One of a kind Ol Yeller Fire Truck

One of the interesting things in my dad’s toy collection, is a late fifties, early sixties, yellow peddle car. It’s a fire truck with ‘Roseville Fire Department’ on the sides.

As you can see from the pictures, it’s a Hamilton Steel Products fire truck, built on a jeep chassis. The odd thing is, it is yellow. My research guy has started looking into this and has found that Hamilton only made red and blue fire trucks.
So my research guy has started contacting fire departments.
It looks like Hamilton might have made a yellow fire truck for the Roseville, Michigan Fire Department. The local fire chief may have a picture of this car on display, years ago, in the firehouse. With any luck, he can find the picture and send us a copy.

Someone at the Roseville, California fire department also emailed him, saying that they remembered a yellow fire truck. They are checking with some of their ‘old timers’.

It will be interesting to see what the rest of the research leads to and ‘how one of a kind’ this peddle car turns out to be.

If it truly is one of a kind, the value increases.

Addendum - Feb 2.

It's nice when experts give you the value of their experience. My research guy has found out that the front and rear ornaments are not standard on the Hamilton trucks (which is what we figured). Also, the hose reel is non-standard. Further checking revealed that the lettering is vinyl. Though the yellow paint is the only paint, there is a little bit of red over spray by one of the peddles.
So, we figure that someone(possible who worked for one of the fire departments), took a red Jeep fire truck, stripped the paint off and had it repainted in yellow.
It's still a good looking truck.

Wifey Ear

Years ago, a coworker was trying to get my attention from across the aisle. Exasperated, he finally raised his voice and said, “GW!”
“Yes?”
“Stop using your ‘Wifey ear’.


So, I went in to have my hearing checked last week because I have been noticing greater difficulty hearing some people, particularly my wife.

I fully expected the Audiologist to come back into the room after the test and say, “Your hearing is fine.” Whack me on the arm and say, “So pay better attention to your wife!”
But alas, it turns out I have lost some hearing in the higher frequencies. (Yes I know, it comes with age.) The Audiologist explained that this type of loss makes it harder to hear women and children, since their voices are usually at a higher pitch. This explains a lot, since Wonder-Girl has a soft female voice. There have been many times when she answers the phone and the person on the other end asks if her mommy is home.
This also explains how easy it is for other noises to drown out WG’s voice.

The Audiologist said that I should consider hearing aids. (Thank goodness my young female friends in the Philippines don’t read this. They already tease me about being old!)
So I’ll consider hearing aids and look into the types and price (shudder)

But maybe there is a bright side. I might as well go back to my old habit of staring at women’s chests, especially since there is no point in trying to listen to them anymore:-)
(Gosh, there must be some kind of witty tee-shirt slogan I can make.)