Volunteer Fire Departments

A few decades ago, I served as a volunteer fireman. I proudly displayed the “Cannon Beach Fire Department” frame around my car’s license plate. We met at the station on Tuesday evenings for training, followed by beer.

For some of us, training sometimes included practice maneuvering the fire truck in reverse back inside the station. One of the volunteers, whose day job was driving a log truck, did it with his eyes closed, (Not literally.) We were paid $2.00 per meeting and $2.00 per fire call; even way back then not enough to compromise our volunteer status.

Once, I volunteered to assist EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) training by being a literal pincushion, for their practicing giving injections and taking blood samples. A major perquisite was the annual American Legion crab feed. Members of the volunteer department ate – and drank – for free.

Not all volunteer fire departments are thriving. In Sonoma County, where I spent the past twenty-plus years before moving back north, eleven volunteer departments are struggling with budgets and lack of volunteers and political bickering. A year ago the county had fourteen volunteer contingents. Response times have increased in rural area. Departments who viewed each other as competitors are now consolidating or putting up a united front for funding and administrative services.

Sonoma County is a microcosm of national trends. An aging population combined with those in the workforce commuting to urban areas and able to respond to emergencies in their rural communities only at night or on weekends.

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Your Tax Dollars at Work

This week our President  hosted Xi Jinping, President of China and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. What better place to have high-level discussions between world leaders than at an ostentatious, soon-to-be-underwater, private club in Palm Beach Florida that boasts our President’s brand? And where, allegedly, no visitor logs are kept.

Cost estimates of the President’s almost weekly stays at Mar-a-Lago are north of $3 million per visit. The New York Times has put together a handy chart showing how many days since inauguration the President has spent at Trump-branded properties and what he purportedly did there. We taxpayers are paying the Trump organization for lodging, meals, et cetera for these trips.

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Thriving on Minimum Wage

A few years ago, the Wall Street Journal published a piece about people earning less than $12,000 a year. The paper called them “Lucky Duckies” because they paid no federal income tax. (WSJ didn’t mention that they paid Social Security and Medicare tax at a much higher percentage than high-wage earners.)

There has been much in the news about people agitating for a $15.00 per hour minimum wage. Here is a handy chart that shows you how to build wealth on half that.

A few highlights:

  • Sell your car. Buy a used bicycle for your commute.
  • Relocate to a place where rents are cheaper. If you’re in San Francisco, move to Amarillo. But how do you pay for a one-way rental truck when you’re making the minimum wage? Well, maybe you’ll take only what fits in your car. Oh, that’s right; you don’t have a car.
  • Buy your clothes at the thrift store.
  • Spend $0.00 on entertainment.
  • But buy health insurance. (Your minimum-wage job doesn’t include medical coverage.) Of course, Congress is working feverishly to eliminate subsidies for low-income people.

Not mentioned: Don’t have children. There’s no money in the budget for that. Practice celibacy; you can’t afford birth control either.

You lucky ducky.

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Sustenance on the Road

People whose employment requires travel can be divided into two groups: those who eat at whatever is in the hotel or at the Applebee’s across the parking lot (Is there an Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar that’s in an actual neighborhood?) and those on the endless and often frustrating search for a good meal.

Calvin Trillin, on the road reporting for the New Yorker magazine’s “U.S. Journal,” became a food writer too, resulting from his quest for something decent to eat in strange towns. He found that hotel clerks and acquaintances always directed to what they considered the best place in town, what he referred to as the generic “La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine.”

  • Yelp and TripAdvisor are only incidentally helpful; even establishments with a lot of stars also have negative reviews because of small portion sizes or some slight by a server.
  • Zagat compiles reviews from those who consider themselves sophisticated diners in major cities.
  • AAA Tour Books try, but their restaurant listing stick pretty much to the mainstream and avoid the out of the ordinary
  • Michelin Guides cover only limited areas in this country and are directed at gourmands with unlimited funds or unlimited expense accounts.
  • Roadfood, the work of intrepid travelers and diners Jane and Michael Stern has been my consistent guide for local, sometimes quirky, places since before the Internet age. (Their newly “upgraded” web site is harder to navigate than its graphics-light predecessor.)
  • Santa Rosa’s favorite celebrity, Guy Fieri and his Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, will steer you to high-fat, high calorie dining.

Which brings us to Duncan Hines. Yes, Mr. Hines was a real person. From the 1920s through the ‘40s he traveled the country selling office supplies and looking for a clean restaurant with decent food. He  carried a notebook to record his experiences.

Hines self-published his first edition of Adventures in Good Eating in 1936. It listed 475 restaurants. Word-of-mouth sales were so good, for the second year’s edition, he raised the price from $1.00 to $1.50. A revised edition was issued annually until he retired in 1954.

While not accepting advertising for his guides, he did lend the Duncan Hines name to food products. Today the Duncan Hines brand is owned by Pinnacle Foods, the folks who also bring us Armour, Tim’s Cascade Chips, Nalley, Wish-Bone, the Mrs. Paul’s and Butterworth’s, Swanson, Birds Eye, Vlasic and on and on.

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