The ceremony will prove that it is possible to become an honorary dean without earning a high school diploma, though only for the kind of person willing to spend 63 volunteer years making “significant contributions to the fire service.” For the man on the $5 bill, such honors are “altogether fitting and proper.” But for a man like Zimmerman, the most meaningful memorials may be of a more informal sort, and while fitting, may not always seem proper.
Zimmerman tributes of this sort are embedded in stories told by Christiansburg firefighters while sitting in folding chairs beside rows of tables where fund-raising dinners are held; woven into tales told at the liars table at the village gathering spot, Loretta’s Country Kitchen; and come alive in anecdotes shared somberly over the phone by people who treasure his memory.
Water Boarding
A father of five firefighter sons, Zimmerman — in addition to volunteering on the fire department — volunteered on the town water board. At his visitation, a woman sought out a son and delivered an envelope with a memorial contribution equal to the amount Ralph had paid out of his own pocket for the water bills she couldn’t afford to pay during her divorce. It was the first anyone had heard of his helpful generosity.
Get your Oreos here
Also at the visitation, Eli Underwood, a freshman at Ohio Northern University, was handing out Oreo cookies. When Underwood was a child, Zimmerman took him under his wing and helped him with projects, after which they’d talk over Oreos. Zimmerman went on to provide full packages of Oreos and a note at each milestone of Underwood’s childhood.
A baby and a cigar
A part-time farmer who also worked as a lathe operator at Hobart in Troy, Zimmerman couldn’t get off work the day the Christiansburg department took possession of the 1976 Ford pumper the chief had dreamed of for so long. So Harold Zerkle and Mike Sullenberger, both from families with multiple generations on the department, went to Tipton, Ind., to pick up a new fire vehicle.
After breakfast in a Tipton hotel where workers air hammered their way through frozen water, “we got to that pond to (test) pump the water at six below zero,” Sullenberger said. Zerkle, whose father died of a heart attack at age 40 while driving a Christiansburg fire truck on a dispatch, dutifully drove the freshly tested truck to Troy so the chief could drive his new baby home. Zimmerman did it with a cigar stuck in his mouth to celebrate.
Ribs to go
Before the days of automatic doors, “we always had trouble with our overhead doors,” said Bob Hoey, the current Christiansburg chief.
“We used to pull them up,” then as a truck was being pulled out “they would go back down, then you’d hear the crunch of the door taking out the firetruck’s lights,” Hoey said. That rankled Zimmerman, and gave him material for ribbing fellow firefighters.
Then came comeuppance day when the chief was backing his baby into the garage. He’d left the passenger’s side door only slightly ajar. As he the leaned on the gas pedal to get the truck over a slight bump in the pavement, the door swung open and the chief himself took it clean off.
There was no pulling rank on this one, said Zerkle: “He had to take the ribbing.”
The Blizzard of ‘78
Citizen Band radios, better known as CBs, were the preferred form of communication when the big blizzard of 1978 started blowing in on a Wednesday night.
And at 6 a.m. the next morning, Zimmerman used it to summon all firefighters for detail.
Unable to get a vehicle out of his garage, Sullenberger walked to the department. And with the chief at the helm and the weather in charge, he and others got busy.
A lady on Heck Hill Road called to say she’d just run out of heating fuel.
Some people from New York were stranded, then seemed further confused when a community they didn’t even know fed them and found them a home to stay in. Three families from Loy Road got the same treatment, and were delivered just in time for a call about a baby on the way in Alcony.
So that the Christiansburg store could open to ration food, the St. Paris and Christiansburg departments managed a relay for the owner, leading up to the final Sunday prescription deliveries, many for diabetics running out of insulin.
It was the kind of shared experience that creates and sustains community and stokes a fire department’s pride.
The Ponderosa Department
The sort of individual who never met a stranger, Zimmerman also knew how to make fast friends at the nearest fire department. That included the Ponderosa department he visited when his son Joe was living in Houston, Texas.
“If you couldn’t find him, that’s where he would be,” said Joe.
Ralph suddenly had more reason to find friendship there when, on the last day of a planned visit, wife Helen suffered a cerebral hemorrhage from which she never regained consciousness. Until Joe left Houston, his father’s every visit would include a visit with the hospital staff that cared for his wife and the Ponderosa department.
And when Chief Hoey spotted a Ponderosa uniform at a firefighters’ conference in Cincinnati and mentioned a guy from Christiansburg, the response was: “His name was Ralph Zimmerman.”
Yanking chains, making friends
Loretta Rhodes, owner of Loretta’s Country Kitchen, and Ralph Zimmerman went back to the days when Loretta and her brother stayed out of the weather by waiting for the bus on the Zimmermans’ front porch.
So when the widowed Zimmerman first rode his bike, then his scooter, to take a regular seat at the “Liars Table” in her restaurant, next to the coffee machine, Rhodes knew what it meant: An order of coconut cream pie to go and, if a new server had been hired, an order of smearcase.
Zimmerman knew the young servers had no idea the word was German for a cottage cheese like food and would be too shy to ask an old time customer. And thus did uncounted servers come to feel the first gentle yank on a chain from a man who built friendships with gentle chain-yanking.
Still in the garage
Garnard and Lucille Littlejohn were best of friends with Ralph and Helen Zimmerman — and as deeply involved in the fire department and its auxiliary. So when Garnard died just before Thanksgiving in 2008, Ralph Zimmerman effectively adopted the Littlejohn’s only son, Roger, into his own brood.
“Any time I was out (on the family ground), he stopped,” Roger Littlejohn said. “One particular instance: I had an old couch. I’d just drug it out of the barn and was ready to take it to the burn pile.”
Zimmerman looked it over and said, “That’d make an awful good place for you and I to sit and talk.”
“It’s still in the garage,” Roger Littlejohn said.
He added one more thing. The founders and old-timers like Zimmerman instilled “good morals in the department” — and for good reason.
“It’s a known fact that everybody (on the force) states their opinion, and sometimes people get upset,” Roger Littlejohn said. “But when that alarm sounds, that’s all forgotten, and you’ve got a job to do.”
That spirit is still in a garage, too — the garage at the Christiansburg Community Fire Department.
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