Most of Grimm's fairy tales begin with the phrase “once upon a time….” That phrase often invokes nostalgia, a favorable reflection on how things were in the past. It's interesting that most folks who take the time to look back on their own pasts tend to remember mostly the good things and to interpret the bad things from their own perspectives. Tellers of tales in modern times often are sharing stories with someone who didn't live during the time frame of the story, so they are asking the listener to suspend their own experience and believe the storytellers version of the past.

As we all know, storytelling is rampant in the fire service. I find that the people who are telling a fire service story, who really lived the experience, often have a totally different perspective than those who are retelling the story after hearing it from someone else. Embellishment isn't out of the question either.

This month's Fire Chief is celebrating an event that's no fairy tale. It is the magazine's Golden Anniversary, so it's time to look back over those 50 years and evaluate what has happened.

To look back at what it was like in the fire service in 1956, we have a couple of choices. One is to go talk to people who were in service at that time. Another is to read the literature of the time. The third is to repeat the stories of the past that have been passed on by others.

As a student of the past, I often seek out documentation from the time of the event rather than read a rehash that was done years later. First-person reporting often is less ambiguous and more realistic. Take, for example, the differences between the newspaper articles that were written immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, and the books that have been written since. I have kept every newspaper that was printed here in Sacramento from Sept. 11 to Sept. 31, 2001. The reporting from those days represents the depth of emotions from that event and it is somewhat different from both works of fiction and the personal accounts published years later.

But to properly respect this magazine anniversary, I engaged in all three methods. I have talked to people who were in service back then. I read what was written during that time, and I collected input from some of my contemporaries by asking them what stories they remember from that era and what they mean to them today.

I was reminded as I reviewed this material of a speaker named Morris Massey, who used to say, “what you are now is where you were when.” His lecture explored the fact that we gather our experiences at different times in our lives and it shapes not only how we look on the past but also how we see the future. Those things we experience early in our lives often shade the way we see things for the rest of our lives.

So where were you in 1956 when Fire Chief magazine published its inaugural edition? Korean War veterans were being mustered out of the service and many of them were looking for jobs. Not surprisingly many of them chose to become firefighters. My own uncle, Lowell D. Teter, was among them. He joined the Costa Mesa Fire Department that year.

I, myself, was a checker-stocker for Piggly Wiggly Supermarkets in Tulsa, Okla., and had no more idea that I was going to be a firefighter than I was going to enter any other occupation. I was 16 years old and the only thing I knew about the fire service was that my grandmother had named a cat “Fire Chief” because it kept getting up in the trees and having to be retrieved by our local fire crew.

In contrast, Cyrillis (Cy) Holmes was a newly named battalion chief working for the California Division of Forestry in Pixley. Gerald Derr was a member of the Elk Grove Fire Department and was about to be elected as the assistant chief; he was going to be paid $150 a month for the job.

The world was different then. Or was it? According to those who were in the service in the 1950s, there was a lot of change in the wind. AM radio was being replaced by FM. There were many fire departments that were already in the ambulance business, though advanced first aid was about all we knew, but the word paramedic was never uttered in the firehouse. The idea of wearing breathing apparatus when fighting structural fires was being debated, and many fire departments purchased breathing apparatus for the first time. Auto-extraction was done with axes and hand tools; there were no hydraulic tools to speak of. The GI Bill was prompting many war veterans to seek an education, which was prompting the creation of training and education systems throughout the country. Gasoline engines were predominant; diesels weren't even considered for fire apparatus design.

While all that change was occurring, firefighters and those in positions of authority struggled with a combination of change and growth. A motto from that era was “the difficult we do right away — the impossible takes a little longer.”

Imagine, if you can, that one of three events was occurring in your career in 1956: What if you were retiring? What if you were starting your career? What if, like Holmes and Derr, you were hitting your stride as a fire officer? How would any of those events have effected your perspective today on the fire profession?

There are lessons to be learned from all three positions. For just as surely as we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Fire Chief now, there will be a fire service looking back from 2056 with similar curiosity.

There is continuity in the process of change, and those who can understand the processes that bring about change are probably going to be the best qualified to take advantage of that change in the future. Those who don't understand it won't be as well equipped to survive. Just because something is old doesn't make it bad, and just because something is new doesn't make it good. What we need to treasure are those things that work and work well and we need to continue to make incremental improvements as we gain experience along the way.

