Janent hightower, Playboy Staff Photographer David Mecey and Senior Photography Editor Jeff Cohen had just finished a relaxed expense-account dinner (a dozen oysters and a lobster apiece) at North Houston's Pappas Seafood House & Oyster Bar Restaurant when Hightower's beeper sounded. It was the moment Mecey and Cohen had been waiting for since they arrived in town the previous day. Hightower was about to fight a fire. "Better to work on a full stomach than hungry," she said, heading for the door.
Ten minutes later, decked out in her heat-resistant rubber coat and fireman's hat, Hightower and the rest of her crew were aboard a pump truck, racing to a burning abandoned frame house on the outskirts of Houston, with Mecey and Cohen following close behind in their rented car. Within minutes of her arrival at the fire site, Hightower had unrolled her hose, rigged it up to the truck and begun inching through waves of heat toward the burning building, laying down a fog (a fine spray of water) to keep the fire from spreading to the surrounding trees and brush. Mecey snapped the action as Janet approached the blazing front wall of the house and entered the building. "And then," he says, "I just kept my fingers crossed for her until she came back out." Which, fortunately, she did--hot, perspiring and exhausted, as Mecey captured her on the facing page. "Still, even though she was covered with soot and water from the hoses," says Mecey, "she was the prettiest damn fire fighter I'd ever seen." And that, of course, is why Janet is unusual. Here you have a 110-pound woman who has the training and physical strength to bust down a door, crawl up two flights of stairs on her belly and, if necessary, drag a 200-pound man back downstairs with her. In short, she puts the lie to the stereotype of fire fighting's being men's work. Her boyfriend, a detective on the Houston police force, "has a dangerous job," she says, "but I think being a fire fighter is the most dangerous job there is." Then why, when she could be doing any number of jobs that don't require risking life and limb, did she choose to be one? "I was invited to an open meeting of the local volunteer fire fighters' group, and after listening to what they had to offer, I was sold. The biggest attraction was that they'd send me to the Texas A & M fire-fighters-training program. I figured that getting through it would be an accomplishment in itself. Besides, it was a switch from shining shoes." Shoes? "Yeah. At the time, I was working for a company called Shine on Texas, which sent female shoe shiners around to various bars in the area to shine men's boots." She signed on with the volunteer fire department of Ponderosa, a Houston suburb, two years ago, took another job as a secretary at a local finance company and has been fighting fires in her spare time ever since. We discovered her when we sent Mecey to shoot The Girls of Texas (Playboy, February 1985). "I wanted to be in that pictorial, but by the time I applied, it was too late. When David asked me if I'd like to be in a pictorial all by myself, I said, 'Are you kidding?' If there's one thing that could be more exciting than fighting fires, it's being in Playboy." And here she is, in photos hotter than a three-alarm fire. Too hot, in fact, for the Ponderosa F.D. to handle; its brass, nervous about Janet's planned Playboy appearance, at the last minute nixed the use of its equipment for our shooting and asked her to turn in her uniform. Fortunately, two red-blooded squadrons of smoke eaters from neighboring areas came to Janet's rescue, with the results you see here.
