Disasters, Fires and Rescues

By Daniel Knowles

This Book has stories about Little Bobby and me, along with numerous others and some of the calls that we went on during the period of time of about 13 years with the Squad and also away from it. I first met the Mascot in June of 1955 to about 1963 when our lives took different paths, and we drifted away from each other for the next 47 or so years, except for special occasions when we met up at certain functions, including many major calls of the later 60s, and 70s, the riots in 1967, when Martin Luther King was killed, the 14th Street Bridge plane crash in the Potomac River.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524501310

Daniel Knowles

The authors Danny and Sheila were both raised and educated in the DC Metropolitan area. Danny spent his career as a professional firefighter, while Sheila has retired from the Federal Government. They both have enjoyed owning many dogs all through their lives, especially the rescued one. The two in the picture are named Chance and Reebee. Missing from the picture is Snorkey, a rescued Dalmatian. Since the authors are avid animal lovers and supporters of many animal charities, they thought it would be a novel idea to write about their vast travels by introducing mice as their trip companions to lighten up the many facts and details of each visited historic site. Enjoy!

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Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Knowles.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 12/09/2016

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CONTENTS

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Picture

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Part 1

Bobby Gollan, a good friend of mine, died on May 19, 2012

I was heartbroken, although I didn’t show it on the outside. I could not even talk about it, especially at the Bethesda Chevy Chase Rescue Squad memorial for Bobby, where some of his friends—and he had a lot of them—spoke about his life and memories.

I saw tears in the eyes of many of the guys at the squad who themselves had spent much of their lives in the fire rescue service and had seen just about everything there is to see.

The Bethesda Chevy Chase Rescue Squad, is one of the finest rescue squads in the country, bar none, and I have ridden with many of them in my long time in the fire service and the rescue line of work, almost or maybe more than sixty years.

Back to the memorial service

Guys like Jimmy Stanton, Jim Seavey, Kenny Holden, George Giebel, Bob Langston, Tommy McDonald, Billy and Tony Veith, Tommy and Stevie Suddath, Johnnie Roth, Bob Duffy, Charlie Moyer, Dave Chaconas, Burt Tree, Tim Kiefer, Farnsworth Rugby, Billy Blackwood, Billy Fitzgerald, and, of course, Jack Hartley and Martha Hilton, Joe Albert, Dickie Mullins and Dave Dwyer, along with Clad Cromwell, Stonewell Cribbage, even Bill Ant was there, and all the other young and old bucks in the squad that admired Bobby—and there were so many. All seasoned fire and rescue guys that had numerous years in the fire and rescue service, and I may have left some names out.

Dr. Thorndike Willowbee was even standing in the back of the room and sporting his cane, as was Dr. Fred Basset, like in basset hound.

I thought that I was the only one in the rescue squad that deeply loved Bobby. All those years, and especially now, a lot of people have been asking me about all the old stories about Little Bobby (as he was affectionately called) as we went on fire and wreck calls all over the county and not just waiting at the squad for something to happen—of course, we did that too—and going around doing other what some cats referred to as crazy stuff (i.e., tapping our heads with beer bottles and trying to maim ourselves by cutting ourselves with razor blades and idiotic stuff like that), although I never considered anything that we ever did as crazy, and neither did Bobby, because he told me so.

The mid-’50s to the early ’60s were the best years in the squad for us and what I call the Bob Cremins, Chippy Edmonston, and Sonny Farrington era, along with such notorious persons as Wine Chamberlin, Joe Dickman, Jack Hartley, and Donnie Fitzgerald, and a few other select members, including a dog named Prince, the second squad mascot—the first mascot being Little Bobby.

This book has stories about Little Bobby and me, along with numerous others, and some of the calls that we went on for about thirteen years with the squad and also away from it. I first met the mascot in June 1955 to about 1963 when our lives took different paths, and we drifted away from each other for the next forty-seven or so years, except for special occasions when we met up at certain functions, including many major calls of the later ’60s and ’70s, the riots in 1967, when Martin Luther King was killed, the Fourteenth Street Bridge plane crash in the Potomac River. the five-alarm Kann’s Department Store fire in DC, various plane crashes, and other large-size calls that usually did not occur around here. Usually, you would have to go to them wherever they happened and, of course, attend squad parties.

Also, there are some stories while on major calls that Bobby and I went on, together or separately, or that Bobby was not on for some reason or another but I was. A lot of times in later years, Bobby would go on calls in his tow truck or with the squad or with the fire department that he was in at the time.

I had no idea when I started writing this book that it was going to be so lengthy, including hundreds of pages of pictures. I have been told that the amount of words here is about the same as there are in four or five Hardy Boys books or Nancy Drew books, and that is good, because I liked the Hardy Boys, and even though I am a guy, as a young buck, I also read the Nancy Drew books, some of them anyway.

The cover

On the front cover of this book: A multialarm fire in a Gaithersburg apartment in the 1970s. Firefighters from Germantown, Rockville, and Gaithersburg fought the flames for about an hour.

