I blame Jim Taylor.
When I was growing up in Creston, B.C. the first thing I would do when I got to school in junior high would be to go to the school library and pick up latest issue of the Vancouver Province, to see how my Canucks or Lions had done the night before, and read Taylor’s column.
I remember one column specifically as the turning point called Rent a Canuck. He suggested that the team trade my childhood idol, goaltender Richard Brodeur, at the trade deadline to the Edmonton Oilers, for a player and future considerations. After the playoffs were over the Canucks would reclaim Brodeur back as their future considerations. While I realize this renting of players is now commonplace, back then, it didn’t happen and Taylor’s suggestion, along with the writing itself, made me want to become a newspaper writer.
He is the reason why I am now chronically overworked and under paid.
However, if I hadn’t gone into the newspaper industry, my other career of choice in my youth would have been a firefighter.
In large part due to a TV program in the 70s called Emergency! The show, which ran from 1972 to 1977, featured two paramedics, John Gage (Randolph Mantooth) and Roy DeSoto (Kevin Tighe) and their weekly adventures as paramedics with Station 51 of the Los Angeles fire department.
When I wasn’t watching the show, I would go to our garage/storage shed, and climb up the stacked up apple boxes pretending I was making my way up a skyscraper, a canyon, or one of countless other structures in an attempt to rescue an injured citizen.
Nor was I the only one of my friends, who were impacted by this show. Out of my immediate circle of friends, three joined the Creston Fire Department, while still teenagers.
Mind you, it is probably for the best that Taylor swayed my career choice in another direction. One of the things I have learned about myself since my childhood back on the orchard is that I have a strong fear of heights, something my recent trip in our own fire department’s aerial truck reaffirmed.
Luckily for me, my current job and as an amateur radio operator volunteering for the Emergency Operations Centre in the Okanagan, I have had many opportunities to be around firefighters and I think, as a group, you will find they are wonderful people who have dedicated themselves to serving the public. Especially in the smaller fire departments, which are mainly composed of volunteers. In fact, in Alberta 75 per cent of all firefighters are volunteers. So as Fire Prevention Week comes upon us, let us all take the opportunity to thank all the members of our department who give so much of themselves. And if you can consider joining their ranks, I know they would welcome you to the fold.
