It didn’t take long for Randy Whitfield to realize he’d found his calling when he joined the Sweet Home Fire Department in 1990 as a volunteer.
“It was easy for me,” Whitfield said. “It definitely scratched an itch.”
Whitfield, 62, retired Feb. 1 after some 35 years in firefighting, in Lebanon and Sweet Home, where he finished as a battalion chief after a long stint as a volunteer.
“Roy Gaskey got me started,” he recalled, reflecting on his decades in turnout gear. He said Gaskey told him, “I think you’ll like it.”
Whitfield was born in Lebanon, delivered by Dr. Frank Girod, and grew up in Sweet Home. His dad Bob was a log truck driver who later owned his own trucking business, and later, with his wife Doris, owning and operating an insurance business that catered to loggers.
Randy Whitfield spent two years at Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas, Texas, where he earned an associate’s degree in theology, thinking he might be a pastor.
After graduating, and dropping out of another Bible college where he had planned to continue his education, he helped local youth pastor Bob Rufener start a Foursquare church in Hollister, Calif.
“That was a lot of work,” he said of the church-planting experience. “I did associate pastor and youth pastor. I think God truly calls you to that.
“What I told myself way back then, ‘I’m not going to be a pastor in the traditional way. I want to make a difference in someone’s life.’”
Plus, he said, “I loved it in Oregon and that’s where I want to be.”
After three years there, he returned to Sweet Home, where he worked in the woods until his dad suffered a heart attack, then joined the family insurance business to help his mother. He stayed for five years.
That’s when he got involved in firefighting.
“I took to it like a duck to water,” he said of volunteering with the Sweet Home department.
He joined the rescue team after a year.
“I kind of went full-speed ahead,” Whitfield said. “There were 10 or 12 of us that were specialized in rescue – steep angle, water rescue, car accidents, and we assisted with Code 99s (injuries, collapses, or other situations in which a patient is conscious) too.
“That was the whole purpose of that group and it was a team. It was fun to be on and it kind of got to where I was more involved and really, really enjoyed my time doing that. I gained a lot of valuable experience.”
Eventually, he earned his emergency medical technician certification and moved on to paramedic school.
On the first day, literally, Whitfield said, he learned his wife was pregnant with their daughter Annie. They already had two sons, Nathan and Christian, and “we didn’t have any insurance, so the money for paramedic school went to pay for my daughter.”
In 1995 he took a job as a firefighter in Lebanon, where he stayed 22 years, until 2018, when he returned to Sweet Home to take the battalion chief position vacated by Guy Smith.
In Lebanon Whitfield worked with Dave Barringer, later Sweet Home’s fire chief, and Brent Gaskey, both now retired from the fire service.
At a retirement celebration held for Whitfield Feb. 1, which drew some 100 friends, family and fellow firefighters from Sweet Home, Lebanon and Albany, Gaskey recalled how the three young firefighters from Sweet Home were assigned to the same shift, so they would pile into whatever rig they were driving at the time, like Whitfield’s Chevy Luv, in which “so many times Dave sat on my lap,” and Beringer’s Bronco “that sometimes had windows and sometimes didn’t have windows.”
“I remember a couple of times when we had socks on our hands, trying to hold the door shut,” Gaskey said.
“So we would pull up at the station, right in front of the windows there, and it would be the entire shift, pressed up against the windows, watching us pull in, so they could see the clown cars.”
Eventually, he said, they all advanced, which created a special type of fraternity that gave them an opportunity to “bounce” issues off each other during their entire careers.
“When I had issues, I could talk to (Randy) and vice versa. It was the kind of friendship that you build over that 20, 30 years of life that really matter.”
Gaskey described Whitfield as “one of the most caring, compassionate guys. Everybody in this room has stories, just like I do, about these kind of things. He’s one of those guys who just makes your day better.”
Both Gaskey and Barringer, as well as other speakers at the event, also recalled Whitfield’s zest for the job and his determination to make things happen, particularly when responding to emergencies.
He was also quick on his feet, in multiple ways, Gaskey said, relating how they once were at an apartment fire in which a cat had perished. A firefighter brought the cat out and tossed it on the ground outside.
“Then we realized that the homeowner is literally standing there,” Gaskey said, to groans from the audience. “Randy, thinking on his feet, yelled, ‘Quick, start CPR!’ He was doing CPR on this dead cat, but that was able to solve this situation.”
He said that Whitfield’s leadership abilities stood out.
“We inevitably knew that a plan wasn’t going to work, so Randy always had Plan B, C and D ready to go. It was always super helpful to have that guy on the team.”
