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Photo by Sarah Finnegan.
Mountain Brook firefighters, from left, Jon Head, Mark Franklin, Eric Meyers and Tony Ratcliff pose together in Firehouse No 1.
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Photo by Sarah Finnegan.
Jon Head moves his cattle around his fields on a Saturday morning. Head lives out in Pine Mountain in Remlap and helps manage a farm with his father.
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Photos by Sarah Finnegan.
Mark Franklin lives in Georgia and commutes to Mountain Brook several times a week for his shifts.
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Photos by Sarah Finnegan.
Cahaba Brewing managing partner Eric Meyer pours a glass of their Irish Stout inside the brewery.
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Photo courtesy of Tony Ratcliff.
Tony Ratcliff has served with the National Guard for 21 years and been deployed overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ratcliff serves as a 1st Sergeant Army medic.
Shifts at the Mountain Brook Fire Department — aside from varying calls from the community — look very similar.
“The first part of the day … we’re checking on the truck, making sure everything is where it needs to be. Then, we kind of go into a cleaning routine,” said fireman Mark Franklin, an apparatus operator for Engine 3.
During the 24 hours the firemen are on their shift, they clean the firehouse, check equipment, complete training and respond to calls, among other tasks. Sometimes the crews cook together, like the crew with whom Jon Head works. He’s been a part of MBFD since 2004.
Tony Ratcliff, a plugman for a MBFD engine crew, said many firemen will go to the gym since being fit and in shape is part of a fireman’s job.
“This is our firehouse. This is our house,” apparatus operator Eric Meyer said. “[Spending time together] makes us close. You spend one-third of your life with these guys.”
But the similarities between work shifts fade when the firemen start their 48 hours off.
No average day
At the fire department, Head is a lieutenant, or an officer on an ALS engine company. For his days off, however, Head is a cattle farmer and traveling clinical educator.
“It started as a family business,” he said of the cattle farm in Pine Mountain that he calls home. “My grandfather started raising cattle in the ’60s or ’70s … [My dad, brother, uncle and I] continued that business even after he passed away.”
Together, they raise between 30-40 commercial black Angus beef cattle on about 100 acres. On any given day, Head is performing maintenance on farm equipment, harvesting hay or taking care of the cattle with his family.
“That’s the fun part about a farm, there’s not really an average day,” he said. Because Pine Mountain has several farms in the community, he said, locals look out for one another.
He even looks after his own community as the chief of the volunteer fire department and chairman of the Blount County Fire and EMS Association. Head is also one of the only paramedics in the community.
“It’s essentially 20 minutes to anywhere, and at least 20 to 25 minutes to the nearest hospital,” he said of his town of about 500 households. “We [the local fire department] can bring the treatment to patients much more timely and efficiently.”
And Head uses his training from over the years to help train others so they, too, are prepared.
Previously, Head worked in the emergency department as a nurse for 16 years and started teaching certification courses on the side nine years ago. This past year, he transitioned into a system education role out of St. Vincent’s.
For usually at least one day per week, Head travels to facilities to teach pediatric advance life support, advance cardiac life support, a trauma nursing core course and emergency nursing for pediatrics.
In Mountain Brook, Head is a member of the city’s tactical team, teaches EMS classes at MBFD and helps develop EMS training that has been used statewide. He said it’s his many backgrounds that help him both in and out of the fire department.
Head said his time spent as a nurse has helped him develop that “gut instinct” with patients and farming has been a valuable experience as well.
“Part of what we do in dealing with people is getting to know the folks,” he said. “Sometimes, that farming background and that particular topic helps develop that … entry into their life. We actually find that a lot, especially in our older folks because a lot of them have farms out in the country.”
‘Tactical patience’
As a plugman, Ratcliff is responsible for connecting to a fire hydrant and performing initial actions when arriving on a call. He’s been at MBFD for 13 years and also works with the fire department in his neighborhood of Adamsville.
“I just kind of like working in the area that I live in,” he said.
He has also been in the National Guard for more than 20 years. “I was already in the National Guard when I interviewed to come here [to MBFD],” he said.
He started in the guard as a radio repairman and the infantryman, moving up to become a medic and a first sergeant in the guard. Since then, he has completed two overseas deployments: first for a year in Iraq and later for nine months in Afghanistan.
Ratcliff said as a first sergeant and medic, he was in charge of training other medics and making sure his fellow guardsmen received proper treatment. While deployed, his fellow firemen kept him up to speed with everyone’s goings-on back home, sending him photos and updates in care packages.
