‘One of the best’

Bob Capaul says he’s hung up his turnout coat for the last time, but his brother predicts that news photographers will be able to shoot Bob at the scene of Kootenai County blazes for years to come.

“He won’t be able to stay away,” Ken Capaul laughs.

Now a captain with the Spokane Valley Fire Department, Ken served with Bob several years in Idaho, “And I’ve always been really impressed that he put in so many years working for nothing, doing a job that paid me good money,” he says.

Bob, 48, retired as a lieutenant in January from Kootenai County Fire and Rescue. He worked as a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician for 20 years and in the recent past has been in charge of training recruits.

Jim Lyon, the department’s public information officer and a firefighter for the past four years, was a schoolteacher for 21 years and thus is able to view Capaul’s performance from the perspective of a professional educator.

“He taught with a passion,” Lyon says. “It was obvious he cared about you and about the district. Whenever there was a training event, he was there.”

And there are lots of training events for the 80 men and women line firefighters – half paid, half volunteer – who protect 113 square miles of Kootenai County land.

His former boss, Fire Chief Ron Sampert, calls Bob “one of the best volunteer officers I’ve ever worked with. He was a great asset, intensely involved with training recruits.”

Firefighting is the Capaul family “business.” Four generations of Capauls have put in nearly a century of firefighting in Kootenai County.

George, Bob’s and Ken’s grandfather, began the tradition back in 1939. He was the first paid firefighter for what was then the Kootenai County Rural Fire Department. He served 26 years

Ray, the boys’ dad, retired as a captain from the Coeur d’Alene Fire Department in 1976 after 20 years.

Ken, an alumnus of the Kootenai and Coeur d’Alene departments, is working on 24 years.

Bob’s son, Justin, is a paid Kootenai County firefighter, his nephew Mitchell Copstead, a Kootenai County volunteer, and cousin Jake, another Kootenai volunteer.

Then there’s the distaff side. Bob’s wife, Eleanora, has been a member of the Kootenai department’s auxiliary for 17 years, and their daughter, RaeAnne, also an auxiliary member, is studying to qualify as an emergency medical specialist for the department.

Eleanora explains that she and other auxiliary members deliver food and drinks to tired firefighters, and help with open houses, Easter egg hunts and other community activities in which the department is involved.

“The men and women on the line seem to appreciate us,” she says. “And I feel like a mom to them all.”

But back to Bob.

His dad recalls that, as a toddler, he was caught playing with matches in a closet and in the family’s tool shed.

“Before it got to be a problem, I took him out to the backyard,” remembers Ray, “and had him light a whole box of matches, one by one, then throw them into a garbage can.

“He didn’t play with fire after that.”

His father calls Bob a “go-getter. I never had to get him out of bed to send him off to work. Working with Ralph Currie, he learned to be a carpenter, and he was a good one.”

Bob says he became a volunteer because, even before joining the department, he was making more money working construction than he would have as a civil servant.

“But there’s an adrenaline rush in firefighting that you don’t get in the construction business,” he says. “That’s a big reason I stayed.”

Also, he says, he likes to associate with firefighters.

“They’re a whole different breed,” he explains. “They care for other people, whether they know them or not. And that kind of attitude permeates their lives.”

Bob says he sometimes donated 150 hours a month to his hobby but thinks he averaged 40 to 50 hours.

He’s still in construction, now a field supervisor for LAC Drywall in Spokane, from which he hopes to retire in about five years.

For now, apparently, his days as an active firefighter are over. At his retirement party, his friends in the department presented him with a “20-year ax,” a leather helmet and a shadow box containing an American flag and firefighters’ badges. He also has 20 years’ worth of memories.

“Maybe I’ll come back as a fire commissioner after I retire, but for now I’ll drop out of the fire service,” he says.

We’ll see. Brother Ken wouldn’t bet on that, and neither would many of his other “brothers.”