Silk-Screened Souvenirs Suit Weary Firefighters to a T

When fires broke out in the mountains of northern Los Angeles County this week, more than 1,000 firefighters responded, and the West family wasn’t far behind.

They make T-shirts.

Traveling in a trailer with a silk-screening machine in the back, Rick West and his six children have covered more than 100 major brush fires over the last 15 years, producing colorfully over-the-top souvenirs for firefighters to take home to their families and fire stations. The T-shirts have become unlikely badges of honor for the firefighters.

As the Cedar fire raged though the San Diego County countryside last October, the Wests were there. They designed a T-shirt adorned with a grizzly bear next to a map of the fire’s path under the banner “The Largest Fire in California History.”

Days earlier, they were in San Bernardino County for the Grand Prix fire, creating a shirt with a racing car surrounded by flames.

Over the past week, the Wests have been busy -- arriving first at the Pine fire near Lake Hughes, then racing to Hemet for the Melton fire over the weekend, then back to northern Los Angeles County for the Foothill fire in Santa Clarita, and then to the Crown fire near Acton.

Over the years, the West family has become a familiar sight at fire camps. They’ve come to know a lot of the firefighters, exchanging stories about the day’s progress or chatting about their children.

“We like to think of our stand as the office water cooler for these guys,” said Benjamin West, 33.

The Wests acknowledge that they profit from disaster, selling the shirts for $10 to $15. But they don’t consider themselves ambulance chasers. Rather, they believe they provide an important service for firefighters, who are looking for a memento for their work on the fire lines. They generally don’t sell the shirts to residents, saying that would be crude.

“We’re not there to take advantage of loss of homes. I hate that,” said Rick West, 54, who lives in Reno. “We’re there to support firefighters, and, yeah, we make some money off of it.”

Collecting the shirts has become something of an obsession among firefighters, who see it as a medal for having survived.

“There’s a saying around that it isn’t really a fire unless the T-shirt guy is here,” said Art Barreto, 28, a firefighter in the San Fernando Valley. He bought a Pine fire shirt to send to his brother in Iraq.

Barreto has a growing collection of about 15 shirts, and buys one after each fire to say, “I survived and I was there.”

Patricia Pierce, who works in the San Bernardino National Forest, said she’s collected 50 fire shirts from assisting firefighters at blazes across the West.

“We work so hard to put it out,” said Pierce, who was helping with the Foothill fire this week. “It’s a way to make something bad go away.”

The Wests run T-shirt businesses out of Reno and Sacramento. Most of the family’s work involves making shirts for little leagues and church groups. But when the fire season starts, they begin monitoring news broadcasts and fielding calls from firefighters about blazes breaking out.

They got the idea after firefighters came to them after a major brush fire, asking them to make T-shirts commemorating the fire battle. In 1989, Rick West decided to go up to a Northern California blaze, produce the shirts at the scene and sell them directly to the firefighters.

The Wests either design the shirts themselves or work with a graphic artist. They often get the ideas for images from firefighters. Most of the logos incorporate the name of the fire with motifs of flames, fire engines, choppers and silhouettes of firefighters in action.

Their T-shirt stand is usually a safe distance from the fires. But sometimes the flames get too close.

At the Star fire in Northern California in 2001, the firestorm got so bad that the entire camp was evacuated. Benjamin West went with the firefighters to a safe spot near a dam.

“I watched the fire burn so fast, like a freight train,” he said. “If I weren’t surrounded by 500 firefighters, I would have been scared to death.”

Two years ago, he was at another Northern California blaze that burned right through the camp. Firefighters set up hoses around the trailer and managed to save everything.

The Wests spend months living in trailers and camping on the road. For six straight weeks in 2000, they sold shirts to Canadian, Australian and U.S. firefighters in Darby, Mont. -- the most time they’ve spent on one brush fire.

“We grew up doing this,” said Flynn West, 16, who often accompanies his father and brothers on trips. “We’d go from fire to fire across America all over the summer and it was awesome.”

With his father, he has been to Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and has spent days at the beach after Southern California fires.

Benjamin West was at the Gaviota fire in Santa Barbara County, near former President Reagan’s ranch, around the time of Reagan’s death. West said he was amazed by the warm reception he received.

“It was really neat. The groundskeeper came down and invited us up for a tour,” he said.

The Wests have found that the biggest fires don’t always mean the biggest-selling T-shirts.

Amid last year’s historic fire storms across Southern California, they produced an “Autumn Glow” shirt that commemorated blazes that hit the Southland between Simi Valley and San Diego. The list of fires was so long it resembled tour dates on a rock concert shirt.

But that shirt did not sell as well as one commemorating the much-smaller Nevada Coffee Pot fire in 1991, which was purchased by 3,000 firefighters.

The Wests said they often feel conflicted when trying to decide whether to go to a fire. They appreciate the revenue, but they don’t want to be seen as coldblooded, and they hesitated to take their wares to the Cedar and Old fires last fall.

“There was just too much damage and destruction going on to want to go to them, but we even had an incident commander call us and ask to come,” Rick West said. “The idea was that the T-shirts would help morale, so we went.”

They donate some of their proceeds to burn-victim units and volunteer fire departments. If a firefighter is killed, they often give money to whatever fund is set up in the firefighter’s name.

“It’s really horrible when we’re at camp and someone dies,” said Benjamin West. “It’s really somber, but people still buy the T-shirts.

“It’s a way to remember the good and the bad and have something physical to keep the memory of a deadly fire.”