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Return to Oral Histories
Jack Relyea was born in 1920 and grew up in Healdsburg. This article highlights
some of his recollections of Healdsburg and his job in the Fire Department,
1947-1977.
Born in Healdsburg
I'm 82 years old. I was born at the Plaza Hotel, December 19th, 1920.
Two rooms were set aside there by Dr. Sohler for laying-in rooms. The hospital
on Johnson Street--I guess not everybody could afford it. You could get
a room in a hotel for a dollar a day.
High School to U.S. Navy
I grew up in Healdsburg. I finished high school in 1938. I started working
[for the Healdsburg Fire Department] in October of 1947. I'd put in three
years in the Navy during World War II. We were Navy gun crew on merchant
ships. We lost 710 ships, but I didn't get lost, thank goodness.
I was out for almost a year and then the Navy recalled me. I went up
to Eureka as a Navy recruiter. I was there for a year. Then, they didn't
fund the Navy-the other branches too, I suppose. The Navy practically shut
down.
At the Firehouse
The hiring process for the Firehouse was: I walked in and said,
“Is there
a job?” and they said,
“Yeah.” That was very much the way it was up until
not too long before I retired [1977]. There wasn't any
“academy” as the
Police had. It was remarkable that we got mostly good people.
I went to work for the City [in 1947] at $150 a month; 84 hour weeks.
You worked regardless, sick or not. There was no relief. There was no retirement.
There was no sick leave, no hospitalization. Nada.
On your day off, you took another job. At a hundred fifty bucks a month,
you took another job! I got married to Shirley not long after. She came
out from Minnesota, her folks did. She died of cancer fifteen years ago.
Around Town
We lived on the Skee estate up on 532 Fitch Street, a whole group of houses.
I knew Old Man [James] Skee. He built that whole group of houses--other
than that middle house--up on the 500 block of Fitch. He built two houses
around the corner on Piper Street. These houses were all shipped in, if I
remember right, from Tennessee. He would go down to the depot and would haul
these loads up to the site
I got a job putting up TV antennas up on the roofs of houses. You'd put
this antenna up as far as you could-40-50 feet. You got a very grainy picture
in Healdsburg. If it was a ball game, you'd watch the ball go up the screen
and disappear. Really! If a car drove by your house-especially if it was
a Ford V-8, your picture disappeared. I worked for Herb Solem-a good, good
person. I had no complaints. Made a dollar an hour; that was twice as much
as I was making at the Firehouse. Now I'm not bitching--I walked into it
with my eyes open. People who worked in grocery stores, the girls that worked
in the banks, were making less than that. My wife was bookkeeper for J. C.
Penney's for seventeen years until we had a child. She made five dollars
a month more than I did.
Healdsburg Fire Crew and Equipment
There were four men, counting me, but we did have a varying amount--maybe
a dozen-- volunteers. Many of the volunteers had been volunteers all through
WWII, and many of them had been volunteers back in the 1910s and the 20s.
We had Claude Nosler who was a volunteer for over 50 years.
What equipment did we have? A 1935 Ford that
was then in good shape. We had a '37 Chevy
truck that the City bought under P.A. "Slim” Kerns. He
mounted the back end off our 1923 REO Speedwagon.
Emergencies
Healdsburg had the only resuscitator. It was an inhalator-it didn't help
you very much. It helped you breathe a little, but it was an antique piece
of machinery. But Santa Rosa didn't even have one, and no one else, so we
made emergency runs with it to Cloverdale, on the River; we went to the Geysers
one time; to Skaggs Springs. Almost from day one, we had drownings. We
had five in one weekend between the mouth of Dry Creek and the Railroad Bridge.
Saving the Model T
Our first power truck was a 1919 Model T Fire truck. In 1935, it had been
sold by the Ford Garage and it was laying out on Red Winery Road, buried
up over the frame in mud. Claude Nosler told me about it-good old Claude.
