Manville Fire Dept. History (from the Glutch family archive)

CLICK TO ENLARGE PHOTOS

In a way, the life of The Manville Blog lays partially in the hands of the community. I don’t mean that in the sense that I’ll ever stop hunting down photos and info wherever I can, but like every community… the real true nuggets of info are in the hands of the families. Please keep that in mind, if you have quality photos you want to share… I can help you digitize them, and even give you digital copies for your own family archive. Over time I’ve gotten great submissions from some of the local folks, including this most recent collection of historic Manville Fire Dept. photos. These come from the collection of Chirs Glutch, his father, and his grandfather. The photos are so great, and so plentiful, that I had to break them down into thumbnails. If you click on the thumbnails they will expand into full sized photos. Unfortunately I do not have names to go with these photos, so like always… please feel free to enlighten us in the comments section.

This first bunch of photos are of a fire department inspection held on south main st. They would have council members and the mayor along with other chiefs from neighboring fire depts inspect the members and equipment of the fire department.

This second second batch are two seperate actual fire action shots…

These pictures are of a wet down for fire company #1′s new fire engine, and chiefs car. The fire engine is still in service at #1 and responds to many calls yet. I know the engine is a 1979 so I would assume the car is around the same year. And the wet down was held close to that time also.

And then a couple awesome shots from a firehouse fund raiser…

And finally one last shot of the #2 Firehouse

Thank you so much to the Chris Glutch, and the Glutch family for submitting these photos. This is a truly great collection, great action shots, historically relevant, and incredible quality of photos. This is the best Fire Dept collection I’ve gotten up here yet. Just awesome.

The South 5th Ave Shutack Family Archive

I was pretty excited on Thursday when I received an email from Richard Onderko. Not just because I was being contacted by one of Manville’s current Councilman candidates. It was rather the content of the email which was something to the tune of “Hey Mike. Meet me over on South 5th I found some great stuff”… and I mean who am I to stand up a possible future Manville Council Seat holder, so I went.

I arrived to meet Richard and a guy named Kevin Shutack, who explained to me the far reaches of his family participation in the towns history. The Manville Police, The Building Commitee, and most thankfully owner of the Manville Print Shop that was right next to the Krausers. I remembered the print shop as a kid… we used to peer into the windows there to find out what went on inside of it. But not to get off track… it seems the print shop handled most of Manville printing needs going at least as far back as the early 40s including the printing of The Manville News. Kevin gave me all sorts of printed goodies that were produced by the shop including A LOT of issues of the paper from 1941-1943. Just as soon as I work out the best way to archive these I will be posting digital copies of the issues just as fast as I can get them up. They are in a super fragile state, with much discoloration and edge damage, but they are brilliant and contain tons of great stories and history including some key Manville events like the building of the row homes, robberies and the Manville train derailment in the 40s in Lost Valley. That’s not even the tip of the iceberg… there are tons of wedding and birth announcements. Deaths, car accidents, reports from the war involving Manville residents, honor role lists, sports scores. I can’t wait to get these up.

This marks the most fruitful batch of town history I have found since Neal Ranauro’s photo archive. I feel like so many mysteries have just been solved. On behalf of the town of myself and Manville’s lost history we definitely own a huge debt to the Shutack family, Kevin, and Richard Onderko for making the connection happen. None of the afore mentioned ever had to waste their personal time to help me communicate this stuff to everyone, but they did. That’s awesome. I also got to spend some quality time with Rich and Kevin who were both very knowledgeable and very willing to share some information with me. Overall I couldn’t think of a better way to spend Saturday morning than striking another victory for my perpetual quest for Manville’s past.

MANVILLE RESCUE SQUAD!

WOAH! IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME! I didn’t give up on this site… I promise! So this next post is for  Ron Chernesky who is a regular in engaging the site with comments, info, and actually even appears in one of the school photos. I wish I could be a bit more informative on the subject of the Manville Rescue Squad, but unfortunately all I have at the moment are a few amazing photos. I am glad that he asked about the rescue squad though, because in my digging through photos I discovered a photo of a Charlie Chernesky, whom I’m assuming is of some relation to Ron. I can’t say where this building was, but I’m 99% sure that someone that looks at this site can tell us. Like all of the other buildings in 50′s Manville there is close attention paid to the design of the building. From the sign across the top, to the finely constructed door and garage bays this building is just awesome looking. If you look at the first aid vehicle fleet photo at the bottom you can see that flooding was obviously always a concern in town, as there are a bunch of life preservers hooked up to one of the trucks. All photos by Neal Ranauro. If anyone can contribute any info please do.

JUST A GREAT LOOKING BUILDING

CHARLIE CHERNESKY “1954″

I’M NOT SURE IF THESE WERE ALL OF OUR RESCUE VEHICLES AT THE TIME BUT… GREAT PHOTO. ALSO FROM 1954