Red Letter Dates in History

Shall we look in the Book, hmmm?



Glenn unearthed three volumes of old Wolfskin Fire Department minutes. I shook out the mouse coprolites and selected a few entries.

From the Oct 1978 meeting discussing the formation of WVFD. Note the last paragraph. The more things change, the more they stay the same! Do you know, they used to call themselves Wolfskinners.



Here are some nice tidbits from Nov 29 1982. The first truck? The very file cabinet from which Glenn recovered these records, "kept in a safe place" all these years! And we still have that desk, too, though it's lost one drawer sometime in the last 27 years. No telling what was in it.

Early safety issues; and oh that barbecue shelter. We finally filled it in two years ago.



O tempora, o mores!



An early attempt at inventory, June 4 1992. And look who makes their first appearance! I believe we had just completed our training so we'd been around for six months already.



Astute observers will notice the doubly crossed out name.

Annual Smokey Road Parade

Saturday, 12 December 2009, was the annual parade down Smokey Road in Crawford. This year Queen Lewis took over the directorship from Delbra Favors and the route of the parade was reversed, but otherwise it was the usual event. Mostly Fire Engines, Ambulances, Rescue, Sheriff, Muscle Cars and an odd float or two. There was an empty Athens Transit bus towards the end of this year's parade.

The local Fire Departments of Crawford, Arnoldsville, Devils Pond, Beaverdam, and Wolfskin each brought a pumper. I was unable to identify the second pumper in line. It was probably a second Crawford pumper but my apologies to another department if was theirs.

Josh Adams rode the back of the Wolfskin pumper. Brian Mixon drove and Jack Adams and I were passengers.

We Have a Board

We have a Board!

Our annual business meeting was held last night. The bylaws, largely boilerplate tailored to the specific needs of the department, require *three* meetings with specific agendas. The arcana were detailed by Glenn, our parliamentarian, in the post below and occasion moments of mirth as we inevitably mess up.

So here are the members of the Board of Directors for 2010:

Chief	Ed Frey
Asst Chief	Wayne Hughes
Treasurer	Cary Fordyce
Secretary	Lisa Vaughan
Community Member	Alan Kotch
Community Member	Bill Cosgrove
Firefighter Member	Brian Mixon
Firefighter Member	Jim Kitchens

In addition to electing a slate of the Board of Directors, the second meeting, of firefighter members, voted for Firefighter of the Year, and this year that turned out to be me. Brian will turn his tiara over to me in February.

In other news, Ed unearthed several old disks that contained some historical training and officer records dating back to the department's inception in 1982. I've placed these on the right sidebar with the option of an excel download or a webpage format. I've added the appropriate meta tags so that these files don't get indexed by search engines. There are some holes in both documents so please feel free to email me with additions and corrections.

And I would guess it was John Wampler, bless his heart, who reconstructed these records.

Annual Meeting Time!

The Firefighter Members and the Board of Directors of The Wolfskin Volunteer Fire Department, Inc. will have their December Monthly and Annual Meetings on December 3rd at the Fire Station on Wolfskin Rd. The following is the agenda based on the Notice in The Oglethorpe Echo, the Schedule of Events above, the Bylaws, and records of earlier years. It may not seem logical, but it gets things done more or less in compliance with the Bylaws.

6:30 pm. December Monthly Meetings of the Firefighter Members and the Board of Directors, as a Committee of the Whole

1) Routine Reports
2) Old Business
3) Unfinished Business
4) New Business
5) Adjournment

7:00 pm. Annual Meeting of the Firefighter Members

1) Elect seven of the eight Directors of the New Board for the next calender year. The Nominating Committee will present a slate of candidates and nominations from the floor are welcome. The openings include:

a) Four Directors elected from among the Firefighter Members, serving one-year terms, to replace Ed Frey (presently Chair and Fire Chief), Wayne Hughes (presently Vice-Chair and Assistant Fire Chief), Jim Kitchens, and Brian Mixon

b) One of the two Community Directors, serving a two-year term, to replace Bill Cosgrove (the other Community Director, Alan Kotch, continues the second year of his two-year term)

c) Two Directors from either Firefighter Members or from the Community, serving one-year terms, to replace Cary Fordyce (a Community Member, presently Treasurer) and Lisa Vaughan (a Firefighter Member, presently Secretary)
2) Elect from the Member Directors of the New Board a Chair/Fire Chief (to replace Ed Frey) and a Vice-Chair/Assistant Chief (to replace Wayne Hughes)
3) Elect The 2009 Firefighter of the Year
4) Any other Business that may properly be brought before the Members
5) Adjournment

7:30 pm. Annual Meeting of the Board of Directors
1) Election of Treasurer (presently Cary Fordyce) and Secretary (presently Lisa Vaughan) of the New Board of Directors
2) Any other Business that may properly be brought before the Board
3) Adjournment



Posted by Glenn Galau

Wolfskin Development Plan

Request for suggestions:

On the right sidebar, there's an entry under WFD Plan, which is a word doc that you can download to view. This is Bill's most recent (Sep 1, 2009) reworking of the WFD Development Plan we've been working on since January. Please do look at it and make comments or suggestions.

(Or you can click here.)

