Clarence Keller has been in a reflective mood lately. The longtime chief of the Hope fire department recently retired from that role, a milestone he celebrated with a party in his honor on Saturday.
So it was strange timing that, just as Keller was looking back on his career as a fire chief, he was also unknowingly becoming the subject of a transatlantic mystery when an old Maine firefighter’s license plate of his turned up 4,000 miles away in Austria.
That mystery came to light on Tuesday, July 8, when a user of the website Reddit shared a photo of that license plate in a channel devoted to Maine. It had a signature scribbled on the upper left-hand corner, the number “23456” and a registration sticker that expired in 2007.
“I’m from Austria and recently came across this old Maine firefighter license plate while cleaning out my place,” the user wrote. “What caught my eye is the signature at the top left. I’ve tried to figure out who it might belong to, but haven’t had any luck. I’m hoping someone here from Maine might recognize it.”
Several responses soon came in, identifying Keller as the likely source of the John Hancock.
When a reporter reached out to Keller to ask if it was his, he agreed that it was — and was also surprised to learn that it had become a subject of fascination for online Maine sleuths.
That license plate and a matching one had been attached to a red Ford Ranger pickup that Keller had called “Danger Ranger,” which had over 200,000 miles on it by the time he sold it.
However, he got rid of its old license plates after Maine began allowing firefighters to have vanity plates, and replaced them with ones that said “Hope I” on them, with the “I” being a Roman numeral for 1.
But how did his license plate cross the ocean sometime in the last 18 years?
When first reached by phone at Rankin’s Hardware & Building Supplies in Camden — where Keller has also worked for many years — he wasn’t immediately sure.
“It’s definitely interesting … that it would surface right now,” Keller said. “But I don’t know how it would have ended up in Austria.”
But some of the details have come back to him, he said a day later.
After Keller replaced his old plates on the Ranger, he apparently donated the old ones to Andy Swift, the owner of Firefly Restorations, a local shop that restores antique fire engines. At the time, Swift suggested that Keller sign them, and one ended up hanging on a wall. After learning the tag was in Austria, Keller met up with Swift to go over that history.
“We both went to his shop, and we’re in concurrence with where it was, or where we put it, or where he put it that day, and it is not there,” Keller said. “It’s apparently in Austria…The rest, I guess, is a mystery.”
But that mystery may be edging closer to the “solved” column.
In July 2014, an Austrian tourist named Florian Fladnitzer was visiting his uncle in the town of Cushing.
Fladnitzer, the author of the recent Reddit post, told the Bangor Daily News that he and his uncle were driving along Barnestown Road in Hope on their way to Belfast for a sailing trip when they spotted a building with several old fire trucks parked outside. The two stopped on a whim and knocked on the door to see if anyone was around.
“Someone answered, and it turned out to be the owner of Firefly Restorations,” Fladnitzer said. “He was incredibly friendly and gave us an amazing personal tour of his shop, showing us the restored fire trucks and telling us stories from his fascinating life.”
At the end of their visit, Fladnitzer recalled, Swift let them pick a few license plates from a box as a gift. Among them were two identical Maine firefighter plates, both signed, which Fladnitzer chose to take home, he said.
Now, exactly 11 years later, Fladnitzer said he found one of the plates again, while cleaning his home in Althofen, Austria, and became curious about the signature.
Now, he hopes to return the license plate to Keller and is working to connect with the recently retired fire chief.
He wants to either mail the license plate back or personally hand-deliver it during a planned visit to Maine next year.