On the back cover: The Silver Spring, Maryland, train collision and fire between a MARC train and an Amtrak train in a blinding snowstorm that killed twelve victims

A massive oil fire and explosion in 1989 in the Bronx section of New York City that killed at least two persons

An out-of-control propane truck that ended up on top of a three-story building in Rockville, Maryland

The Air Florida plane crash in Washington DC into the Potomac River that killed seventy-seven victims

Note:

I would like to extend credit and thanks for a few of the pictures that appear in this book, mostly taken in the 1950s and ’60s by the Evening Star, the Rodent Daily Express, the Taiwan Times, and the Washington Post newspapers, and last but not least, the old Times Herald that probably stopped in the mid-1950s.

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Thanks also to Sheila Kline for her expert help and steady guidance in writing this book and also advice.

Last but not least, thanks to Steve Eisen for his expert wordsmithery and helpful advice and photography work.

Steve also assisted me in his research on rodents in another book Traveling across America, published in 2015. It was amazing how much knowledge he possessed about the rodents mice.

Warning: there are some pictures and text that are not for the timid in this book to read or look at, so you should take it with a grain of salt (an old saying); in other words, just don’t look at it.

There may still be a few persons (hopefully not aspiring and potential firefighters) that might object to some of the pictures that still are not too bad, but none of them are nice.

For those people, when you read the book and come to the pictures, just skip over them or maybe get a copy of Time magazine or Life magazine or maybe the Daily Mule. How about the Washington Post or Ebony magazine (if that is how you spell it)? There is a woodpecker animal book that I think I saw once that might be nice to check out if you are into pecking. There is a good mouse magazine out there; I think it is called the Rodent Times or something like that. Usually, they have a picture of a good-looking mouse, or some people call it rodent, on the front cover, looking at you or, better still, glaring at you.

When you see the eyes staring at you, they almost drill right through your eyes.

The only other eyes that I have seen that might equal these eyes are the eyes on the statue of the blue Mustang Blucifer at the Denver airport, which is standing on its rear legs with the front legs raised high up into the air. It welcomes visitors to the airport; you can’t miss it unless you do not look out the car window.

When the sun is out and hits those eyes, you can see them a half a mile away, and they glare at you like I can’t even describe.

Honestly, when motorists see those eyes, they can get disoriented and blinded for a few seconds and run off of the road or hit another car or cars. If motorists don’t do that, there is a good chance that they will reach their plane. Go there as soon as you finish reading the book, or at least get your plane tickets.

You have to go there and see those glaring eyes for yourself.

There are books about birds out there at newsstands; so if you are into birds, that might be the way to go.

Anyway, hopefully, the reader will like the book and pictures and possibly learn something about treating injuries and saving lives, and if you are not a firefighter or a rescue guy already, maybe someday you will be.

Looking backward a few years

Six-alarm fire at Western Maryland College, located in Westminster, Maryland

I went with Bobby to a six-alarm fire in Westminster, Maryland, to a major blaze at the Western Maryland College (I think it was called), and they were still hitting alarms when we turned off Route 27 into the city, and fire and black smoke were hanging over the downtown area. The most damage was to a huge, old building that was an inferno when we got there, and flames were coming out of every window in the building like a blowtorch, and there were a lot of windows.

We would have gone much earlier, but I thought that the fire was way up in Western Maryland at the time and did not realize that it was closer to us than we had first thought.

We would have left when the third or fourth alarm had been struck probably; as it was, we were now just approaching the town of Westminster as the sixth alarm was being put out, and we could see the flames leaping up into the sky ahead of us.

The fire could not be fought from the inside, so water was poured into all the numerous big windows in the building from dozens of pumpers and ladder trucks, and when the roof was gone and the flames were leaping up into the sky, hose streams were directed there.

The fire was one of the largest fires in the town’s history, and there have been some good ones too in the past fifty or so years. I remember going to a hardware store there in the middle of the town that was destroyed in a five-alarm fire in the ’50s or early ’60s. It might have been six alarms or perhaps many more, and the building was almost as big as a city block and was an ancient building built around the turn of the century.

Freight train wreck in DC

Bobby and I went to a train derailment near Blair Road in the district one time. A Chessie System freight train carrying automobiles derailed, spilling its load and torching four houses and many of the autos.

Brookmont gas explosion at a house on Ridge Drive

I think that Bobby went with the squad to a house that exploded from natural gas in Brookmont, Maryland, in the river rat territory of Glen Echo one night. I went there from the Chevy Chase Fire Department, where I was working nights, and Herby Carpenter, my officer that night (now unfortunately deceased) let me go down there to look and to possibly assist at the fire. I liked Herby, as he let me go on major calls from the firehouse when I was working and told me to take my time, and I did. There was smoldering wreckage in the streets throughout the neighborhood and parts of houses, even several blocks away.

The incident happened so long ago that I don’t remember if there had been anyone in the house or not, but if there had been, they would not have survived.

On calls like this, I would always worry about any family pets that might have been in the house at the time.

Pennsylvania railroad RR train wreck kills the engineer

Bobby, Paul Mole, and I went to a freight train wreck in Prince George’s County Maryland, one early evening at Landover Road and John Hanson Road.

When we reached the scene, we discovered that there were two freight trains that had collided with each other due to a switching malfunction.

