By Richard Stewart
The Houston Chronicle
LAKE JACKSON, Texas — For more than 40 years, whenever the Lake Jackson fire siren started screaming, Paul Israel would be one of the first volunteer firefighters to show up at the scene.
For just as long, whenever a veteran was buried in the area, it was often Israel who folded the ceremonial flag that draped the casket and handed it to the family.
If the alarm sounds today, volunteers will drive their shiny engines out of a modern station dedicated to Paul Israel. Today somebody else will be folding the flag over his casket and handing it to his family.
Israel died Sunday after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 77.
“That fire department is Paul Israel,” Lake Jackson City Manager Bill Yenne said. “He made the department what it is and taught many of the members.”
“He was short of stature, but big of heart.”
Israel was born Oct. 27, 1930, in Las Vegas, N.M. He served in the Navy during the Korean War, his wife, Mary Helen Israel, said.
In 1952, Israel moved to Lake Jackson, where his brother, Troy, worked for Dow Chemical. Israel got a job there too, but was soon laid off. He did odd jobs and then worked at a gas station.
“I met him at the gas station,” his widow said. She was in high school and eight years younger than he was, but was soon attracted to him.
By then he was already a volunteer firefighter.
In 1957, they were married after dating for two years. That year he was also elected fire chief of Lake Jackson and state sergeant at arms for the American Legion. He would be fire chief for 30 years.
There were Christmas mornings when their three children had to wait to open presents until their dad came home dripping and filthy from a fire.
Israel almost missed the christening of his son Chris when the fire signal went off and he walked out of the church. It turned out to be a false alarm and he soon returned and the ceremony proceeded.
Chris Israel said he grew up around the fire station. At only 10 he started going with his father to fire school at Texas A&M University. When he was 19, fire department members voted to change the rules so he could join before turning 21.
Chris Israel is now a fire instructor at Texas A&M.
His sisters, Paula Matzke and Stephanie Israel, grew up watching fires, too. As youngsters they would beg their mother to drive them by fires. Later they listened to scanner radios and often drove by fires.
“Dad told us we might as well join the department,” Matzke said, “but we didn’t want to do all that work.”
Over the years their father worked as an appliance repairman, gas station operator and a banker. In 1979 he became Lake Jackson’s first fire marshal. It was his only paid job as a firefighter.
In 1996 he retired, but even then spent most of his time at a regional fire training facility near Angleton.
For years he helped fellow members of the American Legion provide military honors at the funerals of hundreds of veterans. On Memorial Day, he and his family would place flags on hundreds of veterans’ graves at Restwood Memorial Park.
He will be buried today in the same cemetery.
Services are scheduled for 10 a.m. at Lake Jackson’s First United Methodist Church, under the direction of Freeport-Lakewood Funeral Home.
In addition to his wife and children, he is survived by four grandchildren.
Copyright 2007 The Houston Chronicle
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News