Is there anyone who does not know the words to "Happy Birthday to You"? The words may vary depending on the singer's language, but the sentiment transcends the song itself.
Children love the song, often because it symbolizes some new level of maturity, a new year that allows them to do something that they wanted to do but couldn't before because they were too young. For young adults, the song marks getting a driver's license or gaining the ability to vote. Even for adults, the song connotes maturity, experience and wisdom. But, sooner or later, we stop getting excited about birthdays because they signal the approach of middle or old age.
I will celebrate my 69th birthday this year. I recall my 20th, 30th, 40th, 50th and 60th birthdays as if they occurred yesterday, but my 65th birthday had special resonance. That's partially because I remember an old — and I do mean old — firefighter at the California Fire Show in Costa Mesa in 1965 who regaled us with stories from his days with the Los Angeles City Fire Department. He used to drive the horse-drawn fire apparatus at the first part of the century. He had retired in the late 1940s or early '50s and was about 65 when I met him. Undoubtedly he is now gone now.
Unfortunately, I think I have turned into him. Granted, I do not have the experience of driving a horse-drawn fire apparatus, but I do recall when we didn't wear breathing apparatus and were ridiculed if we did.
Time marches on. Or does it?
I constantly find myself reflecting on experiences that seem so fresh, they could have occurred yesterday. I also find myself visiting a lot of recruit academies, officer training programs, departmental retreats, retirement dinners and a host of other fire service celebrations in which the past often is regaled. I recently celebrated a fire department member's 50 years of service.
This sojourn took me to a department with fire officers who were born in the early 1930s and individuals born in the 1980s — that is a 50-year life span. When we discussed the current state of the fire service, there were agreements and disagreements, and it was clear that each generation looked through a different lens to find a solution.
If you have studied management in the fire service for a while, you may be aware of Morris Massey. Many fire officers saw his theory of "you are what you are because of what you were then" as a reflection of how generational gaps form within fire agencies. With a tip of a helmet to Massey, we shouldn't forget that lesson too soon.
Reality is different when viewed through the experience we accrue before we ever become firefighters. Most of us don't get a badge until we have experienced one decade as a child and one as a pubescent youth before we enter into adulthood — ready or not. Those experiences build a lot of our approaches to life.
Massey should have gone a little further in terms of defining what that way-back stuff means in creating the culture of the current fire service. In other words, we are what we were before we began our probationary period in the fire service.
Do we train recruit firefighters to cope with the changes that they are going to experience? Or do we give them a sea anchor of tradition to prevent them from trying to change the fire service too fast? Worse, do we fail to address the process of change in the fire service until we have to confront it and deal with conflict?
We give recruits information that is little more than a regurgitation of the past. We consciously expose young firefighters to our oldest and most-experienced firefighters to try to make them competent. But we also expose them to the bias against — and sometimes outright resistance to — change that often exists in our more senior members.
Now I'm one of the old guys. Many of you are in that same group. When we train recruit firefighters, we want them to be exposed to people who know what the heck they are talking about. That is what the term "experience" has come to mean in the fire service: reality from the fireground. However, some individuals have a great deal of time on the job but not a lot of real fireground experience. They may not have had the opportunity to obtain fireground wisdom, but have been affected by the firehouse culture. That culture is a big part of what makes this occupation different than others.
Perhaps it is time to take a really good look at the generational gap and call it what it really is: a reality that has never really been that different in the past. Answer these questions to gain perspective:
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When were you born?
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When did you enter the fire service; what date did you raise your right hand to swear an oath of office to become a firefighter and actually receive a badge to make you a member of the team?
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What date are you going to retire from the fire service; what is going to be the year in which your career will be summarized by your family and friends gathering in some social event to either roast you alive or put you on a pedestal as they remark about everything you accomplished in your life?
These three dates are benchmarks. And in the fire service, there is a nexus between when you grew up, when you were trained initially, and how you turned out as a firefighter.
I was born in 1940, entered the fire service in 1960 and retired around 2000. At the risk of making an understatement, a whole lot of things have changed since I began my journey in 1940. My friend from the California Fire Show was born around 1900, joined the fire service around 1920 and retired in the 1950s. It was no wonder that he had a different perspective on the fire service. Just think of the differences that the fire service went through from 1920 to 1950.
What was the economy like when you grew up? What type of military activities was our country involved in when you were a teenager? What was the state of technology when you were between the ages of 10 and 15? What kinds of music resonated with you as a teenager, when you were beginning to move away from family and home? Events and attitudes change every 10 years or so, as the various generations have been created.
I can recall sitting in a firehouse and listening to individuals who were combat veterans of World War II and the Korean War talk about how they felt about the fire service. We didn't need to use the word paramilitary because the fire service was just another type of helmet to them.
I also have sat in firehouses talking to firefighters who grew up in an era in which the military literally was demonized. Of course I am talking about the Vietnam War era. Many of those former soldiers wanted nothing to do with the military context and were more interested in an environment that provided them with respect, support and even an openness that the previous generation would have denied.
America again is engaged in a military struggle, and the individuals who are fighting this war will re-enter our work force over the next five to 10 years. They, too, will have a different perspective than previous generations. Maybe they will feel compelled to go back to a militaristic approach, maybe they won't. But instead of trying to predict that, we should be pay attention to the implications of the conflict and develop observations and techniques to be able to deal with it effectively.
This column probably has readership that ranges from people who were born in the 1940s through the 1980s. You need to interpret what I've written in the context of your own lives. But we all share one thing: Leaders and managers in the fire service affect their organizations' perspective and culture at any given point in time. What they say or don't say and what they do or don't do has impact every single day. There is no such thing as a generation gap in the fire service; instead there's a common mission shared by individuals who have different perspectives.
Our common goal ought to be to make sure that each generation in the fire service experiences the most positive consequences of the contributions from other generations. Change is happening at hyperspeed, and there is nothing we really can do to change that. We only can hope to be able to cope.
After all, there is a point in time in which the number of candles that you have on top of your birthday cake might be sufficient to create a thermal column that will ignite a sprinkler head — or at least activate the smoke detector in your house. When that occurs, you should be able to look back along the line of history in which you have participated and answer a simple question: Did I make a difference?
Hopefully you will be able to answer, "yes."
With more than 40 years in the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the state of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.
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