Dozens of freight cars had been derailed and were sitting on top of each other. Some of them had exploded and burned, and a lot of chemicals were burning.

We stayed for several hours, but due to all the fires still burning, we could not stay very close, and everyone kept moving back until we were about half a mile back. Then we left.

Bobby and I run out of gas in an ambulance on the way to a call one day in the district

One day, Bobby and I were in an ambulance responding to a situation in the district somewhere off of Wisconsin Avenue, where a patient had fallen out of his bed and needed to be picked up and put back in, then tucked away and maybe read a bedtime story to.

We were speeding down Wisconsin Avenue to the medical emergency at speeds above seventy or maybe eighty miles per hour or even faster when the engine started missing and spluttering, and then we were out of gas.

I don’t know if it had ever happened before in the squad, but it did to us way back in the mid-’50s, and I might add, it did happen to us again when Bobby and I were in an ambulance in the state of Connecticut some years later.

We were about a mile and a half from the apartment that we were responding to. Bobby and I got out of the ambulance and started rounding up spectators, passersby, and persons just standing around doing nothing or even if they were doing something. Motorists stopped, and sometimes four or five persons would exit a single car to lend a paw or even a helping hand.

Bobby and I jumped back into the ambulance and with whoever was driving at the time. A crowd of anywhere from twenty-five to fifty citizens was pushing us down the avenue. With more persons joining us all the time, people stopping on Wisconsin Avenue were leaving their cars and pushing the ambulance.

Fortunately, we found a gas station on Wisconsin Avenue

We saw a gas station ahead of us and we glided the ambulance right in, almost hitting one of the pumps, but we didn’t.

When we reached the gas station, there must have been a hundred souls standing around out of breath or breathing hard but happy that they had completed their civic duty and had a chance to have helped their fellow men. There were a lot of cheering and paws up from the throngs of people in the vicinity of the gas station as we put gas in the ambulance.

The ambulance was now full of gas, and then we went to where we were going. In his apartment, the old fellow was still lying on the floor and reading a magazine or maybe looking at the pictures. We put him back in bed and left after covering him up. I always wondered if we should have tied the old buck into his bed so that he would not have fallen out again, but then neither of us had any rope at the time.

Hillandale house gas explosion damages neighborhood, levels one house, and kills two victims

Another major house explosion in Hillandale, Maryland, near the firehouse on New Hampshire Avenue, also caused from natural gas, was completely leveled, and debris were found blocks away. Many nearby houses were damaged. Some were partially destroyed, and a number of cars were also destroyed.

Two bodies were found in the wreckage of the house that had been leveled. They were brought out and put in a hearse, and then I left.

It had taken all day for the remains to be located and removed, and the smell of gas was still evident all over the neighborhood and could even be smelled blocks away.

The big fire at the One Spot Flea Killer Building in Savage, Maryland, a long time ago on US 1

One terrible fire that I took Bobby to—and I still think about it to this day—was the fire at the One Spot Flea Killer Building, a three-story structure in the shape of a large bug. Some called it a flea that towered over US 1 in the ’40s and early ’50s in Savage, Maryland, near Laurel. One day, it caught fire in the early ’60s, I think, and the flames were leaping up into the air and could be seen for miles away. The bug was a firetrap anyway, and it had just been waiting to burn, and that day finally arrived.

I almost cried as I watched the bug’s head and then the rest of its body disappear as it was consumed by flames in the second- or maybe third-alarm fire, which ravaged the poor thing. Route 1 was closed down for a long time, and hose lines were stretched all over the area full of fire trucks.

What a horrible day that was. I’m sure a lot of the firefighters were crying as the bug burned. It is a wonder that they could even do their job fighting the flames. The bug was not just your average good-looking, hardworking, smart, educated, routine, daily-working bug—far from it. This was a bug that would and could cover your back in a barroom fight, be your best friend when you needed a best friend or even a worse friend, stand out in a crowd and be noticed; it was a bug that you would and could be proud of to show your friends, if you had any. Most importantly, it was a bug that you could trust your wife with, if you had one, or your girlfriend or even your dog. It was a bug that had that a certain down-to-earth, homey attitude and would make you feel that you were at home, even if you were a hundred miles away. It was that kind of a bug, and an honest one at that. You could even trust the bug if he was going to the bank with your money to make a deposit; he’d not eat your money on the way.

The great bug will be missed

Motorists that drove from Washington to Baltimore would pass the bug daily and would naturally feel at ease as soon as they saw the great insect, and I’m sure that many of them had worshiped the bug at one time or another and would have gladly jumped off the nearest cliff to save the bug in its last hour of need, and I think that because of this great bug, most people had a more lasting, soothing attitude and were more understanding and even had a whole new outlook on bugs in general. If nothing else, this bug, even though it was not a real bug, probably had done more for bugs around the world than any other bug in history. Thank God for this great insect, and forever may it rest in peace.

One good thing came from the fire; however, no more bug killer was ever made there again.

I first saw the bug in 1949 when I went to a boarding school in Savage, Maryland, and I said to myself, What a neat-looking bug.

