They stayed in the compartments. You checked them out every day and put them back in. So I can remember the tremendous heat. And then once the fire got knocked down and we went to the fire floor, I can remember the tremendous carnage. There were just people everywhere in the hallway. One door we went in, we couldn't from the stairwell. We had the door was hard to open, and we found out when we finally forced the door and pushed it all the way open. The reason it wouldn't open is there were three people piled up against the door. And then they began the process of us trying to find the security guard to get keys to check out the locked apartments and everything else. Well, he was dead in the elevator because it went straight to the fire floor and left him there. What struck me, among a lot of things, was the fact that fire was so hot that it bowled the rails on the elevator, carrier rails. The elevator rode on it, bowled them out because of the tremendous heat. It was just unbelievable, you know, for the second day on the job. I didn't know what to make of it. At the end of the shift, I remember coming down, and once again, Frank Mann, he could see that I was upset because they had told me when I went 25. Well, you got it made. We don't do a whole lot. The morning after that, I'm going, hell, if this ain't a whole lot, I don't know if I can take a whole lot. And uh he told me, he says, Well, in your career, he says, you'll probably never see anything like this again. He said, This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I could remember how upset when the fire was over the chief Roberts was. He literally broke down because of the stress and strain. But I found out later years I can understand why, because he was the ladder driver on one's ladder the morning of the Weinkoff Hotel. We had lengthy conversations about that fire years and years later. But when I found that out, I can understand why he was so upset, you know, long before PTSD, after he told me the stories of the Weinkoff, all of the stories that are not in the books, I can see why he fell apart. I can completely understand just, you know, it was reliving the carnage of all of that. But it was just a hellacious way to start a career. I was so glad when that day was over. You know, all said and done, that the life loss would have been a lot more. And the and the thing is, and it took 20 years almost. You know, that changed codes, which is fire service is highly reactive, so you have to have a tragedy to change the fire code, but self-closing doors in high-rise apartments or direct action after the uh Babus Towers fire. Because those doors were not self-closing, you know, the apartment doors. So when people walked out, if they got out the door, it stayed open, which didn't help them or anybody else.

SPEAKER_04 24:18

Before we go too much further, Joe, how many years did you serve with the Atlanta Fire Department?

SPEAKER_00 24:22

35.

SPEAKER_04 24:22

Is there another incident that uh comes to mind when you're Yes?

SPEAKER_00 24:25

I actually have four. Fast forward to the day that I made battalion chief, 1987, and the end of the latter part of November 1987. It was a B shift day, and we got sworn in and everything else, and I was, you know, having and I think you were in the commissioner's office. Correct. And you know, we had the little ceremony and this and that. Well, before the ceremony got over, the federal prison riot broke out at the Atlanta Federal Penn. Well, I was scheduled to be battalion III A shift because this was a B shift. Well, the B shift battalion chief had scheduling issues, so they told, you know, he asked to not have to go to work that day. But once the riot came in, they just told me to stay at work. That everybody was gonna stay where they were until this was so that evening, after several hours there, I was ordered to relieve battalion five at the uh federal pin. Every day for seemed like I think it's actually 12 days, felt like two years. Every day when I went to work, I went to the federal pen, battalion five, and I swapped off. Once everything got into a rhythm and all the big chiefs went home, it was me and battalion five that managed from the beginning to the end. So once again, I was not supposed to even be there. But I got stuck there for I think actually it was 12 days, 12, 14 days, I don't exactly remember.

SPEAKER_04 25:34

But what did you do in your former life, man?

SPEAKER_00 25:36

I don't know, but I'm paying for it. I paid for it. You know, the interesting thing, when you read the chronicles of the mill fire, even the fire Atlanta fire history books, they talk about the minimal participation with the Atlanta Fire Department and everything. Whoever wrote that is absolutely clueless, you know, as to the things we did and the positions we got stuck into. I know to this day you make fun of me because I don't write airplanes.

