NORTHAMPTON — Tracy Driscoll-Horton may have gone in as the city’s first female firefighter, but the soot that enshrouded her while on duty made her indistinguishable from her male colleagues.
From playing hardball to fighting flames, Driscoll-Horton’s ability to blend in with — and best — the boys made her a pioneer.
“She was a forerunner in baseball as well as firefighting,” said former mayor David Musante, who both coached her in pee-wee league and appointed her to the ranks of the Northampton Fire Department in 1987. “She just showed up.”
The fourth-generation firefighter, who retired earlier this month at age 53 after 30 years with the department, says her family never questioned her ability to contend on the baseball field or the scene of a fire. Neither did she.
The league Musante started was meant for boys, and some 100 kids came the first day. It was the ’70s and boys wore longer hair, so Driscoll-Horton snuck in with gender difference unnoticed.
“Unbeknownst to me, Tracy was one of those little boys. And Tracy was a hell of a ball player,” he said, adding he tested her upon discovering she was a girl. “I tried to get a ball by her and I couldn’t.”
From then on, Musante said, the league was open to both boys and girls.
Driscoll-Horton, who Musante said was “better than all the boys” at baseball, became the city’s first female Little League player at age 11, circa 1975. She said though no one could deny her talent, the president of the Little League association quit because they allowed a girl to join the ranks.
“Girls can’t do that? Oh yes I can,” she recalled, defiance still ringing in her voice. “I did everything I ever wanted in life when they said I couldn’t.”
When she started with the department in 1987, National Fire Protection Association statistics show women made up just shy of 1 percent of the professional firefighting force nationwide. The figure has wavered in the past 15 years, but has largely hovered in the range of 4 percent since the early 2000s.
“Nobody opened the door because you were a woman,” she said. “It took time but I proved myself.”
Those who worked with her said her gender was never an issue.
“We really didn’t know the difference. She did the job as good as any of the guys and she grew up in a family of firefighters so she knew quite a bit when she came in the door,” said Deputy Chief Tim McQueston, who joined the reserves alongside her in 1987. “She wasn’t a woman or a man — she was a firefighter. She did the job and she did it well. She was a trailblazer.”
Driscoll-Horton is the last in a long line of firefighting Driscolls. The fourth-generation firefighter says her great-grandfather, a 40-year firefighter in Holyoke, died following an accident in which he was thrown from a horse-drawn ladder truck.
Her grandfather, Barry Driscoll, started work for the Northampton Fire Department in 1920 and stayed another three decades. Her father, Jeremiah Paul Driscoll, was with the department 40 years before retiring as chief in 1989. Three of her brothers also fought fires alongside her.
“She passed all the tests with flying colors,” Musante said of the physical benchmarks required of fire department recruits. “She was a smoke-eater from the day she was born, I guess.”
Born in April 1964, Driscoll-Horton grew up in Florence with her parents and seven siblings. She was raised to be of service to her community, she said, and that ultimately translated into how she treated her work.
“If you saved a life, you’ve done your job,” she said. “That’s what we’re supposed to do.”
But it’s the ones she couldn’t save that still stick with her. She said she’ll be forever haunted by the face of a 16-year-old boy as she and her colleagues pried him from his car one night. He turned right out in front of a dump truck, she said. He didn’t make it, and he’d only just gotten his license.
“He still had that ‘oh, shit’ look on his face,” she said. “That was one that never, ever went away. But most of ‘em I just learned to stuff aside.”
She said sometimes first responders catch flack for laughing at the scene, but the banter offers protection from the tragedy of the day. She let out a nervous laugh as she recounted how one car chase landed with a car flipped against a tree, and the driver landed “bare-assed, right up against the windshield.”
“The impact had just ripped his clothes off,” she said. “There were times you had to laugh because if we didn’t we would have cried.”
Driscoll-Horton says she knew exactly what type of career she was getting into and has no regrets about it.
“If you don’t want to do it, don’t stand there and put your hand up,” she said. “We’re not God. We can just hope to be there and save ‘em when we can.”
Still, she said all the death has taken a toll.
At 53, she says she reached a point where her mind, body and soul had given all she had to give to the service.
“I had enough — just seen too much, done too much,” she says, referencing her diagnosed hypertension and a ministroke she had. “But that’s part of the job. It’s a physical job.
“You just can’t save them all.”
She said seeing her friend and longtime colleague Bob Davis die rather suddenly of cancer earlier this year was a sobering event that pushed her into early retirement. She said it made her realize she may have less time than she thinks to take trips to the beach and cook meals for her adult son, who is a police officer at the VA hospital in Leeds.
“I ain’t living for a long time — I know I’m not,” she said, acknowledging her health issues, her smoking habit and the elevated cancer risks all firefighters face. “There’s things I want to do. I want to drive cross-country, drive motorcycles with my brother. Maybe I’ll get married someday.”
Amanda Drane can be contacted at adrane@gazettenet.com.