There’s an unfair image of firefighters lazing around the firehouse playing cards while waiting for the fire bell to ring. As last week’s furniture factory fire in Lapel illustrates, I can remember a few times when they earned every cent they got.
Chronicling every major Madison County fire is a task in which I’m sure I’d miss some. But a few big ones stick in my memory bank.
There was the frigid morning in the 1950s when I was walking to high school from Park Place. As I approached 10th and Main, firefighters were putting out a blaze that had leveled the Uptown Recreation bowling lanes. The facility was replaced by the Town Motel. It is now the site of the police department and city court.
I was in Spanish class at then-Anderson College in November 1958 when someone told us the Wigwam was on fire. As soon as class was over, I drove to Anderson High School. A crowd of onlookers peered in at the gutted wooden interior of the old Wigwam, between 13th and 14th streets, as water flowed from the structure. The 4,500-seat Wigwam, built in 1925, would be replaced three years later by the present Wigwam just to the north of the old site.
The morning of Dec. 23, 1960, I picked up The Anderson Herald and read: “METHODIST CHURCH DESTROYED BY FIRE!” Again I drove to the site, and I was confronted by rivers of ice that had cascaded from the First Methodist Church on that cold morning. The present First United Methodist Church was completed in 1965 on the same site.
I believe I was in the Army when the old Park Place Church of God at East Eighth Street and College Drive was torched. It had been serving as Anderson College’s music hall and chapel after the present Park Place Church was completed in 1961.
I had been called for jury selection in the late 1970s, I think it was, but that day was disrupted by the “fireblock” blaze across Meridian Street from the Madison County Government Center. I had to come back the next day, eventually getting the judge to excuse me from jury service.
That era also was when the old Wendell Willkie High School went up in flames in Elwood. The Willkie arch was preserved and stands as a memorial to the one-time presidential candidate from Elwood.
June 25, 1999, was the day the old Anderson High School burned as a smattering of AHS grads kept a weekend vigil. The newer section and the Wigwam were saved, but the older sections had to be dismantled.
The AMACOR fire in January 2005 sent debris across the plant’s neighborhood. And more recently the old National Tile building, being used by Phillips Iron & Metal as a warehouse, went up in flames.
It’s times like those where firefighters show what they’re made of.
Jim Bailey’s reflections on Anderson’s past appear on Sunday. His regular column appears on Wednesday. He can be reached by e-mail at jameshenrybailey@earth link.net.
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