Nearby businesses also helped, including Frankenstein Concrete and Mashuda Excavation. That station – now home to a beer distributor on Dutilh Road – had been a work of love. The proceeds – about $400 – were instrumental in buying garage doors for the newly built fire station. She designed a velvet Santa Claus doll which the Women’s Auxiliary mass-produced and sold. Years earlier, Sally put her artistic talents to use in support of the fledgling fire company.
Sally, who had studied and produced art from childhood, created many of the watercolors that grace the couple’s walls and stand framed in stacks along the hallway and in the spacious music room of their home, where Jim still plays his Hammond organ every day. Sally recalls that in 1957, as they were looking to buy the house located on what was then an unpaved Peters Road, her father eyed the then-seven-year old bungalow, telling the young couple it would make a good stepping-stone.īut the Burkes – who raised their three children there – fell in love with the house as well as with the community, never seeing the need to step into anything different. He can still rattle off the names of all the other men who helped to hand-build its first fire station, overhaul its 30-year old fire truck, conduct carnivals to raise a few operating dollars and then join him in responding to the occasional barn and field fires which occurred in the farm community that was then Cranberry Township.īut the other men are gone now, as is the rural character of the settlement into which he and Sally – his high school sweetheart – moved more than 60 years ago. Behind the Scenes At Home With… Jim and Sally BurkeĪt age 87, with either five or seven heart attacks – he’s lost track by now – along with a handful of stents, a pacemaker and an assortment of other cardiological aids to keep him going, pioneer Cranberry firefighter Jim Burke knows he’s lucky to still be around.Īs the Township’s first fire chief, Burke clearly recalls the 1959 startup of the Township’s volunteer fire company.
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