Andy Schryvers, left, and Elmer Parker attended an open house retirement party recently in their honor.

Submitted photo by Dan Belderrain

"In those days it was all volunteer," said retiring McMinnville Fire Department volunteer Elmer Parker. "Even the fire chief was a volunteer."

By "those days," he means 1949, just four years after the Allies claimed victory in World War II.

He followed his father into volunteer fire service. It seemed like a natural thing to do.

Fellow volunteer Andy Schryvers also signed on in 1949. And he's also hanging it up after 60 years of continuous service.

But he arrived by a very different route. He was, in effect, drafted.

Schryvers was working at the Farmers Co-op Creamery at the time. He was recruited because he had undergone firefighter training in San Francisco during his service in the U.S. Navy.

He was first trained as an aviation machinist. But the Navy found it didn't have any immediate openings in that area, so sent him on to firefighting school.

"I don't know how the information got out," Schryvers said. "But they came out to the creamery and asked me if I would join the volunteer fire department."

He joined, and it stuck. For 60 years.

Parker is a McMinnville native. He enrolled at Linfield College after high school, but spent every spare moment, including his summer and Christmas breaks, working in the woods.

The woods eventually won out.

"I've been in the timber industry, one way or another, all my life," he said. "We've still got tree farms that we manage."

However, he did return later and finish his degree.

Schryvers' family settled in McMinnville in 1937, when he was 12. And he finished his schooling there.

"High school was probably one of my most fun times, because I had no decisions to make," he said. But that would soon change, as male members of the Class of 1943 were needed for the war effort.

"When I graduated, I had to go into the Army, Navy or Marines," he said. He picked the Navy.

After mustering out and getting married, he returned to McMinnville with his bride in 1947 to begin raising a family.

These days, becoming a full-fledged firefighter requires a year of intense training.

But back then, you just signed on and suited up. You got your training on the job.

"It's changed a lot," Parker acknowledged. "When we first joined, they just assigned us to a truck - and a captain to train us."

They feel their experience as volunteer firefighters has been more than worthwhile. The most rewarding moments come, they agreed, when a life and a building can be saved.

"If you get your call soon enough, you can do that," Schryvers said. "We're helping people, and that makes me feel good."

"You feel like you're accomplishing something," Parker said.

The two longtimers no longer rush into burning buildings to battle blazes, which they did routinely back in the days before air packs were invented.

Smoke? You just inhaled it and went on, they said.

These days, they are playing a support role. Still, it's a critical one.

"We're on the squad," Schryvers said. "We have all the backup equipment. That relieves the young guys to fight the fires."

The two work together, gathering the necessary equipment and getting it set up where it's needed. The most essential element of that is keeping firefighters supplied with air.

"They have 45 minutes of air," Parker said. "Their alarm goes off in half an hour, so they have 15 minutes to get out of the building.

"They come to our truck, and we either refill their bottles or we exchange bottles so they can go back in."

That would be bottles they never had in their day, of course. Nonetheless, they feel their generation was, in some ways, blessed in comparison.

"It's not that we had it easy," Schryvers said. "But we had a world where we could trust people. We didn't have the things that are in the world today."

Still, he feels he and his 60-year partner are leaving things in pretty good hands as they relinquish their duties in order to spend more time with their ever-supportive wives. "We've got a lot of good young people coming in," Schryvers said.

Parker said, "McMinnville has been a good town for us." And he hopes it can be equally good for those to follow.