SPEAKER_04 25:57

I do, and to your face, though, to my credit, I make fun of you to your face.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

Right, that's true. And I respect that. But it's the federal prison that caused that. But you know, remember me and you flew to Texas and we flew places and everything else. That's true. One evening uh I was called in to the tunnels. There's federal pin. Underneath the federal pin is a maze of tunnels, causeways where the guards and equipment and everything else is moved outside of the inmates. Well, the inmates had broken into the tunnel system. They had acquired some acetylene bottles and they were fabricating something into a projectile so they could blow through some of the doors on the other side. Well, the only thing at that point that separated us from the inmates was a steel gate. And you could see the inmates on the other side and you know, making their little vulgar gestures and everything else. Behind me were the guys with the black suits on and the, you know, the combat gear and the flat jackets and everything else. And because it was a standoff, me and two engine companies were stuck down there for seven hours. Gentleman behind me with the M16 explained to me that at one point I was standing in front of him and he says, You might not want to stand here. And I said, Why is that? He said, Because if that gate comes open, I intend to kill everything in front of him. But being in that confined space and couldn't get out for those seven hours, the idea of being someplace that I can't leave when I want to is not on my radar screen. Can't do it.

SPEAKER_04 27:15

I understand.

SPEAKER_00 27:15

There's not an exit door, I don't go.

SPEAKER_04 27:17

That was a sobering conversation that that automatic weapon wielding gentleman had with you, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:23

Yes. It woke me up, but just the idea of being down there for those six or seven hours until they could logistically figure out what they were going to do. Because, like I said, it was myself and two engine crews, and we had our hose lines laid with anticipation of a fire explosion or whatever. Also, knowing if any of that had occurred, none of us would have gotten out of there alive, shot or blown up. And that's never been recorded, and I probably never told anybody that story. That was fairly early on in the situation, so then I had to spend every day. You know, being a firefighter, you go to work anticipating, you know, what may or may not happen. It is a completely different scenario and set of circumstances when you know I'm going home two days, and when I come back, I will be at this incident. My longest day was 22 hours. I'll be at this incident, and you know, just knowing what you were going to face every day because you were in constant communication, but because there were lots of things they wanted to do, they just didn't do, you know, storming the prison, breaching walls, and this and that. And I'm sitting in meetings and they're talking about, well, we anticipate a uh fatality rate among uh people entering the prison at 25, 28 percent and all that. And I'm going, okay, that's one person out of every engine crew you're talking about chilling or dying. And and it was just, you know, completely different because that was something, even though you don't have control in a burning building or an emergency incident, that was something that was absolutely positively and completely out of your control. And we're firefighters, we're not stormtroopers that go in buildings and bring order to chaos and this and that, and there were several fires set here and there and everything else, which managed to extinguish from the outside. Once again, that was just a place that, you know, I was not scheduled to be.

SPEAKER_04 28:55

As you tell these stories, and I recall listening in, that's the closest I got to it was listening in, because as you pointed out, it was in an administrative role in the commissioner's office at the time. You know, sort of marveling at at the time being a little jealous that I wasn't able to be part of that, and because we were all crazy then and and wanted to, but now that you express what was going on, I'm damn glad I wasn't even close to that thing. So because the amount of stress that puts your body through never goes away. I mean, you're living with that every day. My admiration for you has always been great, but boy, it's even greater now, brother.

SPEAKER_00 29:27

You know, the one humorous thing that happened, the the incident spread, it went all the way through Thanksgiving Day, and I remember being there Thanksgiving Day, and something was going on where I didn't get to eat. By the time food was brought to me, it came from the Star of India restaurant. And I can remember opening that box and looking in there, and I told the other people in the command post, I says, you know, the only thing missing from this piece of meat is the damn flea collar.

SPEAKER_02 29:49

So the uh Salvation Army didn't show up with their fried bologna sandwiches?

SPEAKER_00 29:53

No, the the people that did show up initially gave up because they honestly thought that thing would be brought to closure in a matter of hours. And then day one became day two, and they had prisoners in there that the prisoners didn't even like, that they were trying to get out before that so they could bring peace in there. One final story on that. I can remember there was a guy in there, his name was Silverstein. He was a truly uh a sociopath and a psychopath and everything else, a bipolar times two kind of guy. And he was so bad that the inmates eventually duct taped him to a set of hand trucks and pushed him out the door. Well, he had, you know, he'd been convicted. At one point he he was convicted of he killed a guard. And when he got to court, they asked him, Well, why did you kill the guard? He says, Well, I hadn't been outside in a while, and I just want to see what people were wearing. It was amazing to watch him parade across the top wall with a federal pen with a homemade machete, and he might got in his way, he just had to be a big deal.

