Firefighter Jim Schlosser made a very big and very heavy table for Fire Station 19 in Silver Spring, Md. (Photo by John Kelly/The Washington Post)

“We wanted to make it a little over the top,” Jim Schlosser said as he showed me a massive American flag that decorates the apparatus bay at Fire Station 19, a firehouse in Silver Spring, Md.

And it is a little over the top, literally. The flag — eight feet wide and five feet high — is mounted over the doors that lead in and out of the station’s kitchen and dining room. Jim and fellow firefighter Matt Stevens fashioned it out of old fire hose.

Repurposing old hose into art has apparently become a common thing in U.S. firehouses. There are companies that sell it. But Jim wanted to make a flag himself. The lengths of red hose have been painted. The white and blue are the original colors of the hose.

“Some of this stuff is pretty dated, like here: It says ‘1977,’ ” Jim said. “It’s already got that kind of vintage look.”

But this is not the coolest thing in the firehouse. When the kitchen was remodeled late last year, Jim decided it needed a new table, one big enough to easily accommodate all seven firefighters who serve during a shift.

Firefighters Jim Schlosser, left, and Matt Stevens fashioned an American flag from old fire hose and mounted it in Fire Station 19 in Silver Spring, Md. (Photo by John Kelly/The Washington Post)

The result is a handsome beast of a table. It’s 10 feet long, with a top of inch-and-a-quarter solid oak, rough-cut to reveal the saw marks. The top is framed by six-inch steel channel and sits atop eight-inch channel. The legs look like girders.

“It’s extremely heavy,” Jim said. “When I was building it, it was on wheels. Then it took six of us — almost the entire shift — to carry it in.”

Jim, 37, made it in York, Pa., the town where he grew up and from which he commutes every third day for his 24-hour shift.

Black vinyl numbers — 19 — are underneath thick bar-top epoxy, ensuring that you’ll never forget which firehouse you’re in.

“One of the nice things about these tables is, when they start to get beat up, they start to look better,” Jim said. “They come in all nice and new looking, it’s almost like you don’t want to touch them. As they start to get beat up, it’s like they’re part of the firehouse.”

Jim likes being part of the firehouse, too. “This is my second family,” he said. “I spend a third of my life with them.”

That means cleaning — the morning I visited was a “heavy clean” day, and vacuum cleaners were buzzing — and cooking. I asked Jim where he gets his recipes when it’s his turn to cook.

Don’t throw away that old hose! These Stars and Stripes were made by two Montgomery County, Md., firefighters. (Photo by John Kelly/The Washington Post)

“I use Pinterest a lot,” he said.

I found that surprising.

Rising from the ashes

While we’re on the subject of firefighters, here’s a story from Stu Newman. He’s the retired Prince George’s firefighter I wrote about last week, after he was reunited with a man he’d last seen in 1959, when he pulled the then-boy from a fire in Hyattsville.

[Nearly 6 decades ago, he pulled a child from a fire. Last week, they met again.]

Stu, 84, told me he’d never rescued anyone before or since, but he did recall one memorable conflagration in Fairmount Heights, near the District line. When Stu and the other firefighters arrived, a four-room house was in flames, the roof already engulfed, the floor fallen in.

As the firefighters extinguished the blaze, a woman stood nearby and wailed: “My poor baby James! I can’t find my poor baby James! I don’t know where he is!”

It was unlikely that anyone still in the house had survived. It was dark, so the firefighters set up floodlights and began poring over the charred remains of the house in search of grim closure.

“We couldn’t find any evidence,” Stu said. “No cribs, no bones, nothing. The chief said, ‘What we’ll do is pack up now and come back tomorrow about 9 and start over.’ ”

That’s what they did. The next morning they returned with rakes and shovels to sift through the rubble as the distraught woman looked on.

All of a sudden the woman shouted, “There’s my poor baby James!”

James was no baby. He was a man, a 6-foot-4 man. He was alive, and he was staggering down the road.

Said Stu: “He probably spent the night in a tavern.”

Radio, radio

Takoma Radio is exactly what its name suggests. It’s a low-power radio station — 94.3 FM — whose signal doesn’t extend much beyond the borders of the liberal Maryland enclave in which it’s located. On Sunday mornings from 9 a.m. to noon, it’s a powerful time machine for local music fans of a certain, ahem, vintage. That’s when Robbie White co-hosts a radio show called “Forbidden Alliance.”

The show takes its name from a song by D.C. punk legends the Slickee Boys. Co-hosted by former WHFS DJ Weasel, the show celebrates local music. Interview guests have included veterans of the Slickee Boys, Switchblade, the Nighthawks and Root Boy Slim’s Sex Change Band.

I’ll be a guest this Sunday, chatting with Robbie and Weasel.

You can listen live at TakomaRadio.org. Robbie archives the shows at www.mixcloud.com/robbinewhite.

Twitter: @johnkelly

For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.