Everybody in this fire station was sleeping one recent morning when the alarms started blaring. Six firefighters hopped out of their bunks and pulled their gear over their pajamas. The sun was still coming up when they reached a house where smoke was rising from the basement.
Afterward, back in their pajamas, the young men gathered in the station’s control room. The chief’s son wrote up the report: furnace malfunction in the basement, no injuries, no damage. Then the bantering began — about girlfriends, the holidays and work.
This all-volunteer fire station and the two others in Shippensburg, a factory and university town of about 5,500 people in a central Pennsylvania valley, are vestiges of the past.