SPEAKER_04 30:45

Well, this is turning into a PTSD counseling session that I hope gets more exposure. Never let me down. And I hope that the listeners know that any of the uh chuckling or laughter that comes out of these kind of conversations is a necessary byproduct of the uh people that work in public safety. They call it gallows humor. But if it wasn't for the release that humor sometimes offers, it gets to be a very heavy load for the people that are carrying it.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

That was our defense mechanism.

SPEAKER_04 31:17

Exactly. And when you get back to the firehouse after those events, and sometimes for a period of time, there may be a little, but and Hank pointed this out when I spoke with him about the Lucky Street fire, is that in spite of losing four of their colleagues, nobody talked about it. Nobody in the leadership positions, 1971, nobody talked about it. Very unfortunate circumstance. Hey, I'd like to step away just for a moment from our conversation with my buddy Joe. I'd like to feature a song from singer-songwriter Ansie McLean. The name of the song is Dinosaur. I don't know what made me think about it when I was talking to Joe, but here it is.

SPEAKER_05 31:54

I read a recent article in Rolling Stone About a new kid rising coming into his own. He was asked about his predecessor Troubador. He just said they were a bunch of old dinosaurs. Well I listen to a sample of his pale eye blue. Here he wasn't worthy to tie their shoes. One day I'll be understandable. Yeah, it's the roads coming in, we don't know if our pits will open in the last end. Think of all the wonders we might find. Come in the earth, the last of our kind. We honor the young and throw away the old Ray Rock, yellow and call away the gold. You can live in the little call yellow. You'll be a tenth door too if you're lucky and uh skilled. Bring it in and I'm taking it all in the baby in the touch of your skin. Steady hard beetle the other way.

SPEAKER_04 35:04

Let's move on to number three. What do you got for us?

SPEAKER_00 35:07

Life changing event number three. I was on the phase shift in the 3rd battalion, and one morning my relief man called me. It was June the 30th, 1989, I believe. And he called me and he says, I've got a mechanical problem in my truck. Can you hold over for me? Man, I got you, no problem. Summer day right before the fourth, you know, make the rounds to the stations, come back and chill out. About an hour later, he says, Well, put my truck in the shop and they had it dismantled, and now my wife's car's broken down and I can't get to work. I said, Okay, I'll get I said, I'll I'll just work for you all day. No problem. I got you 12 hours. 10:35 in the morning, box goes off at 1718 Peachtree Street, which is the Peachtree 25th building. Because I had made a comment to my driver right before the alarm came in. I just finished this in the last station. I said, Well, let's go back to the office. I said, We've done our stuff for the day. We got it made. And I was at Virginia Avenue and uh Monroe Drive when that alarm came in. So I built up 10th Street and turned on Peachtree Road, and about two blocks before Brookwood Station, I saw a ball of black smoke in the sky. I thought, holy hell. So I pull up to the Peace Tree 25th building, and I've got five people hanging out the window on the south side of the building, fire everywhere, smoke, nasty black smoke, what I always called angry smoke. Sometimes smoke just kind of whiffs out of a building, but this is that smoke that's pushing, like it's mad to get outside and completely filling the window opening, and those people with their faces. And about the time I pull up, one of them jumps. But she jumped out. Rescue 29 started working on her. And Wayne Carey was on 29's truck, and he pulled 29's truck in, which is kind of ironic. That was the old sea grave truck that they had used at the Baptist Towers, that was a reserve piece that he pulled in there to pull those people out. And Ronnie Davis was driving, so he raised the aerial, and Chaplain William Davis went up to get the first people out. The good news about having that old truck was if they had had their regular piece of equipment, which was one of those great big grotesque drumming tower ladders, it takes 24 feet to set that thing up. We couldn't have got it in that driveway to rescue those people. Anyway, he got them out and they were having a staff meeting downtown. So when I called a second alarm and told them what I had, the next thing I look up, here comes the parade of big chiefs, the ship commander and the chief of operations and the acting fire chief and everybody else. So at that point, I went inside and became interior commander. And I can distinctly remember getting to the fire floor and the doorknobs were glowing red. It was so hot in it. It started out as an electrifier. A guy tried to pull a 440-amp breaker out of a bus duck, and instead he ignited it, which means you had about a three inch by six-inch welding rod feeding the fire, which I busted up that aluminum burning. So the fire was tremendously hot. The bad news for chiefs that were on the inside, which at that point I was the only one, was a couple of weeks before that they'd taken our breathing apparatus off of the fladder truck in service. So we didn't have any BAs on the Chiefs cars. So I was up there minus a breathing apparatus, you know, crawling around directing fire operations. It involved the entire fire floor when it was all said and done. Very interesting fire because of the way that the heat traveled. There were places on that floor that weren't burned at all, and other places that were burned all the way to the floor. Experts said there was something about conductivity and the airflows and all of that stuff that I'm not scientifically adept enough to figure out. Anyway, it was just a hell hot fire. Got all those people out of that window down. Had two people in the back that were hanging out of another window, but I couldn't get to them because of the parking deck, and I did not know the stress load on that parking deck if it would hold an aerial ladder up or not. Because those buildings were built at a time when the cold was pretty lax, obviously, that the building wasn't sprinkled. So we made an interior attack from the back. You know, one of them survived for several years. Solomon Williams survived for several years. Victor Tanubu was a victim who uh Solomon had literally rescued and had out the window with him. He did not survive the fire, but we got them both down.

