Death of a Firefighter : First Blaze Fatality in Conservation Corps History Was a ‘Good’ Son Who Just Wanted to Help Others

He was laying out the clothes in which his son will be buried Saturday, thinking about how unfair it was, his only son’s life cut short at 18. “Ike” Lindsay Sr. was thinking, too, about the God who has always been good to him and his family. Finally he swallowed and said, “The least I could have done is give Him a good guy.”

By all accounts, Sir Isaac Lindsay Jr.--also “Ike” to friends and family--was a “good guy,” the kind of kid who fed the neighbors’ dog when they were away, let his younger sister tag along with him and his friends to Magic Mountain, brought his mother wildflower bouquets.

When he died last weekend in a freak accident after six days of helping fellow California Conservation Corps members fight blazes that blackened half a million acres of Northern California forest, he became a statistic.

Lindsay Jr., the second on-duty firefighter to die in these blazes (U.S. Forest Service’s Bruce Visser of San Bernardino County was killed Sept. 1 in a motorcycle crash) was the first CCC member in the corps’ 12-year history to lose his life fighting a fire. But most people who tuned into weekend news broadcasts would remember only that a Rialto man had been killed; few would even recall his name.

His short life was not extraordinary. At Fontana High School, from which he was graduated in June, he was neither valedictorian nor football hero. With a C average, he was not on a college track.

But Charles Redd, his high school counselor for three years, remembers him as “the type of person any father would love to have as a son. He was never in any trouble. He was never a discipline problem.”

Redd smiled and said, “We did have an attendance problem in his senior year. He had a girlfriend and they were more in love than they were in school.”

He remembers, too, “He always had a beautiful smile.” No, Lindsay Jr. was not a leader, more a follower, and “his grades did not measure up to his ability.” But he was “a good person, a good person,” Redd said. “We were very proud to have him.”

The week before graduation, Redd recalled, “He came into my office and said, ‘Mr. Redd, I just want to say thanks for all the things you have done for me. I know I haven’t done my best, but I’m going to put it together now . . . . I want to really be something in life.”

He was not to have that chance.

Sir Isaac Lindsay Jr. died when improbability and bad luck came together about 8 p.m. Saturday as he and his crew started back to base camp near Travis after a long day of firefighting in the Six Rivers National Forest, about 70 miles west of Redding.

A 100-foot-tall, 32-inch-thick Douglas fir suddenly toppled, hammering through the steel roof of the truck in which Lindsay was riding. He was facing to the rear, seated at one end of a four-passenger bench seat just behind the cab. Nine other passengers in the truck were injured.

In the truck in front, someone had heard the cracking of the giant tree trunk, Trinity County Coroner George Wiles said, and had screamed into a radio for the second truck to stop “but apparently they didn’t hear, or he was on a different frequency.”

CCC spokeswoman Susanne Levitsky said the fir was a “healthy looking green tree that did not appear to be burned” and was in an area that had been checked for such dangers. But others at the accident scene said they believed fire had damaged the tree’s roots.

Darin Johnson, 21, of Chino, crew leader of the 16-member firefighting group that included Lindsay, suffered a dislocated hip in the accident. He said Lindsay was “getting ready to nod off to sleep . . . and right that second the tree came right through the roof.”

Normally, coroner Wiles said, a tree hitting a steel barrier would break, but this one did not and caved in the roof of the truck. “The brunt of it was right over where he was sitting.” Lindsay suffocated, he said, pinned in a doubled over position. “He was unconscious and probably died in two to three minutes.”

There was no chance of rescuing him, Wiles said, as chain saws had to be brought in to cut out the tree. The Coast Guard flew in a “jaws” rig by helicopter from Fortuna, but could not budge the tree. Wiles estimated that it was “at least an hour and a half before they got him out.”

“I knew he was dead right away,” Johnson said, “because that part of the carrier got taken out. Actually, I yelled to him about three times and there was no answer.”

Johnson described young Lindsay as “a strong kid with a good personality. He got along with everybody and kept morale up in our crew. When people were getting sick of (firefighting), he would talk to them and kind of give them a boost.”

“I loved him,” said Ken Nichols, a corps member from West Covina who was in the same truck but escaped injury. “He was like my best friend up there. He would always find some way to make me laugh . . . .”

Moriel Haskins, 18, of West Covina, another passenger in the crew carrier, said that at the time the crew was relaxed and “looking forward to getting something to eat.” Haskins, who suffered a cut to his head, was momentarily knocked out when the tree hit. When he came to, “Everybody was crying and I was wondering what was going on . . . . The tree was so heavy it flattened the tires and drove it (the truck) to the ground.”

