Dora fire chief and deputy chief retire after 35 years of answering the call

For more than three decades, Dora volunteer firefighters Monte Shipley and John Epley dropped what they were doing when they heard a fire tone ring out from their belt-clipped radios - and they responded. 

During family gatherings, during holidays, during birthdays, in middle of the night and first thing in the morning, with steaks on the grill and potatoes in the oven. It didn’t matter. 

If the tone rang, they went.

They’ve been to everything from neighbors’ homes engulfed in flames to roadside brush fires, from horrific car crashes to minor fender benders, from tragic drownings to multi-day missing person searches, from trash fires that got out of control to raging wildfires in the National Forest. They’ve even responded twice to kill a suffering deer that’d been hit by a car and once to save a blind cat who was stuck high in a tree. 

It’s a legacy of volunteer service that is more than admirable. 

As both Shipley and Epley hang up their fire helmets for good this year, retiring from a long and interesting volunteer career with the Dora VFD, they can hold their heads up high knowing that they’ve truly served their community with all that they had for all those years.

A real need for fire protection

The Dora Volunteer Fire Department was organized in the spring of 1986 when several area residents got together to fill a need. Nearby communities of Tecumseh and Eastern Douglas County had organized fire protection districts in the early 1980s, but when fires flared up in the Dora area, neither fire department was close enough to be much help. 

On May 5, 1986, several people from the Dora community came together at the old Crossroads Church to choose a steering committee and set fire district boundary lines for the newly formed Dora Volunteer Fire Department. 

“Gerald Hambelton was instrumental. He had this little park over there, and he’d get people to come and sign and play music for fundraisers. We had a lot of fundraisers… turkey shoots here at the firehouse, lots of dinners, music shows. It was just bam, bam, one after another,” Monte said. “Gerald and Mary Lou also donated the property to us [where the firehouse sits]. Mary Lou was treasurer, and Gerald was president of the board.”

Stephen Gray was appointed as the first fire chief. He was succeeded that September by Bob Reed, a retired fire captain and 25-year veteran firefighter from Newark, New Jersey. 

Then in May 1987, about a year after the department was formed, Monte was named fire chief, a position he’s served in for 35 years until his retirement Sept. 1. 

“When they made me chief in ’87, I was green. I mean, I didn’t know anything. Bob Reed stayed on as a training officer for awhile, but he got kind of tired of trying to teach us hillbillies fire tactics, so he moved on.”

Monte’s sister Donna and her husband John Epley, who live a short distance from Monte, were also hog farmers at the time. Seeing the dedication and hard work Monte was putting into his new appointment as fire chief, the couple decided to see if they could help him out. 

“He was doing a lot of stuff by himself. I thought, ‘Sounds like he needs some help.’ So I come down to see what was going on one day, and I got stuck. Been here ever since,” John said, with a laugh.

John started as vice president of the Dora VFD board and was later named president of the board. 

“That’s what happens when you go to the bathroom,” he joked. 

He served in the board president position, as well as deputy fire chief, until his retirement at the same time as Monte’s. 

Monte’s sister Donna, who is married to John, has also been involved with the department since Monte was named chief. She started as the membership chairman, sending out membership notices and collecting dues from residents in the district. She continued the job for 34 years up until last year when another volunteer took over the duty. She also served as John’s brush truck driver in the 80s.

First car crash response

Monte and John said in the early years, there weren’t a lot of organized fire training opportunities like there is for volunteer firefighters today.

“Mostly, we just learned by doing…” John said.

In the beginning, the fire department was dispatched to around a dozen fires a year. So, about once a month, they’d respond to a blaze, fight it and learn a little bit more about how to better fight fire the next time.

Sometime around 1990, the department expanded its services to respond to car crashes, which later opened the department up to responding to medical calls. 

Now, the Dora VFD averages six times as many calls as they did its first year with an average of 75 responses a year. They’ve had as many as 145 calls a year, and two-thirds of the calls are for medical response. 

Monte still remembers the first car crash he worked, one that prompted him to seek first-aid training in order to provide help in ways beyond just firefighting and directing traffic. 

“This gal got thrown out [of the vehicle]. It pretty much crushed her, but she was still alive. And we just didn’t know what to do. That was my first one I responded to,” Monte said.

After arriving at the horrific scene, Monte and the other volunteers used their firetruck to block the road to other traffic and guided an air ambulance helicopter to land the in the middle of the highway. 

“When the ambulance finally got there, I told them, ‘She’s drawing her last breath.’ Then they started CPR,” he recalled.

Prompted by that incident, the American Red Cross offered an advanced first aid class in Gainesville, and Monte signed up. 

“I learned a little bit about it there, and later we had a first responders training (now called Emergency Medical Response or EMR). I think I took it three times basically in my career,” he said. 

