Tempe Historical Museum Oral Histories

William "Bill" Hanna was the first professional fire chief for the City of Tempe and held that position from 1960 until his retirement in 1977. Previously Tempe had a volunteer fire department . Hanna came to Tempe at age 36 after serving for one year as a Mesa policeman. Before that he was a fire fighter in Ferndale, Michigan for nine years. When he retired from Tempe in 1977 there were 110 employees working for the Fire Department. Hanna was instrumental in establishing the first accredited fire training academy in the state of Arizona. Bill and Betty were the parents of two boys, and she was a homemaker and employee for the Valley National Bank.

BIELO: Since 1960, and there were how many people?

BILL HANNA: I started on November 15, 1960. I had to, first, get through the test...that was a lulu. It was a six-hour written test.

BIELO: What kind of stuff was on there?

HANNA: Everything imaginable. What it was, there was a young fellow. He didn’t last too long with the city. He was progressive. They fired his butt. [Laughter] His name was Van Dyke. I can’t remember his first name, but he had ASU and then Oklahoma A & M, which has a fire college. He had the two of them write this test. And there were quite a few of us–around 30 or 40–who took the test. Some walked out when they saw what it was. [Laughter]

This Van Dyke, he was really progressive. After they fired him, about a year later, he’d gone to work for a big investment company in San Francisco, a bonding company, they had to hire somebody to come in and straighten out the city’s finances. They didn’t know he had gone to work for this company, so they contacted the company. They were famous around the country. Who did they send over to straighten out the finances? [Laughter]

BIELO: Kind of ironic.

HANNA: All of them had an oral interview. They had chiefs from around the state interviewing, and I was then interviewed by the City Council. By that time I had walked around the fire station and saw what they had. I told the City Council I would take the job providing they purchased a self-contained breathing apparatus for every man on duty.

BIELO: They didn’t have any?

HANNA: They had–one. I had put up with that back in Michigan.

BETTY HANNA: They had one.

BILL: We weren’t allowed to use it. We had chemical plants all over back in Michigan. So, I didn’t want these guys, their lungs, to take that beating. The City agreed. They hired me. They would do it.

BIELO: And how many people were on the department...?

BILL: I was authorized to hire 12, or 11. I needed 11 actually, because one man, Wally Filger, he was working at the fire station and living there -- he and his wife. He would be the first to respond to a fire call, activate the alarm, and the other firemen would chase him, volunteers. Wally knew more about the city than anyone around.

BETTY: He had Badge #1, didn’t he?

BILL: Yeah. He had held every position there was in the city, except for city manager, at one time or another.

BIELO: How long had he been there?

BILL: Wally was around 50-some year when I started. He had been born and raised in Tempe. Just on a farm on the outskirts. So, he really knew the city and the ins and outs.

BIELO: So, he was part of the squad when it was still just volunteers?

BILL: Yeah. So, I just absorbed him. I wanted him.

BETTY: Well, you got quite a few in the department.

BILL: But, eh, I had to prepare a written test. They had no testing procedure set up to hire these men. They had no rules and regulations. I had to write those. And it got extremely interesting. I did hire a few of the former volunteers. Before I started working, the volunteers had formed a committee to get me fired.

BETTY: Tell him about the phone call.

BILL: What it was, I was the first outsider to ever come in as a department head. I was breaking into the clique.

BIELO: You weren’t part of the volunteer squad?

BILL: No. No, I had been a cop in Mesa for a year. Previously I had been on the fire department in Michigan.

BIELO: So, you moved to Tempe when?

BILL: I moved to Phoenix and to Mesa. Then when I passed the test and got hired, I had to move into Tempe. They even called her one night when I was on duty.

BETTY: One night?

BILL: [Laughter] They said, Your husband’s out on a canal bank with some Indian woman. No kidding!

BETTY: They called one night, and you were sitting right there in the living room. [Laughter]

BILL: They weren’t too swift.

BETTY: I just said, Oh, that’s nice. And hung up.

BILL: Cities are rated on their ability to provide fire protection. At that time Tempe was a Class 9. A Class 10 is an unprotected city where there is no fire department.

BETTY: And that’s what governs the insurance rates.

BILL: Yeah, it sets the insurance rates. Now, the National Board of Fire Fighters who conducts these inspections and tests them, they were threatening to put Tempe into a Class 10, which would be completely unprotected. That’s why they had to get somebody in there.

BIELO: So, that’s why they wanted to start it as a paid position?

