Making A Difference: An Occasional Series Profiling North Idaho’S Community Leaders Super Chief Rick Lasky Is Breathing New Life Into The Cda Fire Department

Rocky Lasky usually charged most of the way to the fire scene before he noticed the extinguisher-sized lump under his coat.

He couldn’t return home, not this LaGrange, Ill., volunteer firefighter, while fire threatened someone’s children, home, security.

So Rocky forged ahead with his 5-year-old son, Rick, under his coat, and hoped to land in a decent neighborhood. Rick knew to stay out of the way while Rocky worked.

“I remember standing and watching him, so proud and beaming,” Coeur d’Alene Fire Chief Rick Lasky says, thinking back 34 years. “When he was done, he’d give me his coat and helmet to hold. He was my hero.”

Rick Lasky left Rocky in Illinois when he accepted the fire chief job in Coeur d’Alene 16 months ago. It was a gutsy move away from kielbasa, lifelong friends and Midwestern common sense.

He has no regrets.

“I believe God wanted us to be here,” he says. “We are making a difference.”

That’s why Lasky quit the Chicago area. He had ideas to improve firefighting. His local station wasn’t interested. Coeur d’Alene was.

“Our department needed leadership, someone to give the guys a boost, show them their potential,” says Coeur d’Alene Mayor Steve Judy. “He presents himself as a fire chief, a great leader with great perspective.”

And great bearing. Lasky’s linebacker build tests every thread of his uniform’s white shirt. His crewcut is abrupt. He power-polishes his brogans and tacks his black tie with a red-headed ax.

He needs the spit-and-polish exterior as protection. Inside lives a softer man. Lasky doesn’t hide him.

He covers his office walls with photographs of his heroes: Eddie Enright, a deputy fire chief in Chicago. “I would not be here if it wasn’t for him,” Lasky says; Leo Stapleton, a retired commissioner with the Boston Fire Department. “He’s one of the fire service gods.”

Rocky, looking eerily like a middle-aged Lloyd Bridges, peers from a frame above a poem honoring fathers. He’s on the support wall, adjacent to the mentor wall.

Ricky, Lasky’s 10-year-old son from his first marriage, is there too, in full firefighting gear. So are Lasky’s brother, Darren, who died when he was 9; Jami, Lasky’s wife; and Emily, their 5-year-old daughter.

“My goal is to spoil her so much, no man will satisfy her,” Lasky says, offering up the several photos of Emily he keeps on his desk.

“Talk about someone who can beat a big man,” Jami Lasky says. “Emily has him totally whipped. She calls him Big Daddy.”

Sprinkled among the faces on Lasky’s walls are poetic tributes to firefighters - “Heroes Never Die” - and inspirational works - the “Fireman’s Prayer,” “Don’t Quit.”

`When we go out the door and go to a fire, we go to battle,” Lasky explains. “The fire service doesn’t throw up its hands and give up. We have to finish it off.”

A swing at pro baseball

That sense of responsibility has guided him through life.

Firefighting turned from exciting to compelling after Darren died. Lasky was 12. He’s reluctant to share much about losing his only brother.

“I wanted to be a baseball player so I could visit terminally ill kids like they visited my brother,” he says.

He’s still sore at himself for responding to Darren’s death with a 12-year-old boy’s shallowness. Since then, he says, he’s lived to help people.

That force filled his teenage years with police and fire grunt work. By the time he graduated high school, he was a full-time police dispatcher.

Baseball nearly turned Lasky’s head. The Chicago White Sox took him along to two spring trainings in Sarasota, Fla. He was tempted by the life, but grounded enough to realize it wasn’t for him.

He returned home to train as a paramedic and work full-time as a police patrol officer and part-time as a firefighter.

“I absolutely loved being a policeman,” Lasky says.

He worked the southwest side of Chicago. Drugs, shootings and robberies were routine. A shooting at his precinct didn’t dilute his passion, even though a bullet fragment nicked him in the forehead.

What drained him was the Mother’s Day he had to tell a woman that her son had been killed.

“I went home and cried for three hours,” he says. “It just tore me up.”

And weakened his resistance. The public’s disrespect for police hammered at him. He prided himself in knowing his beat. He closed people’s garage doors to prevent thefts.

“What bothered me most was knowing people didn’t like me,” he says. “They’d wave to me in my patrol car without all their fingers, swear at me without knowing me.”

He quit. He’d worked as a paramedic and volunteer firefighter on his days off from the police force. Plenty of fire stations wanted his full attention. In his new job, Lasky trained firefighters when he wasn’t hosing flames. Teaching opened a new world to him.

