| 90 Die In School Fire | | CHICAGO, Dec 1 - (UPI)- Fire and murderous black smoke mushroomed through an old Roman Catholic parochial school Monday, trapping and killing children at their desks or as they fled through corridors. | | Ninety persons, 87 of them children, were killed. | | As the night wore on, it was feared the final death toll in the holocaust which swept through the Our Lady of the Angels School might reach 100. | | Dr. James Seagraves, staff physician of St. Anne's Hospital where 35 of the 96 injured children were taken, said four to six of the youngsters were not expected to last the night. | | Many of the children's bodies had been broken when they jumped from second story windows, he said. The flesh of others had been seared to the bone. | | The Cook County Morgue, a scene of tragedy and pandemonium where hysterical parents thronged to seek out their young, said it had received the bodies of three nuns, 53 little girls and 34 boys. | | Federal, city and county investigations were ordered into the blaze which caught 1300 of the school's 1700 students in a building with only one fire escape just a half hour before classes would have been dismissed for the day. | | Coroner Walter McCarron said a “blue ribbon jury” would be impaneled Tuesday to investigate the causes of one of the worst disasters in Chicago history. | | Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn ordered an investigation to determine whether the fire was set by an arsonist. The FBI said in Washington it was working in “close liaison” with the investigation. Meanwhile, a search was ordered for a man reported by a grocery owner to have been loitering about the school. | | Police and firemen also investigated reports that a 30-gallon steel drum was found at the base of the stairwell where the fire broke out. Authorities said Monday night they could not confirm the report. | | The school building, once used as a church, had portions which were more than 40 years old. Although it had a large English-style basement, it was classed as a 2-story building and fire officials said it lawfully required only the one fire escape. Quinn said the building had been inspected by fire inspectors only a week ago and its fire precautions had been approved. | | At the height of the fire, children died at their desks, children jumped screaming from the windows, a nun rolled children down the stairs and a father begged in vain for his little boy to jump into his arms. | | In the aftermath, searchlights played across the fire-blackened school. Hysterical parents crowded the street corners, begged doctors in hospital emergency rooms for news of their children, and then went in ashen-faced fear to the morgue basement and to a police station where headquarters were set up for identification of the dead. | |
| The death count jumped rapidly. Firemen found 24 children at their desks in one room, their school books open before them. It was presumed that their teacher, knowing escape was impossible through the smoke-filled corridor, had told the children to await rescue. | | They obeyed and died, apparently when smoke overcame them or when the fire's heat exhausted the oxygen in the room. | | A father, Max Stachura, stood outside the burning building, begging his little boy, Mark, 9, to jump into his arms. | | Children were falling all about the father and he caught or stopped the fall of 12 of them. But little Mark was too frightened or he didn't understand his father. Mark didn't jump and he was among the missing and feared dead Monday night. | | Another father, Daniel Grimaldi, was luckier, he dashed into the building searching for his children. Students grabbed at his hand and he led them downstairs. Still searching for his children, Grimaldi opened a classroom door, but had to slam it in the face of a blast of furnace-like heat. Later his two youngsters were found safe. | |
| For the others, the waiting and the anguish continued into the night. | | The basement of the morgue had the atmosphere of delirium as doctors, policemen and attendants shouted to each other. Fathers were brought downstairs in groups of seven to look at the small covered bundles. | | One, John Jakowski(sic) Sr., screamed “Oh, my God., my boy, my God, my boy.” He had just lifted a sheet and seen the face of his son, John Jr., 10. The father's legs buckled under and he fell. | | Through the basement ran a monotonous chant as attendants lifted the sheets. “This is a boy,” they would say, or “this is a girl.” Catholic priests moved among the bodies giving the last rites of their church. | | The first sign of the fire had been black smoke seeping beneath the school doors. Then the ringing of the school's fire alarm and calm orders from the nuns to proceed out of the building in accordance with fire-drill techniques. | | But when the school doors opened on the second floor of the building's northeast and southwest corners, black, suffocating smoke rolled in. | |
| The luckier children piled into the corridor helter-skelter. There were screams as youngsters went down in the crush. The bolder children ordered their companions to grab old of each other's skirts. A nun made it by crawling through the smoke with students hanging onto her skirt. | | For others, there was no escape. | | Scores of more children turned to the windows for salvation. | | They stood on the second-floor window sills and one of them, 12-year-old Tommy Raymond, recalled later, “All I could think of was how I would look dead.” | | The children began jumping. Neighbors and firemen tried to catch them as they fell, but many lay on the pavement with broken legs. Some of the plummeting children had hair and clothing afire. At least one of those who tried to catch the children, 74-year-old Ed Klock, was a heart patient. He suffered a stoke and was taken to a hospital. Other children, more agile or more lucky, slid down drain pipes or hopped to lower roofs and then to the ground. At the school doors, children poured out-hatless, coatless, panic written on their faces. | | Hours after the holocaust, authorities were seeking to determine whether there were adequate precautions at the school. An investigation showed there was only one fire escape - a wrought iron ladder at the rear of the building. | | All available fire equipment and medical aid was rushed to the West Side, middle-class area. The fire continued for three hours before it was officially struck. | |
