Excerpts from the ChicagoTribune.com:
When Luanne Whitmer took the job as an Aurora firefighter in 1994, she knew there weren’t too many female firefighters around, but it wasn’t until she was accepted to go into training that she found out she would be the sole female firefighter in Aurora, and the first in the department’s history.
“I didn’t know I was going to be the only one,” she said. “It was terrifying. But it had been a dream of mine.”
That dream has lasted 22 years, but is ending soon. Luanne Whitmer and her husband Steve, also a firefighter, are retiring. Fellow workers gathered at a reception in their honor in Aurora. It gave her a chance to reflect on 22 years at the department – the first 19 of those as the only female firefighter in town. There are now two more, who were hired in 2013.
Whitmer was 33 at the time she came on in 1994 – considered an old age for a firefighter to start. But she said the advanced age helped her to have the maturity to be a trailblazer of sorts.
“They made changes physically to the station to accommodate me,” she said. “But really, (the other firefighters) were all really good. I did understand that I was coming into a male-dominated situation. I had to fit into their world, too.”
Luanne had wanted to be a firefighter since she was a child, because her father was a fire department volunteer.
Eventually, she found herself assigned to Engine Company 5, where Steve Whitmer also was assigned. Steve had already been at the department for five years. They were partners for three or four years, she said, before it became something more.
thanks Dan