Later

I got married in 1963, and Bobby and I went our separate ways for a time. He was more active in the rescue squad and started going up in rank, as he should have, and continued to manage his tow truck business, while I drifted away from the squad and went into the Bethesda Fire Department (and eventually the Chevy Chase and the Cabin John Fire Departments), as well as spent a lot of time volunteering in New York at three of the five rescue companies in the Bronx and in Brooklyn and Queens, Rescues 2 and 3 and 4. I never rode in the two other rescues, Rescue 5 in Staten Island and in Manhattan at Rescue 1, but was on a lot of calls that they went to also.

I knew many of the 9/11 firefighters from the rescue companies. Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx were the hardest hit, and more than a third of them died after the planes hit the towers.

To all of them and all the rest of the FDNY members who were killed, as well as the police, even the one police dog that was in a cage in the basement of one of the towers, and to everyone else that fateful day when the towers came down at the World Trade Center, may they all rest in peace.

A total of 343 firefighters died in New York City that fateful day during 9/11, and about a third of them were never found in the now forever known graveyard consisting of all of Lower Manhattan and a part of Brooklyn

Looking back, I wonder if I might have abandoned Little Bobby somewhat by getting married and with my new life changes. After all, for eight or more years, we ran so many good calls together and did things together. But even if so, it didn’t stop him from gaining fame and statue in the squad, and for that, I am happy. And after all, he still had Prince, the dog, and also if it had not been for Bobby, I would never have met my wife, Diane. Funny, I met all my girlfriends before Diane through Bobby.

Danny

Then there was my second full-time job (the first being a paid firefighter) with my tree company. I suffered many injuries while doing tree work (i.e., got run over by a truck in Baltimore, and another time fell out of a tree, breaking multiple bones). While in the Bethesda Fire Department, I was burned several times. I was on injured leave from the fire department, sometimes for over a year at a time, from either being hurt doing tree work or being injured in the fire department, one or the other. I never had a problem with getting hurt no matter where I was working or what I was doing; I could get hurt while doing nothing, if I wanted to, it seemed.

Little Bobby

I saw Bobby at the hospice the day before he died; it was the first time that I had seen him in about six years. Unfortunately, in those years, I had talked to him on the phone periodically but not nearly enough, and then for the last time about three months before he died.

It’s not easy to write some of these stories about Bobby and myself because so much time had passed, and there are so many people that were around then when we first came into the rescue squad that are no longer with us anymore. There are not many persons left to obtain information. In fact, even as I am about to finish this now, about three years since Little Bobby died (and I will always think of him as Little Bobby), I have not been able to ask one question of anyone about my memories; I would not know who to ask now.

I don’t think there is anyone that could help me for that period so long ago and have the knowledge regarding the antics that Bobby and I did together. So many persons have died. It’s amazing how so many people are dying nowadays.

About fifteen years ago, I had written an autobiography about a lot of what happened in my life and other stuff, so other than a few dates and names, I think that will be of help as I write this mostly by memory, in fact almost all by memory, and these stories and calls are not in any kind of order; in fact, they are completely out of order.

Bobby I think would be grateful for the time and love that his girlfriend Ellen and Bobby McDonald from the rescue squad showed at his bedside, taking care of him to the very end, and for all the persons who visited him as he lay there dying. It’s hard to understand what Bobby must have been thinking. I don’t know if he heard his friends as they sat next to him on his bed or stood there, holding his hand, talking, or whispering to him. But enough of all that.

I asked Bobby about the Juvenile Sales fire in Takoma Park, Maryland, that we went to that night in 1960, which may have been the biggest fire ever in the town’s history, if he remembered it.

A four-alarm fire destroys the Juvenile Sales toy store in Takoma Park, Maryland

Bobby always said that this was the best fire that he had ever gone to, and I liked it too, especially that nice smell of burning wood in the air.

When I visited him at the hospice, I don’t know if Bobby heard me or not when I asked him if he remembered the big four-alarm fire at Juvenile Sales in 1960 (the fire that Bobby said was the best fire that he ever went on). He did not squeeze my hand any harder when I said that.

It was also the fire where Bobby and I were on the roof of the building next to the burning structure with a hose line that we had been using for the past hour to pour water on the fire. We were about to climb onto the roof of Juvenile Sales when another firefighter on the roof grabbed hold of us and said that the roof had already fallen in.

Because of all the smoke, we had not noticed that the roof was gone, and also the first floor, and we would have fallen a long way down into the basement and into the flames there. Bobby would have been the first to go because he had already climbed over the wall and was in front of me. I think that it was Bob Kiger from the squad who had stopped us, I’m not sure; suffice it to say, he was wearing a squad running coat.

We loved running large fires in Takoma Park because the buildings were so old and had that neat old burning wooden smell to them when they were on fire that greeted us when our engines pulled up to the scene.

Bobby had already been taken to the hospital one time earlier during the fire by a squad ambulance for cuts or burns and had returned in a cab to fight the flames. At least thirty-six other firemen were taken to the hospital, or would be as a result of the out-of-control fire. I loved that fire.