| The scene of the disaster was a U-shaped building consisting of wings and additions dating back more than 40 years. Once a church, the building was remodeled into a school when a new church was erected. School authorities said that every summer the school was remodeled and reconditioned. Quinn said the fire broke out in the lower part of the school's rear stairwell in the northwest(sic) corner of the building. The flames and smoke swept up the stairwell and mushroomed out. | | At the end, the school's second floor was completely blackened. Except for a wall in the middle, observers could look through it from one end to the others. Ladders straddled the building on three sides and hoses and safety nets littered the ground, along with discarded children's school books and clothing. | | The extent of the tragedy was revealed when firemen entered the building and began bringing out the bodies in cloth sacks and blanket-covered stretchers. There were constant calls from shattered upper windows for “more stretchers - more blankets.” | | More than 5,000 persons ringed the building so thickly that the steady stream of ambulances had trouble getting through. Many of the watchers were hysterical mothers and fathers. Hardened policemen and ambulance workers wept openly. | | Two of the watchers were the new archbishop of Chicago, the Rev. Albert George Meyer, and Mayor Richard J. Daley. The archbishop helped shifts of priests administer extreme unction to the dead. The mayor entered the school while it was still on fire. Then the spiritual and civic leaders of Chicago met and talked together, gray-faced, in the street. | | A nun teaching seventh grade, who would not give her name, said smoke forced her back when she tried to lead her children from the room. | | “The children began to cry” she said. “I told them to get down on their knees and to crawl through the door one after another. I crawled out first and the first ones held on to my skirt. | | “But they were afraid to get down on their knees and to crawl down the stairs. I carried down six and went back for more. A couple wouldn't go down and I rolled them down the stairs. I rolled them down even when they screamed. | | “Finally I told all of the children who were left to go back in the room and stand by the window. We closed the door and prayed.” | | Another nun said “I could see children standing there and crying and banging on the windows. I couldn't do a thing to help them.” The nun wept. Max Stachura, who lives across an alley from the school, had two children inside. He dashed in and led 12 children to safety. But one of his own children was among the missing. | | At the hospitals and morgue, parents fought for news of their children. Case-hardened police wept as they brought in new bodies. | |
| A mother dashed up to United Press International Reporter Pat Craig at St. Anne's Hospital and sobbed, “Tell me this - he's not dead.” | | “Who?” Craig asked. | | “My little boy,” the mother screamed. Then she grabbed a nurse and repeated the entreaty. | | A husband walked out of the Emergency Hospital morgue and his wife screamed and fainted when she saw his face. He had just identified their daughter, 8-year-old Margaret Chambers. | | The new archbishop of Chicago, the Rev. Albert G. Meyer, came to the morgue to administer the last rites to the child victims. Chicago's Mayor, Richard J. Daley, entered the school while it was still blazing and remained to stare stony-faced at the scene. | | Although the fire was reported out three hours after it began, the parade of dead continued. |
| 74 Hurt, Blast Traps Scores | | CHICAGO, Dec 1 - The death toll of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels parochial grammar school was fixed at 75 by Msgr. William McManus, superintendent of Catholic schools. He rushed to the scene from his office in the Loop. | | Twenty-five children and one nun were reported killed in a flash fire that swept Our Lady of the Angels grammar school at 3808 Iowa st. | | At least 74 children were burned or injured. The fire followed a mysterious explosion. | | Firemen said the blast shook the school and other buildings in the block. | | The blast and fire occurred at 2:42 p.m., a short time before school closing time. | | The school has two stories and a basement - all used for classes. | | The principal, Sister Mary St. Florence, was unaccounted for. | | First of the dead to be identified were Sister Mary Clare Therese, teacher of the fifth grade in Room 212, and Margaret Kucan, 8, a pupil. The child is believed to live in the 3800 block of Chicago avenue. | | The fire broke out on the second floor of the school. | | Ambulances sped the burned and injured to hospitals all around the area. | | Four children reportedly died after being taken to St. Anne's Hospital. In all, 40 children were admitted there. | | The flash fire trapped many of the children. | |
| Some were said to have jumped from the second-floor windows. | | Other children were led out safely. | | Fire Commissioner Quinn said firemen spotted the unconscious forms of children on the second floor. | | It was not known immediately whether these children were dead or overcome. | | Fifteen children were taken to Franklin Boulevard Hospital. There were 10 at Walther Memorial Hospital. Garfield Park Hospital took in nine children. | |
| Bodies of 15 victims were taken to the County Morgue. | | Frantic parents converged on the school and the hospitals as soon as they learned of the disaster. | | Firemen and spectators had to quiet many of them. | | Father Gorman, Fire Department chaplain, said 25 to 30 pupils were carried out of the burning building on stretchers. | | A 5-11 alarm brought fire apparatus to the scene from all sections of the city. | | The neighborhood of the Catholic Parochial school is heavily populated. | | The fire sent up clouds of black smoke which blanketed the neighborhood. Smoke could be seen a mile away. | | Gary Wassinger, 7, a pupil, said he saw smoke seeping under his classroom door on the second floor at 2:30 p.m. | | This was shortly before classes were to be dismissed. | |
