Retired Glenboro volunteer firefighter honoured

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This article was published 15/05/2025 (223 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GLENBORO — It is a rare achievement to be able to follow a passion over the course of a lifetime. Rural educator and longtime volunteer firefighter/first responder Garth McIntyre was given the even rarer opportunity of following two.

In the 1970s, McIntyre started his career as a teacher, having taken a job as a Grade 1 to 8 classroom instructor before moving to the town of Sanford to teach Grade 7 for a year. He then took a job as a principal of a four-room school before arriving in Glenboro and a position as a junior high teacher.

He would stay in Glenboro for the rest of his teaching career, eventually taking a job as the community’s elementary school principal.

“And then they combined the two schools. And so I put in an application for the combined principalship, and ended up getting that,” McIntyre said. “It was a K-12 school, which at that time was roughly about 500 students. It was a good-sized school.”

But the teacher and educator, husband and father would eventually find yet another passion in life after he decided to join the Glenboro volunteer fire department in 1982. Yet outside of having a childhood neighbour who used to volunteer as a firefighter, he had no exposure to firefighting, nor any particular interest.

“When I first came up here, I had no intention of ever being a fireman,” McIntyre said. “Then I was a teacher and principal, and one of my staff members was on the fire department. He used to talk about it, and said, ‘You should think about being a volunteer.’ So I did.

That decision sparked a 40-year career that would eventually see McIntyre combine his education training with his work at the Glenboro fire department — now called the Glenboro South-Cypress Fire Department — working as a firefighter trainer in communities across the province.

But it was those early years starting out as a rookie firefighter that really taught him the importance of more and better training.

“We basically did just defensive firefighting,” McIntyre said. “Primarily. We didn’t have the equipment to go in. We had an old, long black jacket. If you were lucky, you got hip waders. If you were unlucky, you got just the fire boots, and you had a gap … between your coat and the boots. And you had, well, almost like a plastic helmet compared to the gear that we had when I retired. So it was a lot of stand back and spray water.”

In the early ’80s, they would go to a grass or structure fire and deal with that, but they didn’t respond to a lot of accidents at that time either.

“After I got on the department, we started going more, and we had a couple of real bad accidents that made us realize we needed equipment. So we started getting things like a rescue truck and the (jaws of life) — all the line of rescue equipment.”

By 1991, McIntyre had advanced to the role of deputy fire chief, and in the intervening years he had expanded his training and expertise by completing his instructor certification at the Manitoba Emergency Services College in Brandon. As the Glenboro Gazette would report, McIntyre would go on to train other firefighters throughout the province in a variety of critical areas, including vehicle extrication, farm accident rescue, traffic control and both Level 1 and Level 2 firefighter certification programs.

He also became an evaluator with the Brandon firefighter college, and was responsible for certifying hundreds of firefighters now serving in communities all over Manitoba.

McIntyre would eventually retire from his job as a school principal, and in 2022 he hung up his fire helmet for good. It is worth noting that in the modern era, his achievement is becoming a rarity among volunteers.

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Earlier this year, McIntyre received one of 15 specially crafted keepsake coins from the Canadian Volunteer Fire Services Association in commemoration of his long and storied service as a volunteer firefighter.

The awarding of a coin followed an earlier Lifetime Achievement Award by the same organization in 2023. The issuance of the coin was special this year, as 2025 marked not only the 15th anniversary of the organization’s annual award ceremony, but also the 25th anniversary for the Canadian Volunteer Fire Services Association.

“We wanted to issue something that was meaningful to the previous recipients of the award,” CVFSA media spokesman Mark Pound said in an interview with The Brandon Sun. “The very first coins that we have given out were to this year’s recipients. They’re personalized with the year and the person’s name on the keeper coin. The coins have been backdated with the names of the previous recipients for each year, back to the very first year that we gave out the award, which is why they’re so rare — because we’ve only done the award for 15 years.”

As of this year, the crystal Lifetime Achievement Awards will be discontinued as the Nova Scotia-based crystal company that made them went out of business a few years ago. The switch to a commemorative coin for award recipients will be a permanent one.

While the coins themselves may be rare, Pound said that the individuals who have earned them are themselves unique and distinguished individuals.

In McIntyre’s case, Pound said that the Glenboro firefighter’s four decades of service is rather exceptional, and will not likely be matched in the years to come.

