{"id":28795,"date":"2016-09-20T08:01:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-20T15:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/former-kenai-mayor-seeks-to-restore-wwii-era-fire-truck\/"},"modified":"2016-09-20T08:01:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-20T15:01:00","slug":"former-kenai-mayor-seeks-to-restore-wwii-era-fire-truck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/former-kenai-mayor-seeks-to-restore-wwii-era-fire-truck\/","title":{"rendered":"Former Kenai mayor seeks to restore WWII-era fire truck"},"content":{"rendered":"

KENAI<\/strong> \u2014 <\/strong>Former Kenai Mayor John Williams is leading an effort to restore a World War II-era Kenai Fire Department engine.<\/p>\n

Williams said he plans to put the city-owned fire truck\u2019s pumps, tires, engine and chassis back in clean, working order, as well as repaint it to its original white color scheme and let it drive once again down the streets of Kenai.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe hope to put it in fine mechanical running condition, and I\u2019m going to drive it in (a) parade,\u201d Williams said.<\/p>\n

The Chevrolet truck that would become the Kenai Volunteer Fire Department\u2019s Engine No. 3 was built in a General Motors plant in Tarrytown, New York in 1941, according to Williams\u2019 research. It was sold to the U.S Army Quartermaster Corps.<\/p>\n

When the truck came to Alaska, Kenai bought it in the late \u201850s or early \u201860s. At that time, Williams said, the town\u2019s volunteer fire department was based in the Old Town building now occupied by the Kenai Art Guild, which it shared with a city jail. By 1974 the town had grown large enough that the volunteer fire department had become full time and professional. That year, the truck was donated to the village of Hope, replaced by a new American LaFrance engine.<\/p>\n

Twenty years later, Williams was in his second term as mayor when a Kenai firefighter discovered the truck abandoned in the woods in Cooper Landing. At their Aug. 3, 1994 meeting, the Kenai City Council authorized a group to bring the truck back so the Kenai Fire Department could restore it. According to the meeting\u2019s minutes, Kenai Fire Chief Dave Burnett was working on a deal to give training time to Cooper Landing firefighters in exchange for the truck. With the council\u2019s authorization, council member Jim Bookey (uncle of present council member Terry Bookey and a former assistant fire chief) drove with Williams to Cooper Landing to retrieve the engine with Bookey\u2019s lowboy trailer.<\/p>\n

The restoration project, however, never came to fruition. Williams left the Kenai city government in 2005 to become Kenai Peninsula Borough mayor, and other restoration proponents also dropped out of city government.<\/p>\n

\u201cJim Bookey retired from council and everything just went into static mode,\u201d Williams said.<\/p>\n

After sitting in Cooper Landing, the truck spent an additional 21 years sitting in a city shop yard in Kenai. A year ago, Williams re-discovered it.<\/p>\n

\u201cLast fall in 2015 I was out there wandering around, and lo and behold, I spot this truck,\u201d Williams said. \u201cIt was still laying out there in the yard. So I said to a couple of people, \u2018what\u2019s going on with this thing?\u2019 They didn\u2019t know. It had been there as long as some of them had.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Restoration<\/strong><\/p>\n

Taking up the project again, Williams spoke to the city council about the fire engine in late 2015. He estimated restoration would cost around $30,000 total and requested a $10,000 contribution from the city council to match the funding he planned to raise himself. Other contributions, he said, could come via a grant he intended to seek from the Anchorage-based philanthropy group the Rasmuson Foundation.<\/p>\n

The Kenai government met Williams\u2019 request, though it took two tries.<\/p>\n

The city\u2019s fiscal year 2017 budget dedicated the requested $10,000 to the fire engine restoration. This funding was removed with a successful amendment by council member Terry Bookey during the June 1, 2016 meeting. Bookey said that although he supported the fire engine project, government funding wasn\u2019t appropriate for it.<\/p>\n

The donation was made at the following June 15 meeting via a resolution introduced by Knackstedt and council member Brian Gabriel. The resolution text noted that Williams had fundraised over $14,200 from individuals and businesses and had applied for a Rasmuson grant as he\u2019d intended. The $10,000 that Knackstedt and Gabriel proposed to give was taken from an unspent remnant of the previous year\u2019s budget (FY 2016) and would return to the general fund if not allocated. Bookey was the only council member to vote against the allocation.<\/p>\n

At their meeting this week, the Kenai council will vote on whether to allocate another $3,500 share of funding \u2014 not city money this time, but from the Rasmuson Foundation \u2014 to the fire truck restoration.<\/p>\n

As for the private share of the funds, Williams has received donations from individual donors such as Jim Bookey and relator Fred Braun, service clubs such as the Elks, the Eagles and the Pioneers of Alaska, organizations including the Kenai Historical Society and businesses including the IGA Country Foods supermarket and Schilling Rentals.<\/p>\n

In addition to the money, donated labor is also going into the restoration. The body of the truck itself presently sits in the shop yard of Freddie Pollard, a co-owner with his son of Pollard Wireline, an oilfield support service company. Pollard restores old vehicles as a hobby and said Williams approached him about the fire truck after seeing a similar 1946 truck in Pollard\u2019s collection. He and his staff are taking off the body panels and grillwork, sandblasting and priming them, and preparing to repaint them.<\/p>\n

\n

\u2018The fun part\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pre-World War II vehicles, Pollard said, were built of higher-quality metal with a greater nickle content, which has helped the Kenai truck stay intact as long as it has.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this were a modern vehicle, and it\u2019d been through what it\u2019s been through, you could poke holes in it with your finger right now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Pollard pointed out other features of the truck\u2019s mid-20th century engineering: lacking a reliable electric system, the windshield wipers were driven by the vacuum of the engine\u2019s pistons. When idling or going up a hill, the wipers would have slowed. The cabin heat vent opens directly into the engine compartment, and the gas tank is under the seat.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday\u2019s cars are so compact, so crammed full of plastic,\u201d Pollard said. \u201cYou raise the hood and you can\u2019t even see the motor. Old cars, it\u2019s a lot more plain … They were still learning how to make cars back then.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Pollard and another sandblaster, John Peterlink, work on the body and panels, the truck\u2019s tires, engine and 300-gallon pump are both off in separate shops \u2014 Alyeska Tires is ordering new tires, the pump is being restored by Mike Schilling at the GLM Turbine machine shop and the engine is being fixed by John Mellish of Kenai\u2019s RPM\u2019s Auto Shop.<\/p>\n

Mellish said RPM\u2019s has worked before on engines from \u201840s, \u201850s and \u201860s, but said the fire truck engine \u201cis probably going to be pretty close to the oldest one we\u2019ve worked on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s interesting to see how they put things together, a little bit different ideas about the assembly and design of the engine,\u201d Mellish said. \u201cYou got to remember what they had to work with back then, too, with precision, as against modern engines. There\u2019s no comparison in bearing clearances and cylinder wall clearances.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such differences, Mellish said, are one of the enjoyable things about old machines.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the fun part of it,\u201d he said. \u201cYou see it, and go \u2018why did they do that?\u2019 But then you figure, at the time, that was state of the art. It\u2019s flying around in an old Spad fighter aircraft and then going and looking at an F-16.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Ben Boettger is a reporter for the Kenai Peninsula Clarion and can be reached at ben.boettger@peninsulaclarion.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KENAI \u2014 Former Kenai Mayor John Williams is leading an effort to restore a World War II-era Kenai Fire Department engine. Williams said he plans to put the city-owned fire truck\u2019s pumps, tires, engine and chassis back in clean, working order, as well as repaint it to its original white color scheme and let it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":419,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-28795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/419"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28795"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=28795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}