SPEAKER_04 38:44

Quick question on the players. Who was your aide on that fire?

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Farrell, Milt Farrell's son.

SPEAKER_04 38:49

Milk Farrell's son? Really?

SPEAKER_00 38:51

Again, I'm just stuck.

SPEAKER_04 38:52

When you took interior command, did he go with you?

SPEAKER_00 38:54

No, he stayed with Chamberlain Sparks and Lieutenant Bang at the command.

SPEAKER_04 38:58

And David Chamberlain, was he the acting chief at the time?

SPEAKER_00 39:01

No, Perrin was the acting chief.

SPEAKER_04 39:03

Oh, Tommy Perrin, yeah. So the Baptist Towers, prison fire, peach tree in the 25th, there was lives lost at each one of those. Yes. And you shouldn't have been there on any of them.

SPEAKER_00 39:12

Just happened to be my day, I guess.

SPEAKER_04 39:14

Incident number four that you were not supposed to be at. Tell me about it.

SPEAKER_00 39:19

All right. In 1999, I started the year as a ship commander on the A shift. And by the first part of March, the B shift was behaving badly, which is not uncommon. So the deputy chair, I was used to the A shift because it was the most senior shift on the fire department. We had more seniority than in the other two ships. So I was used to the tour of grown folks. And the B shift was the B shift. So I got transferred. I got they said, well, we'll flop the A and B shift commanders to bring some stability, like I can do that, uh to the B shift. So that happened in March. So it comes April the 12th. You know, I hadn't been over there but a couple of weeks. Run comes in one day at the uh Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill. So I'm listening to it. And the first unit of the Tens was first on the scene, and uh Lieutenant at 10s was talking about up on the third or fourth floor, I think third floor. He said, We guess you got a small trash fire. Well, I panicked when he said small trash fire at the mill because I'd worked six engines for years. I knew which building they were in. They were mill number one, which was the old yarn mill. There's no such thing as a small trash fire in an old yarn mill because for a hundred years, the way they cleaned all the lint off the floor, all those big wooden floors, was they saturated a mop in linseed oil and mopped everything up. So you're dealing with a hundred years worth of linseed oil on the flooring. And I also, my mind went back to the fire that uh Scottie Duncan died. Once again, that was just a trash fire that went bad really quick. So I told my driver, I said, We need to go to that fire. He said, It's just a trash fire. I said, Here's what you do: you get your ass in the car and you drive it like you just stole it and get me to the mill. About the time I got there, when I pulled up, there was horrible black smoke coming out of about three windows. There again, that angry smoke was just filling every crack of the window. And within a matter of 30 seconds, that smoke was replaced with massive flames. And that crew was panicking and scattering, and we didn't actually, for a minute, for a few minutes, we didn't know where everybody was. It went bad so quick and so violent. The whole floor at that point erupted in flames because all the windows were out because it was being refurbished and turned into lost. So it was wide open. So I had a it was about 150 by 350 foot building. It was four stories tall. So I had about 300,000 square foot of building that was lighting up. You know, all firefighting had to stop for a minute till we found all of Tim's crew. That's when they escaped down the stairwell. Three of them broke right and one of them broke left, and they didn't know where he was. And so we found him and began firefighting operations, and we were trying to account for all the construction crew and everything else. Well, in the meantime, there was a daycare center directly across Carroll Street, which is barely two lanes wide, and the embers and everything were so flying through the air so hard and so fast. We had about a 35 mile an hour prevailing wind blowing that day. So everything was blowing and it was setting the daycare on fire, setting my age clothes on fire because the command post