| Gary said: | | “About 10 second later, the fire gong rang. We all heard the bell and we know this was for real. | | “Our nun opened the door and everybody ran out. A couple of boys fell while we were running out and I think they broke their legs. | | “My buddy, Michael Giacomino - he's 13 - was in the class room with me. He said he heard a lot of kids screaming and crying and yelling for their brothers and sisters.” | |
| Father Gorman said the children carried out on stretchers appeared to be dead “or near dead.” | | Learning of the magnitude of the disaster, Mayor Daley sped to the school. | | He joined Commissioner Quinn at the scene. | | Some residents of the neighborhood, as well as children who got out unharmed, said they saw boys and girls leaping from the windows of the second floor. | |
| A witness said: | | “In most cases their clothing was burning. | | “It was a horrible thing. They screamed as they jumped.” |
| Tough Chicago Police Weep At The Tragic, Tiny Bundles | | CHICAGO, Dec. 1 - (AP) - Tough Chicago policemen, big ambulance drivers hardened to their craft, wept Monday night as they came to the Cook County morgue. | | Fire had swept Our Lady of the Angels Parochial School on Chicago's West Side. | | The morgue was where they took the tragic, tiny bundles which were the human debris of that fire. | | Telephones rang incessantly as parents sought word of children who had not returned home from school. | | Bereaved relatives jammed the morgue, hopeful of not being able to identify a body but fearing the worst. | | Ambulances backed up to the rear platform of the morgue to unload blanket-covered stretchers, from which an arm or a leg of a dead child occasionally protruded. | | Ambulances were backed up 10 deep, as drivers waited to unload their victims and return to the scene of the blaze or to a hospital to pick up more tiny victims. |
| Tom Feared Sight Of Death's Mask | | (Editor's note: Tommy Raymond, 12, a seventh grader, who was trapped for 20 minutes in his second floor classroom at Our Lady of the Angels School. Here is Tommy's story.) | | CHICAGO, Dec. 1 - I stood there on the window sill and all I could think of was how I would look dead. | | Most of my other classmates had already got out and I was the last one, and when I walked into the hall the smoke was so thick I ran back into the room. Then I went to the window and took some books and threw them out through the glass to break the window. It's funny, but I remember which books I threw out. I threw out my reader and some test books. | | After the window broke I stood up on the sill and began to think about jumping out from the second floor. That's when I saw the firemen down below. They shouted at me not to jump, that they'd come up and get me, so I got back off the sill. | | Now that I think back how it started, I remember it was a singing lesson we were having. We didn't know anything about the fire until all of a sudden we heard a lot of screams. We couldn't make out what the screams were for a moment. Then we knew it was the eighth graders yelling, 'Fire, fire, fire.' | | We started going out just like we did in fire drills. You know we had two or three fire drills already this winter because this was an old school and somebody always figured it was going to burn down someday. | | By the time I got out into the hall I couldn't breathe, the smoke was so thick, so I ran into the back room. For a while I was all by myself and then some girls came running into the room. | | They were from another room. I yelled at them to lie down on the floor, because that's what I remember from fire drills to do when there's a lot of smoke. | | The girls said kids from other rooms were hanging on one another's belts to form a line to get to the stairs because it was dark as night on the second floor. | | Then I saw a man coming through the door and we could see flames on the other side of the building. The man grabbed a few girls and led them back out with him. | | I stayed by the window, though, and I was scared. All I could think of was how I would look dead. Then the fireman came up and led me down the ladder. |
| Margaret Was a Little Girl Who Didn't Like to Be Sick | | CHICAGO, Dec. 1 - (UPI) - Margaret Chambers was a little girl who didn't like to be sick. | | The child, 9, stayed home from class at Our Lady of the Angels School Monday morning with a cold. But her mother, Mrs. Rose Chambers, said she complained constantly. | | “I don't want to stay home,” the grief-stricken mother quoted her daughter. “I don't like being sick.” | | Mrs. Chambers said she finally relented and permitted Margaret to attend class Monday afternoon. | | Margaret was one of the children who died in the fire and explosion which swept the school. |
| Joe Wasn't Hurt, He Saw Only Horror | | CHICAGO, Dec. 1 - (AP) - “I can't stop shaking.” | | Joseph Brocato, 11, said this to a doctor who stopped Monday afternoon to look at him in busy St. Anne's Hospital where victims of the Our Lady of the Angels Parochial School fire were brought. | | The words gushed out. | | “We heard it. We were emptying the wastebasket in the basement. | | “It was a boom in the furnace room. And the janitor ran out. | | “He shouted to get upstairs.” | |
| Joseph and his companion - he didn't name the other boy - ran upstairs. They were herded out of the school. Later his father brought him into the hospital because the shaking wouldn't stop. | | Joseph wasn't burned. He didn't have to jump. He only saw the horror. | | It was a heart-breaking thing as firemen carried victims down into the milling throng of youngsters and older people. Clothes were burned off of some of the charred bodies of boys and girls. | | It began with deceptive excitement. There was the noise, and some smoke. | | A priest, Father Joseph Ognoibene(sic), said he drove up to the school shortly after the fire began. | | “I thought it was a fire drill. Then I saw the smoke and knew it was the real thing,” he said. | | The trapped children were mostly seventh and eighth graders whose classrooms were on the second floor. | | While ambulances and fire trucks jammed the street, and mothers sought frantically for their children, Mrs. Mary Jalowietki stood weeping outside her house across the street from the school. | |
