On June 27, 1978, a trio of District firefighters were inside a house on Woodland Drive NW when one of them had a sickening realization.
“We are going to die,” thought Donald Mayhew, captain of Engine 21, a firehouse on Lanier Place NW.
They had not expected to be in the house at all. It was a night of violent thunderstorms — the worst in two decades — and trees had been toppled all over the Washington region. Engine 21 was responding to a report of “wires down.” When the firefighters pulled up on Woodland Drive, the severed power lines were dancing in the street, showering it with sparks and melting the macadam.
“It looked like the Washington Monument grounds on the Fourth of July,” Mayhew, now 89 and long retired, told me last week outside the firehouse he once commanded. He was there to recollect the heroic acts of a firefighter under his command that night 43 years ago, John Bruton Sr.
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“Everything about this fire was most unusual,” Mayhew said.
For starters, Engine 21 had been dispatched to block the street and keep people away from the live wires. But then Bruton reported that a house at the end of the block was on fire, possibly from a lightning strike. A woman was shouting from an upstairs window. Bruton told her help was on the way. And now he had to keep that promise.
A building engulfed in flames is a terrifying thing. Mayhew said the same thought goes through every rookie’s mind when they pull up to their first fire: “I’m going to die.”
Said Mayhew, “It’s truly awful.’’
But then, he said, your training kicks in. You see your fellow firefighters calmly going about their jobs.
“You think: ‘All the other guys are doing it. I can do it, too,’” Mayhew said.
On that summer evening, Mayhew, Bruton and another firefighter entered 2903 Woodland Dr. without breathing apparatus and made it up five or six stairs before the heat and smoke drove them back outside. Mayhew then donned an oxygen mask and went back through the front door while Bruton climbed a ladder to the second-floor window.
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Mayhew made it upstairs but never did find the door to the bedroom.
“You can’t see a damn thing,” he said of a smoky fire. “My handprints were all over the wall from looking for her.”
He collapsed on the way out and was taken to a hospital for smoke inhalation.
Bruton reached the top of the ladder but found that the woman was no longer at the window. He climbed inside the burning house, found her and carried her to the top of the ladder. There, firefighter Jay Hencken took her and carried her down.
As a result of his actions, Bruton earned a gold medal for valor, the fire department’s highest honor. He died in 2005, and the memorabilia from his days as a firefighter were divided among his four children. Later that year, a fire in the Fauquier County, Va., garage of his oldest son, John Bruton Jr., destroyed Bruton’s scrapbooks, his fire boots and helmet, and the gold medal.
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Recently, Bruton Jr. approached the fire department to see whether it might have a replacement medal. His two toddler grandsons have become obsessed with all things firefighter.
“My daughter Brittney called and said, ‘I’d really like my sons to know their great-grandfather,’” he said. “He was such an imposing figure.”
That medal — a gold disk on a red ribbon — is no longer bestowed, but the fire department was able to find one in storage.
“I was expecting that if they had a medal — and I wasn’t even sure they did — they would just pop it into the mail,” Bruton Jr. said.
Instead, they decided to hold a ceremony. Last Tuesday afternoon, John A. Donnelly Sr., D.C. Fire and EMS chief, made remarks. Mayhew returned to his old firehouse, which won Company of the Year under his leadership.
Mayhew was a third-generation District firefighter. Also at the ceremony was his grandson Matthew Mayhew, a firefighter at Engine 10 in the Trinidad neighborhood. He’s the fifth generation of Mayhews to pick up a hose.
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Health issues kept Bruton Jr. from attending in person, but he watched the ceremony as it was live-streamed over a phone. “My father loved you,” he said to Mayhew.
They call Engine 21 “the Alley Rats,” the nickname painted on the bumper of its apparatus. Mayhew explained that the company is “second due” for a lot of fires. While the first engine on the scene — the first due — sets up in front of the building, Engine 21 is often behind the building, in the alley.
“This is D.C.,” Mayhew said. Ergo: rats.
It can be unnerving, Mayhew said, to go into a burning building as rats are streaming out. Every living thing knows you don’t enter a house on fire.
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.
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