Capt. Kevin Ritcheson is a fixer. While aged out of most on-call duties, Ritcheson now passes on what he’s learned, both in his own experience and from his mentors, to the next generations of firefighters for Oregon and beyond. Ritcheson grew up in Redding, California. As his high school years were concluding, his father gave him three options: work, go to school and live at home for free, work and pay room and board, or do nothing and find a new place to live.
With plenty of haste, Ritcheson found himself in a U.S. Air Force recruitment office, and months later, he began about nine years of active duty, trained as an aircraft mechanic and including two tours in Korea. While it may not have meant much to him then, he remembers the Air Force recruiter asking him a simple question at the outset of the interviews: “Do you think you’d want to be a firefighter?” “I got a second chance at that,” he said, now 59 years old.
After leaving active service and more years in the reserves, he found himself as a volunteer firefighter at the Cornelius Fire Department in July 2010. He then joined up as an intern with EMT training under his belt and realized one of his higher callings. “I had been here two or three weeks when I went ‘Wow, I should’ve been doing this my whole life,’” he said. After pursuing higher education — three degrees, to be exact — he finally landed a paid job with the Cornelius Fire Department in July 2015. In the years since, Ritcheson worked his way up the ladder from firefighter to engineer to lieutenant and now captain.