None of us will ever know if Bobby heard us or not as we sat on his bed next to him. Actually, we won’t know until we meet Bobby again, and then we’ll have to ask him. In the meantime, Bobby is in God’s care. Even though he did not go to church, I believe that he proved himself in life as well as any church person ever has, and probably a lot more, and that God will overlook all that stuff, I’m sure he will.

I think that Bobby would want us to do what he would do if he were still here: just keep on living our lives, running calls, prying open cars, freeing trapped victims, and saving and helping people, and when necessary, helping animals in need.

Anyway, here goes

Excerpts from the 1958 Butler Road oil fire story

(related later in this book in the second part)

The general alarm oil fire on Butler Road in Glen Echo in November 1958

I think that it was a lazy Sunday night when the bells went off at the rescue squad.

As I remember, there were not that many guys there at the time, but enough to get the rescue truck out right away, and Bobby and I were on the back of it.

The house siren on the roof of the squad building started tapping off, and we heard it continuously until we were out of hearing distance somewhere down Glenbrook Road and approaching Bradley Boulevard and Little Falls Parkway on the way to the fire.

Montgomery County will never see a fire like that again, stated one old grizzled fire chief shortly after the fire, who himself is no longer around.

Bobby and I knew that even before we got there, while riding on the rear of the open rescue truck, Rescue 8 or 9, whichever it was called back then in November 1958, that this fire was the one that we had been waiting for.

Ahead of us in the area toward the Potomac River, the whole sky seemed to be lit up and on fire. It was almost as if an artist had painted the whole sky with red paint.

Both Bobby and I were still young bucks then, and in the small time that we had been going on fires, just a few years, we had seen our share of the Red Devil (New York fire talk), but tonight you could put it all together, and there it was ahead of us. We were looking at it up in the sky and we could feel the heat coming down on us and we were still a mile away.

You could look up and ahead of us and see pieces of metal, perhaps steel drums, three hundred feet high, or maybe it was six hundred feet into the burning sky, over our heads, and all that stuff had to come down sometime.

As we approached the fire on Butler Road, we could feel the heat, and it’s a wonder that the paint on some of the fire engines and rescue vehicles did not peel off

It appeared that everything in the fuel oil company was on fire. Some of the buildings had already burned down or were currently burning, and some of the buildings had yet to burn, but they would.

Pieces of the ground and chunks of concrete were being hurtled through the air, and sometimes it took some thinking to decide where the best places were to stand while you fought the flames, and the safest, so that you would not get blown out of there. Bobby and I always went to where someone told us to go, to set up a first-aid station, as they were called, or to grab a hose line lying on the ground or wherever.

Eventually, we did whatever we wanted to do in all the confusion.

There were a lot of exploding oil trucks there, and Bobby and I listened as they were blowing up; there may have been one or two that did not blow up, but I know that we counted about ten or so that did.

I remember seeing a lot of dead burned birds lying on the ground that probably were blasted out of the sky when the first explosion occurred, and naturally we felt sorry for them.

Before the night was over, Bobby and I and every other firefighter and rescue squad member there that wanted to fought the flames with two-and-a-half-inch lines or larger or smaller until all the buildings burned down, and at least a mile to two-mile-long oil-filled creek burned throughout the night and into the next morning. It would be just like pouring one hundred thousand gallons of oil into the creek or however much there was that went into the creek and lit it off. The flames might have been a hundred feet high, I don’t remember; maybe they were only thirty-five feet high. I know they were taller than the trees there. I would have loved to have had a camera back then, but I think that instamatic cameras were in the future unfortunately.

A bridge on Massachusetts Avenue was damaged by the fire as well as all the trees and shrubs alongside the creek

Many hours later, a foam truck from Andrews Air Force Base arrived and put the finishing touches on the fire, which still took some more hours. The fire in the over-a-mile-long creek burned into the next day. With the exception of just a few Montgomery County units, just about all the fire companies in the county went to the oil fire, as did many from the following other counties in the region. Fairfax County, Prince George’s County, Arlington County, and the District of Columbia alone, sent at least twenty engine companies or forty more pieces of equipment, not counting all the chief’s cars and support vehicles and whatever else to the fire scene.

In those days, two fire engines would respond as one engine company, one stopping at the fire hydrant and one proceeding to the fire, unlike now where only one engine responds instead of two engines.

The fire was said to have been the largest fire in the history of Montgomery County.

The second-largest fire may have been the Silver Spring Lumberyard fire that happened in 1949, a year when I was away at a boarding school in Savage, Maryland.

There were other tanks of gasoline that Bobby and I, and I guess everyone, thought were going to blow up, but they didn’t. We sort of were hoping, however, that they would go just to liven things up a bit.

I had been discharged from the Marines just ten days earlier before the fire happened, after having been overseas for the past eighteen months.

Back to the oil fire later in the book

Previous to my joining the Bethesda Chevy Chase Rescue Squad, June 18, 1955

I knew that there was a rescue squad in the area even when I was a young buck, because at some point I had learned that they had gone to National Airport in 1949 to the plane crash there, between two planes, which at the time was the worst plane crash in history, killing fifty-five persons. The same day the squad had gone to the fire at the post office in downtown DC near Union Station, which was a major blaze. The rescue squad was always there in the back of my mind. As I grew up in Chevy Chase, you could hear the sirens long before you could see them, as they went down either Wisconsin Avenue or Connecticut Avenue every day near my home on Oliver Street, in Chevy Chase a block and a half from either street, three or four times a day.

