Apparatus and alarms

Early twentieth-century emergency communication meant voice, messenger, telephone and telegraph. As phone service expanded, household phones grew more common — but volunteers rarely had phone access during the workday, and the fire station was unoccupied.

The first fire siren, installed in 1923, sat atop the cold storage before being moved to the town park because it could not be heard. It could carry for miles. It also marked the noon hour, and that daily blast doubled as a system test — every day but Sunday.

The Fire Phone was the predecessor to E911. Established around 1970, it was a party line placed in the fire house, in the homes of the chiefs and the first aid captain, and at the North Rose Diner — "Gordy's," owned by Gordon Strohm — which monitored the line during business hours while most members were at work out of town.

The emergency number was simply 2211. To answer, you lifted the receiver to listen and pressed a white plunger mounted under the cradle to speak. A small box nearby held a switch that sounded the siren. After taking a call, a separate call went to the fire department (9372) to wait for the arrival of responding personnel; the emergency and location were then conveyed and written on a blackboard just inside the engine room.

So the officers could travel on Sundays, members took turns monitoring the phone at the station — "fire phone duty." Family often came along to pass the time; the only entertainment was a black-and-white TV with rabbit ears, and on a good day you might get three channels.

The Plectron Corporation, formed in 1955, manufactured tone-activated home alerting receivers that monitored fire-band frequencies in members' homes from the late 1950s into the late 1990s. Members bought them at their own expense — roughly $120 in 1970, about $700–900 today. They received only limited frequencies, dependent on "crystals": plug-in components each tuned to a single frequency, including the one assigned to Wayne County dispatch.

Later models added alarm tones unique to each department, and could be set to ignore every tone but your own. You could also listen to fire traffic across the whole county, which was a source of entertainment — and somewhat addicting. Crystals gave way to programmable digital scanners, then to personal pagers (first member-purchased, now issued by the department), and finally to cell phones that can follow a vast number of frequencies at once.

Central dispatch in Lyons replaced the Fire Phone in the mid-1980s; a direct line let Lyons trigger North Rose's alert tones and siren remotely. Wayne County E911 arrived around 1997, and the costly Fire Phone system was no longer needed. Radio remains the primary means of communication between command, individuals and apparatus.

Over the past 115 years the world changed in ways the charter members could never have envisioned. Times were difficult and demanding then, but slower. Membership was generational, driven by duty, community and family.

The demands today are overwhelming. Essential firefighting certification, EMS credentials, OSHA training — none of it existed when training was conducted in-house and knowledge passed from seasoned mentors. Members work out of town, and family obligations run year-round.

"In rural areas, volunteer fire departments are not optional — they are the backbone of emergency response. Without volunteers, costs would rise dramatically, and many communities could not sustain a fully paid department. Yet the future of volunteer fire service is uncertain… I hope I never see the end of a volunteer fire department in our community, but the trend is concerning."

Wayne County has already watched Emergency Medical Services transition from volunteer organizations to a paid county service with stations placed throughout the region. Sadly, the archive's author notes, the volunteer fire department may one day be required to follow the same path.