By Bill Johnson
Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
Copyright 2006 Denver Publishing Company
Every other day for better than a year, La Don Williams would rise, put on his running shoes and half-sprint the 1 1/2 miles from his home to Denver Fire Station No. 29. He would briefly glance at the building before racing back home.
He did it, he explained now, just to reinforce his true goal that for the last six years seemed virtually unobtainable for people like himself.
On Dec. 1, he and Kendry Jackson will enter the Denver Fire Department Academy. If they make it through the 24-week training, they will become the first black firefighters hired by the city since 2000.
I last wrote of La Don Williams in August, after he had made the initial-testing cut of 100 applicants, having finished number 88 going into the physical testing.
In past years, being 88th on the list often meant you had little or no chance of actually making the department. The weight given to the written test eliminated many candidates before they even appeared for a final oral examination before a Civil Service Commission panel.
Spurred by the embarrassingly long minority hiring drought, Fire Chief Larry Trujillo successfully fought to have actual firefighters sit in on the final oral examination, the first time, ironically, they would do so in six years.
“There is no doubt in my mind that a panel of firefighters will send the absolute best 24 of the 100 candidates to the academy; zero doubt,” Larry Trujillo vowed last summer.
“They later told me I did really well,” La Don Williams, 29, said in an interview. “I don’t know how well, except that I went from 88 to at least 24, which is how many they take for each academy class.”
It was the third year he had tried to make the department. It was Kendry Jackson’s fourth attempt. They had always tested within the final 100. It was the oral exam that got them.
He faced a panel of four firefighters. He knew they would be harder to get past than any civil service board.
Yet he had done his homework, going to various departments and asking firefighters what he should expect.
“They told me to memorize the department’s mission statement and, above all, never to crack any jokes.”
Instead, he was first asked of his ability to handle the awful parts of the job, “of the blood, the gore, of the assorted nasty fluids” he would encounter. He thought the panel approved of all the ride-alongs he had done. They asked him of teamwork, of his ability to team-build. He nearly fell over, La Don Williams said.
For 10 years now, he has been in management and supervising the ramps at United Airlines. He’d built and managed teams of 120 workers.
Why did he want to join? What could he bring to the department?
“I’d told myself over and over to just be myself,” La Don Williams said, “to just show those guys how much I wanted the job, how I volunteered for three years now with departments, of knowing the monotony that comes with the job, of dropping 30 pounds on those runs to Station 29, that I wanted this.”
It was a real, sometimes daunting fear, he said, that he would somehow wash out, of what that would mean in a city where lawsuits had been filed and other threats made because of the hiring drought.
“Kendry and I talked about that a lot,” La Don Williams said. “It was a good pressure, but I will tell you there were many days early on when we had a lot of doubts. But then we just put our heads down and decided we wanted to be a part of breaking this six-year streak.”
The call arrived Oct. 25.
“I’ll admit there was always in the back of my mind fear of failing,” La Don Williams said, “but with each step I took the more confident I got.”
A couple of weeks ago, he took his wife and kids to the academy for the first time for new-recruit orientation.
“The reason I got in was 90 percent the oral board. People will say Kendry and I got in only because of the six years, but those guys were tough. They did not by any means throw softballs, and you could tell the last thing they were concerned about was politics.”
Now, he and Kendry Jackson are talking of the pressure of surviving the 24 academy weeks.
“We know that in a class of 24, we can’t be Nos. 23 and 24,” La Don Williams said. “We’ve got our shot. We know we have to step up now and show them this should have happened six years ago. It’s a lot of pressure, but that’s life.”
La Don Williams did memorize the department’s mission statement.
“And they never asked me about it once,” he said. “That’s all right. Knowing it may serve me well somewhere down the line.”