ETHNICITY
Angelina Tirado
Smashes Through By Richard Szathmary The lady is holding an axe in her hands. It is a big, heavy axe. With a blood red head and a sharpened peen that looks hard enough to chop into the stoutest of steel doors, or even to dent the shirtless chest of Vladimir Putin. And it is perforce a very lethal-looking axe, the big, open smile of the lady holding it notwithstanding, one that definitely looks made for warfare. (Let’s face it, the alleged misdeeds of Lizzie Borden come right to mind, too.) But the lady is Angelina Tirado and she is merely carrying on a proud family tradition of “axe-toting.” Her father was Alberto Tirado. Alberto was a Passaic firefighter, and on May 9, 2001 he made the ultimate sacrifice while searching a burning building for missing children (they were later found safe), an act of conspicuous on-the-job bravery for which he was posthumously promoted to Lieutenant. On the night her father died, his daughter was a high school senior. Angelina now happens to be Clifton’s first, so far sole, female firefighter. It’s hardly coincidental, of course. Beginnings “I am a firefighter,” Angelina Tirado declares with some evident pride, as even her nostrils seem to flare just the teensiest bit. “I’m the first woman doing it, okay, yeah, right, I know, but I’m also really just proud to be a firefighter here in Clifton. “What can I tell you?” she continues. “I always just wanted to help people.” This led her, after some fitful stints at Rutgers and at PCCC, studying nursing, into qualification as an EMT and subsequent service as one in her native Passaic. She took the written test to be a firefighter in 2006. “It was mostly like basic, general knowledge,” she recalls, and the physical in 2007. It wasn’t until 2010, however, 8 October 2013 • Clifton Merchant
mostly because of the vagaries of New Jersey’s civil service procedures, and budgetary reasons, that she was actually appointed to the Clifton FD. “It was in part because I grew up around firefighters,” Angelina says. “I knew what they did and they all seemed so nice. I knew they did a very difficult job. I admired them for doing that job.” It can be, it surely is here, as simple as that. And of course, she’s heard all the caveats about women as firefighters. “That women wouldn’t last here (i.e. on the testosterone-laden sacred grounds of a firehouse). That it’s a guy’s world and period for that. That we just aren’t cut out for the job. We’re women so we’re just not strong enough. We don’t have the right attitude,” she laughs. “There’s a lot more but it’s the kind of stuff that just always gets said.”