LIMA — At a solemn funeral Mass on a drizzly, overcast day, about 44 of retired Assistant Fire Chief Rollin Kerzee’s family and friends quietly bid farewell to a man who helped shepherd in a new era for the Lima Fire Department.
Kerzee, 87, died on Jan. 8. He created the Lima Fire Department’s arson unit in 1973, according to Fire Chief Bruce Black, and was its first full-time arson investigator.
“The chief [then George Kelley] had asked him to go down and find out what he needed and put something together,” daughter Tama Hollar, of Cridersville, said of her dad’s efforts to get federal funding for the unit. “Dad did all the research, all the work, Mom typed everything up and I helped proofread things,” she said. “It was a labor of love but it was intense for him.”
By 1979, the arson unit in Lima was so successful, Kerzee sought federal funds to expand the arson unit to all of Allen County.
“We’ve had such a successful program in the city that that’s one reason we were notified we were eligible,” Kerzee told The Lima News on Aug. 17, 1979. He said Lima’s 1978 conviction rate on arsonists was more than 30 percent, compared to a nationally averaged rate of about two percent.
“Dad was not too quick to jump on things and have someone arrested without knowing he had a lock-down absolute case,” said Tama Hollar. “He was uncompromising.”
Former assistant fire chief Bob Brinkman, 67, who retired in 2001, worked on the A shift while Kerzee was on the B shift. He remembered Kerzee as a by-the-book firefighter.
“He didn’t like our shift, said we were a bunch of renegades,” Brinkman remembered. “But later on, I went over to his shift, and when they say mentor … he was a mentor to so many guys, even off the job. He came to me one time when I was having real problems, and he broke me down, just by telling me how I had potential to move on and get behind this stuff. He just was a great guy.”
Rollin Kerzee’s influence reached beyond the fire department, to his family. One of his three sons, David, and a grandson, Travis, were both firefighters.
There was a part of Rollin Kerzee there when Capt. David Kerzee helped four other firefighters pull 71-year-old Francis Andrew out of his burning home on South Nixon Avenue, saving his life. David Kerzee was awarded one of the Lima Fire Department’s first medals of valor in 1993 for that effort.
That, too, was part of Rollin Kerzee’s legacy.
“That activism of Rollin’s could be multiplied over and over,” the Rev. Kent Kaufman told mourners at Kerzee’s funeral Mass at St. Charles Borromeo Roman Catholic Church in Lima.
Rollin Kerzee was entombed at Gethsemani Mausoleum in Lima. But his service for Lima will never be silenced.
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