{"id":5366,"date":"2015-04-30T21:09:08","date_gmt":"2015-05-01T02:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=5366"},"modified":"2015-04-30T21:17:15","modified_gmt":"2015-05-01T02:17:15","slug":"a-little-reminder-of-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=5366","title":{"rendered":"A Little Reminder of the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

<\/div>\n

If you are under the age of 30, maybe even 35, you probably don’t know why the telephone poles in this picture have red and white painted bands around them. Unless you are a real local trivia fan (or maybe when you were around 7 or 8, you were very curious about your neighborhood), you probably wouldn’t even notice them as you drive down the road (in this case, Grove Street in Montclair, NJ). And even if you did, you probably wouldn’t ask yourself, hmmm, why are there poles with red and white paint on them every quarter mile or so? <\/p>\n

But now that I’ve made you think about it . . . here’s the answer. Once upon a time, most urban and suburban town of any appreciable population density had fire alarm boxes spread throughout the town. Every box had an individual number, and was electrically wired into a central location at the town’s main fire station. So, if a fire were to break out and a citizen walking down the street happened to see it, they could run to the corner and push or pull on a little button in the firebox that would send an electrical signal alerting the police and fire department that they should get out to the vicinity of the fire box, on the double. <\/p>\n

Now you might ask, with all the telephones out there, even if you go back a decade or so when pocket phones weren’t yet universal, why were these street fireboxes needed? Wouldn’t it be better to wait for someone to call and explain the situation? And wouldn’t it be tempting for wrong-doers to push the alarm button as a false alarm, given that probably no one could see or trace it back to you? That’s all true. But once upon a time, telephones were NOT all over the place. Before 1950, not every household had one. Up to the end of World War 2, telephones were an expensive luxury, mostly used by the bigger businesses and affluent families. <\/p>\n

Obviously then, these fireboxes go way back to the early part of the 20th Century, when you couldn’t count on a telephone being available if a building suddenly caught fire. The thing that got most cities to invest in public firebox systems was the insurance industry. In areas that had street-corner firebox systems, building owners would get lower fire insurance rates. <\/p>\n

In the town where I grew up, there was a firebox just a few houses away from me. Most kids I knew (including myself) wouldn’t mischievously set it off falsely, even though the temptation was great. Back then, we feared the consequences of getting caught (the chances were low, but the perceived punishment potential was high). So there weren’t a lot of false alarms, although I had heard of someone doing it once or twice. <\/p>\n

The fireboxes were tied into a fire siren system, which started blowing once a firebox was pushed. The whistles and horns could be heard all over town. They blew out a code, from which you could determine which firebox had been triggered. If you heard two whistles, a short break, and then 5 more whistles or honks, then you knew that the fire was near box 25. The town fire department gave every household a calendar every year, and on the back of the calendar was a list of all the box locations and numbers in town. Today, no more municipal fire horns or sirens — it’s considered noise pollution, I guess. But no more calendars from the fire department either.<\/p>\n

By the late 1970s, fireboxes were on the way out. I moved into Montclair in the mid-80s, and I just vaguely remember seeing the shoebox-sized fireboxes on these poles, although I don’t think that they worked anymore. They were probably all gone by 1990. But the red and white paint on the telephone poles where they were mounted has somehow lingered on in various locations.<\/p>\n

The world changes fast now, and a lot of other things that I took for granted back then are going or gone. Mailboxes are becoming rare, along with local gas stations. Red brick factories are almost all gone from New Jersey now. Bank branches are being replaced by ATM’s and on-line banking. And growing-up is a very different experience for kids today. So, thanks for letting me indulge in some trivial memories of how things were around here, back when I was young.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you are under the age of 30, maybe even 35, you probably don’t know why the telephone poles in this picture have red and white painted bands around them. Unless you are a real local trivia fan (or maybe when you were around 7 or 8, you were very curious about your neighborhood), you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5366"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5366"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5368,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5366\/revisions\/5368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}