Chuck Montgomery - Hall of Flame Executive Director

For the past five years, Chuck Montgomery has been Executive Director of the Hall of Flame. But once upon a time he was a City of Glendale (AZ)Fire Captain / Paramedic, responding to emergency situations all around the Phoenix area.

Chuck Montgomery - Executive Director of the Hall of Flame Chemo Session

Chuck is facing his own health challenge right now, in the form of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, and he was recently startled to find that one of the people now working to save his life remembered him, from more than twenty years ago, for saving her life.

Now a Registered Nurse at City of Hope in her mid-40s, Christy was 16 years old when she was in a serious auto accident at 51st Avenue and Beardsley. Thrown head-first through a broken windshield, the teen cut her throat on the windshield glass pulling herself back into the vehicle.

Christy's Scar

When Chuck and Rollie, his partner at the time, arrived at the hectic scene with their crew of Engine 155, located on 63rd Ave and Union Hills, they found her mother unconscious and critical and Christy hemorrhaging critically from her throat wound.

Chuck and his partners on the fire engine were able to stabilize both patients, and while Christy's mother Donna was in a coma for around two weeks, they both survived the accident. He remembers them bringing a gift basket to the station many months later with a little toy fire truck; yellow in the style of Glendale engines.

Chuck & Christy

Neither Christy nor her mother ever forgot Captain Chuck and Engineer Rollie, and when she was working in the cancer clinic where Chuck was receiving chemotherapy treatment this week, she remembered him once they began talking and he said he was the only Chuck that ever worked in the Glendale Fire Department. She proudly showed him the scar on her neck that she got nearly thirty years ago.

Curator of Education, Hall of Flame Museum of Firefighting

Mark V. Moorhead

Curator of Education

Hall of Flame Museum of Firefighting

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