Photos: U.S. Air Force
Photos: Miami Valley Firefighter/EMS Memorial Association
On Nov. 21, 1961, fire swept a sprawling office building at Wright Paterson Air Force Base, killing two base firefighters.
Station Chief Dale Kelcher and Firefighter William Collins were last seen entering Building 262-A, headquarters of the Air Force Logistics Command, which took fire at just before midnight Thanksgiving Eve. A backdraft trapped them.
The blaze "reduced a three-story frame building covering nearly the area of a football field to a pile of smoldering charcoal,” according to a newspaper account.
Firefighters resorted to ground and aerial master streams to battle the blaze and called for mutual aid from neighboring communities.
At a November 2018 memorial, Major Tyler Johnson, commander, 788th Civil Engineer Squadron, said: "They looked danger in the eye and they ran into the flames."
Four days after Kelcher and Collins died, another major fire gutted a building at the air base, between Dayton and Springfield. There were no serious injuries in that blaze.
Two other Wright-Patterson firefighters died in the line of duty. Frank A. Smith perished fighting a fire at a motor pool in 1932 and Harold “Sparky” Sparks suffered a heart attack in 2009, according to Air Force records.
Wright-Patterson Firefighter Williams Collins
Wright-Patterson Station Chief Dale Kelcher
On Nov. 21, 1961, fire swept a sprawling office building at Wright Paterson Air Force Base, killing two base firefighters.
Station Chief Dale Kelcher and Firefighter William Collins were last seen entering Building 262-A, headquarters of the Air Force Logistics Command, which took fire at just before midnight Thanksgiving Eve. A backdraft trapped them.
The blaze "reduced a three-story frame building covering nearly the area of a football field to a pile of smoldering charcoal,” according to a newspaper account.
Firefighters resorted to ground and aerial master streams to battle the blaze and called for mutual aid from neighboring communities.
At a November 2018 memorial, Major Tyler Johnson, commander, 788th Civil Engineer Squadron, said: "They looked danger in the eye and they ran into the flames."
Four days after Kelcher and Collins died, another major fire gutted a building at the air base, between Dayton and Springfield. There were no serious injuries in that blaze.
Two other Wright-Patterson firefighters died in the line of duty. Frank A. Smith perished fighting a fire at a motor pool in 1932 and Harold “Sparky” Sparks suffered a heart attack in 2009, according to Air Force records.
