Feeling the Heat : Firefighters Recount Tales of Fear and Heroism in Book by Newbury Park Writer

What’s it like to run into a burning building? What’s it like to stand in the path of a brush fire racing up a hill? What’s it like to confront danger, when every instinct tells you to run?

Those are the questions that Steve Delsohn, a writer who lives with his family in Newbury Park, wanted to answer when he started his book called “The Fire Inside: Firefighters Talk About Their Lives.”

After interviewing more than 100 top firefighters across the country, Delsohn learned that those who attack burning homes do not understand why they risk their own lives in disaster after disaster.

“After doing this book I think I admired firefighters that much more,” Delsohn said. “I don’t think there’s a bad thing I could say about them.”

Delsohn, a sportswriter who has collaborated with sports stars on several books, said he was inspired to write about firefighters after watching them attack the huge Green Meadow and Malibu wildfires near his home in fall 1993.

“We were just glued to the television reports,” he said. “Here were all these people fleeing the fires, and the firefighters were running right into it . . . . I wanted to know where they got their courage.”

Rather than selecting firefighters at random, Delsohn searched departments for the best and the brightest. He asked around and found firefighters who were admired by their peers. Whether they were big city firefighters, smoke jumpers or small-town volunteers, Delsohn sought them out.

His first interviews were close to home with men and women who put their lives on the line in Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, Camarillo and Moorpark. To give them more freedom to speak their minds, Delsohn does not use the names of any of the firefighters in his book. He presents an oral history of their heroic feats. One of the first firefighters he interviewed was Niall Foley, a 10-year veteran of the Glendale department who lives in Moorpark.

Many of the stories deal with fear and close calls, and Foley related an eerie experience he had while trying to douse a blazing storefront during the Los Angeles riots.

While he was standing outside the building directing a team of firefighters by radio, two men came up to Foley and pointed their guns at him.

“Maybe we ought to kill you,” one of the men said to Foley.

The men left but not before telling him, “Hey, this is your lucky day.”

Foley said, “I really liked what he did with the book. I think Steve did a good job. He didn’t do much paraphrasing, and used our language.”

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Although Foley’s wife read it and enjoyed it, Foley said his mother couldn’t read “The Fire Inside” because it frightened her to see the dangers he faced.

Firehouse Magazine also gave the book a good review and so far Delsohn said he hasn’t heard anything negative from firefighters.

He has also received good publicity, appearing on such network television shows as “Good Morning America” and “The Today Show.”

Los Angeles Fire Department paramedic Stacy Gerlich, who lives in Thousand Oaks, looks at “The Fire Inside” as more good publicity for her profession.

Gerlich, who has worked as part of an ambulance team for 10 years, said she liked the book’s rambling style, and liked reading about the experiences of fire department personnel in other cities.

The book recites Gerlich’s rules that she tells everyone who ends up in her ambulance: Don’t spit, don’t throw up and don’t die.

“I liked the way it’s written,” she said. “It has good stories and he doesn’t get caught up in the reading-between-the-lines stuff . . . he didn’t put a lot of extra things in there.”

But picking and choosing from the hundreds of dramatic and harrowing anecdotes meant that many good stories had to be thrown out, Delsohn said.

For instance, Delsohn interviewed his luckless neighbor, Los Angeles Firefighter Scott Miller, who was shot in the face during the riots. Two years after that incident, Miller’s Glendale house was destroyed in the Northridge earthquakes. This year his new house in Newbury Park burned to the ground.

But Miller’s stories never made the book.

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Many of the California firefighters who have read “The Fire Inside” said they were fascinated by the stories from New York and Chicago. Meanwhile, firefighters such as New York City’s Harry Wanamaker said they admired the stories in the book from smoke jumpers and firefighters who battle wildfires and mudslides.

“That’s what I like about the book, it has all those different kinds of stories,” said Wanamaker, 53, who spent much of his 29 years at a fire station in Harlem. “I think to a great extent we’re all clones,” he said. “We do different things but, in fact, we all call ourselves brothers.”

Wanamaker made the book, recounting the dramatic rescue of a young girl on Christmas morning from a burning tenement.

“The Fire Inside” does not address interracial tensions in the firehouse, friction between men and women firefighters or how much money firefighters earn in overtime.

“This isn’t about politics,” Delsohn said. “This is about the human side. It’s about what it feels like to be inside a building while it’s burning down.”

For Delsohn, the book helped put the usual subjects of his books into perspective. After years of writing about sports stars, he found new inspiration.

“These are the real heroes,” he said.