Northeast corner of Parker and Orchard roads in the Le Peep restaurant.
“I’m looking for Joe Shovlin,” I say to a table of men.
“Right over there at the end of the table,” one says, pointing. “I suppose I should have asked if you were a process server first,” he says, and his breakfast buddies crack up.
Jim Breeden is his name. He was on the Aurora Fire Department from 1972 to 2000, and he’ll tell you exactly when firefighter camaraderie started going downhill. That’s his phrase, going downhill, and some would say it never has, but this is his take, and where was he? Oh, yeah, that dark day.
“They brought in the automatic dishwashers,” he says. “Some will say it was when women came on, but that’s just not true. A lot of gals were just as good as the guys. Some weren’t, but same is true of the guys.”
But before the dishwashers were installed, you had a guy doing the washing, a guy doing the rinsing, a couple doing the drying. Every once in a while, some joker would slip the clean plates back into the dirty pile because, at the heart of things, they were still 12 years old.
Breeden tells me all this later, after I’ve squeezed in between Shovlin and an amiable man named Jack Dishong, who keeps a toothpick tucked behind his ear and says things like, “I’ve seen more hair on a piece of bacon.”
Shovlin, pronounced shuvlin, he says, as in shuvlin’ snow, is known here as Joe Pat, and back in the days, he cooked station-house meals, as Paddy Crocker. No one sitting at this table, and there must be 20 retirees, goes back as far on the Aurora Fire Department as Shovlin. 1958 to 1988. Shovlin is 80 now.
If they’d hire him, he says, he’d go back on the job tomorrow, “but no one wants an old duffer like me.”
They call themselves the RODEO. Bud Hills came up with the name. Retired Old Dudes Eating Out. It’s a male-dominated group. Most of the department’s women haven’t reached retirement, yet. After each monthly breakfast, Shovlin will send e-mails to those present and absent. They read like a cross between meeting minutes and a family letter.
“Jan. 5, 2010. We had a pretty good turnout to start the NEW YEAR! Ralph Scalf came this morning and we had a good talk about how things were going and if he’s still square dancing and how everything else was going. All in all everyone was busy talking until it was time to order the food and then talking some more until the food arrived.”
“How long have you been meeting?” I ask, a question that generates some discussion before they settle upon eight years. Maybe. One day RODEO came into being, and it was as if it had always been.
“How long” isn’t the right question. The question is why. Sure, you have nostalgia. They lived together in the station house. They depended upon each other on the line. They spent years riding lulls punctuated by adrenaline. “You could almost call it a family,” says Dishong, 1970-2000.
But, there’s this, too. The city has changed. For better or worse, depending upon how you look at it. The department’s changed. Ditto that. Their lives changed upon retirement. Walk into a station now, and you’re just another John Q.: “Can I help you, sir?”
But the job mattered. The people they worked with mattered. The gathering is not so much an exercise in sentimentality as it is a touchstone. “It’s comfortable,” says Rich Penny, 1973-2006. “It’s like putting on an old shoe.”
Shovlin is the information center of the group. Someone dies, he sends out an e-mail. Someone retires, he tries to recruit them to the group. Shovlin went out as a captain, though he had higher aspirations. He wanted to be a chief one day. “He just don’t have any sense about him,” says Rick Painter. Ole Paint, they call him, and he clocked in the longest time on the job. Thirty-nine years. He just retired last August. “Yeah,” he says, “I had to lay low a lot of years to get that.”
I give them an excuse to indulge in memory, and they tell about the New Year’s fire where the ground iced up so quickly, the crews covering it kept slipping and falling and a citizen reported them drunk. They all had to go downtown for breath tests. They tell me about the fun fires, the ones where no one got hurt, and what the sirens did to their hearing. They agree J.W. Speed was the best chief they ever had because he was smart as a whip and could chew a man out up one side and down the other, but when it was over, it was over. When they talk about the station houses, they refer to each in plural, “when I worked the twos,” and “over at the sixes.”
Shovlin writes the names of every retiree who shows up in neat cursive. He takes the list home for his RODEO dispatch. I’ll get the e-mail hours later. Twenty firemen and three guests, he reports, and he names every single one of them.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
