There have been times when you go into a house fire and you are fighting the fire and all of the sudden the roof will fall on you. One time when I was the new kid on the block, we went on a late-afternoon run for a dress shop on fire in North Park. I was designated to go into the fire with a hose line. You always enter a fire like that on your hands and knees. I didn’t have a mask on because this was back in the 1960’s, and this store was filled with racks full of clothing. So I entered the fire and of course I couldn’t see what was going on, and right away I got tangled up in all of these dress racks. They started falling all over, and I lost not only the hose line, but also my helmet. I was scrambling around in there looking for them. You could see the fire. The glow was toward the back and over my head. I finally found the hose line, and I turned it onto the ceiling area. The trouble was that the water would turn to steam when it hit the fire. It would condense and rain down, and without a helmet these droplets were burning my head. 

After the fire my head was full of blisters, so they sent me to the hospital and put me on one of those tables where you can lower the head or the feet down. The doctor came in and tested me for smoke inhalation, also took all of this gauze and wrapped it around my head so that the only thing that showed was my eyes and mouth. I looked like a mummy! He told the nurses that he wanted them to let me lay there for awhile, and lower my head. They lowered it so far that I was about to slide off the table head first onto the floor because of the tilt. When the doctor came back, he screamed at them to straighten me out before I fell off the table. 

At about two in the morning (remember the run started in late afternoon), the doctor came back and asked me to stand up. They had given me some kind of shot for pain, and I was so doped up that I couldn’t even stand and went straight into the ground. So they left me there for awhile again, and finally called my wife to tell her that I had been burned, but that I was okay. She said that she knew what the call would be about when the phone rang. 

For about the next four or five days I had to be all bandaged up with that gauze, and when I would go outside the kids would run home screaming because I looked like a mummy. That was an interesting time when I was first on the job.