John Paull, Career Firefighter
Photo Credit: Montana Standard
Oral History Transcript of John Paull
Interviewers: Aubrey Jaap & Clark Grant
Interview Date: April 23rd, 2021
Location: Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives
Transcribed by Clark Grant, December 2022
[General chatter & setup prior to interview beginning]
[00:02:03]
Aubrey Jaap: Okay.
Clark Grant: Ready to roll.
Jaap: It is April 23rd, 2021. We're here with John Paull. John, I'd first like you to start off and tell me about your grandparents, great grandparents - just kind of your family's history, as you know it.
Paull: Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, great. Well, thanks Aubrey, I think, for inviting me to come and do this.
Jaap: You don't mean that. [laughs]
Paull: Yeah - I was born here in Butte, my parents - well, I guess I'll go back to what you originally said. Grandparents. On my father's side, my grandfather was Lewellen Matthews Paull, and he was born in Marysville, Montana back in 1895. Then my grandmother, Emily Celeste Kingsbury, was born in St. Louis on November the fourth, 1899. And then on my mother's side, my grandfather was born here in Butte in 1905. And then my grandmother - I guess I should say my grandfather's name - it was James ‘Rass’ Mavi. He got that nickname because he had a long birthmark on his nose, and they called him ‘Rass,’ R-A-S-S, because of the raspberry birthmark.
Anyway, my grandmother Mary Ellen Downey was born in Ireland in 1905. Then she came over to the United States with her mother and her brother. Her brother was actually getting close to four years old. My grandmother was like one year and 10 months old. And they came over with their mother on the Lucania, and that took six days to sail over here from Ireland. And they left from Cob. Cob, County Cork, Ireland. Looking at the word, you’d think it’s Cobb, but at the time it was called Queenstown, because it was still under British control. Anyway, they left there and it took them six days to get here to New York City, and they came into Ellis Island. I can only imagine what that was like with the almost four year old and almost two year old. I'm sure they were in the steerage area of the ship, which probably wasn't the nicest part of the ship.
So then they, of course, my great grandfather was working here in Butte and the mines and of course that's where they were heading. On the ship's manifest, it lists that they were going to 926 North Wyoming Street, Butte. I don’t know if it said Butte, America or Butte, Montana. But anyway, that's where they were heading. And what was really weird was on that ship's manifest, it said that you had to have $50 on your person. So of course, for my great grandmother, I assume she had it, but I would be willing to bet she probably did not have $50 on her. And then they just said ‘yes’ for my grandmother and my great uncle.
[00:05:59]
So anyway, then of course it was like they always said, you know, ‘don't stop in America, go straight to Butte.’ And that's how they ended up over here. My grandmother Mary and grandfather James were married at St. Mary's church by Father Hannan. I don't know if it was Hannan or Hannah, but he was there forever at St. Mary's - and they were married on June 1st, 1927. And then my mother - she was the oldest in the family - she was born October 2nd, 1929. For my father's family, my grandmother - she graduated from Butte high in 1919. She went to the University of Washington for a while, then Montana State. My grandfather - he was a World War I veteran. He got out of the service after World War I and then they were married on September 17th, 1919. I'm guessing here that it was probably at St. John's Episcopal church on the corner of Broadway and Idaho. Did I mention that my grandmother was born in St. Louis?
Jaap: Yeah.
Paull: Anyway, they lived at 2001 South Arizona Street, and my dad and uncle Ted - they grew up there of course. They were very lucky because they had an ice skate rink right across the street from their house. There was hardly any homes out there on South Arizona at the time. They were very lucky because of the fact that they were able to learn how to skate right across the street from their house. My grandmother, Emily, believe it or not, we called her Ga, G-A, because my dad always called her Ma. My brothers and I and my sister - we couldn't say ‘ma.’ We called her ‘Ga.’ A terrible nickname to grow up to. [laughs]
My mom and dad - they got married in1952 at St. Pat's. My father was an Episcopalian, and he changed religions from Episcopalian to Catholic when they got married. That was of course in 1952, and I was born in 1953. My mom - she went to Sacred Heart grade school. They lived over at 257 East Granite Street. And of course she attended Sacred Heart starting out, and then they moved over to 317 North Washington. My grandmother and grandfather bought it - it was an apartment house. It had two apartments upstairs. They lived in the basement, and it had a little house in the back that they also owned and they were able to get the money from my grandmother's uncle, Jerry Sheehan, who at the time ran all the slot machines in Meaderville. So he had a lot of spare cash. [laughs] He did very well, you know, because in fact back then, everybody was gambling.
It was really kind of funny - Jerry Sheehan, a big gambler. His daughter became a Sisters of Charity nun. And then his son became a priest, Father Sheehan - and that's who the park is named after here. He didn't give him the money. They paid him - every month they made the payment. And as soon as the original principal was paid off, he called it off. He never did charge them any interest or anything. He was very nice to my grandparents. They probably never would've been able to buy it, had they not had that loan from Jerry Sheehan.
[00:10:48]
And then after that, my mom went to school at St. Pat's grade school, graduated in 1943, and then she went to Butte high and graduated in 1947. My dad started out at - he graduated from Emerson grade school. Of course, back then it was one through eight grades. [He] graduated from Emerson and he started out at Butte High. He went to two years at Butte High, and then he switched - two years at Boy’s Central, and he graduated in ‘45. And then shortly after that, he went into the Army and he was in Japan, but it was after the war, after World War II had ended. I'm the oldest of five kids. I was born in ‘53. My brother Gary was born in ‘54. My brother Bob in ‘57, my sister Marion in ‘60, and then my youngest brother, Tom was born in ‘67. So between Tom and I, there's 14 ½ years. So it was quite the spread.
Jaap: That's a big age gap, yeah.
Paull: I guess you have one interesting story about my grandmother, Mary. She, of course, came from Ireland, and never did become a naturalized citizen until 1942. And it was really weird because she was studying an American history book to prepare for naturalization, and it was the exact same history book that my mother had in seventh grade at St. Pat’s. So it worked out pretty good cause they were able to quiz each other back and forth. And then - one more little tidbit about the naturalization. She was so afraid of being sent back to Ireland that when they got married - you had to put down where you were born. And she said she was born in Park city, Utah. She did not want anybody to know that she was born in Ireland and had not become a naturalized citizen. She always really, really appreciated Judge Freeborn because he never asked her any questions or didn't pick on her. She was very, very happy about that.
Jaap: Why'd she choose Park City?
Paull: Well, because at one time, my great grandfather worked down there and then my great Aunt Toots, Toots Lowney - she was actually born there. I think that was probably the reason that she picked Park City, because she didn't want anybody to know she was from Ireland. I mean, she was very proud of the fact that she was from Ireland, but she was always afraid that because she wasn't a naturalized citizen, that they could send her back. I guess maybe I could just kind of tell you where we lived, here in Butte.
Jaap: Yeah, please. You're doing great.
Paull: When I was little, we lived down on the 600 block of South Colorado. Then we moved to the 700 block of South Dakota. The landlord of the apartment house at the time was Oakie O'Connors’ mom and dad. And then our next door neighbors were Oakie’s sister, who was Patsy Schmeckle. Her husband ended up being the president of the Montana Power company. And I can always remember - well, I don't remember it - my parents telling me that they were our next door neighbors. And then from there, we moved up to our grandmother and grandfather's apartment up on North Washington Street. We lived at 321, one of the upstairs apartments. I think we were probably there about five or six years, and then we moved right across the street to 304 North Washington.
As a young kid, there was a mine shaft. Of course it was all covered up at the time, but it was the Silver King mine. I can remember - it was probably in the early sixties that the shaft opened up and of course, [there was a] great big hole. I can remember the Anaconda Company dump trucks - truck after truck going up that alley. They dumped everything in there. I mean, it just wasn't dirt. They put in car body parts, everything, hoping that something would stick in the shaft and then it would - as dirt would pile up on top of it. Then believe it or not, they got it all covered up and everything, and then in the early seventies, I believe, it opened up again. I always remember - the gentleman that lived there at the time - his name was Joe Herman. Oh boy. And he was irate, that everything - I mean, here it is. He never knew that there was a shaft there. And it was probably only a couple hundred feet from our back door. Everybody lived Uptown. I mean, you always had that risk that there was a mine shaft - could be in your backyard or your house could have been built over the top of one.
In our neighborhood, there were tons of kids and we were always playing. Most of the time we were playing in the streets. When we got a little older, you know, football, wiffle ball. My god, we were always out throwing football, baseball. There was a basketball court up the street from us, in the 400 block of North Washington. Mr. Jack Warren put it up in the thirties for his son. And of course, then we all played up there too. As we got a little older, it was really nice to go up there and play basketball because the Berrys moved in right across the street from the basketball court, and of course - all the Barry girls - there was Lee Whitney, Barbara, Patty, Nancy. Of course, all the guys went up there just to play basketball and hoped that they would come out and you could chat with them. [laughs] But then we also -
[00:17:55]
Jaap: Did they - did they ever?
Paull: I don't think they even bothered! [laughs] We also played a lot up at the - we called it the clay hills, which it definitely was not clay. It was the West Gagnon mine dump. We played there for years and years - and I can remember we dug tunnels in that. I can only imagine going home after playing there all day, you know, my poor mother having to wash those clothes. I mean, you know how that mine dump - it was yellow. And then if it got wet, then it was just horrible. But we played up there all the time. There used to be a tunnel, a railroad tunnel that had a spur that came off the main line on Woolman Street. And it went underneath Washington Street, Idaho Street, Montana Street, into the Original mine. And it was all blocked off. But of course, all we did was just climb the fence and we'd get in there and walk the tunnel over to the Original. We never did climb over the fence on the other side because definitely someone would see us. We played in there all the time.
And, and here's one story - I guess I'll probably be A-okay about telling this one. I don’t know if you guys remember the Burns Detective Agency - they took care of a lot of the Anaconda Company property. Well, they weren't very well liked by a lot of the people in Butte, simply because of the fact that - and I don't know if it actually happened here (I would say it probably did) - but I know for a fact that they had infiltrated a lot of the unions in different parts of the country, where they had fake union card IDs made up. And then they would get into the union meetings and then spy on what the union was gonna do and tell everything back to the mining companies. And in fact they would - the Burns Detective Agency used to have a lot of - they would supply scabs to work in the mines when the mines were on strike. So of course they weren't very well thought of in Butte, probably in a lot of places, but here's the one interesting story.
The West Gagnon Mine was a ventilation shaft for the mines in Butte. And they had this corrugated tin building with a corrugated tin roof on it. And of course when the Burnsies - that's what we called them, Burnsies - they had to do something inside the building. I don't know what they had to do, but he would unlock the gate. Every mine had a gate and a big wooden fence - all these mines, back in the day, all had probably six to eight foot fences, all made of wood. Anyway, he would show up at the gate, drive his vehicle in, stop, lock the gate, and then go into the building for the West Gagnon vent shaft. And as soon as he'd get in there, we'd wait probably 10-15 seconds. You know, there'd probably be seven or eight of us and everybody had four or five rocks - and we'd start pounding the side of the building and the roof with those rocks. And I'm sure it sounded like a machine gun going off in there. We always wanted a younger guy to be the security guard. We would hope that he would chase us. So one time, this, this one guy - he chased me from - and this would've been approximately the 500 block of North Washington. He chased me all the way down to the City Center Motel, which was on Park and Clark [Streets]. He was not quite as fast as I was at the time. [laughter] It was just one of those things. We talked about that forever. But it was just one of those things that nobody liked the Burnsies. And just made sure that we could give a little grief.
Jaap: Anyone ever get caught? Any of the kids ever -
Paull: Nobody ever got caught. Right at the bottom of that mine dump was a skating rink and all the kids - of course, half the time when we’d go skating - most of the time we’d just find things to burn, because we always had a great big bonfire there. Of course, the kids just loved doing that. Most of the time, like I said, nobody skated. We just burned trees or wood or whatever we could.
Jaap: Literally whatever you could find.
[00:23:12]
Paull: But it was a great neighborhood to grow up in. A lot of times, we would play football over here at the grass behind the courthouse. After a while of course, we'd get bored. And then back in those days you could walk alongside the jail and you could look into the jail cells. We'd be talking to the guys in the jail. Oh my god - and that was when it was the county jail. Those sheriff’s deputies - they'd see us there and they'd just go crazy. ‘You kids get the heck outta here.’ It was kind of funny. We didn’t taunt them or anything, the prisoners nor the deputies, but it was always funny that we were probably 10, 11, 12 years old talking to the prisoners. Geeze, nowadays they'd string you up if they knew you were doing that.
But yeah, of course, growing up there - my brother, Gary, and I and sometimes my brother Bob - we had a paper route for seven years. Oh my god, it was quite the deal. We'd pick our papers up right at the Standard and walk over to - we started in the 500 block of West Granite. We had like 165 papers. The Mueller apartments was our first place where we started. At the time, that was a very classy apartment house and they didn't want kids in there. So we dropped off 45 to 50 papers at the front door and the manager of the Mueller would deliver the papers. I mean, we were so darn lucky. And we might have had the biggest route in Butte, but we had the easiest by far.
Jaap: Yeah because a third of it was just dropping it off!
Paull: Dropping it off at the front door. [laughs] But we had a great time doing that. One time my brother Gary - there was this one customer that would never pay us. And he says, ‘I'm gonna, every time I drop that paper off, I'm gonna rattle that front door there's.’ Well this one time, he winds up and lets one fly - went right through the storm door window. Of course that ended up costing us money. But it was - we had a good time doing it. And all the kids that lived up there, my god. There was the Pesantis, the Littles, the Kearneys, the Denneheys, the McGlaughlins, Williamses - there was always kids to play with. I mean, kids nowadays never go outside. We were always outside. So it was a great neighborhood to grow up in.
And then of course I went to St. Pat's grade school and it was the same school my mother went to. There's an interesting story there. Sister Mary Raymond, who was my first grade teacher - she taught my mother too. You know, it probably would've been sixth or seventh grade, but then sister Mary Raymond - she was the first grade teacher at St. Pat's forever and ever. It was a pretty big school. In our class, we had like close to 40 kids in one class. The boys always outnumbered the girls, two to one, which was kind of tough when we had our eighth grade graduation party dance - the poor girls never had a minute to sit down. [laughter]
I graduated from there in 1967. Every teacher we had was a Sister of Charity of Leavenworth. The first lay teacher we had was Jim and Tim McCarthy's mother Irene.
Jaap: Really?
Paull: She taught sixth grade and then she taught English to sixth, seventh and eighth grade. Irene had my brother Gary and they had a pretty rambunctious class. I'm sure she'd go home at night think, ‘oh my god, those kids.’ An interesting story about Sister Mary Ellen - she was our seventh grade teacher. We played St. John's in a game one time and we ended up tying ‘em when we were supposed to beat ‘em. And she was so upset that we lost, or tied, and she never let us forget it. One time when we were at a class picnic out at the old Gregson Hot Springs - they had the old habit, the long dress. I think it was called a tunic. And then of course the rosary beads that hung down the side and they - honest to god, we were out there playing with the football and she grabbed the football, and we didn't know at the time, but she was a tomboy and she kicked that football. Oh my god, I can't believe how far she kicked it. We all just stood there and couldn't believe it. Here's a nun kicking the football with her habit and tunic on. [laughter] She was a really nice lady.
[00:29:18]
And then of course, after St. Pat's, I went to Boys Central for two years, and we had the Christian brothers that were there. Of course, everybody's probably heard stories about them. If you misbehaved, they brought out the leather strap and you stick out your hand and they’d wallop you with the leather strap and - some would even make you bend over and they paddled you across the behind end. But it was a great place to go to school. The last two years - [laughter]
Jaap: Great place! Got the shit beat out of us!
Grant: Everybody always says that, you know, ‘I used to be abused, but it was a great place.’
Paull: And the last two years of high school - it was when they combined boys and girls Central. It was really different because I think it was the only school where the Christian brothers taught where there was Christian brothers, priests, nuns, and lay teachers. They did stay in Butte for quite a while, which was - and then after that, I think all the religious orders, their numbers dwindled. Then like nowadays it's mostly all lay teachers. At Central, I played football for two years and then, in my infinite wisdom, I decided not to play football and run cross country so I can get in shape to try and make the basketball team. I never did get in shape. I never did make the basketball team. And that year Central won the state championship in football and I'm thinking, ‘boy, that was stupid.’ [laughter]
And you know, after that, I graduated in ‘71 and we're actually going to have our 50th class reunion in September of this year, which is hard to believe it's been 50 years. Oh, I just wanna tell you one story about back when we were growing up - we got milk delivered from the Elgin dairy. The Elgin dairy was up in Elk Park, and Julius Vanina the dairy. They would deliver three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. The milk came in glass bottles with the paper lids, and on the top was the cream, you know. Every morning we had oatmeal, cream of wheat - and it was always a rush to get - you wanted to put the cream on your cereal before your brother or sister beat you to it. But it was, I mean, honest to god - you tell kids now that you have milk in glass bottles with cream on the top, they wouldn’t believe you.
Jaap: No.
Paull: But it was really, oh my god. It was delicious.
Jaap: So you were the oldest, did you always get the cream?
Paull: It was whoever got up first. And then of course, after having delivered the papers, you know, we delivered the papers and then [we’d] come back and go to bed. Well, a lot of times, I was maybe the last one up . Yeah, it was great. I always remember that the most. And then after high school, I went to Tech for a year, and they kindly told me that your grades aren't good enough, so you better get outta here. [I] went to work, and then I did decide to go to the University of Montana for a while. And same thing, you know - grades weren't good enough. You better get outta here. I had terrible study habits.
Jaap: Now look at you though. You've turned yourself around. [laughter]
Paull: Oh, well, thank you. Yeah. And then of course, just like everybody in Butte, I went to work for the Anaconda Company. I was working as a time clerk up at the Kelley mine. Omar Swinside was the superintendent. I talked to him, I said, ‘Hey, I wanna go down underground. I wanna work down.’ He goes, ‘Okay, well, as soon as we get an opening, we’ll see what we can do and get you down there.’ Well, in the meantime, that's when they laid everybody off, shut down the mines. So I never did get a chance to go work underground. I would've loved to have gone down there, but it was - I got laid off. And then later, I went to work at the smelter in Anaconda and that's where I met my wife.
Jaap: Really?
Paull: Yeah. So she was working for this company and I can't remember the name of the company, but the boss was Horace Hand. They had a contract working for this Canadian mining company that - they brought their ore down to the smelter to be smelted. And Peggy would have to, you know, record the weight of the ore cars when they came in. So pretty much - she worked at the smelter, but did not work for the Anaconda company, worked for this private contractor. Like I said, I can't remember the name of the mine that - the ore came down from Canada. Yeah, and that was back in ‘75 or ‘76. And Peggy left and went to - she moved out to Portland and worked out in Portland for a couple of years. And that was really cool, to be able to go out and see her. And it was actually at the same time when the Portland Trailblazers won the national - the NBA championship. So I got to see the Trailblazers play twice, like Bill Walton and Maurice Lucas - boy, they had a hell of a team. They were good. I just thought that was one good thing, one of many good things when I went out to Portland. I better say more than one!
Jaap: Don't show Peggy this.
Grant: Yeah, my god.
Jaap: The basketball was excellent! [laughter]
Paull: But then, you know, just a little bit about my work history. I started working at the fire department November 19th, 1977. I remember it was freezing cold. It was like 20 below. And what was kinda interesting was - it was the same night that Butte High beat Havre for the state football championship. And then my very last shift at the fire department - nope. That would've been November 17th of 2012. Again, Butte High won the state championship when they beat Bozeman.
[00:37:12]
So I always remember when they won the state championships, because it was my first day and my last day. But anyway, in ‘77, when I got on the fire department, we were very, very lucky because they had just appointed a new training officer and it was Bill Griffith. They'd never had a specific training officer. Before, you used to always - depending on what shift you were on - they would do your training. And we had classroom time, practical time where we were out doing - the first thing they always taught you was making a fire hydrant, which sounds kind of weird, but that's what they always say is ‘making a fire hydrant.’ And you weren't actually making a hydrant. You were just hooking hoses up to the hydrant. [laughter] I can remember, they'd always say, ‘you'll never forget the first one you make at your first big fire,’ which I never did forget. It was on the Northeast corner of Iron and Main street. But it was - I mean, it was great.
Like I said, classroom time, all kinds of time out, you know, driving the trucks, pumping the trucks, of course making hydrants. And then putting on the self-contained breathing apparatus, which was very important. I remember the first shift - besides Butte High winning the championship - we didn't have any fires that day. But the next day, we had a fire down in the 600 block of south Montana. And I remember [thinking] ‘oh my God, these guys are crazy,’ my fellow firefighters. They were running in and out of that house. I mean, you couldn't see a thing with all the smoke. I thought, ‘man, these guys are crazy.’ And then I thought ‘they're like smoke eaters,’ which is actually a term that has always been kind of used for people who - back in those days, you know, they'd go in without any masks on, which was not a good thing to do. There was one really good firefighter. He was a good friend of our family and he actually ended up getting throat cancer. And it probably had a lot to do with the fact that he went running in the buildings all the time without wearing a mask.
But yeah, that first day was like, ‘man, you're gonna have to really learn how to put on a SCBA,’ which stands for self-contained breathing apparatus, because my god, you could stay in there much longer. You could breathe. And then later on, you know, there were the new face pieces. You could put an eyeglass holder in there. It didn't have the temples on it. It was just - your glasses sat right in front of you, which was even better because now you could see.
Jaap: Helpful.
Paull: But yeah, it was quite the deal. You were on probation for six months and then we had to take a test, and I thought, ‘oh my god, I don't wanna fail this test and get fired.’ So, you know, there was lots of studying and fortunately I passed and then I went to the Tono Murto shift. He was a Finnlander - his parents came over from Finland. They ran a boarding house. I think it might have been on east Broadway. I'm not too sure exactly where it was, but a really nice guy. I went to work on that shift. At the time we had three shifts that had 15 firefighters each and we also had, you know, of course the chief, assistant chief, a fire coordinator, deputy coordinator, training officer, an electrician, and a mechanic.
And you know, everybody wonders - why did you have an electrician? But the electrician took care of all the pole boxes, you know, that were on the street corners. He made sure that they were all operational and they kept those up until 1983 or four. And then they pulled them out because it was - a lot of times like on a Friday or Saturday night, kids would drive around, pull the fire alarm, we'd get sent to the call, and no sooner did we get done at that call - they would move on, pull another one. In fact, one night, I remember there was 18 of them. It was like ‘those little buggers - I’d like to…’ [laughter]
Jaap: I'm sure that's exactly what you said. [laughs]
Paull: But work for - we always called it Murt’s shift. We shortened his last name to Murt. We did a lot of great things together. You know, skiing, camping, fishing, golfing - a lot of us played softball. He just had a great shift and a great bunch of guys and I learned a ton working around those guys. I worked on that shift for oh, probably five years. And then I went to Bern Morgan’s shift. At that time, they called ‘em assistant chiefs. He was the head of that shift. I thought, ‘oh my god.’ I says, ‘I don't know if I want to go over there and work with him.’ Because he likes to go fast. You hop in that truck, you're not gonna - he didn't want you to be a feather foot. You stomped on that gas. And the big thing was - you better know where you're going. If you don't know where you're going, you'll never get to drive again.
So I remember the first time I drove him - we had a call down at the 3400 block of Busch. And he hops in and he said, ‘Do you know where you're going kid?’ I says, ‘yes, I do.’ And he called everybody ‘kid’ - because he was on the fire department for 44 years. You know, great guy, great firefighter. But my god, if you didn't know where you were going, you'll never drive him again. And I can remember we took off from Montana and Mercury and we're flying down Montana Street and we'd get down there, you know, where Montana street turns into Rowe Road - and it was snowy. And of course, like I said, he wanted to go fast. I got to that corner and I thought, ‘oh man, let's keep this truck on the road.’ So we got there and everything, you know, worked out great. He let me drive him quite often. And I always remember, ‘you better know where you're going.’ If you don't, you better tell him - don't try and fake it.
Jaap: He'll know.
Paull: Yeah. He'll know.
