Event celebrates hostelling, honors firefighters

Fire Station 2 today, a hostel and museum.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The extended family of the Firehouse Hostel & Museum in Little Rock, Arkansas, came together last week to celebrate accomplishment, to honor firefighters, and to raise funds for a new annex in support of fire safety education.

The event featured Razorback college football veterans David Bazzel, now a radio personality, who emceed, and Gary Robinson, 1964 national champion (then, now), who keynoted.

Gary Robinson is the younger brother of legendary Major League Baseball third baseman Brooks Robinson, a retiree of the Baltimore Orioles, who had planned to attend but could not. 

Gary Robinson and me.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The Robinson brothers graduated from Central High School (National Historic Site) in Little Rock. As kids, they spent time at Fire Station 2, where their father was a career firefighter. In a prerecorded video interview, Gary and Brooks reminisced over the firehouse, their father, and his co-workers.

The sporting legacy of the Robinson family is of course especially meaningful in Arkansas and in Maryland. As I lived in those states between 10 and 20 years each, I've felt a special connection to the Robinsons. My father is a big fan of Brooks, and I was a childhood supporter of the Orioles. Brooks retired in 1977, when I was six.

Linda Fordyce stirs up the crowd.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Long out of service and after years of neglect, Fire Station 2 provided the building that the city of Little Rock and an army of volunteers rehabilitated to serve as the hostel and museum, which opened in 2016. I worked on the firehouse hostel project as one of those volunteers until I left Arkansas for New England in 2011. I took (dubious) honors for having traveled the farthest for the event, edging out a charitable soul from Colorado who contributed more valiantly by populating two tables with local friends.

The Firehouse Hostel and Museum has been the brainchild and passion project of two extraordinary people, Linda and John Fordyce. They conceived of the hostel more than 10 years before the hostel opened in 2016, and they have shepherded the project with nothing short of parental love since. Last week they were in attendance as leaders and coordinators. With characteristic tirelessness, they now are spearheading the drive to develop the annex.

Reep introduces Benton; Bazzel looks on.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The Fordyces' passion for travel as cultural education, hostelling as social learning, and the merits of the firehouse as an urban redevelopment project in particular are famously contagious. I could not resist signing on and served in roles as varied as bathroom cleaning and representative to a national meeting of Hostelling International USA.  At the event last week, the enthusiasm the Fordyces still exude was palpable. Many faces I remembered from the 2010s were there and still are vitally involved, importantly including Greg Hart, who lends his accounting wizardry, and Johnny Reep, a retired fire captain of legendarily large personality.

Other presenters and honored guests included Tanya Hooks and Marvin L. Benton. Another Central High alum and a major mover in the Little Rock non-profit sector, Hooks is a board leader for the hostel and museum. Another retired firefighter, Benton is an inspiring advocate for fire safety education, especially for children, and author of a book in that vein, Unfallen Hero.

In Unfallen Hero, Benton tells the near-death, line-of-duty story of having suffered agonizing burns over 39 percent of his body. When doctors said he could never fight fire again, he told the audience last week, he lobbied his superiors for a job in fire safety education. When they questioned whether he would be comfortable appearing before audiences with his disfiguring scars, he said, he answered: "If these scars on me would save just one child, ... it will all have been worth it."

After the example of the Memphis Fire Museum, Linda Fordyce said, the Little Rock museum, with Benton in the lead, hopes to make fire safety education accessible to all children in Arkansas. Fordyce and Benton said that fires and the horrific injuries they inflict are too often easily preventable.

You can support and read more online about the Little Rock Firehouse Hostel and Museum.