is right here. I put the command post between the fire and that daycare to make sure everybody got out and I could visualize everything. So the fire started progressing, and then about that time I was told we got every we're accounting for everybody except the crane operator. I said, Well, where is he? They said he's still on the crane. Well, by then the mill was fully involved on all floors. The daycare center was on fire. The CSX intermodal rail yard had begun to burn, the offices and the rail cars in the rail yard and the freight and everything began to burn. Plus, I had four other fires that had started in Cabbage Town from the flying embers. I started calling help as soon as I pulled up. Well, we ended up going to eight alarms before it was over. Obviously, burnt the mill down, but the key was trying to get this guy off his crane. Couldn't climb up to it because the crane was right next to the building and the fire was impinging on the crane, on the base of the crane, so I wasn't sure that the crane wasn't gonna fall or buckle under the heat. Had a news helicopter there that said they could reach up and pluck him off. Well, they flew up to the top to get him, and the heat began to burn the pilot's legs and arms. Chocolate got unstable, so he backed off because he couldn't get close enough. So then the Department of Natural Resources helicopter came with a heroic pilot by the name of Boyd Klein. He was a Vietnam veteran and he had landed two helicopters with his legs shot. If you know about flying helicopters, legs are critical, so he was a tough guy. And they had practice maneuvers where it literally lowered a weight into a truck tire, so they were pretty targeted. So they dropped a 200-foot road.

SPEAKER_01 43:35

Right now he's coming in on his second pass. This may be the pass where they attempt to make contact with the stranded crane operator. The helicopter's hovering in slowly and approaching the crane from the south into the wind. The barman on the end of the line is hanging hanging precariously a hundred feet below. From this angle, it may look like uh the flames are actually touching that barman, but he's well above. He's lifting him off. He's got him airborne, the air crew has lifted the fireman to get the victim off the crane at this time, so he's out of danger. They'll fly him over to the landing site where paramedics can take a good look at him. And I'm amazed that uh he was able to survive. I think uh he's a very lucky man because the the wind and the flames were blown away or the wind was blowing the flames away from the crane. And I I just want to say uh that that was a heck of a job. I've never seen a rescue like that in 19 years of flying, and we owe a great deal of credit to those guys down there that were able to pull that rescue off.

SPEAKER_00 44:43

Firefighter on there, and we got to the top of the crane, and he walked the crane down and and hooked the uh crane operator, harnessed him up, and we and we brought him down. Of course, it's like anything else. I told the firefighter when you got to the crane, the top of the crane disconnect from the rope, because I don't want that helicopter flying over over and over the crane while you harness this guy up. Well, obviously, my firefighter said the last thing he was gonna do was hook up, you know, unhook his rope for you.

SPEAKER_04 45:06

Remind us of who that uh young firefighter was.

SPEAKER_00 45:09

That was firefighter Matthew Mosley. We hooked Matt up with instructions when you get on the arm of the train, cut loose from the helicopter, walk over and harness the guy up, and we'll pull him, you know, and then we'll come back and get you. Well, Matt wasn't about to turn loose of that rope. Required the helicopter pilot to stand there and hover over the burning building while Matt harnessed Ivory Sims up. It worked. That was the good news. It worked because I told my aide, and I made a joke out of it, but it actually happened. I told my aide when they were doing this, I says, if they pull this off, he'll get to go to Disneyland, and if they don't pull it off, I'll get to go sell shoes at payless. They pulled it off, and true to fact, he got to go to Disneyland.

