The First Fire Call

     

Al Henning tells about the siren history: "When we started the department, I had two small sirens. I put one on the top of the old lumberyard and mounted the other one on a telephone pole someplace. You could only hear them a couple of blocks away, but they were all we had at first and we didn't have any money. We could trigger them from the five telephones in the village.

"We finally acquired a much better a seven-and-a-half-horse siren that you could hear from at l east a mile away. It was on top of the a fire hall. Once we got the new siren working, we put a clock on it. The village wanted it to run at noon and at nine o'clock at night for the curfew."

Council member Kelly Brookman tells this about the siren, "Before the more organized method of having switches on strategic telephones throughout the village to set off the fire alarm, there were only a couple of switch boxes. These operated the earlier sirens, and one was on a pole across the street from my house."

It was decided to use that alarm when they staged the very first practice fire to get their new and untested fire department started. Brookman worked with Eddie Kraemer, the first fire chief.

In a pile behind the Brookman dealership sat a stack of old wooden boxes and crates. At six o'clock one evening, the fire department began a controlled burn and Brookman walked across the street from his house to pull the switch that rang the siren for the very first time. Firefighters came running, and they worked together to get the fire put out. Afterwards they had hotdogs and pop. 

Source: Memories of Lake Elmo, collected and authored by Gloria VaDemmeltraadt