PERU — On Sunday, this Western Maine town lost a native son who faithfully served it as a volunteer firefighter since the age of 14, and as assistant chief for most of the remaining 64 years until his death.

On Tuesday morning, family and friends of Conrad E. Knox, 78, gathered at his home to share memories of the beekeeper who once killed a bear as it pawed through his backyard hives for honey.

“He was quite a man,” Kari Waterhouse of Canton said of her father, an Oxford Paper Co. pipefitter who retired from Boise Cascade in Rumford after 40 years in June 1991 due to poor health.

Up until his death, Waterhouse said, her dad, who was a diabetic and had both legs amputated, was still trying to figure out how to ride his beloved all-terrain vehicle.

The word “can’t” wasn’t in his vocabulary, she said, and then he proved that with prosthetics and a walker after his doctor told him he’d never walk again.

“You don’t tell Conrad he can’t do anything,” Waterhouse said.

Bob Dolloff, who served 40 years with Knox as a volunteer Peru firefighter, said from his Peru home that Knox was a lifelong tinkerer who loved to help people.

“If he could help anybody, he certainly would,” Dolloff said. “He was a jack-of-all-trades. He was pretty crafty and he enjoyed woodworking.”

Every Christmas, Conrad made 35 wooden ornaments and gave them away. He also made Christmas cookies with his grandchildren.

Dolloff described Conrad as being “very gentle and very mild mannered.”

“He was extremely high energy, so he had energy to burn and whatever he could get his hands on he did,” Waterhouse said of the longtime Peru ballot warden.

Whether it was farming, raising livestock, plumbing, woodworking, metalworking, blacksmithing, stained-glass crafting, beekeeping, gardening, lawn mowing, hunting, firefighting or teaching schoolchildren fire safety, Knox did it all and did it well, his family said.

“He tried most anything,” Waterhouse said.

“You used things forever and when they broke, he fixed them. He was the kind of guy people would call to fix things for them.”

Knox’s son, Kevin Knox of Peru, said his dad had no patience for fishing, but loved to hunt, bagging a deer every year as well as ducks and other game.

Recalling the bear incident, Kevin Knox said, “He sat in the back of the truck one night and opened up from the back end — ‘Boom!’ And the bear didn’t go down quietly.”

“He was a character,” Nancy Knox, Conrad’s widow, said. “He loved children.”

Conrad Knox was also a member and past president of the Peru Historical Society and helped Selectman Jim Pulsifer convert the Rockameka Grange Hall’s second floor into the society’s museum.

“He collected a whole set of town reports from the 1800s,” Nancy Knox said. “He was very interested in the town’s history. No matter what it was, he threw himself right into it.”

That rang true with firefighting and teaching children while dressed as Smokey Bear and teaching young firefighters.

“He loved passing that knowledge on to them,” Waterhouse said. “He was a great teacher.”

Up until the day he died, he was still giving Peru fire Chief Bill Hussey advice, Hussey’s wife Kathy said on Tuesday evening.

“He never resigned and Bill didn’t ask him to,” she said.

While Dolloff couldn’t recall any anecdotal firefighting with Conrad, Kevin Knox recalled a chimney fire incident at an area house to which his dad and firefighters responded, only to find no one home and no electricity to the building.

He said his dad used a flashlight to find stairs into the basement to figure out where the fire was, turned off the flashlight, descended the stairs and stepped on a live pig.

Kevin said the pig went one way and his dad the other, landing in pig poo.

As for firetrucks, Kathy Hussey recalled Conrad telling her that he still remembers the 1947 firetruck coming into town.

Recalling another firetruck anecdote, Dolloff said he and Conrad once took a nervous flight to Wisconsin to look at an engine pumper.

It was nerve-wracking because neither had flown before and Conrad didn’t like to travel.

“He was certainly a willing volunteer,” Dolloff said. “We haven’t had that truck in town for I’d bet 20 years.”

“It was an engine pumper with a 500-gallon tank, and it was more or less left up to us whether we bought it or was going to get back on a plane and fly home. But we decided we’d take it and drove it home.”

After

‘s 11 a.m. funeral on Thursday, July 21, at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Rumford, he will get one last ride home inside his casket while atop a Peru firetruck.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

Copy the Story Link