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| August 4, 2001 |
Fredonia, New York, July 15, 2001 Today this Chautauqua County town celebrates the 100th anniversary of the founding of its Volunteer Fire Department with a parade, fireworks, and a kind of festival. The Cub Scouts are selling hot dogs, there's a clown attracting the kids, and the Sheffield Steel Band is performing in the bandshell in Barker Common. It's a bit like our Roosevelt Island Day. Fredonia, which is rich in textures dating back to Revolutionary times, has no more history than Roosevelt Island, which is similarly blessed. 
But Fredonia is better than Roosevelt Island at treasuring and celebrating its history. The Women's Christian Temperance Union was founded here, and Fredonia was the home of the first Grange. Natural gas was first drilled here, and that site, like the others, is marked with a bronze plaque. Like Roosevelt Island, Fredonia is a town of fewer than 10,000 people. Roosevelt Island is in its third generation of natives, its
second of native-born. But in Fredonia's Forest Hill
Cemetery, there is a Cushing who fought in the Civil War and
there is Luther Gates, who was a drummer boy in the Revolutionary
War. Generations have grown up here, early ones attending the Normal School and later ones the State University of New York at Fredonia that transformed the Normal School into a first-class institution of higher learning. This is small-town There is another way Fredonia differs from Roosevelt Island. Fredonia's Town Council meets once a month, and over the years its particular form of democracy has added a "bull session" that precedes any Council meeting by a few days. Informally, things are talked through. After a few days of rumination and off-line discussion, there's a formal session at which decisions are made – or not. Everybody's life is touched by the actions of the Council, and there are few who haven't brought something before the body, or followed its proceedings. These are the grass roots. It is in a town like Fredonia that Roosevelt Island's peculiar circumstance becomes apparent – a town without democracy in one of the Great Democracy's founding colonies. We have the trappings – the Residents Association Common Council – but the people and RIRA Council hold none of the power, which here is exercised instead by appointees of the Governor. 
In Fredonia, that idea of a local government is as foreign as Saddam Hussein or Joe Stalin, and any attempt to deny residents the power of the ballot box in election of key decision-makers might well bring out a local militia, which would no doubt gather at the local Fire Department building and march in anger to the Village Hall and Opera House, where Council meetings are held, ready to punish the arrogance of government that ignores the will of the governed. But then the people of Fredonia have some 225 years of American democracy behind them. And Roosevelt Island has yet to see its first. DL
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And atop one of Main Street's buildings is a
three-dimensional tin sign my Grandpa Hartlieb fashioned for the
Mastor Brothers shop.
America, and the excitement
over the Fire Department's Centennial has brought out shiny fire
trucks from across the region. Volunteer Fire Departments
have always been a major focus of male bonding out this way.