St. Petersburg is celebrated for its fabulous weather, beautiful vistas, world-class food scene, and thriving cultural atmosphere, but the people of St. Petersburg truly make this city something special. In appreciation, each issue Green Bench Monthly shines a light on one of the many people who make our town unique.
It’s Not Just a Career. It’s a Family.
Jim Large has been a proud employee of St. Petersburg Fire Rescue for 44 years. He spent the first 17 years of this career “on the line” before he moved into a more administrative role that culminated in his appointment as fire chief in 2006. It’s an impressive career punctuated with accolades and awards, but you wouldn’t know that talking with him. When I asked him his favorite part of the job, he replied, with no hesitation: hiring and promoting people. As he told me, the people of Fire Rescue form a unique family that other families trust with their lives and possessions. And he is most proud of his role as a talent scout. What could be more vital than crafting that family and its structure?
Important Question: Are you named after THE James Dean?
Jim was adopted at birth in Savannah, and his two older sisters were given the honor of naming him. It was 1955, the year of Rebel Without a Cause. Yes, he is named after that James Dean.
Road to St. Pete Fire Rescue
As a military family, they moved frequently. When Large was 10, his father retired, and the family left the cold of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for sunny St. Petersburg. Eight years later, Large graduated from Northeast High School, thinking he might like to be a police officer. Several chats with a 6-foot-6 desk sergeant resulted in two haircuts (the first was deemed not a real haircut), and the sergeant informed Large that he was too young to enter law enforcement. However, the helpful sergeant, said, the fire department might take him. It did, and Large was only the second 18-year-old it hired. Large soon realized that fate and the helpful desk sergeant had sent him down the right path. “I loved it,” Large told me. “Immediately.”
Man Cannot Live by Fire Rescue Alone
Large understood that a firefighter’s time on the line is limited, so in 1976 he went back to school. Over the next two decades, he took classes at night and on his days off. He earned associate and bachelor’s degrees, then an MBA. He enjoyed going to class and counts his years at Eckerd College among his “Top 10 lifetime experiences.” These days, he teaches part time at St. Petersburg College. Large and his wife have two daughters and a son, all of whom will be in college in the fall. He’ll celebrate 45 years on the job in February. These milestones have the couple looking to the future, but they’re not thinking retirement quite yet. Large still has a few things he wants to accomplish on the job. When the time does come, he says, they will enjoy paradise at home, and he’ll try to perfect his golf game, which as he put it, “is better in my mind than on the course.”
