Firefighters shave their heads for a cause

When a group of Mountain Brook firefighters conducted the first Shave-A-Firefighter campaign in 2007, Logan Whitehead was just 12 years old and remembers very little about the actual fundraiser.

Whitehead had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and was fighting for his life when friends of his father, Roger, a battalion chief for the fire department, decided to raise money for Logan and his family by shaving their heads.

“I was still on treatment, so it was kind of a blur,” Whitehead said. “But I could tell the specialness it had for our family. The thing that set in for me was when some of the firemen came to the hospital to see me, and they were bald.”

Twelve years later, Whitehead is in remission, and the 24-year-old is a firefighter/paramedic himself in Homewood. This year, he wanted to raise money for Camp Smile-A-Mile, which provides camps and other services for children fighting cancer, and once again, firefighters came to his rescue.

Mountain Brook Firefighters Local 1295 and Homewood Firefighters Local 1288 are joining with Tonya Jones SalonSpa and Cahaba Brewery for the 2019 version of Shave-A-Firefighter, which culminates with an event Dec. 6 at Tonya Jones SalonSpa’s location in Cahaba Village on U.S. 280.

“It’s kind of like a silent auction for wives or co-workers or other people who would like to see someone shave their hair,” said John Wesley, a firefighter who is coordinating the effort in Mountain Brook. “We’ve got a lot of iconic mustaches and heads of hair in the department. A lot of the people who were involved with it before are 23 years older, and maybe grey or bald or headed that way. Anyone who does have hair left, a lot of the families are tired of it, and a lot of employees just think it would be funny to have it happen.”

Wesley was one of the original firefighters who shaved his head in 2007.

“It was a lot of fun,” he said. “I look like a terrible baby bird when I have my head shaved … and it took about six months for me to get it back where it should be.”

This time around, Wesley is growing a mustache in November, which he plans to have shaved off on Dec. 6. That event, open to the public, will include some firefighters getting their hair shaved, some man-o-lantern shaving (made famous in the movie “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” in which Paul Rudd’s character got his chest shaved in patches and looked like a “man-o-lantern”) and some mustache shaving. In some cases, including Logan Whitehead’s, wives are donating money so their husbands won’t shave their heads.

The Dec. 6 event follows No-Shave November, a month during which some men grow their hair to raise awareness for fighting cancer.

“The fire chief has been nice to us and relaxed some of our grooming rules for that month, so we can get shaggier than we normally would be and then cut it off,” Wesley said.

The end result, Wesley hopes, will be at least as successful as the initial event, which raised about $3,000 for the Whitehead family. “The goal is to get close to that, if not blow it out of the water,” Wesley said.

For more than 30 years, Camp Smile-A-Mile, a longtime partner of Children’s of Alabama, has provided programming for children diagnosed with cancer and their families. It started with one summer camp session, but it now provides a variety of programming year-round.

The camp is an extremely personal cause for Whitehead. It offered him a chance to interact with other children battling cancer. One of those was a 14-year-old named Hannah, who was fighting leukemia of her own.

In January 2018, the two married. They live in Helena with one daughter and another on the way.

Whitehead spent seven years as a camper at Camp Smile-A-Mile, and he and his wife now participate in the camp’s young adult retreat . The camp remains a huge part of their lives.

“Camp Smile-A-Mile has done so much for our family, we could never really pay them back,” Whitehead said. “This fundraiser helps. Any little bit we can give back is great.”