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Photo by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Mason Parker (left), a firefighter with the Mountain Brook Fire Department, and his father, Rigg Parker, who retired from the department in 2022, stand in front of Truck 1 at Mountain Brook Fire Station No. 1.
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Photo by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
A framed photograph of Rigg Parker and his son, Mason, at a wedding in 2013.
When Mason Parker transferred to the Mountain Brook Fire Department in November 2023, he found stacks of old photos, and he was pretty sure some of them would mean something to him.
“We found them cleaning up, and I went through probably 2,000 of them trying to find pictures of my dad and ended up finding four or five of them,” he said. “I remember the jacket he was wearing; I remember the old station in the background. I looked at them and started remembering all these things from when I was a kid. It’s neat.”
His dad, Rigg Parker, was a Mountain Brook firefighter for nearly 29 years before retiring from his role as an apparatus operator in 2022.
The elder Parker said he first got interested in fighting fires through the Boy Scouts’ Exploring program, which offered career experiences and mentoring to middle schoolers.
“I grew up in Montevallo, and they had just started that program,” Rigg said. “I was 13, maybe.”
And one of the career experiences he got was to train with firefighters — just training, not fighting live fires, he said.
“I didn’t take it really seriously at that point, not until I was in my 20s and doing another job and remembered how much I’d liked what I’d experienced at the fire department,” he said.
Rigg landed not too long after at Mountain Brook Fire Department, which he said was “a great place to work — the best job you’ll ever have.”
“The guys you’re working with, it’s more than just people you work with, it’s family,” he said.
Photo by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
A framed photograph of Rigg Parker and his son, Mason, at a wedding in 2013.
While growing up, Mason knew a lot of his father’s coworkers from when the “family” would get together, and now they’re his coworkers too.
“The guys I’m with are all the guys he was with for a long time,” Mason said. “The older chiefs and stuff, I remember being around them when I was younger — they were dad’s friends, not as ‘chief’ or ‘lieutenant.’ Now I see them as, ‘Hey, Chief, how are you, remember that one time we did this when I was a kid?’”
That’s one of the reasons he wanted to transfer to Mountain Brook after his dad retired.
“It had this home feeling,” Mason said. “This is so much fun because it’s kind of like a locker room atmosphere, or a football team atmosphere — all the things you love about being in high school hanging out with your buddies.”
Even though he grew up with a firefighter for a father, Mason said he didn’t immediately know he wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps.
“I never really thought about it,” he said. “I was in college and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and Dad said, ‘Hey, why don’t you try some things out?’ and the fire department was one of those.”
In 2009, he decided to give it a shot, and he “absolutely fell in love with it.”
“It was the structure I needed at 19 or 20 years old,” Mason said.
He started in Bessemer, then transferred to Vestavia Hills before ending up in his father’s former station.
And now, as he follows in Rigg’s footsteps, he understands more and more about his dad and the advice he gave over the years.
“As you come up in the fire department, you start to realize this was why my dad was this way. He learned it at the fire station — lessons like how being on time is important,” Mason said. “All these life lessons I learned trickled down through the fire department. You don’t appreciate that until you get older.”
The Parkers aren’t the only Mountain Brook Fire Department father-son legacies at the moment — Logan Whitehead is now a firefighter in the place where his father, Roger Whitehead, was battalion chief.
