CHICAGO (WGN) – The Chicago Fire Department and the African American Firefighters and Paramedics League hosted its Firefighter For A Day event Saturday to inspire youngsters to the fire service when they grow up.

The event, held at the Quinn Fire Academy in the West Loop, attracted 140 children who got to be a firefighter for a day.

“I always wanted to be a fireman ever since I was a little kid. I even had a fireman toy,” potential future firefighter Voshon Figures said.

Kids as young as five years old learned how to make “forced entry” into a burning building, how to survive and how to perform CPR, all in hopes of getting them to consider a career in firefighting.

“This is what we train all of our candidates, so they’ll be going through some of the motions that I went through and hundreds of members have went through over the past hundreds of years,” Chicago firefighter and EMT Brandon Hampton said. “A lot of times people think it’s just fighting fires, but we do anything from EMS; I know people say cats stuck in trees – we don’t do that anymore, but if you’re grandmother/grandfather needs help, we come. So we are like pillars in our community.”

WGN’s Judy Wang has more. To see the full story, watch the video in the player above.