Erie Fire Association #4, Inc.

08/09/2026

08/06/2026

08/04/2026

Looking for a local place to hold your next event? Look no further than Erie 4’s recently renovated function hall. With a capacity of 90 guests, our hall accommodates functions for many different events. Rentals include full use of the kitchen facilities, chairs, and tables.

For rental information or to book your next event, contact our hall Steward at [email protected]

07/31/2026

With summer blood donations falling to a 4-year low, the Red Cross is now facing a national blood crisis. The type O blood supply is most impacted. Your help is needed now to avoid surgery delays, postponed cancer treatments & strained emergency care. Please give: https://rcblood.org/4pI2fbC

07/22/2026

Groveland Fire Chief Robert Valentine has Retired.

07/21/2026

07/18/2026

Georgetown Police Department Hiring School Crossing Guard: The Georgetown Police Department is seeking a dedicated and community-minded individual to serve as a part-time School Crossing Guard for the upcoming school year. The…

https://georgetownmapd.com/georgetown-police-department-hiring-school-crossing-guard/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

07/18/2026

In January 1946, in a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains of east Tennessee, a country doctor came through the snow to help deliver a baby.

When it was over, the family had no money to pay him.

So the baby's father handed him the only thing he had.

A sack of cornmeal.

That baby was the fourth of what would become twelve children born to Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in a cabin with no electricity and no running water, in a corner of Appalachia where the nearest paved road was miles away.

The children slept three and four to a bed because the snow came through the cracks in the walls at night, and that was how you stayed warm.

They washed in the creek with lye soap their mother boiled herself.

Their clothes were sewn from flour sacks and feed bags by a woman who made something out of nothing because nothing was all she had to work with.

The baby's name was Dolly Rebecca Parton.

What that cabin had, despite having almost nothing else, was music.

Avie Lee sang the old Appalachian ballads and hymns that had crossed the Atlantic with Scots-Irish settlers generations earlier.

Her husband played a little.

The children sang along.

The music cost nothing.

And it gave that family something poverty could never touch.

When Dolly was about six, her mother made her a coat.

There was no money for a coat, so Avie Lee stitched one together from scraps of fabric that didn't match.

As she sewed, she told her daughter the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors.

Dolly loved that coat.

She wore it proudly to school.

The other children laughed at her.

Years later, riding on a tour bus, she found the back of a dry-cleaning receipt and wrote a song about that day.

The song came out in 1971.

It has made generations of listeners cry.

That was how Dolly finally took one of the worst days of her childhood and turned it into something she could carry.

She had been singing in her grandfather's church since she was six years old and playing a homemade guitar by seven.

As a teenager she recorded her first single.

And the day after graduating high school in 1964, she boarded a Greyhound bus to Nashville with a guitar and a cardboard suitcase.

She was eighteen years old.

The rest, most people know.

"Jolene."

"I Will Always Love You."

"9 to 5."

Steel Magnolias.

Dollywood.

Eleven Grammy Awards.

The Country Music Hall of Fame.

The Songwriters Hall of Fame.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Kennedy Center Honors.

Hundreds of songs she wrote herself and thousands more recorded by others.

But the part of Dolly Parton's story that gets told less often is what she did with the money.

Her father never learned to read or write.

He was, by her account, one of the smartest men she ever knew.

And he carried a quiet shame his entire life over the education he never had the chance to receive.

So in 1995, in his honor, Dolly started a small program in her home county.

Every month, children received a free book in the mail from birth until they started school.

No forms.

No income tests.

No barriers.

She called it the Imagination Library.

It began with a few hundred children in rural Tennessee.

Today it operates across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia.

More than 200 million books have been mailed to children around the world.

Many of those books arrive in homes that look a lot like the one Dolly grew up in.

Her father lived long enough to see it happen.

He told her it was probably the most important thing she had ever done.

And according to Dolly, what he loved most was hearing local children call his daughter:

"The Book Lady."

In 2016, wildfires tore through the mountains around Gatlinburg, destroying thousands of buildings and killing fourteen people.

Dolly didn't just write a check.

She created the My People Fund and gave one thousand dollars a month for six months to families who had lost their homes.

Millions of dollars in all.

Her reasoning was simple:

Recovery doesn't happen in one payment.

People need help next month too.

Then came 2020.

In the terrifying early months of the pandemic, Dolly quietly donated one million dollars to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to support coronavirus research.

That funding helped support work connected to what became the Moderna vaccine.

When the scientific papers were published, her name appeared in the acknowledgements.

The girl from the one-room cabin was listed among the researchers.

Then there was Carl.

She met Carl Dean outside a Nashville laundromat almost immediately after arriving in the city.

They married in 1966.

He spent nearly sixty years avoiding cameras and interviews, content to stay home in Tennessee while his wife became one of the most famous women in the world.

They were married for fifty-eight years.

Carl died in March 2025.

Dolly released a short statement saying that words couldn't do justice to the love they shared and asking for the privacy her husband had spent a lifetime quietly protecting.

Then, as she always has, she kept going.

She turned eighty this year.

She's slowed down some.

But the books still go out every month to children who will never know they're holding a gift from the little girl who once got laughed at for her coat.

A country doctor was paid in cornmeal in 1946 because a family in a mountain cabin had nothing else to give him.

Dolly Parton has spent the eighty years since paying it back.

Do you have a favorite Dolly song?

Has your family ever received one of her books?

And one more question:

What's a small kindness someone showed your family when you had very little — the kind you've never forgotten?

07/18/2026

"The Joy of Riding Tailboard"

We rode the tailboard back in the day,
Before someone important said, “No way”.
Show up to scene, with your eyebrows half gone, Smelling like barbecue, nobody ordered at dawn.

The driver took corners like he had a score,
To settle with physics, and then maybe one more. You leaned with the engine, you trusted your grip, And prayed there’s coffee, at the end of this trip.

Winter was brisk, by which I mean pain,
Your face getting sandblasted sideways by rain. Summer was better, if better means fried, Diesel exhaust, marinated with pride.

No airbags, no sensors, no helpful device,
Just experience, balance, and questionable advice. No seatbelts, no doors, just boots and a rail, And a firm understanding: if you slip, major fail.

They say it was reckless. They’re probably right. We laugh about it now, mostly when drinking at night. ’Cause nothing quite matches that wind in your face, Or the look, when you nearly got launched into space.

So here’s to the tailboard, the grip and the ride, To the stories we tell, now with more pride. We made it through somehow, don’t ask us how, I heard OSHA’s still looking for us, even now.

Jonathan Lusk
Publisher - Brotherhood of 🔥

Photo: Does anyone know these fellas?

(Other Firefighter pages... it would be nice if you gave BoF credit sometimes instead of swiping, cutting my logo off and posting as your own... you know who you are.)

07/18/2026

love it👨‍🚒👕👇