15 Things Every Small-Town Volunteer Firehouse Had That Are Gone Today

You could be pulled from high school to attend a fire. In the Pearl River Fire District (New York) if there was a big enough fire during school hours, the fire chief could call the school to release those students who were on the department to attend the fire. It happened very rarely and during my two years that I was both a high school student and a volunteer fireman we were never called out from school
 
An Army surplus Jeep with a skid mounted tank, pump and hose reel. It did not have a winch, roll cage or seat belts but it did a great job.
 
The neighborhood siren was cool, except if you lived under it in the neighborhood. As a kid, told me that was a good time to turn on my scanner... My town fire district was the size of Manhattan, 22 SQ miles, there were 5 sirens throughout the neighborhood. When brush fire season was in full bloom they almost never stopped blasting...One neighbor I heard tried to chop one of them down...Then there was the blue light, by law you were only supposed to have a single light, usually the "teardrop" that fit on your dashboard, but some went on to challenge the Battlestar Galactica with their set ups and drove like maniacs.
 
I was on my way to Home Depot the other day and was sitting in my Siverado waiting for the light to change and was near wailer for the Jericho Fire Department when a call was banged out. Loud? Holy Poop! We had the wailers and a air horn system that rang out the box number closest to the call location. The system repeated the box number 3 times. The wailers in Hicksville aren't used anymore but the air horn located on the roof of fire HQ still goes off. The box # system has also gone away replaced by 5 blasts from horn for 3 times only between 0600 and 2200 unless it's a working fire. Then everyone get's woken up.
 
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For those of us who broke in out in the country with a rural firehouse across from the church and the post office/grocery store in the early 1960's:

- The house siren going off during Sunday School or at 2:00am scaring the daylights out of everyone and getting the dogs barking.

- A call during the work week with at least one member showing up at the fire house driving a farm tractor.

- The art of following the rig in the era before mobile radios. If there wasn't a smoke column or a loom-up at night, you had to inspect every intersection for spilled water from the booster tank when they made a turn.

- Must have been no chickens, they had a bullroast.
 
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