By Brent Walton

I love to hang out with real heroes! These guys and gals are the best. I am glad to see the firemen, police and military get recognized as the real heroes.

We were lucky enough to be asked to participate in this event again. Hope for Firefighters is a one day event to raise funds for the families of firefighters that gave their lives in the line of duty. You know the guys running in as everyone else is running out. So it is an honor to be a part of this event. If you read the story from last year you will know the grill.

We met Todd Eves and Kevin Graff about 5:00AM at Station 3 in Los Angeles, they had been cooking all night. About an hour later some of the California Barbeque Association members (Grant Ford, Randy Gille and Joe Miles) show up to participate as well. Once again the CBBQA donates their time and expertise for a great cause. We cooked the tri-tip and then set off to Hope Street to set up.

At about 11:30 the bag-piper starts and everyone is ready. All of the buildings empty out into Hope Street. Everyone is having lunch purchased from one of the fire stations booth. They were all enjoying this change in the .normal work week schedule. Everyone is in a good mood.

We were cooking with the Fire Chiefs and each Fire Station had set up a booth along about a 3 block area on Hope Street in the middle of the downtown Los Angeles business district. All of the stations cooked a variety of items to sell from Mexican food to ice cream sundaes to sell to the public for lunch to raise funds. This is sort of a competition between firehouses to raise funds. Some "smack talk" goes back and forth about who has the best and sells the most. All in good fun.

I know we sold out of food and so did Todd and his group. We cooked a lot of BBQ and they raised a lot of money!!!

This is truly a unique event and we have made some good friends that we look forward to meeting up with through out the year.