The City had a 6-wheel drive Army truck, brand new, that we borrowed. My
friend Chet Boehm, now dead, went out with me to Alexander Valley. It took
that 6-wheel drive to pull the Model T out of the mud. Immediately the front
wheels collapsed, but we got it into town. Tony Pavoni, the other fireman,
and I worked on it for a year: it was solid rust. It took months of soaking
the engine in gasoline and oil to remove all that rust. But we did and we
got it running. Tony was the one, for hours every day on his shift, who buffed
it. I painted it and put it back together again.
Work Life
In 1949, we had a Chief that we inherited politically (the worst kind).
Don't mention the name. We didn't get along with him, but he got along
with himself. He wouldn't fight for our wages, but we co-existed. You
were scared for your job in those days. Police were scared; Street [maintenance
workers] were scared. You could go at the drop of anger. You had no recourse.
Tony Pavoni was Chief ahead of me, after "Sully” [Harold Sullivan] retired.
The Walkout
The City Council, without meaning to, was a little tight with us. They
were tight with the Police Department. Let me say that before I was Chief,
we had eight raiders counting myself. Tony [Pavoni] was Chief; I was Assistant
Chief. Well, they blamed Tony for poor wages and poor hours and this and
that and not getting a new truck. I agreed with them, the pay was poor.
They says, “Jack, we're gonna walk.” I says,
“Well, give us time to get
things together,” but four of them walked off the job. And I agreed with
them in essence, but I don't think that any public service-and that means
the garbage service or the one that gets you water or keeps your bathroom
working-you don't just walk off the job. It was pretty messy.
The walkout [in the 1960s] worked out so good for us that the Police walked
out-almost one hundred per cent. We got a 32 per cent raise after a month.
Volunteers
I went to work in '47 and I got out in '77. There were 40 drownings
in that time. They didn't have mutual aid so much, but we did go to Cloverdale
twice with our 1937 truck to huge fires that burned out many businesses downtown.
They had very little fire department; it was all volunteer. Let me say
that when I started and almost up the time I was going to retire, Cloverdale
had no regulars. But they had a lot of volunteers-good men. Sebastopol
had no regulars: it was all volunteer.
With volunteers it's a different thing now, rightly so, they try to train
them to be able to do every job. Well, you couldn't do that with volunteers
in those days. So if one man was good with the pumps, he just went to that
job. If another man was good on entering . . . Clarence Schaeffer, he was
on the roof, the first man up there! Chop a hole in the roof and let it
ventilate. Claude Nosler, he would knock out the windows. If you were a
regular, you did everything.
Fire Hazards
A lot of fires started because after WWII, people started buying refrigerators
and freezers. A lot of houses didn't have them before that-my mother didn't
have a refrigerator. People would hook them up with little zip cords like
the ones that go to a lamp, and they would run it over to the wall. Or else
they would plug it in to a light coming down from the ceiling. There was
no such thing as plugs all around the old house. The first thing you know,
the house was on fire. Well, the houses were painted many, many times with
oil paint, lead paint, inside and out. It was clear, dry redwood, one hundred
years old. And houses didn't have fire stops in them, like over on Tucker
Street, maybe some of them still don't. The first thing you know the attic
was on fire, and they were sleeping, they wouldn't know it.
To call a fireman, there was no such thing as radio. We blew the town
siren, and it was a blaster, really noisy. Days were quiet then, no TV.
Radio, you didn't run it too much. When the siren went off, everybody responded.
We would go to the fire and everyone would look out all around to see what's
happening, all concerned. The town wasn't all spread out like it is. It
was the railroad tracks, more or less, on the west; on the east, Second Street
and on down to the bridge; and Powell to the north, but not on the other
side of the street. The town had 85 fire hydrants.
Rewards of the Job
Whenever you made a good stop, or you saved somebody's property, or you
got 'em out of a wrecked car, it gave you a good feeling. It did.
Other than that, you got good feelings once in a while. I enjoyed more
than anything getting the '35 Ford out and taking the kids on Easter; bringing
Santa Claus in. We fixed it up after we took it out of service so we could
pile kids in the back. A volunteer raider would stand back there and keep
the kids calm-let 'em ring the bell and blow the siren. Incidentally, I
still have a gray-haired person say to me once in a while,
“Do you remember,
you gave me a ride? ” [laughs] Well, then I feel good!
Excerpted from an interview with Holly Hoods, 30 September 2002
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