| “I saw the kids come out of the school,” she told a reporter. “My son, Ronald, was one of the first out.” The boy was unhurt. | | Again she sobbed. | | “The kids on the second floor were leaping out the windows. At least 10 jumped. This was after I went into the school. It was full of black smoke. The smoke hit me and I came right back. | | “And there they were - five or six sitting or laying on the ground. They were full of blood. It was awful.” | | Thomas Raymond, 12, who was trapped briefly in an eighth grade classroom on the second floor, said he and several classmates were rescued by firemen who lifted a ladder to the window. | | “We thought at first that the yells came from some kids playing in the corridor,” he said. “Then, we heard someone shout: 'Fire! Fire!” | | He said the fire bell rang, and his teacher said, “Get up and get out fast.” | | Raymond said he was the last of the class to reach the corridor. | | “There was lots of smoke,” he said. “I couldn't breathe or nothing. I was going to jump, but just then some girls came in. I told them to get down on the floor because of the smoke.” | | “I kept thinking how I'd look dead,” Raymond said. He was not hurt. |
| Sobbing Nun Tells of Horror In School Fire | | (Editor's Note: Nuns who were teaching classes Monday at Our Lady of the Angels School when it was hit by a tragic fire described the scene for a United Press International reporter. The nuns withheld their names.) | | CHICAGO, Dec. 1 - A sobbing seventh-grade teacher said she was conducting a geography class when the fire broke out. | | “I heard the fire bell,” she said. “All of the children stood up and I opened the door. The hallway was filled with smoke and it nearly filled the room immediately. | | “I tried to go into the hall but the smoke forced me back. I didn't see any flames. I just couldn't breathe. | | “The children began to cry. I told them to get down on their knees and to crawl out through the door one after another. I crawled out first and the first ones held on to my skirt. But they were afraid to go down the stairs. I carried down six and went back up for more. A couple wouldn't go down and I rolled them down the stairs. I rolled them down even though they screamed. | | “Finally I told all of the children who were left to get back into the room and stand by the window. We closed the door and prayed.” | | At St. Anne's Hospital, where the injured were taken, one of them stood in a hallway. She seemed oblivious to everyone around her. She fingered her beads and prayed. | | Another sister, a third grade teacher, said she “was lucky” to have only 20 students in her class when the fire bell rang. | | “They told me there was an explosion, but I didn't hear it,” she said. “I lined my children up and took them out right away and they were very good. | | “But when I got out I was afraid to look at the building. Smoke was pouring and billowing out of the windows all along the second floor. | | “I could see children standing there crying and banging on the windows. I couldn't do a thing to help them.” | | She wept. |
| Parish Families Seek Children | | CHICAGO, Dec. 1 - (UPI) - Tragedy hit the parish of Our Lady of Angels Roman Catholic Church Monday when fire swept the church's school. | | Many of the families of the predominantly Italian and middle class neighborhood were involved in the tragedy, with either the loss or injury of children. | | Mothers and fathers rushed to the scene, wandering through streets seeking their children. Many youngsters fled the blazing 3-story school coatless and hatless and were taken in by residents living near the school. | | Parents were advised by police and fire department loudspeakers in the church parish house to claim their children. Neighbors also were urged to bring children they took in to the parish house for reunions with the parents. | | The neighborhood is inhabited by Italian, Polish and German families - and is a section of Chicago's vast West Side. | | The brick, wood-trimmed 3-story school originally was the parish church, but was converted when a new place of worship was constructed. | | The school was filled to capacity of 1,700. |
| Man, 74, Stricken Helping Children | | Chicago, Dec. 1 - (UPI) - Mrs. Ella Klock wept Monday night as she told how her husband, Ed, 74, ill with a heart condition, suffered a stroke while trying to save children from the burning Our Lady of the Angels School. | | “We saw the fire from our back porch. Ed ran over there,” she said. “The children were jumping from second floor windows all over. Ed tried to catch a few, and helped those who already had fallen. One girl, I remember, had her hair on fire and Ed grabbed part of his coat to try to smother it out. | | “I remember it was hard for him to stand up.” | | After a while, the Klocks ran back to their house and Mrs. Klock dialed the operator and told her to send “all the ambulances in the city.” | | “I guess Ed left then, without me and went back to the school to help some more,” Mrs. Klock said. Then she wept. | | On his second trip back to the school, Klock suffered a stroke and was taken to the hospital. |
| 90 PERISH IN CHICAGO SCHOOL FIRE; 3 NUNS ARE VICTIMS; SCORES HURT; PUPILS LEAP OUT WINDOWS IN PANIC | | 1,500 ARE RESCUED | |
| Richard J. H. Johnston | | Special to the New York Times | | Chicago, Dec 1 - A fast-spreading fire today killed at least eighty-seven Chicago school children and three nuns. | | The disaster occurred at Our Lady of the Angels Roman Catholic Parochial School at 3808 West Iowa Street, eighteen minutes before the bell that would have closed the school day. About 1,515 grade-school and 120 kindergarten children were attending classes. | | At least 100 other children were taken to seven hospitals where the condition of many was listed as critical. It was feared the death toil would continue to mount. | | Many children had leaped from windows in panic. | | Priests of the parish dashed from the church and joined teachers in rescue efforts. | |
| It was believed that nuns, lay teachers, priests, janitors and passers-by had rescued more than 1,000 of the children. | | The children occupied two buildings, which made up the school facilities of Our Lady of the Angels parish. | | The fire occurred at 2:42 P.M. in the older two-story brick building. | | Firemen who fought their way into a classroom found twenty-four children sitting dead at their desks. Books and homework assignments for tomorrow were stacked neatly before the children. | | Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn said that the boiler room of the building appeared to be intact. An earlier report said that an explosion had occurred there. | |
