Friday, July 30, 2010
Firefighters Dillon and Altice: Lives of shared service in Rocky Mount
In a larger town, the paths of Danny Altice and Posey Dillon may never have crossed. In Rocky Mount, their paths intertwined.
Courtesy of the Dillon family
William Daniel "Danny" Altice and Posey Dillon ride in a 1929 Seagrave Special. The fire truck, which once belonged to Rocky Mount, was recovered by Dillon and restored.
Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times
Davy Dillon stands next to his sister-in-law Ann Dillon during the visitation Thursday for her husband Posey Dillon and Danny Altice at the Rocky Mount Volunteer Fire Department.
Courtesy of the Dillon family
Posey Dillon
Danny Altice
ROCKY MOUNT -- Their lives were just different.
Posey Dillon was tall, an athlete in his youth, outgoing.
Danny Altice was short, and shunned the ballfield for driving big machines.
Dillon left the family tobacco farm to make his way in town, where he earned a more than comfortable living with the power company and used his savvy to navigate the world of small-town politics.
Altice stayed with the trucking business his father started, and lived the simple life of a working man.
Divorced twice, he was 67 and lived with the woman he called his "partner" for the last 15 years in a crisply maintained little brick ranch on the north side of Rocky Mount.
Dillon, 59, and his wife of 35 years lived two miles away on the south side of town in a two-story brick house in a quiet cul-de-sac.
In a bigger place, they may never have met. But people who spend their lives in the same small town are never too far apart, in physical distance and in other ways.
Dillon and Altice came together as members of the Rocky Mount Volunteer Fire Department and in service to the neighbors they shared. Their paths crossed time and again over the decades in the noisy cab of a wailing fire engine.
And that's where the two met again Monday, one last time.
***
Altice was behind the wheel of a vehicle even before he could reach the pedals. He cranked over his father's tractor and got it rolling toward their garage on Pell Avenue in Rocky Mount. He couldn't reach the brakes, so the brick garage finally brought him to a halt.
While his younger brother, Barry, was a three-sport athlete at Franklin County High School, Danny never showed any interest.
He was more comfortable behind the wheel of a truck, tractor or bulldozer. He was at work for his father's W.O. Altice and Sons trucking company when he was 18.
Dillon, his brother Davy and sister Tammy grew up in the country in Glade Hill, working on their family's tobacco farm.
"We learned to be hard workers," Davy Dillon said.
In high school, Posey worked in factories, played banjo in a band called The Ejects, and played baseball.
By the time Dillon was pitching for Ferrum College, Altice was in his eighth year with the Rocky Mount fire department.
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Previous coverage
- Rocky Mount readies itself for hundreds of mourners
- Investigation continues as Rocky Mount mourns loss
- Rocky Mount in shock after firefighters' deaths
- Rocky Mount fire chief, firefighter die in crash
Guest books
Posey Dillon
William Daniel Altice
Photo gallery
Timeline: Intersecting lives
His father had been a founding member of the department back in 1928, and Altice and his brother had jumped on the truck to run calls as young teenagers.
Danny joined up officially after high school, about 1963.
Fourteen years later, he would be named chief. That was about the time Dillon turned in his application to join the department, too.
***
Danny Altice watched his sister marry and move to Northern Virginia and his little brother go off to college, move to California, and visit places like Russia and Mexico before returning to the family business.
Danny was there in Rocky Mount all along.
"He just didn't like to go anywhere or do anything but stay close to home," Barry Altice said.
Dillon never went back to the farm, moving his life to town, instead. In 1980, he went to work for the power company, the same year he was first elected to Rocky Mount Town Council, where he served for a total of 24 years.
"He was devoted to the fire department and his community," said his wife, Ann. And he was never afraid to speak his mind.
"It was hard to be Posey's brother," Davy Dillon said. His model of hard work and service was a tough act to follow.
"Everything to him came naturally," Ann Dillon said. He played music, painted landscapes and "could make a dog laugh" with his sense of humor.
He earned everything he had through hard work, she said, and was consequently careful with his money. "He could get a dollar out of a turnip."
Davy Dillon has two boys and a girl. Their uncle Posey "was their idol and their second dad."
Posey and Ann never had children, but each was the other's constant companion.
"We were a team. We were always by each other's side," Ann Dillon said.
Altice didn't find his life's partner until he was in his 50s.
He was divorced twice, with a son and daughter from his first marriage. Carey, his son, stayed in Rocky Mount. Christie left for Virginia Tech and then optometry school. She's an optometrist in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Fifteen years ago, Altice met a widow named Frances Holley. They were both at the funeral home at the visitation for a mutual friend.
