Tag Archives: Elmwood Park Deputy Fire Chief Michael Ventura

In the early 1980s, Michael Ventura was working as a plumber after attending Elmhurst College and Triton College. But that all changed thanks to Mike Marino, his late wife’s cousin. Now the chief of the Elmwood Park Fire Department, Marino was a firefighter when he invited Ventura down to the station one day. “After attending college, I couldn’t find anything that really sparked my interest, until I stepped into that fire department,” Ventura recalls. Ventura started out in 1982 as a paid on-call fireman, which is basically a part-time fireman. On May 25, 1985, he took the test and became …