Sirens for Service: Newville firefighter of 48 years nearly quit after early career call

It’s no secret that the job of a first responder is anything but easy.

Taking calls can mean long hours, time away from family and PTSD. But every day hundreds of men and women in Cumberland County answer those calls.

Every week, The Sentinel’s Sirens for Service feature will aim to show the faces of these people and share their stories.

The series focuses on why they became a first responder and highlights a specific call from their service that influenced them and reminds them of why they do what they do.

Charlie Alleman

• Friendship Hose Company

• Driver, Apparatus Committee chairman

Years with company:

Q: Why did you become a first responder?

A: I had two uncles that were fire policemen here and I was just getting ready to turn 18. … We use to have family get-togethers every Saturday night at my mom and dad’s, my grandparents, and they said, “Why don’t you join the fire company,” and I said, “Why?” and they said, “You can be a fire policeman, we need fire policemen,” and I was like, “I could probably do that.”

So I joined in October 1974. The night of the meeting, we had an automatic fire alarm, which at that time was pretty uncommon, and we only ran 33 fire calls that year. So to have an alarm on meeting night was pretty amazing and we had probably 50 [or] 55 people there at the meeting and an automatic fire alarm came in and they were like, “Why don’t you go ahead and ride on the back of the tanker.”

I was like, “Well I don’t have any coats or anything,” they said, “Well, you don’t need them.” So I got on the tanker, drove a block and a half to the automatic fire alarm, came back and backed in and I was hooked.

[There are] a lot of ugly things that you see, but a lot of good things, a lot of people still walking around that you helped to save their life, so it’s been better than what it has been bad in the long run.

Q: Can you describe a call that has influenced you? What did that call look like and why did it impact you?

A: Well, I’ve had a lot of calls that have influenced me, some in not a good way and some very good.

I did CPR on the same lady three different times, I basically did CPR the whole way from Newville where she lived in the borough to Carlisle hospital and they got her back three times, so her family thanked me for saving her. The fourth time she had a heart attack, I was at my job, I wasn’t available to go and she didn’t make it and they were just devastated.

That one influenced me pretty badly for a while. I was glad that she had three or four more years to live, but it wasn’t really me that did it, I was just the force that God used.

One of my first fire calls that I ever went on, it was actually what we call an incident. It was a tractor-trailer accident, a guy had run into the back of another tractor trailer and [it] caught on fire and he was basically just trapped by his ankle between the clutch and the brake of the tractor trailer. Back in those days they weren’t built maybe as strongly or as safely as they are today, but he was just caught by his ankle.

We had no rescue tools like we do today, we had chairs, come alongs, pry bars and we knocked the fire down but we couldn’t put it out. They called more tankers, [but] until they got there he ended up burning to death.

At the age of about 18 and a half or 19, that was just about enough to say I’m not strong enough to do this.

We’ve had fires where we didn’t get there in time to save the people. Other times we did. That’s a good feeling to know that they’re going to the hospital and they’re breathing and they’re alive and there’s a good chance that they’re going to be OK. On the other hand it’s pretty hard to take when you know you did the best you could and it wasn’t good enough.

But I think just being able to try to help people, being able to use what I know, my experience to help young guys learn [and] teach them to drive. I mean I’ve driven tractor trailers for probably 40 years of my life besides the fire trucks and I’ve got a couple million miles of safe driving. I tell these guys all the time, we are obligated to teach our young people what we know. If it’s bad, don’t teach them, but sometimes it’s good for them to know the bad things so that they realize that can happen. I just like to help people.