The Place:
It seems that the City of Cody doesn't have a fire department per se, this service being accomplished by the county. The building, to our knowledge the only fire hall in Cody, is quite large, with offices at the south end of the building, seven overhead doors along the east side and five more along the west side.
For the fire protection district as a whole,
FireDepartment.net lists a total of six stations in the district, manned by 4 paid personnel and 60 volunteers. There's no mention of their apparatus and Fire Wiki has no entry for the district. The district itself has a web page containing no useful information.
The building itself was raised in 1965 and in 1978 was dedicated in memory of Gary Smith, Fire Chief in 1974-75. At the same time the building was named the
Robert C Moore Memorial Fire Hall, in Honour of fallen firefighter Robert Moore, who
perished in a fire on May 20, 1974 while attempting to rescue another person, Eric Olson, who was trapped in the basement of the burning building.
On the evening we were photographing the courthouse next door we noticed quite a bit of activity at the adjacent fire hall. After ambling over to check it out we learned that the department had (if I remember correctly [which, according to the Mrs., is unlikely]) recently taken delivery of a shiny new toy, a Smeal/Freightliner Pumper with lots of bells and whistles, and this was the evening they had set aside to familiarize the members with the new engine.
The Person:
Robert Moore was a fireman with Park County Fire Protection District No. 2 in 1974 when he tragically perished in an arsonist set fire in what was then the Montgomery Ward/Cody Enterprise Newspaper building. On May 19, 1974 the arsonist threw a book of lit matches into a dumpster behind the building which set fire to it. Bob Moore was one of the firemen who extinguished the fire that night. Burning embers remained in the rafters which set the roof afire the next day, while two employees of The Enterprise were working in the basement. Unaware of the fire until it was well underway, one of the employees, Dewey Vanderhoff, managed to escape and tell the firefighters another person, Eric Olson, was still inside, in the basement. Two firefighters, Bob Moore and Kirk Waggoner, entered the building in an attempt to rescue him. Only Waggoner made it back out. Moore was overcome by smoke when the line to his oxygen pack broke. Read the complete story
HERE.
Robert Moore, a father of four, was 41 years old at the time and was only in town to attend his son's graduation. He had been in Denver where his wife had undergone heart surgery shortly before and was due to return the next day.