http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/09/29/Massachusetts.911.dispatcher.fire/index.html
(CNN) -- From baby deliveries to unexpected deaths, Mike Bowes, a 911 dispatcher from Quincy, Massachusetts, has handled a wide range of emergency calls.
Emergency dispatcher Mike Bowes received a call that his home was in flames Monday night.
But Monday night, the 44-year-old received an unexpected call from his neighbor: His own house was on fire.
The 911 call came in about 10:45 p.m. Monday, a little more than an hour before Mike Bowes' shift ended.
My neighbor's house just blew up, the caller said.
"What's the address?" Mike Bowes asked patiently, just as he did with every emergency call for the past 11 years with the Quincy Police Department.
The caller frantically relayed the address, Bowes' home address for 20 years.
"It was shocking," Mike Bowes said. "I thought she was kidding. It's a long shot. I mean, what's the chances it will be your house?"
Out of 90,000 people who reside in Quincy, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, Mike Bowes' was the home in flames, and he had answered the emergency call.
Thoughts raced through his mind: Are my parents OK? Are the neighbors safe? What about my stuff?
Following procedure, Mike Bowes transferred the call to the fire department. Soon, dozens of calls about the fire from other neighbors began to pour into the control room.
One of the callers was his mother, Elizabeth Bowes, 68. She and her husband, Donald Bowes, 72, had escaped unharmed.
About 10:45 p.m., Elizabeth Bowes was reading a novel in the kitchen when she heard the explosion and saw flames shoot through the kitchen window. She ran to wake her husband in a first-floor bedroom.
There was also a landlord living in upstairs. Firefighters arrived within minutes and helped her to safety.
Within five minutes of receiving the call, police escorted Mike Bowes to his home. He could see the fire light up the dark sky from afar. Anxious neighbors gathered in the park nearby. He was relieved to find his parents together on the sidewalk.
"My parents are alive; my neighbors are alive," he said. "It's an inconvenience, but we'll get through it."
In another coincidence, one of the first firefighters to arrive on scene was Mike Bowes' cousin, Tom Bowes.
Tom Bowes, a firefighter for the past eight years, scrambled into the house to salvage old albums with wedding and baby photos amid the flames.
But everything else -- the clothes, electronics and furniture -- were destroyed.
No one was injured in the fire, and firefighters have yet to determine what caused the blaze. They say it started in the garage, about 15 feet from the home.
Mike Bowes says his job prepared him to deal with the challenging circumstances. Bowes and his family are living in a hotel, and local police officers and firefighters have donated clothes and money.
"A lot of people think dispatchers are strange because I've been joking about what happened," he said. "I say, 'If I'm not laughing, I'll start crying.' This is what I have to do."
BOSTON – Mary Travers, of the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, that used beautiful, tranquil harmonies to convey the angst and turmoil of the Vietnam antiwar movement, racial discrimination and more, died after a yearslong battle with leukemia. She was 72.
The band's publicist, Heather Lylis, said Travers died Wednesday at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut.
Bandmate Peter Yarrow said that in her final months, Travers handled her declining health with bravery and generosity, showing her love to friends and family "with great dignity and without restraint."
"It was, as Mary always was, honest and completely authentic," he said. "That's the way she sang, too — honestly and with complete authenticity."
Noel "Paul" Stookey, the trio's other member, praised Travers for her inspiring activism, "especially in her defense of the defenseless."
"I am deadened and heartsick beyond words to consider a life without Mary Travers and honored beyond my wildest dreams to have shared her spirit and her career," he said.
Mary Allin Travers was born on Nov. 9, 1936, in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of journalists who moved the family to Manhattan's bohemian Greenwich Village. She quickly became enamored with folk performers like the Weavers and was soon performing with Pete Seeger, a founding member of the Weavers who lived in the same building as the Travers family.
With a group called the Song Swappers, Travers backed Seeger on one album and two shows at Carnegie Hall. She also appeared (as one of a group of folk singers) in a short-lived 1958 Broadway show called "The Next President," starring comedian Mort Sahl.
It wasn't until she met up with Yarrow and Stookey that Travers would taste success on her own. Yarrow was managed by Albert B. Grossman, who later worked in the same capacity for Bob Dylan.
In the book "Positively 4th Street" by David Hajdu, Travers recalled that Grossman's strategy was to "find a nobody that he could nurture and make famous."
The budding trio, boosted by the arrangements of Milt Okun, spent seven months rehearsing in herGreenwich Village apartment before their 1961 public debut at the Bitter End.
Their beatnik look — a tall blonde flanked by a pair of goateed guitarists — was a part of their initial appeal. As The New York Times critic Robert Shelton put it not long afterward, "Sex appeal as a keystone for a folk-song group was the idea of the group's manager ... who searched for months for `the girl' until he decided on Miss Travers."
The trio mingled their music with liberal politics, both onstage and off. Their version of "If I Had a Hammer" became an anthem for racial equality. Other hits included "Lemon Tree," "Leaving on a Jet Plane" and "Puff (The Magic Dragon.)"
They were early champions of Dylan and performed his "Blowin' in the Wind" at the March on Washington in August 1963.
And they were vehement in their opposition to the Vietnam War, managing to stay true to their liberal beliefs while creating music that resonated in the American mainstream.
The group collected five Grammy Awards for their three-part harmony on enduring songs like "Leaving on a Jet Plane," "Puff (The Magic Dragon)" and "Blowin' in the Wind."
At one point in 1963, three of their albums were in the top six Billboard best-selling LPs as they became the biggest stars of the folk revival movement.
It was heady stuff for a trio that had formed in the early 1960s in Greenwich Village, running through simple tunes like "Mary Had a Little Lamb."
Their debut album came out in 1962, and immediately scored a pair of hits with their versions of "If I Had a Hammer" and "Lemon Tree." The former won them Grammys for best folk recording and best performance by a vocal group.
"Moving" was the follow-up, including the hit tale of innocence lost, "Puff (The Magic Dragon)" — which reached No. 2 on the charts, and generated since-discounted reports that it was an ode to marijuana.
Album No. 3, "In the Wind," featured three songs by the then-22-year-old Dylan. "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" and "Blowin' in the Wind" both reached the top 10, bringing Dylan's material to a massive audience; the latter shipped 300,000 copies during one two-week period.
"Blowin' In the Wind" became another civil rights anthem, and Peter, Paul and Mary fully embraced the cause. They marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, and performed with him in Washington.
In a 1966 Times interview, Travers said the three worked well together because they respected one another. "There has to be a certain amount of love just in order for you to survive together," she said. "I think a lot of groups have gone down the tubes because they were not able to relate to one another."
With the advent of the Beatles and Dylan's switch to electric guitar, the folk boom disappeared. Travers expressed disdain for folk-rock, telling the Chicago Daily News in 1966 that "it's so badly written. ... When the fad changed from folk to rock, they didn't take along any good writers."
But the trio continued their success, scoring with the tongue-in-cheek single "I Dig Rock and Roll Music," a gentle parody of the Mamas and the Papas, in 1967 and the John Denver-penned "Leaving on a Jet Plane" two years later.
They also continued as boosters for young songwriters, recording numbers written by then-little-knownGordon Lightfoot and Laura Nyro.
In 1969, the group earned their final Grammy for "Peter, Paul and Mommy," which won for best children's album. They disbanded in 1971, launching solo careers — Travers released five albums — that never achieved the heights of their collaborations.
Over the years they enjoyed several reunions, including a performance at a 1978 anti-nuclear benefit organized by Yarrow and a 35th anniversary album, "Lifelines," with fellow folkies Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Dave Van Ronk and Seeger. A boxed set of their music was released in 2004.
They remained politically active as well, performing in 1995 on the anniversary of the Kent State shootings and performing for California strawberry pickers.
Travers had undergone a successful bone marrow transplant to treat her leukemia and was able to return to performing after that.
"It was like a miracle," Travers told The Associated Press in 2006. "I'm just feeling fabulous. What's incredible is someone has given your life back. I'm out in the garden today. This time last year I was looking out a window at a hospital." She also said she told the marrow donor "how incredibly grateful I was."
But by mid-2009, Yarrow told WTOP radio in Washington that her condition had worsened again and he thought she would no longer be able to perform.
Travers lived for many years in Redding, Connecticut She is survived by her husband, Ethan Robbins, and daughters, Alicia and Erika.
I can't go shopping like normal people, I have to have things made specially and sometimes they aren't always as fashionable 
