The organization of citizen fire brigades around disparate yokels like us seems a noble extension of civilized society, but it has not always been perceived as such. Back in A.D. 112, Pliny the Younger had been witness to a devastating fire in that portion of Asia Minor under his governance. In a letter to the Emperor Trajan, Pliny bemoaned the lack of firefighters and firefighting apparatus and requested that he be allowed to form a company of 150 firemen.
No dice, replied Emperor Trajan. “If people assemble for a common purpose,” he wrote, “whatever name we give them and for whatever reason, they soon turn into a political club.” He didn’t mind making firefighting equipment and training available to the general public, but feared that any sort of sanctioned firefighting organization would end up fomenting political disturbances. History has proven, of course, that mostly we just foment water fights, raffles, and chicken feeds.
Our little volunteer department is actually a compromise drawn on the concepts of both Pliny and Trajan. We are organized and are a part of the local political scene inasmuch as we subsist in part on taxes, but because none of us is a career firefighter, we are for the most part descendants of Trajan’s general public, trained to use equipment owned by the community at large.
The first firefighting equipment of record in New Auburn is referenced in the handwritten minutes of a village board meeting held April 2, 1902. “Farmer’s Store Cos. Bill for $2.28 for pails used at Hoard’s fire, recommended to the consideration of the board. Accepted, carried.”
Not so fast there, Smokey. Four days later, April 6, 1902: “Pail bill disallowed.” No reason given.
For the next three years, there are no more mentions of firefighting, but apparently, forward-thinking citizens realized borrowed pails weren’t going to cut it in the long run. On June 3, 1905, the village board minutes contain the following entry, an entry which years hence would put me face-to-face with the One-Eyed Beagle:
A typewritten report from the Committee on fire protection and apparatus of their recommendations of May 27th and June 2nd, ’05, was read and report filed with Clerk.
Moved and seconded that we approve of the recommendations of said Committee on fire protection in procuring fire fighting apparatus that will comply with the requirements of the insurance companies in raising our village from a fifth rate to a fourth rate town. Carried.
Duly note we are not just some fifth-rate town.
Moved and seconded that the Chairmen of the finance and street committees and the president of the village board negotiate with the American La France Fire Engine Company and procure their best terms and purchase one double 35 gallon Chemical Engine [rather than using a pump, the water pressure in a chemical engine was generated by combining water, soda, and acid in a sealed tank] as per specifications furnished by their agent T. R. Johnstone under date of June 3rd and exhibited in writing. Carried.
If you’re going to have a fire truck, you better have a fire chief. And he’ll need minions and underlings. We move to July 1, 1905:
Moved and seconded that for the purpose of organizing a volunteer fire company we hereby appoint Thomas W. Peterson as Fire Chief he to select his own assistants. Carried.
On August 2, 1905, it was time to kick the tires:
The Chemical Engine which was shipped by the LaFrance Company having arrived the president appointed a committee to check over invoice of paraphernalia and to see that the village gets a good demonstration of what the engine will do.
Three days pass. In minutes dated August 5, 1905, it appears agent T. R. Johnstone had a bad day:
The exhibition given by the agent was not satisfactory to the board and they asked Mr. Johnstone to give them a further demonstration to show what a chemical engine could accomplish.
The representative of the company agreed to do this on Monday, August 7, and the board adjourned to await the call of the president.
So they chewed the whole thing over for a few days. I imagine T.R. Johnstone in a room at the Hotel Auburn, downing stomach powders and calculating lost commissions. I don’t think he ever had anything to worry about. Small-town folk want to appear skeptic and shrewd, but more than that, we really, really want the newfangled doodad. I imagine the board members met around town and did some dismissive bloviating, but you can hear corollary expositions in the local café to this very day, when some local goes on at length and volume about the frivolous vacuity of satellite television or Indian casinos, then hurries home to watch Silk Stalkings before catching the courtesy bus to bingo night. We know we’re rubes, we just don’t want to be taken for rubes. So they made old T.R. sweat some, and they performed some procedural gymnastics, but on August 10, 1905, New Auburn got itself a fire truck:
Board met in special session at call of President to make settlement of the matter of the chemical engine…the committee on Engine reported that they did not prepare another demonstration feeling that it would not satisfy all, there being so much sentiment against the engine, and thus they would save extra cost. The committee was satisfied that the first exhibition was not a fair test. Committee’s report was on motion, seconded. Adopted.
