SENTIALS OF FIRE FIGHTING® AND RESCUE CTURAL FIRE FIGHTING: INITIAL RESPONSE STRATEGY AND TACTICS
PUMPING AND AERIAL APPARATUS DRIVER/OPERATOR HANDBOOK
CHIEF OFFICER OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY, HEALTH, AND WELLNESS FIRE INSPECTION AND CODE ENFORCEMENT
VE FIRE INSTRUCTOR
provided some information (Figure 7) . Formed in 1937, this degree program is now known as the School of Fire Protection and Safety Engineering Technology. A chemist and high school football coach before he became a volunteer firefighter and fire chief in West Virginia, Douglas was respected as a researcher in fire prevention and control. As head of the first academic program for fire fighting in the United States, he sometimes turned to his students for the “how-to” of the job. He also liked to film his students in practical exercises with his movie camera. At times, fire protection students contributed information directly to Heisler, who liked to give them problems to solve using some piece of equipment. It should be noted that the first actual fire protection-related degree program in the U.S. dated back to 1911 at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. However, this was a fire engineering program, not a fire service program. Longtime OSU Fire Protection and Safety Professor Pat Brock was an alumnus of the IIT program. That program was ultimately discontinued. Whatever the source of the material in the manuals, demand for them soon allowed their production to move out of the amateur class. In 1937, Heisler’s secretary, Doris Walton, began typing the manuals on a specially purchased long-carriage typewriter. The typed text was illustrated by a young architecture student, Fred Pojezny. After review by Heisler’s expert advisors, the drafts were professionally printed and bound in the red covers that became a tradition for IFSTA manuals. Eventually, ten (10) “Red Books” covered each of the 10 basic skills identified at the meeting in 1933, and many others were added later, as the need arose (Figure 8) . Note that the red covers were not something that Heisler chose. They were actually the stock cover material that was used to bind all texts at the Oklahoma A&M printing shop where the manuals were produced. The connection of red to the fire service was merely a coincidence. However, red remains a major component of IFSTA manual covers to this date.
Figure 7
Figure 8
By 1945, the manuals were an indisputable success. Delegates to the validation conferences took a proprietary interest in the manuals and recommended them to colleagues. The Western Actuarial Bureau also encouraged use of the manuals in local firefighter training programs as a way to lower a city’s insurance rating. The NFPA also publicized the availability of the manuals in Volunteer Fireman magazine and announced the appearance of each new manual addition to the series. Several states adopted the “Red Books” as their official training manuals and distributed them under their own cover. Pennsylvania was the first, followed by Arkansas, New Mexico, Indiana, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, and Missouri. The U.S. Armed Forces also began using the manuals. Heisler reported an order from the military for 2,000 copies in April, 1945. The manuals had also gone overseas to military installations and foreign officials. By 1953, an estimated one-half million copies were in use. This growth continued for several years as the demand for training materials increased. Following the example of Oklahoma A&M (which became Oklahoma State University in 1957), many colleges and universities began offering academic credit for new courses in fire protection. Many of the returning World War II veterans who inundated college campuses in the 1940s and 1950s enrolled in these courses. Since most of these new programs preferred to avoid the expense of producing their own texts, many adopted what was already available — the “Red Books.”
10 IFSTA /FPP: THE FIRST 90 YEARS
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