A lament for the disappearing siren songs of our hometowns | Deak
I miss fire sirens.
I don’t mean the whoop-whoop or the whump-whump of fire engines trying to carve a path through oblivious Central Jersey traffic (though, despite the blood pressure meds, my journalist heart quickens whenever I hear that sound).
I mean the sirens that every town used to have that called brigades of volunteers to action and to come to the aid of neighbors in need without question, whether it was a pile of smoldering mulch or a house set ablaze by too many extension cords on the Christmas tree.
I remember sitting in seventh period at Somerville High School before disco became king when every day at about 1:10 p.m. the borough tested its fire sirens, including the one at Brooks Field.
In those days, the Somerville sirens didn’t wail, but gave devil’s belches that corresponded to a code that gave you the location of the alarm. When I became editor of a local newspaper, on the wall of my cramped office was a key to the belches so that reporters and photographers could hightail it to the scene.
As a dashing young reporter in Bound Brook, I remember the desperate banshee cries of the siren on an otherwise quiet February morning in 1985 when a paint factory exploded on Lincoln Boulevard in Middlesex. It was a sound that has stuck with me as much as the sight of 55-gallon drums launched 100 feet or more into the sky after I managed to get perilously near the scene.
But what I miss most is my hometown fire siren that had the power of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.
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Depending on whose kitchen clock you set your life by, the daily fire siren test – two cycles of the wail – came at 6 p.m. It was the signal to come from dinner and for Mrs. Danberry to have supper – nobody called it dinner – on the table for Dave, her son and a future fire chief.
For a normal alarm, like a grass fire on the outskirts of town or an arcing power line after a thunderstorm, the siren sounded seven times in a single cycle.
But if it were a serious conflagration or in the middle of the night, the siren would ring more than one cycle, like London air raid sirens during the Blitz, each cycle with an added urgency. Dogs would howl in harmony, hastily dressed firefighters raced in their stentorian Studebakers to the firehouse and we scanned the horizon for that ominous red glow of what was commonly called “a bad one.”
This was in the days before 911 and radio dispatch so neighbors would call each other to see if they knew where the fire was. And then, if it was a bad one, members of the Ladies Auxiliary one by one would go to the firehouse and start making coffee for the volunteers who had been called to battle.
The sound of the fire siren rallied the town into action, an unity of purpose and duty that never needed to be explained or boasted. You just did your part because you knew, almost from birth and by example, what your part was in the community without nagging doubts or troubling questions. Cynicism vanished when the siren began to wail. And, to be honest, it was also a call to silent, modest prayer that those unselfish volunteers, available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, would return home safe, exhausted with the unassuming pride that they've done their best to salvage a precious piece of our world.
Of course much has changed in a half century. Firefighters are alerted electronically by distant 911 operators. (I know that system is faster and more efficient, but why can't you still have the sirens?) Though some towns have retained their sirens, many have abandoned them and so the rest of the community is not aware when the firefighters are summoned to a call. And there is the fear that someday, perhaps in the nearer future than we may want to believe, volunteer fire companies, like their rescue squad counterparts, will be a hybrid operation of volunteers and paid members, if not eventually all-paid.
With more people working at home, you would think it would be easier to recruit volunteers to answer daytime calls, but the unavoidable and sad fact is that in the 21st century, people have closer ties through their computers with their corporations than they do with their communities.
And there was a time when businesses, aware of their obligations to the community because it simply was good business, tolerated - and sometimes encouraged - their workers to become volunteer firefighters or rescue squad members, even allowing them to take time off to fulfill their duties.
Those days are gone. And they're not coming back.
More than a half century ago, when computers were as common as flying cars, the Neshanic Fire Company didn't have a daily fire test, but a weekly test on Mondays at 6 p.m. The siren wasn't activated remotely, but by a button outside the engine bay doors. (There were other secret locations of the button around town where there were "fire phones" with a dedicated number where you could report a fire, no 911 then.)
Volunteers took turns going to the firehouse - now the Branchburg Library - to perform the test. One Monday it was my dad's turn and he took me with him. And when the hour came, he said I could push the button. The enormity of the task activated every cell of anxiety in my body. What if I goofed? Would I be be ridiculed for causing unnecessary chaos and worry? Would I live the rest of my life in shame?
I didn't screw up. I just pressed the button. And all over town and the open spaces beyond, our neighbors would pause, glance at their kitchen clocks to see if it were a test or the real thing, then settle back into their routine satisfied the siren was working and, quite literally, there was no cause for alarm.
And Davey Danberry was getting his supper.
Email: mdeak@mycentraljersey.com
Mike Deak is a reporter for mycentraljersey.com. To get unlimited access to his articles on Somerset and Hunterdon counties, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: A lament for the disappearing siren songs of our hometowns | Deak
