It was last month when retired Odessa Firefighter John Taylor stumbled across an old, unique photo.
It was a group photo taken in 1927 of the first fire engine along with the first 13 volunteer firefighters in Odessa.
Taylor, who has been researching the history of Odessa Fire and Rescue since the 80s, was stunned when he came across the photo on the website Traces of Texas.
“I was excited,” Taylor said. “That’s the first clear image.”
Now, Taylor hopes to identify all 13 men in that photo. He has five of them identified so far but is hoping the public can help out with the remaining eight.
He has the names but he needs to know which name goes to which face.
“I’m trying to get all the guys identified,” Taylor said. “That’s my goal. I noticed some people on there like Clarence H. Stevens (the 1927 newspaper article just says C.H. Stevens. ) He retired from my department in 1958 so his name was Clarence Hubert Stevens. I need someone in his family that can identify him. Same thing with P.J. Hubbar and all the other ones.”
The ones Taylor has identified are Joe McCown, Sam McCown, Robert Morgan Neil, George Shows and James H. Price.
Taylor runs the Odessa Fire Department’s history website, which can be found at ofdhistory.org and also has its own Facebook page.
Taylor said he first saw the photo in a message on Facebook from a family member of a former Odessa firefighter.
“One of our retired firefighters who is deceased, his son saw that photo on Facebook on Traces of Texas and he shared it,” Taylor said. “I have a Fire Department history website and he shared that photo on the Fire Department history Facebook page. I thought, ‘wow, I’ve been with the fire department all these years and done all this research but had never seen this photo.’”
Taylor then got a hold of Traces of Texas asking where they got the photo from.
Turns out, a person all the way up in Wisconsin was selling it on eBay for $39.
Taylor got in touch with the photo’s seller in Wisconsin to try and find out more about the photograph and if there were more Odessa Fire and Rescue photos that he owned.
“I asked him if he had any more photos but he didn’t,” Taylor said. “He picked it up at an estate sale. There was a bunch of old vintage fire department photos and that was the only one from the Odessa Fire Department. So apparently, someone died that collected these photos and they had one from Odessa. I had never seen it before.”
Taylor has since donated the photo to the University of Texas Permian Basin archives so it can be preserved.
“They scanned it for me at 1800 DPI where I can blow it up really big,” Taylor said.
Back in 1927, Odessa Fire and Rescue, which was just simply called Odessa Fire Department at the time, didn’t have a fire station yet.
“Robert Morgan Neil, who is in the driver seat, he was a city councilman but he also had a garage on the south side,” Taylor said. “It was around First and Pearl, or something like that. George Shows was one of his mechanics and Giant James H. Price was one of his mechanics and they kept the fire truck at the garage where Shows worked as a mechanic. So George drove the fire truck and the rest is history.”
The first fire station in Odessa wouldn’t come around until 1939 on 3rd and Lee which in addition, also hosted city hall, the police station and a jail.
Even though all 13 members of the first Odessa Fire Department have since died, Taylor is hopeful that a few members of their families might possess more photos from the beginning years of the Odessa Fire Department as well as help identify the eight remaining members of the photo.
“I know they’re out there,” Taylor said. “I just have to find who in their families have it stuck in a shoebox in a closet somewhere.”
