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GREENSBORO — Dee Ann Staley wore seven different badges in her 30 years with the Greensboro Fire Department.

But only six were presented to her in the customary shadowbox at her retirement banquet.

Her deputy chief’s badge was in the box. As were her battalion chief and her captain badges.

The only badge not included was the first one she wore: fireman.

In 1978, Staley was among five women to enter the fire department’s training program. Two made it through the training to become firefighters. The other, Kay Pearman, retired from the department as a captain.

The women got separate sleeping quarters and their own bathroom, but it took a couple of years for the department to get badges reading “firefighter.”

Regardless of what Staley’s badge said, she distinguished herself with hard work and a good attitude.

“If you got in the door, you got in the same way everybody else does,” said interim Fire Chief David Spears, who worked with Staley for the past 28 years.

“She could have been successful anywhere she went,” Spears said.

Staley, now 52, climbed ladders, drove trucks, rescued people from burning buildings and got filthy alongside her male colleagues at a time when female firefighters across the country were enduring discrimination and hostility for pioneering in the male-dominated field.

For example, in 1979, a female firefighter trainee in Washington was expelled for poor academic performance, but the city’s Human Rights Office ordered her reinstatement because she had been treated unfairly for being a woman.

In 1980, a woman in Lexington, Mass., won a suit that she filed in 1978 in that state’s anti-discrimination commission. The commission agreed that she had been denied employment with the Boston suburb’s fire department because of her gender.

When Staley’s father brought up the recruiting poster he’d seen, she didn’t know anything about the problems other women were having. A new graduate of UNCG, Staley knew that she didn’t want to go to any more school just then, and the fire department offered a good salary and good benefits.

“I didn’t have a clue about anything,” Staley said. “That may have been a good thing.”

But Staley doesn’t see her experience as different from any other firefighter’s: “Like anybody else, you have to prove that you deserve to be there and you can do the job,” she said Wednesday, the last day she sat at her desk in a now empty office before her official retirement day Sunday. “Spending 24 hours a day together, you have to make it work.”

Besides being one of the department’s first two women, Staley was the first firefighter to be a bride. And the first to be a mother.

None of the approximately 25 female firefighters now in the department will have a conversation like the one Staley had when she made her pregnancy known at the department.

An assistant chief called her into his office.

When she arrived, he held up the black jacket to the uniform.

“How are you going to wear this coat?” he asked her.

The only maternity uniforms she could find in shops then, in 1988, were for nurses. So she cobbled together a uniform out of department-store black and navy maternity pants and white blouses.

Staley said fellow firefighters and the department’s administration have supported her fully for her entire career. The occasional cold shoulder from a firefighter’s wife at a social event back then hardly registered in comparison to the satisfaction she got from being a firefighter.

Staley chose her departure with the same criterion as her arrival: The time was right.

“I’ve had my opportunities and I feel like it’s time to go and give someone else the opportunities,” Staley said.

News researcher Diane Lamb contributed to this report.

Contact Sonja Elmquist at 373-7090 or sonja.elmquist@news-record.com