The barn wasn’t wide enough to park the trucks side-by-side like a real fire station. The
old Chevys had to back in one after the other, single file.
Rusted, dented and leaking oil, they were military-surplus when the U.S. Forestry
Service used them. After they couldn’t find spare parts anymore, Forestry officials
dumped them on the Country Corner Volunteer Fire Department.
“As they say, ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’” Richard Teel remembers when Country
Corner began 10 years ago.
“We were a bunch of guys who wanted to do something, but we didn’t know what we
were doing.”
One of the first emergency calls involved a grass fire.
The volunteers - lightly trained but heavily enthusiastic - quickly converged from all
across southeast Osage County.
They grabbed their gear. Opened the barn door. Jumped into the first truck. Cranked
the engine.
And nothing.
They cranked again.
Nothing.
They hit the dashboard. Cursed. Prayed. And cranked again.
Nothing.
Finally, they pushed the first truck out of the way and jumped into the second.
They cursed louder. Prayed harder. Cranked the engine longer.
And it started.
“We always managed somehow to get to a fire,” recalls one of the early volunteers.
“But we didn’t always get back.
“More than once, we broke down on the side of the road - embarrassing for a
department that was trying to inspire confidence in the public.”
The plan was to make-do with the barn while they raised enough money for a
proper station at Country Corner itself, the intersection of two bumpy asphalt roads
between Sperry and Lake Skiatook.
But like Teel says, “You have to be a winning team before anybody will cheer for you.”
The donations never came.
“Plan B,” says Teel, the fire chief at the time, and now chairman of the fire
department’s board of directors, “was to take a big risk.”
In fall 1998, five board members co-signed a bank loan together, putting their own
personal property at risk to pay for the new station.
They were already giving their time and energy to the department. Now they were
willing to give their homes and cars, too, if necessary.
“If you believe in something,” Teel says, “you don’t give up. You find a way.”
Painted in Country Corner’s distinctive bright yellow, Engine No. 1 rumbles out of the
station just before sunset on a recent Tuesday evening.
No lights, no siren - this is just a training drill. But the volunteers still fidget with
nervous adrenaline, one adjusting and readjusting his boot straps, another snapping
and unsnapping his jacket.
“Imagine if this was a real fire call,” Scot Smith’s voice crackles over the headset.
“The energy would be a hundred times more.”
Tonight, Smith finds himself riding in a rear-facing seat behind the driver. When they
get to “the scene,” his job will include jumping out first to begin unrolling the hose.
Next time, he might have to drive the truck. Or man the radio. Or operate the water
pump.
In professional fire department, people can specialize.
“In a volunteer department,” Smith yells in the mic to be heard over the truck engine,
“you never know who’s going to around when a call comes in. Everybody has to know
how to do everything.”
Tonight, training officer Wayne Groom has deliberately put people in roles they aren’t
used to.
Setting up an obstacle course of yellow construction cones in a parking lot at Skiatook
Lake, Groom uses an extra-tall orange cones at a target “flame.” The he steps aside to
watch Engine 1 “arrive on scene.”
First, the truck parks too far away, so the main hose won’t stretch far enough to reach
the yellow cones.
Then the volunteers put their oxygen masks on too soon, fogging up so much they
can’t see where they’re going.
Finally, when the lead firefighter aims the hose at the orange target, nothing comes
out - somebody forgot to open the valve.
“Not good, guys. Not good.” Groom calls everyone into a huddle. “But that’s why we’re
doing these drills - make your mistakes now so you don’t make them on a real call.”
As evening turns into dusk and dusk fades into nightfall, Groom runs the drill again
and again.
“Hustle, guys, hustle.”
Wearing 130 pounds of gear in the June humidity, the volunteers take frequent breaks
to gulp water, some of them falling to their knees to rest a few minutes.
But Groom and Fire Chief Jim Massey won’t tolerate anyone slowing down in the
drill itself.
They’re volunteers. Not amateurs.
“When somebody calls 911 and they need our help, they don’t care if we’re volunteers,
” Massey says. “They expect us to respond just as quickly and just as effectively as a
professional department.”
No one can do a job on a real “scene” until he gets it right here - again and again, until
it becomes instinctive. Volunteers can train for months, even years, before they’re
ready.
Running out of sunlight hours after Engine 1 left the station, Groom demands another.
The truck parks at just the right distance for the hose to reach. And even though the
obstacles have been re-arranged several times, the volunteers zip through the cones
with ease.
A jet of water knocks down the target on the first try.
“Good. Very good,” Groom claps. “That’s the way to do it.”
Country Corner has become a winning team.
On the first Saturday morning of each month, the fire trucks park outside. Folding
tables come out of storage. Volunteers wear aprons to cook. And hundreds of folks
turn out for eggs, sausage and biscuits.
Breakfast raises close to $10,000 a year, but that’s not really the point. In a rural area
where the nearest neighbor is sometimes over the horizon, this is where people get to
know each other.
“We’ve really become the focal point of this community out here,” chief Massey says.
“It’s a club house, a town hall. It’s where people get together, where they hang out.”
In 2003, Country Corner asked residents to vote on a property tax to make it the
first - and only - publicly funded volunteer department in Osage County.
They needed 60 percent of voters to say yes. They got 92 percent.
“There’s no way we would have that kind of public support if we were just putting out
grass fires,” Massey says. “We put ourselves at the heart of the community, and the
community has given back.”
In more recent years, the upscale Crosstimbers development at Skiatook Lake has
brought million-dollar homes to the district, better known for trailers and farm houses.
Some newcomers have been donating tens of thousands of dollars at a time, paying
for state-of-the-art medical and firefighting equipment.
Country Corner is one of the few volunteer departments in the state to have a
defibrillator for heart-attack patients. And Engine No. 1 comes with a high-tech
infrared camera to find hidden hot spots in a house fire.
That’s long way from three broken-down Chevys in an old barn.
“We’re top of the line now,” Teel, the board chairman, admits to bragging a little. But
who can blame him?
“We’re the Cadillac of volunteer departments.”