If we could steal a page from H. G. Wells and go back into our past, could we have done things better knowing what we know today? That kind of speculation is an exercise in futility because it implies that somehow what we are doing today is so much better than it was back then. Personally, I'm not so sure. In many ways, I wish we could go back to the past and capture the essence of some of the things that seem to be eroding today. I've had many individuals express concerns to me about a range of things from attitude about the job to the changes in our culture. If you would like to start a real good argument in your firehouse, suggest that things aren't the way they used to be.

It's important for us to observe very closely what has continually improved over time. There have been many changes that have emerged from experience over the last 50 years, and some of them have occurred without us really knowing it. Holmes and I were talking about how much communications have improved on the fireground. We are as far away today from the first fire radios as the first fire radios were from the speaking trumpet installed on fire trucks. Just how close are we to the day that everyone on the fireground will have instant communications and their locations will be readily available for the incident commander? Even so, we still have problems with communications don't we?

As we look back at the 1950s and the symbols of what the fire service looked like, as typified by Saturday Evening Post covers by Norman Rockwell, it's fairly easy to be nostalgic. We learned many lessons that added to our arsenal as professional firefighters. Lloyd Laymen gave us the fog attack. The military surplus equipment that was passed along to the fire service in the 50s along with the civil defense surplus property program probably did as much to help many of the small newly formed fire departments as the FIRE Grant program does today. There was not as much technology around then as there is now, but many of those pieces of basic fire apparatus put out a lot of fires and served as the basis for planning efforts in fire departments today.

However, it's probably more relevant that we realize that we have changed because society has changed. Nostalgia is rapidly being overtaken by the demands of a profession that is changing to meet the needs of a changing society.

The fire service, in fact, has become of a reflection of the society it serves more than ever in its history. Diversity has entered our profession. Those individuals entering our recruit academy of today are different in many ways from those returning war veterans who populated the fire service of the '50s, but we have returning war veterans from recent conflicts among our ranks, also. Each generation can debate the merits of change, but none can deny that it has occurred and that it will have a profound effect on what our profession will become in the future.

In the future we may look back at 2006 with that same negative view of change because our experience is in the now while the future tends to belong to someone else. We may either respect the past or regret it, but either way we need to be reminded that what causes our profession to continuously evolve are those lessons learned that become the foundation for the future practices of prevention. As renowned fire service speaker Gordon Graham said, “if something can be predicted, it can be prevented.” That is the challenge we have faced for 50 years and is will likely to continue to face.

Let's take just one example: the firefighter fatality. In the past, we have been able to say that this is a dangerous job. Many of the basic techniques of firefighting that we take for granted today were paid for by the lives of firefighters. Kingman, Ariz., taught us about BLEVEs. Kansas City gave us better ways of handling flammable-liquid fires. But failure to wear seatbelts is still killing firefighters. Have we learned our lesson there? The list of lessons could go on forever. That is where Fire Chief and its 50 years of experience is truly important.

Since September 1956, this magazine has produced information that added to the body of knowledge and has helped develop the inventory of skills and abilities of fire officers of many different generations. Old-timers like Bill Clark, Keith Royer and Manny Fried set the bar. Newbies like myself, Charlie Rule and other contributors of the magazine for the last 20 years have added to the discussion. Now many of us “newbies” are senior citizens, and there's a new generation out there ready to pick up the gauntlet. May be you are one of them.

What's interesting to me is to watch newly appointed fire chiefs add their 2 cents worth to this discussion. In the last month, I have spoken to several newly appointed individuals who will likely be contributors for the next 25 years. While this is the 50th year of Fire Chief, this is their first year as chiefs. If you would like a glimpse of the future, go through the last two years of Fire Chief and look at the names of contributing authors, write those down, and then come back and visit that list in 25 years. You are likely to see that many of these authors have risen to roles of leadership in the fire service.

In contemplating this article, I think the thing that impressed me most is that this magazine parallels the increasing competency and capacity of the fire service to meet the demands of an ever-increasingly complex society. I am not exactly sure whether or not Fire Chief plans on having a birthday cake to celebrate this 50th year, but if they do, I am sure that the amount of heat put off by 50 candles could possibly set off the smoke detector in the room but unlikely to set off the sprinklers. In 1956, neither of those devices were likely to have been in that room.

It's not too hard to recognize that the reason that 50th anniversaries are hailed as golden — and that the chief's badge is likewise made of gold — is that we place high value on them. When we watch a movie made 50 years ago, we often call it a classic; if a magazine is still providing a valued service to its readership after that time, it deserves to be call a success.

We can take pride in all of those incremental changes. We can look back with fondness on some of our failures. We can anticipate more of the same in the near future. And gold will always be more valuable in the future than it was in the past.

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.