From Firefighter to Farmer: A Birthday Tribute

My guy

It’s a big day today!

My husband celebrates another year around the sun. Let me tell you a little bit about my guy.

He retired from the city fire department, where he was a Battalion Chief, in 2020, after 36 years of service to the community.

But that has never been his only job. He’s a life-long farmer who tends cattle on land that has been in his family since 1859. He is also a septic tank installer, one of the few locally licensed for alternative systems. He’s a guy who never lets the grass grow tall beneath his feet - especially at haymaking time.

Farming is my husband’s passion. He enjoys the work because he finds it challenging. Farming gives him the ability to be his own boss and work at his own pace. He loves to see the results of his hard work.

His grandfather and father worked together on the farm, and when my husband was old enough, he joined them. His grandfather passed away in 1983, leaving the farm to his wife, and my husband’s father took over management. When his father died in 2010, my beloved became the next in the long line of family men to take over the farm.

In 2014, my husband received the Clean Water Farm, Conservation Farmer of the Year Award from the Virginia Department of Soil and Water Conservation for a water project and best management practices that he implemented on the farm.

His work as a septic tank installer is also a legacy operation. His father installed septic tanks for a living and was still working when he passed away at the age of 74. My husband began working for his father as soon as he was old enough to be of help and then worked for him full time when he finished high school.

After his father passed away, my husband purchased the septic tank installation business and kept it going.

When he was with the fire department, my husband rose up through the ranks to become a Battalion Chief in 2009. He was in charge of five stations and about 35 firefighters. He was a certified emergency medical technician and chair of the fire department's apparatus committee, which designs new fire engines and ladder trucks.

His biggest fire occurred in the late 1980s, when the TAP building burned down. "It was a cold, long day and a big building with a lot of fire inside," my husband recalled. "The conditions were too dangerous to fight from the interior of the building." At that time, he was a lieutenant with the fire department. 

The flood of 1985 "was the hardest non-fire event we've had," my husband said. He was a firefighter at the time, and his entire department was in mourning because a captain and a firefighter had been killed by a drunk driver during a wreck call a few days before. 

"We were busy constantly getting people out of the water, and we had a few fires," my husband said of that terrible flood. "We couldn't get around town, and people were stranded. Parts of the city were cut off from other parts on account of the water. Our company rescued three people that day on our side of town. We helped get a woman out of the creek where they built the Food Lion Grocery at the intersection of Hollins and Plantation. We rescued her from her car. We used the aerial ladder. We were on one side of the stream and Roanoke County was on the other, and we stretched a rope over and got a boat and brought her to safety."

Now that he has retired from the fire department, he devotes most of his time to farming. He wants to keep the operation going as long as he can.

Today he is mowing hay, doing what makes him happy.

Happy birthday to my best friend and my only love!

(*Written in its entirety by a human*)