Allan Appel Photo
The author by Tony Falcone’s mural at the Dixwell fire station.
Most firefighters in the 19th century didn’t ride horse-drawn carriages, but to lighten the horses’ pump load to speed them to the fire, they ran alongside the carriages blowing “bells and whistles” — hence the phrase — to clear the narrow streets.
The firehouse dogs were not Disney-esque Dalmations, but perhaps Great Danes, or other breeds that worked as mascots with the specific job of calming the flighty percherons.
Oh, and firefighters were for a hundred years called “jakes.”
To find out where “jakes” derives from and to learn fascinating facts about early New Haven firefighters’ history, all you have to do is check out Brigid Bucheit Carney’s new, and first, novel, The Jake House.
The Carneys with daughter Flynn.
She wrote it in tandem with her husband Tim Carney becoming a New Haven firefighter in 2014. For five years previous Carney had been a volunteer firefighter in Bridgewater, where the couple live with their daughter Flynn.
“I wanted to understand what he [Tim] was going through,” Brigid Carney said in a recent interview at the Dixwell Fire Station on Goffe Street, where Tim serves on that firehouse’s Engine 6 and Truck 4.
Each time her husband came home from work, and described his day, Carney asked him to tell her about it. She began to write notes, Tim Carney reported.
Carney, who has a background in acting and the insurance business, decided to set her story in New Haven. She has incorporated elements of firemen’s lives he researched in locations from New York City to Boston to Chicago, which had high-technology fire departments for 1896, the year The Jake House is set.
The story, framed by a grandfather named Sean O’Sullivan telling his granddaughter Jackie how he became a New Haven jake, takes the reader back to when most of the city’s firefighters were Irish.
If you had two lines of buttons you were an officer, one line a regular firefighter.
One day Brigid Carney asked her husband what a “Kelly Day” means. It’s a vernacular term she’d come across, used widely and for generations.
“I have no idea,” Tim Carney said.
On the very next day at work, somebody at work used the phrase: “I wish I could take a Kelly Day.”
Tim interrogated his colleague and reported to his wife that it means a day off.
“But a kind of hooky day off,” Brigid added.
Why? Because back in the day firefighters used to be paid once a month, she explained. Because they had money in their pockets, and the majority of firefighters then were Irish — with the stereotyped appetite for a brew — they often took the next day off because they may well have been a little hung over, Carney said.
Because her own background is Irish, Brigid Carney has centered on the story of the Sullivan clan of firefighters. She was at pains to point out that the family or brotherhood of firefighters, even at that time, included a freed African-American. His name in The Jake House is Salty, and although he jokes that his dark pallor is all the soot that cakes his face, he’s indeed black, and a captain in the fire service.
Carney shows a j-key on her iPhone.
So why is a firefighter a jake? Because in 19th century firefighting, often the most valuable item in a house was a bed. A “j‑key” was usually used to disassemble the beds; often firefighters went into burning homes where everything else might be lost, but took their j‑keys and tried to rescue the bed.
“If you say j‑key three times fast, it sounds like jake,” she said.
Brigid Carney is planning readings beginning in Bridgewater in October, which is fire prevention month, and then at other settings where New Haven’s firefighters reach out to schools and community groups.
She is at work on a second volume in what she hopes will be a series. This first story, set in the same late 1890s time period, will have at its centerpiece an historically based school fire. The books are aimed at 6‑to-10-year olds. In addition to the pleasures of storytelling and helping kids understand a little about fire prevention, Carney said she hopes the tales also provide insight into the selfless sense of service of firefighters, like her husband, then and now.