| Heavy black smudges were found on the stairwell leading from the room, Mr. Quinn said. He reported that the fire might have started from and oil type of blaze in the stairwell. He said he was mystified as to how the fire had spread so rapidly. | | City officials, at the direction of Mayer Richard J. Daley, immediately opened what was promised to be “one of the greatest fire investigations in the city's history.” | | Mr. Quinn said the tragedy might have been caused by a “touch-off.” Touch-off is the firemen's word for arson. | | Chicago schools have been targets of anonymous phone callers who reported that bombs had been planted in buildings. Schools have been evacuated for hours and classes have been canceled while firemen searched the premises. | | Drew Brown, head of the Police Arson Squad, said that the fire appeared to have started in a corridor below the first floor in a corner of the building. | | He said that the rubbish might have been left there and could have been the source of the flames. At 8:30 P.M. he said that no evidence of arson had been found. | | The city's Building Commissioner, George L. Ramsey, said after a preliminary inspection of the building that he had found six exits from the second floor of the building. He said that they and the width of the corridors were adequate for escape. | | Mrs. Barbara Glowacki, owner of a grocery story less than a block north of the school, added to the mystery of the fire's origin. She told investigators that twenty minutes before she heard the fire engines a strange man entered her store and asked if she had a public telephone. | |
| She said she did not. She quoted him as saying, calmly, “I was going to report that the school's on fire.” | | He then walked out, Mrs. Glowacki said. The police are searching for the man. | | The police said they found a thirty-gallon metal can, sealed at both ends, at the foot of the basement stairway where the fire was believed to have started. It was taken to the Police Crime Laboratory for examination. | | Pupils of the school, including two boys detailed to empty waste baskets in the larger building's boiler room, told of hearing strange sounds from the building's radiators just before the flames raced through the building. | | A janitor of the school ran through the halls seconds later, shouting, “Call the Fire Department.” | |
| Flames spread so rapidly that scores of children had been killed, many at their desks, or had leaped from windows before firemen arrived. Others were trampled or crushed by their companions in a panic dash for safety. | | Panic raged though the school and in the streets adjacent. Scores of parents rushed to the scene, where they saw billowing smoke and towering sheets of flames swirling from the building in which their children were trapped or too frightened to escape. | | So rapid was the spread of the flames that carefully rehearsed fire-drill procedures were forgotten by many of the children. | | Within minutes, hundreds of parents pressed frantically against the police and fire lines in an attempt to enter the school to find their children. | |
| Hysterical mothers raced futilely up and down the safety lines pleading to be permitted to enter the building. | | The neighborhood of the school is a quiet residential section made up chiefly of single family frame houses and two-family buildings. Most of the residents are second and third-generation Chicagoans of Italian, Irish and German extraction. The neighborhood is heavily populated by Roman Catholics. | | It was a typical, calm, early winter day with the sun shining and the temperatures in the upper twenties. | | Some of the others of the younger pupils had already donned coats to go to the school yard to meet their children. | | Persons living in the vicinity of the school became aware of the mishap when the sounds of school letting out were strangely different. Instead of happy shouts and laughter they heard young voices screaming in terror. | |
| Within minutes smoke swirled through the classrooms and flames licked through the stairways. | | Without heeding their teachers children began to open and leap through windows on the first, second and third floors. Those on the lower floors managed to flee. | | The children dropping from the upper floors lay still where the fell or crawled in pain away from the burning building. | | Others huddled in panic in their rooms or jammed the corridors, unheeding the efforts of their teachers to organize them for an orderly evacuation. | | Later when firemen were able to enter the building they found children's bodies, some burned so badly that identification was difficult or impossible. | | They lay in groups or sprawling singly down the corridors and on the stairways. | | Among the earliest to arrive at the scene was Chicago's recently appointed Archbishop Albert Meyer. The Archbishop of the largest Roman Catholic diocese in the nation stood with tears coursing his cheeks. Mayor Daley stood beside him. | | Firemen arrived at the scene in time to help hundreds of children down the ladders. Others had found their way to the school fire escapes and had assisted classmates to safety. | | In some instances firemen fought their way against fumes and smoke into classrooms and found groups of children still alive. | | The firemen gave their first attention to the living. Then came the task of gathering the bodies of others. | | As the firemen carried the bodies out of the badly damaged building parents rushed in groups, now in the direction and now in that, seeking to learn if the firemen's burdens were their own children. | | Twenty nuns of the Order of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and nine lay women teachers made up the faculty. | | The dead nuns were identified as Sister Mary Seraphica, Sister Mary Canice and Sister Mary Claire Teresa. | | The principal of the school is Sister Mary St. Florence. The pastor of Our Lady of the Angels is the Right Rev. Joseph F. Cassen (sic). | | The structure was built in 1910. Originally it had classrooms on its second floor and a church on the first floor. | | In 1939, a new church was built for the Our Lady of the Angels parish, of which the school is