I had the opportunity last week to speak to a black firefighter who grew up in New London and is now the volunteer chief of a fire department in Groton.

He tried to get hired as a firefighter a few years ago in New London but wasn't.

The Groton chief is a professional emergency medical technician who works full time for the town of Ledyard and part-time for a Norwich ambulance company. He says he volunteers about 100 hours or more a month for the Groton fire department he leads.

He would have made an excellent candidate for the New London Fire Department. It was always a dream for him, he says, growing up in the city. He is now 43 and the father of seven.

"I used to watch the firetrucks go up and down the street and got to go meet the guys," he said.

The chief said he had interviews a few years ago with fire officials and with Wade Hyslop, the only black member of the New London City Council, but the hiring process changed midstream to one involving a written exam.

He said he got a surprise notice of the exam by a personnel office phone call from City Hall days before it was to happen. He had a new baby in the house, a full-time job and no time for exam prep classes.

Besides, he said, the New London job would have meant a cut in pay.

He backed out of applying - six new firefighters eventually were hired - and not one of the city or fire officials he had interviewed with called to encourage him to follow through with a job application.

I also spoke recently with a black lieutenant in another large Connecticut fire department, who also grew up in New London.

He also said he had always dreamed of being a firefighter in his hometown. Although he knew a lot of New London fire officials and volunteered for a while in Waterford when he lived here, no one from the city ever tried to recruit him for a firefighting job.

"There are others," he told me, saying that other blacks from New London also have been interested in firefighting but never were encouraged to apply. Both men asked not to be named.

The fire chief from Groton told me he lived in Arizona, where the fire departments do outreach to kids in the schools, and he wonders why that was never tried in New London.

Of course, the sad tradition continues with the city's firing late last year of its first black recruit in more than 30 years. Alfred Mayo was fired by Mayor Finizio two days before he was set to graduate from the state firefighting academy.

I also spoke over the last week to two other recruits in the class of 48 people, a class in which Mayo was the only black.

Both the recruits told me they don't believe Mayo was the one responsible for writing the name of the class in wet cement in a new sidewalk at the academy, one of the principal offenses cited in his firing by the city.

In fact, both recruits told me an instructor told the assembled class, after Mayo was led away, that he didn't believe that Mayo was the one responsible for the cement.

"From the beginning, they did not make his stay at the academy easy," said the recruit, who became a friend of Mayo at the academy. "They put him down a lot. ... He was one of the hardest workers there. I would choose him over a lot of the people at the academy if I were going into a burning building."

The other recruit told me about how Mayo took pictures of all the other class members and their families when they came for an open house at the academy. He then made a display of all the pictures on a bulletin board so they could see each other's families. Mayo posted the pictures on YouTube.

I also read a letter last week sent to Mayor Finizio by Delbert Coward, director of the Northeast Region of the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters.

"To say that I was shocked by the circumstances surrounding his unwarranted termination would be an understatement," he wrote to the mayor. "Worse than that was being informed of your city's record on diversity in its Fire Service over the last 35 years: a revelation that brings to mind an era of Jim Crow."

He's right.

This is the opinion of David Collins.