Greeks in a Firehouse

I was walking along the part of MLK Boulevard that is Fraternity Row for, I think, fraternities for both Rutgers and NJIT. One was in an old firehouse, and old Newark firehouses tend to be fairly distinguished architecturally, so I looked up. A lot of the best architectural detail anywhere is above the ground floor. If you are riding in a bus and want something to look at in a city, be it Newark or, especially, in Manhattan/NYC, check out the second story and above.

The fraternity's website says this about their history:

Theta Chi is an international fraternity with approximately 140 active chapters across the continent. Theta Chi was founded on April 10, 1856, and ranks 11th in the number of active chapters. As of May 1, 2000, Theta Chi International has an undergraduate membership of 6,341.

Our founding fathers were two cadets at the university, Arthur Chase and Frederick Norton Freeman. Since that day, Theta Chi has had its many ups and downs, but has managed to become one of the most successful greek organizations on college campuses.

What university are they talking about, that has "cadets"? Something is missing. Proofreaders, people, proofreaders!

When I looked up toward the third floor, I saw splendid windows separated by ornate polychrome medallions. Fortuitously, I could zoom in with my camera to capture detail.

I initially misread the number/s here as 42 (forty-two). Not so.

The top number refers to the Engine Company, the lower number, Ladder number. Of course, I was not clear on what a ladder number is. So I looked it up online.

A ladder company is a combination of a fire truck with an aerial ladder, an assortment of ground ladders and forced entry tools and the manpower used to staff it. Ladder trucks can have straight aerial ladders as short as 65 feet or longer ladders with platforms (buckets) on the end. In many department's [sic] ladder companies are responsible for ventilation and forcible entry duties. A standard ladder company will include an officer, driver/operator and two firefighters on a ladder truck.

I wanted to copy this paragraph but the webmaster of the Marysville, Ohio website in which it appears disabled copying. What an inconsiderate [epithet]. The Internet is about information. The information on an educational webpage should be freely available. If someone wants to lift an entire webpage, that's one thing, but borrowing small bits of text? Why the he...ck not? In any case, there are workarounds. I could have done a screenprint (Alt+PrtSc), called it up in either my graffics program or WordPerfect, then typed the text. It comes out as a graffic, so you can't use the screenprint as manipulable text. I could have stored it as a graffic (foto) and then cropped to show just the relevant paragraph. But I wanted to use text. The simplest way to get text is not available within my AOL software, but is, in MSIE. So I fired up MSIE, copied the URL into it, then went to the Page menu and clicked on "View Source". Alas, "Find" does not work in the resulting window, but since the definitions are arranged alphabetically, I was able to scroll down manually without too much confusion to the text I needed, then block-copy it. This is a lot of trouble for a little bit of information, and I resent webmasters — at the Essex County website and the Marysville website, among others — who are so protective of their precious content that they put us thru such hoops. But now you know what a ladder company is.