David Frenzel always remembers that Saturday morning. He was 21-years-old and had dropped college classes the day before so he could start a fulltime job. He was wearing Dickey work clothes he bought at Bealls on Green Avenue. His mother had sewn patches on his shirt sleeves.
The date was April 19, 1969. The Fifth Dimension had the Number 1 hit of the day singing about the “Age of Aquarius.” Frenzel was given his “bunker clothes” and told to hop on the back of a fire truck if the alarm sounded.
“It was all on-the-job training in those days,” he said.
He worked his way up to chief, and has now been at the Orange Fire Department for 50 years. He’s lasted longer than the old Central Fire Station and that Beall’s store down the street.
“I certainly never came here with a career in mind,” he said.
Back in the spring of 1969, he was going to Lamar Tech (now university) studying to be a lab technician in a hospital. He had friends and a neighbor who worked at the fire station and sometimes he “hung around and visited.”
Fire Chief Vertis Sands once commented that Frenzel should go to work there. Frenzel was open to the idea. “Yeah, if you ever have an opening, call me,” he told Sands.
Sands called him on a Thursday and said the department had an opening and he could add Frenzel as an emergency hire. Frenzel said he went to physician Dr. Howard Williams for a physical that day. He passed and Sands told him he could buy Dickey work pants and shirts at Bealls.
On Friday, he dropped his classes and Lamar and bought three pairs of pants and three shirts. Sands gave him department patches and Frenzel, who was living with his parents, had his mother sew them on.
He said his mother was not enthusiastic about him becoming a firefighter. She knew a hospital job would offer good pay. But it turned out, he would have made $500 at the hospital and he was making $456 a month at the fire department. After he worked a while, his mother noticed how happy he was at the new job, and she approved.
He recalls that after about three months, Sands told him he needed to take the civil service test. The Orange Fire Department went to a fulltime, professional department in 1960 and is still the only fulltime profession department in Orange County. The civil service test was required and Frenzel passed with a high score.
Firefighters a half-century later have more sophisticated gear and training. Frenzel said firefighters these days have almost a year of training before they even apply for the job. Now, the firefighters also are trained emergency medical technicians in addition to having training fighting structural fires.
The bunker gear is more sophisticated and so are the trucks. No one in years has jumped on the back of a fire truck to ride holding on to a pole on the back.
All firefighters now ride in covered seats inside the truck. “The truck won’t even start if all the seatbelts aren’t fastened,” Frenzel said.
In his early years, Frenzel, like a lot of firefighters, had part-time jobs to work on his days off. He first started driving ambulances for Claybar Funeral Home, in the days when funeral homes operated ambulances. “Firemen drove them during the day and police worked them at night,” he said.
After the funeral homes quit ambulance service, he was co-owner of a limousine service. “I had a part-time job for 22 years,” he said.
But when he became deputy chief in 1990, he started working office hours, five days a week, and he stopped the part-time work.
He even met his wife, Hildy, at the fire department. The city had the summer “work-creation” program for high school students to work assisting in different city offices. She was assigned to help the fire department’s secretary.
After she graduated from high school, she started working at Orange Memorial Hospital, and that’s when he asked her out. They have two grown sons, Dave and Adam. Both were valedictorians of their West Orange-Stark. The Frenzels also have five grandchildren.
The chief said the worst fire he ever fought was in Port Arthur at the Magnolia Petroleum Company’s tank farm. Every fire department in the region was there. He compared it to the recent tank fire that spread at Deer Park company.
When he worked the petroleum fire, the attack was “wet stuff on the red stuff and when something goes boom, everybody runs.”
The biggest fire he responded to in Orange was in the fall of 1980 when the three-story, woodframe building that served as the World War II U.S. Navy administration headquarters was destroyed. The building at the east end of Front Street at the time held the offices for American Bridge. Arsonists started the blaze. Frenzel said it was so big, firefighters from out of town came.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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