VIDEO: Rockingham County's assistant fire marshal, Jeremy Shelton, is one of this year's Salute to Heroes award winners. The American Red Cross of the Piedmont Triad will honor him and this year's other winners at an event in Greensboro in late September.
Shelton is a true jack-of-all-trades emergency responder. He has a binder filled with all of his various certifications. But his journey into firefighting is a little unusual. It started when he was burning trash as a teenager. This is illegal now, but was not back then. "My granddaddy's grapevine was on fire. The trash had blew up and set the grapevine on fire, so first thing I thought of was to run up to the back of my grandad's house, grabbed his garden hose and run back down there and put the grapevine out. And I said, 'Well that was really cool. I think I'll be a fireman,'" Shelton said.