Pottstown has its first female career firefighter in Goodwill Firehouse’s Jamie Kreidler, writes Evan Brandt for the Reading Eagle.

Forty-one-year old Kreidler has loved firefighting since she was a child. She began volunteering with a fire company in her native Easton in 1998, but when it was time to choose a career, she opted to get a degree in criminal justice from West Chester University.

“I thought I wanted to be a cop,” recalled Kreidler.

However, soon she felt the pull of the fire service again. So she took a position as an aircraft rescue firefighter at McEntire Joint National Guard Air Force/Army base in South Carolina.

After two years she started to miss home and began looking for work in Pennsylvania.

“I applied here, and I got the job,” she said, adding that “the guys in Pottstown have really opened their arms to me.”

She understands the importance of being the first, especially when she is doing fire safety presentations because “sometimes, you can see the light go off in a little girl’s eye when they see you and realize, ‘Oh, I can do this.’”

Read more about Jamie Kreidler at the Reading Eagle by clicking here.

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