From www.FireRECRUITER.com: In honor of EMS Week-2010, I thought I’d promote the (dare I say) sexiest video I’ve ever seen come to volunteer recruitment and retention. “Roll With It!” is a part music video, part movie trailer — full-on high energy – high impact web site for the recruitment of fire and EMS personnel. Celebrate EMS Week […]

One student was D.O.A. and the other seriously injured, requiring extrication and transport to the trauma center by helicopter; while the teenage driver was put through a full set of field sobriety tests, arrested and hand-cuffed in front of his peers.

It should be no secret by now that I have a passion for story telling, and especially telling of the importance of sharing stories in the fire service as a means of passing down our history, traditions and values. It’s almost an obsession. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve started drawing my Blackberry from its […]

For the next four long hours I felt like I was in a scene from “The Terminal” — the movie about an eastern immigrant stuck living in the airport with nowhere to go and unable to leave because he had no country to return to, and therefore no official citzenship anywhere.

Join Snyder NY Chief Tom Merrill and I for a live broadcast from the show floor of FDIC on Saturday-April 24 from 9:30-10:30am CST. We’ll be special guests of FireCritic Rhett Fleitz and FireDaily John Mitchell — hosts of the new hit Internet talk show series: FirefighterNetcast. We’ll be discussing my FDIC presentation, my www.runtothecurb.com project and the importance […]

I hope to see all of my loyal followers (both of them) at FDIC in a few short weeks. I’ll be presenting “From the X-Box to the Box Alarm” on Thursday-April 22, 2010 at 10:30am in Room 127-128. There’s room for 308 of my closest, most personal friends so there’s really no excuse for not joining […]

My helmet is off to the folks in the Syosset NY Fire Department for recognizing 40+ aged recruits as a viable part of the solutions to our recruitment and retention challenges. Age is Nothing But a Number at Syosset Fire Dept. Joining later in life is becoming more the norm   The approach and image of […]

Rhett Fleitz at FireCritic.com has compiled one of the greatest collections of firefighter stories in hosting his first edition of the First Due Blog Carnival which asked our brothers and sisters to answer the question: “I am a firefighter because…” It fits right in line with my theory on the importance of story telling in […]

If you had just 30 seconds to convince someone why they should join your volunteer fire department, what would you say?

What would your message be? Do you have a standard sales pitch that you use for just such occasions? Can you even say hello in 30 seconds?

I recently had the opportunity to coach and practice some speed-recruiting exercises with the Doyle Hose Co. 1 in Cheektowaga NY. They had been invited to be a part of career day at the local high school in their response area and they invited me to join them.

The Evans Center Fire Hall (as we called it) was just down Bennett Road and around the corner on Route 5, maybe a few hundred yards away from my house, as the crow flies. Closer than that was the rear entrance to the sixteen acres of fire company property, directly across the street from our driveway.

Growing up so close to the firehall, it was an obvious choice as a place to hang out with my friends. We played baseball on the ball fields the fire company leased to the Little League for a dollar a year. We helped out at and patronized the carnivals and other fundraising events. When the fire company added on a large banquet hall in 1971, we helped the contractors move supplies and materials. My initials are carved in the concrete sidewalk they poured. I was eight.