Evicted at DeSales!

My grandson is a sophomore at DeSales and lives on campus this year. He loves it there, but was evicted from his dorm yesterday. So was everyone else in the building. Did they all forget to pay their rent? No, what happened is that a student carrying a chair accidentally knocked into the fire sprinkler system. It works. It works so well that the entire building was flooded out and it will be a few days before students can return. In the meantime, the University is renting out hotel rooms. My grandson and many other students, however, are just doubling up with friends.

Probably female friends.

The reason I tell this story is to share my own experience with the fire sprinkler system at Northampton County's Recorder of Deeds.

Back in the day, long before computers were de riguer, the Recorder's Office was backed with books going all the way back to 1752, when Northampton County was carved out of Bucks County in some kind of power play against the Quakers. In addition to all those musty books, there were plenty of ash trays, and cigarette smoke wafted through the air. You can still smell the smoke in some of the books.

Protecting these treasures was a gigantic ball, hanging from the ceiling, ostensibly full of some kind of fire suppressant. Nobody thought the damn thing worked. 

One day, a searcher (now deceased) insisted the ball is inoperable and said he'd prove it. He lit yup an entire pack of matches and stuck it right under the sprinkler.

It went off. Boy did it go off. But instead of water,it shot out some kind of gas. Not the kind of gas that comes after lunch, but still pretty noxious. It was so bad that Ann Achatz, who then was only a clerk in that office, fainted. Tom Castellano, heartthrob of all the women there, picked Ann up in his arms and carried her off to safety.

To this day, she credits him with saving her life.

I stayed. I liked the smell.