Randolph, MA 1952, Downtown Fire Alarm, Utility Poles, Cars

By Joe Maurath, Jr.; posted April 15, 2014

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This community is about 15 miles south of Boston. Yours truly exchanged changed out a few exoticly-colored Diamond-P's upon the fire alarm lines in this town (mostly during 1970-1971)...which still uses a Gamewell fire box system and glass insulators to this day. All of the iron-wire loops have been carefully searched for anything else unusual. A couple aqua Diamond-P's were since found in service but nothing else of big interest...

A small but highly spectacular cache of Diamond-P's was discovered by a local bottle collector within the town's storage area in 1975. There were about ten different ones including super fizzy ones, greens and a sapphire one. In 1969 I approached the guy in charge of fire alarm ops asking if I could look through their insulator inventory. I was denied as he replied they had a stash but owing to budget cuts (yeah, right) the town needed to keep them (a few thousand, as I found out later) in their inventory. They were in barells that hadn't seen the light of day in many decades. ALL have since been looked through by knowledgeable persons, so nothing valuble was overlooked. It is rumored that an amber T-HE Co. was found around 1990 by a local collector at the very bottom of one of those ancient wooden barrels. The forementioned bottle collector who got access is a resident of that town, so he probably had the right "connections" opposed to some kid a few years earlier who rode in on a bike...

The town had a LOT of crossarm fire alarm open wire, vaguely be seen here on the poles' lowermost crossarm. It existed with lots of beauty because I recall the 6 and 8-pin crossarms loaded with nothing but aqua glass along this rather lengthy main road up through the later 1970s. None as I recall were out of the ordinary, plain aqua's...at least from looking up from the street.

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