Monterey without Ray Tryon? This will take time to settle in.

Courtesy of Monterey Fire Company.

Ray Tryon (left), with his son, Leigh (right), and his crew back in 1982. “Ray always had something to say, and if you didn’t learn anything, you weren’t paying attention,” said Ray’s grandson, Shawn, who took over as Monterey’s fire chief upon Ray’s retirement in 2010. He joined the Monterey Fire Company in 1943, when he was 13 years old and most of the able-bodied males were away fighting World War II. “Back then, the fire company would take what they could get, and I was one of the ones they got,” Tryon said.

The following first appeared in The Berkshire Eagle.

By Felix Carroll

MONTEREY — Ray Tryon, born of human parents but who might as well have been carved from a mountain, has died.

He and his barrel chest, big head, and muscular hands, two fingers of which were mangled by machinery in separate incidents — the man is gone.

His voice that seemed to spin to life by means of a hand crank — it would whirl high-pitched, warped by the elements and sharp with splinters — has been silenced.

He’d point a stubby finger at you and begin each soliloquy with, “Well, you know —” and then proceed to expound upon things you most certainly didn’t know.

Safe to say that nearly every citizen of this tiny hill town had at one point or another entertained the notion that someday Ray Tryon would die, and how extraordinarily strange that would be.

He drew his last breath on Saturday, Nov. 16, at the age of 90. For the past month he had suffered from the effects of cancer. He lay in bed in the home his grandparents first kept, with his wife, June, in the other room, in the center of the village where Main Road slopes low behind its withers like the spine of a hard-ridden horse. 

Upon this little dot on the map, Ray Tryon first drove a car when he was 6 years old. He built a front-end loader in his mid-teens before there were such things as front-end loaders. He heard the church bells ringing one afternoon in 1945 and learned the Japanese had surrendered. 

“Good,” he said, before spinning on his boot heal to finish bailing hay, just another workday. 

As chief of the Monterey Fire Company, he set the county’s gold standard for small-town fire departments whereby his crew would be paid for emergency calls; the equipment would be top rate; the training would be rigorous; and the voters would say yes to it all. 

None of this should imply Ray Tryon was universally adored, nor that he gave a hoot what people thought of him. He was what you’d call a “complicated” man. But cool, Hollywood cool, the town’s unflappable fixed point. Maybe we can thank his asthma for that. He had learned from an early age that whenever he got worked up about anything, he’d have trouble getting the air out of his lungs, so he didn’t allow himself to get too emotional. 

Upon this little dot on the map, Ray Tryon spent a lifetime never being wrong about a single thing, if you were to ask him. 

The man was a giant. 

And now his body has been reduced to ashes. They poured the ashes into an old brass fire nozzle, and capped it off. He’ll be buried in Corashire Cemetery, joining the remains of others from the Tryon tribe of clever scavengers who settled in Monterey in the mid-1800s, having followed the rivers and animal paths north from Connecticut. 

Ray might have approved

But before his mortal remains were laid to rest, the townspeople gathered here at the fire station on Saturday for a memorial for the man who served as fire chief for 56 years and town constable for 65 years. 

No speeches were given, and not a drop of beer could be found. 

It wasn’t so much that Ray wouldn’t have wanted people giving speeches as it was a tacit admission on the part of the planners that Ray, a man of precision, wouldn’t trust anyone to get his story straight — so just skip it, and provide refreshments.

He built this fire house, self-mortgaged, in fact. It’s a dry fire house, per orders of Ray Tryon, with a few notable exceptions that did not include his own memorial service.

Beer was permitted on those winter evenings when he’d decide to drag in a 14-piece orchestra for his annual fireman’s ball. Ray may have been crotchety, but the man liked to dance. As chief, whenever a new prospective firefighter showed up at the door, Ray would inquire if they knew how to dance. If not, he would offer lessons. The offer was not to be mistaken for a mere suggestion.

