Hi. I’m Richie Brown. I’m the fire chief in Burlington. I’m young, but I’m the chief. This is the 1950s. Kids do grown-up things. The Seminatore girls slaughter turkeys and package them up and sell them to people driving by. Kids my age shoot rifles at summer camp. Dorothy Carpenter runs a cash register at her father’s store, and uses the meat-cutting machine.
I fight fires with some other kids. Using what? We have wagons with water tanks, and the tanks have hand pumps. This is my friend Dennis Ames.
Sometimes we use our bikes to tow the wagons to the fires. But sometimes we act like Fred Flintstone. This is my Captain Paul Meaney pulling, and Deputy Ron Johnson pushing.
Usually it’s a brush fire. We have lots of those in Burlington.
We attack them like this.
Here’s our headquarters at 110 Winn Street. It’s on the corner of Peach Orchard and Winn.
We don’t need the whole house. Just the garage. It’s a REALLY old garage. It has a wooden floor and a pigpen under it.
My family has lived in this house for about a million years.
Here are my parents, Ken and Elta. My father runs the town’s credit union — it’s the first one ever — from the bedroom. The phone number is 2046. And he drives a school bus. And he’s a fireman like me.
I named my fire department Stony Croft because that’s the old name for this corner, where the house is. Here’s my Stony Croft roster:
- Chief Richard Brown (me), age 13
- Deputy Chief Ronnie Johnson, 11
- Lieutenant Ken Reardon, 14
- Captain Paul Meaney, 13
- Harvey Ames, 11
- Jimmy Bunton, 10 (his dad is a Burlington fireman, like my dad)
- Dennis Ames, 10
Wanna know how we find out about fires so fast? If you’re a Stony Croft kid, you always listen for the fire horns. The same horns that tell you when school is cancelled.
Let’s say you hear five hoots followed by four hoots. That means box 54. So you look at the fire precinct map in the town phone book and find area 54. Then you hop on your bike and pedal to the fire.
But if you’re at Stony Croft headquarters, it’s different. We have our own alarm system hooked up to the town’s main fire station on Center Street.
So if the fire station alarm goes off, so does our alarm. So no more resting or anything.
When I grow up, I’m going to do a lot of things in Burlington.
And I’m going to be Burlington’s first town administrator. And I’m going to start a new tradition every Christmas. I’m going to light up all the trees on the Common. But I think I’ll be more proud of Stony Croft than anything else. My crew was in Time Magazine and the Christian Science Monitor newspaper and a TV show called Strike it Rich.
Alas, Stony Croft fizzled out in the early 1960s as the members went on to college or military, and the town deployed an adult auxiliary fire department. Steve Duke was a Stony Croft member toward the end. “It was a great learning experience. It was a stepping stone back then.” Duke went on to the adult auxiliary fire department for 46 years, and was civil defense director.
Could Stony Croft happen nowadays? Sure, but you’d need a fire hose strong enough to wash away unions, parents and lawyers.
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