St. Clair County
Remnants Of The Past

Rural Missouri
January 2002

Back Where It Began
St. Clair's First Fire Truck Comes Home

By Jim McCarty

For years one of the duties of the St. Clair Fire Department's secretary was to write to the Harrisonville American Legion post. The letter was to let them know the St. Clair folks were still interested in "The Truck".
Back in the late 1940s members of the post, which ran the town's fire department, found the dilapidated remains of a 1922 Ford Model TT fire truck in a junkyard. They thought the old truck would be a neat way to show off their department.
So they salvaged the truck, a heavy-duty version of the venerable Model T. Remarkably, the truck still had its hand-crank siren and bell.
Also still in place were the neatly painted letters "St. Clair Fire Department". The Harrisonville department sent a letter to their counterparts in St. Clair to let them know they had found their old truck.
St. Clair bought the truck second-hand in 1931 after a series of disastrous fires. It would be the department's first motorized vehicle, and would see service there until 1934 when it was traded in on a more modern truck. Somehow it showed up in the scrapheap on the other side of the state south of Kansas City.
Naturally, St. Clair's firefighters wanted it back. And so began the annual correspondence. "We told them we wanted to buy the truck," recalls Dale Sullivan, a long-time St. Clair firefighter. "They said you've got first call if we ever decided to sell it."
It would take many years of patient waiting before St. Clair got its chance. Harrisonville took over the fire department from the Legion post, but the old truck wasn't part of the deal.
"They called and said if you want it be here in two days and bring a trailer," Dale says.
In short order the truck came home, 54 years after it left. The truck had been stored in a barn and was in sad shape. The engine was sitting in the bed. The upholstery was a shambles.
As it turned out, getting the truck was the easy part. The real task would be scraping together enough money to do a first-class restoration job.
But Brian Hagedorn proved up to the challenge. Brian, a former volunteer at St. Clair who is now a professional firefighter in Brentwood, took on the job of raising funds for the restoration.
He held "Model T Open" golf tournaments, dances and raffles. "Whenever we had money we put it into it," Brian says. "We would get a little money and tear it down. Then we would get a little more money and do the body work. Eventually it all came together and out it rolled."
"When you operate on the taxpayer's money you can't put investment in something like this," Dale says of the project. "If it weren't for Brian, we couldn't have done it. He managed the money real well."
Dale, chief mechanic for the department, says they got a real education on the cantankerous truck. "This one was before my time," he says. "Model A's, I fooled with them a lot. This was a different breed of cat."
At one point Brian asked his dad for Model T advice. "Dad said, 'What I know I'm trying to forget'."
The truck was torn down to the frame and everything was checked, rebuilt or replaced. Parts proved difficult if not impossible to find.
If there is one thing the St. Clair department had plenty of it was savvy volunteers. Most notable was the late Bob Berkel, who was in charge of parts procurement. "Dale would need something and Bob would just show up with it," Brian says. "Sometimes he would need money and sometimes he wouldn't."
The project was completed just in time for a Fire Fighters Association of Missouri parade. With its chrome bell gleaming and sporting a fresh coat of red paint, the truck turned a lot of heads at the parade and at many car shows where it was put on display. "It's a conversation piece wherever we take it," Dale says.
Before the rebuilders could say they were finished a sign painter carefully relettered the department name on the truck's side, using tracings made from the original paint. Everything is back exactly like it was before, with one exception. The pump that forced a stream of water through its single hose is missing.
"That pump is in someone's barn somewhere and they don't know what it is," Brian says.
While the old truck is special to the volunteer fire department, it's also a reminder of the tough times the St. Clair Department faced over the years.
When Dale joined the department in 1955 there was no tax base to support its efforts. Firefighters held fundraisers to buy equipment. He can remember the days when volunteer firefighters had to dip into their wallets to buy fuel for their trucks.
In 1973 voters approved a fire district for St. Clair and surrounding towns. District status gave them much-needed funds that bought better equipment. For a department that once fought fires with a Model T truck, it was a godsend.
Today the department has 20 pieces of modern equipment, including a supertanker truck that can unload 5,000 gallons of water in less than a minute. The equipment is housed in four firehouses. Best of all, this year the first paid employee, Jim Alsop, will come on board as chief. Plans are for six professional firefighters to join him in the future.
Adds Brian, "I guess that's what this means more than anything. A lot of the older guys can say, 'look where we were and look where we are now'."

This photo shows the truck in 1948 when the Harrisonville American Legion recovered it.


Brian Hagedorn, left, and Dale Sullivan take a ride in the St. Clair Fire Department's Model TT truck. The two were part of a group effort that restored the truck, which was the department's first motorized vehicle. The 1922 truck features a hand-crank siren, lever-activated bell and a 40-gallon water tank located just behind the seat.