Pike Township Family Stories
CHARLES J. CLARK
Nichols, Iowa Centennial Book 1884-1984, page280
By Charles J. ClarkI cannot be considered a pioneer citizen of Nichols, nor can I claim to have ancestors who lived there in an earlier time, because I came to Nichols in September 1927 with my parents. My father, C. E. Clark, was a minister and was called to serve in the Christian church there.
I graduated from Nichols High school in 1928. I planned to stay out of college and work for a year to make a little money, so I went to work in Rice’s Café for Willard Rice and his mother.
I enrolled in Drake university for the 1931 term, which I completed. Then I came back to town to work for money to return to Drake. However, the bank closings and the general economy put a stop to that. I continued to work for Rices until Mrs. Rice’s grandson, Ralph Borgstadt, became able to do the job.
In the spring of 1934, I started a small shop and service station in the old Frank Hummel building, which is no longer there. For the next eight or nine years, I did business as Clark’s Garage, selling Ford cars and tractors, and going general service work.
My years at Rice’s and in my own store put me in contact with many people, all of whom I like to call friends. While some of them are now gone, many are still with us, and I do truly enjoy coming to Nichols to renew friendships and visits.
In the spring of 1937, the City Council appointed me, of all things, Fire Chief. Our equipment, at that time, consisted of a 1914 Reo truck with two chemical tanks and a bunch of buckets for a bucket brigade. We used to have trouble getting the old Reo started, and we generally had someone delegated to come to the station with a car or pick-up truck to be sure of getting it to the fire – by pulling it, if it wouldn’t start.
I appointed Ben Nichols as Assistant Chief, and in our many talks and going to some district meeting, etc., we evolved the idea of improvement of the Fire department, which we finally got done after a lot of work.
A Mr. Frank Pierce, then president of the Iowa League of Municipalities, had a small business selling fire fighting equipment and fire trucks. I can no longer remember the legal things that made it necessary to do it as we did, but we came up with the idea of selling one time shares to the rural people – these made the farm, not necessarily the tenant, a member of the Nichols Fire department, and it would never cost that farm for a fire call. Farms that were not members were to be charged.
The city was to furnish the truck chassis, house the complete machine, maintain it and man it on all fire calls. The City Council promised to buy a new chassis if we could raise enough money to buy the equipment. This we did by means of hard work and many, many rural calls and letters to land owners who did not live here and rented their farms. When the salesman for Mr. Pierce and I presented the money to the City Council in October, I remember B. L. Metcalf saying, “By Jove, I didn’t think you would get this done, otherwise we might not have obligated ourselves to the purchase of a truck chassis!” He was joking, for he was very happy to see us get along so well.
We had wonderful cooperation from the merchants and the general public. As time went on, we had dances (Tom Owens and His Cowboys was our best), various donations, a little tax money, etc., and this all helped to get a fire siren, modernize the old City Hall Fire station (you now have a nice new one), but the one I like best is that I would bet that Nichols is the only town in the United States that pumps their water out of the ground to fight a fire.
Ben and I dreamed this up. And with the help of the Chandler Pump company of Cedar Rapids, the Crawford Brothers, well drillers from Lone Tree, and again, the cooperation of the local merchants, we installed the first of several large sand points about town – this one in front of the City Hall to take care of the business district.
The very fact that there was to be high volume of water pumped from these points made the process far different than the driving of an ordinary sand point. It used to be that we often saw someone with his middle finger off at the second joint. It is necessary to know the old process for driving sand points to know how it is possible to have this happen.
Back to the Fire department, we had a roster of twenty men, and they were all volunteer. Many of the names I can remember, but I will not mention any, as I would want all of them listed. We were proud as a group and put fire fighting on a much higher plane in our small town. It was lots of work, but we had some fun, too.
The biggest fire that we ever fought while I was Chief was the fire at lone Tree, and we did an excellent job there, even though it was -10 degrees in January.
Again, I will say that I was proud to have lived the seventeen years in the Town of Nichols, and in many ways, it still seems like a second home to me.
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