Jaap: Oh, interesting.
[00:45:12]
Paull: But yeah, that was great. Oh, I gotta tell you one story about when - on Morgan’s shift. My good buddy Bernie Boyle, who was also on the fire department - he was on the back of the truck. Then, we used to ride on the back, on the tailboard. Mickey Mulcahy was driving Morgan and they were heading, I can't remember. They were heading out on Harrison Avenue somewhere. Again, it was a slick day - and they went underneath that railroad overpass there at Harrison and Front, they went under that overpass sideways. Mickey and Bern Morgan did not know that Bernie was on the back, because it was right at the shift change. And when they got to the call, Bernie got off the truck and he says, ‘what were you doing?’ He says, Mickey says, ‘were you on the back?’ He says, ‘yeah.’ So, I mean, it scared the heck outta Bernie at the time and scared the heck outta Mickey, because he didn't realize that Bernie was on the back.
So, I mean, it was, you know, sometimes - that was kind of dangerous because you're responsible for that driving apparatus. No different than driving your own car - if you cause a wreck, you're responsible for it. You're not gonna be protected by the city or anyone else. So that kind of - everybody kind of slowed down after that.
But then in 1983, the fire department, in cooperation with St. James hospital - we started the EMT program, emergency medical technician. And again, speaking of training, when I first started, we were very lucky - every class that we had for the EMT training was taught by a doctor. The year before, they had a layperson teach it and all he really did was tell horror stories about the calls he had been on. They really never learned anything. But we were very lucky because we had doctors for every class. The only one we did not have a doctor was for emergency childbirth, and it was Cindy Kaiser who was a nurse midwife here in Butte. In fact, she delivered both of our daughters. And I always considered her probably a doctor, darn near.
So anyway, we had that class for six months and then we had to take a test, a written test and a practical test. The written test wasn't that bad, other than - the worst category for me was emergency childbirth. Peggy was pregnant with Erin. I was taking the EMT class, and we were going to Lamas classes and the worst category on the written test for me was emergency childbirth. And I thought, ‘man, I guess I don't pay attention!’ But I ended up passing the written test, and we had to do practicals, which was nerve wracking because we had six practicals - four were a single - you did the practical by yourself. And then two with a teammate of yours. And that was nerve wracking because of the fact that all the proctors for that were other EMTs from throughout the state of Montana. You know, there was no - you couldn't fib, lie, cheat - you had to know what you were doing. So that was a huge relief, you know, getting through that program.
I did skip a part. I gotta go back a few years. On September 17th, 1978, Local 96 of the International Association of Firefighters went on strike. It was 11 days long. It all started over wage issues, I believe. And see, I hadn't been on the job - less than a year. It was all like 26 months of negotiations that just didn't get anywhere. So we ended up going on strike. The international sent in a staff representative from Chicago. His name was Mike Lass and he pretty much led the union through all these 11 days.
[00:50:36]
The picket duty was really actually kind of nerve wracking because of the fact that, you know, here you're picketing all these different places - courthouse, jail, airport. We did it at the airport for a while, but then the FAA says, ‘no, you can't do that. You're gonna get fined.’ Well, so we pulled off of the airport, but then we picketed the dump, the golf course.
Jaap: Yeah. Don't mess with that! [laughs]
Paull: That was, oh my god. The grief that they caught at the golf course was horrible. And for 11 days I was down at the Metro sewer plant. And of course, nobody in there operating the plant. Also at that time, they were adding on to the Metro plant and there was a construction company by the name of Sletten construction. They had the job to add on. I think they were adding on. I don't think they're remodeling. Anyway, for the first two days, the guys working at Sletten wouldn't go to work. They said, ‘well, they don't have a construction gate.’ And we says, ‘well, you know, we didn't set that up. That's up to the company.’
So they eventually did put in a construction gate, but in the meantime, after the strike and everything was settled, the International Association of Firefighters, Local #96 got sued by Sletten construction company. Oh god, I can remember I had to go testify in court. That was horrible. But we ended up, of course, getting sued. I can't remember what it was. We had to pay for two days of lost wages and production for the Sletten construction company. And we didn't have any money to pay that. We had to try and borrow it from the state council of union firefighters. They didn't have any money. We ended up just slowly paying the bill off. But also, when we were at the Metro sewer plant, they couldn't let any of that sewage get into the creek at all. Well then the chief executive at the time, Mario Micone - the director of public works was Don Peoples, and the foreman at the county shops was Jimmy Johnston - and they had to drive a tanker full of the sludge from Metro sewer. They had a settling pond out by Silver Bow and they dumped it in the settling pond, because if they let that water or any of that sewage get into the creek, they'd have been fined big time by the EPA.
So that was very contentious because, like I say, when we were picketing at Metro sewer, the press showed up as they drove the truck out. And it was - we did our best to kind of hide from the press on that one. But eventually, the strike ended after 11 days. In my personal opinion, I think the fire department suffered for years because of that strike, as far as getting personnel, equipment - any kind of firefighting equipment apparatuses. So I really think that it hurt us big time, because of that strike, you know, I think we suffered. We did get a nice little raise out of it, but other than that, that was about all. I actually still have my - it's the very first contract that I got after that strike, and I've kept it all these years. When I started working there, we made $750 a month. And then I think after your probationary period, you jumped up to about $900 a month - but yeah, I still have it. And unlike the current contracts - you know, they're just printed out on 8 ½ x 11 sheets of paper. This one is bound and has a cover on it. It's pretty cool.
Jaap: It's nice.
Paull: Yeah. [laughs]
[00:55:39]
Paull: But yeah. Then of course we all remember - and here’s another story about a firefighter. He started working January 4th, 1983 at three o'clock on afternoon shift. At four o'clock, ARCO (Anaconda Company) decided they were shutting everything down. And I remember him saying, ‘oh, I won't even last till the end of the shift. They're gonna lay me off.’ We said, ‘Oh, no, we'll be okay.’ Well, thanks to the efforts of the chief executive Don Peoples and the city council, nobody got laid off. Because you know, of course the whole community of Butte suffered because of that, because they shut everything down. There was nobody working. A lot of people left town, but we never lost anybody. Nobody got laid off. But when a person retired from the fire department, they were never replaced.
But then we all remember Denny Washington come in and saved the day. Was it ‘86? I can't remember for sure. But then I think there was another period where they actually shut it down again and it might have been because of the very high power bills that they had at the time. They couldn't make any money, but then, you know, it opened back up again. And of course, as we know, it's been going great ever since. But that was a very tough time for Butte, at the time. And my god, like I said, we were very lucky that nobody got laid off. And of course, during that time, there was no raises. I remember the first time we got a raise, it was 0.25%. A quarter percent. And of course we thought we hit the mother lode. At least we were gonna move. That was a great, great deal when we got that first raise. That was by far the hardest part. And of course, back then too, we went over six years before we had another firefighter hired. It was actually six years and five months before we got another guy.
In the meantime, in 1987, we went to the 24 hour shifts, which was really a cool deal. There was a few other departments in the state that had already gone to a 24 hour shift schedule. We went to a 24/72. So you worked one day, you were off three, and we had four shifts. Each had eight firefighters on the shift.
[00:59:03]
I can always remember - I was on actually two of the two negotiations where we tried to get the 24 hour shift. And some of the old guys in the department at the time did not want to do it. And in fact, they said, ‘you're going backwards, because we fought-’ And the firefighters did fight for a long time way back in the early 1900s to get to an eight hour shift. Because they were working all the time - they very seldom ever had days off. And he says, ‘you're going backwards.’ He said, ‘no, we're progressing.’ Finally, a lot of the older guys came around and the younger guys, of course, were the ones that were pushing for it. And we got it. It was a great deal. Some of the older guys didn't like it because they didn't like being away from home for 24 hours, but they all got used to it. So it was a pretty good deal. We were very lucky to have gotten that shift change.
Well, right before that, like I mentioned earlier, we had a lot of retirees, or a lot of firefighters retired and left. So there was a lot of vacancies in the battalion chief ranks and the captain ranks. So in ‘86, there was tests for both, you know, battalion chiefs and captains. I took the captain's test and thankfully passed and became a captain on January 1st, 1987, which also happened to be the first day that we went on 24 hour shifts. And it was great because, at the time, I went to work for Pat Durkin, who was a battalion chief and a great guy. Like I mentioned earlier, there was a lot of great guys that were there. He was very helpful, also trained us well. Of course, everybody liked working for him, so we enjoyed it. He enjoyed it. And then I went from Pat Durkin's - four years later, then they moved the battalion chiefs and then Bob Cook became the battalion chief for A shift. I was on A shift, and we had Bob for two years and then after that, I got switched to C shift, which I worked for Timmy McCarthy, battalion chief. And of course, Timmy and I, we'd known each other since I was probably about eight, and he was a great guy to work for too.
Then during that time - I guess it would've been - I guess I'm probably getting ahead of myself here, because I'm gonna tell some stories about some fires and some medical emergencies. In 2004, then I took the test to become a battalion chief and you know, passed and got promoted to D shift, which was great. I enjoyed it. There was again, a lot of great younger guys that I worked with, Then with becoming promoted, there was a lot more responsibility. You had to run the fire ground operations, hazmat ops, medical emergencies, and of course handle personnel issues, which you would think all the others would be the hardest - the personnel issues were the hardest, because no matter where you are, how many guys are there - not everybody's gonna get along. That was the hardest part of the job, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. There was a lot of great guys. Again, I sound repetitive about the great guys, but they really were.
Jaap: Well, you guys really have to be a team, I imagine. I mean -
Grant: Your lives depend on it.
Jaap: Yeah.
Paull: And that's the big thing, you know - like we always practice the two in two out, which means if two of you go in, two come out. Then there's another two that should be outside waiting, prepared to go in, in case something happens to you. It’s teamwork. One thing I always remember saying, ‘there's no freelancing. You don't take off and go off somewhere by yourself because you're in a burning building.’ Everybody has to know where everybody else is because if someone gets lost, then everything goes to hell in a handbasket. Because then it becomes the priority one, to find the firefighter and get 'em out of there.
[01:04:30]
I guess maybe I'll tell you a little bit about the self-contained breathing apparatuses. I mentioned earlier about the eyeglass deal that you could put in your mask. Well, at first, when I first started, they were negative pressure masks, which meant if you didn't get a good seal on the side or the top of your SCBA, air would leak in. And back then, you know, everybody had a different size. Everybody has a different sized head, so not all masks are gonna fit everybody correctly. There'd be times when those masks - they would leak - and you could actually smell the smoke. So then you'd be reefing on these straps trying to get ‘em tight so you wouldn't be able to smell that. Well later - and I'm not too sure exactly when that happened - everybody got their own mask, which was great because you could adjust it to fit your face. Then of course, they became positive pressure masks, and as a result, there was always pressure in there. And if you did have a leak on the side of your mask, there was pressure against the little gap so that nothing could get in. That's very, very important, especially like on hazardous material calls because you don't - a lot of times you couldn't smell any of those chemicals, and if they're getting in, you know, it could drop you over.
Those masks were the best thing that they ever got. The newer self-contained breathing apparatuses were a lot lighter. The other ones were steel. The new ones - and I think now they're probably the same - they were like a fiberglass material. So they were much, much better. Because when you have a heavy object on your back, you're working a lot harder. As a result, working harder, you're using up more of that air, which I gotta tell you, too, that everybody thinks those self-contained breathing apparatus are full of oxygen. They're compressed air, just like the air we breathe, you know, 21% oxygen, 78%...
Jaap: Other stuff.
Paull: Yeah. [laughs] I should know that! I wrote it down too.
Jaap: Ah, did you?
Paull: I'll come back to it, but it’s actually - that the same air that we have in the self-contained breathing apparatus is the same air we breathe. Back in the day, we used to fill these masks by way of a cascade system, which meant we had seven or eight big tanks of compressed air. And you would - it took forever to fill a bottle. You had to put the bottle in a bucket of cold water, because if you filled them too fast, they'd get hot and you didn't want the bottle to get hot. So you would start out - say that the first bottle had 2,500 PSA of the compressed air. You'd start with that bottle. You'd get down so far - you would switch to the next bottle, which would've been lower, until you got the SCBA cylinder filled. It took forever. In fact, one time I got called out and all I did that night was fill SCBA cylinders. They had a fire at the Walsh Apartments right across the street from the power company. I mean, they went through tons of bottles and it took forever.