Moved and seconded to postpone the acceptance and settlement till some future time. Motion lost.
Motion made that we reject this engine. Motion lost.
Motion and second that we accept the engine and that the President and Clerk be authorized to draw an order for ($200) two hundred dollars to make first payment on contract and to sign all necessary warrants in settlement of the same. Carried by unanimous vote. Moved and carried to adjourn.
Really, the village board deserves a little credit. In the space of three months, our burg went from appropriated buckets to a full-blown department. From fifth rate to fourth rate.
The chief arranged to store the fire engine at the village hall. The local marshal hauled it to fire scenes at a buck a shot. (The same minutes that indicate the marshal was paid $4 for hauling the fire engine to four different fires also indicated that he was paid $2.60 “for care of tramps.”) There remained the difficulty of alerting firefighters to the presence of a fire. The solution came about on January 6, 1906, in the form of fortuitous fallout from a controversy involving school equipment:
To set aside future misunderstanding it was moved and carried that the ownership of the school bell be transferred to school district No. 11, the Village to reserve the right of the use of the bell by the Fire department for fire and practice call.
Just over three years later, in the minutes of February 3, 1909, it was recorded that an order for $200 was drawn “to pay the final note on the Village fire engine.” Six months later, on August 4, 1909, the minutes state that “a representative of a hook and ladder company was present and laid a proposition before the Board for them to consider the purchase of a hook and ladder truck.”
This is the thing about firefighters. You give them toys, and they want more toys. Today we have seven trucks. Two pumpers, three tankers, one rapid-attack pumper, and a rescue van. One of the pumpers is twenty-seven years old. We use it mostly to fight wildfires. The Beagle is one of the few people on the department able to run it with confidence. The new pumper is fourteen years old. It has an open, rear-facing cab unit in which three firefighters can ride. In the winter, by the time you get to the scene, your fingers are so cold you can’t work the buckles on the air packs. The tankers hold roughly 2,300 gallons of water each. Because we rarely have access to fire hydrants, we use a shuttle system, running water to the fire scene in a constant rotation of tankers. The rapid-attack pumper is our newest vehicle. We got it primarily for fighting brush fires (it has four-wheel drive and winches fore and aft), but with its on-board water and twin inch-and-a-half hose reels, it can be invaluable in getting an early jump on a house fire while the main pumper is being set up. The rescue van is a 1985 Ford panel van. We bolted an old school-bus seat to the floor and use it mainly for responding to medical emergencies.
All of the rigs carry extra equipment. Two of the tan
kers are equipped with small outboard pumps and can be used to fight grass fires. The main pumper is crammed with gear—air packs, fire axes, an array of nozzles and couplers, 1,200 feet of hose, chimney fire equipment, powerful flashlights, a roof saw, a collapsible water reservoir, hose wrenches, suction apparatus, a generator, a rackful of ladders. Our most recent acquisition is a thermal imager. It can see through smoke, detect heat inside a wall, show the outline of a body in the darkness. It is, in short, magic. It fits in a case half the size of a pillow. It cost $15,000.
Some of the money we have to raise on our own. It’s not all covered by the tax rolls. Fund-raisers are a way of life in most volunteer departments. We’ll have a pancake breakfast now and then, or sell some barbecued chicken. We have a raffle almost every year. For as long as I can remember, two of the top five prizes have been firearms. I always get a kick out of that. All the efforts to do away with guns, and here we are giving them away.
