A life of service

By the time Lewis Harrison was 15, he had been orphaned — twice.

Born in 1944 to an unwed mother in Ozark, Harrison was in a Montgomery orphanage by the time he was only about a week old. At nine months, he was adopted by Mabel Harrison and Sam Harrison, who took him to live in Edgewood in Homewood.

When he was 11, the Harrisons moved to Southwood Road in Vestavia Hills, which had only been incorporated as a town a few years earlier.

While not the earliest residents, Harrison said his family moved to the area early enough in the process that the Vestavia Country Club was still offering memberships to anyone who moved in.

“It was kind of unique,” Harrison said.

The family lived only a few blocks from the old municipal complex at 513 Montgomery Highway.

At that time, the fledgling city of just fewer than 3,000 residents had a clerk, a building inspector, the police chief and a handful of volunteer firefighters.

As a teenager, Harrison said he and his friends would ride their bikes up to city hall to help the firefighters work on the hoses and equipment and just be around the excitement.

“We were a lot different than kids today,” he said with a chuckle.

The teens also got the chance to help directly.

With only a skeleton city staff, dental students would man the city’s phones overnight, taking any police or fire calls that came in and alerting the authorities. In exchange, the students were housed in the municipal building.

When those students wanted to go out on dates or take a night off, Harrison said, he and his friends would take over.

“You didn’t get a lot of calls because Vestavia wasn’t very big,” he said, but added that if they did, they would spring into action, turning on the “air raid” siren to alert the volunteers and writing the location of the emergency on the notification board.

“It was a fun time,” he said.

It was at this point in his life Harrison was orphaned for the second time.

At age 14, he lost his father to an alcohol related illness and lost his mother a year later to cancer.

Harrison was facing being put up for adoption for the second time, and while he was attending Lyman Ward Military Academy during school months, was at risk of being extracted from the life he had built in Vestavia.

But once again, Harrison was adopted — this time by the Vestavia Hills Fire Department.

“The firefighters were, in essence, his father,” former Fire Chief and Mayor Butch Zaragoza said. “The fire fighters at that time kind of took him under their wing and said, ‘Come on with us, and let’s learn how to be a man.’”

Harrison said Fire Chief Hartley Ayers and Police Chief W.O. Haynes took him in and allowed him to live in city hall when he was home from school. 

“Basically they said that they would look after me,” Harrison said. And thanks to sponsorship by a family friend, he was able to stay.

“Lewis had a home there,” said Henry “Hank” Battle, who was friends with Harrison at the time and who would go on to serve on the Vestavia Hills City Council from 1984 through 2000.

When Harrison and Battle were old enough, they began going on fire calls as volunteers, helping the paid firefighters with the other members of the Junior Volunteer Fire Department.

“They let us keep the fire trucks polished and waxed,” Battle said.

Harrison said that while it was hard work, they got a kick out of it.

“It was a wonderful thing to do for your neighborhood. We really enjoyed it,” he said.

Harrison graduated from Lyman Ward and began studying at Montevallo, where he also volunteered for the campus fire service.

He said he remembers sitting in a business administration class when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and at that moment decided he was going to join the U.S. Marine Corps.

“I just was convinced that we were going to have to fight the Cubans and the Russians,” he said, recalling the moment.

In his time with the Marines, Harrison was stationed around the world, from North Carolina to Spain, doing everything from running a correctional facility to guarding nuclear weapons.

He also did a tour in Vietnam.

He was one of only two survivors of a mortar shelling attack on the southern border of North Vietnam — when he earned his first Purple Heart  — and was briefly listed as MIA and wounded by an artillery attack — earning him his second Purple Heart and ending his tour in the country.

Zaragoza said Harrison’s time in the military showed in his later years.

After being discharged from the military, Harrison returned to Vestavia in 1969, and having taken the Jefferson County civil service test before leaving, was immediately offered a position as either a police officer or firefighter.

“I told the police chief that I’d already been shot twice — so I thought I’d be a fireman,” he said with a laugh.

And while he joked that being wounded in the war helped make his decision, Harrison said he was excited to formally join the service he was already so connected to, and having learned firefighting skills in the Marines, the work came easy.

Zaragoza said that the environment of discipline in the fire service is not dissimilar to that of the military, so it makes sense that Harrison took to it.

“What you see is, the fire service is a kind of para-military structured organization,” he said, “and with him coming out of the Marine Corps, and the values that the Marine Corps instilled in Lewis, really kind of fit the profile of a firefighter.”

As the city grew, so did the need for the fire service, and for the department to increase its capabilities.

On Aug. 27, 1971, three Vestavia Hills High School coaches were killed in a crash with an 18-wheeler that had lost its brakes coming down U.S. 31. Six vehicles were involved, and with only one fire truck, the job was much larger than the Vestavia service could handle alone.

“If you got help, you got help from another city,” Harrison said.

It took nearly every ambulance in Jefferson County, Harrison said, and it painted a clear picture of what the city of Vestavia and all of the over the mountain area lacked.

“We discovered that there was a real inadequacy in emergency medical services,” he said.

After the crash, Harrison said Vestavia teamed up with Mountain Brook, Hoover and Homewood to apply for an ALDOT grant for an emergency medical services department, but were denied. The over the mountain communities then partnered with the city of Birmingham, and the first paramedic programs were born.

“I was lucky enough to be chosen,” Harrison said, and with five other Vestavia firefighters as well as representatives from the other communities, the first paramedic program took shape.

“The paramedic program was the best thing that ever happened here in our area,” Zaragoza said.

Harrison served on the Rescue 30 unit, which serviced both Vestavia and Hoover, and was the first of the units to become operational.

“We ran all of Vestavia Hills and all of Hoover,” he said of himself and his partner Sam Hansen, who he worked with for 13 years.

In 1976, Harrison was named Jefferson County’s Paramedic of the Year, which at the time meant he was actually Alabama’s EMT of the Year, because there were no other programs with the same level of service.

“It was just so different,” Harrison said, recalling the ways the department operated that would be unthinkable now, including being able to send only one firefighter on a call or having to use a pay phone to call city hall because the radios weren’t strong enough over the mountain. 

“But it was wonderful. It was the best anybody could do.”

Harrison retired from the fire department in 1991, much to the surprise of his fellow firefighters.

“When Lewis came in and said he was going to retire, everybody said ‘What?’ because we really thought that we would have to take Lewis out in a stretcher for him to leave the fire service,” Zaragoza said.

Harrison said as he neared retirement, serving on Rescue 30 became too much for his back, so he began driving Engine 2.

No matter what he did though, he said, he enjoyed the work.

“My love was the fire department. Even when I was at Montevallo, I was on the volunteer fire department on the campus,”

But Harrison’s wife Donna Peters is an artist, and to spend more time helping her with art shows and distribution, he said he decided to close his fire service chapter.

In the time since, Harrison said he has spent time with his children and grandchildren, traveling and going on mission trips and promoting his wife’s art.

Zaragoza and Battle both said that through his entire career, you could see how connected Harrison was to the Vestavia community and to the department that literally raised him.

“They saw in Lewis something that they really felt like that he could be of some value to the community in the future,” he said.

“As it played out … they were right.”

Battle agreed.

“To me he gave back to the community what they had given to him,” he said. “where someone in that situation could have gone a lot of different ways.”