Sean C. Morgan
The Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District said goodbye to retiring Fire Chief Mike Beaver and Administrative Assistant Diane Shank at a reception on Friday at the Fire Hall.
Beaver, 60, has worked in the fire service for 28 years, 23 of them in Sweet Home. He worked in Albany from 1989 to 1994. Before that, he worked in Sweet Home from 1985 to 1989. He became fire chief on April 16, 2001. He is succeeded by Dave Barringer, a former Sweet Home battalion chief.
Shank, 66, has been involved with the Sweet Home Fire Department and SHFAD even longer. She and her husband, Doug Shank, a U.S. Forest Service geologist with Sweet Home Ranger District, are from Ohio. They came to Sweet Home when someone he knew moved here to work for the Forest Service and suggested Doug come too.
Shank holds a bachelor of science degree in education and was an art major. She graduated from Youngstown State University in 1971 and taught elementary school art.
Moving to Sweet Home, she found that position was already filled, she said, and the art teacher wouldn’t be retiring any time soon. She needed to find something else to do.
“I read in The New Era about this group of volunteers that drove ambulances,” Shank said. “I thought, what a great group of people.”
She started out training in first aid and Red Cross procedures and talked with then-head EMT Terry Brooks, who sent her to Linn-Benton Community College.
Shank started taking classes in 1978 and volunteering in 1979 and eventually became the city’s first female paramedic in the early 1980s when the ambulance service was still part of the Police Department. She continued working as a paramedic, at one point supervising Beaver, until 1988 when the Shanks adopted three children from Korea. That’s the same time the ambulance service moved to the Fire Department and Chief Joe Mengore succeeded Fire Chief Gerry Wooley.
She took time off to raise her children, and then in 1991, Mengore asked her to come back and help out in the office part time. When Mengore retired in the late 1990s and Dean Gray became fire chief, the department reorganized, and Shank went full time.
Part-time wasn’t going to work with the amount of paperwork, primarily billing, she had to handle, she said.
Shank loves the community and “all the wonderful people,” she said. “How could I be so lucky to continue to work and to help people as a paramedic?”
She said she felt fortunate to be able to continue helping people as they navigated the red tape of billing and other paperwork.
“I will miss all of these people that I work with,” Shank said.
“I’ve got four grandsons. I hope to spend a lot of time with them.” She said she also plans to catch up around the house and get back into art.
Shank also hopes to volunteer in the community, noting the work volunteers do with the Beautification Committee, for example. She will remain involved in the SHFAD women’s association as long as Doug Shank remains involved in the fire department.
He has been with the fire department for 25 years. He started with the rescue team before it was part of the department.
“She started before me and dragged me into it,” Doug Shank said.