Word: firemen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Moncreiff is probably most proud of the Council's efforts to normalize the collective bargaining process for public employees. For years, the firemen and police considered themselves exempt from the usual budget process, as they bypassed the city manager and went directly to the Council to have their wage increases set by ordinance. "Whatever we gave them," Moncreiff explains, "the city manager felt duty bound to give to everyone else...
...CHAIRMAN OF the Council's Finance Committee, Moncreiff had a major role in instituting the new system. While the firemen have accepted it, the police remain opposed, and Moncreiff is well aware of that. "I've had some police wives call up and call me a cheesy rat," he says with a smile...
What do seemingly fit firemen and overweight, stress-ridden executives have in common? The answer is heart disease, according to Dr. R. James Barnard of the University of California at Los Angeles. Barnard tested 100 firemen while they were exercising on a treadmill and found that 10% - the same as in a group of sedentary insurance executives - showed signs of latent coronary disease. Potential heart problems were even more obvious in a group of firemen asked to jump onto the treadmill and exercise with no prior warmup. Of 60 tested, 40, or two-thirds, showed abnormal electrocardiograms...
Barnard suggests the reason for the firemen's rapid heart rates: the fire-alarm bell. Among firemen monitored for 24 hours, most of the younger men, with supposedly healthy hearts, showed great excitement and doubled heart rates when the alarm sounded. But oldtimers were not immune to the excitement syndrome either. At least 20% overreacted to the bell, their bodies releasing hormones that might contribute to heart disease. Barnard's recommendation: a fitness program for all fire fighters...
...music consisted of 100 firemen in 100 red shirts with 100 sledgehammers hammering all their might on a hundred anvils and artillery," wrote Painter Thomas Eakins to his sister Fanny about the Boston Jubilee in the summer of 1869. The letter, one of 20 recently given to the Archives of American Art, a part of the Smithsonian complex in Washington, D.C., went on to observe that "Bostonians have music on the brain." Added the proper Philadelphian: "God forbid they should get art there, or they will get some hundred firemen to copy a Jerome or Meissonier a thousand times bigger...