President’s Corner

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Today I want to look back a little bit on our recent 2007 New Jersey Firefighter’s Convention and show we just had in Wildwood. It amazes me every year that we pull off the kind of booth that we do, because just as I’m convinced it won’t fall into place it always does. This kind of event doesn’t happen overnight, and I’d like to thank all the customers that allowed us to borrow their apparatus for a few days to display at the show, without their support, putting on a display of any kind would be very difficult indeed. But in addition to them, I need to thank some in-house help for their work; especially Bill Russell, Eric Trevena, and Bill Ring for a lot of the behind the scenes logistical work they handled for me. I’d also like to thank Sean O’Connor and Vincent Scalera and the entire Service group for their efforts. While Wildwood is essentially a sales show, Vinny and Sean and their group of guys really bail us out year after year helping getting units down and back from the show and helping us get organized and loaded prior to the show and organized and put away once we return. With sales staff spread all over the state, it is sometimes hard to get the bodies here to do all the work that needs to be done, and the Service Division really comes through in the clutch to help out.

I thank all of the people who came through our booth and stopped and talked to myself, or to our sales representatives about our products that we had displayed, especially the first VELOCITY delivered in NJ to Haddonfield, NJ and the awesome PUC pumper which can completely change the way we thing about and approach fighting fires and designing apparatus. You can always count on Pierce to push the envelope when it comes to firefighting apparatus.

But more importantly, I want to talk about the “guest” apparatus we had and thank the gentlemen who brought it down for us. The TFFT (Tactical Fire Fighting Truck) is by itself a pretty awe inspiring apparatus. But to me, what really made the display were the Army Reservists Trombetta and Rochette. These two men did great honor in representing the Armed Services during our show. They were very personable and answered any question I heard asked of them. The only time I heard any hesitancy in an answer was when one was probed about details of his tour in Iraq as a Marine. They were great with the younger kids posing for pictures and I think were even asked to sign their names a couple times by people. No matter what your opinion on the conflict in the Middle East and our involvement, these two gentlemen portrayed all that is right and good about our military personnel, no matter where they are stationed. God bless them and Support our Troops.

Thank you,