SILVANA — When Darlene Strotz first joined the Snohomish County Fire District 19 in Silvana, she was the first woman to serve there.

Now that she’s retiring, 32 years later, she can count at least five women in the current crew alone, and countless more in the intervening decades.

As Strotz prepares for her retirement party on Saturday, Nov. 22, from 1-5 p.m. at Station 94, at 2720 212th St. NW, she’s looking back on how her service started.

“My husband was a fireman at the time, and as we were running our family farm, I became interested in being an EMT,” Strotz said. “I was worried about possible accidents, since we had four kids running around. And you didn’t need to belong to a fire department to take an EMT class back then.”

Strotz nonetheless joined the Silvana Fire District after she graduated from the EMT class, because she wanted to go out on aid calls. She noted there were far fewer 911 calls for relatively minor injuries back then. Strotz estimated that Silvana personnel have responded to 300-400 calls a year in more recent years, of which she usually goes out on about 200.

“I enjoy going out and helping people,” Strotz said. “I enjoy it when I show up and they say, ‘You’ve been here before.'”

When Strotz started at Silvana, its 10 responders all had landline phones in their homes, which would ring longer to indicate they were receiving fire calls. In the years since, she’s seen this shift to personal pagers that everyone carries. Another change she’s seen is a significant increase in paperwork.

“I’m getting older, and there’s so much training,” Strotz said. “We didn’t used to have to come back from a call and spend half an hour writing up a report. Let the younger kids do that,” she laughed.

Strotz will miss the familiar faces she’s come to know through her calls over the years, but she feels confident that the current crew will carry on well after her retirement.

“Take good care of your patients, be sociable and just do the best job that you can,” Strotz said.