“It was just a million in one thing,” Johnson said. “I don’t think it’ll ever happen again in a hundred years . . . . It just happened that one got us.”

At home, in a sprawling subdivision in Rialto, Mattie Lindsay was welcoming each visitor with a brave smile. “Hi, Mom,” the teen-agers said. (To Lindsay Jr.’s close friends, black or white, his parents were “Mom” and “Dad.”)

Mattie Lindsay welcomed the reporter, said how much it would have pleased her son to be written about in the newspaper. She brought out a fabric-covered photo album, blue and pink and edged with lace, explaining that her son’s fiancee had made it for him.

The pictures inside were a chronicle of two teen-agers in love--Ike and Kim, Kim and Ike. At the homecoming dance, a school trip to Big Bear. An invitation to the Sadie Hawkins dance, Kimberly Daniel inviting Sir Isaac Lindsay. The junior-senior prom, with Kim in a black gown, red ribbon laced through her black gloves, Ike wearing a red bow tie with his tuxedo.

She smiled and said, “She loved that boy, I’ll tell you.”

When her son was little, she said, a big bandage and a kiss had always made everything OK. Now, there was nothing she could do for him.

But former neighbors had dropped by to say how sorry they were, and the Lindsays were making it easier for them. Everyone laughed readily, remembering the silly things of childhood--a water balloon fight in which Ike Jr. had scored a direct hit on his mom as she left for work, the way he’d call her “Mrs. Lindsay” when he was trying to be stern.

They remembered how proud he was of the 1971 Triumph convertible his dad had bought him at the start of his senior year, they remembered how he and his friends had practiced break dancing in the Lindsays’ garage, Ike joking, “Mom, white people were not made to move that way.”

Mattie Lindsay was always losing her keys, so just before Ike Jr. left for CCC basic training in mid-August, he’d bought her a key ring that said, “I Love Jesus.” She’d lost it.

At school he’d played football and basketball, but weightlifting was his passion. At 6 feet 2, 195 lbs., Ike Jr. was strong and well-built. Since 16, he’d wanted to be a firefighter and had joked about building up his muscles so he could be in the firefighters’ “hunk” calendar.

He was a good boy, Mattie Lindsay said. “He never talked back to me, ever. He’d just say, ‘OK, Mommie Dearest.’ And he’d get this big grin on his face.”

“I raised my son on two things,” Lindsay Sr. said, “love and discipline. And they went hand in hand. If I whipped him, two or three hours later we were hugging. We always hugged and kissed. We were more than just father and son. We were a team.”

He laughed as he recalled how his son would assess the family emotional climate and conclude, “Daddy’s blood pressure’s up.” If it was, it was apt to be because Ike Jr. had raided his dad’s closet--again. “He’d destroy my clothes,” he said.

His father, only 20 when the son he’d asked for was born, had changed the baby’s diapers, handled midnight feedings. He himself had been an abused child, raised in foster homes, and he’d raised his boy “the way I’d wanted my father to raise me.”

If he feels strong enough, he said, he will speak at his son’s services at 11 a.m. Saturday in Loveland Church in Fontana. He wants to talk about fathers and sons and the special beauty of that relationship.

“It’s tough,” he said “I always said, ‘Be careful, boy. You’re the only one I’ve got. And you carry my name.’ It’s real tough.”

Perhaps, Mattie Lindsay said, it will get easier when she returns next week to her classroom at Ganesha High in Pomona, where she teaches English and drama. She will make sure she’s busy.

She thought a moment and said, “I don’t think I could go through this if I did not believe God has control over us, that he loaned Ike to us for a while. It was a gift, a beautiful, wonderful gift. He was a joy for 18 years, and that’s more than a lot of parents can say. How can I be angry with God for loaning him to us?”

Kimberly Daniel had two missions when she dropped by the Lindsay home Tuesday evening. In her hand was a small gray box inside of which was nestled a slender gold band. It was to have been a surprise for Ike Jr. when he came home. “We’re going to put it on him tomorrow,” his father said.

She wanted, too, to share with the Lindsays her news--she is two months’ pregnant. She and Ike had found out just two days before he left for CCC camp. “He was really happy,” she said. They were making plans for a December wedding. She will keep the baby. “It’s going to be hard on me, but I want to go through with it,” she said. “If I do have a boy, I’ll name it after him.”

Sometimes, when they’d talk, he’d ask what would happen to her if he were to die and she’d say, “Don’t talk like that.” She never worried. He was “so big and strong. It seemed like he could handle anything.”

They had talked by telephone a few days before he was killed--”He kept asking me if I’d marry him, and I said I would.”