part. The structure was then given over entirely to classrooms. It was remodeled in 1951. it retained its high ceilings and extensive wood trim. | | Adjacent to the ill-fated building was another school building. It escaped the fire. It had been constructed within the last five years on the site occupied by the parish church and the older school building at 3808 West Iowa Street on Chicago's West Side. The buildings were constructed of brick. | | The victims of the fire were children between 8 and 14 years of age. | | The building that burned had only one outside fire escape. It was at the rear and consisted of a conventional iron stairway with a railing. | | A pupil reported that the children and their teachers had been unable to open the door to the stairway from the inside. A priest reportedly climbed the stairway to open the door from the outside. | | Fire Department officials said that the exits from the second floor consisted of six stairways in addition to the fire escape and that these were regarded as adequate by safety inspectors. | | The ceilings were of wood and plaster. No violations were found, officials said, in an inspection of the building last October. |
| F.B.I. Ready to Assist Chicago Fire Inquire | | WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (UPI) - The Federal Bureau of Investigation said tonight that it was maintaining “very close liaison” with the Chicago Police Department on the parochial school fire disaster. | | An F.B.I. spokesman said its full facilities were being made available to the authorities in Chicago “for any possible assistance we can give.” | | The bureau is not expected to have any direct jurisdiction. It might become involved, however, if arson were involved and a suspected arsonist crossed state lines. |
| Panic Grips Classrooms; Confusion Increases Toll | | CHICAGO, Dec. 1 (UPI) - Panic aided the flames at Our Lady of the Angels School today. While some children recalled the disciplines of fire drills to make their way to safety, others perished in their confusion. | | Some pupils jumped from windows; others were pushed. Still others were trampled as they groped for exits. The smaller ones huddled in confusion in corridors. Efforts to get some to move were of little avail. | | In a few classrooms teachers were able to maintain control. | | Mrs. Eda Shanahan, one of the nine lay teachers, talked soothingly to her pupils, urging them to wait for firemen and ladders at the open windows of her second floor room. | |
| Meanwhile the Rev. Charles Hunt, (sic) assistant pastor of Our Lady of the Angels Church, and James Raymond, a janitor of the school, managed to get a fire ladder in place on the building outside Mrs. Shanahan's room. Her charges reached the ground safely. | | Another teacher told how she had persuaded pupils to form a human chain by clutching each other's clothing and leading them to safety. | | A nun who made three trips into the burning building to rescue children said: | | “I felt untold strength.” | | One teacher, who was not identified, told of leading her charges to the head of a stairway and rolling them down to safety when fright immobilized them. | | Sam Tortorice, the father of a pupil, rushed from his nearby home. Plunging through the smoke, he ran to his daughter's second-floor classroom. One by one he managed to swing six children in the arms of another man leaning from a window on an adjacent wall of an inside ell of the building. Before being driven from the window himself, he managed to pass the sixth child, his daughter. | | “I just knew where my daughter should be,” he said. | | What happened? | | Joseph Brocato, an 11-year-old pupil who was taken to a hospital, told his father. | | “I was carrying a wastebasket to the boiler room. I saw the janitor running from the boiler room. He shouted, 'Call the Fire Department.' I heard an explosion and there where flames. My classmate and I ran upstairs and we were told by one of the nuns to go to the church. A lot of children were in the church. We were then told to go home.” | | Mr. Raymond, the school's chief janitor, said that he had been across the street from the school when he saw smoke billowing from the building. He rushed to the school. His attempts to swing a fire escape from the second floor to the ground failed. He broke a window on the ground floor and was cut by flying glass. Then the fire escape suddenly plunged down and struck him on the head. He was treated at a hospital. | |
| Few children were able to provide coherent accounts of what had happened. Mary Brock, 10, said someone told her, “I smell smoke.” | | “When the door was opened a gust of smoke blew in,” she said. “Sister Mary Clara (sic) Therese said, 'Get out of the window, get on the ledge and stay there.' I got out the window and stood on the ledge. Lots of others jumped.” | | Mary was rescued by firemen. Her companions who left the ledge were found on the pavement below by the first firemen who arrived. | | Among those who survived the plunge to the paved yard from a first (sic) floor window was Linda Barleto, 12. | | “Our backs were burning, then someone pushed me,” Linda said. | | Linda was taken to a hospital suffering from burns and bruises, but her condition was reported as good. | | Her cousin, Andrea Gagliareo (sic), also 12, told of opening a classroom window and screaming for help. | | “Some of the boys jumped out of the window,” she said. “When we looked down we saw them lying still on the ground. We stayed and the firemen saved us.” | | Across the street from the school Leroy Hewlett, 31, heard the screams. | | “Kids were hanging from windows, jumping or falling in groups of three and four at at time,” he said. “Smoke and flames poured from the windows.” | | As fire engines and police cars converged on the scene parents rushed to the school. In the chill wind they strained against police lines and sought to enter the building. | | Mrs. Pauline Baroni clutched a small red, quilted jacket brought from home to warm her daughter, Karen, 10. | | “But I can't find. I can't find her,” Mrs. Baroni cried to her friend, Mrs. Mary Sansone. Mrs. Sansone could offer little comfort. She had not been able to find her son, James, 12. |
