Fire history museum houses memories, free fun

Don Fooshee looks at the 1945 American LaFrance pumper truck, the fire-engine red paint now mellowed and chipping, and remembers driving it on a day when Colorado Avenue looked more like the Colorado River.

On that day in the early 1960s, he said, they saved three people from floodwaters.

The Dr. Lester L. Williams Fire History Museum is full of memories for firefighters such as Fooshee, who served from 1958 to 1986, when he retired as a battalion captain.

For the rest of us, the free museum is full of cool stuff.

Stretching out over a 3,700-square-foot high-ceilinged lobby in the Colorado Springs Fire Department Complex at 375 Printers Parkway, the museum is chock full of firefighting memorabilia — four old fire trucks, air masks, helmets, hose nozzles, badges, lanterns, a strip of leather fire hose, toys and fire extinguishers.

"Almost everything in here is from Colorado Springs," said Ray Turner, a retired firefighter who heads up the private, nonprofit museum. "I hope people leave with a sense of the pride that we have at the Colorado Springs Fire Department."

Collectively, the artifacts tell the story of firefighting in Colorado Springs, which began with volunteers when the city was founded in the 1870s. In 1894 it became a professional force, as firefighters relied on state-of-the-art horse-drawn wagons, leather helmets and wooden water pipes.

The showstoppers are definitely the trucks, or "apparatus" in firefighterese: a horse-pulled 1896 hose wagon, a horse-pulled 1898 wagon with steam pumper, a 1926 Ahrens-Fox fire engine that stayed in service until 1959 and the 1945 truck that Fooshee remembers driving.

Turner opened the museum in October 2001, and he and his colleagues raise the money to keep it running through membership dues, donations and fundraisers. The impressive memorabilia collection of Dr. Lester L. Williams, who served as the department's volunteer physician from 1946 to 1996, makes up the lion's share of the displays, but new pieces are constantly being added.

"Dr. Williams was such a close friend of me and my wife, that I had to do something," Turner said. "We're honoring the legacy that he left behind. There's so much history that he knew and passed on to me."

Museum operators talked about moving part of the collection to Fire Station No. 4, a historic building erected in 1909 at 29 S. Institute St., but as the station nears its 100th birthday it's still being restored.

"We've had (the station) since 2005, and we're still working," Turner said. "We've had a lot of people pitch in, and maybe it will be ready in a year or two. It all depends on how the donations come in."

In the meantime, Turner, Fooshee and other retired firefighters gather at the museum to swap stories, drink coffee and check up on the exhibits. Placards in the museum are brief, but these guys are willing to give tours of the collection.

Memories are no extra charge.

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CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0226 or bill.reed@gazette.com