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OLD PETE SAYS
[The Welland Tribune and Telegraph, 13 October 1921]
“I called around to see Chief Stapf the other day-and maybe I wasn’t surprised. Course seein’ them new shinin’ motor buses of theirs flying around Welland every once in a while, I kinda expected to see things spick and span around the station. But when the Chief showed me all these new-fangled businesses down in his cellar and up around the building, I was dumbfounded so to speak.
I kinda thought that when a feller pulls the hook in one of them there red boxes in the corner, it burn’t a light or somethin’ in the hall, and the chief or maybe the driver, or somebody pulled a rope that blew the whistle, so that folks would know there was a fire, and everybody could come out.
But say, for intercate machinery and high fallutin’ ideas, that firehall beats the cards. It takes more room to accommodate all the paraphernalia used to blow that fire horn than a man would need to pile up a hundred cases of good old Johnny Walker.
As near as I could figure it out, course I couldn’t keep up to the Chief when it comes to explainin’ electric things, they have to have about twenty black boxes, where they make electricity so that they can keep shooting it along them wires that goes to the red boxes on the corners. Then they have three great big round tanks about ten feet high, which they keep pressed air in, to say nothin’ of lots of delicate instruments in the Chief’s office, which he says regulate the whole business.
It seems an awful lot to set one whistle goin’, doesn’t it?
The Chief’s not a bad scout, you know, but he’s gettin’ awful stuck up about his outfit. But you can’t blame him much, seein’ as how he has a real up-to-date equipment. The men’s bedrooms look as if old maids slept in them, they’re so neat and tidy. I bet they do a lot of sweepin’ mornings.
I’ve only got one thing against the chief. He got me sliding down the pole from the second floor and I hung so tight the muscles of my arms was made sore. But then I ain’t so young as I used to be.”
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