My Hometown

Always eager to serve, the town’s volunteer fire brigade did manage to get caught in the hot seat from time to time

Afire is serious business, but for this teenager and his friend in the late 1950s, a fire in the town of Paris—the self-proclaimed prettiest town in Ontario— was sometimes also a source of great amusement. When a fire was reported, a siren blared its call to the volunteer fire brigade to rush to the downtown station. Three particularly memorable occasions illustrate why my friend and I made sure we were on the scene whenever the siren went off.

I was busy one day at my usual corner, folding newspapers for delivery, when the alarm sounded. I scurried to get a clear view of the action down the street at the fire hall. Within minutes, cars came racing to a screeching halt as close to the fire station as possible. As usual, there was a scramble among the volunteers to be the one to drive the fire truck. That having been decided, the truck began to pull out, only to be stopped by an errant car blocking the exit. This produced loud, angry screams and curses aimed at the idiot who would do such a thing. Somebody rushed over to the driver of the fire truck, who, after a few words, jumped from the driver’s seat and with a red face walked over to move his own vehicle. In his haste to arrive first and claim the driver’s seat, he had left his car in neutral, and it had coasted to a halt in the worst possible spot.

One year, at long last, town council decided to put in a sewage system. The work required digging a ditch down the middle of the town’s main street. One day, I was enjoying a malted milkshake with my friend in the Piccadilly restaurant just up the street from the fire hall when the siren called out the volunteers.

A number of the volunteer firemen worked in stores downtown. One conscientious clerk raced out of the store next to the Piccadilly about the same time my friend and I sucked back the last of our milkshakes and scooted out to enjoy the proceedings. The clerk approached the gaping ditch that impeded his path to the fire hall and, after a quick calculation, announced to us that he was going to jump across it. Unfortunately he overestimated his jumping skills or underestimated the width of the trench. From the bottom of the ditch, he yelled that his ankle was broken and, for a few minutes, the fire, wherever it was, seemed to be forgotten.

On another occasion, my friend and I were biking home from our donut-making jobs one evening when we heard the alarm and saw the fire truck come to a halt in front of the Penman’s plant. This provided us with a firsthand view of the volunteers in action. Four or five of them grabbed axes and rushed the building. Within minutes they had bashed in most of the lower windows. Then, over the pandemonium, one of them, I believe it was the chief, screamed at them to stop: the door was unlocked. Apparently it turned out to be a false alarm, and the only damage reported was a number of broken windows.

Paris was a great town in which to grow up, and I remember fondly its kind, caring, amusing and lovable citizens. ■