Being relevant

I don’t know what made me think of Percy Bugbee when I first woke this morning. He had already retired from the NFPA where I held my first professional job when I joined the staff. I did meet him. He was sitting in the library with tears running down his cheeks. “It’s a terrible thing to get old and useless,” he said to me. Even in my late 20s I could imagine feeling irrelevant had to be a horrible fate.

I looked him up on the internet and found his death notice from 1989 at the age of 90. But I also found that there is a $5000 fire engineering scholarship in his name. Too bad he didn’t live to see that his existence is available to every human who has an internet connections and his scholarship furthers the education of people who in turn will hold down jobs that help society.