By Pat Kinney
Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier
CEDAR FALLS, Iowa — Fire Capt. Sharon Regenold has left a job she loved.
She took her fire helmet with her -- and left a big piece of her heart behind.
Regenold, 55, just called it a career with the Cedar Falls fire division.
“I taught high school math for a year. Didn’t like it,” Regenold said. She’d graduated from Aplington High School where she played basketball on some state tournament teams, then attended Waldorf College in Forest City before earning a bachelor’s degree from Wartburg College in Waverly. Then she went to the University of Northern Iowa for a master’s degree in cardiac rehabilitation.
She took a job at Agape physical therapy in Cedar Falls. That’s where she found her calling -- from a couple of firefighter patients there. One was former Cedar Falls Fire Chief Jerry Llewellyn.
“I had this education. I had a plan for my life. And this totally came out of the blue,” she said. “I always tell people it found me. Serving in the fire service found me.
“I don’t even have the words to describe the experience I got,” she said. “It is amazing. The rewards you get from this job are amazing. The sacrifices you make are huge, too. But the rewards are amazing. What you do, the friends you’ve made, the connections, everything. I feel very fortunate. It almost seems like everything fell in place for me.”
She was hired as a Cedar Falls firefighter in 1995. She left in 1999 following some surgery and worked for a year at the National Program for Playground Safety at the University of Northern Iowa before joining the city as a firefighter in 2000.
Both times, she was hired by former Fire Chief Art Lupkes. “Whenever I see him, I joke that he hired me twice,” she said.
She was Cedar Falls’ first woman firefighter -- and first woman fire captain. “When I first started, the guys were walking on eggshells a little bit. But when I went in there, I didn’t go in there as a female wanting to change something. I went in there just wanting to do a job. I went down there with the attitude, ‘Just do everything. Be a part of everything. If something’s going on, be in the middle of it.’ I went in with an open attitude.”
It took time to get used to the all-at-once stress of the job. “The alarm goes off and you get jacked up right now,” she said. “I can tell you until the day l left, when the (alarm) tone went off, there was probably an extra heartbeat in there. You always wonder what’s coming. I don’t think you ever get used to that. And for 20 years, I don’t think I ever got a good night’s sleep down there either.”
The most difficult call was a fatal traffic accident on Iowa Highway 58. “We saw car seats in the car. We were hoping no child was involved,” she said. There wasn’t. But a young father died. He was a member of her church and she heard him eulogized there. The deceased man’s grieving father had also reached out to her.
“It was so emotional,” she said, voice quivering a little.
She found most of her rewards in the public fire prevention education through activities such as Fire Prevention Week in the schools.
“To me, all that was way rewarding,” she said, and kids would approach her in the store and say, “You’re that fire lady!” and hug her. They’d also repeat a fire safety tip she taught him. They’d also tell their parents.
Copyright 2017 Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier
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