Thank You for your Knowledge

After perusing over many of the stories I have written about over the past five months on my blog I needed to set my readers straight. I am no hero...

I have lived an adventuresome life style, sometimes wroth with danger. It is paramount for you to know that I did not simply grow up one day able to handle some of the life threatening situations I have been thrust into over these past thirty years while serving in the fire service. Yes some of the qualities it takes to scan over a dangerous event came from watching my folks when I was younger, when they ran the ambulance service in Cave Junction. It takes a special minded person, able to stay calm when everybody else is freaking out and to actually help resolve an emergency. I think I gleaned that ability from watching my mom and dad in action.

The real catalyst behind much of the success I have enjoyed serving in the fire service and now Josephine County Search and Rescue has come from the instructors I have been fortunate enough to learn from. Early on, Dixon Davis started my fire learning curve when I first joined the department many years ago. My first structure fire was fought beside the knowledgeable Mike Melton, shoving me into that first inferno together; I have never been the same since. During the center of my career it was the young Jeff Gavlik that took over training our rag-tag department. He would be the one I would credit with bringing our little fire department into step with some of the bigger more successful departments across Oregon. He too would be the one whom fought for the hard to find funding so he could purchase some of the more serious rescue gear they still use today. Simple things like having our own life jackets on the rescue rigs so we didn’t have to wait to save someone’s life trapped in the water, while jackets were driven to us. Mike Yanase was my mentor on the medical side of my life. He pushed his students to be some of the best "down and dirty" medics in the fire service. He trained us in how to scrape the mud, the blood, and the beer off our patients so they could be packaged and gotten to the hospital faster for the life saving medical care many of them needed.

Many of the things I find second nature today I learned by making mistakes and then not making the same mistakes on the next call. I have been fortunate to have had and still have employers that have allowed me to leave my paying job to go help when our community needed help. Rough and Ready Lumber Company were huge supporters of the volunteer fire department and firefighters in the Illinois Valley. The City of Cave Junction and City of Grants Pass have both been very supportive of my extra curricular career on the rescue side of my life.

Without all the training received and moral support from the aforementioned individuals I would never have been able to write about so many heroic sounding stories while living the life and times of billy blaze.