Barringer noted that Whitfield held multiple positions during his fire service career – apparatus operator, firefighter, paramedic, EMT and finally, battalion chief.
He related how, when he was Sweet Home’s fire chief in 2020 and Whitfield had joined the department in the latter role, he was sitting on his porch on a windy afternoon after work just before Labor Day and looked up to see a plume of smoke near the edge of his own property.
“Chandler Mountain is at the back of my property and all of a sudden it was gone, from the smoke. I was like, ‘Ugh, that’s bad.’”
He said he then got a call for the fire, on Green River Road, as he turned out of his driveway, and shortly after got a call from a police officer who was “freaking out.”
Barringer said he sped through town with his lights on and turned down 47th Avenue and descended into the low area by the river to find power lines and trees down and “fires going everywhere, moving toward these houses.”
He was trying to figure out how to get to the head of the fire “as the wind was blowing away from me” and awaiting support from firefighters who were out on other calls.
Whitfield had arrived in the battalion chief’s “little brush rig,” which holds 400 gallons of water.
“He decides he’s going to go to the head of the fire, over the trees, over the power lines, over anything that was in his way.”
Barringer told the crowd that he told himself, “We’re going to be fine because he’s an idiot.”
He said Whitfield, “screaming and yelling,” enlisted help from the homeowners as “the troops started arriving,” had the fire out “in 15 minutes,” at which time Oregon Department of Forestry crewmembers showed up to help button things down.
“People like Randy, they throw caution to the wind,” Barringer said. “He fixed it.”
He said Whitfield oversaw repairs and maintenance at the firehouse, doing a lot of it himself “time after time, hour after hour after hour, the thankless work that Randy did that people didn’t even know about.”
During his firefighting career, Whitfield was also raising his kids, who later included Garrison, the youngest.
“Growing up with Dad in the fire service was pretty cool,” said Christian Whitfield, now a Sweet Home firefighter himself, along with Garrison. He recalled growing up in a firefighter’s household
“I remember waiting in the car,” Christian told of how the family would come upon a wreck or a fire.
“Dad would say, ‘I’m just going to see if they need help. I’ll be back in a minute.’ Two hours later he’d return and the fire was out.
“We got front-row seats for both burn alarms and working fires. We stopped at every car we came across because Dad had to get out and help.”
Whitfield, who had set the Sweet Home High School school record in the javelin as a high school senior, coached sports at Sweet Home, including all four of his kids.
He credits his own successes to coaches like Bruce West, Norm Davis, Paul Dickerson, Rod Rumrey and Rob Younger.
“I still use his euphemisms with kids,” Whitfield said, half-jokingly.
“I started reaching out to the community,” he said. “One of the things I did is I started coaching sports. A lot of these kids need role models. They just need somebody that’ll pay attention to them alone, and I took that responsibility fairly seriously. And for years and years, I coached three sports a year, you know, coaching kids and coaching others and – no regrets. I had a lot of fun.”
He coached Annie to a state championship in the javelin and Nathan, his eldest, is now head coach of the track and field team at Sweet Home High School.
“Sports, to me, is a microcosm of life for kids,” Whitfield said. “Most kids don’t know really what their potential is. They have no idea. And if I can drag them from where they think can be to a little bit higher, I’d say my job as a coach is successful, you know, just give them a vision of what they can do.
“It was the same thing in the fire service. Really, what prepared me to be a battalion chief was coaching for 25 years. You know, you coach a team to win and we coach firefighters to put the fire out, get the person out of the car as fast as we can. It’s a challenging job sometimes.
“I tried to give them everything they needed to succeed.”
Whitfield said he has no big plans for retirement, although he intends to continue coaching. His wife Pam often can be seen on the field with him as he coaches track and field.
“She’s been a tremendous help,” Whitfield said. “She loves me and she does a really good job of taking care of me. I can’t complain.”
He said he doesn’t intend to “sit around.”
“I want to be purposeful with my time,” he said. “God’s been a major part of my life. I’m not going to be on the cover of some Christian magazine as a poster boy for Christianity, but it has definitely affected my life and been a big part of making decisions.”
The part of firefighting he’s liked most, Whitfield said, is “dealing with people.”
“I’d tell new recruits, ‘people’s trust is huge for our job. We go into someone’s house in the worst moments of their lives and they allow us into their inner sanctum. They expect us to do our best. The chaos that’s sometimes involved is almost overwhelming.
“‘But that’s our job. Be proud of what you do, who you are, and do it well.’”