Our most well-worn money-maker is the Jamboree Days beer tent. We run it for three days in conjunction with a softball tournament. The softball tournament kicks off on Friday night with an exhibition game between our fire department and the fire department from the city of Chetek, nine miles to the north. A lot of the guys on the Chetek department play league ball. A lot of the guys on our department play pinochle. It shows. We get trounced on a yearly basis, but it’s a real good time. Not too serious, a lot of hollering and shenanigans. Beer cups in the outfield. It pays off in little ways throughout the year when the two departments fulfill their mutual aid agreements by helping each other out on big calls. You’re in a ditch somewhere, or packing up to head into a burning barn, and you recognize the person helping you as the same guy that blew a shoe rounding third, or who lent you his glove in the outfield. It gives you a little human common ground. The chiefs and government representatives hash out the specifics of the mutual aid contract at big tables during long meetings. The spirit of the contract works itself out on the softball field.
The real softball tournament kicks off at eight A.M. on Saturday, runs ’til dark, and picks up again Sunday morning. Teams come from all over. The softball field is directly adjacent to the beer tent, which is no accident—amateur softball players are your prime suds demographic. We always hope for hot weather. When it rains, the teams still show up, but beer sales tank.
The Beagle feels he is past his softball prime, so he spends most of the weekend tending the beer-tent bar. He’ll usually punch out early Saturday night so he can drink and dance some, but the rest of the weekend, you can find him behind the plywood stand, filling pitchers. Last year the Beagle and I got down to the park early Sunday morning to do a little cleanup before the crowds arrived. It wasn’t even nine A.M. and the first softball game of the day was already under way. We were picking up plastic cups and straightening tables when this guy walked into the tent and asked if he could get a beer. “I guess there’s no law against it,” said the Beagle. He went behind the bar and got a clean cup. The guy propped his elbows on the plywood. I didn’t recognize him, but he wasn’t dressed for softball. Bob took his money and passed him the beer. The guy raised the cup, and just when it was at his lips, someone smacked a long fly ball. At the crack of the bat, the man’s head snapped to the right. His beer stayed right where it was, fixed in midair. He scanned the field for a minute, watched the outfielder make the catch, then brought his lips back in line with the cup, which hadn’t moved. Ducking forward to take a pull at the foam, he rolled his eyes at the Beagle and shook his head.
“Little early in the mornin’ for softball!”
The only equipment some of your early colonial firefighters had were leather buckets made by Dutch shoemakers. The firefighters worked in pairs, the buckets suspended between them on two parallel poles. A good team could hustle eighteen buckets. This being prior to the age of personalized license plates, many of the firefighters gussied up their buckets with embroidery and gold leaf. Without a pickup window in which to strategically hang their helmet and turnout gear, you probably had your guys who ran around town with their personalized bucket dangling off their mule. Operative theory being, chicks dig firefighters, and why should colonial chicks be any different?
Before I moved back and joined the department, someone out in the county called in a garage fire. Bryan Swanson and my brother Jed were working in that neck of the woods, and got there first. The flames were just taking hold. Bryan grabbed a plastic bucket, filled it in the ditch, and handed it up to Jed. Jed flung the water on the flames. It was touch and go for a while, but when the fire trucks rolled up, Bryan and Jed were standing there in their gear with their buckets and the flames were flat. “Get the wet stuff on the red stuff,” the old-timers say, and sometimes the old ways will do.
Right now, the Beagle needs a little extra cash. Wife Number Two hit the road a while back, but it will take a thousand bucks to do the divorce and make it official. He’ll get the money in November, he says, off all the overtime he accumulates butchering during deer season. The deer come in nonstop then, stiff in the back of pickups, slung over trunks, stacked in trailers. The Beagle will cut up fifteen, twenty deer a day. He is at work by four A.M., and he leaves for home, bone-tired and nicked up, at eight P.M. It goes on like that for several weeks. My family and I butcher our own deer, but I dropped off a few extras for the Hunters Against Hunger program last year, and it was strange to see the Beagle in his apron, with his knife and steel, strange in that off-center little way it always is when we see acquaintances outside the usual context. The deer—over 200 of them—were all dragged in headfirst and laid out four wide along the chutes leading to the killing floor. The effect was riverine. One thought of logjams. Most of the deer were hung from trees or rafters after they were shot, and had frozen with their back legs and necks extended, and their forelegs bent at the knee. All those deer in that position, it looked like the mass start of a deer triathlon, everybody doing the backstroke. I know what it is to skin and bone a deer—my family and I do probably twenty a year—and when the Beagle tells me he sees the river of upturned deer legs in his sleep, I believe him. But this year, for every hide that hits the floor, another couple of dollars go in the divorce kitty.
