I was skeptical the first time I turned down the narrow road toward the Antique Toy and Firehouse Museum in Bangor Township. It didn’t seem there was much on the road aside from a few homes and farm fields.
For a moment, I thought my GPS was tricking me, sending me somewhere it shouldn’t. But then, on my left, at the end of a gravel drive, the place appeared: fluttering flags waved me in, a series of large red garages set back from the road, and a hulking antique firetruck was parked out front. This, I thought, was it.
Everywhere inside, there were fire helmets, hoses, toys, and trucks, both the kind a child might push across a living room floor and the kind that once roared down New York City streets with sirens piercing the night. The museum claims to hold the world’s largest collection of motorized fire trucks. It is, in every sense, a monument to obsession: the lifetime project of the late Jimmie Dobson, who spent decades collecting engines from Bay City, New York, and everywhere in between.
The artifacts from New York are more than objects in a collection. On the day after the 24th anniversary of Sept. 11, we remember what those vehicles carried: firefighters who sprinted toward danger when the rest of the world was running away. Everyone remembers where they were that morning. The attacks bound the nation together in tragedy, but also in awe of those who climbed the stairwells in the World Trade Center and never came back down.
Which is why, each September, the museum hosts an event. This year’s gathering falls on Saturday, Sept. 13, beginning at 10 a.m. It will commemorate both the anniversary of Sept. 11 and another local catastrophe: the 1990 explosion of the tanker Jupiter on the Saginaw River.
The museum is open from May through October. Step inside, and you are reminded not only of what happened on Sept. 11 but of what it means, day after day, to be the person who answers the call. And that, perhaps, is the quiet gift of this place: not just remembrance, but perspective.
I’m glad I went. You might be, too.
Visit the museum’s website for more information.
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