Long Beach

I- Your, uh, uh, passion, for lack of a better term, your passion for giving back to the community or volunteering first off, I mean the volunteer fire, you're, you were the chief, you are the chief.

I know it's the Long Beach Fire Department, right?

Correct.

I've been a 28-year, uh, volunteer with the Long Beach Volunteer Fire Department.

The last I think two, three years I've been chief.

Before that I was assistant chief and before that I was a safety captain.

My dad and my grandfather before me where I grew up in West Central Illinois were volunteer firefighters in addition to running a business and so I grew up with that and it was always a fascination and a desire of mine as a way to serve.

And when I moved to Michigan City after a couple of years, uh, I had a gentleman named Jimmy King, uh, who I played basketball with.

John Roberts and his family lived just across the border.

I mean, you know, a few hundred yards from where our summer, very modest summer cottage was in a town called Long Beach.

And Long Beach and Michigan City were very different places.

Michigan City was... an integrated city that had had racial conflict and had big city problems, even though it's not that big a city.

Long Beach was a little pristine, all-white enclave that, and I checked the census, had in 1980 one Black person.

And I strongly suspect that was a resident servant in somebody's house.

It had had restrictive covenants.

It was known Michigan City was a mixed place with a lot of Jewish families.