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National Fallen Firefighters Foundation

Roll of Honor

Fire Chief
Age: 49
Year of Death: 2018

Richard Chalmers McCormick

Ricky McCormick served his community faithfully for 31 years. He started his career as a junior firefighter in high school. In fact, he left right in the middle of his own high school graduation to hop on a truck and answer a fire call. Fighting fire and helping people was his calling, and from that day on he never did anything but just that. Over the years, he moved up through the ranks until 2014 when he was promoted to the honorable position of fire chief for the City of La Vergne Fire and Rescue. He served as the city’s first municipal chief. He was a fireman’s chief. He loved the job, loved his department, and most of all loved helping people. He had a true servant’s heart. He never met a stranger and he loved to talk. He was quite the jokester with a laughter so contagious that you couldn’t help but smile every time you heard it.

There was a call of a two-year-old little girl drowning. It came across the medical radio, which they could listen to but would not get toned out to. This was long before the fire department ever started running medical calls. Realizing he could get on the scene before anyone else, he instructed the guys to get on the truck and take the call. When they arrived, the two-year-old’s lifeless body was handed to Ricky. He performed CPR, got her breathing again, and saved her life. He received the Heroic Life Saving Award that year. Several months later, the little girl stopped by the fire hall with her parents and gave him a picture of her. He carried that picture in the front of his wallet every single day thereafter.

Ricky was a family man. He loved his family with everything he had and would go to the ends of the earth for each and every one of them. He was preceded in death by his parents, Billy and Sally, and his son, Brandon. He is survived by his wife, Diana; sons, Tyler and Jordan; daughter, Ashley; grandchildren, Annabelle, Abigalle, and Brylee; brother, Allen, and his wife, Briana; sister, Christa, and her husband, Nick; father in-law, Bobby; mother in-law, Judy; and his canine babies, Sebastian, Sabienne, Jasmine, Cheyenne, and Shiloh, whom he loved so much.

Ricky touched the lives of so many people in the short 49 years he was here on this earth. His smile and contagious laugh will live on forever in the hearts of all who knew him.

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