We talked about it on our way back from a call in the rescue van, just me and him. An old lady had fallen in her bathroom and become wedged between the toilet and the tub. She had been there all night. She was cold to the touch and unable to talk. She had terrified eyes. We took her vital signs and gave her oxygen, and then the Beagle covered her with a blanket and I held her hand, talking to her until the ambulance came. Sometimes the best thing we can do is give someone a little comfort. On the ride back, we got to talking about women, and the Beagle said he knew this last marriage was in trouble when his wife wouldn’t let him look at the checkbook. I agreed that might be one of your Top Five Signs. Other disagreements—about bills, about stepchildren—followed, until eventually the Beagle reckoned it was time—once again—to split the blanket. The One-Eyed Beagle, el lobo solo. But I had heard he was already seeing another woman. The Beagle never stays lonely long. We were crossing the overpass when I said as much. I asked him what his secret was. I was in the passenger seat, and he turned and grinned at me. “I got a big sign on my forehead,” he said. “Blinking red lights. It says, dumb bastard!” He turns his eye back to the road, and laughs like it’s the best joke ever. What the Beagle has is equanimity.
Back in the mid-1600s, certain prominent citizens of New Amsterdam were assigned by the city government to patrol the streets at night with large wooden rattles. Upon spotting a fire, they spun the rattles, waking the locals, who jumped out of bed and formed bucket brigades. According to historian and Firehouse contributing editor Paul Hashagan, the “rattle watch” is generally recognized as the first organized attempt at fighting fire in America. You’ll read here and there that Benjamin Franklin founded the first volunteer fire department in America. That’s inaccurate, but it is widely agreed that when he formed Philadel
phia’s Union Fire Company in 1736, he set the organizational standard for all volunteer brigades to follow. Franklin’s fire company would put your fire out no matter who you were; prior to this, many fire “clubs” and “societies” existed only to protect paying members. The Friendship Veterans Fire Engine Company of Alexandria, Virginia, counted among its members a surveyor named George Washington. In 1774, he bought the city its first fire engine. Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Benedict Arnold, James Buchanan, and Millard Fillmore were all volunteer firefighters. The first female volunteer firefighter of record was a slave named Molly Williams. The juxtaposition of “volunteer” and “slave” produces a certain irony.
If I could swing the time-travel thing, it would be a kick to convene Ben Franklin and the Beagle over some beers and venison sausage. Maybe a basket of deep-fried cheese curds. It would be a ripping chat. They would speak of firefighting, of course. Of all that has changed, and all that remains the same. It is difficult to know what the Beagle would have made of the Franklin chestnut “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.” There is much there of pertinence to a cross-eyed double-divorcé. Franklin filled Poor Richard’s Almanack with that sort of wit, but here too the Beagle would be more than able to return serve. The Beagle can turn a phrase. One frosty morning we work half an hour to extricate a young man from a mangled car. Later, the Beagle declares, “Hell, you couldn’t a got that guy outta there with a shoehorn and a plunger!” When rotund Tee Norman and skinny Dude Fawcett get to horsing around next to the portable reservoir during a training session and Tee pulls Dude into the water, I try to describe the thrashing and splashing to someone back at the fire hall, and the Beagle breaks in. “What it looked like,” he says, “was a water snake wrasslin’ a walrus!” Once the Beagle and I made a call after dark on a godforsaken logging trail and got jumped by some cheesehead Deliverance feeb. The Beagle was cool, but later, when we were safely home, he turned that eye on me. “Hell, Mikey, I was nervous as a whore in church!”
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