“The number of years that Garth McIntyre has put in, seeing people exceed 30 years is going to become exceedingly rare in the fire service,” Pound said. “The days of hitting 30, 40, 50 or even 60 years in the fire service — you won’t see that kind of stuff happening any longer. It’s harder to keep volunteers. It’s harder to retain and get new volunteers in many areas of the country.”

The time commitments can be stressful for the firefighters and their families, not to mention the fact that it’s harder to find businesses and workplaces that tolerate the need for volunteers to drop what they’re doing and attend a fire or ambulance call.

“It’s hard to find workplaces that are willing or able to allow their volunteer firefighters to leave work for a call,” Pound said. “When I joined the fire service 25 years ago myself, there were many more workplaces that allowed those firefighters to go at the drop of a hat if their pagers went off.”

In terms of achievement, McIntyre fit the mould, so to speak. Pound said that the organization looks for well-rounded nominees for the award — people who not only spend their time on the volunteer force, but who also get involved in their communities as fundraisers, municipal councillors, or volunteering with the local Lions Club, for example.

“It takes a lot to be a volunteer firefighter outside of their careers, right? And then on top of all that, they put commitments to family in there. It’s extraordinary what some of our recipients have done over their fire service careers.”

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McIntyre’s basement office is a testament to his firefighting career.

One wall is lined with more than a dozen framed course and training achievements. The bookshelf behind his office chair is full of course training manuals and old equipment, including a heat damaged fire helmet he used as a Glenboro volunteer firefighter.

In recent days, he had taken out of storage a large wooden board covered in labelled firefighter knots that he had used previously as an educational prop. With his grandson now thinking of volunteering his time as a firefighter too, McIntyre thought it may prove helpful.

Looking thoughtfully over a cup of coffee, he recalls some of the more difficult situations he faced during his volunteer career. Several years earlier, shortly after new training and equipment had allowed the Glenboro firefighters to do more active work within a burning building, McIntyre said there were a few scary moments when he took a crew into the interior of a burning furniture store.

“You couldn’t see anything, like it was just totally black. You could hear the fire burning. We were trying to find the source and crawling around through a furniture store. You can imagine what that would be like. It was scary.”

Another time, it was the attempted rescue of a pair of dogs inside a burning residence. One dog made it, the other didn’t.

And still a third situation that involved the loss of a human life. They had initially been told that nobody was inside, but when the owner was contacted, he said his girlfriend had been inside sleeping.

“So, then we had to switch from defensive, just keeping the fire from spreading, to knocking it down and going in and searching for the body. That was a tough one,” McIntyre said. “And it was hard on a lot of firefighters.”

He also attended his share of vehicle collisions as a first responder and said that the worst ones would always involve people he knew personally.

“If it’s a stranger from Alberta who runs into a care from Saskatchewan, that’s a different story. They’re still humans, still people, but it’s not somebody you know. One of the things I always told any of the fire department, any guys that joined the department, is that you’ve got to be prepared…to know the people that you’ll work with.”

In his conversation with the Sun, McIntyre echoed Pound’s words about the difficulties departments face in finding new recruits. While the school division was understanding about his volunteer commitments, particularly during his tenure as school principal, he knew first-hand what it was like to have to get up in the middle of a Thanksgiving dinner and leave for an ambulance transfer call, or miss a school reunion because the pager went off. And he says that while his family has always been supportive, he knows there were some difficult days.

“They never said too much, but I’m sure that they were disappointed a lot of times,” McIntyre said. “It interferes big with your social life.”

After 40 years of service, he said it’s been difficult to forget the time and effort he has put into it. Even now, the sound of a passing siren gets his ears perked up.

If he had the chance to talk with someone who was considering taking on a volunteer position with their local fire department, he would warn them that the job requires them to give of themselves and sacrifice their personal and professional time.

But he would also tell them just how rewarding the work can be. Not merely because of an award received — though he certainly appreciates that, too — but because of the impact you can have on your community, and the people who you serve.

“You provided a very essential service at a very important time,” he said. “One that always stuck with me, and this was a case of an accident involving an elderly couple. I ended up going into the car doing patient stabilization. And this lady said afterwards, she said, ‘You know, I was never so glad to hear your voice.’

“And I thought, well, you know, if that gives them comfort at a time like that, then it’s all worth it.”

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