He’d been homesick, and a little scared, his mother said. “This was the first time he’d been away from home, ever. He called me every day when he was up there. He’d say, ‘Mom, things are fine.’ He liked what he was doing.”

His last telephone call from Trinity County came on Wednesday, three days before he died. He told them how tired he was, how hot it was on the fire lines. No, he hadn’t yet received the “care package” they’d sent. They talked about visiting him there this week, and he asked if they’d bring his weight belt. “He was to be off Wednesday through Sunday, if he could get a break. We’d planned to hitch a ride on a truck, a jeep, anything. We missed him so badly,” his mother said.

She is, admittedly, a “worrywart” and when Ike Jr. did not call home a week ago Thursday, the first day he’d missed, she was worried. When he did not call on Friday, she called him and was told by someone at camp that he was fine.

That night Mattie Lindsay had a dream, a frightening, unsettling dream. It shook her so that she spent most of Saturday in bed. In that dream her mother, dead for 13 years, was very much alive. And Ike Jr. was a little boy again. He was running to his grandmother, she recalls, and “she held her arms open and she scooped him up” and they ran off. “I couldn’t catch them. It was like I was running in slow motion.” She thinks it was “a premonition.”

On Sunday morning about 7:15, as she was getting ready for early church, the doorbell rang. When Mattie Lindsay saw Ardess Lilly and Sam Duran, both CCC center administrators, she knew. Before they could say anything, she said, “My baby’s dead . . . .”

She called her husband, who was just ending his night shift as a security officer at the Sheraton Grande Hotel, and said, “I’ve got the worst news in the world . . . .” Then she blurted out, “Ike is dead.”

There is no consolation. But they take some comfort in the coroner’s assurances that he did not suffer. They make no attempt to assign blame. “I can’t,” Lindsay Sr. said. “I wish I could. God called him. It was his time. I blame the tree. I want to blow it up.”

Ike Jr., who had one sibling, 11-year-old Samantha, was the fourth Isaac in the family line. “I can’t have any more kids,” his father said. “If I could, none would take his place.”

It’s an odd name, Sir Isaac Lindsay. “My father was reading about somebody famous (Sir Isaac Newton) when I was born,” Lindsay Sr. explained. “He said I’d be famous. Now, it’s not me who’s famous. It’s my boy.”

Ike Jr. was only 16, his father said, when he decided he wanted to be a firefighter. His parents had asked him to put in writing his reasons and he had written a five-page essay in which he talked about being strong, accepting a challenge--and saving lives.

It was his father who had encouraged him to apply to the CCC, viewing it as “a career thing.” The corps is a work-ethic program for young people between 18 and 23, modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps of the ‘30s.

The corps’ motto is “Hard Work, Low Pay, Miserable Conditions . . . and More!” Its routine work includes clearing streams and eradicating agricultural pests, but members are on call for front-line jobs in emergencies such as forest fires and earthquakes. Sir Isaac Lindsay Jr. had joined up only weeks before one of those major emergencies.

The corps, saluting him as the first member to die while fighting a fire, has lowered flags to half staff at its offices and camps statewide until after tomorrow’s funeral.

And local fire departments “are going to give my boy a good send-off,” said Lindsay Sr., who spent 16 years as a police officer. Battalion Commander Dan Bowling of the San Bernardino County Fire Agency said departments had responded to Lindsay Sr.’s request--”He is going to have his motorcade. Right now, I have five engines confirmed” for the journey from the funeral home to the church and several will accompany the hearse to Forest Lawn in West Covina.

At the church service, Bowling said, Lindsay Sr. will be presented with a plaque bearing a Maltese cross, the universal symbol of firefighters, and an inscription designating his son as an honorary firefighter with the San Bernardino agency. Firefighters, most of them off-duty volunteers, will stand in formation both inside and outside the church.

“We’re doing everything we can,” Bowling said, “but this is a terrible time of year, with so many of our people gone to the fires . . . .”

Mattie and Sir Isaac Lindsay Sr., touched by the letters of condolence and unsolicited cash gifts that have come in, have decided to establish scholarship funds in their son’s name--one to assist youngsters wanting to join CCC but unable to afford even the fees for the required medical exam, another to help Fontana High graduates go on to college. (The address is 1369 Wabash St., Rialto, Ca. 92376.)

It will be his boy’s chance to help others, said Lindsay Sr. He held out the drill instructor’s belt that he himself had worn at the police academy. He’d added a firefighter’s badge to the buckle. The casket will be open and he wants everything right--the khaki and brown CCC uniform pressed just so, the Division of Forestry sleeve patch in place.

“He has just a little bump on the head,” he said. “He looks like he did when he left here.”