Dora school fire

After 35 years fighting fire, which fire sticks out in their minds the most? There wasn’t even a hesitation when Monte, John and Donna all answered - the Jan. 21, 1998, fire at Dora School. 

Monte said he remembers the details of being on scene with perfect clarity.

“We didn’t have pagers then… there were certain people whose phone all rang at the same time. Then [those people] had to start calling the firefighters. It took a long time to get all that done. The call came through at 2:30 in the morning. Somebody was going by the school and saw the fire. And it was all downhill from there.”

Donna said when she first received the call that the school was on fire, she looked out her window to see if she could see fire or smoke. 

“And, of course, I could. It was blazing. So, I quickly called Monte to tell him it was a big fire. I remember him just saying, ‘Oh my goodness,’ because he knew he was in for some work - and it was,” she said. 

Fourteen area fire departments responded to the fire and immediately began efforts to battle the blaze, but no matter what they did, they couldn’t get the fire extinguished. 

“It was impossible to put out because they’d put another roof on the building. It had a flat roof at first and then they put another roof over it. All that tar across the whole roof was just getting with it, and we couldn’t do anything. There was no way to get water to it,” Monte said. 

Monte remembers a particularly close call that came for him and several other firefighters that day. 

“We were going into the gym because we thought we could knock the fire out of there. You couldn’t see anything for the smoke. Me and Joe Auffert, the Howell Rural fire chief, were sitting there hunkered down together, and his team was going down the wall trying to make it to the lobby so they could push the fire back,” Monte said. “We heard the roof pop two or three times. I looked at Joe and I said, ‘I don’t like this.’ So I said, ‘Hey guys, come back now,’ and they all scattered. Just as soon as we got out of that door, the roof just crashed in. It gushed ash and smoke out everywhere, and we just ran. I was following a Howell Rural coat, and we entered an area where they had construction going. It had the frame-work out. He ducked, and I saw this cross cable coming right at me, and I just dove. It almost took my head off.”

Afterward, another close call came when Monte was being interviewed by a news outlet about the fire, which drew media attention from across the region.

“One gym wall was still standing. It was coming daylight about that time, and I heard this big, loud whoosh. I turned around right in the middle of the interview and said, ‘that gym wall just fell. I hope no one was under there.’ It was scary. I mean, it threw blocks plumb across the road when it fell.”

The only injury reported from the fire was that of a Pottersville firefighter who sustained a broken bone when a block fell from the roof and hit the man in the shoulder. 

Epley’s hog barn fire

One of the most heartbreaking fires that the family remembers responding to occurred at John and Donna’s own farm where 1,000 hogs, 28 sows and 700-800 feeder pigs, along with the family’s hog barns, all burned.

“It was February of ’89, and ‘Lonesome Dove’ was on the TV. It was the first time we’d ever watched it,” Donna recalled. 

While John and Donna were watching the movie, their son walked by a window in the back of the home on his way to the bathroom and saw flames coming from the hog barn. 

John immediately ran out to the barn. Without pagers or cell phones, Donna grabbed the phone and hand-dialed each of the Dora firefighters phone numbers to ask if they could to respond to help. 

The blaze tore through the barn, killing all the animals. 

“I remember, we were crawling around in that barn that day. The smoke was thick, and we kept stumbling over this stuff. We didn’t realize in then, but it was dead pigs we were crawling around on,” Monte recalled. 

The clean up efforts were labor-intensive too.

“You would have to be careful, or you’d pull a leg off. The smoke killed them, but they were kind of tenderized from the fire too. We were pulling dead hogs out of there for a long time,” Monte said. 

A backhoe was hired, and a large pit was dug where the nearly 2,000 dead animals were buried. 

“It was traumatic,” Donna said. 

John agreed, explaining that the hog barn event wasn’t his first brush with a scary fire situation in his lifetime. 

“When I was 10 or 12, my parents owned Crossroads Store. We had built three little rooms on the side of it and lived in there,” John said. “I believe it was Chad Hambelton… he come sliding in there next to the gas pumps, laying on the horn to see if we were up. It was that early in the morning, probably around 6 o’clock. There was no fire department back then. Neighbors and family just carried buckets of water from a pond and threw it on the fire. We lost everything.”

When asked if those traumatic fire experiences were enough to make John think twice about volunteering for the fire department, he said it was quite the opposite. 

“That’s why I joined the fire department. Someone needs to help,” he said. 

Potato Cave fire

The potato cave fire in 2012 was another one that Monte and John remember well. 

The blaze broke out in the Mark Twain National Forest where there was a cave that locals call Tater Cave, Monte explained.

“Back in the old days, people would take their boxes of potatoes or whatever else and store them down there in the winter to keep cold. That’s why they called it that. Supposedly nobody stole the potatoes from one another. You can imagine how that might’ve worked,” John said. 

An area near the cave that had been ravaged by a tornado two years before had caught fire from a lightning strike in a particularly nasty storm. 

