Women’s History Month spotlight – Terri Parker

March 22, 2023

Terri Parker sometimes doesn’t believe she gets to be a firefighter for a living.

“I’ll still sit in the rig and pinch myself, ‘is this real?’… I’m getting paid to do this?” she said.

Terri is a captain at Pine Ridge Fire Rescue, a combination department in Summerville. She’s recently joined the career side of the job, but her journey in the fire service started long before her tenure at Pine Ridge.

“To say I have gone a non-traditional route is not the least bit an exaggeration,” Terri reminisced.

In 1993, Terri left her roots in Ohio, where her family had instilled in her a strong commitment to community service, for a small college in Florida. The fire department was a big part of the community where she grew up and she knew a captain at the local air force base, but firefighting wasn’t a family tradition for her.

A few of her college classmates were volunteering at the local station and many of the department members were students. It was a demographic that lent itself to accepting people outside of the norm.

“When I first started volunteering in college, it just clicked,” she said.

She was hooked.

Terri briefly returned to Ohio before moving to South Carolina. It was then that she took a ‘mom hiatus’ while still being loosely affiliated with a few departments in the area. Like it always does, motherhood changed her life; her life would drastically change again when she became a single mom juggling multiple jobs, one of them being a part-time gig at Pine Ridge.

An avid proponent of self care, volunteering in the fire service is where she turned to when she was searching for an identity outside of motherhood.

It would take some time before Pine Ridge added full-time employees, but when they did, Terri was among those hired. When they had their very first paid shift as a department, Terri worked her very first shift as a full-time firefighter as a captain.

“There’s a lot of pride in being part of a historical amount of growth for our department and this area,” Terri said. The learning curve—for both Terri, who’d been promoted to Lieutenant when she was part-time and was now taking on the responsibilities as captain for the first time, and the department—was steep.

When she reflects on that first shift, one thing sticks out to her.

“When I worked my first full-time shift at Pine Ridge, gender never came up. It just wasn’t a thing,” she said.

“I only know how to be a woman in the fire service,” Terri continued. “The reality is, I think that women in general have some latitude in general that men don’t when it comes to how we engage with the public, when it comes to how we engage with patients and people in our care, and how we engage with each other, and the softer stuff is much more acceptable for us.”

Many of her crew members are the same age as her kids, and she confessed in a laugh, “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t mother a lot of people at work.”

Terri knows how important it is for women and minorities to be celebrated when they accomplish a first. She’ll loudly cheer them on until firsts are a thing of the past.

“Those firsts are exciting,” she said, “but it’s just as exciting for you to get to that point where it’s not a topic.”