When there’s a family business, it’s not unusual for the kids to get involved early on. But it’s pretty unusual when the business is fire fighting.

Although putting out fires is not specifically the Maciel family’s business, it’s certainly a vocation, and everyone, including Mom, has participated in one way or another since Robert Sr. (called Bob by family and friends) began fighting fires with his brothers about forty-eight years ago. But even that wasn’t the beginning of the family’s battles with fires. As Bobby (Robert Jr.) remembers, “It actually started off with my grandfather, Raul Maciel Jr. My grandfather was a captain on a ladder truck in Tisbury for a long time. Then all my uncles joined the department in Tisbury – Richard, Roy, and Russell, and my dad, Robert. They were all on the ladder truck at the same time.” When he wasn’t fighting fires in Tisbury with his brothers, Bob worked as a mechanic for Burt’s Boatyard, which he later bought and renamed Maciel Marine.

When Bob and wife Barbara moved to West Tisbury in 1973, he wasn’t planning on joining the fire department. He had a house to build. “While I was building the house,” he says, “the fire alarm went off in West Tisbury. I listened and didn’t hear any fire trucks.” He investigated and found the fire truck still inside the fire house. “So I started it up and brought it outside and called on the radio to find out where the fire was. They said that the truck’s not needed because Vineyard Haven’s gone to put the fire out.” No one from West Tisbury had taken the call. So he attended the next firefighters’ meeting, volunteered, and quickly rose from custodian of the West Tisbury station to captain. “I wanted to make sure my house was protected,” he says.

Meanwhile, he and Barbara kept having sons. As the boys grew, they too volunteered. The oldest, Bobby, started at thirteen, helping out around the fire station. “We did all kinds of things,” he says. “Painted the fire truck up for parades. Worked on one of the tank trucks, lugged hoses around, and things like that.” At eighteen, he was eligible to drive and was assigned to a brush truck – the heavy-duty monster that puts out forest fires. Now forty-four years old, he’s the only one of the brothers that has moved off-Island – he’s a heavy-truck mechanic for a Ford dealership in Maine. He’s also assistant chief of the Ross Corner Fire Company, serving the Maine towns of Waterboro, Alfred, and Shapleigh.

Steven, the next in line and a year younger than Bobby, began his fire-fighting career at fifteen. Arnie Fisher, the chief at the time, asked the town’s permission for Steven and Bobby to start training. “They let us drill for a year until we were sixteen,” Steven says. “So we learned the truck. When he [Bobby] was sixteen he got to go on the truck, but you weren’t allowed to drive the truck until you were eighteen. Then they let me do the same thing.” Steven volunteers for the West Tisbury Fire Department at the fire station on State Road.

Kevin, the middle child, followed his brothers in roughly the same way. He volunteered in West Tisbury for twenty years, moved to Oak Bluffs Fire and Rescue, moved back to West Tisbury, then settled in Edgartown two years ago, where he now works on the rescue truck.

As tots, Vincent and Keith Maciel, the two youngest, witnessed a lot of fire and rescue from the car of the police chief, George Manter, because by that time their parents were both EMTs in West Tisbury. “Mom and Dad went to all the calls,” Vincent recollects. “We sometimes rode with the police chief. He spoiled us, bought us candy.”

Barbara laughs about it now. “I used to put my scanner in my laundry basket when I hung up clothes,” she recalls. “There weren’t that many EMTs at that time. People were working. Bob and I would get called quite often because we were a couple.” Vincent and Keith are both on the West Tisbury squad.
Barbara says that having a whole family involved in fire and rescue could be complicated. “In the night, it was jumping up and putting the lights on so everybody could find their stuff, and telling everybody what was going on. Sometimes it was a bit of a process.” And the laundry after the fire? “Stinky,” Barbara chuckles. “Soaking wet clothes, stuff draped all over after we had house fires, and the boot dryers out to dry the boots.” But the boys never burdened Barbara with post-fire chores. “They always put their fire gear out,” she recalls. “That was important to them. They always took care of their own fire gear. The only thing I did for them was I sewed on an awful lot of West Tisbury Fire Department patches.”

What Mom and Dad Maciel also did, and continue to do for their fire-fighting sons, is provide a forum for post-fire discussions – especially if the fire was particularly tough.

They gather around the dining room table for a gab session. “Lots of times you just can’t sleep,” Bob says, “and it affects us all the same. So we’ll all come together and talk it out. I try to reinforce in them that they did the right thing – if you weren’t there, if you didn’t do what you did, think how that situation might have turned out. That gives them some relief.”

Though still on the fire and rescue squad in West Tisbury, Bob sits out these days. “Now when I go to the fires, I don’t do any of the work,” he explains. “I just go, make sure they have enough help, and make sure the guys are doing the right thing.

“Generally, the chief comes over to me within ten or fifteen minutes and if I’m not needed he’ll say, ‘You can go on home, your kids have it all under control.’”