Playing the Long Game, One Person at a Time, Part Two
The conclusion of the odyssey of Ulyses Sanchez from knucklehead kid to loving, grateful husband to full-time firefighter
We left our story on Ulyses Sanchez, former knucklehead middle schooler, as he became the first in his family to graduate high school. If you haven’t read part one, please do so now. It’ll make what’s to follow that much more satisfying — and I won’t have to punish regular readers by recapping the many difficult steps he made along the way to getting that sheepskin.
Ulyses stayed in touch with Jim Nuse, the former Round Rock City Manager who mentored1 him at Fulkes Middle school, after leaving high school. He found a job at a manufacturing plant and was in a relationship with the woman who would become his wife. Good and good. Actually, that second good is great, but gets us a little bit ahead of the story.
Aside from steady work and a steady girlfriend, life was not good, Ulyses said.
“I was drinking heavy with friends,” he said. “I was really reckless. I mean, really reckless. I was still out of control, but I was an adult now.”
The dream of becoming a firefighter was still in Ulyses. But the life he was living threatened to stop him before he even got started. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been warned. When it became obvious the initial visit with firefighters sparked real interest in the fire service as a career for Ulyses, Jim made sure he understood it took more than just passion to make it happen.
“I told him, ‘The thing is, you can’t get to be a fireman if you have a lick of trouble — if you get drunk, if you get high, if you have drugs, if you beat your wife — you’re out,” Jim recalls.
So when Jim reached out to adult Ulyses and asked him where he was on his journey to becoming a firefighter, it caught him up short. In addition to the reckless behavior, Ulyses had added 70 pounds to his 5-foot, 5-inch frame.
“I remember him calling me and asking, like, hey, are you a firefighter yet?” Ulyses said. “And I remember having to muster up (a response). It felt like it took forever to tell him no, and I said, ‘No.’
“I don’t remember hearing disappointment in his voice, but it was more or less just like, surprise, like, ‘Oh, really?’”
Jim’s lack of judgment, and his continued belief in Ulyses, made something click. As Ulyses put it, “that kind of put a fire under my butt.”
“It was just a simple conversation,” Ulyses said. “That’s all I needed.”
When Jim called, Ulyses was 25, out drinking with his buddies every weekend and packing on the kind of weight single guys that age who drink too much pack on with ease.
“I went from being 160 pounds to roughly 230,” Ulyses said. “When Jim called, I lived in the second story of an apartment complex and there was one day when I was walking up the stairs and was completely out of breath. That was a big moment for me. I knew I was not physically fit to be a firefighter, so I hired a personal trainer to get me closer to my goal.”
Along with the physical transformation, there was an emotional one as well. Jim was a powerful but occasional influence in Ulyses’ life. The love of a woman who believed in him had a life-changing impact as well.
“I’ve always told myself my family had a curse,” Ulyses said. “We’re just generational (knuckleheads). I’ve never heard of anybody in my family do anything good.”
He knew it didn’t have to be that way for him, but the obstacles to becoming a firefighter just seemed too high. After Jim called and rekindled his dream, Ulyses talked to Isamar, his girlfriend.
“I remember telling her, like, hey, I’m an idiot,” he said. “I’m here working at this manufacturing job, exactly like what my family has done and I’m going to be exactly what they are. This curse is just going to continue. And she just looked at me and was like, ‘Then quit and go to fire school.’ And I was like, ‘No way. I can’t do that.’ And she let me quit my job and just focus on what I wanted to do. She knew I could do it.”
The belief that he could do it — and the willingness to support him while she remained in school and continued working full time — prompted another life-changing moment for Ulyses.
“Growing up, I didn’t believe in marriage,” he said. “I only have two family members who have been married since I was a child and they have been rocky, so in my mind I didn’t think it was a big deal to be married. (Isamar) wanted to marry me and would talk to me about it to let me know it was important for her. I wasn’t ready yet. I had so much stuff going on in my life I didn’t feel like I could be a good husband. When she did this for me, I made my decision she was going to be my wife and I will be a great husband because I have the greatest partner to do it with.”
He started out at an EMS Academy. While Jim believed in him, and Isamar believed him, Ulyses still heard that voice inside his head saying he came from a family of (knuckleheads).
“When I was in EMS academy, I remember my classmates all seemed smart,” he said. “Everyone there had some background in the medical, college or military fields, and there I was, a regular dude that had trouble passing high school. I remember there was a classmate of mine that said he wanted to be a firefighter, and he looked like a fireman. He was easily 6 feet tall, smart and fit. I remember telling myself, ‘What am I doing here? I’ll never be a firefighter going against someone like him.’ I just doubted myself as soon as I sat in the classroom. At that moment, I was completely comfortable with the idea of failure and going home telling my fiancé that I tried but the manufacturing life is better for me. I didn’t think I could make it.”
Still, he stuck it out, earned his EMT certification, and … continued working at the manufacturing job. Wait, what?
“I had been working with a manufacturing company for four years and the company I was working for allowed me to continue working for them while I was completing my EMT-Basic certification,” Ulyses said. “When I returned to work my boss at the time made me a leadership offer to stay with them for more money, so I accepted the offer and that delayed my path on becoming a firefighter. I wanted to save money to propose to my wife. Two years later, we were engaged, and I quit to go to fire academy.”
Fire academy is much more physically demanding than EMT school. Part of the academy process is determining who can’t cut it, physically as well as mentally. There is a weeding out, and Hell Weekend plays an integral role in that process. There were 40 members in his class starting out. After Hell Weekend, there were 20. It’s grueling. That impressive classmate he met at EMS Academy? He also happened to be in Ulyses’ fire academy cohort. He quit on a day when it was freezing outside, and the cadets had to roll around on the icy cement.