Well then - and I think it was after ‘88, maybe 1988 - they had sent a fire truck down to the fires in Yellowstone Park. And we received quite a bit of money by sending that truck down there. So they bought an air compressor, which could fill three bottles - and it was very expensive. I don't remember the amount of money that it cost, but it’d fill these cylinders. You could fill 'em three at a time. You still couldn't fill 'em fast because inside this air compressor was - you'd put ‘em in and then it dropped the tanks down into water. And again, the water kept the tanks cool. The steel cylinders, you really had to be careful with those. Fiberglass, the same way. You had to make sure that they stayed cool. And there was a little pump in there that pumped the water all over the tank to keep it cool. So you could fill 'em a little bit faster than what you should have, but you know, they always recommended not to do that. That was a huge improvement, and actually they bought another one after that. I couldn't tell you if they’ve bought another one since, but just a huge improvement as far as filling those tanks as fast as you could.
Jaap: Yeah.
[01:10:34]
Paull: I'm gonna tell you what the makeup of the oxygen is, but oh my god, I can't. I mean, not the oxygen - that compressed air.
Jaap: It's not, that is not a big deal. [laughs]
Paull: I kind of had a brain, you know, a brain forgetfulness there. I’ll just give you kind of an idea of some of the things I did while I was there. At the fire department, when you first started out, of course it was the food locker. Each shift had their own locker and you had to collect the money from just your shift. And then everybody - each shift would lock their own food up, because you didn't trust the other guys because they'd steal it. I did that for, oh I don’t know, maybe I guess about six months. Then after that, I became the head of the social club, which, you know, they pretty much did all kinds of things. We bought different supplies for the fire department. If there was a funeral or anything like that, we took care of the different things for the family. In fact, one time after John Kavanaugh died, we had a party - not a party - it was a reception after the…well, let me say it turned into a party, even though I wasn't even there. A lot of firefighters came from all over the state because he was the fire marshal and he knew a lot of people. Well then the reception turned into a party. Unbeknownst to me, they decided to have themselves a good time. Well then we had no money left in the social club after we paid that bill. And uh, it was like, ‘oh my god guys, come on. You could have bought your own drinks, your own food!’ But anyway, that was just one of those things that - you give somebody a check, they're gonna take advantage of it.
Then after that, I became the secretary-treasurer of the Butte fire department relief association. And what that was - we paid the retirees. So I would write the checks for the widows and orphans. We didn't have any orphans at the time. Then the retired firefighters - I did that for two years, which I learned quite a bit about our retirement system. During that time - the firefighters were the very last retirement system that the state of Montana didn't control. During the two years when I was on the Butte Fire Department Relief Association is when the state of Montana, the Public Employees Retirement System, the Montana League of Cities and Towns, and even the Montana State Firemen's Association all drew up separate legislative bills. The state wanted to take care of it. PERS wanted it. The League of Cities and Towns - they pretty much - they didn't want to control it. They wanted someone else other than the local fire departments to control it. So then we even drew up a plan and we were gonna have offices in Helena and we were going to take care of it ourselves. Well, as a result, it came down to one bill. Everybody got together and said, ‘okay, we gotta work this out.’
Basically, we didn't want some of the things to happen to the benefits we had. So we had to - you had to negotiate. So in 1981, they passed the firefighters unified retirement system, and that drew in all the retirement systems from the state of Montana into one. Actually, it was probably without a doubt, the best thing that ever happened to our retirement system because we no longer, here locally, had to worry about funding the system. Now it was all on the state's shoulders. In fact, I'll tell you one thing - the state couldn't believe that the Butte Fire Department in 1953 bought a 30 year war bond. At the time, it probably paid pretty good money, but when we turned it over to the state, they went, ‘what in the heck were you doing that for?’ I says, ‘well, that was way before my time. I couldn't tell you why they did it.’ It was probably a good investment back then. I always remember then it was in 1983 when it matured. And then of course the state was happier than hell to get rid of that. But they did a great job running it.
[01:15:56]
After all that, I went and became a member of the pension advisory board for the State Firemen's Association. We would go to the retirement PERS meetings every month. We were actually the only retirement system in the state that could actually go to the meetings and advise them, because it was stipulated right in the law. We could definitely advise, but that didn't mean that it was gonna happen. And then of course after that - we were the first ones to actually go. The PERS board meetings were held in a room that was smaller than this. They pretty much - I can remember going to the first one. They didn't like the firefighters being in there. They wanted to be able to take care of business and do it all by themselves. But then later, of course, with public open meeting laws, they had to open up the meetings. Now it's in a great big conference room at PERS and there's all kinds of people that go - retirees, police, fire, PERS people that, you know, work for the highway department or any of the government offices. So I did that for 12 years. And then back in 2005, a couple of the firemen says, ‘Hey, we want you to put your name in for the Public Employees Retirement Board.’ And I says, ‘oh, I don't.’ I says, ‘you can put my name in, but I'm not gonna get picked.’ I says, ‘go ahead, put it in.’ Well, lo and behold, I got picked, so Governor Schweitzer appointed me to the board in April of 2005. I served on that board for five years. One of our good friends who works here and volunteers here is on the Friends [of the Archives] board. Dianna Porter.
Jaap: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Paull: She served on the board. I think I might have been on there for two years, maybe three years, before Dianna came on. Well, you know, then we became great friends because we drove back and forth all the time to Helena. I always remember before that - I put my name in and they said, ‘well, it's only one meeting a month. For five years, you'll have to go to 60 meetings.’ Well, it was more like about 60 meetings in a year. It was like, oh my god, you guys meet just to meet. We did get a lot of things done, but really going back and talking about the advisory board - firefighters, they didn't hire lobbyists, they did it all themselves.
And there was a lot of great benefits that happened during those years. A lot of it happened because of the fact that the economy was booming. You know, the board of investments was making tons of money on pension systems and it was a great time to ask for more benefits. And of course it worked out. The lobbyists at the time - one guy from Missoula, a guy from Kalispell, Helena, Billings. They did a great job lobbying. But on that board - I can always remember the packets. It was before the days of computers, and they would mail the packet. Honest to god, the packet would come and it'd be three inches thick of different things that we had to meet on. And then a lot of requests for proposals for different companies to run certain investments. Oh my god, it was a lot of reading. And of course it takes me two or three times to comprehend what I'm reading. [laughs] So I take that much longer.
And then of course I served, like I mentioned earlier about the union negotiations - trying to get raises for the guys - that was very, very hard, especially during those years when Butte was suffering so bad. Like I said, we negotiated for those 24 hour shifts, which we got. We really fought hard to get the firefighter one, two and three program, which meant that after you were confirmed, there really wasn't any step, as far as advancing and maybe getting a little more pay. So firefighter one, you, if you took the test and passed, you gotta bump in pay - same thing with two and then three. So that was a great thing to happen for the firefighters. There was a lot of different things like, you know, negotiating for clothing allowance and holidays on the base, different things like that, that are beneficial for the firefighters.
But then one big thing that I led the effort in Butte was - back in ‘88, there were these ladies out of Bitterroot county that were - if you wanted a constitutional initiative or a constitutional amendment, you had to secure signatures, so many from each county, a certain percentage of the registered voters. Well, anyway, they had proposed two initiatives that were going to drastically hurt public funding for city-county and state governments. Anyway, they asked me, ‘would you kind of help out and do everything in Butte?’ And I said, ‘yeah, sure. I'll give it a whirl.’
Well, what we did was when these ladies showed up, they would be at the grocery stores or hardware stores wherever, trying to gather signatures to get their initiative on the ballot. Well, we would find out they're in town. We'd go where they were. We would hand out a brochure to the people that were getting ready to sign or not sign, and say, ‘before you sign that, would you please read this?’ And it was pretty much an explanation of what's gonna happen to local governments, county governments, city governments, and the state - if these initiatives pass. So of course - Pat Dobel, who was the president of the union at the time, myself, and Howie Rosenleaf, who worked for the AFL-CIO here in Montana - we would follow these ladies around. Never harassed ‘em, never harassed the people that were at the stores. So we said, ‘Hey, before you sign this, please read this.’ Well, one of the little - they were older ladies too. She got so mad at Pat Dobel. She hauled back and walloped him right in the face. And it was like, ‘oh my god.’ [laughter] So he just - he was stunned. To make a long story short, they did not get the necessary number of registered voters to sign their petitions here in Butte. So we were very, very, very happy about that.
[01:23:56]
I always mention about the strike that - again, the strike was horrible. Then like in 2002, the union was gonna start a smoke alarm program. I dunno how the hell I always get involved in these things, but the guy says, ‘would you do it?’ And I said, ‘well, you gotta check into this. I mean, where are we gonna get the money first? That's going to take a lot of money to run a smoke alarm program.’ So we were really lucky because, at the time, the state of Montana got a grant from the CDC to start this program. And we didn't even know that. I called up the State Fire Marshal's office. They sent me to this guy that worked for the Labor Department. So we were able to become part of the program. And I mean, thanks to Chief Bob Armstrong and all the firefighters, we were able to put in tons of smoke alarms, free of charge, with 10 year lithium batteries. As a result of all this, we actually had the best program in the entire country per population. I mean, it was a great, great program. In fact, we know for a fact that there was lives saved because of that. I'll give you a couple of examples.
There was a little boy that lived down on Sampson Street. He was handicapped, you know, in a wheelchair, and his sister had gotten in a little argument with her mother and father. She was supposed to clean the house and she didn't. So she ran into her bedroom, slammed the door, and of course she had all kinds of things up on the wall. One fell off, landed on a candle that was burning in the house, and started a fire. Mom and dad were, I think, out in the yard working it. The little girl - she left, of course. And here's the handicap boy in the house. Tom was the father. I remember he told me that they heard the smoke alarm going off and ran in the house and were able to get the handicapped son out of the house. There was other cases where it actually - the people who lived in the houses were able to get out because they had the smoke alarms.
One lady - she had a terrible, terrible habit of - she was on oxygen, and believe it or not, there are a lot of people who smoke on oxygen. She took the nasal can off, set it on her lap. It was in the middle of the night. Lit a cigarette. And then she got tired, fell asleep. The cigarette fell on her lap, started burning the oxygen, burning her nightgown and robe. And her husband was able to - he heard the smoke alarm going off and was able to come out, get the fire put out that was burning on her clothes and then get out of the house. And it caused a lot of damage to the house too, but he says, ‘otherwise’ he says, ‘I probably would not have been able to get her out.’ So little stories like that - it actually worked. Because of the success of the program, Mark Jackson, who was the head of the program from the CDC, came to Butte and he wanted to go visit a couple of the people that had alarms put in their house. And one of them was Kareen Graham who lived up on Waukesha Street. We went to her house and of course she was - still is, a very, very nice lady. She welcomed us - there was four of us: two people from the state, CDC gentleman Mark Jackson, and myself. She couldn't have been any happier. Then we also went to Joan Shannon's house, you know, Ellen's mom. Same way, you know, and they couldn't have been any happier. So as a result of that, I actually got invited to go to the NFPA conference in Salt lake City, the National Fire Protection Association. I went down and talked about the success of our program. And like I said, the reason it was so successful was that Bob Armstrong, the fire chief, was all on board with it. The union was all on board, and the firefighters were all on board. I mean, we saved lives. So, I mean, that's the most important thing.
A little side note to that - when I was at the NFPA conference, Bill Bradley spoke at the conference. You know, he was the US Senator from New Jersey and a former NBA all-star great who played for the Knicks. At the time, he played with Phil Jackson. I dunno if everybody knows - he was born in Deer Lodge.
Jaap: Oh, I didn't know that.
Paull: Yeah. Oh god, great guys. His parents, Phil Jackson's parents, were both ministers. He never went to a movie until he was a senior in high school. Never went to a dance until he was in college. So his parents were very, very strict. But yeah, so that was a great part of the smoke alarm program.
