Clare Frank was a 17-year-old emancipated minor when she began fighting fires in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains.
The year was 1982. Officially, she was one year short of the minimum age required, but Frank managed to maneuver her way through the paperwork jungle to land the seasonal firefighter job she craved.
Thirty-three years later, Frank retired in 2015 as the chief of fire protection with the state agency popularly known as CalFire. During a groundbreaking career that included law school and a four-year stint as fire chief for a San Francisco Bay Area city, Frank was the first — and she’s still the only — woman to serve as the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s chief of fire protection.
Frank responded to every manner of emergency in her career, from car collisions to the King Fire in 2014 that scorched 97,717 acres east of Sacramento.