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Surviving the Fire

 
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roger.pape
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Joined: 17 Mar 2009
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Location: Liverpool, NY

PostPosted: Fri Jan 15, 2010 9:49 pm    Post subject: Surviving the Fire Reply with quote

Not all memories of the old days in Concordia were pleasant ones. One of the saddest moments in our family was the lumberyard fire on that 1949 Memorial weekend when Concordia celebrated Paul Heyne’s national oratorical contest victory. After a parade down Main St., the crowd had assembled in Central Park for band music and Paul’s recitation of his winning oration. But the celebration was cut short when fire broke out in the lumberyard area. Actually, the fire had started in the old livery stable next door. For some inexplicable reason, they had parked the floats with still smoldering railroad torches on the sides of the wagons in that tinder dry building.

People react differently in an emergency. I must say that my actions were not particularly heroic. My mother was extremely distraught, so I escorted her home along with my baby sister and sat on the front porch at home for a few minutes to collect my thoughts. My brother, on the other hand, had rushed home to change out of his band uniform and immediately ran back to help battle the fire. But the whole community pitched in to help. The Concordia fire department quickly arrived at the scene and began pumping water onto the blaze and companies from other communities showed up soon afterward. The fire companies did a great job of preventing the fire from spreading to the surrounding buildings. While windows buckled in some of the buildings across the street, like Bailey’s Implement Store, fortunately the flames were contained. The water supply in the town water tower was depleted. (That was probably one of the reasons behind my father’s continued campaign for a city water reservoir.) People moved as much as possible out of danger. They seemed to develop superhuman strength in the excitement of the moment. One of the enduring memories was that of little Alice Bokelman carrying a sewing machine out of the Dr. Brady home.

Finally, it was obvious that nothing could be saved from the lumberyard other than the old Ford truck that had been rolled out into the street. People stood and watched the blazing inferno. The Pape and Schnakenberg families weren’t the only ones that suffered a financial loss. While Dad and Nups had purchased the lumber business and inventory, the building was still owned by the Walkenhorst family. “Swag” Walkenhorst, in his usual inebriated state, threatened to jump into the flames, but was restrained by others around him.

A lumberyard fire is an amazing sight with all of the dry lumber, roofing, and paint solvents fuelling the blaze. Flames seem to reach several hundred feet up into the sky. Weeks later, farmers from miles away would bring in charred 2x4s that had been lifted by the updraft and landed in their fields.

The most ironic part of the affair was that the lumberyard was not insured. Dad and Nups had been working with an insurance agent the very day of the fire. The agent had gone back to his room at Concordia Hotel to draw up the papers for their signature the next day. After the fire, the agent quietly slipped out of his hotel room and left town never to be seen again. Bill Dreyer probably didn't realize who he was. Dad made an attempt to see if the insurance company had any legal obligation since a verbal agreement had been reached, but to no avail.

I had just finished the eighth grade at that time and joined the effort to rebuild the company. The first order of business was cleanup. We spent many weeks scooping up the charred lumber and burned out bags of cement. The only thing that I can remember salvaging from the wreckage (other than the old Ford truck) was a few fence pliers from the hardware department. Gone was the huge slice of a redwood log that stood by the office door with events from centuries ago marked on its growth rings. All of the company’s books were lost. Even a fireproof safe cannot withstand the intense heat of such a fire. The records inside the safe had been reduced to ashes. Customers usually make their purchases on credit (which was part of the assets purchased with the business.) But we had no idea of what was owed. To the credit of the people in the community, most of them came in soon afterward and paid a guesstimate of what they thought their bill was. Fortunately, my father was a director of Concordia Bank at that time and friends of the Kansas City bankers who were also on the board. So, he had no trouble lining up financing from one or more of the KC banks.