Of course - for years, you know, since 1953, the International Association of Firefighters has been involved in muscular dystrophy. We did Fill the Boot, which we raised a ton of money for that. Another thing that we did was - everybody knows about the Kenyon-Connell explosion. There was never any memorial. So we put up a little memorial for the firefighters that died in that explosion. And then [we] also included the other seven members of the fire department that died in the line of duty. We put up a memorial at the uptown fire station, and also put up tombstones for the firefighters that were buried - especially the Kenyon-Connell [victims] that did not have tombstones. We put tombstones on their graves. That’s all thanks to Bernie Brophy from Granite Works.
Then we - again, thanks to Bernie - we put up a big memorial at the south side fire station for the FDNY firefighters that were killed in the line of duty on 9/11. We also did a - three of us, Bernie Boyle, Jim Ryan, and myself. We started a little memorial up at the Knights of Columbus gymnasium and we painted the names of all 343 firefighters from New York that died and also the 61 police officers that died. And then Mike - I dunno if you guys know Mike Hamblin - he painted a picture. You may remember the firefighters in New York raising the flag in the rubble. He got permission to paint that and we put up that picture right in the middle of the memorial. Then just as luck would have it, we were notified that there was gonna be a firefighter and a police officer coming to Montana.
[01:32:41]
And by the way, we did this in 2002, just seven months after 9/11. We found out that there was a firefighter and a police officer from New York coming in. I believe it might have been - they were coming to Montana at the invite of the Irish, the Gaelic - I can't remember the exact name. They were in Missoula - Montana Gaelic Society?
Jaap: Thank you - the Gaelic League, but that’s not it.
Paull: The Gaelic people. Yeah. So anyway, they found out through Tom Powers that they were coming and they were gonna be in Missoula, and we said, ‘well, hey, we got this memorial that's just about finished. Could we have a little ceremony there?’ So anyway, he said, ‘yeah, we'll arrange it.’ So we had a little ceremony at the KC and Mike O’Hanlin was the firefighter and Thomas O’Riordan was the police officer. So we had the ceremony and Monsignor Don Shea - he was a priest at St Patrick's and he also was a 20 year veteran of the US Army, a two star general. He gave the invocation at our ceremony.
And then - a little side note about that was - he had been in Vietnam with Jim Ryan, who helped paint the names, and actually they're related. They’re cousins. Monsignor Don worked at the Pentagon, and where that plane crashed into the Pentagon was right where his office was. And of course he had left the army at that time and came back to Butte to be a parish priest. But so anyway, he gave the invocation. Mike O’Hanlin and Thomas O'Riordan - they spoke at the ceremony. It was very moving. I mean, it was very, very nice. And then a really sad note was that Mike O’Hanlin, two years ago, died as a result of cancer - because there's been over 200 firefighters who have died from the effects of the - most of 'em lung cancer, from the effects of pushing and going through all that rubble looking for bodies. Like 200 firefighters have died since then. So there's been like, I would guess now probably like about 550 firefighters that died because of that. So it was a terrible, terrible deal.
Then of course I did a little work on The Hidden Fire: The Great Butte Explosion, with Gus Chambers. Gus called me up one day and said, ‘Hey, here, you might have some information that I could use for The Hidden Fire. I said, ‘oh yeah, sure.’ I said, ‘well, come on over. Maybe we'll have pizza.’ And honest to god, I had two brown paper sacks of stuff. And I handed it to him and he says, ‘what's this?’ I said, ‘this is all the stuff I have on the Kenyon-Connell fire. And he said, ‘well, can I have it?’ I said, ‘yeah, sure.’ ‘You can, you can use it.’ He said, ‘I'll make copies and get it back to you.’ I said, ‘okay, great.’
Well then of course, to make a long story short, his father ends up getting sick. He went back to Georgia to be with his father for a while. And it did take a while before he finally put the movie together - and he actually won an Emmy for that. I mean, just a terrific guy - just very, very happy I was able to help.
I was gonna tell you a couple of the different fires that I’ve been on. Probably the biggest fire was shortly, like two weeks after the strike. And thank god we went back to work because if that would've happened during the strike, we probably all would've been in Deer Lodge, in prison.
[01:37:06]
The biggest fire was right across the street from the [Montana] Standard. It was the Silver Bow block, the Intermountain block, and the Professional building. Again, Bob Armstrong was working that night. He said, ‘when they came out of the fire station,’ he says, ‘they could see the flames shooting out of the top of the Intermountain building.’ And they knew right then and there that - he says, ‘oh boy, this is…we're gonna be here a long time.’ They figure it started in the Intermountain building, and it spread to the Silver Bow block and the Professional building. And, you know, my god - there was tons of people that worked in there. Safeway alone - they were in the professional building. They had over 80 employees. And then of course in the Silver Bow block, there was law offices. The armed forces were there. In fact, that's where I took my physical for the draft. Oh, that Silver Bow block was just a beautiful building, but it was all wide open. They had that great big - they had a skylight in there. There was nothing, there was no fire stop. So once it got in there, I mean, it just ran all the way to the ceiling. You remember being on top of the - it was Ellis office supply - it was on the corner of Granite and Maine. We were on that roof aiming fire streams into the Silver Bow block. I mean, it was, oh…it took, I mean - well, it burned for a long, long time. That was, without a doubt, the biggest fire I had been on. We had three buildings - the Silver Bow block and the Professional building were both five story buildings with basements. The Intermountain, which was a real skinny building - it was four stories tall. There was a restaurant in there at one time. It was called the Mother Lode. I don't know if that was still open or not. I don't think there was anything upstairs, up above the Mother Lode restaurant.
Grant: What happened after they burned?
Paull: Oh boy, I mean it took a while, but they were - they did eventually tear 'em all down. There's some great pictures, and I was going to see if I could get 'em from Tracy Thornton of that building on fire. There was a picture that was taken from the backside of the building, and the hose lines that were there. I couldn't tell you how many were there. We had probably four or five up on top of the alley across the street from the Silver Bow block, because of course, you didn't want that fire to spread. You probably all remember - I wasn't on the fire department at the time when Pennies caught on fire. It jumped Dakota street and caught three more buildings on fire. And of course, thankfully back then they had a firewall at the Miner’s Hotel, you know, where Ted Ackerman has his place now. Otherwise that might have taken the whole building the whole block.
Jaap: Yeah.
[01:40:49]
Paull: Yeah. That was without a doubt the craziest fire. The Superior block fire was 209 Colorado Street. It was going pretty good, and the place was full of people. I can remember going down in the basement and there was this guy - his first name was Gabe. I cannot remember his last name. He was sitting at his kitchen table having a cup of coffee - the building's full of smoke. And I says, ‘Gabe, come on, you gotta get outta here.’ I knew him from Doris Boyle’s bar - Bernie Boyle's mom's bar. I said, ‘Gabe, come on, you gotta get outta here.’ He says, ‘oh no, somebody just burnt their food.’ I said, ‘no, this building's on fire! You gotta get outta here.’ And of course, by the time we got everybody out, you know, the fire had a pretty good head start on us, but everybody was out, no injuries. So that was probably the -
I'll tell you what the coldest fire. I wasn't there. I got called out and went to the south side fire station and we ended up having a fire from someone trying to unthaw their pipes. But it was 48 degrees below zero when the building at 1615 Grand Avenue caught on fire. And when it was all out, the guys who were there had to actually take the axes and chop the ice away from the tires so that they could move the fire trucks. See because when it's cold, you can't turn off the water to the hoses, because if you do, they freeze instantly and you'll never get 'em opened up again. So there's always water at the fire ground. And of course that day, with it being so darn cold, when they left, they had to use the axes to chop the ice away from the tires so they could move. That was without a doubt, the absolute worst.
We also had a fire one time, June 30th, ‘85, at Jerry's Distributing down on South Arizona Street. And I don't know if you guys know Jerry - at that time, they distributed Blue Bell potato chips. Plus at 4th of July, they sold fireworks. So, the fire started on the loading dock, got into the building. We're standing outside there and fireworks are shooting all over the place. You know, those little rockets or whatever - they're flying all over the place. It was actually hilarious, but it was crazy. Who would think you'd show up and have fireworks flying all around you?
In September of ‘89, good, good friends of ours had a fire at their house. I was at home and they came and got me at home, and went down. As we all know, there's nothing worse than a fire, because everything is wrecked. If it's not wrecked from the fire itself, the water and smoke - water's probably the worst. I mean it was a terrible deal. They were very fortunate that they got out because they didn't have any working smoke alarms in their house. A person driving down Excelsior Street seen it, came to their house and just pounded on the door until they finally woke up and got out. Mom and dad and two kids. So they were very, very lucky. I mean just a terrible, terrible deal for anybody to have a fire.
[01:44:53]
Oh, we got a couple of - actually three elevator stories to tell you about. We had a fire at the Grand Hotel. We were up on the fifth floor and the fire was up above us in the ceiling, up in the area where the elevator penthouse was, where all the elevator motors and everything were. So it's burning. We had a hole opened up in the ceiling, had attic ladders up in there, and we're aiming our fire streams at the fire in there. And same thing, like I mentioned earlier - it was two in, two out, two down watching. So my partner and I - we were up there and all of a sudden we heard the worst racket you've ever heard. I thought the ceiling was coming in on us. And of course, me being me and the idiot I am, I just put my arms over my head. And my partner who had the flashlight and the radio - he takes off running, runs down the stairs. Here I am - he thought I was behind him. And I'm, I'm doing this. Well, what happened was - the elevator motor and elevator itself fell from the top all the way - it got down to the area in between the first floor and the basement. In fact, I believe it's still in there. If they ever wanted to get it out, they'd have to, you know, cut it up into pieces and get it out.
But I mean, it was like - we thought we were goners. We thought the whole entire building was coming in on us. Thankfully, that was a very, very well constructed building because otherwise, we would've been toast. [laughs] But it was so funny because he takes off running. I'm still up there. On the trucks, we have those radios that - you could turn the speaker on and you could hear it. Everybody could hear what you were talking about. And I can remember hearing ‘em say, ‘get everybody out there, get everybody out of there! Is everybody okay?’ And my partner, by that time, he probably set a world record running down the stairs. He's already down the stairs and out the building. And he turns around, he goes, he says, ‘where's John?’ I was slowly coming down the stairs, because at that time I didn't know what the heck had happened, but we eventually got the fire out and now the building has the Quarry Brewery. I think at one time they had a bakery in there, so it's still a viable building.
Another elevator story was 44 East Park Street. Same thing. We were up there. The fire was up in the elevator penthouse and we're directing fire streams up at the fire. Three times that fire blew back on us and honest to god, all we could see was orange and red. So again, being firefighters, it takes three times before you realize you better get the hell out of there. We got out of there. We walked down the stairs - there was four of us up on the top - walked down the stairs. I remember I was the last one that walked out the door onto the street level. And I heard this bang. I thought, ‘geez, somebody slammed the door behind me.’ Well, no, it was the elevator, when it fell. Same thing, just like the Grand - only this building was not as well constructed as the Grand. It just - the whole entire part of that building fell right down into the basement. And you know, that was say…four to five minutes. If we'd have still been up there, I know for a fact there would've been fatalities. I mean, it was like, boy…that's crazy.
Jaap: That's only you have the picture of, right?
Paull: Yeah. Oh, geez. I didn't even begin to start talking about Monty Boston. I dunno if you guys remember Monty Boston? There's actually a book written. I think it might have been called Reign of Terror.
Jaap: Oh yeah. Oh yes. Okay. I know Monty Boston.
Paull: Yeah. Well, he wreaked havoc in Butte. I have like 12 different fires that he started. I believe there was more. There was - Mike Thatcher's van was the first one that he started. That was parked out in front of his house on South Jackson. He started the county attorney's office on fire in the courthouse. The probation office at 51 West Granite. Leipheimer’s, a car dealership, at 2611 Harrison. And at the same time he started that fire, he also robbed Jim Crow Chevrolet. He created a diversion, so he could - and actually, he had to have help on this one. He pulled a safe right out of Jim Crow Chevrolet, but then he started two mobile homes on fire in the 2300 block of Pine Street. The Coca-Cola bottling company, the chamber of commerce. And at the same time - the chamber of commerce was over on 2910 Harrison, but he created that diversion and robbed Arby's at the same time.