“That was my birthday. I had steaks on the grill, and baked potatoes cooking. Me and [daughter] Gina [Dreckman Volkmer] responded. We went way back into the woods to try and find it, crawling through that tangle back there. I thought ‘What did I get her into?’ We could barely crawl out, and you could just hear the fire roaring over the hill, but it was across the ravine for us. We made our way out of there, and the forest service was on scene by that time. It wound up burning 1,200 acres,” Monte said. 

Dora and Bakersfield VFDs supplied water to the national forest firefighters to battle the blaze. The firefighting efforts included a forest service helicopter pilot who dumped water on the blaze from above.

“He was dipping out of the [North Fork] river for awhile, but then canoers were coming down and trying to grab the [helicopter’s water] bucket. So they had to abort that plan. That’s when they called us in and asked if we could set up a tank… [The pilot] just hovered over it, looking at a mirror through his glass floorboard, and he’d lower and just rock it back and forth, then sink into that bucket and away he’d go.”

After the helicopter lifted off, Monte, John and the rest of the Dora VFD team would go in and refill the tank for his next pass through. 

While on scene helping with the potato cave fire, the department was called out for two other fires - a brush hog that had caught fire and another lightning strike that caused a field of dry, wheat-stubble to engulf. 

The national forest helicopter pilot returned the fire-helping favor by pulling away from the potato cave fire at one point to drop a load of water on the field, which helped get it under-control enough for the firefighters on the ground to fully extinguish it. 

“That really saved us,” Donna said.

There are dozens of other stories from their time together, a mix of hilarious, heartbreaking and heroic moments, that really define their experience working together and with their fellow firefighters. 

“Working together like this really brings you closer. These people become your brothers and sisters in fire,” Monte said. 

Another generation taking over

The Dora VFD now has several new volunteers who have stepped in to lead the department into its next chapter. 

John Stanton, who has been with the fire department for several years, has stepped into the role of fire chief. 

Monte and John are still sticking around some to help train the new crew on the equipment, they said. 

But even though the department has firefighters to continue on, Monte and John say they worry about what the future holds for all local rural volunteer fire departments. 

“The future is bleak. It’s hard to get volunteers now. I think it’s going to come down to some kind of tax base to have at least two paid firefighters on duty at each department at a time,” Monte said. “That’s the biggest drawback – lack of volunteers. I think someone is going to have to get paid to do this.”

When asked what makes a good volunteer, they all agreed. 

“Dedication. You throw down what you are doing and respond. It’s hard to find a person like that,” Monte said. 

“We always responded. I don’t know how many Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas dinners, I’d get my plate full, and the tones would go off. I wouldn’t get one cotton-pickin’ bite,” John said. “There are three or four [Dora VFD volunteers] who are really working hard to keep it going, but they need some help. People who will show up… You have to be willing to give a little of your time.”

Funding is also another topic of concern. The department is financially supported by voluntary dues paid by residents in the district. The dues are not required by law at this point, and only about half of the residents in the district choose to pay them. 

If a tax is instated that legally requires residents of a fire district to fund the department in some way, either included in property taxes as Arkansas does or through some type of sales tax, it’s thought that the cost to district members may be less because more people will be sharing the financial burden. 

The next chapter

Monte, John and Donna say they’ll be watching eagerly to see how it plays out as departments face a critical shortage of volunteers and a difficult economy that will create even tighter budgets than they’ve faced before. 

Donna and John say that it’s been hard for them to transition out of the mindset of dropping everything when a fire or medical call comes across their phones. And when they do see that a call has been made for a Dora fire or medical issue, it’s sometimes hard for them not to jump in a truck and respond.

“We’re floundering a bit. It’s strange not going when there’s a call. The other day we could hear the sirens. And so there we were, out in the yard, listening…” Donna said.

“I stomped around and had a little fit because only three people had answered. I thought, ‘That’s not enough. They need more help. Nobody’s going to answer because during the day everybody is working. And everyone has a family,’” John said. “So, that part of it, worrying about it, that’s hard to shake.”

Monte says he’s spending more time taking care of his farm where he raises beef cattle with wife Sue. 

“I have more than I can keep up with there,” he said, explaining that he hasn’t had trouble filling his time with farm chores and other things he’s catching up on around the house. “When a call comes, I look at it and think, ‘Wow. I don’t have to go to that.’ But, I feel bad for them. And I feel guilty some.”

But after three decades of serving their neighbors in their most desperate moments, the time has come to pass the torch and let others stand in their place to take the call and respond in aid. 

As for Monte, John and Donna, everyday life will no longer be fragmented by fires, crashes and medical calls, and come this Thanksgiving, when plates are piled high and family circles the table, they’ll know that no matter what happens throughout the county, they’ll be there at the table to take it all in - every cotton-pickin’ bite.