Cat Lewis ’14 didn’t know she was about to break a glass ceiling. When she took the tests to become a member of the Long Beach, N.Y., fire department, she didn’t know that it was a century-old institution. She didn’t know that they’d never had a woman on the job, much less a paid one. And she definitely didn’t know that she’d end up on The Drew Barrymore Show, transforming into an inspiration for girls around the country dreaming of becoming first responders.
“A lot of people are used to seeing the fire truck drive by and seeing four guys in the back, but now they see my ponytail and they immediately light up with a smile,” Lewis said on Barrymore’s show.
Rewind. How can you become a symbol for change without knowing it?
After spending a few years teaching NYC 4-year-olds as part of a Teach for America program, Lewis earned her master’s degree in early childhood education and special education. “That responsibility and being in a lower socioeconomic community and really playing a pivotal role in these young children’s lives was pretty eye-opening,” she recalls. Upon graduation, she looked for physical education roles at private schools in the city. It seemed like a good way to combine her passions for teaching children and playing sports.
But, in the back of her mind, she kept seeing a different child — herself. “Growing up, I always had this fascination with the FDNY,” she remembers. “I knew a ton of people who were on the job, but I really never knew any female firefighters.” She filled out the application, but with a pool of approximately 50,000, it was a long waiting game to see if she’d join New York’s bravest. In the meantime, she came upon an opening at a smaller department, in Long Beach, N.Y., where she was already coaching and managing at a CrossFit gym.
She scored 100% on the written test; then came the physical fitness test. The standard is the same for men and women — you have to be able to pull someone out of a burning building, after all — and while some women had tried in the past, none had ever succeeded. But because she was already in shape, thanks to consistent training dating back to her Colgate basketball days and working as a CrossFit trainer, Lewis says she had an easier time. “I was, for the last six years, living in a gym training other people, but also really working on my own fitness.”
In some ways, working in the firehouse is just like the movies: They slide down a pole, landing near the truck that takes them to emergencies. But what you don’t see on TV are the 24-hour shifts spent preparing for some of the worst accidents imaginable, which can stir up anxiety. “When you can sleep, you try to sleep and hope there are no crazy emergencies throughout the night, but there often are,” Lewis says.
The camaraderie among members of the department helps ease those troubles. The Long Beach firehouse serves as a second home for Lewis, and the firefighters celebrate birthdays, have afternoon coffee, and even keep up their physical fitness together. Lewis helps with that one. She writes and leads her team through daily workouts: “More often than not, we’ll start working out, and then we’ll get called out [to an emergency]. [When] we come back, we finish our workout,” she says.
Lewis studied sociology at Colgate, and she says the skills she learned in her courses, like considering other perspectives when assessing a situation, keep her working relationships strong. “Working and living in the firehouse is tough because you have a whole new family, [there are] people from different backgrounds [who] have different opinions, and everyone feels comfortable enough to talk about it.”
Barrymore wanted to help the department foster those relationships: Someone from her show DM’d Lewis about appearing on the show, which led to Barrymore redesigning the firehouse’s lounge space. “Cat Lewis has made history, or ‘herstory’ as we now say, as the first career female firefighter in the city of Long Beach, N.Y.,” Barrymore said on the show. “Any man, woman, or child is going to watch you, Cat, and dream and think about possibilities, and hopefully … rise to the occasion you have.”
Consider that ceiling broken.