1928 Winona Lake Fire Truck on Display Sunday in Warsaw
Posted
Jennifer Peryam-jperyam@timesuniononline.com
Winona Lake Fire Department’s 1928 truck will be on display Sunday in downtown Warsaw. The fire truck will be one of many vehicles displayed during the Warsaw Breakfast Optimists’s Club Cruise In in downtown Warsaw. The event is from 1 to 6 p.m. Art Gakstatter, Cruise In co-chair, and Bruce Howe, Optimist Club member, will ride in the fire truck at 1 p.m. Sunday at Warsaw Community Public Library. It will be on display on the south side of the Kosciusko County Courthouse after that. At 1:30 p.m. there will be a presentation of colors featuring four antique fire trucks and an aerial display provided by a 1943 Stearman Bi-Plane aircraft piloted by Alan Hoover, Hoover Aerobatics LLC, and the Island Weaver. The 1928 American LaFrance fire truck was purchased by Winona Lake, and delivered in January 1929 when Howe’s father, Bruce Howe Sr., was Winona Lake assistant fire chief. Howe Jr. said he has memories of riding in the truck with his dad, who served on the fire department from 1928 to 1941. Howe Jr. served on the WLFD from 1951 to 1974. He said his fondest memories on the truck were when he went on a fire call with his father to a trailer park on Winona Avenue in the middle of winter in December 1939. “There was no windshield on the fire truck and it was freezing,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many times I got on this truck in a hurry or jumped on the back of it and when my dad drove it to a fire.”