When Hell Weekend was at its hardest, Ulyses drew from the stories of the men Jim had introduced him to all those years ago, and to the faith Isamar had in him.
“I just remembered Jim and all those people while I was running, and it was really hard,” he said. “I remember there was no way I was calling my wife to tell her I quit. There was no way Jim was going to call me back and I was going to say, ‘No, I’m not a firefighter.’ There was nothing that was going to beat me. Everything else left my head. I forgot I was 5-5. I forgot about everything about me in my past that was holding me back. I forgot it. It was me and a goal. It was just, forward. And at that moment, that’s when I realized I could do anything. Now, it’s me versus whatever’s in front of me. There’s nothing slowing me down.”
He started applying for firefighter jobs a month before graduating the academy. Competition is fierce for these jobs. Typically, there are hundreds of applicants for a handful of openings. He didn’t have his state certification yet, so many departments declined his application. But he found a department willing to take a chance on him — after he completed his state exam — even though the chief told him he only wanted experienced firefighters who could drive the engines.
“I looked at him with all the excitement in the world and told him to trust me, that I could learn that,” Ulyses said. “He gave me my first fire job. It was part time, but I didn’t care as long as I was a firefighter.”
The dream became a reality at Spicewood Fire Rescue, aka Burnet County Emergency Services District 9, a department that serves a rural community in the Texas Hill Country.
Personal note: Jim Nuse has been a friend and mentor to me for decades. He and Daisy, his lovely wife, moved to Tennessee a few years back to be closer to their son, daughter-in-law and grandkids, but we stay in touch. On June 9, 2021, the day he found out Ulyses got the job, I got this text and photo.
His first full-time gig was with Bastrop ESD 2, which serves a small but growing suburban community east of Austin. Three months later, he got the call from the Leander Fire Department, where he applied earlier, which serves an even faster growing community of 75,000 just northwest of Austin.
“At first I was not very happy, and I struggled,” Ulyses said. “But as time passes, it is the best decision I made.”
The folks at Leander FD agree. He’s been with Leander nearly two years now. Here’s what his supervisor, Lt. Chris Gardner, wrote to me about Ulyses.
“Honestly, the kid doesn’t get bragged on enough. I have been supervising FF Sanchez for a little over a year now. Throughout this time, I have come to enjoy working with this young man. He has a positive attitude that never wavers; even when surrounded by negativity he will always attempt to shift the mood or conversation. He strives to improve at the job and takes other more inexperienced folks under his wing along the way. He is receptive to feedback and constructive criticism when provided and then applies it to improve. I have been supervising firefighters for a while now and this young man is the type of firefighter that makes my job easy and also the kind that I wish I could replicate. It is a pleasure to work with and supervise FF Sanchez.”2
You would think landing his dream job in Leander would be the perfect bow with which to tie up this amazing story of a lost boy who finally found his way. And you would be wrong.
Leander is a couple of stone throws away from Fulkes Middle School, where there remains a mentorship program that connects kids with challenges with adults who willing to spend time with them. Ulyses has applied to be a mentor and will be going through the same training Jim did more than 15 years ago in hopes of having a similar impact on another knucklehead kid.
“I just think now I'm prepared to listen to and kind of give them advice,” he said. “I think I haven’t experienced everything, but I do think that I am capable of listening to someone and kind of helping them, in a way, with things that I’ve seen or things that I’ve encountered. I think now I realize that every day I get better, and I think that’s why I want to be a mentor, because I feel like I can help someone.
“And every day you can get better. It’s not a fast process. But now I’m 28. I just realized that I’m getting better every day, and some days I go backwards, but every day I’m getting better. And yeah, I think now, just mentally, I think I finally became mature.”
He recalls the man who first really listened to him, asked him serious questions about his life and where it was headed, and introduced him to other men who had a rough go of it early in life. In one of their last half-hour visits over lunch at Fulkes, Ulyses connected with Jim in a way he hadn’t before.
“What’s crazy, and I told my wife this, is (Jim) brought all these (other) people that I thought were super interesting, and towards the end, I kind of opened up with him,” Ulyses said. “And then he started talking about himself. When I was hearing about his background, I remember my mind was like, I was judging this old dude. He brought in, like, firefighters, he brought in cops, he brought in people that I was like, all these guys are cool. And then when he started talking about himself, I was like, oh, man, there are a lot of similarities as far as what we grew up with and what he had to deal with. And he didn't push that on me. He really kind of just let me be me and talk. And then at the end of it, he kind of showed me who he was and talked about it. I was like, ‘Oh, wow.’ Out of all those people, I'll always remember him.”
Says Jim: “Well, it was in that kid all the time. But I do think he got an opportunity, and he made the best of it. But boy, I tell you what, I am so proud of him. … Ulysses is like another son to me. I think the world of him.”
Onward and Upward.
Studies show students who have a mentor:
Have better attendance
Show improved attitudes toward school
Gain confidence and abilities to make positive life choices
Thanks to LFD Chief Billy Wusterhausen for arranging to have Lt. Gardner share his thoughts on FF Sanchez. I’ve known Billy for more than 20 years — he was at Round Rock FD before Leander named him chief. He’s another super sharp public servant dedicated to helping his peers and the community. Here’s an article he wrote about risk factors and warning signs for firefighter suicide.
I am deeply moved by your parable.
A builder sees the potential of a lost young man
and believes in him.
The builder had himself been a lost young man.
Through their long term relationship
the young man becomes a servant leader
like his mentor.
How blessed you have been to have Jim
as your friend and mentor, too!
Blessed, indeed. Everyone needs help, for issues large and small in their lives. Only the foolhardy try to go it alone.