OUR NEIGHBORS: Former fire chief still believes in community service

PALMER — Service to community has always been a calling for Dan Contini. In fact, it was ultimately geography that led the Palmer fixture into a nearly four-decade career as the city’s full-time fire chief.

After first coming to Alaska in 1952, Contini became a volunteer firefighter in 1969. With a chance to work full time for the Boy Scouts of America or be the fire chief, Contini chose the Palmer gig in part because it would save him a daily round-trip to Anchorage. He remained active with Scouts throughout his life.

“I just like to be community involved,” Contini said. “I do a lot of time with the Boy Scouts with hunter safety and fire prevention. At the time, (the choice) was either a full-time Scout executive or full-time fire chief.”

Admittedly a little more naive then, Contini said he “was visualizing working for the city would be five days a week and 9 to 5.”

He soon learned the life of a firefighter is 24/7. He helped squelch thousands of local fires over the decades before he retired Jan. 1, 2009.

“The last few years we were making 300, 400 calls a year,” he said, adding not many calls stand out as particularly memorable.

“Some of them, unfortunately, ended in fatalities,” Contini said, recalling that one fire where two children were killed “was the saddest one. They were in a trailer, and they got stuck in the back of the trailer with the baby-sitter.”

Dealing with people in some of their most dire times “is part of the business” of being a firefighter, Contini said.

“Children and young folks probably affected me the most,” he said. “Then there were always the good stories.”

The good stories, he said, were calls that ended with no injuries.

“That’s the first thing you check, are the people out,” he said. “Is it all clear?”

Contini’s contribution to the Palmer community was such that the fire station downtown bears his name, Daniel M. Contini. It’s something that’s normally reserved as a posthumous honor. And while many children flirt with fantasies of one day becoming a firefighter, Contini had no such early ambitions.

“No, I never had a plan,” he said. “I lived in a coal town in Pennsylvania. When I graduated in 1952, I already had plans to come to Alaska, and the plan was to not work in a mine.”

But when he arrived in Alaska, the job Contini had lined up fell through and he found himself working at Evan Jones Coal Co.

After beginning as a volunteer and later as Palmer’s fire chief, Contini also continued his involvement in local Scouting.

“I always thought Scouting was a great thing to do, and I still do,” he said. “It’s a tough standard to meet these days, but for Scouting, I would do anything. It’s great. I look at the old (Scouting) pictures and see the boys, and they’re all community leaders now.”

Now retired, Contini, 75, enjoys the outdoors and his grandchildren.

“I putter in the yard and I have a cabin on the Big Susitna River,” he said. “My wife and I fight regularly just to keep things going.”

And he still has firefighting in his blood. Like many emergency responders, he recalls the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Over the decades, firefighting “has gotten bigger, and there are more demands because the fires and the homes got bigger,” he said. “But the equipment also got better. In the old days, we were always running out of water. Since then, we’ve gotten a little better at it.”

There’s one thing about firefighting that time can’t change, Contini said. “We’re still a little crazy. We’re firefighters; we run into fires when everyone’s running out.”

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.