Volunteer firefighter has served company for 68 years

Even Bill Weitzell scratches his head at the question, and he knows as much about this kind of thing as anybody.

On Sunday, Weitzell, 82, will be tending kegs, spinning game wheels and handling other bull-roast tasks at the familiar firehouse at Ritchie Highway and Earleigh Heights Road.

It will be his 60th such feast in the past three decades, he says, or something close to that.

Now in his 68th year of service, Weitzell has been everything from a junior firefighter to an assistant fire chief and bingo caller. He's the longest-tenured person in one of the county's oldest firefighting organizations, and, in many ways, the personification of what it does.

"I can tell you there's just great respect for [Bill] around here," says Charles Disney, president of the organization otherwise known as Anne Arundel County Fire Company, Station 12. "I've been here 10 years, and in that time, he has been [at the firehouse] almost every night. That's amazing for a man in his 80s and a big bonus for a [company] like ours."

The story of Weitzell, a two-time Anne Arundel County Firefighter of the Year in his heyday, offers parallels that of firefighting itself, at least in the county he has called home since he was 8 years old.

He rubs the grayish beard that runs below his jaw line. "The basics haven't changed," he says. "You see fire, you squirt water on it. But a lot of things are different, when I think about it."

Brush fire

An emergency responder is nothing without good timing, and when it comes to his favorite pastime, Weitzell has had that from the start.

Born in 1928 in Baltimore, he was too young to serve when World War II broke out. By the 1940s, his family was living in Severna Park, then a mostly rural enclave.

Most healthy young adult men were in the armed services, which left the fire company near his home in need of help. He joined the Earleigh Heights unit, then based on Truck House Road, at 15.

"There was really nothing else to do," Weitzell says. "There were only two movie houses nearby. There weren't any stores. We'd socialize [at the firehouse], help out on bull roasts and so forth. Of course, it was exciting just to be a fireman."

When there was action, it was a snapshot of mid-20th-century firefighting.

The firehouse had only a party phone line, and when operators called in with emergencies, it triggered a succession of events. First came the siren blasts: two if the crisis was to the south, four if to the north, six for the west, eight for the east. Those on duty jumped on the back of the company engine, standing on the bumper as it roared to its destination.

They wore the garb of the time: black coats and pants, not today's visible bright colors. They lacked the protective gloves, air masks and hard-soled boots that are standard now.

When they arrived, they had to find water sources — creeks, inlets, ponds.

"Anne Arundel hadn't heard of hydrants," Weitzell says.

The weeks tended to blend together for the junior firefighter, but they helped him develop a feeling many firefighters describe — that of belonging to something bigger than himself.

But he did get one unforgettable look into how far his craft had yet to go.

At home one afternoon, Weitzell heard the wailing of what sounded like a thousand sirens. Looking outside, he saw a sky filled with smoke. A brush fire was roaring across the countryside.

He rushed to the fire line, where he found himself alongside firefighters from all over the area, squirting water from the best gear he could get his hands on — a five-gallon pump tank he wore on his back.

He could only watch as the blaze jumped Ritchie Highway and raced toward Baltimore.

"When it got to Curtis Bay [six miles away], there was nothing left for it to burn, so that was it, thank goodness," he says. "A lot of the time there wasn't much you could do."

Growth of a company

As an emergency unit, today's Earleigh Heights Volunteer Fire Company Inc. — an independent, public-supported corporation — is a far cry from the one for which Weitzell signed up in 1943.

It has 140 members, according to Chief Ed Detwiler, 20 of whom are career firefighters employed by Anne Arundel County. Nearly 40 are volunteers.

The company owns six pieces of major equipment, including its crown jewel, a $390,000 Pierce Dash engine nicknamed the Rocket. It has a 515-horsepower engine, a 750-gallon tank and 1,700 feet of hose. Emergency medical technicians man an ambulance.

As at each of the county's 31 firehouses, two career professionals are on hand at all times — alongside volunteers who have received identical formal training.

