A second chance builds a fire department
Staff writer
Hillsboro fire chief Ben Steketee will retire Monday after what he candidly describes as a 25-year second chance career.
In 2001, after three years as a star volunteer firefighter, he was elevated by then-Mayor Delores Dalke to take the paid helm of the department.
But he felt obligated to unload a troubling fact on her: “There’s probably something about me you don’t know — I’m a convicted felon,” Steketee told her.
“It’s not for arson, is it?” asked the mayor, as incredulous as anyone would be who knew the cheerful, reliable first responder.
When Steketee told her that five years previously he’d spent months in jail in California for possession of methamphetamine, losing his plumbing business and almost his family, she told him, “We all have skeletons in our closet.”
Her major investment in trust paid off for Hillsboro and for Steketee, who has become a local legend for building the county’s largest fire team, making the Hillsboro department the county’s only water rescue unit, jumpstarting plans for a new $6 million fire station, and spiritually supporting his team.
“One of the things that sets Chief Steketee apart,” county emergency management director Marcy Hostetler said, “is that he’s worked really hard to find people that actually, live and work in Hillsboro.” Then he works with both the firefighter and the company that they work for to work around responding during the day. They have quick response because they’re right there in Hillsboro.”
That’s no small thing in a county where a structure fire calls for three city departments to be called. There’s never a guarantee how many volunteers — if any — will show up. But Hillsboro, with 26 volunteers mostly in town, often gets at least nine responders, Steketee said.
It’s not just the quantity of volunteer Steketee commands, Hostetler said. It’s the quality and cohesion he’s cultivated by finding “what they’re good at and then focus their work on what it is that they enjoy.”
Steketee’s job with Hillsboro has been threefold, serving as building inspector and code enforcer, always with his fire department radio on his hip, ready to fly off to be first on the scene of any fire.
His decision to retire as chief — but not from his two other jobs — is partly related to Hillsboro’s building boom and the need for his focus on that side of his job. It also has to do with handing the reins to Matt Hein, who he says is very ready and deserves to be the chief. Hein can inaugurate the new fire department building. Besides, he said, he won’t missing anything because as inspector, he’ll be completely involved.
When Steketee stepped off a bus from California in Wichita on July 5, 1996 (he recites the date often), he had $150, a backpack with some clean underwear, and five arrests and months of time served in Los Angeles County jails.
He also held a kernel of hope that by following his wife, Mary, and four kids, who’d moved with her parents back to her mom’s hometown of Hillsboro, he could be forgiven and allowed to rebuild a life with them.
Hillsboro was a new life, a new pace, and a center of the Christian faith he always knew was in his heart.
He recalled walking past Hillsboro Middle School with bikes left unlocked at the rack and thinking, “‘What is this, free bike day?’ Where I come from, if it’s not locked up, you’re giving it away.”
Because his license had been suspended, he couldn’t work as the skilled plumber he was, so he took a job as a plumber’s helper for Matt Hebert, earning $8 an hour, most of which was garnished to repay fines and welfare aid his family had drawn while he was in jail.
“But I stuck it out,” he said. “I knew that this was better.”
Today, at 66, he seems grateful he had to eat humble pie: Hillsboro was not the complicated, fast-paced spiral that Los Angeles was in seducing him into a “crank” habit he thought would increase his productivity.
“Hillsboro didn’t judge me when I got here,” he said. “They saw who I was. They didn’t know who I had been. And even though I told them, this is who I used to be, they’re like, ‘Yeah, right.’”
A new Hillsboro friend, Dale Winter, brought Steketee into the all-volunteer fire department in February 1998.
Steketee had no firefighting background, but he said the job “did fulfill my sense of adventure” — a way to channel the same pull toward risk that had once wrecked his life into something that served his neighbors — and God — instead.
Having to drop everything — whether he was on a plumbing job or at the Thanksgiving table — became his life. And though disruptive, it was far more acceptable to his family than the “disaster mode” he said he’d inflicted on them in California.
After he was named chief, a tragic but professionally galvanizing turning point came in 2004, when the Hillsboro Mennonite Brethren Church — “a mecca of the Mennonite faith,” and Steketee’s own church — burned.
“I learned during that fire how unprepared I was, how unprepared the fire department was for a fire like that,” he said.
Firefighters conducting an interior attack ran low on air and pulled out moments before a balcony collapsed.
He said it reshaped how he ran the department, turning what he called a “ragtag group” into “a professional-quality fire department,” built on incident command training, mandatory bunker gear and air packs, and courses in fire behavior and hydraulics.
Under Steketee, the department expanded beyond firefighting, becoming one of four primary rescue teams under contract with Marion County Emergency Medical Services — doing vehicle extrication and high-angle rope rescue — and using a $55,000 Firehouse Subs grant to buy motorized rescue boats that made it the county’s only water-rescue team as well.
Even though his fire career is closing, he was visibly pleased — and proud — to show a visitor this week around Hillsboro’s shiny red fire engines and equipment like jaws of life, Stokes basket stretchers, inflatable boats, and all manner of suits for fire, water, and ice all squeezed into a tiny fire station downtown and a substation that was once an ice cream factory.
There have been tragedies and disappointments — he knows of at least three people who died in fires during his tenure, and a firefighter died by suicide; and promised federal funding for the new fire station was shredded in politics — but for his part, Steketee is satisfied he’s done “the Lord’s work.”
“I would like to think that I have affected lives positively,” he said, “the lives of firefighters and the lives of the citizens of Hillsboro.”
He prays for each of his 26 firefighters and their families every morning, he said.
“I don’t preach to my firefighters,” he said, “but they know who I am. And they know that they can come to me.”
And he’ll tell you straight up that his time as fire chief is significant because it has shown that “God allows second chances. And third. And fourth. And fifth. Yeah. He doesn’t give up on us.”
Typo sin some editions indicated he was appointed in 2021 not 2001 and mispelled Delores Dalke's name.