First Drivers, Certification for Driving, & Old School Firefighters.

A while back I wrote about old school firefighters. In all the interviews I’ve done, one of the obvious changes from old school to modern is driving. Ironically, it’s not a subject I ask about directly, but it comes up often. For those of you unfamiliar with the present certification process, it goes something like this:

- Training (drilling) can begin after six months on the job.

- Preparation for certification (being given the study guide for the written portion of the test) can begin after one year on the job.

- First you must pass a written exam.

- Then you must pass a practical test that demonstrates you can drive the rig & pump or raise the aerial.

- Only if you show you have the necessary knowledge & skills can you drive.

If you were certified to drive w/o going through that process, there’s a good chance you’re old school.

So, how did they do it back when they had first drivers?

Or maybe more recently when Chief Tauriello certified drivers?

How many guys even remember first drivers?

To get you up to speed, here’s a tale about the position as told to me by Deputy Chief Freda:

In those days there were steady pump operators too. That was another change. A steady pump driver & a truck driver on the truck who was steady. They guarded their positions. If you would ask the pump driver whose name was Jimmy Page & I loved the man. He was in that firehouse while the horse & wagon were in there.

He was just at the end of his career when I came. If I had asked Jimmy what the relief valve was about, he wouldn’t tell me. He didn’t want me to know anything about that rig because that was his job. I wasn’t taking it off him. He wasn’t hanging on the back step. If I asked him, how did he know how much pressure to pump, he’d say things like,

“Well you put your foot on the hose & you press down. If it gives a little bit, that’s enough. Too solid, back down a hundred.”

I asked him about the pressure. “How do you know how much pressure to put in an inch & a half?” He said, “When they holler out the window ‘Give us more.’ or ‘Cut the pressure down’ you’ll know.” He was very vague. He wouldn’t tell me.

The captain would take us out on drills because every fire we went to, me & the other new fireman would drive back. It got to be a pain in the neck because you had to keep switching. We would go on occasional drills. Until the time that Jimmy Page went on vacation, then you’d be called on to drive. And I loved it because I couldn’t wait to drive this big red fire engine around. This was fun. Until I found a spare in the house that had a magneto on it.

The fire department had a spare. This thing was an antique. A magneto has two levers that sit underneath the steering wheel that you had to set by sliding them back & forth. It set the spark. That was the ignition. The siren was a chain coming into the cab on the captain’s side that was hooked up to the fly wheel & you pulled on it. The siren went up. It hit the fly wheel & spun. That’s what made the siren noise. But the motor was so loud that you couldn’t hear the siren because they did not have mufflers on the rigs then. So, they could hear it coming w/o the siren. You could hear this thing coming a block or two away. When I saw that, I didn’t even know how to start the engine. I had no idea how to start it. But it was interesting how guarded the position was. How the driver or the pump operator really had to learn on their own because the first driver was not going to tell you anything. The symbol of their authority was they always had rags hanging out of their back pocket.

The tradition was, if the chief ever came in, always look busy. Never be sitting around doing nothing. Traditionally the chief would hit the bell on the gig. You knew when he was coming. You got up & did something. Jimmy Page would take the rag, I don’t care what time day or night it was, he would take the rag out & would be wiping the chrome on the apparatus. The chief walked in; the rag was always there.

By the time I was appointed, things were a little looser. I was assigned to a young company where no one wanted to drive. Driving was considered a necessary assignment to be endured for a week. It wasn’t really firefighting. The attitude was it was a support job. We all wanted to be in the building & get a piece of the fire. Which meant me getting certified as quickly as possible & getting into the rotation. I was assigned to Six Engine in late January of ’79 and was certified by Chief Tauriello at the end of April.

Training consisted of an intro to driving the rig (a ’74 Ward LaFrance), then driving, practicing pumping, and finally driving to fires & pumping. It took a couple of hours to get certified. The process entailed demonstrating I could handle the rig by driving around the Academy grounds. When the chief was certain about my basic driving skills, he had me drive him to his bank. Banking business completed, we returned to the Academy w/o me hitting anything. There he asked me if I had ever pumped at a fire. I answered in the affirmative & he signed off on my cert.

No pumping demonstration, no questions about pump pressure or friction loss (they did teach a little of that to us while we were in the Academy). It’s possible he asked about checking the oil & bleeding the brakes, but that’s forty-three years ago. I don’t remember it in that much detail. As far as first drivers were concerned, there were a few steady drivers, but the term first driver never came up. Most companies rotated the way we did.

One other point, the Ward LaFrances broke down a lot. While in the shop, we were given a spare. These were inevitably a gas or diesel Mack that had a manual transmission which required the driver to “double clutch” when shifting gears.

The first time I drove one of these, I forgot that last little tidbit of info. My hand was shaken numb until I remembered to double clutch (push the clutch in, shift to neutral, let the clutch out, then push it in again, shift to the next gear, & let it out). One of the guys I worked w/ had driven rigs cross country in his previous life. He had such a good feel for synching the engine and transmission that he didn’t need the clutch. But I was a twenty-one year old kid w/o that kind of knowledge or experience. So, gears were ground often until I got used to it, but that wasn’t on the cert test either.

Feel free to add your thoughts or comments.