The St. John Professional Fire Fighters Association had great success in our Breast Cancer Awareness month activities. We started out with designing our duty shirts printed in pink with a ribbon on the back. Our initial order was for 40, but we ended up selling over 200 shirts. The shirts were bought by people in the parish — parish employees, residents — and people from outside the parish. We also had success with ribbon lapel pins and ribbon magnets. We participated in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. We had a Chili’s Night during which Chili’s donated 10 percent of the evening’s proceeds to breast cancer. We are totaling up our efforts as of press time. I will have the total in my next column.

We were very excited with the outcome of all of our fund raising efforts. We are going to start earlier next year and try to raise more money.

Out next event is a football game against the Sheriff’s Department

on Nov. 20. We are finalizing all of the particulars this week and will definitely let everyone know the time. We might call it “Guns & Hoses.” We hope this will be an annual event.

We participated in many fire prevention days at local schools.

We are also going to start our annual “Toys For Tots” campaign. We will have boxes out at a variety of retail outlets for toy collection.

We have had a busy year. We have grown to 45 career firefighters and opened a station on Walnut Street in Laplace. We also have some new fire trucks.

We are looking forward to what the future holds for the St. John Office of Fire Services.

Michael Heath is president of the St. John Professional Firefighters Association.