To be a firefighter under Ray Tryon meant not only knowing the mechanics, the minutiae, of firefighting and emergency rescue. It meant not only understanding the science of smoke, heat and fuel loads, and the biological effects on the body when exposed to carbon monoxide. Or how to calculate friction loss on, say, a 100-foot section of 2 ½-inch hose line. Or the geographical differences between Monterey’s Lake Avenue, Lake Shore Lane, Lakeside Lane, and Lakeside Terrace (“Do you take a right out of the station or a left?” he’d quiz, pointing his stubby finger, pistol-like, at your very heart).

Indeed, to be a firefighter in Monterey also meant having a working command of the box step, Fox Trot, and Lindy. After all, Ray Tryon would not have his crew embarrassing him at his own ball, not with all his fancy ballroom dancer friends in attendance. 

The fire crew on Saturday had big band recordings playing in the background. The fire engines were all parked out on the apron, their bumpers draped in purple cloth. Last week, they had gone into Ray’s old barn and pulled out a wagon he made that he used with the team of Percheron horses he once owned. The wagon was on display at the memorial service along with his white chief’s helmet, the nozzle with his ashes, his various badges, and photos of Ray throughout the years going all the way back to the olden days.

All in all, a classy affair. Firefighters from throughout the county came in their blue, Class-A uniforms. After about three hours, everyone was gone, having a beer elsewhere, the trucks back inside the station, everything put away nice and neat.

Ray probably would’ve approved. But how extraordinarily strange to not have the man here to critique the hidden particulars of his own memorial service.

What do you want to know?

His mind was still a marvelous thing up until a month before his death — “the gears still turning,” as his grandson, Shawn Tryon, put it. 

Ray, born on Sept. 28, 1929, could still tell you about cutting across yards, playing cops and robbers as a kid and rushing home in time hear Tom Mix on the radio. He could tell you about putting a wee-bit of water into glass bottles, capping them off, sticking them into the stove and running off before they exploded. He could tell you about the moment he decided he would no longer cry when his mother paddled him for misbehaving.

He could tell you about being frightened to the bones throughout World War II that the Germans would start dropping bombs upon Monterey and there’d be nothing he could do about it. Maybe this is why he was attracted to the fire services — to emergencies, to things he could do something about. He responded to thousands of calls over the years.

He said, “I’d pull up. I wouldn’t have a plan. Then, flash: a plan.”

But bombs falling from the sky — there was nothing he could’ve done about that. Following the war, when it came time for him to report to the draft board, they turned him away after he had an asthma attack before their very eyes. 

His marvelous mind could tell you about the young gals who, each summer, would come to town as camp counselors, and how he presented himself before them, a boy with a bicycle, a fine specimen, a Grade-A, Monterey-made country bumpkin.

He could tell you about his maternal grandfather, who quite literally kept the gears turning as a millwright in Lee; abouthis paternal grandfather, the first man in Monterey to own a car. He could tell you about cutting ice from Lake Garfield into 60 pound blocks; about his elementary school teacher, Ms. Emma Heath, who played piano decently enough.

“But the real education I got was right out there,” he’d say, sitting in his kitchen, pointing to the field behind his house.

His father, Albert Wallace Tryon, had a garage next door with a gas pump in front and a collection of broken down Model A’s and Model T’s in the back. With a hacksaw, screwdriver, plyers, cold chisel, monkey wrench, and a hammer, Ray as a teenager would chop up those old Fords and turn them into crude tractors. His front-end loader — with hydraulic arms and all — drew the attention of Caterpillar, so the story goes. He was offered a free ride to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, but he backed out. He was never good at classroom learning.

He stayed put in Monterey. He founded Tryon Construction. He shoved earth around. He got things done. 

Now Ray Tryon has been reduced to ash. The surrounding hills shudder.

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Ray is survived by his wife, June; son Leigh; daughter Kathie; grandchildren Shawn and Christopher; great-grandchildren Ian, Phoebe and Owen; and extended family.