Before

In Emergency Management, we generally think of incidents^[1] and events as having a ‘Before, During, and an After’. This book will be organized that way, as well. This ‘Before’ part is before I became fully involved with Emergency Management and evolved into an Emergency Manager. This was not a career I thought about when I was a kid growing up – and I am working, along with others, to make it just that: a profession for anyone to aspire to be a part of, in the United States. More on that in the ‘After’ part.

Too Cool for High School

I certainly did not aspire to become an Emergency Manager when I was in high school. I started high school in 1979, which was the same year the FEMA was established – so I do not think that the term ‘Emergency Manager’ or ‘Emergency Management’ were in the lexicon of the public back then. Those were both evolutions of Civil Defense (and after 2001 evolved again back towards homeland security – the latest incarnation of civil defense) and not top of mind for the public back then. I grew up in rural Ohio. I am sure I wanted to be a fireman when I was little kid, a lawyer when I was in middle school, and a computer scientist at the end of high school. I did spend a high school summer volunteering with the Red Cross in my hometown, and responded to two fires to help. You can read in this ‘Before’ chapter some of the reasons why the Red Cross was already a small part of our family, but the reality was I was a typical high school student back then: self-absorbed and not very interested in community service unless I had to, let alone helping people during their worst days of a disaster.

In fact I was a Red Cross volunteer in my hometown of Athens, Ohio when I was in high school. Might have been for a summer in the very early eighties. All I have from that time is a patch and a handwritten ID card. I think I went to one home fire in response – and I really did not do anything to help that family, who had insurance and did not have any injuries or health impacts from that incident. My late grandmother, Laura Hohenstein, was a long-time Red Cross volunteer – and at one point a paid administrative support person to a state or even division level person in Wisconsin, for their Service to the Armed Forces. Again, no real records from her tenure either. I actually checked. I do have her year service pins though, which she proudly kept and passed on to me.

I did not get the ‘bug’ to get involved with disaster relief until after college, and even after working for a decade or so. In elementary school I wanted to be a fireman (which kid didn’t?), then a lawyer. And by the time high school came around, computers were all the rage – even ones you could have in your own home or office. I started out studying computer science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and then switched to Management Information Systems (no calculus requirement, as it was back then – I have no aptitude for that or trigonometry) and also switched back to living at home and attending Ohio University. I graduated in March of 1987 and started working at the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City (after doing a summer internship there, the prior year). That will be the first of two chapters in this ‘Before’ section.

The second will be my own 9/11 Story.