A Deliberate Gas Station Fire From the 1940's Solved

By Nick Markowitz Jr.
Fire Investigator

I was working at one of my customer's business' several weeks ago when I got to meet his very elderly father. We were talking and he asked where I grew up and I mentioned the town of Carrick. It ends up he grew up in Carrick the same 29th ward of the city of Pittsburgh south area that I grew up in. This was a rough and tumble town that at one time was its own township. Everybody knew everybody and your father either worked at the local steel mill or for the city as a fireman or policeman etc. or your parents ran one of the many numerous little shops. Carrick has 2 streets where professionals and shop owners lived The Boulevard and Horniday. We were reminiscing about the old town and found that we went to the same church Saint Basils RC. We were even in the same Boy scout troop 224 that was sponsored by St Basils RC.

He related a story to me he thought I might find interesting since I was a volunteer firefighter about a fire at the old Boron-BP Gas Station along Brownsville Road at the corner of Agnew Street. The fire started when one of the kids, who he was in Boy Scout’s with in the 1940’s and is now dead, deliberately dropped a lit cigarette into the spilled gasoline on the ground as a gag while they were on there way home from a scout meeting at St. Basils Troop 224.

Apparently it caused quite a commotion and damage at the pump area. Remember back then they stored the oil in bottles. Yes, I said bottles. Stations bought motor oil in bulk and filled glass bottles which had a metal spout and were held in a movable rack as well as windshield cleaning rags etc. The pumps back then did not have near the safety controls they have now. I got to see several of these old time gas stations when I was a kid and my dad would take us for road trips in the country before NFPA codes and EPA either had them shut down or converted. Well as you can imagine they immediately took off for their lives running as fast as they could into the dark winter night. They thought they got away with it until the beat policeman in the neighborhood, a giant of a man who was strong and quick thinking and who by now had summoned help from his call box, stopped them. He told me how they were able to convince him they did not do it as they were on their way home from their boy scout meeting. Obviously scared for their lives because they never expected this goof ball kid who always got in trouble and whose family owned an appliance business in the area that closed in the 60’s to do something that drastic. They all knew they were in serious trouble and would be sent to the now closed notorious Camp Hill Juvenile Prison near Warrandale because they were with him.

As a child I heard stories about this place. I knew a kid who ended up there. It appears the officer let them go for theie own good because they all became very successful except for the kid who threw the cigarette. As far as I can tell the story and characters are true and I wrote the Pittsburgh Arson Investigator I know with the story and we got a good laugh out of it.

Obviously so much time and statute of limitations has expired there is no point in investigating it but it does make for a good example someone always knows. Maybe my friend’s father finally was able to tell someone what happened after all these years to clear his conscious. There have been many fires over many years’ and crimes and misdemeanors that go on all the time. Lost to history but maybe this time this one was not.

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