When you are a firefighter, the exhilaration of the job can quickly turn into terror, as Michael Schwade, 27, learned last September.
“We almost lost a whole company of firefighters,” said Schwade, recounting one of his most terrifying experiences as a Milwaukee firefighter and one reminiscent of this month’s loss of three firefighters in a building collapse in New York.
It was a particularly big fire in an apartment building on Hubbard and North Ave. Schwade said, “They dispatched us, and normally you have two chiefs, two trucks, three [fire] engines and a squad, an ambulance for firefighters. [T]his time it was just us and a truck.”
Schwade and others entered the building and climbed to the second floor. Shortly thereafter, other firefighters arrived on the scene and were stationed on the third and first floors.
As the fire began to engulf the third floor, the firefighters there, unbenownst to Schwade, escaped via a ladder. Meanwhile everybody else had to scramble out as ceilings began to collapse.
“We put the fire out by sunrise,” said Schwade. “The chief took everybody aside and said we did a lot of things wrong, but also a lot of things right.”
So why would a Jewish guy want to enter such a dangerous field?
“You know,” Schwade quipped, “I guess I wasn’t prepared for college. I didn’t want to waste the professors’ time.”
After graduating from Riverside University High School in 1992, Schwade realized he needed discipline. So he joined the Navy, where he “was an aircraft director on an aircraft carrier.”
Because of its maturing effect, Schwade said, “The military was probably the best decision I ever made.”
Following his tour of duty, Schwade was ready to try college again. He moved back to Milwaukee and attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for a year.
But lecture halls and discussion classes did not satisfy his craving for adventure. So when a former neighbor who was working as a firefighter in Chicago invited Schwade to work with him for a 24-hour shift, he was ready.
“I went down there and I was amazed,” related Schwade. “At the time I thought it was an incredible job. I thought, ‘This is heaven because you never know what’s going to happen when you go to work; it is always different.’”
He started going to Chicago once a week, mostly “staying in the [fire] house…. I wasn’t fighting fires because I wasn’t trained. I was their cleaning lackey.”
Determined to become a fireman, he passed stringent written, oral and physical tests and then waited another two years before being inducted in 1998 into the firefighting academy, where City of Milwaukee firefighters receive their training.
Of the 4,000 to 5,000 people a year who begin the process of becoming a firefighter, Schwade said only about 150 are accepted.
After graduating, “you are on probation for one year,” he continued, at which time you are known as a “cub.” Cubs have to “take care of the fire house and do all the work … you have to know where everything is.”
“My first call was a squad run, an EMS [emergency medical service] run,” he said. “Eighty percent of all runs are EMS [related] … This includes shootings, stabbings, car accidents, heart attacks.”
While Schwade accepts that EMS runs are an integral aspect of his job (part of the 16-week academy course includes being trained as an emergency medical technician), he said his passion is to fight fires.
“Every firefighter joins the department to fight fires. We don’t want anybody’s property to get destroyed or for anybody to get hurt … but we like to do our job,” he said.
Schwade said he gets an adrenaline rush every time he hops inside the fire engines and trucks and hears the wail of the sirens.
Being a Jew has never been much of a career issue for Schwade, who was a bar mitzvah at Congregation Anshai Lebowitz. Once in awhile the firefighters tease each other, and except for an occasional “little joke about money and things like that,” the horsing around is not malicious, he said.
He contended that the main problem with being a Jewish firefighter is that his colleagues “cook with a lot of pork and I stay away from it. My dad always asks, ‘So what did you eat today, not any pork?’”
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