Friday morning in Winston-Salem, 38 men and one woman graduated from training and officially became Winston-Salem firefighters.
“It was 8 months, it was a very, very big learning curve,” said William Rivers, president of the graduating class.
After four year in the Marine Corps, Rivers, a Winston-Salem native, returned home to help care for his mother. After she passed, he found the job he had to be unfulfilling.
“Moving equipment, moving product, it just didn’t fulfill me the way that I thought that it should,” he said.