Many people feel they lose touch with their former jobs once they retire, but the Calgary Firefighters Museum gives past firefighters the chance to be involved once again.

 

On the first Monday of every month, retired firefighters gather at the museum, which is located at fire headquarters, for coffee.

 

During the month of April, 30 retirees showed up to drink free coffee and reminisce about the old days. On April 6, five of those men returned to the museum to talk about their experience.

 

When asked why they come to coffee at the museum, Rick Choppe, Brian Freney, Bill Stupak, Jack Henderson and Gary Borkristl all easily agree that the camaraderie is what brings them there each month. The mutual trust and friendship among the men makes for a wide variety of discussion, be it humorous or heartfelt.

 

“The reason I come here is because the guys speak fireman,” says Stupak. When people ask him if he misses the fire department he says no. What he misses about his job is sitting around the coffee table in the morning talking with his co-workers.

 

Being able to talk amongst other firefighters is what makes coffee at the museum valued. Stupak says that once you leave the fire department “you can’t go back. You’re not in the clique.” Choppe and Henderson shared similar feelings.

 

Choppe says that if you go back to your own shift after a few years the person who greets you at the door won’t know who you are.

 

“I used to be the boss and now I’m a street person,” he says.

 

As for Henderson, he has only been back to the fire department a few times to get information. Despite being invited to come back for coffee, Henderson says that he doesn’t know anybody.

 

Museum Mondays gives retirees a chance to be involved again. They’re able to enjoy free coffee while discussing the ups and downs of their careers. “It became almost like a social club – a private social club,” says Freney. “You can sit and tell the stories and reminisce.”

 

Despite being retired for over a decade, Choppe says that when he walks into the museum and sees co-workers it feels like he was working with them a week ago.

 

The majority of the conversations the retirees have over coffee are based around goofy stories from their days at the fire hall.

 

Going around the table, the men take turns telling their wildest stories. Some of the stories are so well known that the others can jump in if there is a missed detail.

 

One aspect of the job that seems to have a lot of stories dedicated to it is the fire poll. Once one retiree brings it up, the rest of the table starts to chuckle as memories come flooding back.  

 

“One day Danny Craig walked over to the pole hole with a cup of coffee in each hand and just stepped off into space,” said Stupak. “I actually got out of my chair to check because I figured he’d just be a splat on the floor at the bottom.”

 

Today, some of the fire departments are opting to have slides put in. It’s not surprising the retirees disapprove considering all of their fond memories.

 

The laughter continues as more and more stories circle around the table. But eventually, the humorous tone of their conversation takes a more somber tone. They all have their share of heartbreaking stories.

 

Choppe said the key to staying stable in such a stressful job was through self-healing.

 

When a particular car left the guys feeling down they would lean on each other for support.

 

“You’d go to a horrendous call and you go back to the fire department and sit amongst yourselves and kind of laugh about it in a friendly way,” he says. It may sound crazy to a bystander, but for the firefighters it was a matter of coping.

 

Freney said one of their most common ways to destress was to have a water fight. Back in the day, firefighters didn’t have easy access to counsellors for PTSD like there is today.

 

Stupak recalls one incident in particular that left them feeling deflated – the death of a two-year-old.

 

The child caught fire after climbing up onto the stove. By the time the fire crew arrived at the scene of the incident, the child had died.  

 

“Firemen and kids, that’s the one that bothers you,” Stupak says. The men sat in the room for a while contemplating the weight of what had happened. Eventually, one of the men made a comment that caught the guys off guard. How attached could they be? Said the man. They only had him for two years. “It wasn’t being insensitive,” says Stupak. “He didn’t mean that. It was to break the tension and it helped.”

 

The men agreed that throughout their careers they never took stuff home with them. “We left it at the fire hall,” says Freney. They didn’t want incidents from the job to affect their home life or their families.

 

The first coffee was organized  in 2011 by Rebecca Melenka, the executive director for the Firefighter Museum Society of Calgary. She heard that some of the retirees were meeting at Southcentre Mall for coffee and wondered why they weren’t meeting at fire headquarters. Since then, Museum Mondays has been up and running once every month.

 

Having the men meet at the museum opened up an opportunity for Melenka. They were easily able to tell her about the artifacts and the history behind them, which gave her stories and information to share with museum visitors. “They’re the threshold of the museum,” she says. “They tell the stories and they know the artifacts. If we lost the museum I would consider them to be my biggest loss.”

 

The museum’s current location at fire headquarters opened during spring of 2017. Before that, the museum had a permanent location at the fire prevention bureau from 2010 to 2013. In between locations some of the artifacts were placed in exhibits at Glenbow Museum and Lougheed House.  

 

Melenka says the official start date of the museum is debatable, but she goes with 1985.

The original owners were more focused on antique trucks. Freney says that they collected a lot of unique artifacts, but they weren’t all relevant to the Calgary Fire Department. “Unfortunately they didn’t have an end vision,” says Freney.

 

Today the museum has an array of different artifacts in their collection including 24 antique fire trucks that are stored off-site. The museum is open to guests Wednesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.