Already Part of the Family: Dalton's Newest Firefighters
Dalton’s four newest firefighters have been on the job for only three months, but they’re already part of the family.
“I was used to a sports family,” said firefighter Devonte Davis. “To this day I still have a bunch of guys I was teammates with and if they called me I wouldn’t hesitate to drop everything and go help them out… outside of sports I never knew if there was another place that would be like that.”
“When I got here, these guys say, ‘hey if you need anything let me know.’ You can bring your family around, you can have dinner here at the firehouse. I was blown away at how family-oriented this place has been and every day it’s still mind-blowing how much family stuff goes on here at the fire department.”
A New Challenge, Daily
Davis and fellow firefighters Tyler Putnam and Dylan Massengill are taking their first steps in their fire service careers. Fellow recruit Whitney Lacks, however, is an eight-year veteran of the Greenville, NC Fire Department where he’d risen to the rank of lieutenant. He moved to Dalton to be closer to family in Ringgold. All four completed the DFD’s grueling 14-week recruit school in November.
“At first I was coming into it with a good attitude of this is what’s best for my family because we moved here for family reasons,” Lacks said when asked about going back to being a new recruit after serving as an officer in North Carolina. “I really didn’t give it a second thought until maybe midway through the second week [of recruit school] when it started getting very physically demanding and I started thinking, ‘what have I done?’”
“But very quickly that feeling turned into knowing this is absolutely worth it,” Lacks said with a smile. “Absolutely worth it.”
Lacks wasn’t alone in his assessment of the challenge of the department’s recruit school. All four of Dalton’s newest recruits come from athletics backgrounds, but still call the training program the most demanding experience of their lives.
“It was way harder than what I thought it was going to be physically and mentally,” said Dylan Massengill who played college baseball at Chattanooga State. “When you get through one day you feel good but then you realize you’ve got to get up the next day and go do it again the next day.”
“Every week, it was a new challenge, something that we had to grow and push through,” Davis agreed. He played college football at Tusculum and played many other sports at Dalton High School. “It was physically demanding, but it was a good experience.”
“You just had to lean on these other guys to keep pushing through every week,” said Calhoun native Tyler Putnam, who won two state championships with the Yellow Jackets football program.
A Different Culture
For Whitney Lacks, coming to the Dalton Fire Department represented more than just a chance to get closer to family in northwest Georgia. It also represented a chance to take his fire service career to a different level.
“The biggest difference that I saw initially was the level of expectation here,” Lacks said. “From the first face-to-face interview we had, it was made very clear that the expectations here are high. That bar is set high here for a reason. And every single person here in this department holds to that standard and they are very diligent in holding you to that standard. Coming to this from another department that may not have had that high standard across the board was humbling.”
“The culture where I came from was very different,” Lacks explained. “The culture in this department… we are aggressive about training, about the dedication to the job, to the people to the community and to each other… the place where I came from I had a tight knit core group of guys that I was friends with. They would have fit in well here, that close-bonded, aggressive attitude was there but it wasn’t department-wide. The culture was much more of a business-like culture. It didn’t feel like the fire service all the time, it felt more like a business.
“I think it was a positive change coming here because this is much more what I feel the fire service should be.”
A Higher Calling
For Dylan Massengill, the decision to join the Dalton Fire Department felt more like a calling. After finishing his college career with a degree in business from Tennessee Temple University, he started to work in commercial and residential roofing in both sales and estimating. The Dalton native felt something was missing, though.
“I’ve called myself a Christian most of my life and I realized some hard truths and realized maybe I wasn’t living how I was supposed to so I felt like there was more purpose out there,” Massengill said. “The Bible in John says that we should love as Christ loved and there is no greater love for man than to lay down his life for others. And in our small group there’s a guy who works for Whitfield County and he said, ‘hey, there’s an opening in Dalton,’ and immediately in my mind I thought, that’s it. So, in the time span of a month maybe a month and a half I realized that’s exactly what I wanted to do.”
Massengill credits that sense of purpose with being his inspiration to rise to the challenges faced in the department’s recruit school and also on the job.
“Coming into it with that mindset, because it was the most challenging thing I’ve ever had to do,” he said. “I came into it with that mindset of it being what I wanted to do so quitting wasn’t an option for me.”
And the sense of family in the fire service also keeps Massengill coming back.
“That’s one of the things that I look forward to each day, even though you’re leaving your own family at home for a period of time, you look forward to coming to what I already think of as my second family,” he said.
A Life-Long Dream
For Devonte Davis, meanwhile, the decision to become a Dalton firefighter was made a long, long time ago.
“I’ve always wanted to be a firefighter since I was two or three years old,” he said. “It was always something I told my mom that I wanted to do and it just never left me all throughout my life. I always knew I was going to do it. And at an older age I knew that I needed to wait for that opportunity because of the way life was going. Through the waiting, I’ve always stuck with it. When I got the opportunity, I went for it.”
“Everyone here is uplifting and they want to push themselves and to help me push myself everyone else to a new level,” Davis said. “They want everyone to see things in a different way or to experience things that we haven’t experienced. When you come in, everyone is like, ‘what do you want to do today? How do you want to get better today?’
Switching sides?
Anyone who has watched cop or firefighter shows on television knows about the rivalry between police officers and firefighters. In Dalton, that rivalry is a friendly one as both the firefighters and police officers see each other as being part of the same team. Still, though, Tyler Putnam’s decision to join the DFD was a change in direction from his upbringing.
“Most of my family is in public safety, with my dad being in law enforcement. I knew I wanted to do something in public safety, I just didn’t know what.” Putnam said. “I worked for the Gordon County jail for a year, but I had a bunch of guys who go to my church who are firefighters in Atlanta, Cobb County, and Cherokee County. Just talking to them about the job and what to expect, I went that route and here I am. I’m loving it.”
“Every day has been awesome. There hasn’t necessarily been a call that stands out, I just like going out there with lights and sirens helping somebody.”
Best Day?
The four new Dalton firefighters had difficulty picking out their best day on the job so far. For Whitney Lacks, though, the day that stands out is the day that he decided he wanted to join the DFD.
“We were visiting family and I just wanted to come down and check out the department. I don’t even think the city was hiring at that point,” he said. “I just came to visit and I brought my oldest daughter with me and I met some of the guys here on B-shift which is where I ended up being assigned later and the level of welcome that I received from these guys was staggering.
“We just stood in the kitchen and talked and my daughter was running around and it was like we’d been here for years. It was pretty powerful. And I left here feeling like this would very easily be a place to call home and a good place to work. Afterwards I came back a couple times and it just happens one of my interview days was B Shift and I came back and saw the same guys and they acted like we’d known each other for years. That feeling of welcome has only multiplied.”
The City of Dalton certainly echoes that welcome for these four new firefighters along with gratitude for the men and women who have been serving the DFD with excellence for years.
