By Elizabeth Gibson
The Columbus Dispatch (Ohio)
JEFFERSON TOWNSHIP, Ohio —Take one house. Fill with hay. Add a generous amount of kerosene and gasoline. Light it up.
That’s how they used to make training fires for firemen in the 1950s, sometimes with a live person in the burning building so they could practice rescue techniques.
“There are things back then that, if you’d stopped to think about it, it might not have been a very good idea,” Jefferson Township Fire Chief Dale Ingram said. “You knew you wanted to come home safe at the end of the day, but we didn’t spend as much time thinking about how to make sure that happened.”
Ingram plans to retire at the end of this month after a half-century of battling blazes, including 30 years as a full-time firefighter in Jefferson Township and 11 years as chief.
He joined firefighting as a volunteer out of high school in Mifflin Township in 1959. The eastern edge of Franklin County was farmland.The fire-alert system would ring up volunteer firefighters’ spouses, who then called the volunteers.
Now, Ingram can listen to the emergency dispatch radio on his cell phone. In 50 years, he’s sure another chief will be contemplating the primitive computers of 2009.
On their first day, Ingram and another newbie rushed to a crash involving a school bus and car. Nervous as could be, they dragged the car’s driver to the hospital, despite his protests that he was in perfect shape.
A month later, the driver showed up at the station to say thanks. He’d had a ruptured kidney.
“All we knew was basic first aid back then, but we’d done the right thing,” Ingram said. “You just picked them up, loaded them up, and you went to the hospital like the devil.”
Ingram said he also worked as a plumber because he made only a few dollars for each fire. His customers understood when he would hop into his 1943 Jeep, red light flashing, and promise to finish later.
“You’d be working a fire and you’d hear this muffled voice over your shoulder that sounded like Ingram and think, ‘Isn’t Ingram off today? Doesn’t that man stay home?’ But he’d just appear,” said Crystal Dickerson, now his assistant chief in Jefferson.
Chris Ingram, who has worked as a firefighter for his father for more than a decade, said seeing him retire will be odd. But he said his dad has earned a little time for fishing and hiking.
“It never really dawned on me until I started with the fire service that I was lucky to have him come home every day,” he said. “He’d show me the latest and greatest equipment from back then, and, man, how’d you ever fight fires with those tools?”
Firefighters subdued farm fires with special brooms and backpacks of water that they had to pump like water guns. Face masks didn’t filter out toxic chemicals, and nobody had heard of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Dale Ingram said.
It took a mere 36 hours of training to be certified in 1959, and the handbook didn’t have a chapter on firefighter safety. Now, training is like a full year of college, firefighters have stress debriefings, departments select safety officers and federal standards have changed how firefighters think about personal safety, Ingram said.
Firefighting injuries, from work and accidents at stations, have dropped from 112,540 to 80,100 annually, according to the National Fire Protection Association, which has data back to 1977.
Ingram said he’s grateful to never have lost a man since becoming chief, although sometimes he thinks the field has become overregulated.
“It’s an extremely dangerous occupation no matter what,” he said. “But if you get hooked on it, it gets in your blood.”
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