Fire station pole slider

 I may have told this story before and if I have I'm telling it again.

I guess I was about 7 or 8 at the time and this would have been BLP, in the time-line that would be "Before-Ludlow Porch. At the time my Dad was just Bob Hanson, mild mannered Claims adjuster and owner of Hanson Claims Service. Anyway at times during the Summer I would go with my Dad to work and we would just hang out at his office in downtown Decatur and I would spend most of the day playing on the elevator or running up and down the stairs because his office was on the 8th floor and it was just fun. On one particular day we were on the road and whenever we got south of town it always seemed to be around lunchtime and we would almost always find our way at my Grandmother's house and we would eat like Kings! There was rarely any leftovers and if there were the REAL King of the house would get that...That being Nick the black and brown dachshund that I'm not sure my grandmother didn't love more than us.

After the feast we would end up parked at the Headquarters Station of the East Point Fire Department in beautiful downtown East Point. We would stop there because my Uncle Tommy Kidd was the Fire Chief of the Department and we were a close family and it would have been rude not to stop by.

We were all standing out front and all of the bay doors were open and as any 7 or 8 year old would do I was very busy eyeing that beautiful tall brass pole that went all the way from the sleeping quarters upstairs to the ground floor we were standing. I got my nerve up and I ask my Uncle Tom if I could slide down the pole. He looked down at me as if I had just ask if I could touch the Mona Lisa. Then he bent way down and put both of his hands on my shoulders and we were eye to eye about 3 inches apart and he said "If I let you do that you have to give me your word that you will NEVER tell anyone that I let you because the last thing I need is to have 2 or 3 hundred 7 or 8 year old boys lining up around this building to slide down that pole". He must have thought I had WAY more friends than I had and most of them lived in Decatur at the time. I promised I would never say a word to ANYONE about it and I didn't until a few years ago and I figured that since he had passed away and they torn that building down and the pole is long gone I could tell the story. In the last 15 minutes we were there I bet I ran up those stairs and slid down that pole 50 times. That would be the only day I would do that... Precious Memories, how they linger.