Although I'm not a truck girl, per se, and as silly as this may sound, I love fire trucks. Especially red ones like this 1964 FWD with a Peter Pirsch body that popped up on Marketplace for sale down in Canton. They're asking just $1,400 for it. Such a deal.
This big engine is historically significant because it represents a transition from the traditional postwar fire engine to the larger, more sophisticated apparatus that would become commonplace in American fire departments for decades.
The body was designed and built by the Peter Pirsch & Sons Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin. The company was founded in 1900 and became one of America's best-known manufacturers of fire apparatus. Pirsch eventually filed for bankruptcy in 1987. Pierce Manufacturing in Appleton, Wisconsin, which is owned by the Oshkosh Corporation, is the largest manufacturer of firetrucks in the United States today.
The chassis this is built on was manufactured by FWD, originally the Four-Wheel Drive Auto Company, also based in Wisconsin. FWD specialized in four-wheel-drive trucks and heavy-duty chassis and became an important supplier of military and commercial trucks. The company has survived in various forms and, through its current incarnation, continues to build specialized, heavy-duty truck chassis.
However, my purely affectionate view of fire trucks changed after a fire broke out in my childhood home on October 24, 1979. That feeling of awe, safety and protection when one rumbles by with sirens screaming is now mixed equally with fear and dread because I know very well that where that truck is going could very well be my house.
I was in my sophomore year at Oceanside High School back on Long Island that picture-perfect Wednesday afternoon. I was the starting center on the JV football team and was headed to the locker room for practice when my name was announced over the school's crackly P.A. system and I was told to go to the principal's office. Immediately.
Once in the office, the staff, which was, if anything, indifferent to students, was eerily and suspiciously kind to me. The kind of overt niceness that puts me on edge to this day; I knew something was up.
One of the usually stone-cold, stoic aides said to me, "Charles, there's been a small fire in your home and your mother called and would like for you to be taken home immediately."
While she said it in as nice a way as possible, what she said had as much of an impact on me as if she'd said it to me in the hack-sawed, blow-your-head-off way my mother would have. Even the principal came out of his lair, gave me a hug, patted me on the head and assured me everything was going to be all right.
"The fuck is going on here?" I thought to myself.
I braced for impact all the way home in the aide's car. My heart was racing, my mind a blur. I was so upset I don't even remember what kind of car she had.
We couldn't make the left onto my block from the main road because of the fleet of fire engines lining the street. The aide dropped me at the corner and wished me well.
I walked the plank down the block past all of the pumpers. I don't remember, but some of them might have been FWD's like this one. Fire hoses were attached to every hydrant on the block, water was everywhere, and the odd stench of burned wood and plastic hung in the air.
I got within a couple of doors of my house, and my worst fears were realized: the fire was worse than advertised.
The fire had started and was all but contained to the small bedroom my younger brother and I shared. A firefighter was hacking away with an axe at an increasingly gaping hole in the side of the house where the window next to my bed was. Smoke and steam continued to pour from the hole. Everything my brother and I owned was strewn on the ground, some things still smoldering, some things, like my mattress, incinerated.
One firefighter told me the fire was out and it was safe to go inside the house. I said nothing as the aluminum door slammed behind me. Water was dripping from seemingly everywhere; there were buckets and pots to catch some of it.
My mother was in the dining room, right off the front door; she was chatting with insurance people and a police officer. Once she turned her attention to me, she was scant with the details at first, easily unhinged even on her best day, she seemed fine with everything, actually.
My mother had an acid tongue and was notorious for saying the absolute worst things at the most inopportune times. Like the time when I was 11 and I was inconsolable when my best friend died of pneumonia. She barked at me sharply, "I hope you're this upset when I die."
Apparently, the fire started under my bed. There was only one outlet in that room, and my brother and I had maybe a desk lamp each plugged into it and a small black and white TV through extension cords that wrapped around the room. There was a large window fan in the window next to where my bed was, too. Aside from being told that it was an "electrical fire" that may have started because of a "short in the fan," I never got a definite answer as to what started it.
My mother, bless her heart, eventually came around to her true self. Just before bed that night, after the fire, knowing that the fire started under my bed and that it was obviously all my fault, she unpinned a hand grenade and tossed it at me:
"I just want you to know that you almost killed me today."
Ole Red here comes with a 750 GPM (gallons per minute) pump, original ladders, booster hose, and a Waukesha six-cylinder engine with 12 spark plugs. Asking price does not include the rotating beacon lights.
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