The house on Connecticut Avenue where a man died one time while smoking

When I was a kid, just a young buck then, I would walk from my street, in Chevy Chase, with our maid and my sister, Jeanne, down Connecticut Avenue to my grandmother’s house at number 5 Newlands Street off Connecticut Avenue. It was one of the first houses that Senator Francis G. Newlands from Nevada, the rich guy that started Chevy Chase, built and then named the street after himself. Senator Newlands formed the Chevy Chase Land Company and planned the first suburban community in the United States, which would become known as Chevy Chase.

All the streets in Chevy Chase were given English and Scottish names, such as Kirk, Lenox, Melrose, Oxford Primrose, etc. Hesketh Street was named after Lord Hesketh, who was an English gentleman and Senator Newlands’s brother-in-law.

On the way to my grandmother’s house, we would pass this large wooden and stone house a few blocks down from Chevy Chase Circle with the top of it burned up, and I found out that a few weeks earlier, the man that lived there by himself had died when his house caught fire and he had burned to death right there in his bedroom.

For the next few years or as long as the house was there with the top of it burned off, I looked at it every time that we walked or drove by it. I had heard that the man who had died there had been smoking in bed and had set the house on fire. I wondered how he felt as he burned to death. I wondered how much pain that he had been in. In fact, I think that I made up my young mind then never to smoke. Even my parents smoked at the time, but I never did smoke and never will.

One day I discovered behind the Chevy Chase Post Office and the so-called city hall the instrument that was used, or at least used to be used, to sound the alarm to summon the fire department when there was a fire.

It was a large locomotive wheel rim made of steel hanging from a large wooden post with a sledgehammer used to beat on the rim, and if you did that, the fire engines were supposed to come and then go to the scene of the fire wherever that might be. I’m not sure that it worked, though, because every time that I would hit the wheel with the sledgehammer, no one ever came; of course, I never stuck around to see. During the war years, it was taken away to be melted down for the war effort, as was the old gun that used to sit on Wisconsin Avenue at Bradley Lane, with the steel gun facing toward the district line.

As late as the early 1950s, both Wisconsin Avenue and Connecticut Avenues were two-lane roads.

You could drive from Bethesda to Rockville and just see a few farms and a gas station or two and a few houses here and there.

In the early years in Chevy Chase, when you called for the fire department, an engine would come from the district because Chevy Chase did not have a fire department then.

At some point during the war years, or maybe before, my grandfather, who was a judge in the District of Columbia on the DC Supreme Court, was in charge of setting up a fire department, and the Chevy Chase Fire Department was formed. He had also been the judge at the Teapot Dome oil scandal in the 1920s.

In 1923 he was summoned to the White House where he administered a second oath of office to President Calvin Coolidge. The first oath had been challenged by Attorney General Harry Daugherty as illegal.

The whole time that I worked as a paid firefighter for the Chevy Chase Fire Department, I never even knew that my grandfather was instrumental in starting the fire department so many years ago.

Gloucester, Massachusetts, during the war years

And speaking of the war years, it was up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where I saw my first dead part of a body from a little distance away and realized what they looked like at a real early age. I did not get a real good look at it because it was covered with oil and sand and seaweed and partially buried in the sand.

Had the guy been on a ship when it had been sunk possibly by German submarines, which were all over the ocean off the coast at that time. I don’t remember seeing any ever, but other people said that they had seen them especially just before dark when the sun was sitting, around the time that the ship, the night boat, went by every night.

The night boat would go past Gloucester every evening at the same time on the way to Halifax, Nova Scotia, from New York City

The night boat, because of the threat of German submarines, stuck close to the coast, and I would look forward to seeing it every night going from New York to somewhere up the coast in Canada. I would even sit on a rock on what was called the rocky coast and eagerly wait for the boat to appear and then disappear, and that happened every night until it stopped happening. You could see the boat for about fifteen minutes before it was out of sight unless there was fog and then you might not see it at all.

My grandfather owned a house there right by the Atlantic Ocean, and there were a lot of rocks on the property and a cave and a tennis court. My sister and I used to go to Good Harbor Beach several miles down the road to go swimming, play in the sand, throw sand at each other, play with the seaweed, and look for seashells at about ten o’clock in the morning every day.

On the way to the beach, we would pass the shore patrols that guarded the area and the coast there. There were army trucks with large guns attached to them and jeeps filled with armed troops all over the place, and we had to have a special tag or sticker on our car so that we would not be stopped. Because of all the German submarines that were sinking the ships out in the ocean, oil was always coming in, and the beaches were always covered with oil and wreckage from the sunken ships, and I think that it was that way all during the war. I remember seeing dead seagulls and other oil-covered birds on the beach. I know that we saw a lot of dead fish, and my grandmother once told me that the oil had killed them.

