Gauthier: ‘If we hired a new chief, what does that leave me?’
Micky Gauthier’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing since the weekend.
Grafton’s fire chief quietly let friends and family know over the July 4th holiday that he would be taking his retirement at the end of the month. A couple years early, if “early” could describe ending a career at the Grafton Fire Department after only 47.5 years.
“The outpouring of support and gratitude — I wasn’t expecting that,” Gauthier said Thursday afternoon, just two days after his retirement was made public. “I’m hearing from people I haven’t talked to in years. It’s overwhelming.”
Gauthier’s first day on the Grafton Fire Department was Jan. 1, 1973. Back then, on-call firefighters didn’t have extensive training and safety gear like today, but it was a brotherhood. And he wasn’t the only Gauthier in gear — his father, Phil Gauthier, was also on-call, and later he served as chief. Eighteen years after that, it was his son’s turn.
Everyone was expecting Gauthier, 63, to hang on until the mandatory retirement age of 65. But Gauthier was tired from the rigors of balancing his job as fire chief with his full time job at Republic Supply Co., weary of the nights where a radio crackle might send him to a fire that he’d leave at dawn and barely rest before heading to the warehouse at 7 a.m. There was another issue making him lose sleep: Grafton is in the process of changing its entirely on-call department to one run by a full-time fire chief.
That job wasn’t going to be offered to him.
“The whole process…” Gauthier started, trailing off into silence. “The last time I talked to Tim (McInerney, the town administrator) was Dec. 30 last year. He wanted to talk to me about staying on to bring in the new people. I said I had two years left. Tim said he’d be wiling to get me to retirement. I said OK. I felt good.”
Later, he discovered that the plan was to hire a new chief and he was “welcome to apply.”
“The job that I’ve been doing — I don’t say that I’m perfect, I make mistakes like anyone — but I’ve been doing this job for so long and it isn’t even offered to me?” Gauthier said. “Am I deeply hurt? Yes.”
While the fire chief had decided to hand in his retirement letter in advance of Monday, he was surprised when another chief phoned him to say Gauthier’s job was being advertised on the Fire Chiefs of Massachusetts website. It had gone up before he announced his retirement.
Gauthier retires on July 31. He’s looking forward to time with his wife, Susannah, and traveling. And also nights when he can rest easy without worrying about fire department administrative tasks and fire calls.
“The question no one could answer — they wanted me to stick around but if we hired a new chief, what does that leave me?” Gauthier said. “Am I still the fire chief? What am I in charge of? I decided I’d go out as the chief and go out with my head held high.”