This is a plan by function, rather than by date. At some point we'll probably have an alternative document in the form of a 1-3-5 year plan that is consistent with the current one. What we found was that for our specific needs it was better to first carve out our various functions along with officers in charge. Too many functions were ongoing, and didn't really fit a 1-3-5 year plan (recruitment, for instance, or fundraising). There was a sense that a 1-3-5 year plan should be more visionary, addressing special projects, rather than messing with day to day ongoing operation.

So it's a start. With that context, we'll update as we get suggestions and incorporate them. Suggestions can emailed or added in the form of comments to this post.

Thanks to Ed, Lisa, Phyllis, Wayne, and to Bill who heads the committee. Actually there were several times when just about everyone sat in to offer suggestions, so let's thank everyone.

September Update

First, I'm having some computer difficulties so the full September update may not appear for awhile.

Second, Brian Creech's very nice article on the Margaritaville appeared today in the Athens Banner-Herald.

Third, for Inactive Firefighters:

We're having to do inventory on our equipment. If you haven't attended a business meeting or training session, or attended a fire call in the last six months without notifying the fire chief, you are considered to be inactive. It's kind of a "duh" situation that we have to address - no offense intended.

So, we're asking all inactive firefighters holding outstanding equipment to either come by to turn in your equipment on the next two Thursday evenings (Sep 10 or Sep 17) after 6:30pm, or to contact Ed or Wayne (email addresses and phone numbers appear on the right sidebar) to work out a time to settle this issue.

The deadline for this is September 17 - emails have been sent out, and snail mail for those without email addresses. Of course we'd love to have formerly inactive firefighters return to activity, but regardless wish you all well. We just need that stuff back!

Goodbye to the Margaritaville

I don't know how Wolfskin fire chief Ed ran across this little neon amusement, but we hung it on the door to the Margaritaville bay a couple of years ago. Googling shows it may have a connection to Jimmy Buffett, complete with parrot, but we'd named our beloved pumper long before any such discovery. It's a fitting introduction to the end of a long relationship.



For those who don't know who the Margaritaville is, she's our old pumper that we leased from Oconee County many years ago. She's a 1984 GMC/Chevy (thanks Brian!) with a somewhat checkered past. You can see why we call her the Margaritaville. The unconventional paint job was due to an earlier idea that lime green would be more visible than red, without the distraction to passersby. That idea seemed to go by the wayside fairly quickly.

She's been featured many times, for instance, here, or here and certainly no one in any of our 13 fire departments mistakes her for some other pumper. She's been a faithful and well-used engine and has taken us to many fire scenes.

But over the past couple of years she's become intermittently cranky. Or rather the reverse, since electrical problems that have plagued her for years have led to an increasing frequency of dead batteries and nonstarts. Wolfskin residents should know that a few WFD firefighters have spent a lot of time going back and forth to the station to hook up and unhook battery chargers to make sure she's startable. (Once she starts, she went every time!)

But all good things come to an end. It was painful to have to remove the decals that we took such pleasure in applying. Could anyone emote such sadness at a distance as Josh does here? I don't think so. Good job!



So it was that yesterday we said goodbye to our old Margaritaville. Ed, Josh, Brian, and I arrived at 3:30 last Thursday to begin the stripping process, removing all our equipment. Here's her bay, on the other side of the neon folly, and there are 1200 feet of 1.5 and 3 inch hose lying on the floor of the bay (but you've seen that before, last June, from the other end.

Brian took out our radio, flashlight chargers, and other equipment, and we brought in all the couplings, adapters, SCBAs, and other implements of destruction, and accumulated them in a large pile in the station.

It only took us a couple of hours, and at 5:30 Ed and Brian drove her away into the west for the last time, leaking water in the manner to which we had become accustomed.

And here's her replacement, arriving at 7pm.

By that time the rest of the crew had arrived, and we worked until nearly 10pm putting all the hose back on, and getting a good start on organizing the placement of other equipment. Brian installed the radio and flashlight chargers, tested them out, and found them good. Lisa, Phyllis, Jim, and David helped to get hose back on the truck and make it immediately ready. Glenn had stopped on his way over and picked up sustaining pizza. A merry time was had by all although some of us are going to feel a bit sore today after the monumental effort of taking heavy hose off and then replacing it. We don't do that every day.

The new pumper is actually a "new old" pumper. It's a 1987 Ford, with an FMC chassis, but has been scrupulously cared for. If you didn't know the real age, you'd still be able to figure it out - the side panel controls give it all away.

But it has a 1000-gallon water tank, compared to Mville's 750 gallons, and a good strong pump. And it starts! It has automatic transmission, as opposed to manual, and doesn't tend to run oncoming vehicles off the road by wandering from side to side. I'd argue that Mville was more generous in storage space, and that she had more in the way of strategic outlet ports, but since some of those no longer worked it would be a weak argument.

On the other hand, it doesn't have a personality quite yet, although the brakes are extremely squeaky and may be the nucleus of some kind of notoriety. It's red, of course, and there are those who find this to be a major asset, but I'm going to miss the margarita green.

(There are quite a few folks who worked hard to make sure this happened over the last few months. The new old pumper is a transfer from Oconee County, who values our mutual aid agreement over a section of southeast Oconee County and our responses to their mutual aid calls. The Boards of Commissioners of both Oglethorpe and Oconee County, along with the Oconee County Fire Department, and Fire Chief Bruce Thaxton, worked out the transfer, and we're very grateful to all of them.)