Editor’s Opinion | By David Rhodes
Fellow firefighters, I would like to introduce myself. I am David Rhodes, a firefighter for the past 37 years who has been deeply involved with Fire Engineering and FDIC for more than 25 years. I retired from the Atlanta (GA) Fire Rescue Department in 2021 as a battalion chief and I have served as chief elder for the Georgia Smoke Diver program (501c3) since 2005.
Eric Schlett, Executive VP Clarion Events, and Bobby Halton, then editor in chief/educational director, approached me about joining the team in a full-time capacity soon after my retirement. The job was to be a fire subject matter expert with the understanding that I would be shadowing Bobby for the next year or two and there would be a gradual transition for me into the editor’s role. Bobby would be slowing down and easing into retirement, and I would assume more and more of the day-to-day operations gradually over the next couple of years. I agreed to it and hit the ground running in August 2022.
Over the next few months, I was in full learning mode: reviewing articles, recruiting authors, selecting classes, still maintaining my role as the H.O.T. logistics chief, and wrapping my head around the sheer volume of work required to keep all the pieces running—Web sites, books and videos, magazines, solicitations (of the next great thing), show planning, and the list goes on.
I confirmed really quickly that the glue holding it all together was my longtime friend and now co-worker, Diane Rothschild (my new “work wife” and now VP, editorial director), along with dozens of great Clarion Events team members whose names you never hear and faces you don’t recognize but their expertise and hard work make it possible for us to deliver great content and education to you.
Bobby and I spent hours every day on the phone talking about authors, training classes, and you and sometimes just shooting the bull and laughing at ourselves, wondering how we ended up here. I don’t know that I have ever seen a greater work ethic and passion for anything like what I witnessed in those first few months with Bobby, Diane, and Eric.
I received a text message from Bobby on December 19, 2022, at 4:32 p.m. It was a link to an online article—no comments, as was typical of Bobby—just a link (I knew this meant, “Let’s see what Rhodes thinks of this”). I opened it and read it, then responded with my thoughts. He replied in agreement of my assessment and the action to take. It was late in the afternoon, and I knew we would pick up the conversation over the phone early the next morning.
A short time later, I received a question from someone else on a matter that I wasn’t sure about so, at 5:36 p.m., I texted Bobby to see if he could provide some guidance. I never got a response.
As we all know, Bobby passed away that afternoon during or shortly after his daily workout on the elliptical in his home gym. I got the news from a close friend in Tulsa early the next morning. In disbelief, I started making calls to notify our company. Although we all knew Bobby had fought a tremendous battle with cancer, he did such a great job with his fight that this really caught us off guard.
To say that the days from December 20 to now have been anything but hectic is an understatement, but that’s exactly what I have been training for my entire career. On big incidents, things rarely go as written on the incident action plan (IAP) despite all the hard work that goes into creating it. If you’ve ever been on a deployment and don’t see IAPs folded with notes all over them, names crossed out, and lines drawn everywhere, you know the plan isn’t working! It’s a foundation to work from, and it’s expected that unknowns will happen, priorities will shift, and new information will be obtained.
Twenty years ago, I lost another larger-than-life mentor, Scott Millsap, who had involved me with FDIC as a H.O.T. instructor. He was in charge of the Georgia Smoke Diver program, and I was asked to step up to lead the organization. I will tell all of you just like I told the Smoke Diver instructors 20 years ago: You can’t fill the shoes of these larger-than-life personalities like Scott and Bobby, nor should you ever make the attempt, so don’t expect me to. They would not want you to try and pull off some imitation of who they were.
So, instead, you honor them by taking the lessons they taught you mixed with your own life experiences and style and you build on their successes. You miss them dearly, but you’ve prepared your entire life by training day after day, grinding and grinding, so when the bell rings, no matter what the circumstances are, you are ready to act. Things don’t always go as planned, so you adapt, build up, and support a great team, and you climb up on the strong broad shoulders of those who got you this far and you respond.
Thank you, Scott and Bobby, for blazing the trail and setting me up for the opportunity to serve! I look forward to sharing my opinions and thought with you here every month.
