Perhaps you can join me in making this admission: We don’t offer our thanks often enough to the men and women who serve in our fire service.

What brings this up? Well, today I went on a photo assignment for the Princeton Herald. My boss asked me to take some pictures of Princeton firefighters reading to children at the Lois Nelson Public Library. It was scheduled for mid-morning. Just a few minutes before the firefighters were to begin reading to the kids, the library filled up rapidly with children and their parents.

I mean it was chock full of kids. They were sitting in a reading room. I guess there might have been about 150 Princeton-area kids and their parents gathered to learn about fire trucks, which a young fireman, Joe Vega, explained as he read the text.

To be sure, many of the kids were too young to even know what they were hearing. That is not the point. The men and women who serve in our fire service are ambassadors for the city they represent. They are present to do things such as what I watched today. They spoke to the kids who wanted to know about what they do … and to the parents whose taxes pay for the firefighting infrastructure that is so valuable an asset that protects the community.

I have a bit of personal experience with the professionalism these individuals display. I had a medical emergency in my home in January 2023. I called 9-1-1 and told the dispatcher of my need for someone to arrive immediately. They sent a fire crew to my home and it was there within, oh, two minutes of the call. The men who burst into my home to tend to my wife could not possibly have been more courteous … even as they went to work immediately tending to Kathy Anne’s emergency.

That’s only one part of the job they do. They rush into burning buildings. They respond to motor vehicle crashes. And they read to children, telling them about what they do to protect our community.

I feel the need to thank them publicly for all they do to keep us safe.