Firefighter Rowe walked slowly around to the front of the red engine, past the children with their plastic helmets and the table of lemonade, and crouched at the bumper where a small brass plate had been polished by forty years of passing hands. He read the six names aloud, one at a time, and his voice grew quieter with each of them. When he reached the last one, he stopped. “Margaret Kinney,” he said. “Volunteer Firefighter. First woman to ride this engine.” I am Margaret Kinney, eighty one years old, and I stood by the folding table in my church cardigan with a little silver Maltese cross pinned over my heart, and every person at the open house had turned to look at me.
In 1974, the women of the Kettering Fire Auxiliary raised eleven thousand dollars with bake sales and rummage tables to buy a new pumper for a station that could not afford one. There were six of us on that plate. In 1977, when the department was short of volunteers, the chief asked me, half joking, if I could pull a hose. I could. I rode Engine 7 for eleven years and fought forty one structure fires, and I never once asked for my name on a wall. The cross on my cardigan was given to me on my last day, by a chief who was crying.
The old chief himself, Walt Brenner, ninety one years old and sitting in a lawn chair beside the garage door with a paper plate on his knee, got to his feet with the help of his cane. “Maggie,” he said, loud enough for the whole yard to hear. “Maggie Kinney. I would know that chin anywhere.” The children with the plastic helmets had gone silent. A woman with a stroller put her hand over her mouth. A teenage volunteer in a station t shirt pulled out his phone, and then put it away again, as if he had decided it did not belong in the moment.
A silver Maltese cross on a church cardigan gave one retired volunteer the length of an open house to bring a young firefighter back to the truth in Kettering.
I gave my terms while Rowe was still crouching by the bumper. “Young man, I am not angry with you. You are twenty four, you are proud of this uniform, and you thought you were protecting it. I would ask two things. First, that you stand up and read these six names to every group that comes through this station, every open house, every school tour. Second, that you find out who the six of us were. Five of them are still living, in Kettering and Beavercreek, and every one of them would love a visit and a slice of pie.”
Rowe rose to his full height, and his face was blotched red. “Mrs. Kinney, I have worked here three years,” he said. “I polish this bumper every Friday. I have read your name more than a hundred times, and I never once asked who you were.” He pressed the back of his wrist against his eyes. “My own mother tried to join a volunteer company in Xenia in nineteen ninety and they turned her away. I told you that the cross was for firefighters only. I am so ashamed.” Chief Brenner put a hand on his shoulder.
But shame can make a young man do foolish things. Rowe reached out in the next breath, unpinned the silver cross from my cardigan with fingers that shook, and took off toward the open bay door at a run, saying he would have it checked against the roster in the office. He got as far as the hose rack. A woman who had been serving lemonade, a stout grandmother in an apron, stepped into the doorway with the pitcher still in her hand. Chief Brenner swung his cane across the other side. The volunteer in the station t shirt ran to close the gap, and a line of children with plastic helmets formed behind.
Rowe stood at the hose rack with the cross in his fist and the whole open house looking at him, and I have rarely seen a man so alone. The old chief spoke in a voice that had once carried across a burning lumber yard. “Son,” he said, “you do not take a thing from a firefighter. Walk it back.” Rowe walked back across the concrete floor, with the children parting before him. In front of me, he held the cross in both palms, and then pinned it, gently, to my cardigan, and stepped back, and stood at attention with his heels together.
The consequences were just what the station needed. The next Monday, the township trustees voted to add a second plate beside the first one, with the dates of the Auxiliary and the names of all the women who had ever ridden the engine, and Rowe organized the polishing. He drove to Beavercreek and sat with two of my old friends. The station began a Saturday program for girls aged twelve to seventeen, with a real hose and a real ladder. Chief Brenner and I sat in lawn chairs and watched, and argued over who had the better aim.
In the name of my husband Frank, who passed in 2016, I started the Frank Kinney Fund. It pays for training and turnout gear for volunteer firefighters and for a junior firefighter program for girls, in Montgomery, Greene and Warren counties. In the first year we outfitted thirty one volunteers and enrolled forty four girls. One of them was a thirteen year old from Oakwood whose grandmother had been turned away from a company in 1966, and who held the nozzle of a hose for the very first time with both hands, laughing out loud.
This past Fourth of July, the station held its open house again, and I sat on the same folding chair beside the lemonade. Rowe gave the tour. He stopped the whole group at the front of the engine and crouched at the bumper. He read all six names, slowly, and at the last one he looked up and found me in the crowd. “And she is here today,” he said. A little girl in a plastic helmet, perhaps eight years old, walked across the apron and put her small hand in mine. “Can I ride the engine when I grow up?” she asked. “Honey,” I said, “the seat is already saved.”