[01:51:01]
He lit a whole bunch of police cars - they were old police cars that they weren't using anymore. He cut through the fence at the city shop, got in there, and torched three or four of the cop cars. Then the Mormon church - he started a fire at the Mormon church, 311 South Jackson street. NCAT, National Center for Appropriate Technology on Continental Drive. That one - it was a three story building plus a basement. He started 18 fires in there. Thankfully, only one of them really got going, and they had an automatic sprinkler system in there. The big fire that actually set off the sprinkler system was in the basement. And it was in a small room, and the automatic sprinkler system put the fire out - but 18 fires. 18 fires in that building.
He had a fire - he started a fire at Second and Wyoming Street. There actually was probably more that he may have started at that time. When he started the Mormon church on fire, he tried to extort money from the church. Little did he know that - I believe he might have been a president or an elder in the church - he was a retired FBI agent. He set this up - that Monty Boston was going to have the church drop off the money at a locker at the old Union Bus Depot. So the FBI - they were in the pre-release center building, watching the front of the building. They had FBI agents in the back, in the alley, watching the building. Well, he never showed up, never. I really don't think they would've put any money in there, but he never showed up. So, thankfully he was not successful in trying to extort money out of a church.
Well, then he had rented a garage over at 1016 West Park Street, and it was like his trophy room. He kept something from every fire he started and every place that he robbed. The little lady that owned the garage - she had no idea what he was doing. Well, one time, this guy wanted to see something in her garage. Well, they walked in the garage and they seen all this stuff and thought, ‘oh my god, what the heck is this?’ They found out that it was his trophy room. Well, anyway, in the meantime, he had left Butte, went to Billings, and he got caught shoplifting at Sears. They brought him into the police department and booked him. He paid the bond. He was gonna get out. He used a false name. He didn't give his real name. And then a probation officer who actually was from Butte. His name was Sean Lyle. He walked in, and at the time, Monty Boston was waiting for a ride from his girlfriend. So he was sitting in the lobby. Sean Lyle walks into the lobby and sees him and says, ‘oh, Monty,’ he says, ‘they're looking for you in Butte.’ Well, the police department - they fell over. They said, ‘what's he wanted for?’ He says, ‘well, you name it.’ Well, that's how we got caught.
Grant: Wow.
Paull: And thankfully Sean Lyle walked in at the time because he might have, you know, scooted. Well, then he ended up again, back in prison. Because that's where he was, you know, originally.
Oh, here's another interesting story. We had a fire at 2015 Florida Street. It was down in the basement. When we get down in the basement - there was three of us - got down in the basement, and we hit the fire with the hose. There was grow lights in there. The guy had a marijuana grow operation in his basement. You know, then all of a sudden, we’re going, ‘holy man, what's that smell?’ Like we didn't know - but the marijuana was burning. So we got the fire out, and him and his wife - his wife was pregnant at the time. He pulls up, drops her off and then leaves! He left town. They didn't find him for the longest time. But in the house, besides the marijuana in the basement, he had coca plants growing in a closet. And of course, all kinds of guns and knives. I mean, it was like, holy man - that was crazy.
We've gone on a lot of, you know, like meth labs. We had one call at the War Bonnet Inn. The staff there was a little leery about what was going on, because they [some guests] never wanted room service. So we respond. Of course, they're pretty dangerous. You didn't want to go bombing in there. They ended up calling a DEA agent out of Missoula. He came in and I'll never forget. We put on Tyvek suits. We had air packs on, sleeves and cuffs were all taped. And we walked in there. Myself and my partner, we walked in and he says, ‘If I go, right, you go, right. If I go left, you go left. Don't touch anything.’ We lifted up the mattress, and where the box springs are - it was full of meth that he was making. And then of course, you know - later there was another meth lab that was down on Oregon Avenue. They get paranoid. They had the back door booby trapped, because they're always afraid someone's gonna steal their product. I don't think they worry so much about getting caught. I think it's that they don't want anybody to steal what they have. But that was a crazy call.
And then I got - how much more?
Jaap: You're fine. I have no time limit. So you're good, John.
Paull: Oh, okay. You probably remember the fire at the jail. I was on jury duty in Judge Whelan’s court. I could hear the sirens and I thought, ‘wow, that's awfully close.’ And then at the time, our signal to turn the water on after you made the hydrant was four honks of the air horn on the truck. And I thought, ‘holy man, that fire’s gotta be really close.’ Well then Judge Whelan says, ‘ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna have to dismiss court for the day.’ He says, ‘when you leave, please leave by the front door.’ And so I thought, ‘well, what the heck? I'm going out the back door.’ I went out the back door and ran into Bob Armstrong and he said, ‘the jail's on fire. You gotta get to the station and start making a call out. We need guys.’
But then some other big fires were - well, like the fire at the Blue Venus Cafe. Mark Evankovich rescued George Grossbeck off the second story balcony - I mean, he had no idea the building was on fire and couldn't get out because the fire started on the staircase. You probably all remember the Montana Broom & Brush fire. Oh my god, the chemicals that were in that building. Here’s another great one - the Party Palace, everybody in town was upset that we saved the building. [laughs] You know, which was, yeah - I’ll say no more.
Jaap: It is your job! [laughter]
Paull: Then we had a fire one time at 307 in West Granite. Thankfully a neighbor had come home. He worked a weird shift and got off at three o'clock in the morning, seen the building on fire. And the crazy thing about it was the landlord would lock the exterior door and you could only unlock it from the outside. So the place is on fire and these guys, people, the residents, in there couldn't get out. Well, this gentleman that lived across the street, Jim Pantoja - he was able to bust down the door and get the people out. There was one other person in the building. We actually got him out because he couldn't couldn't get out at all. Thankfully Jim Pantoja was able to get the people out of there.
Whalen Tire, of course, that was - some of these pitchers. My god, the smoke was just absolutely horrible. All those tires burning - you know how they stink when they burn. Oh, it was…but you know, it was really interesting when - the first day, of course, the place was going like crazy.
[02:01:21]
But then every day after that, Carrie and Lisa Casagranda - because you always have to have firemen on the scene until it's investigated by the fire marshal, state fire marshal, [and] the insurance companies. So we were there for quite a while, you know, maybe two guys per shift. Carrie and Lisa Casagranda - every night around 5:30 - would come out and say, ‘what do you want to eat?’ Every night. A firefighter - I mean, if you wanted steak, you got a steak.
Jaap: People were fighting to go babysit that one. [laughter]
Paull: Oh, geez. Yeah, that was a great one. And my god, they were so nice, and they still are very nice. But yeah. They were actually - the crew that responded to that fire were actually in there, and it was just chock full of tires. Probably not very safe because, you know, if a stack of tires tips over, you're not gonna find your way out. Jeff Miller - he came later. I mean, not too much later, and ordered everybody out of there because he was afraid that they might lose somebody in that fire. I mean just, oh [it was] just horrible.
You know, we actually did go to a couple of wildland fires. We had one on Rader Creek, which burnt about 425 acres. I know one guy, one resident up there, refused to leave. He ended up getting burnt. They sent him to the University of Utah hospital. You know, we also had a deal with the Forest Service and the Montana Department of Natural Resources that if they needed help, you know, that we would send an engine to the fire. We went to the Pony fire. It was June 24th, 2012. That one eventually ended up burning 5,100 acres. And have you guys ever heard of the Indiana University Judson Mead Geological Field Station.
Grant: Yeah, Dick Gibson.
Jaap: Is that where Dick was?
Grant: Yeah.
Paull: Oh really? Did he teach there?
Grant: Yeah, he was a liaison there for years and years.
Paull: Oh really?
Grant: Yeah.
Paull: Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, it's quite the campus. And I think they built it like in ‘46 or ‘47 and there's like 60 acres there and they have 13 dorms. The dorms aren't very big. So when we went to the Pony fire, that was our main responsibility, was to protect the Indiana University campus. Well, after the first day, the fire pretty much blew the other way. So they pulled everybody off of the Indiana University summer campus. And then we went over to - we ran operations for the heliport, where all the helicopters flew in and out of. And it was over on the other side of the mountain, close to Pony. And at that same time, you know, there were two other forest fires, one at Bear Trap and another one called the Antelope Fire, which was just north of Whitehall. They ran all the operations out of Whitehall, and there was like 400 people there. You should have seen it. The kitchens, the shower facilities, all the equipment that was needed. I mean, it was just crazy how many people that it takes to run a fire.
I just got a couple other things that - and I hope I'm not going too long here.
Grant: No. And I got a couple questions for you too. I'm sure you [Aubrey] do as well.
Paull: I’ll give you an idea on a couple of medicals. There's always good ones when we actually help people. And there's the bad ones. And then the really sad ones. Some of the good ones - and this is in fact - at one time it was pretty embarrassing for me. We delivered a baby. [laughter]
Jaap: Just your face when you say that.
Grant: Not you!
Jaap: Afraid of the childbirth class! [laughter]
Paull: Oh, oh yeah. That was my worst grade in the EMT test. So we get this call and I believe it was out on Sunrise, or Sunset - I can't remember the exact address. And at the same time, there was another medical [call] uptown. And I told my partner, Pat Dobel, I says, ‘oh, this is all on us. Because by the time they get here, it's gonna take them a long time to go from that medical to the hospital, to our call.’ So we walk in and it’s like, oh my god - the baby's crowning. I looked over at him. I says, ‘this is on us. We're all by ourselves.’ Well, we were nervous as heck. Mom, thankfully, was very calm, which made it a whole lot easier. So we delivered the baby. The first thing you always do is suction the ears and - actually not the ears - nose and mouth. No wonder I didn't get a very good grade! [laughs] So then we clamped the umbilical cord, cut the umbilical cord. The ambulance showed up then. And of course you do your best to keep the baby and mom comfortable, and especially the baby, warm. Then of course, they loaded her up and they took her to the hospital. Well, we actually were on the front page of the paper two or three days later.
I had not seen the girl, the little girl, for years and years. In fact, I had no idea where she lived or even if she lived in Butte. So I went to Brooks Hannah Ford, and this girl that was helping me - I says, ‘oh, I'm John Paull. I'm here for a service job.’ And she said, are you John Paull, the firefighter?’ And I says, ‘yeah.’ Well, she lets out a scream. She says, ‘oh my god!’ So she takes me around and she introduces me to all of her coworkers and tells him that I delivered her. [laughter] Well, I was embarrassed, but it was like, ‘okay, this isn't about me. It's all about Kayla.’ And she was so happy. And I'll never forget that as long as I live - that she took me around and introduced me to all of her coworkers.
Jaap: Amazing.
Paull: I actually got to help on another delivery on a baby, over on Florence Street, which wasn't quite as dramatic because we really didn't do anything. Another good call. It started out as a bad call. It was October of 2011. We get a call saying there's a young woman heading up the East Ridge and she's been in contact with her counselor from Bozeman. The counselor has lost contact with her.
[02:09:15]
They believed she may have, you know, taken some drugs and she's heading towards the Lady of the Rockies. So we take off. My partner is Chad Silk. Of course, getting up there is a chore. The fire department does now have a key to get in that gate. We had to wait for Mike Cerise from the Lady of the Rockies Foundation to come unlock the gate. So we get up there, we're walking all around. We're walking around by the statue, by the chapel, all the area up there around that site. We didn't see a thing. Didn't find anything. So I'm looking down the hill. And like I said, we were told that she had a pen light, which - they're not very big. They're only like maybe a little bit bigger than a pen or a pencil. So we're searching some more around the top part there. And we look down the hill and I see this great big spotlight. So I holler at Chad and I said, ‘Chad, come here.’ He says, ‘is that a light down there?’ I says, ‘yeah, it is.’ So we start walking down the hill to where we thought the light was. We get down to where we thought the light was. Nothing, no light, not a thing. ‘Oh, geez. That's weird. Where did that light go?’