| Everybody was Jumping | | CHICAGO, Dec. 1 (AP) - Carlos Lozano, 10, whose leg was injured in a leap from a second floor window, said: | | “Everybody was jumping. The smoke was terrible. Everybody was screaming. Everybody was trying to get on the firemen's ladders at the same time.” | | Patricia Perryman, 14, slid head foremost down a fire ladder, scraping her left arm. From her bed in Walther Memorial Hospital, she told of panic in the room where fifth-five girls had been taking a reading test. | | “Most of them were fearful, and some of them started jumping up and running around.” | | Patricia said a nun, Sister Conice, (sic) calmed the children before a fire ladder was lifted to the window. | | “There were some coming out after me,” she said. “I don't know if all of them got out.” | | “The first I knew about the fire,” said Mrs. Barbara Glowacki, 29, “was when a stranger rushed into my store and asked to use the phone to call the fire department.” | | Mrs. Glowacki operates a small grocery store adjacent to the school. She is the mother of one of the first graders. She said she had seen flames at the rear of the school. The windows vented clouds of thick black smoke. | | She said she had seized youngsters as they marched out of the school. | | “I lined them up near my home. All the time I was thinking about Helena. But she got out okay. | | “Some of the kids coming out of the school had their hair on fire. I poured water on a number of these.” | | Concella Bellino, 8, whose burned hands were treated at Walther Memorial Hospital, fretted about her single red slipper. “I lost the other one on the ladder.” |
| List of Identified Dead In Chicago School Fire | | CHICAGO, Dec. 1 - (AP) - Here is the list of dead identified in the Cook (Chicago) County morgue who perished in a fire Monday at the Our Lady of the Angels grade school. Ninety died and nearly 100 children were injured. Nine pupils still have not been identified. | | Joseph Massidla, 11; Karen Culp, 10; Wayne Wise, 10; Marilyn P. Rech, 10; David Biscan, 11; Linda Malinski, 10; Patricia Kuzma, 10; Annette Mantia, 10; Karen Baroni, 9; Donald Mele, 10; Frank Piscopo, 12; Joseph Canella, 10; Barbara Hosking, 10; John Janjkoski (sic), 10; Joanne Ciolino, 10; John A Manganello, 10; Frank Piscopo, 12; Joseph Modiga, no age available. | | Elaine Pesoli, 10; Janet Gasteier; James Profita, 9; Linda Stabile, 9; Ronald Fox, 14; John D Trota, 13; Joann Chrzos, 9; William Sarno, 13; Jo Anne Sarno, 9; Rosalie Ciminello, 12; Rosanna Ciochin, 9; Charles Neubert, 9; Kathleen Magerty, 13; Jo Ann Chiappetta, 10; Roger Ramlow, 10; Eileen Pawlie, 13; Raymond Makomski, 12; Diane Karwaki, 9; Richard Bobrowicz, 13; Richard Kampanowski, 10; Peter Cangelosi, 10; Kenneth Kompanowski, 14; Kathleen Mary Carr, 9; Yvonne Pacini, 9; Angeline Kalnowski, no age available. | | James Sickels, 10; Mary Virgilio, 15, Nancy Rae Finnigan, 14; Lawrence Grosso, 12; Michele Altobell, 13; Karen Margaret Hobek, 13; Mark Allan Stochura, 9; Milicent Corsiglia, 13; Maria Dijulio, no age available. | | Nancy Mary Desanto, 9; Edward Nikinske, 12; Mary Finale, 12; James R Moravek, 13; Helen Ann Busiac, 12; Annette Lanantia, 10; Christine Vitacco, 12; Mary Ellen Moretti, 12; Nancy Riche, 12; Patricia Ann Drzymala, 12; Nancy Smid, 10; Peggy Sansonetti, 11; Margaret Kucan, 10; Robert Anglin, 10; Margaret Chambers, 9; Marge Lasala, no age available. | | Richard Hardy, 9; Lawrence Dunn, Jr., 8; Antoinette Secco, 10; Phillip Tampano, 12; Aurelius Chiapette, 11; Mary Louise Tamburrno, 13; Frances Fuzaldo, 12; Nancy Pilas, 12; Carolyn Perry, 10; Antonnette Patrasso, 11; Sister Mary Seraphica Kelley, 43; Sister Mary Claire Theresa Champagne, 27; Sister Mary St. Canice Lynge, 44; Carol Ann Gazzola, 13; James Ragona, 9; Beverly Burda, 13 (tentative). |
| Fire Gong Tolled A Deadly Message | | (Editor's Note: Gary Wassinger, 11, was in his seventh grade classroom on the second floor of Lady of Angels School when a fire broke out Monday: This is his story.) | | CHICAGO, Dec 1 - I was sitting in class and just happened to look up at the clock and I saw it was 2:30. That's when it all began. | | I looked toward the door and I saw some smoke coming through the door. So I turned around to tell the boy behind me and everybody saw it then, too. | | About 10 seconds later - gee, it didn't seem more than 10 seconds - the fire gong rang. We all heard the fire bell and then we knew this was for real. | | Our nun opened the door and everybody ran out. A couple of boys fell while we were running out and I think they broke their legs. | | My buddy, Michael Giacomino - he's 13 - he was in the classroom there with me and he says he heard a lot of kids screaming and crying and yelling for their brothers and sisters. But I didn't notice that too much. | | Well, we started going down the stairs and Mike tells me he saw flames coming out of the first floor washroom. | | While I was going down the smoke got so thick I couldn't see my way down the stairs and this other buddy of mine - Basil de Stefano - I heard him cry real loud, “Let's try to get out. Everybody hold to my shirt.” | | So we grabbed Basil's shirt in line like and start going down and out the building. | | I have no idea how many kids got down and how many didn't. Part of the kids got down one set of stairs and part got down the other. |
| Frantic Dad Tells Fire Rescue Role | | By Hal Brun. | | CHICAGO, December 1, 1958 - Theresa Gorski, 10, of 935 N. Avers av., a survivor of today's tragic fire at Our Lady of the Angels school, 3808 W. Iowa st., said: | | “The first bell rang. We all stood up for a fire drill. | | “The sisters took us outside the building and then took us into the church and told us to pray. | | “We prayed and one of the altar boys said the fire had started in the boiler. | |
| Theresa fingered a rosary as she talked in the grocery store of Mrs. Barbara Glowacki, 919 Avers av., where the girl was sheltered temporarily. | | A frantic father raced through the burning building rescuing other children while searching for his own whom he believed were trapped on the second floor. | | Daniel Grimaldi, 32, of 852 N. Hamlin av., said he was returning from a barber shop when he saw the children filing out for a fire drill. | |