Good Harbor Beach on the Atlantic Ocean in Gloucester

When I was a kid in the early 1940s, every beach that I ever went to was covered with oil and tar due to the war

Before anyone was allowed on the beach, the army or shore patrol had to search it, and I was told by my mother once that all the dead soldiers and sailors from the ships that were sunk that floated onto the beach or anywhere on shore had to be removed first, and that is why the beach here and others were closed until about ten or eleven in the morning to the public.

If it had not been for the beach closures in the mornings every day, even Sundays, then the general public would have seen all that stuff that washed in with the tide each morning especially.

I would have liked it if the beaches had not been closed, although I would only have been five years old when the war started and about ten when it ended, still a mere kid.

Army trucks filled with soldiers would always be driving along the coastal road day and night

I remember one time the beach was closed for several days, and we figured that maybe a whole lot of bodies had washed up onto the beach. The newspapers never reported anything about Good Harbor Beach or any of the others, and my mother said that because of the war, there was a blackout on everything that happened around us, the newspapers and radio; of course, there was no TV at that time, still a few more years away.

Sometimes live round mines with spikes on them would float up on the beach, and they had to be removed by the army and the shore patrol guys. I don’t know if I ever saw any of those or not.

Sometimes in addition to the dead fish that washed up, there would be some bigger things like dead sharks, and sometimes they would stay there for days, stinking up the beach. I don’t remember if I ever saw any dead whales or not; I don’t think so.

I used to like to pick up the seashells, and if you listened to the inside of them, you could hear the ocean also, but even those had oil on them and inside of them.

Grapevine Road in Gloucester

There were always wrecked ships on the rocks off the coast or parts of torpedoed ships that had floated in, and there were fishing boats that had been sitting on the rocks, some of them for years. There were the remains of a fishing boat at the end of our street, Grapevine Road, that had been there since before I could remember. I kind of grew up with it, and each year, it got smaller and smaller because of all the waves hitting it and breaking it up. The area where my grandmother’s house was, was called Bass Rocks, and the street that ran along the beach and the ocean was called the Atlantic Road.

At the end of the road where our house was by the ocean were rocks, and the waves would wash up on some of them, and my mother and I would sit on other rocks, and she would set up her easel and paint pictures of the rocks and the waves and ships out in the ocean, if there were any at the time, and I would watch her paint and from time to time throw small rocks into the Atlantic Ocean.

Bass Rocks, on the Atlantic Coast

Once after the beach was searched, we were allowed to cross over a long narrow bridge over some pools of water that had been trapped in holes when the tide came in.

In the water-filled holes, there were also trapped live fish swimming around that had also come in with the tide. When the water was gone, the fish would die. One time, I tried to grab one of the fish to put it back into the ocean, but the guy was too slippery, and I never could do what I wanted to do—put the fish back into the ocean.

Someone told me that even if I did put the fish back into the ocean, the tide would just bring it back in anyway and it still would die.

Sometimes you could hear noises out in the ocean, and we were told that they were explosions. When that happened, it sounded like a faint echo that seemed to go on for a long time. Some people said that sometimes you could see fires out in the ocean also, but I don’t ever remember seeing any, although one German submarine was captured one time near Gloucester.

In the Atlantic Ocean off of Ocean City, New Jersey, German submarines were routinely seen sometimes close to shore and several times had fired their guns toward the shore. As far as I know, no one was ever hurt or killed.

The most dangerous place as far as German submarines sinking ships was the outer banks of North Carolina during the war, someone said.

Opposite the Atlantic Ocean in Gloucester Harbor, there had once been a sighting of a sea serpent in August 1817. It is a snakelike creature or reptile up to one hundred feet long that would coil itself around ships, possibly looking for some type of a treat or even a human being to eat or maybe just to chew on.

By the twentieth century, the giant sea serpent sightings had ceased. In the early 1940s, I was aware of the serpent and always was on the lookout for it but never did see it unfortunately.

I think that I went up to Gloucester every summer during the Second World War.

One time, the house next to our house, called Blueberry Ledge in Gloucester, burned to the ground; our house was called Rock Haven.

Also I would go to summer camp for several months in Vermont and New Hampshire, then for the rest of the summer in Gloucester.

I would take the train out of Union Station in Washington DC along with other kids going to camp to Boston then meet the camp owners and go the rest of the way to whichever camp that I was going to at the time, either in New Hampshire or Vermont.

Black window shades

During the Second World War, your window shades had to be black; in fact, that’s the only kind of shade made at the time. No matter where you lived in America, you had to have black window shades on all your windows.

During the war years in Chevy Chase as well as the rest of the country, all the houses had black window shades at all the windows, and there were air raid wardens who would walk up and down the street, looking for any light showing from anywhere.

The air raid wardens had the power to break into houses and put out lights that were on if they could see them on from outside the house.

Several times I walked with my next-door neighbor who was a master warden and was like a head person, and he would take his club and break out a window to get into a house to turn off a light, if there was no one home.

There were no street lights, or if there were, they would be turned off, and I don’t remember if cars were allowed to drive at night or not, but there were not that many of them anyway then like there are today. I think that people had some kind of low-intensity headlights that could not be seen from up in the air where enemy planes could be.

