FARMINGTON – Harry Wyckoff has spent more than a quarter century as an active volunteer on the Chesterville Fire Department.

“He’s watched others face trials and tribulations and how they handled those,” his wife, Maggie, said Friday, “and has realized that it’s not what happens to you but how you approach what is happening.”

“A positive attitude is a gift,” she said, speaking of her 65-year-old husband, who is undergoing cancer treatment and faces surgery in January.

The Chesterville Fire Department will support the fellow firefighter with a benefit spaghetti supper from 5 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 8, at the Chesterville Town Office on Dutch Gap Road, said Ed Hastings, a friend and member of the department.

With a magic that draws kids in, Wyckoff said of her husband, he enjoys children and has visited schools teaching youngsters through the Learn Not to Burn program.

The couple wrote and received a grant for funds to purchase a 14-foot fire prevention trailer that is used as part of the presentation, Hastings said.

The trailer, painted to look like a child’s bedroom, uses stage smoke to simulate a fire. Wyckoff starts in the classroom, she said, teaching the children to get down and to touch the doors with the back of their hands to check for heat.

Then he takes them out to the trailer where he asks if they have a light on while they sleep. He then adjusts the lighting and starts the smoke, she said. The children can hear the smoke coming before the two smoke alarms. They then drop and crawl out to where there is a fake phone to dial 911. The phone is connected to an acting-dispatcher who asks the same questions they could expect from a real dispatcher: town, name, address and problem.

“It gives the children that edgy feeling of a first-hand experience,” she said.

The trailer was used during fire prevention week in October, said Chief David Archer as he named several local schools that were visited this year.

“The trailer’s available to other departments to use also,” he said. “It’s a great educational tool, and if it saves one child, then it’s done its job.”

Wyckoff has written several grants over the years, Hastings said, the most recent one received, a FEMA grant in 2004, brought several thousand dollars to the department to help purchase fire equipment such as air packs.

It’s equipment that brought the department up to OSHA standards, Wyckoff added.

A retired self-employed carpenter, Wyckoff is often around to respond to fire calls, Hastings said. He is important to the fire department, especially so when the town’s two fire departments merged in the late 1980s.

A little rivalry between the North Chesterville and Chesterville departments was buried when they built the new firehouse together, Wyckoff said.

“They’re a wonderful group of people,” she said, “and the department has brought in many young people as junior firefighters. Watching them learn and grow has been very edifying for him. He’s a real mentor.”

Wyckoff has also served as the department’s treasurer for years, said Archer, who called him a good friend and his experience a valuable aid.

The Wyckoffs have two sons, one in Baltimore and one in Cape Cod, she said. She is employed at the University of Maine at Farmington.

Donations will be accepted at the supper, Hastings said, to help with expenses expected when the Wyckoffs travel to Boston in January for the surgery.

Wyckoff was undergoing treatment Friday and was unavailable for comment.