BILL: Right. The city manager, he took me out for a drive one day. He wanted to show me their new big industrial area over here at First Street and Hayden Road. They put in this fabulous water system. I said, Well, what size mains [do you have]? [He said], Four inch. I said, You want to put industry in here? Well, yes. That’s what this is zoned for. I said, You can’t even provide your daily drinking water with that. I said, For an industrial area, you’ve got to have at least 12-inch mains. [He said] Oh, no. The engineer told me all about it. I said, Well, have you got a map of the grids of the water supply? [He said] Well, what’s a grid system? I said, Let’s go visit with the city engineer. You’ve got a grid system of your water supply. A map of it. The city engineer said, Well, what’s a grid system?

BIELO: Are you kidding?

BILL: I am not kidding. He’d just run water lines and they’d dead end. Unless you have a loop, you’re not going to get any decent flow. Tempe was real interesting when I first started here.

BETTY: He’d come home....

BILL: I was tempted more than once to just say, To heck with it, and walk away. When I first started hiring men, I had to teach them not only to be firemen, I also had to teach them how to cook....

BETTY: How to clean.

BILL: How to clean. I was like a babysitter for 12 men.

BETTY: They’d get mad at him, and they’d come to me. Mrs. Chief, would you tell the Chief...? I’d say, I don’t tell him nothing. I’d say, down there is his ball game and yours. If you don’t like it, you go to him.

BIELO: How old were you when you started?

BILL: Thirty-six.

BIELO: Were most of the guys older or younger?

BILL: Well, let’s see. Wally was older. There was a couple the same age as me. Most of them were all younger.

BIELO: You only took a couple from the volunteer staff?

BILL: There was about five.

BETTY: Dick Carlson stayed a volunteer, and Henry [Hamer] stayed a volunteer.

BILL: Russ was a volunteer.

BETTY: But he came to you. Ralph came to you.

BILL: I guess there was only about three or four.

BIELO: So, about a third of the squad. And the rest of them were none too pleased with you coming in?

BILL/BETTY: Nobody was. [Laughter]

BILL: The only real support I had was this Wally and then a Mexican fellow, Manuel Luque. He was a volunteer and he stayed a volunteer. I found out later he was the one person who really supported me. Oh, they used to pick on that poor guy somethin’ awful.

BIELO: Was he the only Mexican?

BILL: Yes.

BIELO: Were the rest of them all white.

BILL: Yes. I threatened to get rid of all the volunteers if they didn’t lay off Luque. It was just a small town who was exploding in growth.

BETTY: And they didn’t know what to do with it.

BILL: And they had no idea on budgeting. Like I said, I started here in November. Hired the men right after the first of the year when I was working with the firemen. I was wondering where the budget package was. I had received no budgeting instructions. So, I went over to the city manager and asked him when the budget packet coming in. [He said] You’d better talk to Miss [Edna M.] Barbre about that. She was talking to Frank Connolly, the newspaper owner. So I went over to the fire station. I figured, the heck with them. I’ll draft up a proposed budget using the code numbers from what I had in Michigan. I laid out my proposed budget for the coming year, and I figured it’d have to go to the Council by May, at least, to be adopted in June. So, I take it over and gave it to Miss Barbre. She looked at it and said, What in the hell is this? I said, It’s a proposed budget. [She said] I write the budget for the departments in this city!

BETTY: She was the city clerk.

BILL: I said, I’ve never heard anything like that in my life. So, I immediately get on the phone to some of the councilmen. Like I said, I was in hot water a lot.

BIELO: Just because you’re an outsider, you think?

BILL: That and trying to bring in progression to the city.

BETTY: Well, bringing in honesty and proper bookkeeping.

BILL: Suddenly each department had to prepare a budget. [Laughter] Then I came up with a five-year projection, a five-year plan. That went over like a fart in church.

BETTY: You can edit anything out of this that you want to.

BILL: You know, it was things they had never heard of or didn’t want to hear in Tempe.

BIELO: Why do you think that was?

BILL: It was just a knit little group, controlled...Well, I’ll tell you how bad it was. The library, when I started, had an unlisted phone number.

BIELO: Public library?

BILL: The public library.

BIELO: Twilight Zone here.

BILL: Oh, yes. It was like the Twilight Zone. Anyone wanting a liquor license in Tempe played hell because a cousin of the mayor had a liquor store in Tempe. He didn’t want competition.

BIELO: When did all this monopolizing break down?

