Sweat, Passion and TNT: Firemen's Park had an Explosive Beginning
By Mark Olson, Chaska Herald
March 31, 2008
Sweat, passion, and a healthy dose of TNT.
These are the elements that gave birth to Firemen’s Park, in downtown Chaska.
A few weeks ago, a group of firefighters addressed the Chaska City Council about preserving the park.
The council was hashing out redevelopment plans, for the northwest corner of highways 212 and 41. One of the big questions was what part of the project, if any, should sit on Firemen’s Park.
The firefighters were vehemently opposed to encroaching on the park, which sits just north of the redevelopment site (now the site of Ohnsorg’s Truck Body Manufacturing, Chaska Farm and Garden and Randy’s Auto).
To understand why Chaska firefighters are so passionate about the topic requires a trip to 1952 in the Chaska way-back machine.
The Jungle
Booming at the turn of the century, by the 1950s Chaska’s brick industry had gone bust. At the time, the park was referred to as “the jungle,” and bore deteriorating remains of what had been one of Chaska’s principal brickyards.
The site included a couple “beehive kilns,” so called because they were circular, with a cone-shaped top. The kilns were used to fire and harden clay, mined from a nearby clayhole.
Vines now grew over the kilns; weeds and trash covered the land; and water filled the nearby clay hole.
Firefighters held an annual picnic at the Valley Ballroom. However, with the Minnesota River flooding of the early 1950s, they moved their festivities to Carver. Willis Neutgens, a Norwood Young America resident and former Chaska firefighter, said that the incident pushed firefighters to create their own park.
Leonard “Dick” Lano, recalled that then-Fire Chief Ben “Butch” Kochs, who owned a filling station next to the clay hole (on a site which now serves as the park’s parking lot) was tired of looking at the mess. Kochs called a department meeting and suggested it as a project.
The firemen received permission from property owners Charles and Christian Klein, Chaska bankers/industrialists, to clear the land and use it as a park from who owned the property.
Weekend work
So on weekends, firefighters (there were about 20) began volunteering “hours and hours and hours” of time on the park, Lano recalled.
“A lot of work went into that sucker,” Neutgens said.
Using pickaxes and shovels, they took down the 25-feet-diameter, foot-thick beehive kilns. Originally the firefighters only planned to clean up the westerly part of the park, but needed a place to put the bricks. So they received permission from the Kleins to drag the brick rubble to the eastern part of the park, “which was low and soggy,” recalled Lano, who spearheaded the project as fire chief after Kochs was killed in a car accident.
To build the beach, city crews hauled in tons of sand and firefighters used a fire truck to blow the sand into the lake, until they had a beach, Lano said.
Local grocer Jake Cooper donated money for playground equipment. In 1955, to pay for park improvements such as the picnic shelter, the department began its annual fishing contest on Lake Bavaria. The contest was moved to Firemen’s Lake a couple years later.
TNT
There’s one park construction incident that retired firefighters recall with great relish.
Firefighters had been attempting to topple a 75-feet-high smokestack by chiseling a hole in the north side. However, the stack wouldn’t move.
“The weekend we were to take it down was the highlight of the community. Everyone was going to watch us remove it, but were curious about what system would be used to accomplish it,” Lano recalled. “That Friday evening I received a call from what seemed to be a local pub, as noise and laughter could be heard in the background. I was told to come to the park because there was something to see.”
What Lano found was that a firefighter and three other members of the community (in the bar all afternoon drinking) had taken the situation into their own hands, using dynamite to tear down the tower. “That went down with a bang, all right,” Neutgens recalled.
By varying accounts, the flying bricks from the explosion had knocked out windows on the Ohnsorg building, a nearby brick house (now Ernst & Associates Landscaping Architects building), and even Cy’s Liquors (now Kelley’s Bar) across the street.
Lano recalled that “People were so happy to see the work progressing on the park, that we never got a bill for the broken windows.”
“I was coming down there when I heard the boom. And I thought, ‘Oh my God they blew it already,’ And all there was, was dust and dirt and bricks flying and everything else when I got there,” recalled former firefighter Tom Jensen, in an interview a few years ago.
“The city had to make the repairs to the roof, begrudgingly. But later on, after we thought about it, we all got a good laugh, because only in Chaska could somebody do something like that,” Jensen said. “But it certainly was not funny at the time.”
Mr. Klein
The firefighters worked closely with Charles H. Klein on the project. “Every Sunday morning Mr. C.H. Klein would invite me to his home to discuss the project and ask me what equipment would be needed,” Lano recalled.
The pair sat on the front porch of Klein’s mansion (now Peacock Inn Bed and Breakfast), facing City Square Park.
Klein would offer the use of equipment such as dump trucks and bulldozers. Klein also brought in dirt from his other defunct clay hole (where Cooper’s County Market now sits) and used it to cover the brick rubble.
Klein was a tall, heavy-set man, who always wore a suit and tie and Lano always addressed him as “Mr. Klein.” Sometimes, even the Herald used a courtesy title when referring to Klein.
In the field of banking, Klein could be “very intimidating,” Lano said. However, “he was a different person when it came to this (project).”
Klein asked Lano what the park would be named. “Klein Bros. Firemen’s Park,” Lano replied. “He just jumped off the chair he was so happy.”
“He liked what we were doing, and he wanted it to continue,” Lano said. When the fire department faced problems, he’d tell Lano, “‘You’ve got to finish.’”
Initially, the city leased the land from the Kleins for the park. In late 1961, shortly after Charles Klein’s death, the land was donated to the city of Chaska as a public park. (Christian Klein died in spring 1962.)
Lano later moved to Norwood Young America, and stepped down from the department in 1962. However, the park is still a source of pride. “I look at it, and I’m so proud. I say to myself, ‘I was part of this,’” Lano said. “It would be a shame to do anything to this.”
Meanwhile, the City Council gave a developer a year to market the corner site to determine commercial interest, and asked that the development minimizes encroachment on Firemen’s Park.
“I’m sure 90 percent of the people in Chaska right now don’t know the start of it, because we’re really getting old now,” Lano said. “It’s a story that needs to be told.”
Firemen’s Park timeline
1951: Idea for park is formed.
July 1952: Firefighters begin work.
June 19, 1955: Park officially opens.
January 1957: Firefighters hold first ice fishing contest on Lake Bavaria – moves to Firemen’s Lake two years later.
September 1960: Firefighters develop two baseball diamonds
September 1961: Charles H. Klein dies.
December 1961: Park deeded to city of Chaska.
May 1962: Christian P. Klein dies.
August 1962: Chaska Lions add a “Texas size” 20-foot long brick barbeque pit.
Sources: Chaska Herald archives/Former Fire Chief Dick Lano