Huntington Beach's Bob Baker reflects on lifetime of service

The museum in Bob Baker’s Huntington Beach home has decades of memorabilia relating to the fire service.

There’s an old speaking trumpet, a leather fire helmet and axe from the 1890s and an aluminum helmet from the 1930s and 1940s. The use of the latter item was short-lived.

“It eventually got outlawed because guys were walking into electrical wires and getting electrocuted,” Baker said.

His favorite piece in the museum, though, is probably one of the earliest examples of fire hose. It’s leather, with copper rivets and washers.

“Very heavy,” Baker said matter-of-factly. “They didn’t have 50-foot cows, so they had to splice it.”

While the collection is impressive, there are decades more experience in the mind of the 86-year-old.

This month, Baker celebrates an anniversary. It’s been 50 years since he helped bring the first paramedic program to Orange County.

Baker was part of the first class of students, with 24 members from Huntington Beach, Orange, La Habra and the County of Orange. After graduation, the program launched on Aug. 4, 1973.

Baker, who grew up in South Central Los Angeles as the second-oldest of 10 children, was instrumental in making it happen. After working for the fire departments in San Gabriel and West Covina, he joined the Huntington Beach department as an engineer in 1966.

Just months later, 5-year-old Troy Chad Golighty drowned in an Huntington Beach pool.

“We thought we could have saved this kid, but he was lost in the ambulance trip to the hospital because they wouldn’t let us go with him,” Baker said.

The chairman of the First Aid Committee at the time, Baker asked longtime Huntington Beach Fire Chief Ray Picard if an ambulance service could be started. At the time, the paramedic program was new in Los Angeles County, but hadn’t made its way south yet.

The “Emergency!” television show, about two paramedics and firefighters who work in Los Angeles, was popular throughout much of the 1970s. Baker, who became fire captain in 1970, helped make it happen in real life in Orange County.

“I did the research and wrote a paper, turned it in to the fire chief,” he said. “All of the fire chiefs in the county had their monthly meeting, and decided to get a committee going.”

Brett Morehead, who worked for HBFD for 33 years and had Baker as his first captain, still remembers this time well.

“Bob loved the fire service,” Morehead said. “He worked extremely hard. Even before the medics, he was involved in training, whether it was officially or coming up with different programs. He just loved the fire department.”

Baker became a staff officer in charge of the paramedic program until he was injured in a freak elevator accident at City Hall in 1977, one that led to four back surgeries and a stimulater implant. But even after his consequential retirement from HBFD, he made a difference.

He was a Santa Ana College Fire Academy commander for a few years before becoming a civilian training officer for the Santa Ana city fire department.

Baker retired in 2001. In recent years he joined “Angel’s Army,” led by Vietnam War veteran Angel Cortez out of Calvary Chapel Beachside church in Huntington Beach. The group went to feed the military at different events, until Baker said it was slowed — but not stopped entirely — when Cortez passed away due to COVID-19 during the pandemic.

The giving nature comes naturally to Baker, who gets around his home off Newland Street with a walker. He has experienced still more loss on a personal level.

Though some of Baker’s siblings remain alive, he lost his wife of 51 years, Linda, about a decade into retirement. Two of his three children have also died.

Rob, his son, currently lives with Baker and helps take care of him.

“He’s just pretty much a good guy,” Rob said. “Very humble, though.”

Martha Danell, 82, met Baker at a fellowship gathering in his backyard. He was once known for those, inviting people over on Sunday afternoons after church.

When Danell’s husband died in 2016, Baker was there to help with the grief.

“Bob is a first responder at heart,” she said. “He has a gift for recognizing people that are hurting and need help, and that’s very highly developed in him … He supported me through one of the hardest times of my life. He and his home were a sanctuary for me. I value his friendship more than I can say.”

Baker doesn’t get overly sentimental about his life, but he realizes how full it has been. He wrote a manuscript for his children and three grandchildren detailing some of his experiences and how he believes God led him through them.

Shortly after the paramedic van was put into service in 1973, a 7-year-old girl named Tracy also nearly died via drowning. She was actually clinically dead when paramedics arrived on the scene, Baker said, but they successfully resuscitated and stabilized her.

Baker didn’t think it was a coincidence that both Troy and Tracy’s cases involved drowning.

The progress was tangible, but he has continued to work in the decades that have followed.

“He’ll never change,” Danell said. “Bob is going to be helping people with his last breath because that’s who he is. He can’t be anything else.”