BILL: It broke down slowly as the city grew more. I was put on probation a few times for being a radical, a troublemaker. But it was fun, more or less building a city because I had received fabulous training from the city manager back in Michigan. The fellow had been a city manager on the Virgin Islands. He had come to Michigan and ended up as manager there for 30-some years.

BIELO: What part of Michigan was it?

BILL: Ferndale, suburb of Detroit. Heavy industry.

BIELO: And how long were you there for?

BILL: Nine years. He taught me, You work for the taxpayer. The taxpayer doesn’t work for you. You either produce or you get out. That’s the way he ran a city. It was fair and very efficient. Here I came in to a very knit group that had control of a small city for years with all these radical ideas on how to run a progressive city.

BETTY: Fred Laking and Helen ended up being some of our best friends.

BILL: He was the manager back in [Michigan].

BETTY: They’d get into arguments at work, and five o’clock would come around. He’d be sitting in Fred’s office, and they’d be bantering back and forth and arguing over something. Five o’clock would come and Fred would say, That’s it. Let’s leave. We’d see him at the city park. The kids playing softball. He lived across from the park, and he’d come over and there would be no mention of the job.

BILL: Back there I even threatened to shut down the city yard one time.

BETTY: You threatened to close down a few schools, too.

BIELO: For fire code?

BILL: Yes. But got along great with the city manager. Until his death we were the best of friends.

BETTY: They retired out here and we saw them a lot.

BILL: He was a stickler for honesty and efficiency in city government, and that is the way he had trained me. You have a small city or town, a lot of, you might say "inbreeding" because it is a knit group. They don’t want anything to rock the boat. They’ve been running it their way, and even though the city is exploding in growth, they don’t want changes.

BIELO: How did you come about getting a job?

BILL: They advertised. There were people from around the country taking the test.

BIELO: How many people?

BILL: There was about 40.

BETTY: One guy was from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. [Detail about him and his going to work in Michigan]

BIELO: You say it changed gradually?

BILL: Yes. They went through a lot of city managers. There was [Art] Bunger, he was the first one, and he eventually got fired.

BETTY: Cooper was the longest one.

BILL: We had some that should have been fired, too. [A manager from Walla Walla, Washington], he was another one where I visited all the City Councils, and I told them, Either he goes or I go. I think the guy was off his rocker. He threw a book one time at a police chief. [He thought] everybody was always spying on him. He got fired in Tempe, and he went to work for ASU to set up their student-parking department. He didn’t last a month there; he got fired there.

BIELO: Were the city services [staff of different departments] pretty close?

BILL: I knew I had to establish good relations, especially with the police department because they gave you traffic control and everything else. If you have any friction between the police and firemen, you’ve got real problems. So Worth Farley [the police chief] used to meet every morning at the little coffee shop next to city hall. We would discuss any problems that we had during the night so we could get better cooperation.

BIELO: How long did that go on?

BILL: Until Worth retired [in the early 1970s.] He was a good man. He was anxious to see changes.

BIELO: Was he a local person?

BILL: Born and raised in this area. He was just a progressive person that knew that change had to come, and he wanted to see efficiency.

BETTY: He knew everything was growing, and they would have to change to meet the growth.

BILL: As the city grew, we got a better city council, better people running for Council. With any city, you’re going to get your best people running for city council. We had people with bones to pick, people who think they’re political geniuses, and at times you get some real lulus on the City Council. Occasionally you do get some great people. The best mayor Tempe ever had was Elmer Bradley.

BIELO: When was he mayor?

BILL: When they built that city hall, that upside down pyramid. Elmer was so against that. He had his designers design a city hall that would cost the same thing, and it would have been triple the square footage.

BETTY It was going to be a regular building, and it was going to be done at the corner of Rural and Southern. The library was already there, and all that space was open yet. The only thing there was the library.

BILL: And Elmer wanted to put it down there so it would have been more centralized.

BETTY: He said everything was moving that way, and he was going to build an L-shape on the back perimeter of that whole area, and put all the city offices there.

BIELO: Why didn’t that...?

BILL: The rest of the City Council were great friends of Kemper Goodwin who designed that. They were all buddy-buddies. Elmer wouldn’t even show up for the dedication of that.

BETTY: He threatened to sue them if they put his name on the plaque.

BILL: His name’s on it, but he was mad. He was an honest, hard-working mayor.

BIELO: How would you describe the atmosphere of the city councilmen when you were first starting out?

