When I was a kid, watching newsreels and hearing old radio broadcasts from the '30s through '50s, I just thought that people back then REALLY DID TALK LIKE THAT. Maybe that's a holdover from the way public speakers were trained before amplification?

The cab-forward fire trucks with bulbous front ends are by Crown Coach, still very much in use in the '80s and maybe later, with bodywork shared with their line of school buses. Many of the other fire trucks look like relics of the '30s. I see firefighters standing on the rear bumpers of moving trucks, something I remember from the '70s, which is definitely not done now.

Both of the houses my family owned in Southern California had cedar shake roofs, two decades later. We weren't in a canyon, but that seems positively insane to me now.

Many good reasons to watch the documentary (thanks for the link, Deborah), including amazing fire footage, crisp sound editing, instructive graphics, William Conrad's narration, and a fantastic array of cars and trucks from the fifties and early sixties.