"It requires a lot of upper body strength, as far as throwing the hose up on the top of the truck. And at that point in my life, I really didn't have much upper body strength at all."
I was hired to be on a Model 71. And that was in about, I guess probably the summer of '88. That was my main experience with firefighting as a job. A Model 71 is not your regular tanker truck—it's one of the bigger ones, so it has more hoses, more water. They have more of the smaller trucks, and then they have maybe one or two Model 71's—or that's how it used to be. So it requires a lot of upper body strength, as far as throwing the hose up on the top of the truck. And at that point in my life, I really didn't have much upper body strength at all. Most of my strength always was in my legs. So I had a real hard time with that.