Lexie Engleman is pictured with a composite of numerous Lawrence Journal-World archived headlines and articles featuring her through the years.

Digging through archives of old newspapers you’ll find dozens of stories about one of Lawrence’s first female firefighters.

Rescuing a dog from a burning building. Overseeing a rescue of a fisherman from the Bowersock Dam. Bulking up as a competitive weightlifter.

Being named captain at the department and, for a brief time, acting as fire chief.

Lexie Engleman may be one of the most storied first responders in recent Lawrence history.

Though she retired from fighting fires more than 10 years ago, she continues to serve her community working the front desk at the Douglas County Jail a few days a week — and they’re a busy few days. On a recent day, within a matter of minutes, a dozen inquiries were fired off in her direction, from a resident trying to register a vehicle, an attorney entering the jail to see a client, a co-worker trying to schedule a delivery of books for the library and a reporter trying to take her picture.

photo by: Chris Conde/ Journal-World

Lexie Engleman poses at her current job on Sept. 1, 2023, at the Douglas County Jail.

Engleman’s story with the department starts in 1981 when she was selected by Fire Chief Jim McSwain as one of two of Lawrence’s first female firefighters, but she said the story that led to her decision to join the department goes back a little further — to when she was fresh out of college and teaching in Linwood.

“I was coaching all the women’s sports but only getting paid for one. And so, I didn’t think that was right. Especially when the men were getting paid more for coaching one sport. I took it to the KNEA (Kansas National Education Association) board and said, ‘You know this is wrong.’ That was before affirmative action and all of that kind of stuff. I went back to Linwood for my job and they said I was fired,” Engleman said.

Around the same time Engleman and her then husband welcomed their son into the world, and she needed a job.

“I saw an ad in the paper. We didn’t have the internet back then. I saw they were hiring firefighters. So I thought ‘that might be OK, looks pretty good,'” Engleman said.

She applied for the job and doubted she would be hired, so she didn’t bother to tell her parents. To her surprise, she did get the job, beating out over 100 applicants.

“It was the beginning. Thank goodness Chief McSwain knew that this was something that we (Lawrence) wanted to get into. I can’t think that I was a better candidate than another person,” Engleman said.

She still wasn’t sure how to tell her parents, who lived in Great Bend, but the news of a woman being hired as a firefighter in 1981 traveled fast across the Plains and her folks learned of her new job via a radio broadcast.

“They found out that I’d been hired and immediately called and said, ‘What are you doing with your life? This is a dead-end career. You have a baby,’ all that kind of stuff,” Engleman said.

She assured her parents that the job was only temporary and that she would look for work as a teacher — in the meantime she needed the money. But then she worked her first emergency call.

The same day the Journal-World reported about Engleman and Denise Clemens starting with the department on June 19, 1981, a tornado ripped through the city, killing one person and injuring at least 33 more.

“My first day was a trailer house fire and a tornado… When I got off the truck, I didn’t have bunker gear that fit. I had bunker gear with long pants that were rolled or doubled up on the ground. It was an eye opener for me to see that (destruction),” Engleman said.

Engleman said the devastation of the tornado and the clear need for emergency responders was a big part of why what she thought might be a short-lived job turned into a 30-year career.

“You know, I always thought it was divine intervention that kind of got me to that point,” Engleman said.

Helping people and being able to see the real-life impact of the job kept Engleman driving forward in her career, but it wasn’t just the heartfelt moments of rescuing people; it was also the adrenaline rush of entering into a burning building.

“The first fire I went in was just amazing. Scary, but it was thrilling all at the same time,” Engleman said.

She divorced her husband soon after and quickly learned that working a 24-hour shift and raising a baby was not an easy task.

“I had a 4-month-old baby when I got on with the department. And so it was juggling, trying to be a mom and having a 4-month-old child,” Engleman said.

Engleman’s son spent some days at day care and some days with his dad, but Engleman said that the guys at the fire station did their part to pitch in as well.

“The guys were very helpful,” she said.

In addition to helping her ocassionally with the baby, they also taught her about firefighting.

“A lot of it was on-the-job training,” Engleman said.

In her first decade, Engleman rose through the ranks to become Lawrence’s first woman named lieutenant with the department and then captain. And while she never became a full-fledged fire chief, she did get to fill in as “acting chief” a time or two.

“I got to be fill-in chief because one of the chiefs got injured and he was gone for several months. And whenever a chief goes on vacation, then the captain is filling in for him, so I got to do that. I really enjoyed that,” Engleman said.

Engleman oversaw not only the cultural shift of bringing women into the department, but also the addition of medical services being added to the department’s service, the addition of various modern technologies including automatic ladder trucks and infrared cameras that could see through smoke during a fire, and the construction of numerous new fire stations.

After 29 years with the fire department, Engleman said retiring in 2010 was bittersweet not just because she wouldn’t get to run fire calls, or because she never quite attained her goal of being named permanently as fire chief but because of the relationships she had with her fellow firefighters.

“There was a lot of camaraderie. That’s what I missed the most,” Engleman said. “If I was younger, I’d still be doing it. I miss it. You know, just helping people every day — showing up on the worst day of their life, trying to fix things”

Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical recently honored Engleman by naming a training room for her at Fire Station 1, where Engleman started all those years ago at the corner of Eighth and Kentucky streets.

“I was there for the majority of my career… one of the busiest stations,” Engleman said.

photo by: Contributed

Lexi Engleman, left, and Fire Chief Rich Llewellyn during a ceremony naming a training room after Engleman on June 30, 2023 at LDCFM’s Station 1, 746 Kentucky St.

Engleman looks back with satisfaction at her time in bunker gear and in command and says she is pleased that the culture has changed, that women can enter the field on equal footing with men and that while the world may have taken notice of her career because she is a woman, most of her coworkers and supervisors over the years took notice of her abilities and not her gender.

“Everybody that does that job, nobody really ever quits. You know, you see a lot of bad things but you’re there to help,” Engleman said.

Forty years later, Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical currently employs 10 women in sworn firefighting positions, holding the ranks firefighter and fire engineer, said Fire Chief Rich Llewellyn. In addition to their firefighting training, each has an associated EMS certification level of EMT, advanced EMT or paramedic. The department employs seven nonsworn, or civilian, women in support roles.

In total, the department has 153 sworn positions and nine civilian positions, but some positions are vacant due to personnel retiring, Llewellyn said. The department was approved to add five sworn positions and two civilian positions in the city’s 2024 budget, as the Journal-World reported, and is actively recruiting to fill vacant positions, Llewellyn said.