BILL: Some of them were real good. Others were just there taking up space, part of that buddy-buddy.... The two that stand out in my mind are Clyde Gililland and Art Livingston.

BIELO: As being two of the better ones?

BILL: The better. They knew the city was growing; they wanted it done correctly.

BETTY: [The mayor, Hugh Laird] was part of the Laird and Dine Drugstore on the corner of 5^th and Mill.

BILL: I can’t remember who the others were. Gililland and Livingston were good, hard workers who had a lot of interest in the progression of the city. I don’t know if you’ve met [Ross] Rice?

BIELO: He is actually one of the people on our list to interview.

BILL: He was a good one. A lot of people didn’t like him, but I did. I got along great with him because – it wasn’t per se his education level or anything – but the man realized the city was growing. Things had to be done, and they had to be done correctly.

We used to go to some League of Cities things, and I was always [saying] that they should have a requirement for anyone who wanted to run for City Council. They would have to take a course of city government and pass it before they could run for City Council. That upset a lot of people. [Laughter] And I would still do it today. People running for City Council think they know it all, and they have no idea really what city government is about. The schools don’t teach municipal government. It’s a huge hole which is so important.

BIELO: When all the change was going on, were there any particular things you remember that were really kind of kicking it off, the changes that the city had to accommodate to?

BETTY: [Population] growth.

BILL: It was exploding right when I came in in the ‘60s. I drew graphs up. I took loan applications, post office receipts, electrical connections, (I went back a couple of years) and tried to get a projection and made graphs for this five-year plan. It surprised me how accurate they actually worked out, because the city was just exploding.

BIELO: What do you think kicked off that big population boom?

BETTY: Well, for one thing they had a real bad winter back East. I think it was in February there was a builder in Tempe. He had the subdivision laid out. He had been approved, and he had the streets bladed but not paved. He had some of his lots marked, and he was working in his office in the models. All he had there was just one desk and some half-constructed houses and some blueprints. He sold 82 houses in one weekend, and almost every one of them was from back East because the weather was so bad back there. 82 houses in just one weekend when you don’t even have a model to show, let alone a furnished model!

BILL: That’s just one example of the way the explosion was. It was strictly weather because there was very little good employment.

BETTY: There were some of the companies starting to move out this way, but not a whole lot.

BILL: Not that much.

BIELO: Was there a lot of entrepreneurship going on out here?

BILL: It was just starting. You couldn’t really say that had anything to do with it. There was very little place for the people to work. A lot of people would move in and go on to California because they couldn’t find a job [here].

BETTY: When we first came out, we had trouble finding that. I tried to go back to work and I couldn’t get hired because he wasn’t working. They were afraid that because he wasn’t working, we would pick up and move, and they would have trained me for nothing. We moved out here because of the kids. Both our boys were sickly, and we decided to come out to see if their health would improve with a change of client. And there was no transferring pensions, so we forfeited everything back there to move out here. We were just on the verge of having to go somewhere else when he got on the police department in Mesa, and things began to happen for us.

END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE A,

BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE B

BIELO: How long before you started feeling comfortable within the community and with your job?

BILL: The community didn’t take long. Oh, there is one funny story about Tempe. There was a man in Tempe. He was a genius. He owned a huge piece of property north of where Desert School Credit Union is [Broadway and Dorsey]. Had a house back there, and he was rich. During the Cuban crisis, they were having a lot in the paper on how to build your own bomb shelter so you’d be safe from atomic attack. So one day I get a copy of a letter sent to the Atomic Energy Commission. Frank Connolly, the guy that ran the newspaper, he comes flying in my office and he says, Bill, did you get a copy of this letter? I said, Yes, I am just reading it. This man wanted the Atomic Energy Commission to loan him just a small atom bomb because he would build a bomb shelter on his property and set this small atomic bomb off to prove that that bomb shelter wasn’t safe. [Laughter] But he wanted the fire and police departments to know what his plans were, and that’s why we’d gotten copies.

BIELO: What was the reaction to that?

BILL: We knew nothing would ever come of it. Then during that Cuban crisis, they made me the civil defense director. I didn’t want a thing to do with that cotton-picking job. Frank Connolly tells the Council that the citizens of Tempe want a meeting with the civil defense director to find out what to do in case we’re attacked by Cuba. So the Council wants me to have a meeting, so I had one in the council chambers. It was packed. I said, I just want to start with questions. One guy raises his hand and says, What are you going to do in Tempe to protect us if a big atomic bomb hits out at the Motorola plant? I said, I don’t have to worry. He says, What do you mean? I said, You’re going to be dead! That was the end of my career as the civil defense director.

