Sugarpine Chronicles: The adventures and strugles of the first co-ed U.S. Forest Service wildland fire crews in California

By David Queirolo

It was early June 1974, and we were on our initial fire with the Tahoe Brigade, California's first wildland fire crew with women on it. We were transported by military half-tracks to an area near the fire and walked out to it along with an all-Hispanic crew. It was an open area steaming with heat, and the acrid smell of burned wood filled our lungs. We were near a thirty-foot hill, and both crews lined up and covered the area slowly, taking one glove off and feeling for heat with the back of a bare hand. Glancing at Sarah and Linda, I thought, This fire is a piece of cake with frosting. The fire gods had a different message for us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9798891574359

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Sugarpine Chronicles

The adventures and strugles of the first co-ed U.S. Forest Service wildland fire crews in California

David Queirolo

Copyright © 2024 David Queirolo

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-89157-418-2 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-89157-435-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Postscript

Firefighting Glossary of Terms (From Fireline Handbook)

Bibliography

About the Author

Preface

In 1973, the Equal Rights Amendment was passed in the US House and Senate and was awaiting three-quarters of the states to ratify the legislation. This set the stage for women to work in jobs that were only occupied by men. Firefighting was one of those jobs. California was one of the first to ratify the amendment; and on a cool day in spring 1974, a meeting was held in Pioneer Park, Nevada City, California, to form a coed CWN (call when needed) wildland firefighting crew eventually named the Tahoe Brigade. The crew would be trained and sponsored by the US Forest Service and be the first one in the United States with women on it.

The Tahoe Brigade, also called Tahoe 1 and Tahoe 2 when it ran two crews, and eventually referred to as OC (organized crew) 33, fought wildland fires with between three to six women on every fire it went to between the years 1974 and 1981. This eclectic crew was made up of college students from Cal State, Sacramento, and UC Davis and mountain people from the Grass Valley and Nevada City area.

There were poets, musicians, singers, former Vietnam soldiers, anti-war protesters, vegetarians, an anthropologist, a belly dancer, ex-cons, and other assorted wonderful individuals who somehow came together as a highly functional Forest Service wildland firefighting crew.

In writing this story I wanted to concentrate on the development of this very unusual fire crew and its many adventures. For me personally, it was an adventure to the outer world. I grew up in Sacramento, California, and I thought the world was what was offered in the city I grew up in—the stores, eating places, baseball fields, parks, schools, automobiles, concrete surfaces, and road signs. Years later, I remember looking up at the sky on a fire in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest and saw what must have been a billion stars gleaming back at me. As a city dweller, there were times when I couldn't even see stars at night.

The lights of the city had blinded me from seeing our place in the universe that was so significant and humbling.

I started this book with an excerpt from John Barbato's wonderful poetic writing about the Tahoe Brigade on a fire titled Rumor Control. John was the first one to help me visualize the thoughts, daydreams, mental struggles, images, and awareness of all those pieces that made me whole as a firefighter in a strange and wonderful place that was no longer the outer world but the natural world.

Sarah Johnston provided me with several short and invaluable writings about her observations and struggles as a woman with the Brigade and White Cloud fire crews. She was determined never to fail, and she never did. Lois Richter added a wonderful account of her time with the Davis Fire Crew. I had interviews with other women from the Brigade: Malou Thompson, Judy Star Kreft, and Linda Bandimere. It was the mindset of the entire crew that we would work together, men and women, and not fail.

I'd like to thank Hal Berliner for his important story about how he was recruited as a squad leader when the Brigade was started. I would often ask a Brigade member about a favorite fire. Hal's very detailed account of his experiences on the North Fork Fire in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest revealed many of the struggles that firefighters face with fatigue on a fire. Yet he still referred to it as a great time.

Les Becicka provided me with the most important details about how the crew was formed. He helped with teaching our first Basic 32 fire school and gave us insights about what we would face on the fireline. He was my most important resource for understanding how the Forest Service operates when it comes to fire control. He was also a rich source, along with crewman Steve Callahan, about the many adventures of our most outrageous and entertaining fire crew member, Miles Rodney.

Nevada City's local newspaper, the Union, provided me with wonderful details about the Nevada City Classic bike race, which are used in this writing.