“People golf. I teach for stress relief,” he says. “I teach for my vacations.” He taught in the University of Illinois’ fire academy, and traveled to schools and fire stations all over the country. Then, he gave it up in 1989.

Death of a firefighter

“I didn’t want to teach anymore. My friend was dead,” he says. “It was very hard.”

Firefighter Joe Samec was 27 when he fell through the floor of a burning building. Samec and Lasky had chased fires all over the Chicago area.

Lasky grieved for his friend and for Samec’s wife, Jami. She was 24. Other firefighters’ wives avoided her after the death. Her tragedy could easily be theirs. She and Lasky helped each other, and eventually married.

“Rick let me talk about it,” Jami Lasky says.

“She’s my best friend. She got me back into teaching,” Rick Lasky says.

Samec’s death replayed itself in Lasky’s brain until he understood that he had to teach firefighters how to save their own.

“We’d always taught firefighters how to save others, but not the guys next to them,” he says.

He analyzed hundreds of lineof-duty deaths, searching for common causes. Collapsing floors ranked high.

“How do you get a 200-pound firefighter up the stairs when he’s injured, in full gear, carrying an air pack and the visibility is poor?” Lasky says. “And if you don’t get him out in 15 minutes, he’ll die.”

Fire Engineering Magazine named Lasky innovator of the year in 1995 for the firefighter rescue program he created. He’s contributed six articles a year on fire safety to the national magazine since.

“Rick’s always looking at what’s in the best interest of firefighters and the people of the community, and how to provide a more effective service,” says Hayden Lake Fire Chief Jeff Welch. He taught at the University of Illinois’ fire service institute with Lasky for 10 years before moving to Idaho last May.

New job in the Northwest

Politics and poor management pushed Lasky from Illinois in 1997. He saw ways to improve fire fighting as clearly as a thermal camera sees through smoke. His bosses didn’t listen.

Fire Engineering Magazine carried Coeur d’Alene’s want ad for a fire chief that year. Lasky checked out the town on the Internet, and interviewed for the job.

“When he walked out, we all said, `Wow,”’ Mayor Judy says. “He has that aura.”

Discontent simmered in Coeur d’Alene’s two fire stations at the end of Chief Frank Sexton’s reign. Lasky lifted the gloom.

“He functions as a coach rather than a critic. We’ve had no advocate to promote our department to the City Council. Now we do,” says Capt. Marty Knapp. “The working environment is much improved. I’ve been waiting for him for 27 years.”

Atmosphere improved so much under Lasky that firefighters agreed to repair their station themselves after bids came in too high. They built a storage unit, remodeled the bunkroom and fixed leaks - work estimated to cost $76,000.

In his first 16 months, Lasky persuaded the City Council to add three firefighter jobs, buy a Chevrolet Blazer for each fire station and purchase a new pumper and new ladder truck. He convinced the council of the need for a third fire station.

“It moved from `We should do it’ to `We’d better do it now,”’ Mayor Judy says. The city bought 30 acres for the station last fall.

Lasky’s resourcefulness awes Judy.

“He took the budgets for the trucks and, through his contacts, got us show trucks with all the bells and whistles,” the mayor says. “In exchange, they’ll be exhibited for a few months and we end up getting a lot fancier truck than we would have gotten.”

Life-saving equipment

The area has a new thermal imaging camera thanks to Lasky. The camera focuses on heat sources. It senses body heat through smoke-filled rooms and spots fire hiding behind walls. It costs $23,000. Lasky wanted one.

“I missed a little girl in a fire once. Her mom said she was in there. I looked everywhere,” he says. “She’d crawled under a table.”

He shared such memories with local civic groups. Sunrise Rotary was so moved, it bought the camera in December after talking the dealer down to $18,500.

“He’s so enthusiastic,” says Sandy Emerson, one of the club’s directors. “You hear him once and you’re a believer.”

Lasky demonstrates the camera all over Kootenai County to convince groups to share the cost with Sunrise Rotary. Already, he’s helped raise $8,000.

He shares the camera with every fire department in the county, and with the police. Cooperation will only improve services, he says.

There’s more.

Coeur d’Alene’s firefighters no longer disconnect from a scene after the flames are out. Now, the fire department places victims in motels and finds computers to keep people in business. Lasky found businesses to sponsor the service.

“Rick always has new ideas. He amazes me,” Jami Lasky says. “He lives his job. He wouldn’t be happy doing anything else.”

Which is lucky for Coeur d’Alene.

“I love the fire service more than life itself,” Lasky says, cocking his head to catch scanner chatter about a fire alarm. “There’s something addicting about serving people.”