BETTY: He heard those radio towers blow up one Sunday. He had the radio with him. We were in a dead spot and they couldn’t reach him. They were warning everybody because of these towers. They didn’t know what had caused it. We came home, and he said to me, You know the evacuation route out of town. I said, I ain’t going. Can you imagine how many cars will be on that evacuation route? I could be caught in that traffic in an open area. I’m going to do what they told us – close all the doors in that hallway, put up the mattresses, and just stay in that hallway. I will be safer than I would be out on the road somewhere.

BILL: There was some funny stuff during that Cuban Missile Crisis. Then we had the Viet Nam protestors. The Viet Nam protestors at ASU, over 90% of them were not students at ASU. They were high school students from Scottsdale. Somebody had organized them, and they would come down and start fires. They would just raise hell. The fellow who was in charge of campus security, John Duffy, who was a retired FBI agent and the police chief at ASU, would have people filming these protests. There were very few students involved. They tried to burn down Old Main. They almost succeed in some of those attempts.

BETTY: It was sort of like this G-8 conference, all the rioters that were there. These people were coming in and then recruiting all these people here. Basically the people in the area (not just Tempe but this general area), even if they didn’t agree with Viet Nam, they weren’t the kind who would go against the government in that fashion.

BILL: They would protest and scream and holler, but they wouldn’t be starting fires or try to bomb things.

BIELO: Earlier you were talking about how many people were on the squad. Did that number grow at all?

BILL: Oh, yes. When I retired I had 110 full-time employees.

BIELO: And when did you retire?

BILL: ‘77. At that time, we had the only accredited fire training academy in the state.

BIELO: Did you guys start that up?

BILL: Yes. Phoenix had lost their accreditation. If you see the fire methods today, you’ll know why. They are accredited now. We used to train fire fighters from all over the [Valley].

BIELO: What was the area you covered?

BILL: When we first started, there was north Tempe, which hasn’t changed at all. Going south, Southern was the city limits. Price on this end, and Priest was on the other.

BETTY: And between Priest and Phoenix was county. There was a big county island.

BILL: Then Tempe went as far as they could east and west and then started heading south. Tempe knew they were getting bottled in [so they had to move south]. Somewhere in the history books it will write about Tempe’s three-foot annexation. They annexed three-foot strips of ground along side of a road, and then they would branch off for somebody’s farmhouse and would annex it. Not all the farm, just the house. The strip went down to Williams Field Road, which is now Chandler Boulevard. There were three-foot strips all over that area. I used to get more teasing from other chiefs in the state wanting to know if I was going to have a special fire truck to fight a three-foot wide grass fire. [Laughter] But Tempe figured if they ran this three-foot line around, no other city could annex within that three-foot line because they would be surrounded by Tempe. That was thrown out in the courts.

BETTY: Who was that fellow Dave Merkel spent the night with down where Arizona Mills is now?

BILL: There was one guy (I don’t think he’s alive now), he was the genius of the water rights in Arizona. The state legislature, the governors, everybody used to call on this guy when they had problems trying to figure out the water laws. Dave Merkel, who just retired recently as the city attorney, when he had first started something came up about water laws. David tried contacting this guy, but he wouldn’t talk to him. So I talked to him, and this fellow agreed to meet with him. The next morning I went into work after the meeting, Dave comes over. His eyeballs are just slits. He said, I haven’t been home yet. We just finished our meeting a few minutes ago. He said, I’ve never learned so much about water laws in all my life. I could have never gotten that in college.

BETTY: Dave Merkel is, what, 5 foot 5 inches? And skinny. And his wife is even shorter.

BILL: Dave was hired not as city attorney when he first started in Tempe. He was hired to set up sales tax. They finally got rid of the part-time city attorney they had. He was getting things so screwed up. They moved Dave in there as city attorney.

City managers, let’s see, Cooper he was real good. He was from California. He got killed in a plane crash. He was learning to fly. Ken McDonald was a good city manager, and he stayed for a long time. That poor devil had a lot of personal problems. His two boys had been in car wrecks and both had brain damage. Ken was under a lot of strain, but he still did a great job as city manager. Jim Alexander was another good manager. They got some good people as time went by.

BIELO: So you think the bigger the city got, the better...?

