I’ve been a bit remiss in reporting events from Marblehead. There was a Firemen’s Muster over the weekend, and the handtub competition was won by the hometown handtub, the Okammakamesit #2, with my brother on the crew and captained by my friend Rick, both of whom attended my Installation as WM of Goliath Lodge a few months ago. These used to be yearly events in Marblehead, but they have been somewhat neglected of late. They are a lot of fun, an occasion for consuming much malted fermented beverages, and an interesting insight into how fires were fought in the late 1800’s.
But the Police Log outdoes itself this week. I cannot begin to describe its wackiness. You must go and look for yourself, but the headline tells it all: Police Log: Suspicious Man Watches Cat.
a while back I bought my dad a subscription of the newspaper from his hometown to be mailed to him Texas. They have a section like that in there and everytime I goto see them we read it and laugh at the folks in it. Sadly, he knows most of them and a few times my family has been in there. I love it. And reading stuff like this is almost better than TV somedays.
Now when the police found nothing on the watermelon incident do they mean they found no melon or nobody hanging around to admire their swastika handywork? LOL great!
What in the world is a Fireman’s Muster???????
Oddly enough, Wikipedia does not have an entry on this.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, and perhaps the beginning of the 20th, firefighting in most communities was a communal event. If you discovered a fire in your house or on your property, you rang the church bells or some other bell in the neighbourhood to rouse the citizenry. A large pumping engine was towed to the fire either by your neighbours or by a horse and the hose was either put in the local pond (if it was close enough) or in a tub of water or a well. Then the pump, which has a kind of rocker rack which drove the water, would be manned by your brawnier neighbours and they would repeatedly lift and press down the rack of the pump while a couple of men would aim the hose at the fire.
There is some description of this in the History of Firefighting entry in Wikipedia. Look at the end of the “Europe” paragraph.
Fast-forward to the end of the 19th Century. The old hand pumping fire engines were being superseded by steam-powered or gasoline-powered fire engines. So the hand tubs were put in barns or left to rot. However, enterprising teams of men rediscovered some of these old hand tubs and restored them to working order. On the weekends they would gather in nearby towns with other hand tub teams to compete to see who could pump their tub the hardest and shoot the stream of water the farthest. Yes, really! I should think you would see all sorts of homoerotic stuff in this. It’s an excuse to get together, have some fun, have a pissing contest, and drink lots of beer. These weekend gatherings are called “Firemen’s Musters” as in the early days, in order to make sure that the locals were fit enough to pump the tubs, there would be a muster of able bodied men and teenage boys who would take out the hand tub and make sure it was in good condition and that they were up to the job of pumping. This would be analogous to a muster of a militia.
There is an association of these handtub teams. There is a picture of a pumper at the top of this page. A much better explanation of what a muster is is on this page. The history of the Okommakamesit is here.
I won’t know whether you can see this video, but it’s the Oko team at the Marblehead muster. It shows you what pumping a hand tub is like.
There is some danger in it. People have broken their jaws if when the rail of the pumper comes up they don’t keep their heads out of the way and the rail hits them in the jaw on the way up. Sometimes the dome (where the water is marshalled before getting into the hose) explodes from the pressure and people are killed. Doesn’t happen now (I don’t think) but did happen in the past. Guys have overestimated how fast they can pump and have died of heart attacks.