Author: David Rubenstein

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

Every year about this time, the Noise Pollution Clearing House gets a flurry of calls about leaf blowers. Some people don’t like them, and in California, the gas-powered models have been outlawed or restricted in several municipalities. They can’t be used within five hundred feet of a residence in Los Angeles.

The director of the Noise Pollution Clearing House is Les Blomberg, an Arden Hills native. He clearly enjoys his work. Reached at the group’s headquarters above a travel agency in Montpelier, Vermont, he had just come in from conducting a field test, using a hand-held decibel meter. He was measuring the sound produced by a rake. “We’ve done lots of readings on leaf blowers,” he explained with a laugh. “One of our guys was just curious how they’d compare.”

For the record, the rake, measured at fifty feet, registered forty-four decibels. That’s about four times quieter than the quietest leaf blower. Up close, the gas-powered models are noisy enough to permanently damage hearing. “The leaf blower is really a silly invention,” said Blomberg. “It solves the problem of ‘leaf pollution’ by creating a bigger problem of noise and dust pollution.

One might think the Twin Cities, with its solid if shrinking liberal core, would be predisposed to take up the issue, but that hasn’t been the case. A municipal clerk in St. Paul agreed to show me a few pages of recent noise complaints. It reads like a poem of urban malaise: “Working on cars till late hours of the night, dogs constantly running loose”; “Ethanol plant is louder than usual”; “Noise all night and during the day. This is so loud”; and the oddly moving “Noise complaint. Ringing in ears. Two tones.” But no mention of leaf blowers.

That fact put me in mind of something I once witnessed while driving east across the Ford Bridge in St. Paul. A few blocks ahead, I noticed a thick, brown turbulent haze. It looked as if one of the shopping centers at Highland Village was on fire. It turned out to be just two men at work, using leaf blowers to flush debris out of the foliage, onto the sidewalk, and into the street. The air had that strange color it takes on just before a total solar eclipse. The sound was like two angry chain saws. Nonetheless, the outdoor tables at a Starbucks, about twenty yards away, were fully occupied, boulevardiers sipping their lattes as if nothing was happening.

But something was happening: Two machines were “pushing relatively large volumes of air, typically between 300 and 700 cubic feet per minute, at a high wind speed, typically 150 to 280 miles per hour,” in the words of the California Air Resources Board. (“Hurricane wind speed,” that study noted helpfully, “is 117 miles per hour.”) The localized storm raises a cloud of dust that, according to a California grand jury, includes “fecal material, fertilizers, fungal spores, pesticides, herbicides, pollen, and other biological substances.” In an urban setting, the blower also stirs up what some studies call “paved road dust.” That would include your allergens, your heavy metals, and the residue that comes from brakes, tires, and engine exhaust.

The only place this issue has risen to the level of a political battle is California. It went on for years, and it isn’t over yet. “It was a battle of Democrats,” says Larry Rolfuss of the California Landscape Contractors Association in Sacramento. Hispanic workers carried the water for the landscapers, at one point staging a hunger strike in the state capitol over the issue. Los Angeles passed its leaf-blower ordinance in 1998.

One anti-blower activist was Joan Graves, still an active member of a group called Zero Air Pollution Los Angeles, and the wife of Minnesota-born actor Peter Graves. “They are really dreadful machines,” she said. Today enforcement is lax, according to Graves. She noted that the elderly and chronic asthmatics, who may suffer the most direct effects, may be the least likely to complain.

Robert Moffitt, communications director of the American Lung Association of Minnesota, agrees there’s a problem. Two-cycle engines are part of it, he says. They pollute as much as several cars can. Electric models solve that, but not the problem of the “fine particulates” leaf blowers stir up. “They get right past the body’s defenses and breathed deeply into the lungs, where they are trapped,” he said. —David Rubenstein