BILL: There were actually no real departments when I started with Tempe. They had the police department and then the city [everything else]. To show you how bad it was, directly across from city hall there was a group of stores where that hotel is now. The post office [was there] and it did not say United States Post Office; it was Tempe Post Office. Some magazine – Time or U.S. News, something like that – was out taking pictures of it one time, and it was right after that their sign changed. It was so bad when I first started, I wasn’t getting any mail. I was writing various cities trying to get some of their stuff to help in Tempe, but mail would take forever to get to me and it had all been opened. I waved down the postman one day. I said, What the heck is happening to my mail? He said, Well, I deliver it to city hall. The next day I went over to city hall. Miss Barbre, the city clerk who almost ran the city, all the mail was put on her desk for everybody in the city, including the city manager. She stacks it all up by department–police department, city manager, fire department, councilmen, she didn’t care–it was all separated out and it just sat there until Frank Connolly came in. He pulls up his chair next to hers and she starts opening the mail. No matter who it was addressed to she would open it, read it, and hand it to Frank Connolly. He would read it, then they would put a piece of Scotch tape over the top of the torn envelope, and it was stacked up for distribution. I finally went over to the postmaster, and I said if my mail is not delivered to the fire station I am going to call Denver to see if we can’t have an investigation. At that time Denver was the head of the western states for the Postal Service.

BIELO: Did it come to an end?

BILL: Oh yes. My mail started getting delivered. Then immediately the police chief wanted to know how I was getting my mail. He said, By tomorrow my mail will be coming to the police station. And it did. [Laughter]

BIELO: When we were talking earlier about the interaction between the police and fire departments, what was the general atmosphere like? Did you guys get along well?

BILL: They got along real well. We had picnics, baseball and basketball teams. On the basketball team I had representatives from about every department there was in the city on it. We used to use Tempe High’s basketball court. We’d play the FBI. We had a softball team that was unbelievable. Burt Hollis, whom they named the park after, he was a teacher, a volunteer fireman, a great man, was a good ball player. He was a comedian. He went up to Grand Canyon one time with his new 8mm movie camera. Burt went over to where people get on the mules. He filmed the backside of people getting on the mules (and getting off). [Some minutes on local baseball stories.]

Ladmo [who played in some games] more or less adopted Tempe because he lived in Tempe and wanted to be involved in some way. He couldn’t be a volunteer fireman and answer calls. He said, I couldn’t be dependable with the TV stuff [and] personal appearances. But he said, I will help any way I can. [I suggested the softball team.] He said, That’s what I want.

[Ladmo’s son took and passed the fire exam.] Nobody got on through friendship. They had to pass a written test, an oral exam, physical agility exam.

BETTY: And the oral exam was conducted by people outside of Tempe.

BILL: I had friends of state legislators, a son of state representative that failed the test. They didn’t get hired. When some of the political cronies’ friends were failing the test, the Council said the test was too hard. I said, I’ll bet the girl working on the switchboard can pass it. By God, she passed it.

BETTY: You had some other women pass it. The only thing was, they failed the physical.

BIELO: So you didn’t have women...?

BETTY: Not when he left. There are now.

BILL: The government said the physical agility test was too hard for women, and I said, O.K., I’ll have some women take it, and you come over and watch it. My youngest son was an instructor at the health spa. I asked him, Do you have a couple of small gals who could probably pass the fire department physical agility test? He said, Oh yeah. Lots of them. He sent over two girls; one may have been five foot. The other girl was about five-six. They sailed through that physical agility test with no problem whatsoever.

BETTY: [Her opinions on why women should not be on the fire or police forces.]

BILL: How can the average five-foot woman drag out a 225-pound man? I hired a group of women from a government program one time for fire inspection. They were terrific. These women developed the program for our schools, trained kids. They did a fabulous job for the city, but we couldn’t get enough funding to keep them.

END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE B

BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE A

BETTY: They were going around checking frayed electric cords.

BILL: There would have to be at least two women and a man outside on the block for their safety.

BIELO: What other positions were there besides just the actual people who went out and fought the fires?

BILL: When I first started, there were just the fire fighters. Period. They had no training. I couldn’t rely on the training of the so-called volunteers because they hardly knew which end of the hose the water came out of. They tried, but they had no one to train them. The ones who really had the desire, they were wanting to learn but it took them awhile to do it. I can’t remember when I first opened up a position...I had to do all the fire inspections myself.

BETTY: The first year I did all your typing.

BILL: I didn’t have a secretary.

