Anniversary for women at SF Fire Department, but it’s not what you’d think

In a progressive, diverse city like San Francisco, which likes to think it does everything first, some particularly backward pieces of history are hard to believe.

Take the admission of women into the San Francisco Fire Department. On Saturday, those first female trailblazers will be celebrated for an important milestone. The 50th anniversary? The 60th? Nope, just No. 30. Incredibly, the first women didn’t join the department’s academy classes until the fall of 1987.

We already had our first — and, sigh, still only — female mayor, Dianne Feinstein. Women were already members of the San Francisco Police Department and many fire departments around the country.

Michael Jackson’s “Bad” and Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now” were among the top hits that fall. “Fatal Attraction” and “Three Men and a Baby” were big at the box office. Ronald Reagan was winding down his two terms in the White House.

In other words, it was a long time ago. But not nearly as long as you’d think.

“Women had applied before, but I’m not exactly sure why they weren’t hired,” said Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, who joined the department in 1990 and became its first female chief in 2004. “The Fire Department is wonderful, and it’s rich in history and tradition, but part of its tradition was that it was a homogenous group of people for a really long time.”

To put it more bluntly, it was all men — mostly white men — for a really long time.

Amid a web of lawsuits against the department for its discriminatory hiring practices, the department began allowing women to join in 1987. (A federal judge in 1988 called the department “out of control” in its discrimination and put it under court monitoring. The court order was lifted in 1997.)

The five women being honored Saturday entered back-to-back academy classes in August and October. The male firefighters dubbed them “Feinstein’s First,” apparently because the mayor, who kept a chief’s coat and helmet in her trunk and regularly showed up at fire scenes, urged their admission.

Frances Focha, 57, was one of those five. She described herself as a tomboy who liked working on cars and was never interested in dresses or anything girly. While taking a CPR class at City College, her teacher told her the Fire Department was opening up to women and she should apply.

“He said to me, ‘You can do it.’ You can be the first woman in the department,” she recalled. “Before, if you said, ‘May I have an application?’ it would be, ‘No, I’m sorry, that goes to men.’ San Francisco doesn’t always lead the way in things like that.”

At an interview the other day at Station 33 in the city’s Oceanview neighborhood, Focha and Shelia Hunter, another one of the five, reminisced like long-lost sisters. Focha retired five years ago and drove from her home in Forestville (Sonoma County) for an interview at the station where Hunter still works as a lieutenant.

Both women are 5-foot-11 and muscular and said they didn’t have much trouble keeping up with the guys in their academy classes. They remembered lifting long ladders, cutting holes in ceilings and dragging heavy hoses. They said that once the men in their classes saw they were serious, they were accepted.

“We were new, we were odd,” Hunter recalled. “But our goal was to be there to do the job, and do a good job.”

Focha agreed, noting, “I wanted them to know I wasn’t there to rock the boat or ruin their world. I was there to do a job.”

Fred Postel, who left the department in 1992, was the director of training back then. He confirmed that the women had to do the exact same training as men.

“We treated the women the same as everybody else,” he said. “Some excelled and others had to work hard, but that’s the same as male firefighters.”

Focha’s academy class finished first — and for a while, she was the only female firefighter at Station Five in the Western Addition. She remains incredibly grateful that Hunter soon joined her.

“I never saw another woman. When she walked in the door, I was trying to be cool in front of the other guys, but it was like, ‘OK, OK, OK!’” Focha said, jumping up and down to mimic the excitement she felt all those years ago.

The women recalled loving the firefighter life immediately, except for the problematic bathroom situation. There was only one bathroom with urinals, stalls and showers that had glass doors rather than curtains. After fighting a fire, the crew would return to the station covered in black soot, and everybody wanted access to the showers. Usually, the men would let the women go first while they waited outside.

“Do you know how fast you make a shower go when there are nine guys wanting to take a shower, but they’re going to let you go first?” Focha said with a laugh. “I was never clean.”

City voters in 1992 approved money to build separate facilities for men and women.

Focha said her proudest day on the job was when she helped save the City Hall dome in February 1998. A worker had accidentally started a fire with a welding torch. Firefighters had to walk up a narrow spiral staircase inside the dome with all of their heavy equipment.

Focha said she and another firefighter climbed onto the outside of the dome — they were so high, they were level with a television reporter in a helicopter reporting on the fire.

Hunter said her proudest day on the job was more recent: when her daughter, Khristina, became a San Francisco firefighter.

Hunter has had plenty of firsts in the department. She was the first African American woman, the first woman to marry a fellow firefighter, the first to be pregnant on the job (there were no maternity uniforms, so she had to improvise), and the first mother to have a child join the department.

“Her first fire was with her dad,” Hunter lamented. “I’m a little envious of him.”

Her daughter doesn’t stick out nearly as much as she did when Hunter joined 30 years ago. Of the department’s 1,716 uniformed members, 272 are women — just under 16 percent.

In December, the U.S. Department of Labor called San Francisco “one of the top five departments in the nation when it comes to diversity.” Chief Hayes-White said she was walking near Ocean Beach recently when she happened to see a fire truck drive by and all four firefighters inside were women.

“I was really proud,” she said. “I thought, ‘Boy, times have really changed.’”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf

Celebrating female firefighters

The United Fire Service Women will host “Celebrating 30 Years of Women in the San Francisco Fire Department” at 6 p.m. Saturday, 111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco. $30-$150. Visit www.ufsw.org for details.