Thursday, May 16, 2024
Jeff Tucker, of Brownwood, spent twenty years as a fireman, ten years as a fire fighter, then ten years as an arson investigator.
“I put in twenty and got out because I saw a lot of firemen who, as they got older, didn’t move as well as they used to. I knew I had a lot of good years left and wanted to do something else. I’m a bit of a serial entrepreneur. As a fireman I was on 24 hours, off 48, so I mowed yards, painted houses, built houses, and ran businesses. If there was something I was interested in, I went in neck deep.”
In Brownwood, he turned a historic building into a brewery, sold that, and is now restoring a twelve-story hotel. Part of his inborn sense of adventure made him audition for a television series called “Darkness.”
“It was an extreme survival series,” says Jeff. “The experiment was to put three guys in a dark cave, each in a different area, and try to find each other, then find a way out. We each had six ounces of water, a blanket, and a helmet. No food, no light. So, it was a light deprivation experience. But, for five and a half days, I never got to see anything but dark. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.
“The cave was just outside Hannibal, Missouri and was twenty-nine square miles or something like that. The three of us had never met. They put us in at different entry points and we would try to find each other. Supposedly there were caches of food down there, but we never found them. Two of the guys found some crawdads and earthworms. I found a natural spring and got water.
“We were constantly trying to focus but we could never make out anything. I bumped into one guy who happened to be a fireman from Louisiana. Then we found the other guy who was a former Green Beret. Then the fight was on to get out.
“What happened was your mind started to play tricks on you. Light deprivation is a very serious thing. Some people who had been on the program before wanted out after twenty-four hours. It was that extreme. I had worked in a dark environment as a fireman, so that worked to my advantage. One day in the cave, I saw Porky Pig. It was so strange. It was like he was across from me just looking at me.
“At one point, one of the guys had fallen. I didn’t know how far he fell but I felt he was going away from me. I thought he had fallen off a cliff. We would throw rocks out in front of us and once we threw a rock and never heard it hit bottom. There were a lot of things that would mess up your mind mentally.
“Now, the crew that was filming us wore night goggles that allowed them to see in the dark. When one of us got close to the edge of a cliff they would tell us to stop, that we couldn’t go that way. But we were fortunate enough to find our way out in five and a half days. It was an emotional moment when we got out. After that I didn’t sleep good for about a year.”
