F. Scott Mellott, a native Texan, was born in El
Paso. His Army Master Sergeant dad
retired in 1954 and moved the
family to Galveston, Texas.
His dad was an "Army Chef" and he did
what he knew, so the family bought an
existing diner near downtown Galveston,
called "The Two Sister's Grill".
The family lived on Galveston Island
until the late 1959 when they moved to
LaMarque, Texas where Scott lived
until after high school.
When asked
at an early age what he wanted to be
when he grew up, he always said "a
fireman". However, after several
semesters of college, he found that
the timing was not good for entrance
into the Houston Fire Department. He was
hired by the Port Terminal Railroad Company where
he was a clerk for 3 years. One day
while sitting at a desk at the
railroad's main office, he decided he
had had enough and wanted to start doing
what he really wanted to do, be a
Houston Firefighter. The next day he
started the application process.
In 1974
Scott went through the lengthy hiring
process and was hired and placed in
Class 74F, which started late November
1974. He graduated in March of
1975 and his first assignment was to
Fire House 8, which was one of the
several downtown fire houses.
After two
years of being a firefighter, with many
fires under his belt, he took the civil
service exam and became a Chauffeur in
1978. He stayed at that rank for
the rest of his career. He retired after
31 years in May 2, 2006.
Scott was
always interested in history and was
excited when the Houston Fire Museum
asked him to do a research project. The
project was to research information
pertaining to the HFD's line of duty
firefighters. The information was going
to be used in the "Memorial Section" of
the 1988 Houston Fire Department
History/Yearbook. The research took 8
months. In that time, he corrected a lot
of wrong information and actually
discovered two firefighters who had been
left off
the official HFD line of duty list. His
research was also used in the next two
HFD yearbooks, 1995 and 2000.
In 2000 the Houston Firefighters Pension and Relief Fund moved into their new home on the north side of Houston. The complex also included the "Memorial Garden" with a memorial wall and a line of duty monument. The new wall contained all of the names of HFD's deceased firefighters, which at the time was 1200 names. Each year names are added for those that died during the year. That same year, Scott started a memorial web site that contains the lists of those names. In 2002, Scott began to collect HFD photographs to enhance his research. Soon he had a collection of over 6000 HFD photographs.
Scott joined Facebook in 2005 and began adding firefighter friends and posting his old photos. Soon after that firefighters began encouraging him to "write a book". It was not until January 2012 that Scott began the process of producing a HFD pictorial history book that covered the years 1895 to 1980. When this book was published in August of 2012 and the sales process began, HFD firefighters were already asking him to continue to chronicle the rest of HFD history.
In January of 2013 Scott took all of the requests to continue the history to heart and started the process. The book that covered the years 1980 to 2014 was finished on July 16th 2014 and off the printing press and 4,000 books were delivered to Scott's house. Very early on the morning of August 20th, the truck from Taylor Balfour Publishing contained 8 palates, 44 boxes of 11 books each box. The two delivery men stacked 367 boxes of books on palates in Scott's den.
Scott
continues his research of the past HFD
firefighters and maintains his HFD
memorial web site. His mission is to
keep the memory of deceased Houston Fire
Fighters alive. This web site is prove
of that.
He retired after 10 years as a part time
baggage handler at Continental/United
Air Line. With his volunteer work with an animal
assisted therapy group, and the Houston
Beagle rescue group and this web site
keeps him very busy!
