Birthday Sets Her Smile Ablaze

A firetruck came for Charney Herst-Buchsbaum’s 70th birthday. Not to extinguish her candles, as the old joke goes, but to fulfill her fantasy.

The truck pulled up to her Canoga Park home June 17 and gave rides to Charney, half a dozen grandkids and any neighbor children who wanted to hop on for the fun.

“This is such a trip,” shouted Charney, perched atop the pump truck in white overalls, a red T-shirt and baseball cap. “Haven’t you always wanted to do this?”

Her more subdued adult kids stayed on the driveway shaking their heads, their expressions somewhere between “Now I’ve seen everything” and “What do you expect? This is Mom.”

The grandparents and youngsters then rolled to McDonald’s, waving to honking cars and passersby.

Charney grew up on “the other side of the tracks” in Perth Amboy, N.J., a small, old industrial city--the city that invented smog, she says. “Because the town was so small, we had to entertain ourselves; a fire was a major event, and we all went.” At the sound of the fire bell, she and the neighbor kids would chase the trucks (she remembers when they were horses and wagons), then watch the conflagration.

Today, the sight of a firetruck still sends her heart racing. Her husband, Simon Buchsbaum, 72, understands completely. He grew up in Perth Amboy, too, and though he was from the “right” side of the tracks, he attended the same fires.

“We still talk about the different fires,” he says. “There was the lumberyard fire and the Schindel Department Store fire. . . .”

So when she and Simon attended the Canoga Park Memorial Day parade and saw that the firetrucks there were for rent, Charney said: “I gotta have it.”

Retired fireman Joe Ortiz, who claims the largest collection of retired firetrucks west of the Mississippi, brings a firetruck to an event for $300. “Mostly, I do this for kids,” Ortiz says. “I’ve never done this for someone this age.”

“I like to fulfill Charney’s fantasies,” her husband says with a shy smile.

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Simon and Charney met as children. A few years later, in 1945, they attended the same party and got on like, well, a house afire. But their families frowned on the romance, and the two split to live separate lives. Forty years later--he widowed, she divorced--they reunited. Charney wrote about it and won an essay contest for the best true love story, the prize a wedding in the Santa Anita Mall in Arcadia and a honeymoon, all expenses paid. Charney used the mall escalator as her aisle.

“Whenever I hear one of her schemes, I just smile to myself and say, ‘Only Charney,’ ” says Simon, a retired investment broker.

A woman of many interests, Charney is a psychotherapist with a doctorate in clinical psychology; has written a book, “Mothers of Difficult Daughters”; was pronounced woman of the year by her synagogue for her volunteer work; and is a prolific painter.

She counts as her biggest success her five children--three daughters and two sons--and eight grandchildren, all of whom came for the birthday event.

“At my age, you don’t want stuff,” she says. “You want experiences.”

So, what’s next? “I’ve never been hot-air ballooning,” she says, looking at Simon.

“I do anything she wants me to,” he says. “We missed a lot of years together.”

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