HOLLIS – In 1948, Harry Truman was President, the number one single was Dinah Shore’s “Buttons and Bows,” and Ken Towne was a teen working the fields with his dad on their Hollis dairy farm when duty came rushing like a rocket from their rural homestead.

“Mother would come roaring out in the fields and shout, ‘There’s a barn on fire and they need you to go!’” he remembers. So Towne and his dad Warren, Hollis’ longtime volunteer fire chief, would jump in the family truck and head for the station to suit up with their neighbors and fellow farmers.

Sixty years and thousands of middle-of-the-night calls, interrupted meals, and cut-short Christmases and school plays later, Towne has never looked back.

“The dedication kind of grows on you,” says Towne. “If dad left, he took me to the fire with him… My work over the years kept me in town, so I was able to help. It just sort of gets in the blood. If you enjoy doing it, you stay with it. If not, you leave.”

Towne, a local truck and backhoe operator, hasn’t. At 79, he remains part of a statewide tradition of volunteer fire service that spans two centuries and today still makes up more than 80 percent of New Hampshire’s 245 departments. Of the estimated 8,000 firefighters statewide, some 6,800 either donate their time entirely or are paid nominally by the hour for each call they answer. They are CEOs and custodians, plumbers, farmers, pastors and doctors. They are college students and senior citizens. They are neighbors.

They are folks like Pembroke’s Hank Munroe, a former president of the state’s college consortium who helped start New Hampshire’s fire training academy in the 1990s, and served as his town’s volunteer chief; like Peterborough’s George Brown, 82, a retired meter reader and pole climber for the power company, who has served his department since 1952 and whose childhood home now serves as the town’s fire museum.

“It just came kind of naturally, I guess,” says Brown, whose father battled blazes for Peterborough in the early 1900s. “It was a way of giving back.”

In New Hampshire, as with the rest of the nation, neighbors have been giving back since the early 1800s, when the first fire chief was a famous Philadelphian named Ben Franklin. Back then, the machines were unwieldy and the technology rudimentary.  Each home would have a leather fire bucket that, in times of emergency, was filled and placed outside the house for the local volunteer force to pick up and pass to one another in a line. A hand-tub would come along a few years later that allowed those with brawn to rope-pull a heavy tank to a fire and manually pump a stream of water about 75 feet. One of those scarlet-red pumpers now sits on display in the old Hollis fire museum.

Towne, of course, isn’t old enough to remember those days. But he is old enough to remember when his department’s ‘state-of-the-art’ machinery consisted of an old 1931 Ford Model A open-air truck and a 1929 Buick; when an air-raid siren took the place of cell phones and pagers, on-call firemen averaged $1.50 an hour, more residents mooed than spoke, and uniforms weren’t made of Kevlar, but cotton and rubber.

“You just put on your rain coat and hat and went out,” Towne says. “In a town of 1,000, when you did have a fire, if you got everybody there and a truck out of the station within 15 minutes, that was good.”

Today, Hollis is a town of about 8,000, and things are dramatically different. The days of an all-volunteer force have given way to the need of having a handful of full-timers in place to always be there when calls come in. The town’s ambulance service, once the domain of an undertaker who’d slap a red light on top of his hearse before running out, now dominates about two-thirds of the department’s calls – a figure almost identical to numbers statewide. Where Hollis averaged about 40 calls per year when Towne started, today it averages more than 1,000.

Education and equipment are light years beyond what they were when Towne started – when Merrimack Deputy Chief Martin Carrier says training often consisted of “arriving at a scene and someone saying, ‘Do what that guy tells you to do,’” and the firefighting philosophy, according to former Hollis chief Don McCoy was to “ride up and put the wet stuff on the red stuff.”

Today’s volunteer firefighter must often meet the same training standards as his or her full-time counterparts – a regimen that means 220 hours of taking in everything from ladders and self-contained breathing apparatus to heightened focuses on safety and science. To become a basic emergency medical worker adds another 125 hours.

The result has been the evolution of a volunteer firefighter unlike anything the state has seen – one trained to respond at a moment’s notice and to handle almost any eventuality or hazard imaginable. It has also meant a dip in recruitment across the state. As the time demands of training and responding have soared and many towns continue to serve as bedroom communities for Massachusetts-based jobs, a lot of folks are taking a pass on the added responsibility.

“It’s a huge number of calls now compared to the past, the time demands are horrendous, and the calls don’t come when you want them to,” says Peterborough’s Jim Grant, who’s volunteered the last 43 years. “You have to be hyper-alert, prepared at the drop of a hat to race to the station and get in a truck – my wife will tell you, I’ve abandoned her at many meals. It is strenuous work, and the burden falls on a handful of dedicated people.”

Volunteer advocates like Merrimack’s Carrier – the state’s representative on the National Volunteer Fire Council – are recognizing this, and working with town and state officials to offer everything from tax incentives to small retirement plans and increased life insurance provisions for all state safety personnel – including volunteers. Since 1981, New Hampshire has lost 16 firefighters in the line of duty, according to the U.S. Fire Safety Administration, most of them volunteers.

“I’ll stick with it as long as I feel I can contribute,” says Towne, who even nearing 80, still jumps into his truck with the same sense of purpose each time the tone goes off. It has become a family tradition, with his son Richard now Hollis’ chief and his granddaughter Hilary a firefighter and emergency medical worker.

“Even at the volunteer level, you make it your life,” says Hilary, 29, who works days as an EMT down in Lawrence, Mass. “You create friendships that you’d never have in any other circumstance. I would do anything for anyone here, and I know that they would do the same. These people become your family… and when the tone goes off, you all come together.”

Special thanks to Jim Grant of Peterborough, Hank Munroe of Pembroke and Martin Carrier of Merrimack for their help with this story.