People Who Made a Difference:

Harvey T. Anderson

In 1930, Harvey Anderson graduated from UCLA with a Masters degree in Botany. It was less than a year after the stock market crashed and the entire country was gripped by the so-called Great Depression. Jobs were scarce but Harvey found a position with the Los Angeles County Department of Forester and Fire Warden. He quickly proved to be a bright, well-educated, natural leader with uncommon energy and a strong work ethic.

Eventually, Harvey Anderson (or “HTA”, as he was often referred to) was promoted to Assistant Chief in command of Division 3. At the time, Division 3 included all the mountain and desert areas that encircle the LA basin to the north and east. Chief Anderson constantly studied his territory and the vagaries of vegetation fires. Eventually, he earned the respect his department, as well as state and federal fire protection agencies, as a pre-eminent expert on fighting fires at the urban-wildland interface.

In the 1950s, Chief Anderson served on the interagency team that studied the feasibility of dropping water or chemicals on wildland fires from fixed-wing aircraft at low altitude. One of Chief Anderson’s passions was physical fitness. He loved to challenge groups of younger firefighters to beat him at push-ups, especially in front of a class of new recruits. Few could beat him but those who did earned his respect. During the 1960s, Harvey Anderson was the primary influence in the LA County Fire Department’s adoption of a mandatory fitness program.

Chief Anderson was forced by law to retire on his 60th birthday, in February 1968, thirty-eight years after he joined the organization that would become the Los Angeles County Fire Department. In retirement, he often said that he rode to success on the shoulders of the men he commanded. He also said he had enjoyed every day of his career, and felt very lucky to have been paid for doing something he loved to do.

In retirement, Harvey Anderson served as a physical fitness consultant to the US Forest Service. He and his wife Alice regularly groomed and repaired hiking trails in the Santa Monica Mountains, and they swam almost daily in the Pacific Ocean beneath their Latigo Shores home in Malibu. Harvey often said we’re all going to die eventually, so we should work to be fit and healthy until we do expire. He lived that philosophy and died in his sleep in 1999.

(adapted from a story by David Boucher in volume 9, issue 1 of the Fire Warden newsletter)

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The following essay was written by James O. Page and published in his book “The Magic of 3AM” (1986):

“The Hands-Down Expert”

On a summer morning in 1966, I pulled my sagging VW into the parking lot of fire station 69 in Topanga Canyon. I was a new fire captain and this was to be my assignment – 42 miles from home. A red Plymouth sedan was parked in front of the station. That could only mean one thing.

As I walked into the station with my arms full of turnout gear, Harvey Anderson sized me up sternly and grunted a reluctant “good morning.” He was the division chief and supreme commander of the several hundred square miles of mountains, canyons, brush and timber that circles the north and west of the Los Angeles basin. I had never before worked for Harvey but I’d heard about him (“…a tyrant – eats captains alive”).

Harvey is a self-made man. He grew up in the worst of the Depression and worked his way through the University of California. When he joined the fire department’s forestry division, he was distinctive from the first day. The foresters did a lot of pick and shovel work in those days and Harvey Anderson, with his college degree, could work circles around any of his brawny counterparts.

Many of the firebreaks in the mountains around LA were first cut by hand. Harvey was among those who cut them. They used horses and mules to get to and from their work projects. Harvey usually hiked, pulling the mules behind him. As time passed, he came to know every nook and cranny of his future brushfire battlefields.

He rose through the ranks till he got to his level of peak competence. Long before Dr. Lawrence Peter wrote about his “Peter Principle,” Harvey Anderson stopped seeking promotions that would remove him from what he did best: manage major emergencies. I’ve seen him covered with the grime of a campaign brushfire, standing at the peak of a mountain with radio in hand, surveying his battlefield and commanding a dazzling array of resources as few men could.

He was good at it for several reasons. He knew the terrain – he had hiked every mile of it. He knew the enemy – he knew the botanical pedigree, the calorific fuel value, and the combustion characteristics of the Southern California watershed vegetation. He had experience – he had fought fires on the same ground every few years and he remembered those battles. He knew how to use his resources – he used aircraft for strategy, not TV cameras. He used tractors, hand labor crews, and pumpers for greatest effect and least hazard to life. Most important, he knew his people – he would assign a big sector of a fire to a young captain whom he trusted while telling an office chief to “get the hell outta my way.”

In 1968, Harvey Anderson became the victim of a dumb law. He was forced to retire simply because he turned 60 years old. He came to my station in the final hours of his last day on the job. True to his nature, he didn’t wind down into retirement. He was on the phone, taking care of business, until the clock forced him to stop.

Since 1968, Harvey has been busy saving lives. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been running five miles every day. He’s become a physical fitness consultant and he’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the subject. He’s transferred much of his uncommon energy and zeal to the subject of preventive health and particularly blood pressure screening and management. For several years, he’s served as chairman of the Physical Fitness Committee of the International Association of Fire Chiefs. In recent years, he’s been travelling to the Grand Canyon to teach physical fitness to forest rangers.

My first encounter with Harvey Anderson was not a meeting. It was a collision of personalities. He won and I benefited. As we watch the clay-footed performance of so many supervisors and administrators in today’s world of public service, I only wish that more people could have shared my opportunity to see a real boss do his job as nobody else could. When you know your boss is the hands-down expert and has the courage to stand for what’s right, it’s hard not to be loyal.

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