Barrington author gets helping hand from fire department

In his newest book, Barrington resident R.W. Alley leaned on a local expert for some important fact-checking.

Alley called on the fire chief. 

The well-known children’s book illustrator and author said Barrington Fire Chief Gerald Bessette played a key role ensuring the accuracy of “Firefighters to the Rescue!”

“I needed the expert stuff,” Alley said.

The book offers a fun and informative look at a fictional fire department and all its vehicles and equipment. 

“I got enough fundamental stuff to do a sketched-out version of the story, and I sat down with the chief,” said Alley, who has illustrated the Paddington Bear children’s books. “He was very willing to do this. I showed him this version. And he had a bunch of suggestions and specific changes. And he took me around the firehouse and he let me take as many pictures as I wanted to of all the equipment so I could get it right.”

“Firefighters to the Rescue!” is the first in a series of three children’s books that Alley will write and illustrate that offer the readers a closer look at how people interact in a community, similar to the books by Richard Scarry. 

Alley’s book opens — literally, it’s the inside cover — with a map of the town that will be featured in all three books. 

“It started with mapping out a community,” Alley said. “When you start drawing something like that, you think ‘Well, I have this, then I need a this. If I have a school you have to have houses for the kids to live in. Then you have to have people for teachers. Then the kids have to do something after school, so you’re going to want to put in restaurants and movie houses and all that stuff, and then you’re going to have to figure out who grows the food for the restaurants, who participates in whatever activities they’re doing.’ One thing leads to another.”

Alley loved drawing the map — he said he probably spent too much time working on it. And he loved creating the characters also. 

“I love drawing animals in people clothes,” Alley said. “It takes all the prejudices we bring to seeing illustrations of humans, it just takes it away completely. You can have characters doing things and not have to worry that the characters are being judged. The most fun was making sure that every character was a different animal.”

Alley created one character, a newspaper reporter, who follows the story throughout the book. 

“He’s covering the events, and at the end of the book there’s a page of the photographs he’s taken during the story. The kids are invited to go back through the book to see if they can find places where photographs were taken,” Alley said. 

The longtime Barrington resident said he really enjoyed writing and illustrating “Firefighters to the Rescue!” He said he needed to teach himself an entirely new way of working … “because it’s all done digitally.”

“I did it the way I had begun doing my very first books, which, coincidentally, is the way that Richard Scarry did his books,” Alley said. “All his books are pencil drawings that are photographed onto clear sheets of acetate and watercolor paper is put underneath and he painted the color that way. The thing with the pencil drawings is that you can cut and paste them and move things around and change the sizes and that’s how I did some of my first books too. And that’s exactly what I did here. On the computer, I did a black line drawing and then all the colors underneath it, but I could manipulate everything and change the sizes. It was a lot of work. It was a lot of fun.”

Alley said he was recently able to present a copy of the book to Chief Bessette and members of the Barrington Fire Department. 

“He (Bessette) showed it to the other guys at the fire station,” Alley said. “Apparently, it seems to be accurate except for one page. One fireman pointed out that a hose is connected to the wrong plug. It’s going into the intake plug and it should be coming out of the outtake plug. But he did say only a fireman would notice that. I took it as ‘My God, they studied this thing!’”

Alley added: “It was interesting to walk that fine line between putting in too much information and not enough information.”

Annapolis

Alley said he has always wanted to a book about firefighting. 

“Once I got the idea of doing the series, the question was ‘What three topics do you want to deal with?’ Besides the fact that fire trucks are of interest to kids… the other reason was that in 2007 my parents both died in a house fire in Annapolis (Md.)” Alley said. “So I also got to know the Annapolis Fire Department pretty well, so this whole idea of doing a firefighter book was rumbling around for quite a while. It’s been a long time, but it’s still horrible to think of.”

Alley said he reached out to the Annapolis Fire Department while creating the book. He discovered that one of the firefighters who responded to his parents’ house fire was now the fire chief there.

Alley sent the Annapolis Fire Department a copy of “Firefighters to the Rescue!” when it was finished. 

“It’s not one of those things where I was just trying to make another kids’ book about firefighters,” Alley said. “That’s the reason I was wanting to do such a deep dive into all the equipment and all that stuff.”