“I think being in the guard first kind of helped me with the fire department,” he said, explaining he was more structured and mission oriented. “There’s a lot of times one [role] translates to the other.”
While he isn’t in a supervisory role in the fire department like he is in the National Guard, he still makes sure everyone is taken care of and said the different viewpoints help him understand both sides to decision making.
“When you’re in leadership in one job and you’re in a position of being under somebody else, you kind of understand what the other person is going through,” he said.
Being deployed has also helped him handle stressful situations to plan a course of action.
“You have to learn how to slow down and take in everything that’s going on,” he said. “When I got [deployed], you’ve got an IED blowing up to the right of you, you’ve got someone in the vehicle yelling commands. Coming back to the fire department, it’s kind of the same way [on calls].”
While some calls are simple, he said, others require “tactical patience.”
He said his experiences in military have helped him relate to patients, much like Head’s experiences with farming.
“It comes up and it alleviates that stress in the back of the transport,” Ratcliff said.
Cahaba connection
Eric Meyer, a Hoover resident who started with MBFD 14 years ago, became interested in firefighting because the ability to help others in their time of need appealed to him.
“People are usually calling us at their worst moment, and we have to have the ability to arrive and no matter what the problem is, we have to find a solution,” he said.
But he isn’t just a fireman — he’s also a managing partner of the Cahaba Brewing Company.
“I’d always been a homebrewer,” he said. Years ago, one of Meyer’s friends brought up the idea of starting their own brewing company as others in the area were taking hold. “It just kind of started with that idea and it’s quickly progressed.”
Cahaba Brewing Company was founded in 2011, and Meyer said they started with the goal of being on tap at The J. Clyde in Southside. Now their beer can be found throughout the state.
Because of scheduled days off Meyer was allotted as a fireman, he said he was able to be hands-on with the brewery as an employee as it was taking off.
“For any small business, that’s a huge expense,” he said. And his fellow firefighters knew it was coming, too.
“I’d been talking about it for a while,” he said. “They are your brothers. You’d be excited when something good is happening, then sad when something bad is happening. Just like you are with your family.”
He’s noticed that personal management and leadership abilities have carried over to his job at the firehouse, too.
“The firehouse is a business, just the guys on the truck are doing something a little different,” he said, mentioning that he feels blessed to have a healthy family and two careers that he loves. “Both of them, both my jobs I miss when I’m away.”
And he appreciates the support and camaraderie of his fellow firefighters, too. “If you have the respect of those guys, that means more than any promotion you could get or any job title you could have,” he said.
Balancing act
Originally from Oklahoma, Franklin and his wife moved to Birmingham for better opportunities, where he found the Mountain Brook Fire Department. “I’m going on 26 years with the fire department,” he said.
Two years ago, it was time to move again. But this time to Atlanta.
“My wife, she got an offer she couldn’t refuse on a job she didn’t apply for,” he said.
At the same time, Franklin said, their youngest child was about to go to college and he had a little over a year before retirement. He had also recently closed down the heating and air business he previously ran and had stopped leasing many of the homes he rented out in Birmingham.
“It was kind of the perfect opportunity for where we were in that position in our life,” he said. “The only thing I was doing was this [at the MBFD].”
Now, Franklin starts his commute from Atlanta around midnight before each shift.
“I like that time because there’s less traffic on the road,” he said. “We have enough space where I can go into the station and get in a bed [before my shift].”
Both his background in renting homes and working on the air duct system aided him as a fireman as well.
“When you’re working on houses you learn about houses,” he said. “Heating and air is like electric and plumbing combined.”
There’s also problem solving, customer interactions, time management and knowing how units operate. Franklin said he can go into a house on some calls and recognize if a burning smell is coming from the heating and air conditioner.
“Electricity, heating and air equipment, lights … all that helps because it’s all intertwined,” he said. “You know how things are built and work.”
And he still keeps a balance with family, the fire department and the drive over.
While Franklin admitted that he may have changed his plans as a fireman if he had longer left at the department before moving, he did say that there is one thing staving off his retirement: his books.
“[Retiring] would kill my listening time [for books],” he joked. “I’d never read a book before I came to the fire department. I’ve read the whole time I’ve been here.”
Franklin said because firemen work on average 10 days a week with 24 hour shifts, it isn’t uncommon for them to find second or even third jobs.
Many at MBFD do, and Franklin said he’s worked with men who owned trailer parks, operated a pest control business or worked in landscaping.
It’s a balancing act of many abilities and calendars, with firemen swapping out their hardhats for other equipment after their shift is done. And when they return to the firehouse from their other adventures a couple days later, the cycle starts again.