They were together ever after.
They were just alike, Barry Altice said. Both easygoing and reserved.
"I don't know if either one of them could holler," he said.
They often cared for Danny's only grandchild, Kayla, a seventh-grader. They would baby-sit for Barry's kids anytime Barry asked.
"I think they would have died together," Barry Altice said, "if he hadn't died early."
***
If Danny Altice and Posey Dillon shared a single character trait, it would be an innate restlessness.
While working at the power company, serving on the council and as fire chief, Dillon built a garage at his home, a boathouse at his lake house, and found time for boating and riding his Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Altice suffered a stroke and had heart bypass surgery several years ago, but it didn't slow him down much, his brother said.
Even after he retired from the trucking company, he drove trucks for Rocky Mount Ready Mix Cement and Cundiff Trucking.
And when he was done with that, he busied himself gardening at the home shared with Holley. The lawn was impeccably tidy, every sidewalk edged, the roses staked, and not a chunk of mulch out of place.
If he wasn't busy with his hands, his mouth might go to work.
"If he saw you, he was going to make sure he spoke to you," his friend Susan Thomason said. "Whenever you talked with Danny, you was going to be there for a while."
Dillon finally gave in to retirement after his wife retired from the Virginia Department of Transportation in April.
His took an early buyout from the power company, and worked his last day on June 1. He retired so the two could have more time together.
"We don't know how much time we have left," he told her.
***
Whatever else occupied their lives, both Altice and Dillon were apt to drop it if they felt a buzz from the scanner each carried on his hip. That buzz meant the Rocky Mount Volunteer Fire Department was needed.
"They were the backbones of this department," said Charles Robertson, who was Dillon's assistant chief.
Dillon had been chief since 1990. And to hear firefighters tell it, he was an exacting boss.
It was rare for him to not tell a young firefighter something he could do better after a call was finished.
"Other than his wife," Robertson said, "this was his life."
Ann Dillon called the station her husband's "home away from home."
It was the same for Altice. "Worked all the time at the fire department," Holley said.
"Meetings, calls, work nights, classes, you could always count on Danny being there," Robertson said.
If he drove by the main station and noticed a group of firefighters gathered, he would stop and check it out, Assistant Chief Jeff Rakes said.
The young firefighters called him "Uncle Danny."
As he aged, Altice stuck with operating the pumps that kept the water flowing reliably to firefighters -- a complicated task.
When you're inside a burning house, said Brian Garland, 26, "that man running the truck is in control of your life."
Rakes said he could be surrounded by flames, but "as long as I knew Danny was on the truck, I was fine."
Among the senior members of the department, it was rare for Altice or Dillon to miss a call.
Records show Dillon responded to 60 percent of the calls over the past year, and Altice 75 percent. They were so ever-present, their colleagues guessed they were there 90 percent of the time.
So it was no surprise that they were the first two at the station Monday when their pagers buzzed yet again.
***
The call was to aid the Glade Hill department, which was responding to a fire in Union Hall where they believed someone was trapped in a burning house.
Allen Richards, the Glade Hill assistant chief, always thought of Altice and Dillon as brothers. Like Altice, he was a second generation firefighter. His own father was responding to a fire call in 1986 when he was in a crash that paralyzed him from the neck down.
Altice had spent the day grocery shopping with Holley, then mowing the grass. He had just cleaned up when the call came.
He met Dillon at the old downtown station, and the pair climbed onto the 1989 Pierce fire engine and headed out by themselves, with Dillon at the wheel.
As they pulled onto Floyd Avenue, they were seen by Garland and Ulis Chitwood, who responded seconds too late to be on the truck.
Rakes would have made the call, but a customer at his garage insisted he check the air pressure in his tires. The delay was enough to make him late for the truck, too.
Justin Woodrow mounted his motorcycle, which someone had test-driven that day, but ran out of gas before he could make it two miles to the station.
So Altice and Dillon went it alone.
Their path carried them on a tour of landmarks they'd know their whole lives.
They passed The Hub restaurant, turned down Pell Avenue, the street where Altice grew up, passed Donald Avenue, the road where he lived with Holley, and which was home to the town municipal building, where Dillon was still serving as vice mayor.
At Franklin County High School, where they both were students, they turned left on to Virginia 40, headed east.
It was but a two-mile ride before they came, sirens screaming and lights flashing, to the intersection at School Board Road.
An SUV with a green light entered the intersection and collided with the truck. Dillon swerved, 8,000 pounds of water in the truck shifted, and the massive engine rolled three times before landing on a Mustang convertible.
Altice was dead, and Dillon would die minutes later, both during one more day of service to the only hometown either had ever known.
