By Ben Caldwell
The Charleston Gazette
ST. ALBANS, W.Va. — At 91, Ben Griffith’s body slows him down a bit, but his mind is as sharp as the day he first jumped aboard a fire truck.
That was more than 70 years ago, when as a student at St. Albans High School he became a volunteer firefighter for the City of St. Albans. In 1940, after he had graduated, he and three other men became the city’s first, full-time, paid firefighters.
As the last living member of the original four, Griffith sometimes refers to himself as “the last of the first.”
In a 1994 newspaper article, Griffith recalled that the other three original full-timers were “Mr. Buckland, Mr. Buster and Mr. McNealy.”
Griffith and his wife, Wilda, paid a visit Aug. 16 to the St. Albans Fire Department, where they visited with firefighters and talked with fire Chief Steve Parsons. To commemorate the occasion, firefighter Eric Mitchell took photos.
As a man whose frame of reference for fighting fires dates back seven decades, Griffith said he was impressed with the amount and quality of equipment available to today’s firefighters.
“They have got equipment that you would not believe,” Griffith said.
Griffith served as a St. Albans firefighter from 1940 until the outbreak of World War II, when he joined the service. After returning from the war, he rejoined the department but left in the late 1940s to work as an electrician.
When he was a firefighter, the fire station was on Sixth Avenue behind First Baptist Church. The building also housed City Hall and the jail.
Griffith said he earned $25 a week as a firefighter. The station had one bed, because “there was only one man per shift,” he said.
As he recalls, there were three fire trucks in his day - two made by Seagraves, and one made by Ford.
“We had to take the Ford to Ohio to have a pumper put on it,” Griffith said from his St. Albans home.
Compared to today’s fire trucks, the ones Griffith and his colleagues used were rudimentary.
The fire trucks at the St. Albans Fire Department today “are luxurious — we would have fought you for one of those trucks,” he said.
Griffith said firefighters today are more highly trained than in his day. When he joined the fire department, he and the others would travel to Morgantown once a year for some simple, basic firefighting training.
“Back then it was crude; it’s a scientific thing now.”
Griffith remembers a few bad fires during his tenure with the department. One was the “newsstand fire” on Main Street in the early 1940s.
No lives were lost, “but it was a bad one — it was a total loss.”
There were some comical moments, too. A call came in one Sunday about a house that was supposedly on fire. When firefighters arrived, they discovered not a fire, but something that only looked like a fire.
The “fire” turned out to be some brightly colored Christmas crepe paper that had fallen behind a baseboard.
When sunlight reflected from it, it “made it look like a fire,” he said.
Griffith and the other firefighters also were involved in rescuing people from the nearby Coal River.
“We pulled a lot of people out of that river that had drowned,” he said.
Based on his experience with the river, Griffith knew it could be a dangerous place to swim.
“He would never let us get into the river,” said his daughter, Joyce Angus.
When Griffith and his wife visited the fire station, they met with Parsons, who showed them around the facility.
“He knows his business,” Griffith said.
Parsons, who has researched the history of the fire department, said it was an honor to meet one of the department’s first full-time firefighters. He was familiar with Griffith’s name because, for the department’s 100th-year celebration in 2006, he had compiled a list of all the firefighters who ever served on the St. Albans Fire Department.
“I knew his name and knew that he had some brothers on the fire department,” Parsons said.
He was glad that Griffith stopped by the fire station, because it gave some of the younger firefighters a chance to meet him, hear about his experiences and get a firsthand sense of the fire department’s history.
“It’s important for them to see the heritage and how much it’s changed,” Parsons said.
Parsons said he and Griffith discussed how firefighter training has changed since Griffith’s days on the department.
In Griffith’s time, there was “no organized training and no requirements like there are now,” Parsons said.
He said firefighters today must complete 6,000 hours of training within three years.
But one thing that hasn’t changed is the dedication that firefighters bring to their jobs.
Then, as now, when a call comes in to the fire station, “you just felt a duty to get down there, get on that truck and get out of there,” Griffith said.
Parsons keeps a plaque with all the names of St. Albans firefighters on display at the station. During Griffith’s visit, he studied the names and remembered many of the men.
“He would look at a name and tell a story about that person,” Parsons said.
“I’ve been around the horn a few times,” Griffith said.
Copyright 2012 Charleston Newspapers