A co-op connection, a donated fire truck and the rest of the story
August 2026
by Jack Cooksey, Staff Writer
This is a story with two happy endings. The first moment of grace occurred 20 years ago and was documented in the January 2006 issue of Cooperative Living.
In 2006, the Windsor (Va.) Volunteer Fire Department — served by Community Electric Cooperative — had a new fire engine on the way and was retiring its 1972 Ford pumper truck that served the department for 34 years. The old pumper had become a third-line backup, at best, and had outlived its market value, even though it had fewer than 30,000 miles on it.
Weighing what to do with the still-capable truck, Windsor Fire Chief Lee Marshall and his firefighters decided to donate it to another department, specifically seeking any Gulf Coast fire department in need after Hurricane Katrina devastated the region in 2005.
To find candidates, Marshall called CEC’s then-CEO Jim Reynolds, who accessed the nationwide co-op network and was soon connected with the West Hancock Fire and Rescue in Pearlington, Miss., which lost two of its three engines during the hurricane. “It was a perfect match,” Reynolds said at the time.
A donation from CEC helped spruce up the truck, and within two weeks, Marshall, two firefighters and a retired Windsor chief delivered the truck to Mississippi.
Happy ending No. 1.
Yet the story kept on going, just like the old truck. “It stayed in service for us about nine years after Katrina,” says Joseph “Ticker” Dawsey, who has worked in fire and rescue in Pearlington for 45 years. He’s now a one-man department, the chief of a station with five volunteers to call on.
When West Hancock acquired a new engine, the 1972 pumper was donated again, this time to a small Louisiana station about 30 miles away. That volunteer squad had one subpar truck at the time, Dawsey says, and Windsor’s old soldier kept serving another five years until the salty clime of the coast finally claimed it. It was sold for salvage.
Dawsey remembers how that 34-year-old truck was a godsend to Pearlington. “That was just an old truck to them,” he says. “We looked at it as a brand-new truck.”
A fire engine twice donated, twice reborn. And a second happy ending.