What started out as a single post on the Firehouse.com forums has grown into an international organization of diverse, yet likeminded firefighters striving for the same goal - to make their job a little easier and a little safer by sharing their experience and camaraderie.

The International Association of Crusty Old Jakes was born in 1999 after Firehouse.com forum user Capt. Gonzo, also known as Capt. Ron Ayotte, saw too much disrespect and dishonesty among the anonymous firefighters online. After one particular discussion thread got out of hand and was shut down, 'I said maybe it's time for a new organization,' Ayotte said. 'I just threw this out on a whim.'

Ayotte suggested an online organization of firefighters who would respect one another's opinions, hold themselves to higher standards as firefighters, and communicate in order to make things better for firefighters rather than to attack one another.

He posted the membership requirements as follows:

* An appreciation of the job, respect for those who did the job while you were still in diapers and the sacrifices made by those who preceeded us.

* A willingness to honor the past, think outside of the box, challenge the future, train and learn new stuff (in other words....building more crust! )

* A willingness to take the next generation under your wing and show them the true path to firefighting enlightenment...making them 'pup proof'

* A dislike for 'mutts'.

* A love of leather helmets! (it's okay if you don't have one, ya just gotta love them! )

* Doing your time as a 'lower than whale scat probie' without complaints or regrets.

* Crawling down a long, smokey hallway with zero visibility.

* Knowing what it's like to be on the other side of an opposing hose stream.

* Working together to make the job better rather than fight among each other!

* Respecting each other in the true spirit of brotherhood/sisterhood.

* PS: you don't have to be crusty and old to join...just be willing to make the transformation!

Ayotte was surprised when after his post, 'All of a sudden there were answers to my post saying where do I sign up. It just snowballed from there,' he said.

The group soon started an official website and has grown to 212 members, both career and volunteer, and ranging from cadets to chiefs to firefighter support staff. Members come from all across the U.S. and countries including New Zealand, England and Australia.

'It's truly an international association of crusty old jakes,' Ayotte said.

One night they even held elections to choose officers for the organization. 'They call me the president because it was my idea,' Ayotte said. Ayotte has been in the fire service for 22 years and serves as a captain at the Marlborough Fire Department in Massachusetts.

In addition to communicating over their forums, IACOJ members hold Sunday night chat room meetings. 'We talk about things that happened during the week, and it's all the same,' he said. Whether career or volunteer, he said, firefighters are looking for solutions to the same basic problems such as staffing and funding shortages.

IACOJ members share advice and discuss news, scenarios and strategies. Ayotte said the sharing of everyone's experience is extremely valuable regardless of rank.

'Some say you don't know anything if you're not a chief, but who's doing all the work? It's the grunts,' Ayotte said.

'Our entire site, our organization, it's an education process,' he said. 'We make mistakes and we learn from them.'

Ayotte said most members discover the IACOJ through the Firehouse.com forums or by word of mouth, so many of the members are already familiar with each other from the Firehouse forums or the Firefighterclosecalls website.

Ayotte said his members see cyberspace as a vast source of information and the online firefighter community as a great learning tool. He describes looking at the forums as similar to looking at a big photo album; every comment gives a snapshot of the topic being discussed, but you need to draw back and look at all of the different viewpoints to see the big picture.

One thing that makes the IACOJ forums unique, Ayotte said, is that there isn't a lot of hiding behind anonymous screen names in order to make inflammatory comments. Firefighters can choose to be anonymous but they really aren't because they get to know each other, and therefore respect each other.

They also discourage casual, one-time forum users by asking people to apply for membership and to register for a free online account. When people apply they need to answer the following questions: 'Why you would like to be an IACOJ Member: Where/who you heard about the site from: If you heard about this site from another site, what your username is there: Explorer/jr/cadet probie/firefirefighter: Describe your firefighting experience.'

'We're not discriminating, but we want people who are serious about the job,' Ayotte said.

Some of the events they have sought to learn from included the Worcester and 9/11 tragedies, as well as the Lairdsville, NY training death of Bradley Golden, which drove home the standard against ever using real 'victims' in live fire training. 'Lairdsville was an eye opener for a lot of people,' Ayotte said. 'Everything that could go wrong in Lairdsville did.'

Ayotte said IACOJ members certainly have their differences of opinion, but they agree to disagree rather than lash out at each other on things like career versus volunteer issues. They try to contribute to progress in the fire service, and to help groom the next generation of firefighters by taking their junior members under their wing.

'The fire service is the type of organization where you take the good with the bad, as long as people are willing to learn new things and take new approaches,' Ayotte said. 'Twenty years ago if you said terrorism and weapoms of mass destruction, you'd say that's the military's job. Now it's our job.'

Ayotte said the IACOJ members are always in touch with each other and have become a very tight knit group. About 15 of them met in person in 2002 in Manhattan after the 9/11 memorial service, and some have gotten their families together for dinner.

'It's like we're friends and family,' Ayotte said. 'And we are family, we're brothers and sisters.'