SCITUATE, MA—Sitting in Bob Quinlan's driveway on Old Oaken Bucket Road in Scituate is a piece of history: a 1924 White Motor Company firetruck, one of the fire department's three original motorized trucks.
Quinlan, along with three other retired Scituate firefighters, recently bought the truck and are now looking to restore a piece of their department's history. It's a little out of place among the high-end sedans and commuter cars that are usually zipping down the street, but the group is happy to have the truck back in town after a circuitous route through Central Massachusetts and across state lines, luckily avoiding the grim fate of a junkyard.
Retired firefighters Quinlan, 75; Donald Litchfield, 84; Deputy Chief Tom Bell, 91; and Capt. Norm Duffy, 77, each put in $1,000 to buy the truck, which formed what they've dubbed the Scituate Antique Fire Engine Restoration Group. Quinlan's wife, Jerrilyn Quinlan, helped compile the truck's history.
"I couldn't believe it," Bob Quinlan, said when he first saw the truck uncovered in a barn in Westminster. "It was in great shape."
Scituate originally bought the truck in 1925 for $5,800, according to historical records the group found. It was Scituate's second fire truck ever purchased, and was bought in part with insurance money from a fire that burned down the Minot Beach fire station in late 1924.
The truck was sold to a resident in 1947 after it was retired from more than 20 years of service. That man took it to his apple orchard in Westminste,r where it sat in a barn, mostly unused. It was sold to another relative in the 1960s, and ended up down in Pennsylvania. It was eventually returned to Westminister in 2008, when it was bought by Clay Swenor, who had envied the truck since he was a teenage working at the orchard.
Swenor worked on the truck, managed to repair some of it, but eventually lost interest in restoring it.
Duffy first learned that the original truck still existed from local author James Glinski, who came across it working on his book "A History of the Scituate Fire Department." Duffy said he thought the truck should come back to Scituate, and he enlisted Quinlan to go check it out. They didn't expect much, but were surprised to find the truck in decent shape.
"We were anxious to get it back in town," Duffy said.
Fire trucks have come a long way since the original Whites were in use. The simplistic truck is open air and carried a tank full of water on the back — fire hydrants were few and far between when it first went into service. More dangerous than modern trucks, three Scituate firefighters were killed when the town's first truck tipped over en route to a mutual aid call in Norwell in 1924, the firefighters said. The trucks the town bought in 1947, American LaFrances, were a substantial upgrade.
"They were like a spaceship compared to these things," Duffy said. "The (LaFrance) had a full cab, glass windows . . . it was like night and day."
But, it's all relative, the retired firefighters joked. The White must have been "like a Cadillac" compared to the horse powered fire equipment the town used before, Quinlan said.
Now, the men are plotting the best way to have the truck restored and, eventually, returned to and enjoyed by the town. Quinlan said he did get the truck to run, an improvement over when they got six months ago, but it's still relatively stripped down.
The men, who all met decades ago as firefighters, said they are researching grants and other ways to pay for pieces and repairs for the almost 100-year-old truck.
"It's a piece of the town's history," Litchfield said. "It's not everyday you come across something like that."
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