The Equal Rights Amendment was never passed. It needed 38 states to ratify it to become law. At its high mark, it reached 33 states. I would like to thank the US Forest Service for their lead in bringing women to the workplace in a profession that was traditionally men-only. Also, and most importantly, I would like to thank the many women mentioned in this book who contributed to the establishment of equal rights for women in the workplace and sports. We truly become a free nation when we all have equal opportunity.

Chapter 1

Rumor Control

Electrical storms raged in the clouds, bombarding the land with lightning. The spirits have chosen us to cool the ashen earth. Bodies pitch forward, arms and legs flail among wind, and fire under our white star. Primitive man was trusted with Earth's golden secret—fire! We use it to cook food and warm our bodies. Its radiant light guided us from the passionate story of our beginnings to an ordered, human, civilized world. But time and space drift here, and man is united again with his ancient past.

I thought about the summer I was 14 and had to clear an acre of blackberries with a machete, of how I spaced out into a medieval fantasy where I was Prince Valiant and the blackberries were a million-headed dragon.

Now I was almost 30 and still lived in a tent and what exactly motivated a firefighter anyway: Boy Scouts, Walt Disney, TV, Vietnam, college, lack of response from the gray people, poverty?

The air tanker made its last drop of retardant for the day. Its spotter plane flew around like some nervous little Tennessee Williams spinster entertaining the Harlem Globetrotters with her best tableware.

The crew climbed out of the bus and walked the eastern hogback. We saw 2,000 acres of burned forest and three convection clouds steaming and filtering the sun's rays, so we cast blue shadows and our skin was orange. It was a charred landscape combo served up by Bruegel with a cast by Remington trailing off down the clean-cut firelines. Our helmets reflected the setting impressionist sun. We got to our sector. The hill was about a mile and a half to the top and averaged a good 68 percent slope; so at times you'd dig your fingernails in and climb another step or two, stand back, and start clearing or scraping or shouting or just let your heart slow down as you coughed little nicotine hackers out on the killing fields. We found our rhythm; and then it was dark enough to turn on headlamps and the night work seemed to spiral down into sound dreams, Pulaskis chopping, McLeods scraping, light beam dances and fusions, shouts of, Bump up! Keep in your squad! Here's two pines touching across the line! The CLO, dubious about this conglomeration of gypsy pirates, took us to heart in true 1930s movie fashion when he realized we actually managed to function as a working unit and were just a bunch of lovable kids like Spanky and his gang. We got to the top about midnight. Humpbacker, the gorilla man from another crew, ordered a backfire; and his demon lieutenants lit the hellfires ablaze, and it's Jump back, Jack, pull your handkerchief up over your face so as not to breathe the poison oak smoke.

We spaced ourselves twenty yards apart down the hill, watching for any sparks that jumped across the line, watching and waiting; and in my sector, eyes appeared in the burning stumps. Trees showed me their hero's faces as their consciousness changed to gold fire energy, and in none did I see fear or pain.

The backfire had secured the fireline, and we huddled together in small groups, trying to stay warm till the morning sun cleared the hill. Our first 18-hour shift was over.

John Barbato, Tahoe Brigade Fire Crew

Chapter 2

The Truth about Fire (Part 1)

Fire, water, and government know nothing of mercy.

—Albanian proverb

I remember in second grade all the students were asked to draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up. I drew a fireman with a big red fire engine. It was a lie. I really wanted to draw a baseball player, but I chickened out. I thought I would be teased. The thing is, even as a second grader, I was a really good baseball player. I played every day with my brothers, cousin Crystal, neighborhood kids, and even my mother. Hell, my mother was the first person to ever strike me out. Then again, she had been a pitcher/manager of a highly rated women's fast-pitch softball team sponsored by Monk's Jewelers in my hometown of Sacramento, California—a tough team. The story goes that Monk's catcher, a rather large woman, was playing with the team at the minor league ballpark park and was so annoyed at the home plate umpire's calls that she turned around, picked him up, carried him in her arms, and threw him into the stands. Later on, that catcher went to play in the All-American Women's Baseball League. So yeah, I was struck out by my mother; and yeah, I lied in second grade about what I wanted to be when I grew up.

In 1960, Willie Mays came to the California State Fair at its old location on Stockton Boulevard and Broadway. The old fairground was a beautiful place with brick buildings housing exhibits from all over California. My father, Angelo, had helped cast the Golden Bears in the front of the buildings, which was the meeting place for kids who got lost at the fair (the bears are now at the new state fairground called Cal Expo). My older brother, John, and I caught a glimpse of Mays near one of the exhibits. John, always the braver one of the two of us, went up to Mays and asked him, You Willie Mays?