"It's really a first-class operation," says Weitzell, who was on the firefighting side of things for 45 years. "Almost every volunteer company is that way now, whether it's in the county, in Maryland or someplace else."

It took a while for things to get that way.

Historians aren't sure, but some believe that when 14 residents of Earleigh Heights got together to form a fire company one night in 1918, it was the county's first. Within a year, the fledgling group had laid out $75 for a firetruck — a horse-drawn cart that carried axes, buckets and ladders — and set up a "station" — a portable wooden shed.

The next few decades were a study in how firefighting entered the modern age.

They laid out $498 for a "chemical wagon," an extinguishing unit mounted on the chassis of a Ford Model T. They bought a pumping engine in 1930, an ambulance in 1945, and mobile radios and an emergency phone system in 1950. By the early 1970s, the Earleigh Heights company boasted a centralized dispatching system and the county's first firehouse-based emergency medical services.

The company moved from Truck House Road to the Ritchie Highway site in 1958, paying $6,000 for 4 acres of land. The company's 80 auxiliary members, including Weitzell, still use the firehouse to stage the events that fund the majority of its operating budget, including one big carnival and two bull roasts per year.

Just as he links past and present, Weitzell bridges the two key elements of any volunteer company: firefighting and administration.

He started the weekly bingo nights during the 1970s, when he was still a "riding" member, and ran the operation for three decades, sometimes grossing six figures a year.

He's still there every Wednesday night, helping raise as much as $2,500 per session.

"Somebody whose house is on fire might not agree with this, but fundraisers like Mr. Bill might be our most important members," Detwiler says. "Without the money they raise, we'd have no vehicles to come and rescue anybody."

Emergency calls

Weitzell lives with Judy, his wife of 37 years, in a ranch house near Severna Park High School. They raised eight children together — four from Weitzell's first marriage, four from Judy's.

"The amazing thing is, they've always gotten along," he says.

He's retired from his paid job as an engineer — for more than 40 years, he tended the boilers at a condo complex in Washington — but a visit to his basement den amounts to a tour of his real passion, the career from which he never made a dime.

A white dress hat and white hardhat hang on one wall. Then there are the face plates he wore on his helmets, leather shields that symbolize his ranks: firefighter, lieutenant, captain, assistant fire chief.

Weitzell is known today as a stalwart around the firehouse, a man who served on the board of directors, sits in on planning meetings, helps recruit volunteers. But everything, it seems, began with the firefighting. At times, he complains of a failing memory. The mementos sharpen his recollections. Some are grim. Once, when he was a young man, he was called to a house fire. He entered the two-story home only to find a 10-year-old boy who seemed to be hiding under a bed. As he drew near, he saw the boy had not survived.

Then there were those moments, as the fireman puts it, "where you actually do something right," such as on March 2, 1973.

That night, the familiar call for a house fire came in. When Weitzell, a captain by then, arrived on the scene, he ordered his crew to knock out all the upstairs windows.

"I thought we should let some of the heat and flames out," he says.

He entered the house, crawled upstairs through the smoke, and spotted a crib. A baby lay inside. He tossed his hat out the window — a fireman's request for a ladder — and handed the child to a crewmate.

Two others in the house died, but the girl survived.

He never met the child's father, who happened to be away that evening, but the man sent him holiday cards for years. One is framed on his wall, not far from a citation he won for his deed. "As I write this note, I am looking at my [child]," it reads. "If it weren't for you, she would not be here. I can't imagine a world without her."

Serving

You won't catch Weitzell dwelling on such things. He's usually too busy caring for Judy, who has been ailing, or preparing for the next firehouse event — like this weekend's bull roast, which he figures will draw the usual crowd of more than 200.

"We'll have all kind of food — pit beef, ham, turkey, shucked oysters," he says. "We'll have oyster fritters, oyster stew, a garnish table. You can bring your own bottle if you don't want beer." At $35 a head, it should raise a goodly sum for Company 12.