The value of hardwork: Firefighter focuses on priorities, dedication

William Caldwell refuses to sit in his home recliner and twiddle his thumbs. 

Caldwell, a 2006 Hewitt-Trussville High School graduate, has been working since he was old enough to have a job. First, during high school, came Jack’s. Then he was hired on at Trussville Fire & Rescue in 2007, where he remained until 2016. While working at Trussville, Caldwell spent three or four years at Mabe Power Equipment Center on Main Street. He worked for NorthStar EMS for six years. He has been working at the Mountain Brook Fire Department since 2016 and also at the Center Point Fire District for the last seven years. 

“You take a little bit of something out of every job that you’ve had,” said Caldwell, a firefighter and emergency medical technician. “Being able to have those relationships that you’ve built over time, man, I feel like that is very invaluable.”

Caldwell is a positive person, and he’s not quite sure where that positivity came from. He’s just always been driven. It could possibly be traced back to when Caldwell was 13, when he joined the Fire Service Exploring program. Originally from Gate City in Birmingham, Caldwell could have taken a negative path. Instead, he got involved in the Exploring program, which allowed him to learn the ropes of firefighting at a young age. 

“It was the hand that we were dealt at the time,” Caldwell said of Gate City, “and obviously it was good to have those positive figures (in the Exploring program), because life can take you down two roads: if you hang with the bad eggs and this, that and the other, especially living where I lived, man, you could have been on the street corner selling drugs and in gangs. But with the Explorer program I was able to do something that kept my mind stimulated and on the positive road, so to speak, and led me to where I am today.”

Where Caldwell is today might seem to be a perplexing place for most people, folks who work the same job every day for the same eight-hour span. But Caldwell contends that working primarily at Mountain Brook and also at Center Point is “organized chaos.” The schedules are made well in advance. He can tell you where he will be any given day into 2022. Because a schedule for a firefighter is working 48 hours straight then off for 48 hours, it allows time for a second job. 

“For me, I’m just a driven person,” he said. “I’ve always kind of had two jobs, even before I was full-time at Center Point I worked on the private ambulance for six years for NorthStar EMS. I would lose my mind if I was sitting at home twiddling my thumbs.” 

That drive, that emphasis Caldwell puts on building positive relationships, also goes back to 2011, when he was diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkin lymphoma. Caldwell went through six months of chemotherapy in 2012 and underwent a surgical biopsy. Caldwell has been in remission for almost 10 years. 

“God has a plan for everybody and at the time that was part of His plan, for me to go through that test,” he said. “And fortunately for me and through the Lord’s grace and good friends and a good support group, I was able to be successful with my treatments and come out of it with a different attitude and a different outlook. I’ve always been positive and tried to be motivational and pick people up, but at the same time it helped me to just reinforce that.”

Caldwell motivates via his social media channels. He posts about his daily workouts on Facebook and Instagram, often around 4 a.m., before his work shifts begin. The posts almost always contain messages of positivity. But 4 a.m.?

“It comes down to priorities and dedication,” he said. “Whatever you are driven to do, you’re going to make time for, whether it be going and sitting in a tree stand at 3 a.m., may it be getting up to go on a vacation early in the morning, if you’re getting up to run a marathon. If you put your mind and body toward a goal, you’re going to try to apply it and make that goal happen.” 

For now, Caldwell will continue working at the Mountain Brook Fire Department in hopes of one day earning a fire truck driver position. Because of his years of service, he will be eligible for retirement in his mid-40s. But to retire and do nothing else? No way. Caldwell’s 6-year-old daughter, Brooklynn, may be heading off to college then, and higher education is expensive.  

“Heck, maybe I get to that point that I’ve worked 48s for umpteen years, and I just say, ‘To heck, I want to go to Walmart and be a greeter,’ you know?” Caldwell said. 

He may be joking, but the thought of Caldwell standing and smiling while wearing a navy vest, speaking with shoppers, is intriguing. The assumption is that Caldwell would attack that job like any other he’s had. Caldwell confirms that. 

“Absolutely. It’s just one of those things, for me, a lot of people do things just for a paycheck nowadays,” he said. “There’s not a lot of passion put into a job or career. But my thing is, every job you have you can take something from, if you choose to. Everybody’s mindset and everybody’s drive is not the same as what it used to be. Everybody’s mentality is not what it used to be when we were coming up. Hard work is not valued like it used to be. It’s all about ‘Let me do this little bit of work and you pay me my whole salary for this little bit of work that I’ve done.’ Unfortunately it’s just how our society has become, but we’ve allowed that to happen as well. But it’s like this fire department, every day I show up to work. Man, it doesn’t matter what’s going on in my personal life, it doesn’t matter what’s going on wherever, as soon as I step onto this property, into those doors, into this uniform, ‘My name is William Caldwell, I work for Mountain Brook Fire Department, and it’s my goal to give excellent service.’ And it’s the same thing at Center Point.”