Crime & Safety
Fire Chiefs Spray Anecdotes at Station Closing
As the Lexington Avenue fire station prepares to close, retired fire chiefs gathered to share their recollections of life at the station.
The fire station on Lexington Avenue was donated to Roseville in the 1940s, when the city was known as Rose Township.
Now, 67 years later, mold and age are shuttering the station.
In honor of the station’s “storied history,” the Roseville Fire Department held a farewell event Thursday evening where retired fire chiefs reminisced, blustered and told tales of yesteryear.
Floyd LeCuyer Sr. started fighting fires from the Lexington Avenue station in 1958, and eventually was promoted to chief. He remembers how the diesel pumpers cost only $35,000; today their price hovers around $500,000.
“In my time our masks were all-purpose, and if you bumped the air hole on the surface of the canister, you couldn’t breath,” he said.
Roseville’s fire chief, Tim O’Neill, said that all of the station’s past fire chiefs were in attendance.
“This station has seen a lot of history, and when it came down, we wanted to honor that,” he said.
The station is scheduled to be demolished the first week of December, and a new station will be built in the same location.
Retired fire chief Jim Bodsgard had the longest memory among the speakers.
“I remember when we first started, we had porcelain bowls we had to wash in the back sink,” he said. “The back sink was a haven for--I guess there’s only one way to say it---we had alcohol in the building back then.
Bodsgard’s recollections strayed toward the mischievous.
“There was the time Judge Frankie sent the bailiff over and told us, ‘If we wanted to keep our jobs, to keep the noise down,” he said.
Historical Society Displaced
LaVerne Dickhudt, a Roseville native, and her husband, Herb, volunteer for the Roseville Historical Society, which was housed in the fire station.
They’ve been scrambling the past couple months to transfer the society’s holdings.
Firemen helped them move artifacts--an old bed from the 1800s, antique wedding dresses, potato and beans farm equipment--to fire station No. 2 for six Thursdays in a row, LaVerne Dickhudt said.