Property behind the garment factory was purchased as a new site for the lumberyard. We had started building arched chicken brooder houses and one of those became the first office of the new lumberyard. Nups’ fertilizer business was part of the partnership and provided revenue. As part of Nups’ trips hauling cattle to the KC stockyards, he would return with lumber, hardware, and other building materials that the customers ordered. So the business was up and running again. It was an exciting time to see the Fiene brothers build the block building as a core of the new yard. My brother, John Schnakenberg, and I worked after school, weekends, and throughout the summers without pay. The company was able to hire Nups’ brother Gilbert, Walter Lueck, and Omar Lohman as the business grew.
While times were tough being heavily in debt, we didn’t go hungry. Having lived through the depression and with recent memories of the shortages during WWII, we were accustomed to living modestly. John Schnakenberg joked about how much corned beef hash we ate then. We would buy Dinty Moore’s hash by the case. Our milk supply, Don’s 4-H Guernsey Daisy Mae, was gone by then; but we still raised an Angus steer or two in our small pasture between the creamery and our house. When we butchered, we stored as much of the meat as we could in our DeepFreeze and the rest in Alewel’s locker plant. We still had our chickens in the back yard that provided plenty of eggs and our regular Sunday dinner. Mom always had a large garden and canned a lot of the vegetables for the winter. She also washed clothes for some of the St. Paul’s students for a little additional income. Mother still had some colorful feedsacks that she used to sew dresses for herself and Mary. Dad sold off assets including his beloved stamp collection that included sheets of the Famous American series, for example.

Our education continued. The $40 tuition per semester that we paid St. Paul’s College as non-ministerial students was no problem. But my dreams of going to M.I.T. were out of sight. Instead, after high school I began working in a paint factory in the Detroit area and going to night school at Radio Electronics Television School on Woodward Street in downtown Detroit. Paul and Gil Ziegelbein, Orville Bodenstab, and I lived in small rooms in the YMCA on the corner of Grant Blvd. and Grand River Avenue while we all worked and studied there. One evening after class, an instructor who was moonlighting from Wayne State called me aside and told me that I didn’t belong there. I should be studying engineering in a university instead. So after a year we all headed back to Concordia.

Now I was being paid $40 weekly for a 12 hour day, six days a week job at the lumberyard. On Sunday afternoons, I would pick up a little extra cash at odd jobs, like bucking bales of hay onto Alvin Bokelman’s truck and into the farmer’s barn for a penny a bale. The next fall I enrolled in the University of Missouri at Columbia. I figured that I had saved up enough money to make it through school. Being a state university, tuition was free at that time and the only educational expenses were a few hundred dollars a year in fees and books. (Good used books were always available.) It was amazing how cheaply we could live back then. Marv Frerking, Orville Bodenstab, and I shared a room in a rooming house one year and Orville, Gil Ziegelbein, and I shared that same room the last two years at MU at the cost of $19 per month each. I regularly had a 49 cent bowl of beef stew at the Topic Restaurant down the street as my evening meal. Being a land grant school, we were all required to take ROTC courses for our first two years. I decided to continue ROTC training in my junior and senior years, partly because of the modest additional pay we received, but primarily because it provided me with a military deferment until I graduated. (That was during the Korean War.) Fortunately, the Korean War was winding down by the time I graduated. They had an excess of officers at the time and offered us a deal of only 6 months active duty followed by 7 ½ years of reserve duty. Needless to say, I snapped up that offer. I worked for a short while before entering active duty but by the next summer was back at work for General Electric on the East Coast, finally on my way to financial freedom.

So we survived the hard times brought on by that fire. Not by charity or government handouts, but by honest hard work. Many of those government programs (food stamps and the like) tend to promote dependency, not true independence.

Please excuse me for this lengthy posting. It was not intended as a sob story, just something I wanted to get of my chest after all these years.


Last edited by roger.pape on Wed Apr 12, 2017 7:32 am; edited 1 time in total
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mjolson



Joined: 01 Jun 2009
Posts: 2
Location: Concordia, MO

PostPosted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 4:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Roger: I have really enjoyed your last posts, I had forgotten about the fire at the lumber yard and the railroad flares, I remember that when they used the flares the crowd at the fair didn't push as close to the wagons as they do now. Also the pictures of the old cars are really neat, wouldn't you love to own either one of them?,or both.

Keep posting,

Myrna
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