Don’t pretend you’re above toilet humor—you clicked. You’re here because you find the idea of a fire truck that says “pee pee” on the side funny. Not just because of the name, but because of the obvious implication. I mean, when it’s an emergency, you gotta use what’s on hand. Fortunately, that probably won’t be urine, no matter what the Pee Pee fire truck’s livery suggests.
This oddly decorated fire truck was produced by All American Fire Equipment, which featured photos of the vehicle undergoing pre-delivery inspection on Facebook. The Freightliner pump truck (or tanker, it’s unclear) is bound for service with the Waverly Fire Department of Waverly, Ohio, and is colored in honor of the local high school’s mascot, a tiger. As for why the bumper says “pee pee,” that’s in reference to another municipality covered by the Waverly FD: Pee Pee Township.
Pee Pee Township (population ~7,400) is believed to have been named for the nearby Pee Pee Creek, which you’ve probably seen as a stopover between Poo Poo Point in Washington and Pee Pee Island in Newfoundland, Canada. Pee Pee Creek itself is not named for the liquid that flows through it, but for initials scratched into a tree on its banks by an early European settler, reading PP. These initials didn’t have their current connotation when they were scrawled, nor when the township was established in 1798. They wouldn’t take on their modern meaning for almost a century, with the Oxford English Dictionary recording the first known written use of “pee pee” referencing urine in 1890.
Places with funny names like this naturally tend to generate amusingly labeled emergency vehicles, such as the police cars of Sandwich, Massachusetts and Climax, Georgia. The best example I’ve personally encountered in my travels was in Pie Town, New Mexico, whose town bakery honors the community with a damn good apple pie. Specifically, a green chile apple pie—don’t skip town without a slice.
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