From Ringing Bells to 911, Tallahassee’s Fire Dispatch Has Come a Long Way

‘Call No. 7’

State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory

One-horsepower fire engines were a common sight in Tallahassee back in the horse-and-buggy days of the Tallahassee Fire Department.

“In case of fire, break the glass and ring the bell.” 

That’s the way it was in Tallahassee during the days of derby hats, Arrow collars and Gibson Girls. Today, it’s just as simple to call out the fire department. Just pick up your phone and dial 911.

What’s not so simple is how the city’s fire dispatch has evolved over the past 100 years. In fact, the story behind the city’s dispatch system is not just one of changing technology, but of people trying to work out the most efficient system possible. It’s an important history lesson even today, as the city and county worked together to build a unified Emergency Communications Center, part of the new $47.5 million Public Safety Complex that opened in July 2013.

To tell the story of the early dispatch days, Tallahassee Fire Department Historian and Fire Museum Curator Maurice Majszak wrote a history of the city’s fire department, “Remembering the Tallahassee Fire Department,” which includes a section about how help was dispatched when there was a fire. Majszak is a certified fire inspector and fire investigator. He was the Broward County Fire Inspector of the Year in 2003 and Florida Fire Inspector of the Year in 2008. He has been an adjunct instructor at Broward Community College in Broward County and the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg, Md. He spent the last six years of his fire-fighting career as a fire inspector with the city of Tallahassee, and was instrumental in establishing the Hydrant Garden in front of Station One at 327 N. Adams St. and the Fire Museum in the training building at 2964 Municipal Way.

That Rings a Bell

The twin marvels of electricity and telephony played a big role in early fire alarms. Around 1896 the city had a complete Gamewell Fire Alarm System consisting of eight call boxes (also known as street boxes) located in the city’s fire districts. There was a bell in the tower of the Market building, located on the southeast corner of Adams and Jefferson streets, a large bell in the city hall tower and a gong-and-indicator set in the fire department itself. Service was available 24 hours a day at a price of $300 a year. 

A metal hammer was set up to ring the Market Tower bell using a system of heavy iron weights. Electrical power, provided by a set of storage batteries that also powered the street-level fire call box system, controlled the weights. 

“The bell was run in connection with a system of coded signals based on the number of strikes,” Majszak wrote. “The area within the city limits was divided into a number of physical sections, divided by specified street boundaries on all four sides. These sections were known as fire districts and assigned distinct numbers.”

 

State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory

Once a fire call was placed, the ringing tower gong could be heard all over town.

A street box was located in each district. To report a fire, you had to break a glass panel, turn a key, open a door and pull a lever. Majszak said that from there, a metal disc with the district number of the activated street box was manually set so the bell would ring the number of the district, telling firefighters where to find the fire. Fire District 25 was identified by two long rings followed by a 20- or 30-second delay, and then five short rings. This was repeated automatically up to five times.

“The volunteers could easily hear this bell all over the city, which was quite small in those days, and they would know that they had to respond to the northwest corner of North Macomb and Tennessee streets (where box 25 was located),” he wrote. 

By the early 1900s, telephones were common in Tallahassee and were used for talking to the neighbors and reporting emergencies. A telephone directory from 1916 instructs residents to report fires by calling “No. 7” — the 911 of its day. According to the directory, “Each and every telephone in the city is also practically an alarm box. In order to reach the Department in case of fire it is only necessary to ring up Central in the usual manner and CALL FOR NUMBER 7 or just FIRE STATION, and give them the location of the fire and the number of the District in which you live, and they will promptly ring in the alarm, precisely the same as from your street box.” 

The advent of telephones didn’t ring in the end of the street box, however. Majszak said the street boxes were retrofitted with telephones in 1971, but discontinued 10 years later after having been used only 22 times.

Incidentally, the “Market Tower” bell, which was the city’s first fire klaxon, was retired in 1937. It found a home in the Immanuel Baptist Church at South Boulevard and West Saint Augustine Street, where the Civic Center is now located. The church moved to 2351 Mahan Dr. in 1976 and took the bell with it. The church used the bell until a vestibule was built around it and hasn’t used it since, Majszak said. While not on display, per se, you can still see it — if you know where to look.

Along Came Radio

Radiotelephones came to Tallahassee in November 1941, when two firefighters received their three-month Restricted Radiotelephone operator licenses from the FCC. The following February, Fire Chief William Earl Levy and seven other firefighters received their operating permits. The technology only offered one-way communication, Majszak said. The phones were on fire trucks and could receive calls, but the firefighters couldn’t talk to the fire station. Even so, Chief Levy kept a radiotelephone at his house and listened throughout the night so he wouldn’t miss a call.

In 1961 there were three fire stations around the city and three chiefs on duty, one for each shift. The dispatch center was located in Station One at 109 S. Adams St., and the actual space was called “the hole” because “it was like looking down into a hole from the second floor,” Majszak said. “When a call was received and all information gathered, the dispatcher would call the on-duty chief who would tell the dispatcher what units to send to the call. At night, the firefighter who was assigned to the ‘hole’ slept on a fold-up bed in the truck bay next to the phone.”

A few years later, in 1965, the fire department sent a group of four firefighters to Atlanta, Savannah, Jacksonville, Lakeland and Tampa to learn how other fire departments handled dispatch. They took the best features of those systems and used them to develop fire dispatch methods for Tallahassee.

A team of firefighters was assigned to the new Station Three and used a back conference room to create the system. To do so, the men had to map the entire coverage area. Of course, at the time there was no “app” for that; GPS and Google Maps were far into the future. So the men split up into two teams and “rode every street, road and pig trail in the entire county,” Majszak said, a time-consuming process. One firefighter drove while the other drew a map that noted all nearby hazards and fire hydrants. Back at the station, this information was transferred to a “run card.” On one side of the card there was a listing of all the different types of emergency calls, and the units that were to be called out for each type. On the back of each card, a map of that particular block was printed, and the cards were filed alphabetically by street name and block address number. At the end of 1965 these four firefighters — Lynwood Watts Jr., Don Pumphrey, Thomas Brown and Ralph White — were assigned to Station One as the city’s first official fire dispatchers.

At that point, the dispatch center consisted of a desk with two telephones, a ticker tape machine and two tape recorders. The phones didn’t have dials and could only receive calls; when a call came in it was automatically recorded, and a second line handled another call if the main line was being used. The new card system meant dispatchers themselves decided what units to send out based on the information on the card. 

In 1971, fire dispatch moved to 327 N. Adams St. when the Central Station (also known as the Headquarters Building) was opened. 

“This formerly was the Chevrolet building which was extensively remodeled to accommodate the fire department,” Majszak wrote. “In addition to the dispatch console, a light switch was installed so that the upstairs dormitory lights could be turned on by the dispatcher as soon as a call came in and prior to waking the firefighters using the alarm bell. Many times the firefighters were up, had their bunker pants on, and were putting on their boots before the alarm bell sounded. This decreased the time it took for firefighters to respond to a call.”

In 1976, a new form of “Call No. 7” debuted with the arrival of basic 911, which was innovative for its time. A single three-digit number provided residents with access to fire, police or ambulance services. In 1988, the firefighters who served as dispatchers were moved to the police department building at 234 E. Seventh Ave. And in 1991, Enhanced 911, or “E-911,” appeared.

In 1996, at 0700, firefighter Jackson Whitehead was relieved by a civilian police department dispatcher, and the era of the fire department dispatching units to fire calls came to an end.