SPEAKER_04 45:43

Well, you guys made international news.

SPEAKER_00 45:45

Something we'd never done, never practiced, and you know, never really prepared for, except for the part of the rescue harness. We knew how to harness other people up, getting down window washers and everything else. You know, you have to take extreme measures to do extreme things, and we were out of all other options. What's interesting when they talked about climbing the crane and all that, we knew we couldn't do it. And at the end of the day, I asked the engineer that was there to look at the stability of the crane. I said, uh I said, What's the probability of that crane falling over after it's been exposed to all that much heat? And he looked at me and he says, I really don't know why it's standing. So the collapse of the crane had been imminent throughout this entire rescue. So at the end of the day, I had over 180 firefighters there: 22 engines, 13 trucks, five command teams, two medical command units, one heavy rescue, and mutual aid backfilling Atlanta stations from about 10 departments.

SPEAKER_03 46:35

And this was the B shift.

SPEAKER_00 46:36

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 46:37

And you weren't supposed to be there.

SPEAKER_00 46:38

No, no, I was at that point, I was beginning to wonder, you know, I I've either got to I'm it's either my destiny to be a really famous sense of the commander, or I'm the most unlucky bastard that ever lived.

SPEAKER_03 46:48

Well, you know, it could be both.

SPEAKER_00 46:50

Yeah. But we did good that day. I was proud of everybody. They worked hard. I was after the eighth alarm when I requested additional resources, they told me they weren't gonna send me anybody else. I hadn't maxed it out. I thought about that old line from Backdraft. You know, I looked at my aide and I said, well, hell, I guess this is really John Wayne time, ain't it?

SPEAKER_04 47:07

We can smile about it now, but I can imagine the amount of stress that you and and all of your uh colleagues were in at that moment because the eyes of the world were were on all of you. And of course, the big memory comes from Matt hooking up the crane operator and getting them off of there. But there was a whole lot of other miraculous things that were going on at that time. Can you talk about some of the exposures besides the daycare center that you were able to keep that thing from turning into a even larger conflagration?

SPEAKER_00 47:39

Well, the thing about that area of Atlanta known as Cabbage Town, it's a typical old mill village where you have wood balloon frame structures that are six, seven feet apart, and there's several blocks of them, and the prevailing wind was blowing the embers directly over that entire area. We had spot fires as far as a mile away from the embers. The last fire we had was over a mile away from the initial incident on Memorial Drive. And by then I had ran out of resources to the point I can never say enough about the people that were there, their resourcefulness and their just ability to work way beyond anything sensible. Because there was no take-a-break, there was no rehab. I literally put the medical command units carrying a Nigel cooler full of Gatorade around and watering people because there was no rehab and no break for several hours. But the last spot fire was over a mile away, and the only thing that I had left to send over there was truck two. A captain by the name of Jeff Luburn on that truck, and in his resourcefulness, we had a pretty good sized garage on fire in order to keep it from spreading or getting any worse. He literally took a chainsaw and collapsed the building into itself. The thing ended up with eight separate sectors, and I had working fires of at least two frame houses in each one, plus the intermodal rail yard and the helicopter and the initial fire itself in the mill. Because there were several other buildings under renovation in the mill complex that potentially would have caught fire if the wind had ever died down or shifted. The good news was it was a prevailing wind from the west and it stayed prevailing. But the incidents involved were just, you know, I would have one engine company trying to extinguish two house fires, a house fire and an exposure and that kind of thing. And I got to the point I really didn't have a full alarm in any of the various sectors. They were just doing what they had to do. And a lot of it, to be honest, I never really knew was taking place because obviously in an incident like that, I didn't have the radio capability or the staff capability to branch it off. We were managing every sector and talking pretty much on the same frequency. So it became difficult for me to literally know everything going on. But I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt I had people like Marvin Latham on the 20s and people like that. That I knew that they were going to do what they needed to do with what they had because they were just resourceful, tenacious, tenacious firefighters, you know, the old school guys. You know, they weren't the fancy, cute, highly educated fire administrators. They were the guys who had a wife, two girlfriends, and tried to sober up before they came to work kind of guy on a day like that. That's what you need.

