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Way back in the last century after I left the fire service (though you never really leave), I stayed in the public service by completing a college degree with the money I’d saved fighting fires for $3.02 an hour (I lived in a low rent dump), then moved to the University of Connecticut to enroll in its new public affairs program. The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities in New Haven provided the internship between my first and second years, and one of the alleged perks for our cheap student labor was meeting the illustrious former Mayor Richard Lee in private to hear 
his tall tales of political derring-do.
Our boss had us gather in the conference room one day and told us sternly before Lee entered that what we heard there stayed there. Lee grinned nearly the whole time as he told us the secrets of staying in office, such as having one of his people check the obituaries each day, and if a funeral looked politically important, Lee would show up at the front door to offer condolences as he shook hands through the funeral parlor wake, then out the back door to a waiting car. And he told us, almost laughing, about how to stuff ballots. But the firehouse anecdote caused me to bite my tongue the hardest to keep from saying something honest that would get me fired.
Lee criticized the New Haven mayor at the time for lack of political saavy in how he went about shutting down a firehouse. He said the mayor, in so many words, stupidly went to the station to be closed with a television news crew in tow and made the announcement standing in front of the ladder truck facing the camera. Lee said the fool would lose union votes that way. The right way to shut down a firehouse was, as he did, to visit the firehouse without cameras and meet face to face with the firefighters and tell them how sorry he was that he had to close the place, and he told them with his hand resting affectionately on “Old Betsy.” Yes, he used that name, because the vaunted Mayor Lee, considered then and now a great urban leader, thought firefighters had pet names for their rigs.
Which meant, of course, that I sat there ready to blurt out, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” but didn’t, preferring to keep the job for the summer. Lee confirmed my opinion when the excuse he gave for shutting down the ladder company was one echoed today by New York’s Mayor Bloomberg and his ilk in Philadelphia. Not enough runs. Distance traveled and area covered meant nothing.
But once in a while a city leader actually gets it. The current example is America’s most hands-on mayor, Newark’s Cory Booker, who gained a ton of press attention for a couple of days for rushing into a burning house on April 13 with his security aid to save a woman. After the rescue, standing before the press with a burned and bandaged hand, the privileged (Stanford, Oxford, Yale) Booker expressed a new-found respect for the work done by firefighters with a tone of genuine sincerity compared to the nonsense spouted by Richard Lee or, most recently on April 9, by Philadelphia’s Michael Nutter, who offered the usual platitudes on speaker phone from Chattanooga following the deaths of two Philadelphia firefighters during overhaul after a massive five-alarm conflagration in an old warehouse that had been abandoned for years and used by vagrants who would set fires to stay warm.
Nutter’s words of sympathy concerning the deaths of firefighters Robert Neary and Daniel Sweeney rang hollow because he and his administration remain at odds with the Philly firefighters and arguably with the city residents who are told time and time again that closing firehouses does not add risk to their lives. Brownouts are good for the taxpayers, as is leaving tens of thousands of abandoned buildings waiting to burn in Philly. Imagine the jobs that could be created if Nutter had the dedication to urban renewal that made Lee famous, in spite of his ignorance concerning the fire service.
Imagine the shift in attitude of an urban mayor who did not wait for chance and circumstance to open his or her eyes to the value of the emergency services as Booker did. Imagine an ordinance that required Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Nutter to spend the first week of each fiscal quarter bunked in a firehouse, but not just any firehouse–bunked with the busiest engine company of the city. Perhaps then the urban leadership would see first hand the valuable return on tax dollars spent on fire and medical emergency services. Perhaps the taxpayers would get a greater return on their mayoral tax dollar compared to the money wasted on yet another management study completed to provide political cover to brownout another Old Betsy.
Perhaps. But doing so would take the courage of a Cory Booker who gave his security aid a direct order to let him go when the aid tried to stop him from entering the burning home. Booker may be the first citizen of Newark, but he knew he was also just a citizen of Newark, no more, no less, with the same obligation of any neighbor to help another neighbor just as firefighters and EMS personnel do each and every day.