Like father, like son.
David O’Brien, longtime chief of the Kittery Fire Department, remembers the moments from his childhood when his father, a volunteer call firefighter in town, would be summoned out of bed and ordered to an active fire scene. O’Brien’s mother would wake up, hand his father the keys, and off he’d go to fight the fire.
O’Brien would wake up in their Badger’s Island home and, if the fire was roaring close by in Portsmouth, walk over to the Memorial Bridge to watch his father and the first responders work to hose down the scene.
“I used to be 10 years old, and I’d walk across the bridge, no matter what time, 2 or 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning, and go to the fire because I knew Kittery (firefighters) would be there,” he recalled. “My father would look for me to see that I was there, just to kind of take care of me. It was a different world. We would do that stuff.”