Rascal, Rough Rider, Fire Chief
How my grandfather rode with Teddy Roosevelt, married into Panamanian politics, and accidentally died a hero.
My grandfather wasn’t exactly a choirboy. According to family legend, he got into enough trouble in Detroit that the best advice anyone could give him was, “You should probably leave town.” So he did what a certain kind of young man did in 1898—he joined the cavalry, went off to the Spanish–American War, and wound up fighting in Cuba alongside Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. The paper trail backs at least part of that up: later records list him as a U.S. Cavalry soldier in F Troop during the Spanish–American War, which fits the family version almost a little too perfectly.
Apparently he decided he liked Latin women, because after the war he didn’t point his boots back toward Detroit. He drifted south and ended up in Colón, Panama, where he somehow managed to fall in love with Felicidad Meléndez, daughter of Don Porfirio Meléndez—a serious local heavyweight, former governor of Colón Province, and one of the guys wrapped up in the politics around Panama’s independence. So this kid who’d been told to get out of Detroit suddenly found himself courting into a respectable Panamanian family. That’s about when he cleaned up his name, too. Christian I. Ternes became Charles Ternes DeReuter, a version that sounded right in Spanish and didn’t scream “guy who left town in a hurry” if anyone went looking in old Detroit papers.
In Colón, Charles and Felicidad had four kids, and he traded horses and rifles for hoses and helmets. He worked his way up to Mayor Charles Ternes de Reuter, jefe del Cuartel de Bomberos de la provincia de Colón—basically the head of the provincial fire department. For a man who started out as a bit of a rascal, he ended up with a very straight job: running the fire brigade in a wooden Caribbean port city stacked with bad wiring, flammable buildings, and people living on top of each other.
And he didn’t die behind a desk. In April 1917, during a serious fire in Colón, he went into a burning structure on a rescue with his crew. The scene wasn’t romantic—it was smoke, shouting, collapsing wood, and a spiderweb of early electrical lines overhead. In that chaos, a live wire came down and hit him, another firefighter, and the person they were trying to pull out. All three were killed on the spot. When that happened, my dad—born in 1909—was about eight years old. So the version that got handed down to me was never “grandpa the saint.” It was “grandpa the troublemaker who rode with Teddy Roosevelt, married a governor’s daughter, changed his name so his past wouldn’t catch him, and then went back into a burning building and didn’t come out.”
A rascal who happened to die a hero.
There is a monument in Colón honoring the 3 killed that day. They later kept adding names of all firefighters that lost their lives in the line of duty,
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Live Long and Prosper,
-Dan
parade for bomberos. when I was a kid I’d have to attend the ceremony at the park every year..
As an Canal Zone historian enthusiast I have read about the many fires that destroyed Colon. I enjoyed learning about your hero grandfather and his history.