This much is verifiable: Tangent used to contract with Albany for fire service. Some fires didn't need an actual engine. And in the days before cell phones, it wasn't easy to tell the difference.
Whether there really was a fire one day back in the 1950s that Albany merely sent a guy in a pickup to check out — a fire that eventually destroyed multiple buildings before the neighboring city could scramble a full crew and a tanker truck in response — is no longer known for sure. But it has become the story over the years as to why, on May 9, 1958, Tangent came to create its own fire department.