So we turned, I looked to my left, south of us, and I see the big spotlight again. I said, ‘Chad, Chad, look it, there it is again.’ So we walked down to where we thought it was - same thing. The light disappears. We searched the area, couldn't find a thing. And then Chad was looking up in the trees. He says, ‘look, you can see a light shining up in that tree.’ So we walked over to where we thought that the light was and sure enough, there she was. She was unconscious, but she was breathing and she had one of those foil blankets, the very thin aluminum foil blankets. So we radio back to dispatch that we found her and that we're gonna start taking her back up the hill. Well, we took her up the hill and oh my god, there's a lot of deadfall up there. Thankfully she wasn't a very big girl and we were able to get her up to the top. By that time, there was some police officers. They grabbed some equipment out of the back of the rescue and we were able to put her on a tray, which is a collapsible canvas tray that you can put a patient on. We got her up to the top of the hill, and by that time the ambulance was there and we got her in the ambulance my partner went with them, Chad. I often wonder first off why the two lights that we seen - because it didn't make any sense that - because I mean they were huge. And then to see it twice, once down the hill and then once across the hill - and I always think that somebody was looking out for her. Because there was no explanation for it whatsoever. And I always think - I hope she's okay and doing well. It was actually a good story because we were able to find her and get her to the hospital. But I mean the two lights -
Jaap: And for both of you to see it.
Paull: I'm so glad that my partner was with me. I told him later, I says, ‘you know, I am so glad you saw that too, because you know, people thought we were crazy.’
Then the first time I ever used that automatic external defibrillator was over on Park [street]. Of course, the AED now, I mean, they're so automatic. You just put the pads on - you put one pad up here on the right, you know, just below the shoulder and one other pad down left, like at the edge of your rib cage, and the machine pretty much tells you what's going on.
[02:14:01]
If they're suffering from ventricular fibrillation or ventricular tachycardia, it'll tell you. The machine does all the work. All you really need to do is put the patches on ‘em. And so anyway, this gentleman lived on the 400 block of West Park. No kidding - by the time - we went in the ambulance and helped him. By the time we got to the hospital, wheeling him in the back door of the ER, he was talking to us. I mean, I was just flabbergasted with that. And they do the job. And now of course, I mean, I'm not too sure. I'm sure the civic center has them. There's a lot of different public places that have 'em. They’re real easy to work. I think when we first got 'em, we were all afraid. But one thing is you definitely have to clear before you shock because if you happen to be touching the patient, you'll get shocked too. And they say it's not quite as bad as getting hit with the taser,
Jaap: But it still does not sound pleasant!
Paull: No. And then, well you probably - there's been terrible, terrible accidents. You probably all remember the school shooting we had here. That one bugged me for a long time, because, you know, I was calling Jeremy by the wrong name during the confusion, you know, names were…I really do believe that people can hear you, even if they're unconscious, you know. I think they can hear you. And I kept calling him Jeremy by the wrong name. And that bugged me for a long time, because he probably thought, ‘oh my god, nobody's taking care of me.’ So that was, you know, that bugged me a lot.
We've had several burn victims. One little boy - his father started at a campfire with a can of gas. So the next day, the little boy - he was probably about 10 years old, same thing. He tries to start a campfire just like his dad did. Well, he ended up getting burnt really bad and the little bugger - he passed away, but I can remember him just telling me, ‘am I gonna die?
Am I gonna die?’ And I kept saying, ‘no, no, no, you're gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay.’ I mean, it was - the poor, poor kid. I just, oh…
And maybe the last story I'll tell you about is that - Terry Rossland, you probably remember Terry Rossland when he blew up the car down there on Montana and Broadway. Well, we were out doing an inspection out at the Montana Livestock Auction company - the assistant chief Bob Dumicich calls and says, ‘get back to the station right away. Don't stop. Don't do anything.’ ‘Oh, wow. That's weird. What's going on?’ We got back to the station. They informed us of what's going on. A
So normally if there's a bomb call, we go up and we get close, get everything ready, hook up to the hydrant, and get ready in case we need it. But this time they told us to stay in the station because they're afraid he might take off in his vehicle again. Well, so we're ready to go and pretty soon we hear that first explosion and it was like, ‘holy man!’ So of course, jump in the trucks, away we go. We get up there and we started to - well, first, engine one drives in front of the car. And just at that time, Terry Rossland is getting out of the car and he is on fire. So they had to stop right there because of course, he was right laying on the road. So then I'm in engine four. We pull up, start using an inch and a half hose to put the fire out. I was in between the car and a pickup that they had used to block him in. And then all of a sudden, the second explosion happens. And it blew me up against the pickup truck and knocked my helmet off. This scared that holy hell outta Bob Armstrong because when it knocked me up against the truck, it knocked my helmet off. And he actually told me later, he says, ‘I thought it was your head rolling down the street.’ I thought, ‘holy shit.’ He said, ‘that scared me worse than the blast.’ So then again, you know - how many times does it take a fireman to realize you're in danger? It blew up a third time and it was like, ‘okay, let's get the heck outta here.’
Well, I ended up - my own fault - didn't have gloves on, got burnt on my hands. Got burnt on my face. I was off work for like about a month and a half. And then poor Terry Rossland ended up going to the University of Utah burn center. He was there like about six months and then came back and unfortunately took his own life later. I'll just tell you this - that after that, I always had dreams about Terry Rossland. It was never - he was never coming after me. He was always coming after my wife and kids to cause harm. And that was so weird because it was never me, but it was them…and you know how…
Jaap: That's much worse, I imagine.
Paull: Yeah, it really is. Because I mean, you can never really do anything about it.
[02:20:17]
And then one little humorous medical - we had this girl that suffered a seizure. She was probably 17, 18 years old. And her mother brings us into her bedroom, where she had the seizure, and I reached down to take her pulse. And just as I did that, she woke up, and she seen me, and she decked me!
Jaap: Good for her! [laughs]
Paull: She hit me so hard. Well then my partner, he falls on the floor laughing. The mother's on the floor laughing. I ended up with a black eye over it. And it’s like, you should have seen that coming because she was - wake up and didn't know what happened and who's this guy?
Jaap: Oh, that's funny.
Paull: But yeah, it was - there's been a lot of, you know, crazy calls. A lot of happy ones, a lot of sad ones. And then, you know, terrible, terrible fires throughout the years.
Jaap: Was it hard for Peggy?
Paull: Well, yeah, it was. Because, if I was working, she never knew what was happening.
Jaap: Right.
Paull: But if I was called out, then that's when she worried, because you'd leave. And I said, ‘oh, don't worry. Everything's gonna be fine.’ But that was always the hardest part, for her anyway.
Jaap: Sure.
Paull: But we had - one time when Peggy actually got put to work, one day when the fire department - you probably remember, you know, that terrible plane crash? Well, we were uptown. I thought, ‘boy, what are all the sirens?’ Police cars flying down Montana street. And you know, the fire trucks were gone. So I pulled into the uptown station and I called the flat. We always called station two ‘the flat’ and nobody answered. So I called dispatch and I said, ‘what's going on?’ He said, ‘are you at the station?’ I said, ‘yeah.’ ‘You gotta make a call-out.’ He says, ‘we got a plane wreck.’
Oh, so right about that time we get a medical. So I'm the only one there. One of the other guys is coming. So I says, ‘Okay, I'll take the rescue. I'll meet you at the call.’ And then in the meantime, Peggy's making the call-out because dispatch was way, way too busy to do any of that. And I'm sure that the fireman that she called, they probably thought, ‘what are you doing, doing it?’ But that was - she got put to work that day.
Jaap: Oh, that's funny. Do you wanna go ahead with yours?
Grant: Yeah, my turn?
Jaap: Your turn.
Grant: I don't know much about the school shooting that took place here. Could you tell us that story and elaborate a bit more on what happened to you there?
[02:23:15]
Paull: Oh yeah, no, it was horrible. It was April of ‘94, I think. I was at the south side fire station. It was probably about 20 after eight in the morning, somewhere around that time. And we get a dispatch saying that there's been a shooting in a school. We looked at each other - my partner and I did - and said, ‘is that what we heard?’ So of course we take off. On the way out there, the police officer, he says, ‘step on it, hurry up, get out here.’ And we get there. The principal, Kate Stetner, and all the teachers, I mean, you really have to give 'em credit - because they had the situation handled very well. They got all the kids into the school. Actually one of the teachers grabbed the little boy who did the shooting and - what happened was that - the boy that did the shooting, his parents both had AIDS and the kids were teasing him. You know, like I guess they kept it up for a long time. So he was able to find a gun at the house and he brought the gun to school and he was - the victim was not…he was not the intended person to be shot. It was another little boy that was around that area. So he ended up shooting the wrong boy, which I mean wrong or - it just was terrible, what happened.
Like I said earlier, when we got there, you know, the names of the kids were confused for me. It was just a horrible thing that the little boy that died was 11. The boy that did the shooting was 10. They were the youngest shooter and victim for a schoolyard incident in the history of the country at that time. So I mean, it was a terrible, terrible tragedy. You know, then they built those beautiful soccer fields out there in Jeremy's honor because he was a soccer player. Yeah, just a terrible deal for the whole community, especially the kids that went to school at Margaret Larry - terrible thing.
Grant: Thanks for recapping that for me. It was before my time in Butte, so I hadn't heard about that. I wanted to ask too about Monte Boston. What made him do all those things?
Jaap: Yeah. What was his deal?
Paull: You know, I think he had it in for any government agency. Because he spent - and I can't remember what he was in prison for prior. I believe he was from Great Falls. Anyway, when he was in prison, he actually received a degree in criminal justice or - well maybe I can't remember the other. But he actually received a degree from the University of Great Falls. But when he got out - oh, this is another crazy thing. He did ride-alongs with the police department because you know, he told ‘em he wanted to get into that business, because he wanted to use his degree. Well, he had other motives behind that because he knew exactly the movements of all the police officers. Believe it or not, most of the fires that he started happened around 5-5:30 in the morning because that's when they were - the police officers were changing shifts.
[02:27:34]
So he knew all that. He pretty much knew exactly what they were doing. So I think he probably just had it in for any type of government agency. You know, like the county - oh, I didn't mention earlier that every one of his fires that he started, that was in an office - he would empty everything out of the desks and the file cabinets and then pile all the papers up and start the fire. That's how - I was at the probation office, the county attorney's office, the chamber of commerce and NCAT - all of them were all the same way. He piled up all the papers. Thankfully for a lot of them, especially NCAT, they never really took off. Because there was 18 fires that he started.
Grant: Ridiculous.
Paull: Most of them - at NCAT anyway - most of them burnt out. They never really got going.
Jaap: Yeah.
Paull: But thank god they caught him.
Jaap: Was he from Butte?
Paull: I think. Well, he ended up - I think he was sentenced to prison out of Great Falls, but I don't know where he was from. And of course he's out of prison now and I don't know where he lives, but I don't think he lives in Montana anymore.
Jaap: Interesting. Probably not. I bet he doesn't.
Grant: I wanted to ask how it made you feel to see the uptown burning. Did you have an emotional response to that?
Paull: Oh yeah. You know, living uptown all those years - like some of the fires, my god. My dad - he was a dental technician. He had an office on the third floor of the Miner’s Bank building, or the Phoenix building. I always remember - it was February of ‘72. He got a phone call. He says, you better get down here and take your stuff out of the building in case that fire jumps Park Street. And I can remember he came up to the bedroom and he says, ‘do you wanna go to the fire?’ And I said, ‘ah, no, I don't wanna go.’
Well, still to this day I’ve kicked myself in the butt for not going, because I mean, it was a huge fire. I mean, there was the Pennies building, and then the little building that was to the west of Pennies. And then on the other side of Dakota Street was the - what the heck was that hotel?
Jaap: Park hotel.
Paull: Yeah. And then the Baltimore building was there. Well it burnt five buildings. To see that, I mean that was horrible. It actually looked like they dropped a bomb in that area. I mean, it was…
Jaap: Well for a while, didn't they think it might have been a bomb or something or did they thought it might have been?
Paull: Yeah, because it never - and of course there was all kinds of names that were mentioned that started the fire and you know, they could never prove it. And then of course when the Silver Bow block and the Intermountain and Professional buildings burnt, I mean that was a whole half of a block that burnt. The Medical Arts fire - that was before my time, that was in ‘74. Man, that was a huge fire. And you know, typical for Butte - there had to have been hundreds, if not a thousand people watching.