SPEAKER_02 50:04

If Marvin's wife is listening, uh that wasn't really about Marvin, okay?

SPEAKER_00 50:10

No, no, no, no, no, absolutely not. No, not about that.

SPEAKER_04 50:14

Marvin was a hell of a firefighter.

SPEAKER_00 50:16

And I just had a bunch of them there. I had people that did extra, extraordinary things under unbelievable conditions. You know, the worst we had for injuries among firefighters was a strained ankle and a few little straights. At the end of the day, everybody that my ultimate objective was met, everybody went home. That was the important part. And that was the last of a string of I wasn't supposed to be there things. But you know, I began to wonder at that point, you know, once as a coincidence when it happens four times, and those were literally the the four biggest fires of my career. Had a bunch of big fires, but those were the ones that just kind of stuck. Those were the biggest of the biggest, and they all of them received national recognition one way or another.

SPEAKER_04 50:52

They also made the professional magazines, fire engineering, firehouse, which were written with the purpose of providing education leading to code changes.

SPEAKER_00 51:03

Yes, the uh P Street 25th building was the was the fire that that caused Atlanta to finally, even after all the years after the Baptist Towers fire, to put in the retro fit sprinkler ordinance. And you know, just always something. And and unfortunately, every code change in the fire service, or not everyone, but most of them were as a result of some tragedy that occurred. Do you miss being in the fire service, buddy? No, it uh we still have the son that's a battalion chief at the airport. Ironically, the rule book that we wrote years ago they still use, and most of the SOPs that I wrote from 20 years ago are still in force, only slightly revised. Every once in a while I have to give interpretations and rulings, and I was probably the last person to read city code and ordinances, so now they just don't understand it. Sometimes you just have to revert back to the law. I don't miss it, and I'll and I can say this, and I told the told the fire chief, the fire chief that was there, and I won't mention his name. Well, when I got ready to retire, I told him, I said, he asked me why I was leaving. I says, Well, here's the deal. Fire service today exists in a format that I really don't understand and I have virtually no respect for it. And he took issue with that. That was just my thoughts, you know. Obviously, by what I'm saying, and it's all documented, I didn't need anybody. And, you know, anytime you get a transient, I call them transient fire cheese, they want to come in with their recipe, you know, like Gordon Ramsay, this is how you cook it, you know, master chef kind of stuff, thinking about my recipe works. Wherever I go, I can administer fire service in the same way. You know, I didn't need anybody from a uh three-engine, two truck fire department in South Alabama telling me how to fight fire. There's a lot of things that I could maybe learn, but I don't need somebody to tell me that what I need you to do is fly out west and listen to no respect, disrespect your shirt, but go out there and take classes from a guy who's gonna crack jokes wearing a Hawaiian shirt that's gonna teach me how to put out a burning building.

SPEAKER_04 52:53

I know exactly who you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 52:55

I almost wore one out of uh you know condescending humor. But uh not you.

SPEAKER_04 53:03

I hear you, and and I I I do understand, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 53:07

It was just it it's i I found it offensive. Plus, we had worked for five years on pension improvements for the Atlanta firefighters because the police had gotten way ahead of us on pension, and we were finally successful. So to a large degree, leading along with my inability to suffer fools, was the fact that it was going to pay me more to be at home. You know, once I made chief, I always wondered if I could stand up to the test of a very large-scale incident and bring it to closure successfully. Well, I feel as though I was you're never completely happy with your performance, nobody in the fire services. But I was comfortable that the mill proved that what I had always wondered if I could do, I think I did it pretty well. I had nothing else to prove. And as I said, uh I was growing weary of suffering fools telling me I need to learn how to go somewhere and learn how to fight fires, like telling Julia Child she needs to go somewhere and cook a duck for one hour, you know.

SPEAKER_04 54:00

I do understand.

