The key to getting it running again was the carburetor, which had been incorrectly installed by a previous owner, he said. But on the whole, “It stayed in pretty darn good shape.” It had old gas in the tank, the water tank had rusted out, and the bed was painted with lead paint. The truck had been sitting outside under a tarp that had been slowly disintegrating in the elements, Sullivan said. Holding class over a video link with his students, Sullivan said every Friday became “Firetruck Friday.” “Using it as a classroom prop in my garage for COVID teaching, I began to restore it to full driving and functionality while remote teaching,” he said. Teacher James Sullivan with his classroom project during Covid School timeīack in Brier, the truck’s new home was in Sullivan’s garage. The charge to take ownership was a $500 donation on condition he do his best to get it running and that he didn’t strip it for parts (some of them, such as the bell and lamp, are worth up to $3,000 each). Sullivan said he “bought” the rig from the Ferndale Fire District Retired Fire Fighters’ Association in 2020. That was located in Custer, Wash., further north on I-5 and just a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. On the phone Monday, Sullivan said, “My brother, Mike, and I have always been in to old fire trucks.” Mike was working on one from 1953 a couple of years ago, and James had also just suffered a heart attack.Īfter coming out of the hospital, one day he said to himself, “‘You only live once - let’s go get that truck.’ It was probably the healthiest thing I’ve ever done.” A teacher at Brier Terrace Middle School in the suburbs of Seattle, “It became the best classroom element I could have ever imagined,” he said. He went on to tell his incredulous wife that he wanted to buy a fire truck. “When the pandemic hit, I talked to my wife and said, ‘What am I going to do? Everything’s closed,’ I don’t idle well,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan said his purchase came about as a reaction to COVID and a separate health issue.

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