by Tim Healy, Northwest Region Volunteer

It’s not a competition, of course. Not when your mother is a Red Cross legend with an award named after her. Not when your kids are forging their own legacies fighting fires, serving as emergency medical responders and volunteering to provide comfort and care during natural disasters.

It’s certainly not a competition, but Matt Hickey, son of a legend and father of a growing legacy, could be excused for not taking a back seat to any generation.

His own list of accomplishments, as a lifelong firefighter and ubiquitous communications officer during the response to many of the highest profile natural disasters of his generation, is nothing short of astonishing.

Consider that he has been to Haiti and American Samoa in the aftermath of devastating earthquakes. Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Rita. Hurricane Wilma. Hurricane Ike. The list goes on. “It got to the point when I would hear about a disaster in the news and, wonder, ‘Am I going to that?’” Matt says. He was a firefighter for 36 years — 24 of them with the Tukwila Fire Department, including during the time many of those disasters occurred. “You get your deployment orders, hand the chief the paperwork, and say your goodbyes,” he recalls. “Like a snap of the fingers, I was out the door and on an airplane.”

Matt and his new wife, Judy, became Red Cross volunteers in the last year. He grew up and graduated high school in Spokane, Wash. His mother, Kay, was well into her own celebrated career as a dedicated, passionate volunteer for the Red Cross, who taught swimming safety and swimming rescue techniques for 64 years. The Red Cross Greater Inland Northwest chapter, which includes Spokane, gave out the first annual Kay Hickey Award in 2006, and continues to use it today to honor “selfless dedication and personal commitment to community safety and health.”

With that legacy behind him, Matt chose to be a firefighter. He ended up spending most of his career with the Tukwila Fire Department before retiring in 2016. He says his mother never put any pressure on him to choose the career he did. “No. No. None at all,” he says. “She never pushed any of her kids or anything like that. It was just, you know, we wanted to be like her.”

Today, Matt has three children, all of whom have spent time fighting fires. His son, Alex, still fights fires with North Kitsap Fire and Rescue. Daughter Laura worked on that same team for a time until she suffered a serious broken leg, which ended her fire-fighting career. She became a physician’s assistant and eventually volunteered to be deployed during natural disasters (she has deployed to Hurricane Ian in Florida, on the same team that her father was once on).

Laura recognizes how the family legacy of service rolled down from her grandmother, to her father (and mother) and then to her generation. “It definitely had an impact,” says Laura. “I mean, I watched my dad as a firefighter all the time I was growing up. That was certainly part of it for me.”

As for the next generation, Laura has two children — a two-year-old boy named Wyatt, and a five-year-old girl named Ava. It may be a bit soon to be picking careers, but both have inclinations.

“Wyatt already thinks he is a firefighter. He's out in the backyard with a hose putting out fires,” says Laura. And Ava wants to be a different kind of first responder – a veterinarian. “She also loves the hurricane stuff, so we, me and her, we’re always looking at the hurricane tracker. We’ll see. So far, she's interested in the disaster team.”

For over 140 years the Red Cross volunteer workforce has served a critical role in our mission to prevent and alleviate human suffering.  Become a part of this historical legacy and join us today. Apply or learn more here.