Answering a new call: Chesapeake's fire chief plans a career in law

CHESAPEAKE

For the past four years, fire Chief Steve Best has carried his blue L.L. Bean bookbag to work. He's eaten peanut butter crackers for dinner more nights than he can count and sat in classes until 10 p.m.

Best has studied in his city office over lunch breaks and taken leave from work to cram for finals. There have been weekend trips to the Outer Banks with a laptop but no real family vacations.

That's the way it is when you decide at 47 to go to law school.

Best was going to be a band director. He joined the Chesapeake Fire Department in 1974 instead and has devoted nearly 34 years to it.

Law was always in the back of his mind.

A childhood friend's father was an attorney. The boy's grandfather was a judge, and Best spent his summers as an adolescent doing yard work for the man.

Best remembers checking a law book out from the library in fifth grade.

It was the same year he learned to play the drums. Music took hold. He switched to cornet in sixth-grade band and played through high school.

"I put a lot of time and effort into it," he said. "I developed a passion for it. I was supposed to attend Shenandoah Conservatory of Music. I had a scholarship."

Then came a higher calling.

Best followed his older brother to the Deep Creek fire station as a teenage volunteer. He earned his advanced American Red Cross card at 16 - all he needed to try to help save the world.

Best began responding to heart attacks and vehicle accidents and house fires.

"That was a very maturing experience as I look back on it now," Best said, "seeing people in their worst hour."

His first fire sticks with him still, a middle-of-the-night call that shook him from sleep. Best suited up, jumped on the back steps of the truck and saw an orange glow in the dark sky.

The adrenaline was so powerful he could hardly stand still.

In his first full year as a volunteer, Best won an award for most valuable ambulance technician. He changed his plans.

His parents weren't pleased at first. One brother was studying to become a pharmacist. One was at Virginia Tech. College was expected from all three.

Best promised them he'd get an education. "But I wanted to do it my way," he said.

His way took awhile - three years to earn an associate's degree, seven years to earn a bachelor's in government administration. By then it was 1984, and Best had become Chesapeake's fire marshal.

He married his wife, Sheree, in 1986. His first son was born in 1990. He made assistant fire chief in 1991 and began working on a master's in business administration. That took three more years.

He became fire chief in 1998. He also learned of a new nighttime law school program at Regent University.

But Best figured he was too new to his job to pursue it. It would have to wait until retirement.

In 2000, at the encouragement of Sheree, Best took the LSAT, a test required for law school admission. One evening in May 2004, Best read a newspaper ad for Regent's law school.

It said law was "a calling." Best knew about callings.

To him, it all made sense: His LSAT scores were soon set to expire. Regent's last night law school class was about to start.

Best went to Clarence Cuffee, Chesapeake's city manager at the time.

"Just do it," Best remembers him saying. "And don't worry about figuring out each and every thing that could go wrong."

It was the final push he needed.

Three months later, Best was sitting in his first class and wondering what he'd gotten himself into. He was 47. He'd been out of school for a decade. There was so much material to learn.

"I'm just going to take it one day at a time," Best decided.

He did. It was hard, running a fire department by day, watching his kids get older, having life go on while he was in class and briefing cases and studying for finals.

The class that started with more than 20 dwindled to around six. Best kept going. He took his last final in April and graduated May 10.

The years had been wrought with sacrifice for Best and for his family - the missed dinners and the weekends spent in his home office.

They are the reason he made it, Best said. His family and God and a fire department full of capable people, and Tom Green, the local pharmacist who hired him at 14 and told him to be the best he could be, and Clarence Cuffee, and City Manager William Harrell, and so many others.

"It was not me," he said.

After briefing the Chesapeake City Council about severe storms that tore through Chesapeake one recent Tuesday night, Best was called back up front.

Harrell gave him a book and a certificate of recognition for successfully "balancing work, family and school."

The council applauded him.

Best plans to put the new degree to work, somehow.

Rescuing people from fires and practicing law aren't all that different, when you break it down. "When people find themselves overwhelmed... you're able to step in with expertise and provide help," Best said while sitting in his office last week.

His bookbag, still in surprisingly good shape, was out in the car.

He takes the bar exam in July. He has a lot of studying to do.

Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5208, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com