BETTY: You never did have one. In 17 years you never got one.

BILL: I’d get part-time or high school kids. It was some kind of government deal where you could pay the kids through the summer. Then I was forced to hire some so-called "unemployables" through some government program. I had them painting fire hydrants and cutting weeds. This was in the ‘70s.

[Some discussion on one of his summer helpers who went to NAU to become a teacher and broke football records.]

It was a challenge all the way through and something I would never do again. When you go out to a small town to organize a department, you’ve got to be sick in the head.

BIELO: Are there any social expectations within the community that resulted from being a fire chief and from being a fire chief’s wife?

BETTY: It didn’t gain us anything. We didn’t go in with the ruling, outside of his fire department rules. We didn’t go in with the idea of changing anybody. Consequently, we were always accepted.

BILL: Generally, I had the support of most of the firemen. When we would go to build a fire station, I’d make the architect sit down with the firemen and go over any ideas they had and incorporate them into the fire station. Some of them came up with good ideas. Take Fire Station No. 3 on McClintock, south of Baseline. There are no hallways. The young fellow, he was the protege of the fellow who designed the fire station on University. He was hired for station No. 3. He sat down with the firemen, and someone mentioned about the hallways being such a waste of space.

BETTY: I think the best compliment was when you’d been chief for ten years, and the volunteers always had a Christmas party up at the old Legion Hall on 5^th Street. During the intermission, somebody got up on the stage and he said, I want any man who is a volunteer fire fighter, or has ever been a volunteer, to come up here. He lined them all up in front of the stage, and then he had him come up. John Curry, who had Curry Hardware Store, had a plaque in the clock with a pen set for his desk, he said, Chief, when you first came here there was a lot of us who didn’t want you, who didn’t think we’d make it. But now we’ll follow you anywhere. And Johnny was listed as the oldest active volunteer in the United States, but he resented the "oldest" part.

BIELO: You said when it was Class 10 they were threatening.... Where was it when you left?

BILL: When I left it was Class 3.

BETTY: I think it’s Class 2 now. Cliff Jones, the current chief, when [Bill] started Cliff was delivering the Tempe Daily News to the fire station. Cliff would always go down to the fire station. He wanted to be a fireman.

BIELO: Do you have any involvement with the fire station now?

BILL: No. Just the picnic. It’s for all the retirees.

BETTY: Whenever there’s a funeral for a fireman, even the old ones, Cliff always turns out with a truck and a contingent of men.

BILL: It was a good life, but it was a hard one, too. It’s the politicians mainly. If they were educated and knew what was happening within the city government, things would be a lot easier.

BETTY: It had a lot of downfalls. It was hard in the beginning. He answered every fire call. We had a radio in the bedroom, and every time a truck moved we knew about it. There was no family life. He had a portable radio that was in the city car, and it could be taken out and plugged into our private car. We knew everything that was going on no matter where we went.

BILL: For a long time I couldn’t even leave the city limits because I had to be here to [answer calls]. This lasted about two years. It was like a prison for two years.

BETTY: We couldn’t go out at night to dance or party or anything. He quit going to church because he didn’t want his beeper to go off. [Discussion on a dog they owned who responded to the fire calls.]

BILL: One job I was offered was the job of city manager out in Peoria [Arizona]. I thought it would be nice, and then it dawned on me that Peoria was just starting to explode the way Tempe had. I thought, Starting a fire department was bad enough. What would it be like to try to get a city government organized?

When we moved here from Mesa, Mill Avenue was two lanes. Southern was two lanes. Kids would paint quarter-mile stripes across Southern. At nighttime they’d go down there and drag race, and the sheriff would stand there and time them. There was nothing around, no traffic. The whole side of Southern was cotton fields. From college heading east, that was all cotton fields, and there was nothing on the west side of Mill Ave. So the sheriff would park at the end of Mill Avenue, and the kids would drag race down there, which was a good, safe spot for them.

BIELO: This was around 1950?

BILL: 1960.

BETTY: Our oldest boy went in the service in 1967.

BIELO: When you weren’t answering calls or going out on fire runs, what were you guys doing around the fire building, or was there any down time?

