lol. My friend just emailed me back about my inquiry. This is how he responded when I asked him what it was like to be a volunteer fireman:

I have my Firefighter certification in the state of Tennessee, but I don't recall an actual cut off age for firefighters, volunteer or paid.

If I had to hazard a guess though I am fairly sure that you are under an age requirement for volunteer status, especially so since you are as active as you are. Hazardous jobs that allow volunteers are not exactly choosey when it comes to people wanting to do just that.

One last thing, good for you Paleocon.

I was for a while. It was fun. In the rural area I was in it was mostly brush fires. Unfortunately our response time meant that for structure fires we basically showed up to keep it from spreading.

If I remember correctly, there weren't any physical tests for basic volunteer status. Although I believe for certification there are.

My buddy told me that they are starting to institute physical agility requirements for a number of reasons. One of them is that the weight of the average person you have to rescue has increased dramatically from 170 (ten years ago) to nearly 300 now. That isn't to say that everyone is 300 pounds, but, as he puts it "skinny people meet you at the door, fat folks you have to drag down the stairs."

He doesn't think I'll have too much trouble with the physical requirements, but said that it will require some working up to. One of the things they are really concentrating on at the MD Fire Academy, for instance, is rescuing rescuers. Try dragging a 200 pound rescuer in 100 pounds of gear while you're wearing 100 pounds of gear and breathing through a mask yourself. It's not easy regardless of what kind of shape you're in.

That's okay. I realize that most folks left Paleoland in the 1960's.

My father does it and he's 50.

Awesome, hope you go for it Paleocon. I have great respect for the volunteer crew that covers the area where I work/live.

Don't blame Ed, it was obviously a parser error.

Here in Texas, volunteer firemen have to meet the same physical requirements as regular firefighters. There was just a story in the paper this week about it because the Dallas firefighters have lower standards than any of the surrounding areas, and the veteran firefighters are upset that people who may not be able to do the job are getting positions.

You are probably more than physically capable of doing the job. Good on ya.

You run? Really? I never would have known that...

I'm not sure, but I think he might run.

I'm trying so hard not to giggle, and really I'm failing miserably. I take it you didn't grow up in a small town, and specifically, you didn't grow up in my little hometown of Niles, Michigan. I'm trying to picture any of the volunteer fire department members being able to run more than very short distances, beer bellies waggling in the the breeze so to speak.

Don't get me wrong, the response time for these guys, who always have their scanners on and a couple of them lived a few blocks from my mom's house...was like 40 seconds or so. Seriously. During a Thanksgiving break the motor on the humidifier attached to our furnace shorted out, and filled the entire house with smoke (we had no idea where all the smoke was coming from, but I woke up surrounded by smoke). The volunteer guys who we knew were there almost instantly.

But the best picture of these guys I have in my head is during the summer at one of their parties (~3 blocks from our house) where they'd get seriously drunk on cheap beer and "safely dispose of confiscated, illegal fireworks." Which translated into them setting off all of the fireworks, while drunk, and hopefully not catching anything on fire themselves. Age range was probably 30-55, and if you added all of the running they all did together each week...well you might get a mile or two...maybe. Half-mile maybe. Or you know, a couple blocks...