Willow Fire Chief brings decades of experience to new job

WILLOW — It’s pretty common for smaller fire departments to employ just one full-time person working a regular, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule.

Everyone else, then, is either a volunteer or paid only when training or responding to a call.

In the case of the Willow and Caswell fire departments, they actually share a full-time chief — Mahlon Greene.

“My schedule’s 8 to 5, five days a week, but I’m also pretty much on call 24-7,” Greene said. “I think it’s important at least for the first couple of years that I try to go on all the calls just to mentor the other firefighters to teach them how to do my job so that maybe a couple of years down the road I can stay home and maybe listen to the call and let them handle it.”

Greene has been filling in as chief in Willow since the spring of 2013. The borough officially made him the permanent, official, full-time chief in a ceremony last month.

“I just thought it was great opportunity to help people up here in a place that I love,” he said of the offer to first become temporary chief.

Greene said he’s got a cabin on the Kashwitna River near Mile 82 of the Parks Highway, so before he became chief, it was an area he visited whenever he had the chance.

“I live up here at my cabin all week long and then I just go back to my house in Wasilla on the weekend to see if everything’s OK,” he said.

Greene came into the department in the wake of the abrupt departure of the prior chief, who left under circumstances that weren’t ever fully explained publicly. In turn, the department has been chronically understaffed.

“There were a lot of challenges just from the lack of, you know, the responders up here. The members that were still responding to fires, they really needed some leadership. Some of the key people that were here keeping things going after the chief was gone, they were doing everything and they were getting burned out,” he said.

Like a lot of firefighters, Greene kind of grew up in firefighting.

“In my hometown in Columbia Falls, Montana, where I grew up and went to school, my dad was the local volunteer fire chief and then when he retired from that, my uncle became the fire chief of that community,” he said. “I used to go to fire trainings with my dad and uncle and hung out there and I just always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to be a volunteer firefighter.”

After high school, Greene went to community college in Montana but soon decided he wanted to do something else. His brother had moved to Anchorage and was working for the Carrs grocery store chain. That was in the early ’70s, and the chain had just added a branch on Dimond Boulevard, which looked a lot different then.

“The store was kind of out in the middle of nowhere,” Greene said.

He signed on stocking the shelves at night and worked in grocery stores in one capacity or another for the next decade, until he got a job driving a truck for Wonderbread. In Anchorage, which has had a professional fire department for a long time, Greene didn’t have much opportunity to do volunteer firefighting. That changed when his trucking job brought him to Mat-Su.

“When I moved out to the Valley in the early ’80s I just decided, wow, you know, I’ll check out the local fire department, and actually one of the deputy chiefs at the time worked with my wife at Xerox and he talked me into coming down and joining,” he said.

That was the start of what would turn out to be 27 years responding for the Central Mat-Su Fire Department. Greene rose to the rank of assistant chief.

In his professional life, Greene eventually put enough time into his Teamsters job driving the bread truck that he was able to retire at a higher rate of pay than he was earning. So he took the retirement, intending to spend more time volunteering with Central. But eventually, through some friends, he wound up working for the state Fire Marshal’s Office doing public education. That’s the job he eventually retired from to be a chief.

He said, so far, he loved his new job. He said he gets out of the office when he wants to and he has the opportunity to mentor young firefighters.

“Being a chief is a goal I’ve had all my life,” Greene said.

In a conversation with Jack Krill Sr., one of the former chiefs of Central, he recalls saying as much.

“He asked me what my goals were and I said, ‘to have your job,’” Greene said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.