Air raid warden Mr. Humphrey complained about all the fireflies and lightning bugs making too much light

I remember one time while I was out walking with my next-door neighbor who was a chief air raid warden and it was summertime and he was complaining about there being so many fireflies out that night that the Japs and the Germans could see from the sky. I don’t know if he was serious or not, but he never smiled.

He even complained about one of the neighbors who had brought up the idea of placing a small flashlight on her dog’s collar when the canine was out at night and going to the bathroom. I saw no problem with the idea, but he would not hear of it and he ruled that area of Chevy Chase Village down by the circle with an iron fist; indeed he did.

He was right about the fireflies, however; there were a lot of them, and also Japanese beetles. Of course, we were at war with Japan, so that made a lot of sense.

During the war years, I was bound to get the German measles because we were at war with that country also, and in 1943, I did, and the mumps in 1937 and the chicken pox in 1941. I got my polio shots along with everyone else years later in 1956, when the cure for the disease was discovered by a Dr. Salk, or something like that.

I have several friends that got that dreaded polio; it is a crippling disease, and most of the victims end up with braces and cannot walk without them, at least back in those early days of the disease.

What really made me pay attention to the war being fought overseas with the Japs and the Germans was while listening to the radio in the evenings while eating dinner at the kitchen table. My father would listen to this radio commentator named Lowell Thomas every night at the same time and he would tell all of the latest news about the war. The things that I remember the most were the times that he would relate about the atrocities that were being inflicted on our troops by the Japanese in the Pacific and the Germans in Europe.

Most of the news on the radio was about the war. There was no TV back then; that came in 1945, black-and-white TV. My parents got their TV the day that America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

I think that the worst thing that I remember hearing was that Japs forced captured American soldiers to look at the sun with their eyes taped open, and then when they were blind from the sun, their cornea or something was burned up. Their captors then took rifle butts and broke their backs and necks by hitting them in the small of their backs and paralyzing them. Then some of them were bayoneted to death or shot, while some were just left there to die on the ground where they lay. That’s something that I will never forget—what I heard on the radio one night in Chevy Chase so long ago at the dinner table; in fact, I heard stuff like that every night, come to think about it.

Another thing that I heard that the Japs did during the war was to fasten a victim’s legs to a tree and then, after putting a rope or a chain to a victim’s neck, pull the person apart with a jeep or a tank.

Every time that I saw a jeep for many years, I would think about that.

The biggest regret that I have about the war was that the atomic bomb was developed too late to be used on Hitler’s Nazi Germany

Sometimes we would go around the neighborhood and collect newspapers and paper boxes to be used for the war effort; just about all the kids would do stuff like that if they were old enough. Cans also were collected for their metal.

In those days, people did not save anything, and that is why some comic books are worth so much money now. I remember buying Superman and Batman number one of each for ten cents in stores, and now they are worth at least a million dollars apiece or much more in nice condition.

My mother would routinely throw away stacks of my comic books that were brought in the 1940s along with all the newspapers, and everyone else did the same thing, especially during the war years.

During the Second World War, there were hidden antiaircraft batteries in Montgomery County

There were antiaircraft batteries around the Bethesda Chevy Chase area that were well hidden. There were forty air raid sirens in Montgomery County. You could see them; some of them were on schools, and one of the sirens was near where the Farm Women’s Market was in Bethesda. You could hear them being tested at certain times in the day. Around noon was one time when you would hear the air raid sirens. The sirens went off so often that you kind of got used to them; it was sort of old hat.

One evening, a Marine in uniform was walking by my house in Chevy Chase and he saw me and walked over and asked where this girl lived on Oliver Street, and I told him that she lived about three houses away.

The girl that lived in the house was named Virginia. She was not too bad looking, and her father was a real rich duck. I had only seen her a few times and didn’t really know her that well, and they lived in the most expensive house on the block.

The Marine told me that he had been shot and injured in the Pacific and was now healing. I asked him if he had killed any Japs, and he said that he had. I told him that was good, and then he went to the girl’s house.

He had asked me if I wanted a beer, because he was carrying a bag of beer, and I told him that I wasn’t old enough to drink yet but that I would when I got older. I must have been about seven or eight at the time. But thinking back now, I probably should have taken one of the beers that evening because the summers were hot then and there was no air conditioning in houses. I think that I was nineteen before I had my first beer, maybe eighteen.

Facts: Victory Gardens

During the war years, fire engines from the Chevy Chase Fire Department would routinely go to the homes in Chevy Chase and water their gardens with the fire hoses, especially during droughts.

People were required to have what were called victory gardens to grow food because food was scarce then, because of the war. My parents had five gardens in and an extra lot that they owned next to our house. In the gardens were lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, radishes, corn, and other things, including worms. You needed coupons to get a lot of things at the grocery stores, car parts, tires, batteries, and a lot of other stuff; you needed coupons for just about everything.

My parents had ration books to buy things like meat, sugar, shoes, tires for their cars, and just about everything else. My sister and I also each had one.

There was a building in Bethesda called the Ration Building, and that is where they issued ration books and stamps and whatever else that needed to be done.

In 1942, there was a war rationing calendar schedule on how things were rationed for the war effort. In fact, in March of