Sure am!

John, whom I nicknamed the Hunter because he always had a habit of getting cool stuff, especially autographs, pulled out my 1959 baseball card of Mays's great catch in the 1954 World Series. Mays signed it, and I kept that card in my wallet for the next ten years.

In downtown Sacramento, where I grew up, the big red fire engines were the neighborhood kids' pied piper. When they blew their sirens, it was an event. Every dog and even some cats would let out their loudest wail and alert all the kids that there was an event happening—a fire. We'd race over with our bikes and watch the whole thing in awe. It was truly beautiful, and our social conscience about what it meant to the family who lived there trailed far behind. We were kind of in the moment, just watching.

When I was about 11 or so, downtown Sacramento flooded. My friend, Ashley Hartness, got his father's aluminum boat out; and we paddled through the same streets of Sacramento that I knew all too well on my bicycle. It was strange but cool. We came to a house that had been recently burned. It was a different experience—the blackened wood, the acid smell from the flood and rainwater, the smoked-out and broken windows, and the damaged personal items strewed all over the front yard. It was sad. The fire had damaged and displaced a home, and a family. The rain and flood did the rest. That was a tough memory to store.

My grammar school history teacher, Mr. Overton, said that flooding in California's last century before all the dams and levees wasn't all that rare. In the 1780s, about five million acres of California were wetlands. The Swamp Land and Overflow Act of 1849 was a piece of legislation that ceded all usable land due to swamp and flooding to our state government for the purpose of constructing necessary levees and drains to reclaim the swamp and overflow land. That obviously changed wildlife habitats, but that wasn't a big concern back then, I guess. So by the mid-1800s, farmers in the Central Valley of California began diking and draining the floodplain areas of the valley for cultivation. He said that today California wetlands are about one-tenth of what they were a couple of hundred years ago.

In 1964, the Beatles invaded America, so baseball and neighborhood fires took a back seat to rock and roll music. Their first performance was on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. My cousin Gary Schiro was a music promoter. He wanted the Beatles but the only place that would be viable in Sacramento was the 25,000-seat Hughes Stadium. The problem was that Brian Epstein, the music group's manager, wanted what they got for The Ed Sullivan Show, a guaranteed $10,000 (the price of a house in 1964) rain or shine. Gary couldn't take that kind of financial hit, especially with the security needed, so later in the year he went after and got another British group called the Rolling Stones and booked them into the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium on October 30, 1964, five days after their live performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. The concert in Sacramento would be the Stones's first one of this, their second, US tour.

Back at Sutter Junior High School, I was busy handing out concert flyers to my schoolmates which didn't mean very much to them until they saw the Rolling Stones on the Sullivan show. Then it got a lot of attention.

On concert night at the Memorial Auditorium, the place was packed. Temporary seats in the way of mental chairs were put in front of the permanent seats facing the stage. It brought the capacity of the auditorium to over four thousand seats in total. I was located with family members in the first-tier corner seats to the right facing the stage, a great view of everything. John had disappeared for a while, and when he returned to his seat, he was holding his grammar school graduation autograph book. In it, he had gotten autographs of all five Rolling Stones twice! Later on, I realized he had gotten that second set for his little brother. Anyhow, he bragged he sold the two pages for $5 each; that would be a dollar a Stone.

This was my first indoor concert. I had seen Ray Charles twice from the racing grandstands at the California State Fairgrounds. I remember he got up from his piano during one of his songs and walked to the edge of the stage and just danced and sang. He was blind, of course, and it was a little scary. The Stones concert would get a lot scarier, not for me so much but for the people in the temporary seats down below me and to my left. The opening acts went along fine. They even had a Paul McCarney dead-ringer lookalike play just before the Stones. He walked up to the stage holding his right-handed guitar and said, Howdy, and the audience roared. He proceeded to play a bunch of rockabilly songs.

Then the curtain went up; and there were the Rolling Stones—the tall, lanky Mick Jagger wrapped around his microphone stand and Brian Jones with his gleaming blond hair holding his guitar straight up as if it was a mini stand-up base. This was later in 1964, so all the band members had much longer hair than the Beatles had back in February. That same instant I was taking this all in, a great metallic crunching sound came from below as the people in the metal temporary seats were trampled by concert fans rushing through them from behind. Simultaneously a line of policemen formed in front of the performers, and the curtains came back down. It took about ten minutes for order to be restored along with a threat that the concert would be canceled. I looked over to Gary to see if he was at all concerned, and I saw him mumble, Rock and roll. Given how fast those cops got out there, I don't think he was all that surprised.

