James P. Smith was nationally known for his firefighting expertise
OCEAN CITY – Ocean City Fire Chief Jim Smith knows he has lost a huge influence on his personal and professional life. He takes solace knowing that influence extended to fire service personnel across the country
On March 1, his father, James P. Smith, 75, died from cancer. The elder Smith was a retired deputy chief in the Philadelphia Fire Department, having risen through the ranks to the top civil service position in a 41-year career that saw him work on engine and ladder companies throughout the city before he and his wife, Patricia, moved to Ocean City 15 years ago.
Although he retired from the Philadelphia Fire Department, he continued to lecture across the country and spent 36 years writing “The Fire Studies” column in the influential Firehouse Magazine. He was a longtime instructor at the National Fire Academy, where he was a graduate of the Executive Fire Officer program, and Emergency Management Institute. He taught nearly 400 classes.
His son knows that magazine and his father’s seminars well.
“His impact across the fire service is immense,” Chief Smith said, pointing out his father’s many areas of expertise that he shared through his writing and seminars.
Long before he thought of his own career in the fire service, Smith said his father always encouraged him to keep studying and improving himself, a message he shared with anyone he encountered.
“Before I even thought of being a fireman, I was reading Firehouse Magazine because that was in the house. I used to go to all of his seminars that were local. I would soak it in, before I was a firefighter and then when I was on the job,” Smith said. “I could probably teach all of his seminars, including with his corny jokes, because I had seen them so many times. Each time I went I still learned something new.”
As his father was spreading knowledge throughout the country, Smith was using what he learned to pass on to the other members of the Ocean City Fire Department.
“I absorbed everything he gave out and now that I’m one of the elders in the firehouse, dropping that knowledge that he served up to everybody else,” Smith said. On Friday, he sent one of his father’s quotes to everyone in the local department: “Never forget regardless of your rank, that you are a public servant. Treat everyone like you would like your loved one treated.” He said as simple as that message is, he saw it in action when the department had to respond to his father’s house when he needed the ambulance during his battle with cancer.
They weren’t giving his father special treatment because that is how the department treats everybody. “That’s how good our department is,” he said.
“That sums up who dad was, always putting someone else ahead of him. And I see that now in our own personnel. I don’t credit myself for that. It is one of his sayings. That’s how good our department has been for years because we live by that mantra as well,” Smith said.
He said his father not only had the “perfect ingredients for a top-notch” officer, but was “an even better person, humble and nice. He was so chill, an unassuming man, outside of his prominent mustache.”
He knows he was fortunate growing up with both of his parents, whom he credits for personal and professional success.
“Being in the position I’m in, and having one of the top guys ever in the country there as my sounding board, my goodness,” Smith said. “My friends tell me how lucky I am and I know it.” He said his father’s support was there when he was a kid growing up in Philadelphia. His father was a coach and he remembers by the time he was 11 or 12, his dad would be at all his games. “I knew how special that was, even as a kid. He was the only dad coaching. …. He was there every week. I cherished that from an early age.”
Busy start to his father’s career
Smith said his father joined the Philadelphia Fire Department in 1966 and was soon kept running by the riots during the Civil Rights Movement in that decade. Combined with less stringent building codes, as soon as the department would “take up” from one fire scene, there was another they would have to go to. If they made a mistake on one fire, they would learn from that as they went to the next one. That busy turbulent period gave his father and that generation of firefighters an unmatched workload, Smith said, while helping him hone his craft.
Smith paid homage in the same Firehouse Magazine that was carrying his father’s last article. He wrote that he wanted to recognize his father’s accomplishments while he was still alive. He noted his father wrote a book about strategy and tactics, “Strategic and Tactical Considerations on the Fireground,” now in its fourth printing.
“When I became a firefighter myself I realized that I was one of only a few firefighters in the country who had a father with the knowledge base and experience that my dad had achieved,” Smith wrote in his tribute article. “I did my best to absorb his lessons and listen every chance that I could.” He noted he never used his father’s name to advance his own career because he was in a Civil Service town where relatives didn’t matter. “However, I certainly utilized the knowledge and experience that was handed down to me from my dad.”
Smith surprised his dad with his guest column in the magazine because he knew his father would have tried to stop it. His father, he said, was so humble he didn’t even tell his family he made it into the Hall of Fame for Firehouse Magazine.
In his column, Smith also noted the importance of his mother in supporting her husband and family “in every facet of their life.”
Smith said he received a lot of comments through Facebook from people who offered their praise for his father. “They never met him, but they read his work for years” in the magazine.
Family before everything
Smith learned a personal lesson from his father as well: “Family before everything.”
The elder Smith was one of 11 children who was working at Sears as a teenager to help support his parents and mostly younger siblings before getting on the fire department at age 19 in 1966.
His father remained close to his parents and siblings as he had his own family and Smith remembers all the big get-togethers as his grandmother’s house.
“You knew on New Year’s Day, Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, that you were at grandma’s house. It was the Sunday before because she didn’t want to make her kids have to choose which in-laws to go to,” Smith said. “It was always the Sunday before and then she would cook again on Thanksgiving Day to make sure everyone had a place to go to.”
Smith loved those gatherings, which also included “meatball madness” when the family got together to make 2,200 meatballs in an afternoon or a massive cookie baking, traditions that continued after his grandmother died. During COVID when the family couldn’t get together physically, one of his uncles who took up the tradition would send out everything necessary (except a few fresh ingredients) to everyone, right down to the measuring cups.
Now Smith also loves large gatherings with his wife’s huge extended family as well, keeping to the belief in importance of family.
He noted his mom took over his parents’ social agenda when they moved to Ocean City because his father was still traveling across the country to give seminars. “He and mom enjoyed their time in town,” Smith said. “During the first part of their lives, everything revolved around dad and the firehouse and his 10 siblings. When they moved down here dad was still teaching and traveling the country and mom was stuck home alone. She went out and made the friends. For the last 15 years mom was the driving force in their social life. Dad liked that.”
His father, Smith said, “was a helluva man,” and he has done his best to live up to the credos he espoused, but Ocean City’s fire chief admits there is one area where he has fallen woefully short: the mustache.
During COVID, when haircuts weren’t available, he grew his own. “It came in pretty banging, but I can’t take myself seriously with it at all,” Smith said, laughing. “Initially it was really cheesy. My wife said I can have a beard, but I can’t for work (because the air masks firefighters wear wouldn’t fit property), but she said, ‘Just a ‘stache alone? No way.’”
In addition to his wife and son, James P. Smith leaves a daughter, Colleen, siblings, nieces, nephews and cousins.
A visitation is 9 to 11 a.m. Friday at Godfrey’s Funeral Home 644 South Shore Road, Palermo, followed by an evening visitation from 6 to 8 p.m. at Our Lady of Calvary Church 11024 Knights Road, Philadelphia. A final visitation is 9 to 11 a.m. Saturday with a Mass to follow at Our Lady of Calvary Church, 11024 Knights Road, Philadelphia. Donations can be made to the “Charitable Trust” via Philadelphia Firefighters Local 22 – 415 N. 5th Street Philadelphia PA 19123-4095. For condolences to the family, visit www.godfreyfuneralhome.com
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
