03/01/2018
Grand Junction Fire Department, 1921
We got this photo of the Grand Junction Fire Department showing off their new fire engines in 1921 from the Museum of Western Colorado. The photograph was taken by Grand Junction’s well-known photographer Frank E. Dean. The fire station at the time was at 609 Colorado, immediately adjacent to the city hall and the police department.
Written in an unsteady hand at the bottom are the names of those pictured.
On the left truck, from left to right, are Charles W. Downing, who would have been twenty-seven years old; Le Roy “Roy” Oakes, age twenty-three; and a name that is smudged considerably, but looks like it might be something like C. M___. Casset, but we found no such name in the directories or censuses.
(At 1:45 a.m. on June 27, 1943, when Charles Downing was fire chief, two rail cars loaded with ammunition for the war effort exploded and rained shrapnel all over the west end of Grand Junction. No one was killed, and only four of the eight people who were injured required hospitalization, but Downing was hit by flying shrapnel just below his right elbow, resulting in an injury that required amputation of his arm below the elbow. Our thanks to Debbie Brockett for reminding us that the injured fire chief was Downing!)
The names of the two men in the middle are smudged almost entirely away, but it seems likely that they are the fire commissioner, Charles E. Cherrington (left), and almost certainly the fire chief, John S. Hynes (right). Cherrington would have been sixty-one when this photo was taken, and the man in the photo doesn’t obviously look that age, but we all age differently. He was a busy man: In the 1918 Grand Junction City Directory, in addition to being the fire commissioner, he is listed as mayor, president of the (city?) council, commissioner of public affairs, and municipal court judge, and in other years his occupations included insurance sales, real estate, and investment brokerage. John S. Hynes was a naturalized citizen who arrived with his parents in the U.S. from Ireland in 1874, where he had been born in 1867.
In the truck on the right are, from left to right, Otto Vopel, the twenty-three-year old American-born son of German immigrants; the Missouri-born John C. Schmidt, age thirty-two, who remained with the fire department for at least the next twenty years and has a Grand Junction Fire Department badge carved into his headstone; and what looks to be either “Boy” Benton or “Ben” Benton, who could have been Benjamin F Benton, B.E. Benton, or Richard Benton, all of whom would have been about the right age, but none of whom appear in either of the available city directories (1918 and 1922) from around the time of the photo as a fireman.
Both trucks were made by American LaFrance (ALF), which made gasoline-driven fire trucks from 1907 to 2014, and steam-driven trucks before that.
Below are the notes from the Museum of Western Colorado that accompanied the photo:
“On September 22, 1918, a large fire started in the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad ice house in Grand Junction. The fire was barely contained and destroyed the ice house, loading dock, and twelve railroad cars full of freight. Firefighters at the scene feared that the whole city might have burned.
“The Grand Junction Fire Department felt the fire got out of control because of their antiquated equipment. The City agreed and funded the purchase of two new vehicles, including this 1921 La France now on exhibit at the Museum of the West. The truck faithfully served the city until its retirement in 1955.
“The truck ended up at Frank Dunn Auto Salvage. City firefighters, in cooperation with Mr. Dunn, recovered the truck and carefully restored it to its former glory. For many years the truck was the centerpiece in parades around Grand Junction.
“In order to ensure the preservation of the fire truck, it was donated to the Museum of Western Colorado to complete their collection of historic fire-fighting equipment.”