[02:31:16]
I forget if it was a Friday night or a Saturday night, right about dinner time when it started. Everybody and their brother was there. And you know, I mean, there's been some - and it's really a shame because a lot of these buildings are absolutely beautiful and then to lose them to fire. Like that Silver Bow block - that was an absolutely amazing building. So, so pretty. And you know, there's been a lot of other fires up here that - the Montana Hotel right across from the library - that burned the Montana Hotel and the residence next door. I mean, just terrible. And it's part of history - it's gone. You'd never be able to replace those buildings as ornate as they were back then.
Grant: How did it affect the town as a whole, do you think?
Paull: Oh, I think it was - I think it was very, very hard because, you know, there was so many people affected by the fires. Well, as an example - Pennies, when that burned, then they moved - they had stuff scattered all over uptown. Well, low and behold that in the Medical Arts fire, Pennies got hit again because they had their shoe department in there. So I mean, it was devastating for the business community and I think people just - I think it may have hurt bringing people into town too. Big businesses - they certainly were not gonna come uptown just because, I don't think, because there were so many fires. They were old, old buildings and I think they weren't kept up, you know, like especially electrical work. So I think it really hurt the town.
Grant: And how much, how big of a role do you think arson played in these fires uptown?
Paull: I don't know. You always heard there was. I think the Medical Arts fire might have been electrical. There was always a rumors that the Pennies fire was started by certain members of this one family, but it was never proven.
Grant: The McKnights?
Paull: [laughs] That was one name mentioned. Yes. I'm surprised you know that. [laughs] I know the Montana Hotel was started - transients were in there. It was in February, or no, March. So it was cold and they got in, started a fire to stay warm, and then it got away from them. And of course, you know, they didn't go and report it to anybody. They took off running and you know, at two, three o'clock in the morning, there's hardly anybody around. Well, I mean, there was other arsonists too. There was a business owner down on West Park Street that - they actually filed charges against him, but arson is very, very hard to prove. And he got off, you know. They brought him to trial, but he was found not guilty.
There's been other - well like the National Hotel fire that started with two guys arguing. I mean, geez, just go out in the back and duke it out. Don't start a fire. [laughter] Geeze. There's been others - there was an individual who lived - actually I don't know where he lived the first time, but he spent time in prison. He got out, started in again. They weren't very big. Thankfully he didn't know what the heck he was doing. There was another individual who lived up in Centerville that started all kinds of grass fires. And then he moved on, starting vacant houses on fire. Amazingly, they brought him in for questioning, and as soon as they brought him in for questioning, they stopped. So it gives you a pretty good idea that he was probably involved. Probably scared him, you know, and then it stopped, so that was a good thing.
But yeah, there was this one that’s really kind of sad. A lady down on North Drive - she starts her house on fire, takes a five gallon can of gas and walks all the way through her house. And then she gets back to the back bedroom, torches it. Well, she also got burnt, really bad, ended up in Utah. And it was like, oh my god. You know, and why? Because if you pour gasoline on a fire - I mean to start a fire - first off, we can even smell it when we walk in and the arson team is going to - they have equipment that can tell you what the accelerant that was used to start the fire - they can tell what it is. You're not gonna get away with it. And the only sad part is that generally you're not gonna get convicted, because it's very, very hard to prove, because there's always that reasonable doubt.
Grant: What about this notion that it was in the Anaconda Company's interest for the uptown to burn in order to expand the pit? You ever hear anything about that?
[02:37:21]
Paull: Yeah, that was mentioned quite often, especially - that was before my time on the fire department. But all the fires they had over on the east side. Yeah. East Mercury, East Galena, Park, Broadway, Granite. But again, you know - I don't know if that was…
Grant: Can't prove it.
Paull: Can't prove it. And then, of course, they were blamed for starting the Columbia Gardens on fire too, which was, I dunno if you guys ever - did you ever go, Aubrey? Was that around when you were -
Jaap: No, I'm too young.
Paull: Yeah, that was a beautiful place. I mean, honest to god - to think that we had that in Butte. I mean a roller coaster, a merry go round, the carousel, the picnic area. I think it was even nicer before my time. That they had a zoo up there. It was just amazing. And it was a great place to go for a picnic. Even if you didn't go down and ride the roller coaster, you could stay up above and have a picnic, and you could walk down to where all the playground equipment was. Oh, it was quite the place. But they wanted - the Anaconda Company didn't want it there anymore. They wanted that ground for the pit.
Grant: So they had a fire.
Paull: Yeah.
Grant: I guess I was just curious, in general, what is the most common cause of a structure fire? I get really paranoid because we've been renovating several big buildings. I'm always very attentive to things when we leave or, you know - so I'm just curious, what are the most common causes?
Paull: Well, a lot of 'em would be electrical. If your electrical isn't up to code, that could be a big problem. Even leaving rags, like if you're putting on polyurethane or something and you put those in - leave ‘em on, you just - and they will spontaneously combust. We had one down at - a brand new house - one of the houses they built for Habitat for Humanity down on Nevada Street. That's exactly what happened there. It didn't burn the house down, but that's how it started. You'd be surprised too at the number of dryer fires you get. You know, people don't clean out their vent - that happens a lot. It even happened one time at St. James hospital. The poor nun that was there. She was having a fit. She was so scared the hospital was gonna burn down. They had a fire in their dryer. Cooking fires are the biggest.
Grant: Okay.
[02:40:33]
Paull: Because, you know, especially [when you] deep fry something or something that you heat up on the stove with grease, and then forget that. You might want to run and take some laundry out of the washing machine or something like that. And then you forget that the things are cooking there. That actually happened to my grandmother. She would always go to church, and she started something on the stove, forgot to turn it down, went to church. Daily mass was probably a half hour long. [She] come home, the fire department’s there. And that was the whole thing. She left something hot on the stove. That's about the biggest thing.
Candles are a big problem too. You forget to burn 'em out, you know, blow 'em out. Something may fall - just like that one call where the handicapped boy was in the house and something fell off the wall, landed right on top of the candle, started the paper on fire, and of course started everything else around it on fire.
Jaap: Yeah, I won't have a candle with kids in the house.
Grant: No.
Paull: Oh no.
Jaap: They just throw shit! They don't know there's a little candle, you know, they don't.
Paull: Yeah. We had a fire one time down kitty corner from the Emerson school. A lady had a really nice decoration on her mantle above her fireplace. [She] lit two candles. She had the Christmas tree, or tree boughs, across the mantle. They went downstairs, watched TV, and next thing you know, the front room is on fire. I mean, any time there's a fire - there's been a lot of fires in garages that end up starting the house on fire. Just horrible.
Grant: I wanted to kind of work back a little bit. You had mentioned just very briefly, you worked at the smelter.
Paull: Oh yeah.
Grant: What was that like?
Paull: Oh, actually I didn't work anywhere near the smelter. I was working in the office at the time.
Grant: Okay.
Paull: But I did go down every day, twice a day - I went down to the reverberator to pick up - I was working in the time office. Then you have to go down there and pick up time cards and, oh my god. I mean, it was cool to watch that hot melted copper coming out and they would dump it. I mean, it was just bright, bright orange. But the smell. And most of those guys down there didn't wear respirators. Oh, I don't know how the hell they did it. But yeah, no, I didn't get to work down actually where they did all the work. That was quite the place.
Grant: You would almost never know nowadays - they tore everything down except the stack, you know?
Paull: Yeah. Thank god they kept it. The stack.
Grant: Yeah. Well, you had also mentioned that you didn't really get good grades at Montana Tech [laughter] and that you didn't do much studying. If you weren't studying, what were you doing?
Paull: Well, let me tell you - I spent a lot of time in the SUB, the student union building. And then at night, maybe not every night, we spent a lot of time at the Vu Villa. [laughter] And then later it was at Boyle’s Bar. But most of the time it was at the Vu, and of course, the drinking age back then was 18. So, I mean, we could get in. There was no never any problem. It changed on my birthday -well, when I turned 18 was when they lowered the age to 18. So, what a birthday present.
Jaap: Yeah, really. That's the greatest gift, I'm sure.
Grant: Well, and you had said you graduated in ‘71. I was curious - and you mentioned it briefly about being drafted - did Vietnam play in at all to your life?
Paull: Oh, I never did get drafted. Like I said, I took my physical at the Silver Bow block. Well, my draft number was 39. So I took the physical, you know, passed the physical, and then I was 1A, which meant, you know, you're gonna go. Because I think that year they were going - the year before, they went as high as draft numbers, 115, as high as 115. The next year they were planning on going to a hundred. So, you know, there'd been no doubt I would've been drafted, but then President Nixon cuts out the draft. Oh, I used to know the date. So anyway, he cut out the draft and then I went from being listed as 1A, to 1…god I got the card at home. I still got my draft card. Yeah. It was 1A, which meant you could go - they could take you anytime. And then it might have been - I think 1F was if you weren't physically fit to go. So I can't remember what I would've been, but no, never did go.
But I know a good friend of mine. He was number one that year and he joined the army - or excuse me - he joined the Navy. And shortly after he joined is when President Nixon cut out the draft. So he spent four years in the Navy when, if he had waited a little longer, he wouldn't have had to go. But he thought, ‘well, there's no way. I'm not getting out of it.’ So, four years in the Navy.
Grant: I just had one more question. You had mentioned - I think it was your parents' house was on East Granite, or one of them, 257 East Granite -
Paull: Oh, that was where my grandmother and grandfather lived and where my mom grew up.
Grant: Okay. And you know - they had gone to the Sacred Heart school and I mean, there's just so many places that were a part of your childhood, or your parents' lives, that are gone. And I'm curious how that makes a guy feel.
[02:47:37]
Paull: Well, you know, what's really a shame is that all those houses that were over there on the east side, you know, all gone. And all the people that lived over there - where my mom and grandmother and grandfather lived - I think it was like an eight-plex maybe. But there’s so many people that still to this day - from my mom and grandmother telling me - their neighbors, like Helen Rodman, Rick Zibinick’s family. Joe Zibinick, who was a policeman. I mean, all the people that they knew that lived over there were all great friends and then boom - all the houses are gone. Everybody spread out, went to different parts. They still stayed friends, but it's just not quite the same when you know your neighbors aren't there anymore -
Grant: When your neighborhood is destroyed?
Paull: Yeah. And you know, like Sacred Heart church. I can remember going to church in there. That was a beautiful church, you know, Spanish style. It looked like something you'd see in Mexico. I mean, it was beautiful. [It was] kind of a yellowish color, maybe yellow brown. And I remember they had, I think it's right. They had three bells in the front, a great big bell in the middle, and two off to the side. And then to be honest, I don't remember where Sacred Heart school was. I always remember the Grant [school]. The Grant was a big stone building and the address was on East Galena. But I always remember that - I really don't remember where Sacred Heart was.
Jaap: Other side of the street. It was the original church and then that burned. And then they built the school on the base of the, like with the foundation of the church. And I believe it was across the street, but if that's wrong, cut that out.
Paull: Yeah. And like I said, that's where my mom started out school. And then I believe Sacred heart may have closed in ‘66. Yeah, probably was ‘66 because there was kids that came from Sacred Heart over to St. Pat’s, like all the Thatchers and the Gonzalez's - and of course that's all I remember is those two names, two family names, but they came over to St. Pat's after.
Grant: Driving around these days, do you think - do you dwell on those things being gone?
Paull: Oh, many a time driving by Sacred Heart church. I don't remember when the church closed, but I think it was long after the school closed. I believe they had a six o'clock mass on Sunday and there was three of my buddies that - we all delivered papers. And we'd hurry up and deliver the papers, go to church, and then go to breakfast, and then go home and go to bed. But you know, being in Sacred Heart - then to think, you know, that's where my mom was baptized and where she went to church - that's really kind of sad. But then, you know, just driving around some of the neighborhoods that have had bad fires, and the buildings ended up being torn down and - it is sad. You can look right here, you know, Murray hospital was there. I mean this neighborhood, Quartz and Copper, I mean tons of homes. I don't know how many of them burned, but it's just really sad to see it all gone.
But I do like that a lot of businesses are moving over onto East Park and East Galena, East Mercury. I mean, and what a view that they have. Right out your front windows and you see the highlands.
Grant: Well that does it for my questions Aubrey.
Jaap: I don’t have any more questions John. I kept you longer than an hour and a half. [laughter]
Grant: Double that.
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