My favorite song that night was Time Is on My Side. I loved the blues feel and the atmosphere it created in the entire building. Every moment was special.

A few years later in October 1969, Gary promoted a Janis Joplin concert at the new Cal Expo. It was one of many concerts he promoted with Janis. I was off to the side just a few feet from where Janis was performing. It was amazing how much one person could put into her music. It was also a dance concert, so everyone was in motion. As the concert ended, the lights went out. Janis stayed where she had been on the stage, waiting for the lights to come back on. After all, rock and roll always has an encore, right? The lights didn't come back on, and from my place just off stage, I could see her face was filled with tremendous sadness. She started yelling, cursing for the lights to come back on, and still she waited. When the lights finally came back on, she picked up her mike stand, then calmly walked back toward her audience with great joy restored to her now angelic face. Then she hit us with Piece of My Heart.

After the tremendous drama of the 1960s, I was ready for a calmer decade.

I, of course, didn't think much about fire as I grew older and had long ago stopped chasing fire trucks. The only time I remember using fire was lighting up sparklers and Piccolo Pete fireworks during the Fourth of July. That was about it till one day in early spring 1974, my friends Bruce McNitt and Sarah Johnston told me about a coed fire crew organizing in Nevada County, California. So I went with them to Pioneer Park in Nevada City to join up. It seemed like an adventure; it was definitely more than that.

Chapter 3

Woman Firefighter, April 1974

In 1974, for a college student of modest means, a summer job in the woods that paid nearly double the minimum wage seemed like an exceptionally sweet deal. I drove with my friends David and Bruce to the firefighter tryouts in Nevada City, California. We had to pass a physical, including a step test. To pass the test, you had to step up and down on a wooden platform for five minutes to the beat of a metronome. At the end of the five minutes, your heartbeat was measured to test your fitness. During my step test, I developed a small audience of young men. I suppose that the guys there thought it was funny (and probably entertaining) to see a young (and braless) woman jiggling up and down a step in an effort to be a firefighter. Steve, an aspiring comic, asked me if I was there to be a cook. I think he was serious. (I can't tell you how many times time over the years this same comment has been made to me on fires, regardless of my increasing rank.) At this time, however, I was nineteen and still pretty innocent and trusting. I didn't think anything of the comment, except that it was pretty understandable. So I passed my test and started fire training with the other women and men applicants. Fire training consisted of the Basic 32—thirty-two hours of fire science and suppression techniques. We also had to complete eight hours of cutting the fireline.

The Tahoe Brigade was made up of a mishmash of exciting, sometimes talented, always colorful misfits. By and large, they didn't compare with the conformist, semimilitarist core of the rank-and-file Forest Service. We were a group of ragtag outcasts in their eyes…probably only a thin step different from the con crews that they hired to cook food and keep the camps clean. What's worse was the Brigade had a number of female employees—a situation that had only recently come to pass due to the expected adoption of the Equal Employment Act or some such legislation. The Forest Service itself felt up against it; they weren't about to hire women themselves, but the service could see that soon they were going to have to. After all, there were several women from the Brigade, who would someday soon be qualified to apply for FS regular jobs. I suppose the old guard could see the writing on the wall and did not like it one bit. The attitudes of the regulars toward us women seemed to say, Go ahead and try to work with us, but caveat emptor, we're going to make it as hard on you as we can.

Sarah Johnston, Tahoe Brigade Fire Crew

Chapter 4

Training Firefighters, May 1974

In the spring of 1974, the first gathering of the would-be Tahoe firefighters happened in Pioneer Park in the gold rush mining town of Nevada City, California. Both women and men were at the meeting. In 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment was actively being circulated; and 22 states, including California, quickly ratified it, continuing its momentum in 1973. So when Chuck Welch called firefighter Les Becicka and asked him to help form a United States Forest Service CWN (call when needed) wildland fire crew, he didn't specify gender. Les enlisted White Cloud fire crew alumni Eric Toom and Bob McClarty to speak to everyone and sign them up for the physical tests and training. This was going to be, as we learned later, the first Forest Service coed crew. Les, who described himself as kind of straight, was a bit amazed at the number of long-haired men and beautiful women at the first meeting. In context