Pineville mayor and volunteer firefighter Gregg Sweeten recently won an essay contest for a piece about his best day as a volunteer firefighter.
He said in February he saw a contest on Facebook. The Jack Daniels distillery in Lynchburg, Tenn., has a group of employees that are volunteer firefighters, and they have some nice equipment, he said. The prize for the contest was a chance to tour the distillery and the fire department, along with a concert by country music artist Chase Rice.
The contest rules said to write about your best day as a volunteer firefighter, submitting 50 to 150 words. Sweeten wrote about how his youngest daughter, Kalee, became a volunteer firefighter in Pineville and has taken Fire 1 and Fire 2 classes through Crowder College and has become a part of something Sweeten has done for 25 years. To complete his entry, he submitted a photo of Kalee.
"I kind of forgot about it. I never expected to win," he said.
Sweeten said he found out it was the volunteer firefighters in Lynchburg who judged the essay contest. They selected 50 volunteer firefighters from throughout the U.S. The essays were judged on creativity, originality and thoughtfulness.
On May 14, Sweeten received an email saying he was a winner.
"Being in law enforcement for as long as I've been in law enforcement and kind of having forgotten about it, I started making some phone calls to make sure this wasn't a hoax," he said. A representative with the contest emailed him the contest rules to jog his memory.
He said he was shocked that he won. The prize has a $2,500 to $3,000 value, he said.
"The only sad part is my daughter that I wrote about can't go because you have to be 21, and she's only 20. We've promised we'll take her back there when she turns 21," he said.
Sweeten and his wife, Stephanie, will fly out of Northwest Arkansas and arrive in Tennessee on a Saturday. The tour and concert will be on a Sunday, and they will return home on a Monday.
Sweeten discussed Kalee's volunteerism. He said she has volunteered for different things around town as early in life as she possibly could. When she turned 18, he asked her what she thought about joining the volunteer fire department, and she said yes. Sweeten said his brother-in-law inspired him to join the volunteer fire department, and Kalee was inspired by Sweeten. He said she is consumed by it. Now she has taken emergency medical technician training, and he believes she will probably pursue that as a career, he said.
"You don't get a lot of young kids these days to help. It takes a special kid to want to get up in the middle of the night and deal with what a volunteer firefighter does," he said.
General News on 06/27/2019