Ghost stories, historic equipment and firefighting history are featured at the Mesa Junction fire museum.
By Nick Bonham
The Pueblo Chieftain
Copyright 2007 The Pueblo Chieftain
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
PUEBLO, Colo. — Dozens of folks blazed into the past of Pueblo firefighters on Sunday.
They took rides in antique engines, shared stories and drifted into history at the Pueblo firefighters’ museum, transformed from the old Hose Company No. 3 station located at 116 Broadway Avenue.
“Pueblo has a tremendous history” of firefighters, said Gary Micheli, president of the Pueblo Firefighters Historical Society.
The station was built in 1895 and closed in 1979. Visitors to the annual open house wandered through the two-story building, looked at photographs, old gear, equipment and vehicles, and listened to a lot of memories.
One of the firefighters’ favorite pastimes at the station, Micheli said, was to watch from a second-story alley window as they called a pay phone across the street hoping somebody walking by would answer.
“And when they’d pick up, they’d say ‘The money is in the trash can.’ So they’d get a kick out of it when someone would start digging through the trash can there.”
Micheli also explained how hook-and-ladder trucks got their name. In the early years, fire crews would tear down the front of burning buildings with hooks and then cast up ladders to fight blazes.
That’s the origin for a popular term firefighters use on calls: “laddering the building.”
In the early years when numbers of independent fire crews would respond to fires, the first company to hoist a ladder on a building won the right to fight the fire.
Micheli likened this to a scene in the Martin Scorsese film, “Gangs of New York,” where fire companies literally fought each other to extinguish a burning building.
“They’d fight to see who got their ladder up first,” he said.
“It’s in us to fight fires,” added Don Mauger, who retired from the Pueblo Fire Department in 1995 after 32 years. “It’s a lot of fun.”
But there are different fire museum stories, too -- ghost stories.
Micheli said it is believed the station is haunted by a firefighter who died in his sleep there in the 1910s.
Early one morning years later in the 1950s, a pumper truck mysteriously started and drove through the garage door. The truck stopped after it smashed through the door, Micheli said, but when police arrived to make a report, the truck started again and drove into the street unattended.
Then there is the bizarre incident that happened more than a year ago.
Micheli said an old chief’s car, a 1923 Ford Model T, was left running and unattended in the parking lot behind the museum to charge the car’s battery. A handful of firefighters were at the museum at the time.
The car was parked facing west and, somehow, slipped into gear. Kids were playing in the area, Micheli remembered, and the car magically drove out of the parking lot and passed between two headstones placed outside of Davis Mortuary on Broadway Avenue.
The car turned onto Evans Avenue, then back onto Broadway, and circled around to the front of the station where it crashed into a trailer.
“This is creepy because I witnessed it,” Micheli said. “Two people saw it driving and thought it was being powered by remote control.”
Afterward, Micheli said they took aerial photographs to see how it was possible the chief’s car circled the building unattended. They found few answers.
What is more is the car has sensitive gears and it is easy to kill the engine.
“It stayed in gear,” Micheli said.
The pumper truck since has been repaired, but the chief’s car still showed front-end damage Sunday.
The stories had little effect on visitors like Mauger’s 7-year-old grandson, Mason Mauger, and his 6-year-old brother, Garrett, who climbed all over the vintage ladder and pumper trucks.
Their parents, Theresa and Doug Mauger, who is starting his firefighting career, brought them to the open house.
“The history is amazing,” Theresa Mauger said. “It’s just amazing. I can’t get over it.”
Museum tours aside from the annual open house are by appointment only.