BILL: Oh yeah. Your firemen have training, they’ve got maintenance. The underside of a fire truck has to be as clean as the top part of it. You’ve got a lot of hydraulic lines, water lines. And unless that underside is kept clean, you’re not going to know you’re starting to develop a little leak. So everyday they are checking underneath there. All your tools in your compartments have to be in the correct compartments. They’ve got to be in good condition. They have to inspect them, check them out, and make sure they are working. There’s always plenty to do

BETTY: They do their heavy work and housekeeping in the morning, and then in the afternoon they do their classroom [work]. Sundays were pretty much down days, and then nights you could sit and watch TV.

BIELO: And how many people were on duty at one time?

BILL: When we first started there were six. You should have a minimum of four men per fire truck to be safe.

BIELO: How far away did you live from the fire station?

BETTY: We lived at Mill and Southern on Fairmont, a little over a mile and one-half.

BIELO: Right when we started talking you mentioned something about Laird and Dines Drug Store. Did you go down there at all?

BILL: I used to.

BIELO: It was open for 68 years or something like that, and it closed down was it in ‘64?

BILL: When they closed that place whoever bought it was tearing things out in the basement. Laird was the druggist who was the mayor. He must have run into the greatest guitar string sale in the world. [Somebody] waved me in. He said, Chief, I want to show you something. Look at these boxes. There must have been–I don’t know how many–big, cardboard boxes of guitar strings. They were in the basement of the drug store.

Johnny Curry was one of the pioneer families of Arizona. He and his brother had Tempe Hardware. His dad started it. Johnny had a grandfather who started with Barry Goldwater’s dad selling [merchandise] off of a wagon. They’d go around to all of the mines. Johnny Curry’s dad had hardware. So they would travel together to all the mining towns and small towns selling their wares. And that is how Goldwaters and Tempe Hardware got started.

You could go in there and ask for a "coal saver." This was from back in the ‘20s. It was a little basket where you go into your fireplace, scoop up the ashes, and had a screen on the bottom and shake them. The ashes would fall through and the pieces of coal [could be saved].

BETTY: They used to have enamel, oval baby bathtubs. Johnny had one of those when they needed it.

BIELO: Is it still open?

BETTY: No, it was on Mill Avenue and 7^th Street.

BIELO: When did that close down?

BETTY: It was in the early ‘70s that Johnny died and his brother sold it.

BIELO: [I am interested in Laird and Dines as a social gathering place.]

BILL: A lot of politics went on there. There was very little political decisions to discuss as a city council. That was all done down at Laird and Dines before, so the public wouldn’t be involved and bother them. [Laughter]

BETTY: When we moved [on Fairmont] the Christmas of ‘60, if I wanted a loaf of bread I had two choices. I could go all the way up to Tempe Center or I could come out on Apache Boulevard by Terrace where Bayless was. That was it.

BILL: As far as eating went, there was Lola’s Café between Laird and Dines Drug Store and the old city hall. There was a bowling alley and Monti’s. That was it. Then another one opened on Mill Avenue. There were three places you could eat: Lola’s, Monti’s, or the bowling alley. Most of them went to Mesa or Phoenix for lunch, [or they went home].

BIELO: When Laird and Dines closed down did anyone take the place as a substitute?

BILL: No, but there was a gathering place, a restaurant right on the corner of Mill and University, the southeast corner. [Where Chili’s is now.] We used to go down there after a Council meeting because it was open late, and have coffee and a piece of pie.

BETTY: And at budget time I saw him come home at 2-3 o’clock in the morning.

BILL: We had one mayor, [Bernard] Caine, he was an attorney. He wanted meetings on everything. He was the one who said he got elected on one campaign promise – fire me and the police chief. We ended up with so many meetings, he ran out of nights of the week. So he started having breakfast meetings. We got up to three mornings a week. You had to buy your own breakfast, and our salaries weren’t that good at that time.

BIELO: Did you work at all?

BETTY: Yes, I worked at Valley Bank.

[General conversation about their daily lives]

BIELO: Did you ever socialize with the firemen?

BILL: I didn’t socialize a lot with the fire department. It is no good to...If you were a fireman and I was the chief, I can’t be going out with you socially. The others would say [a person who got a promotion] was buddy-buddy with the chief.

BETTY: The first year when you only had the 12 men, you were lucky because you could go hunting with them. Monday morning...they knew where the line was.

BILL: When you’re small you can do that.

[Various talk on hunting.]

When you have, say, six men on a shift you’re a little closer with them. When it starts getting larger, you can’t socialize individually.

[Various talk on different individuals who served on the fire department, the Caledonia Society, their younger son who is a fire fighter in Tucson, the union, grandchildren, etc.]

END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE A

END OF INTERVIEW