GNA CAMPUS – “I’m a fourth-generation firefighter. Growing up, if we weren’t at school and the pager would go off, me and David would hop in the car with my dad and go. We just grew up around it. My father would travel with me as I tested outside of the state and always pushed me to pursue my dream. It’s something that I know inside now, and I love everything about it. I feel like I hit the lottery with my career. It had been a dream of mine to become a paid professional firefighter. I wake up happy to go to work day in and day out.

I started at fourteen as a junior, and then, when I turned eighteen and became a senior member, as we call it, where you can start going into buildings, I started doing that, and I kind of climbed up the ranks real quick. We’re a smaller department down here, so at, like, twenty, twenty-one, I got my first promotion, and I worked my way up. It was probably two or three years after my dad died that I got promoted to deputy chief, and I’ve been deputy chief down here for the last six or seven years. In the future, I would like to become a fire service instructor to pass on my knowledge and help mold new firefighters.

Fear? Absolutely. Absolutely. Anybody who does this job and tells you they’re not scared is a liar. It can go from zero to sixty in the snap of a finger. But I enjoy helping people on their worst days. It is very rewarding, being able to change someone’s life, hopefully for the better. When I first got hired in Nanticoke, like within my first four months, I actually had two or three saves. I went to a couple cardiac arrests, and by the time we were putting the people in the truck, they were breathing on their own again and had a heartbeat again. It was pretty cool.”

Jimmy Hoffman, 2009
Deputy Fire Chief, Newport Township
Career Firefighter, EMT, City of Nanticoke