More Top Picks Best Migraine Glasses For Outdoor Use
player ready...Every so often, at random times on any given day, a siren echoes through the neighborhood. It’s not overly loud, but when the wind is blowing just right, we can hear it inside our homes. Sometimes it sounds lonely and distant, as if it’s had to travel a very long way to deliver its clarion call.
In truth, those sound waves aren’t traveling all that far, having originated one town over in East Hazel Crest, a small village tucked between Homewood and the Tri-State Tollway. It split from the rest of Hazel Crest a few years after its main neighborhood was physically separated from the rest of the village by the raising of the Illinois Central Railroad tracks in the 1910s.
But in terms of time, the siren has traveled very far indeed. It’s been alerting the village’s emergency responders that their help is needed since “the very beginning,” said Chief William Vallow, head of the East Hazel Crest Fire Department.
He should know. He’s been called to work by that siren for the better part of 70 years, having started as a 16-year-old cadet in 1951. He was involved in an unofficial capacity even before that, accompanying his father, Buck Vallow, who helped organize the volunteer department shortly after moving to the village in 1937.
“When I got to be 12 he used to haul me with him every time they had a fire call because he said I could always help drag a hose or do something,” said Vallow, who became an official member as soon as he was old enough, and has “been on ever since,” including two stints as chief.
Over the years, he’s seen some notable events, including the 1977 inferno that destroyed Homewood’s Washington Park Race Track, which once made up the bulk of his village’s southern border.
“You could always tell where a fire was by looking at the sky,” Vallow said. When he heard a dispatcher call for help from additional fire departments on that cold February night, “I looked out the back door and the whole sky was red. … We were there until 4 in the morning fighting that fire. It was an all-night deal.”
On the village’s north side, Interstate 80/294 has created its share of drama as well, including semi trucks that have crashed over the side and fallen 60 feet to the village streets below.
In one case, a drunken driver plummeted over the side and landed upside down in the Illinois Central rail yard. Miraculously, the motorist was unharmed, but he asked about his wife, who was nowhere to be found.
“There was a train going through, and now we wondered if his wife got caught on that train and was heading south,” Vallow said. “So we called the railroad and had them stop the train and inspect it to see if there were any bodies on board.
“Come to find out, he had forgot his wife at the last gin mill he was at, so there was a happy ending.”
Natural disasters have also been a factor, and when a tornado devastated Oak Lawn in 1968, his department was on hand for five days furnishing illumination with a light plant truck while the town remained powerless.
And a year before that, the blizzard of 1967 stranded hundreds of motorists on the interstate
“We helped people down off the toll road and took them in,” he said. “A lot of the truck drivers we housed at the fire station — we had something like 100 drivers there. And the couples who were up in cars, we got them stationed with different families in town. There were a lot of families taking in people off the Tollway. It was three days before they got that road finally cleared off.”
That incident led to another happy ending: “We had one guy who stayed with a family, and he ended up marrying the daughter,” Vallow said.
East Hazel Crest is a bit larger now than it once was, having annexed the Bremerton Woods subdivision on the west side of railroad tracks that once sequestered the village, but it’s always had the feel of a small town, and that was reflected in its fire department.
“When we first started out, we made our own equipment,” Chief Vallow said. “The guys worked extra hard to build vehicles.”
The department’s first truck was assembled using a Chevy chassis donated by the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1941.The department got another truck from Midway Airport that had hauled gasoline to airplanes and converted it into a water truck that they used for “a good many years,” Vallow said, and would bring to fires in outlying areas that weren’t served by hydrants at the request of other departments.
“We put the pieces of equipment together, so you knew exactly how it worked,” he said. “We had a lot of great people who put their skills into making this equipment.”
When East Hazel Crest got its first new firetruck in 1957, it was the result of an effort by the volunteer firefighters taking on an entirely different task.
“The fire department went around town and solicited people — if they would donate a dollar a month into the fund we could buy this brand new FWD fire truck,” Vallow said.
“So every month, the firemen would go around the village and collect their dollar from all the people in order to make the payment on the truck. That went on for a couple of years, and finally the guys got tired of doing that and the Village Board took it over.”
It wasn’t just the truck. Firefighters also helped build their own fire station.
“We’d always furnish our own,” he said. “We would run dances and yard parties and anything else we could have to get donations to build our department.”
It helped that “everybody knew everybody,” Vallow said.
“There wasn’t a house in town you didn’t know who lived in there and how many kids there were and so on,” he said. “We were a small community and that went on for years and years.”
His service to the department and to the community has always been a family affair, he said. For six years in the 1960s, Vallow, his dad and four brothers all were on the volunteer department. His brother Kenny also had two stints as the police chief. Between them, the family has chalked up 168 years with the fire department and 51 in the police department.
More Top Picks Best Trolling Motor Batteries
It’s a record of service he said he owes to his father.
“My dad loved this village,” Vallow said. “He always told me, ‘you have to make sure you take care of the village. Do whatever you can for them. The people living here are great people.’ I’ve pretty much stayed in tune with them.”
That tune probably sounds a lot like the siren that’s been signaling for seven decades to Vallow that it’s time to go to work. He told of times when his family would be sitting down to dinner when the siren would go off and his mother would curse as he and his father and brothers would all run out the door.
“That siren puts adrenaline in your body,” he said, “and no matter what you were doing, you could lift a car up once that siren started. You became Superman because you felt that strong.”
Initially, the button that set off the siren was outside the fire station.
“At one time we had a fire chief who lived across the street. They would call his wife and she would run over and push the button. A lot of years she did that, God bless her,” Vallow said.
The responsibility eventually shifted to a network of five firefighters and their wives, including Vallow.
“Many women in town always made sure their telephone was covered,” he said. “If they were going to be gone, they made sure someone else was going to be around to take care of it. They were very dedicated.
“And the kids were instructed if they touched that button they were dead.”
As he contemplates imminent retirement, Chief Vallow knows the department he’s leaving to his successor is very different from the one his father helped to start, as volunteers are harder to come by and the small-town spirit that once united his village is undermined by the million distractions of 21st century life.
But he’s confident that every time that siren goes off, now part of a multi-service dispatch system that also includes pagers, there will still be people running to the station.
“Because this is where we live and where our kids have been raised, and we all want to do our part,” he said.
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected].