A picture request for a new fire book

You know what I like? Fire trucks.

I also like history.

I'm also a fan of my home town, Albion.

Now, as a person who's been a volunteer firefighter for some 35 years or so, I can safely say I've been a part of all three of those things. And we've combined them all before, in a book Emily and I did called Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century Or So With the Albion Fire Department:

The days were smoky ... the nights were sleepless.

I'm very proud of that book, which was decades in the making. But, although it did have some photos, it didn't have as many as I'd have liked. Now, some time later we did another book about Albion and Noble County, entitled, naturally, Albion and Noble County:

Ahem: That's the Kendallville Fire Department on the cover.

It's part of Arcadia Press' Images of America series, which features images of ... well, you know. Now, that book was a load of hard work, but it was also very cool, because we searched long and hard and world wide for pictures, and got a lot of really cool ones loaned and donated to us. That got me thinking.

And here's where you come in. Yes, I'm pointing at you.

I've been having some family and medical stuff that's kept me from getting very involved with the fire department recently, so I wanted to do something, and here it is: Another book about the Albion Fire Department, but this time all about the pictures. Fires; fire trucks; firefighters; firehouses; fire history; fire dogs; whatever. Not a lot of text, just all the good photos we can get our hands on.

If you have any fire related photos involving Albion in any way, could you please loan them to us long enough for us to make a copy for the book? You'll get credit, naturally, and half the proceeds from sales of the book will go to the Albion Fire Department. I'm not asking the AFD to fund the making of the book as they did with Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights, so the other half of the proceeds will go toward actually designing, producing, advertising, and printing the book.

If it's in any way related to Albion's fire history, even slightly, we're interested; and we're especially interested in former members, since it's awfully hard to fight fires without firefighters. Seeing as how this is going on my blog, I should stress that I mean Albion, Indiana. Although, come to think of it, it would be kind of cool to have a section on Albion firehouses from across the country.

We'll collect all the best and put out a great visual record of Albion's firefighting brothers and sisters. I don't know for sure how long this will take, but I'm shooting for getting it published maybe early next summer. And as always, thanks for your support!

You can contact Emily or me on our website contact form at www.markrhunter.com, our through any of our social media, or--believe it or not--our number's actually in the phone book.