SPEAKER_00 54:01

And the good news about that is shortly thereafter, a few years, you know, a couple years after I retired, they got another transient chief in who uh felt like all of the old chiefs didn't suit his program, so he demoted all of them. So if I'd say it's highly likely that I would have not held my position. So it all worked out. And I left Atlanta and went to the City of East Point and as deputy chief of operations, and I had a good little run there, albeit short, it was a good run.

SPEAKER_07 54:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:24

You know, I had some health issues I had to deal with, and I had to leave more before I wanted to, but it was a good run, so I finished it up okay.

SPEAKER_04 54:30

A lot of the firefighters that we've known decided that they were gonna hang up their turnouts, have continued to educate and train, and I think you've been one of those as well. You continue to tell the stories and and help the young firefighters who were interested in learning more start their careers. And and of course, your son being a battalion chief at the airport, that's pretty amazing. You got to be very proud of that. And I know he's proud of being part of your history as well.

SPEAKER_00 54:55

And he's a really good chief officer because he understands, and I understand the new generation. They're about experiences and not about life as a long-term process. Experiences have a beginning and end point. You know, realistically, you have to look at your management style and everything else. And I don't know whether it's good or not. I was a fire chief. Now the trend and it has been fire administrators, and they're a different breed, and there's a different skill set required.

SPEAKER_04 55:19

That's true.

SPEAKER_00 55:19

Yeah, my skill set is not bad. I can't put a spin on anything politically. It all worked out for me. You know, it's better to leave on top of your game than leave in shame.

SPEAKER_04 55:30

I think you're absolutely right. And the abilities that you've had to share your leadership style with the young firefighters really is whether you were intended or not, it's created a future, you know, for those kind of firefighters, not administrators, but for firefighters, incident commanders. I really appreciate you making the time, brother. Did I meet your expectations? Oh, you've exceeded them in every every way. And you've also didn't tell a few stories that I'm glad you didn't.

SPEAKER_00 55:54

Gotta live too.

SPEAKER_02 55:57

We're living our current life where the uh former life probably shouldn't really have a place.

SPEAKER_00 56:02

Right, yeah. Always remember Paul was a tax collector before Jesus found him, so you know.

SPEAKER_04 56:11

Let's talk again soon.

SPEAKER_05 56:21

I've played 45 of these 50 stays. If you count that night in a Bismarck bar. Swinging karaoke with the local thumb wing. Twee shots a bourbon and a still single Do a crack of seven four. End up take final stairs sometimes we don't know where to go till we get it sometimes we don't know where to go till we get it. I remember that time in the hole with me. Don't breathe through the window. Like along with it, sometimes we don't know where we'll go with till we get it sometimes we don't know where we'll go with till we get Roadside to make it clear. It's not all it's clear. What's going on right here in front of it? That's the weekend day. Or not it's okay, give it to the surprise. Let's hit you up, honey. It's time to roll. Down a winding road to an unknown sky. Those folks who think they're in control. We'll just smile and wave as we ride by.

SPEAKER_04 58:56

Even though Joe and I worked together on the Atlanta Fire Department for many years, our careers did diverge, and well, to paraphrase Robert Frost, the path we took made all the difference for each of us. Here's a question for you. What do Joe Talbert, me, Lou Cunio, and Doc Holliday, the gunslinger, have in common? Aside from the penchant for good whiskey, that is. Well, the Atlanta Fire Department is part of our history. Yep, it's true. And that tidbit is in the 100-year history book of the Atlanta Fire Department that Joe and I worked together on in 1983.

SPEAKER_06 59:32

So many skeletons under bed. So many demons inside my head. That's when I cry and want to disappear. Nothing makes the bruises go.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:13

Well, folks, there's an hour that you will never get back. But please know that I'm grateful to you for listening in. I'm proud to be able to call Joe my good friend. We've been through a lot together, and it's good to hear him tell his stories. Thank you to Dave Pascoe, fiddle player extraordinaire, for allowing me to use his song Ordinary Florist as my intro music. Thanks also to singer-songwriter Janie Thorne for her song Whiskey and Warm Morphine. Love that title. As well as the music of one Ansi McLean, Nashville based recording artist, whom you will hear much more of in future podcasts. He's very generous that way. I have to go now. It's time for my nap.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:52

How do I find something I can see breathing over?