50 Years Fighting Fires

               In June of 2010 the Town of Saint John Volunteer Fire Department (VFD) will celebrate its 100th year anniversary.  For 50 of those years, Clarence (Pete) Monix was a member.  Pete joined the Town of Saint John VFD in 1949.  The 17 year old was supporting his family, since his father’s death in 1946, by working on local farms.
            “The Town of Saint John liked to hire the farm boys, because they could work,” said his wife of 51 years, Bobbie (Sanders) Monix.  The town needed hard workers because it dug ditches with picks and shovels, it didn’t own a backhoe.  The fire department needed hard workers too, so he became the ninth volunteer in that year.
            Pete is frugal with his words, letting his actions speak for themselves.  “We had a grain elevator fire here,” Pete related, but when he showed the photograph it was a roaring inferno contained only by years of knowledge and training.  Learning his accomplishments would take a great deal of questioning and research.  The letters of commendation he showed would have to speak for themselves.
            When he first joined the department had one fire truck, a 1949 Mack, and little else.  The volunteers, including Pete, were on call whenever needed.  They would respond to the sound of a siren and a telephone system that would call their house.  When they answered the phone, the operator would tell them where the fire was.
                    The first six months he trained at other local fire departments, until he was able to train at a fire academy in Indianapolis.  During that time they “had a few barn fires,” as he said.  One of those barn fires was at a local optometrist’s farm, Dr. Kuhn, whose cattle “burned up” in it.  The firemen would burn down abandoned houses to learn how fire reacted and what they could do to control it.  Working as a volunteer fireman meant that he had to support himself, and he did so as a custom farmer, later accepting a job with the Town of Saint John.  Pete did anything the town asked, from digging ditches to crossing children in school zones.
            As a custom farmer, Pete worked on many farms throughout the year, but he also owned a combine and would take in the harvest for the farms at that time of the year.  He met the love of his life, Bobbie JoAnn Sanders at Shorties Truck Stop & Dorothy’s Restaurant on Rt. 41.  Dorothy Sanders, Bobbie’s mother, ran the restaurant and Bobbie helped her with it, when not at her job as a telephone operator in Crown Point.
             Pete walked into the restaurant, in the summer of 1954 and it was love at first sight, for both of them.  Bobbie admitted that she had seen the handsome young man at the truck stop, several times before he walked inside.  After that first meeting, Bobbie would take Pete lunch, while he worked the fields and brought in the harvest.  Money was tight, so a date might consist of Pete walking from house to house to read the water meters, while Bobbie drove his pick up truck with a notebook sitting on the seat next to her.  Pete would shout out the meter reading and Bobbie would record it in the log.  “We got 10 cents a meter,” Pete said.  Another date might be Pete driving his truck full of cattle to the Chicago slaughter houses, then let Bobbie drive the big rig home.  Bobbie said, “It was too hard for me to handle, full of cows.”  Often times Pete would fall asleep on the trip back to Saint John.
           Fire fighting, however, was Pete’s passion.  “I loved the job, the camaraderie, the friendships, the whole thing,” Pete said, speaking more words than usual.  He trained and learned, until he took over as chief in 1971.  He stepped down after a year, only to take back the helm from 1975 to 1981.  He worked for the town, but gave his life to the fire department.  It wasn’t always pleasant.
           One of his saddest experiences was when a man, who was like a father figure to him, died.  The man hit a child with his car and became so despondent that he drove his car into a corn crib, put a hose from the exhaust into the car and left it running.  Pete put his eyes down to the table remembering that day.
            One of Pete’s jobs with the town was to plow snow in the winter.  One snowy evening, after plowing snow for 14 hours, he wasn’t able to make it home, so he spent the night in the house of Town Marshal, James (Red) Larimer.  The next day Red asked Pete to bring him his portable radio, which he had forgotten.
            As Pete drove to meet Red, the marshal answered a suspicious person’s call.  The janitor of Kolling School reported that two men were sleeping in a car behind the school.  Marshal Larimer responded and questioned one man as the second exited the car.  The second man walked up to Red and shot him without warning.  Within seconds an Indiana State Trooper pulled into the lot, in response to Marshal Larimer’s request for a back up, before he got out of the car and he too was shot and killed.
            By the time Pete got to the school to give Marshal Larimer his radio, he saw all the activity and learned that Red was dead.  The two men in the car were captured on the scene, by other county police and state troopers who responded, where it was learned that the killers had escaped from a prison in Lexington, Kentucky.
            “Being a fire fighter doesn’t mean that things will end up like you want them to, but someone has to do it,” Pete stated.  Pete has seen many changes over his proud 50 years of fighting fires.  When he was a rookie, the department answered 50 to 90 calls a year; today they are called out over 100 times a month.  Leaving something he loves so much is difficult for Pete.  While he may be retired from fighting fires, he is not done with his commitment to the department: “I cut the fire department’s lawn, for free,” Pete proudly said. 

Old habits are hard to break.  

Bobbie & Pete Monix, 1954