Joyce T. Bowden gave up everything—cloistering herself for seven years in Montana’s mountains and forgoing her family and hometown—so that, by the age at which some are reaching the apex of their careers, she could be a rookie.

On the second floor of the headquarters of the Cambridge Fire Department (CFD), located just south of Memorial Hall, the 30-something sits at a hallway desk, typing. Her more seasoned colleagues, half-dressed in sleep shorts and the firefighter’s uniform, pass behind her chair and mutter gruff greetings.

She won this chair in February, after beating out thousands of firefighter hopefuls from around the country in a selective process that can stretch more than a decade. It all starts with a civil service exam, the firefighter’s version of the SAT. Hopefuls take the test every other year by the thousands, many of them with lifelong dreams of the CFD.

“You get, who knows, 10,000 people fighting for the same two jobs,” says Bowden’s superior, CFD Lieutenant Steve Brogan.

Cambridge Fire Department (CFD), once the domain of men who passed the job on to their sons, has turned into one of the most selective fire departments as it has added more and more tests to the application process.

There’s a reason it keeps attracting applicants. The 6.25-square-mile area that CFD serves is one of the most densely populated in Massachusetts. It includes hundreds of laboratories with potentially toxic substances. And then there’s the T, which fire officials fear could attract terrorists.

CFD is one of only 32 “Class 1” fire houses in the country—a recognition of the CFD’s effectiveness from the Insurance Services Office, a risk information clearinghouse.

“What that means is that the boys have all the toys,” Bowden says. CFD firefighters get sent to pricey training programs in far-flung places like Alabama and Las Vegas, and they have access to water rescue equipment and other gadgets that firefighters at other fire departments can only dream of.

But only the carefully selected few get to play with the toys—the kind of men and women who dive into the burning building instead of dousing it from afar.

“You could be a triathlete and, after five minutes in a fire, you could be exhausted,” Brogan says. CFD firefighters, however, “are knocking each other down to get inside the [burning] building.”

FAMILY MATTERS

On the ground floor of the station, the red-and-white trucks gleam and pump diesel fumes into yellow hoses. The department has come a long way since the days of horse-drawn rescue trucks, but up a back set of stairs to the firefighter’s quarters, it often seems that little has changed. Green metal lockers fill one room, and beyond it scraggly mattresses rest on bed frames that Brogan, the lieutenant, jokes are remnants of World War I.

Brogan, 46, a member of the old guard at CFD, is the descendant of a family with a rich pedigree in firefighting: the Friels. As a boy in North Cambridge, he played at the CFD station, the same one where his grandfather had made the Friel name famous by creating the country’s second rescue team. In the office that he shares with a set of three other rotating lieutenants, Brogan proudly shows a copy of a photo of his grandfather with the pioneering horse-drawn rescue team.

After Brogan’s grandfather, the rest of the family’s males joined the CFD—Uncle Willy Friel, two of his brothers, his cousin Ed, maybe a few other uncles. It’s hard to keep track, Brogan says, smiling. The black sheep was one uncle who left CFD for law school.

But even with his legacy, Brogan didn’t aim for the at first CFD. He joined the Navy instead. But by age 26—after taking a civil-service exam at his brother’s insistence—Brogan got a call from the CFD.