Five Alarm Election

Even within the obscure subcult of fire truck restoration buffs, Jeffrey Schadt is a bit unusual. Most of these gentlemen are ex-firemen or have always wanted to be one, and most own just one truck, which gets polished and brought out for special occasions but will never be returned to service.

Schadt (pronounced “Shade”) is a dealer, primarily of working trucks. At any given time he is likely to have two or three in various stages of restoration and in the pipeline to the sale block, all stored in an oversized garage that he had built next to his house in Maplewood. There is a thin but consistent market for these machines, he explained the other day. New ladder trucks can cost more than a million dollars. He typically sells his refurbished models for prices ranging from ten thousand dollars to one hundred thousand dollars.

Schadt is unusual as well in that he is an active on-call fireman for the city of Maplewood, and for many years he was the department’s chief engineer in charge of equipment. (His day job is as a health and safety official at 3M.)

Normally, St. Paul electoral politics are not one of Schadt’s major interests, but thanks to his interest in fire trucks, lately he has found himself in the middle of them. St. Paul firefighters, many of whom he knows personally, have not been happy with St. Paul Mayor Randy Kelly. On weekends they’ve been making the rounds on a 100-foot ladder truck—air horn, loudspeaker, and all—campaigning for his DFL opponent, Chris Coleman.

“People love it,” according to Pat Flanagan, president of Local 21, the St. Paul firefighters union. “They look shocked, then they smile. We get honking and thumbs-up from all kinds of people.”

When the firefighters started their Coleman runs, local, right-wing bloggers briefly seemed to be going into full-swarm mode. It looked like a case of city employees commandeering municipal property for a partisan campaign against one of their own. But the attack petered out when the union posted a notably civil response on one of the blogs, explaining that the truck was leased “from a fire buff that is a friend of St. Paul firefighters.”

That would be Schadt. But he has no plans to sell this truck, a 1975 Seagrave, which has quite a story behind it.

For Schadt, it began in the winter of 2003, shortly after he had sold a ladder truck to a fire department in Bernice, Louisiana. At that point he was down to two vehicles and was again in acquisition mode. Thumbing through a magazine, his eye lit on a used ladder truck that had come in on trade to an American LaFrance dealership in Landisville, Pennsylvania. He called for details, then asked to be sent a video. “‘Hit all the bad spots,’ I told them, ‘so I can see what I’m getting myself into.’”

“I watched that thing a bunch of times,” he said. “Too many times.”

He flew out to Pennsylvania for a final look, closed the deal, and had the truck shipped back on a flatbed. It sat for a few weeks, until March, when he started getting “a little antsy” and began tinkering. Among the things he discovered was an identifying tag that told him the truck had come from a town called Fairview, New Jersey. He decided to give the department there a call, mainly to see if they had any of the operator or service manuals. “When I sold the truck I wanted to have, you know, kind of a complete thing,” he said. “That’s when they told me it was used at Ground Zero.”

Fairview, it turns out, is only a few miles as the crow flies from lower Manhattan. With virtually the entire Manhattan equipment fleet destroyed after the towers’ collapse, Fairview firefighters were among the first non-New York crews on the scene, Schadt explained. His ’75 Seagrave was at Ground Zero for forty-two days, they told him—in “rescue-recovery” for a few days, then just recovery.

When he discovered what he had, Schadt sold a pumper for cash and went to work on a total restoration. Now the truck is pretty much cherried-out and he rents it as a package, along with Benson, his Dalmatian, and himself, as driver.

“I just had a wedding last Friday,” he said. “A St. Cloud fireman got married and he hired me for the limo.”

But he considers the St. Paul deal more than just a gig. “If I didn’t support the candidate, I wouldn’t be doing it,” he said.—David Rubenstein


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.