Goodbye, Bill

It was hard for Bill Dagon to say goodbye after 35 years with the Spokane Valley Fire Department. “I’ve been threatening to retire for the last 10 years,” said Dagon, who retired July 29. “I love the job, and I just didn’t want to give it up.” As it is for most people in the fire service, it’s not just the job, it’s also their co-workers.

“What do you tell these guys after 35 years,” Dagon said. “You spend a third of your lives with them. It’s just like having a second family.”

“I don’t know how I’m going to act when I wake up in the morning,” Dagon said. “Everyone says when you retire you are going to have all kinds of stuff to do. This is the stuff I’ve done for 35 years, and I don’t know how I’m going to adjust.”

Dagon, 61, doesn’t know what he’s going to do in retirement other than work through a “long list of honey dos” his wife, Doreen, wrote for him. He also has six grandchildren he said will keep him busy.

Dagon was hired at Valley Fire in July 1970 as one of the first six emergency medical technicians. He was the last one to retire.

During his time in the fire service he held six additional positions. He was a fire truck driver, a paramedic – one of the first at Valley Fire – a lieutenant, a training officer, a captain and a division chief of training. He’s been an instructor for numerous courses, including EMT and paramedic classes, and he taught at seven Spokane Regional Fire Recruit academies.

Dagon outlasted six fire chiefs, and “It’s impossible to count how many lives you (Dagon) have touched in a positive way, but there were many,” Larry T. Rider, an assistant fire chief, said during Dagon’s retirement ceremony.

There are so many stories, Dagon said. “The guys say, ‘Hey, do you remember when…?’ And you remember about half of them.”

Most of Dagon’s memories involve medic calls.

“Adults, we can deal with that; young adults, we can deal with that, too,” Dagon said. “It’s the calls involving children that stick in your mind. Those are the ones that hit close to home, and you want to go home and hug your kids.

“The first thing you think when you arrive on a call where a child is involved is: I need to save a life. I’ve arrived on calls where mothers have just handed me their child,” Dagon said. “We really don’t think about the moment right there because we’re trained to do a job. We just click into that job. After we do everything we are trained to do and we come back, when we sit down and close our eyes, that’s when you see the face.”

Dagon remembers a case involving a 3-year-old girl in which he and a few other firefighters learned a tough lesson.

“We fished a girl out of the Spokane River. She had wandered across River Road and down into the water,” Dagon said. “We brought her back, not there, but in the hospital. We got really attached to her, and we don’t usually do that for a lot of reasons. We were buying her teddy bears and going and seeing her. Her mom brought her to the station to see us after she was out of hospital. Then eight months later, she died of a brain aneurysm. I swore to myself I’d never get that attached. We got way too close to that one. That was tough.

“You have to do your job and there’s empathy there, but you’ve got to know where to cut it off, because you don’t know what the next call is going to be.”

On the lighter side of Dagon’s work in the paramedic field, Randy Olson, Valley Fire’s emergency medical services division chief, said Dagon’s first attempt at finding a vein to insert a hypodermic needle wasn’t as successful as his longtime career.

“We went to advanced life support class together. I remember him trying to start an IV on the back of my hand, and he didn’t draw blood, and he didn’t draw blood,” Olson said. “The sweat was just pouring off of me because of the pain, but I didn’t tell him I was in pain. I told him he better figure it out soon, because he was next.”

Fire calls don’t stick in Dagon’s mind as much as the medic responses. The last major blaze he responded to was in 2001 at Yamaha Spokane in the Valley, which destroyed four businesses along East Sprague Avenue.

“We used to have a lot of apple barn fires,” Dagon said, referring to blazes that commonly occurred in Otis Orchards. The barns containing the apples were typically 50-foot-by-150-foot barns. “They were spectacular when they burned. When they burned, they burned down.

“We seemed to have had more fires in my younger years. Public education changed that.”

Wayne Howerton, who has now taken over Dagon’s position as division chief of training, worked with him off and on for 25 years.

“Bill was a heck of a guy,” Howerton said. “He was always a really good conscientious paramedic, his patient’s care, public relations and customer service were always a primary concern.

“He’s spent several years doing training and instructing us. He knew his subject matter. He had a positive attitude, professionalism and confidence in his knowledge of what he was teaching. He wasn’t a clown, but he kept everyone relaxed using humor.”

Howerton shared some humorous moments he experienced with Dagon as well as a couple of his idiosyncrasies.

“If Bill Dagon’s group was ahead of us in a truck and they turned right, we’d turn left, because they would invariably go the wrong way,” Howerton said with a chuckle. “It only happened twice, but it was a running joke after that.

“When he and I were both lieutenants in 1988 at old Station 5, I was barbecuing chicken and the smoke kept filling up the station. The firefighters were giving me a bad time, so I soaked them with a garden hose,” Howerton said. “Bill got the guys together and they soaked me with a fire hose.”

On another occasion at the same station, Dagon and another firefighter went out on a call in the middle of cooking a meal. When they returned, the smoke in the station was at eye level. Dagon said once they cleared the smoke they found burned toast in a toaster that malfunctioned.

Dagon did have a nickname, Dollar Bill. “I gathered that it’s maybe because he counts his pennies,” Howerton said.

Valley firefighters also coined a term in recognition of Dagon’s treatment of his new vehicles: “Dagonize,” Howerton said.

“He’d Dagonize his vehicles by adding chrome, or fog lights or running boards.”