Getting Fired Up Not for Faint of Hose

Joyce T. Bowden gave up everything—cloistering herself for seven years in Montana’s mountains and forgoing her family and hometown—so that, by the age at which some are reaching the apex of their careers, she could be a rookie.

On the second floor of the headquarters of the Cambridge Fire Department (CFD), located just south of Memorial Hall, the 30-something sits at a hallway desk, typing. Her more seasoned colleagues, half-dressed in sleep shorts and the firefighter’s uniform, pass behind her chair and mutter gruff greetings.

She won this chair in February, after beating out thousands of firefighter hopefuls from around the country in a selective process that can stretch more than a decade. It all starts with a civil service exam, the firefighter’s version of the SAT. Hopefuls take the test every other year by the thousands, many of them with lifelong dreams of the CFD.

“You get, who knows, 10,000 people fighting for the same two jobs,” says Bowden’s superior, CFD Lieutenant Steve Brogan.

Cambridge Fire Department (CFD), once the domain of men who passed the job on to their sons, has turned into one of the most selective fire departments as it has added more and more tests to the application process.

There’s a reason it keeps attracting applicants. The 6.25-square-mile area that CFD serves is one of the most densely populated in Massachusetts. It includes hundreds of laboratories with potentially toxic substances. And then there’s the T, which fire officials fear could attract terrorists.

CFD is one of only 32 “Class 1” fire houses in the country—a recognition of the CFD’s effectiveness from the Insurance Services Office, a risk information clearinghouse.

“What that means is that the boys have all the toys,” Bowden says. CFD firefighters get sent to pricey training programs in far-flung places like Alabama and Las Vegas, and they have access to water rescue equipment and other gadgets that firefighters at other fire departments can only dream of.

But only the carefully selected few get to play with the toys—the kind of men and women who dive into the burning building instead of dousing it from afar.

“You could be a triathlete and, after five minutes in a fire, you could be exhausted,” Brogan says. CFD firefighters, however, “are knocking each other down to get inside the [burning] building.”

FAMILY MATTERS

On the ground floor of the station, the red-and-white trucks gleam and pump diesel fumes into yellow hoses. The department has come a long way since the days of horse-drawn rescue trucks, but up a back set of stairs to the firefighter’s quarters, it often seems that little has changed. Green metal lockers fill one room, and beyond it scraggly mattresses rest on bed frames that Brogan, the lieutenant, jokes are remnants of World War I.

Brogan, 46, a member of the old guard at CFD, is the descendant of a family with a rich pedigree in firefighting: the Friels. As a boy in North Cambridge, he played at the CFD station, the same one where his grandfather had made the Friel name famous by creating the country’s second rescue team. In the office that he shares with a set of three other rotating lieutenants, Brogan proudly shows a copy of a photo of his grandfather with the pioneering horse-drawn rescue team.

After Brogan’s grandfather, the rest of the family’s males joined the CFD—Uncle Willy Friel, two of his brothers, his cousin Ed, maybe a few other uncles. It’s hard to keep track, Brogan says, smiling. The black sheep was one uncle who left CFD for law school.

But even with his legacy, Brogan didn’t aim for the at first CFD. He joined the Navy instead. But by age 26—after taking a civil-service exam at his brother’s insistence—Brogan got a call from the CFD.

“I didn’t really put a lot of thought into what I was going to do,” he says. Despite the fact that firefighting had given his cousin a broken back and his uncle waist-down paralysis, Brogan boarded a flight back to Cambridge.

OUT WEST

In the hallway office outside Brogan’s room, Bowden, the rookie, pulls up the sleeves of her CFD-issued sweatshirt, complete with denim patches and labels. She’s already soaked up the rhythm and ritual of the place, though she joined the CFD nearly two decades after her boss.

Growing up in Cambridge, Bowden listened to stories about her grandfather and the horses he used to care for at the Boston Fire Department. But beyond that and a love for the smoky flames and adrenaline, she lacked any connection to that world.

Out of college, Bowden trained rescue dogs before landing a spot as a medic at Professional Ambulance, a private company contracted by CFD. It was a step closer to her dream. On the job, Bowden met veteran firefighters. They told her that if she wanted to have a shot at their jobs, she needed to study—and get herself into a fire or two.

Bowden says that, by the time she became interested in the job, the father-to-son mentality that allowed the same families to serve at CFD from generation to generation had eroded.

Hoping to find flames, she moved west to Montana’s Yellowstone National Park, where she dispersed law enforcement and medical expertise and fought a few fires on patrol. It was a good job, but it came at a cost. She virtually had to give up contact with the world, getting just one day a week to make calls and check mail in town. And every winter, she risked “furlough,” or being temporarily laid-off.

So, on the side, Bowden studied for civil-service exams, poring over study guides and flying across the country to take the state-specific tests. She put many of her hopes in Cambridge. Because she was raised there, she knew she was able to meet CFD’s one-year residency requirement.

In 2004, seven years after first joining Yellowstone, Bowden received a voice mail during one weekly trip into town. CFD had called her over for more testing.

“I finally clawed my way to the top of the list,” she says. But she bought a round-trip plane ticket, knowing she had not yet secured the spot.

GETTING IN

Bowden arrived in Cambridge to be greeted by a barrage of psychological exams and interviews. Then came the Physical Abilities Test, which required Bowden to carry a ladder solo and drag a heavy dummy through a course alongside the other competitors, who she says were mostly men.

She made it through, and snagged an invitation to the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy, where she spent 11 grueling weeks in the classroom and in intense training. She didn’t know whether she would make it, watching as others tripped up along the way—like one who, unable to overcome his fear of water for a pool test, was sent packing.

Bowden jumped, and by February, 2005, she and fewer than 20 others joined the ranks. Still, she reminds herself, she and the other newcomers are still firefighters on probation—she shortens it to “FFOP.” They won’t lose the “OP” until this fall.

Bowden has yet to shed her rookie status, but she’s already left behind romantic notions of firefighting. She and her group work 7 a.m.-to-7 a.m. shifts nearly twice a week. Some of her colleagues work a second job on the side to fill their time and supplement the modest pay.

Then, there’s caring for the station, their home. Every morning they clean the toilets and check their equipment, and on off-days they dip into their wallets or neighbors’ front yards for treadmills and televisions.

“There isn’t a couch or a chair that wasn’t pulled out of the trash somewhere,” says Brogan, the lieutenant.

The heart of headquarters is in the kitchen, where an antique stove and constant cable serve the firefighters. Each month the firefighters chip in $8 to pay for the Ritz crackers and peanut butter that stock the kitchen.

Bowden has joined an institution that’s hard to leave. Pension plans tempt veterans to stay on board, and there’s the pride of the hard hat and fire truck. Then there’s the camaraderie built on mutual meals, a shared house, and relying on the next person for your life. It offers something that Bowden might not find in another line of work—a sense of family.

—Staff writer April H.N. Yee can be reached at aprilyee@fas.harvard.edu.