MILLIONAIRE CHIEF

Fire Service magazine, Jan. 28, 1922

The resignation of Percy Hoyt as chief of the Cheyenne, Wyo., Auxiliary Volunteer Fire Department, an organization offering fighting veterans called upon to aid the paid city department in time of emergency has been delivered to Mayor Taylor and the auxiliary department is to be disbanded.

Whether it will be replaced by a similar new organization of volunteers has not been decided.

Chief Hoyt, a wealthy clubman whose hobby is fire fighting, has been chief of the auxiliary since its organization 13 years ago, when the old volunteer department was disbanded.

Chief Hoyt was a conspicuous figure at the annual conventions of the International Association of Fire Engineers.

He was in the habit of wearing a cowboy’s sombrero with a rattlesnake skin around it.

The local papers in writing up the conventions frequently referred to him as “the millionaire Chief.”

Whether a millionaire or not, it was admitted that he had done much for the fire service of his state. 

More than once he paid for apparatus out of his own pocket and was liberal in expenditures for the fire department over which he presided.