| He related. | | “I saw flames leaping from the second floor. | | “I saw that the school was on fire and I knew my kids were in there. I have two of them. | | “I ran into the building and up to the second floor. | | “It was full of smoke. | | “I could hardly breathe. I was yelling for my kids. | | “I grabbed some other kids and led them down the stairs. | | “Then I ran out in the street and around the other side. | | “They were jumping out the windows. I ran up a ladder to help a kid. A little girl jumped from the second floor. I leaned out and my body broke her fall. She hit me with so much force it knocked off my glasses.” | |
| He continued. | | “I helped some kids out of the window and down the ladder. | | “Then I ran around into the church.” | | When Grimaldi reached the church, he said he was told his two children, Frank 11, and Mary Ann, 8, were safe. |
| 85 Youngsters Still Hospitalized; Blaze 3rd Worst In 100 Years | | CHICAGO, Dec. 2 - (AP) - Grim investigators today shook off the shock of Chicago's worst school fire and strove to find the answer to this question. | | “How did it happen and why?”. | | The fire that flashed through Our Lady of the Angels School Monday shortly before closing time cost 90 lives - 87 children and three nuns. | |
| It was Chicago's most disastrous blaze since the Iroquois Theater holocaust in 1903 and the third worst school fire in the nation in 100 years. | |
| The flames shot up in the two story brick building like fire from a blowtorch. Heat and smoke trapped the victims on the upper floor of the north wing of the U-shaped structure. | | Twenty-four bodies were found in one room. Most of them were jammed near windows. Firemen, sickened by the spectacle, said a few of the children were still at their desks, apparently paralyzed by fear and panic. | |
| The little survivors suffered from burns, bones broken in falls and the shock of the horror they beheld. | | Fire Commissioner Robert J. Quinn considered the possibility of arson. That possibility was raised by the swift spread of the blaze. | | “It was the worst thing I have ever seen or ever will see,” he said. | |
| Quinn also said the black smoke indicated an oil-type fire. | | The fire originated in the northeast corner of the school at 3808 W. Iowa St. on the Northwest Side. Investigators pinpointed the placeof origin below the street level. | | A 30-gallon can was found in a stairwell in that section of the structure. It was taken to the police crime laboratory for careful examination. | | Another possibility was that the fire sprang up in the waste paper in the basement near that corner of the building. | | Daniel O'Shea, 12, a pupil who carried the waste paper to the basement a few minutes before the fire started was questioned by police seeking to determine the cause of the disaster. | |
| The boy said he left his seventh grade room with a basket of paper about 10 minutes before the fire began. He added that he dumped the paper in the container to be burned later by the janitor. | | Sgt. Drew Brown, head of the police arson squat, said the waste paper was dumped in the boiler room about 15 feet from the stairwell where the fire was believed to have started. | | One theory was that a cigarette may have been discarded in the refuse. | | Sgt. Brown found black smudges on the lower walls of the stairwell that indicated an oil-like substance had burned there. | | He stated that no evidence of a touchoff had been found thus far. | | Pope John XXIII send to the Chicago Archdiocese a telegram of profound sorrow over the disaster in the Roman Catholic school. | | Just 18 minutes was the difference between life and death for the 1,300 students and black-robed teachers in the school. The first box alarm was turned in at 2:42 p.m. The school let out at 3 p.m. | |
| Within minutes the building turned into a wild, screaming inferno. Smoke and heat filled staircases and second-floor corridors so fast that normal exits were impassable. | | “We are trapped. We are trapped,” nuns screamed from the windows as they huddled with groups of pupils. | | Many children panicked, stampeded to window. Some leaped to death on sidewalks below. | | “Nothing killed those kids but heat and smoke,” Quinn said. “They just couldn't get out into the corridor to go downstairs.” | | Nearly all the eighth-grader class in two upper-floor classrooms perished. | | Screams of children trapped on upper floors drifted down to hundreds of horrified spectators and hysterical parents. | | Firemen raised ladders and brought down dozens of pupils. Priests, on the scene even before the fire fighters, led out others. | |
| Nuns, with disregard for their own safety, rolled some pupils down staircases. Children ducked to the floor, seeking cool and fresh air, and clawed out. Others groped their way to freedom by grasping hands and beltbuckles of classmates and filing out the smoke-filled structure. | | For some there was no rescue, however. | | “God, we tried. God, how we tried,” sobbed one fireman. “But we couldn't move fast enough. No one could live in that fire.” | | As the bodies were brought down in the eerie, hazy light, parents pushed against police lines, crying. “Where are our children? Where are our children?”. | | The dead were placed in a courtyard where only a few hours before the children had been laughing and playing. | | The injured were taken to seven nearby West Side hospitals. Twenty-two victims died en route to hospitals or soon after arrival. Sixty-eight bodies were sent directly to the morgue where parents and relatives gathered for the dreaded identification ordeal. | | Of the dead 53 were girls and 34 boys. The heroic nuns accounted for the other three. | |
| The U-shaped school as 3808 Iowa St. was built some 40 years ago. It was remodeled about five years ago. Fire officials said the school was checked last October and no violations were found. Exits were adequate, they said, and the ceilings were of wood lath and plaster. There were no false ceilings. The heating plant is fueled by oil. | | A single fire escape, with exits from the first and second fllors, was in the center of the read, or east side of the building - the bottom of the U which joined the wings. | | As news of the impending disaster spread through the low-income neighborhood, hundreds rushed to the scene. Grief-stricken parents began crashing through police cordons as the dead were removed. Several people fainted in the surging mass of humanity. | | Priests walked through the crowd and stood near the doomed building, administering Extreme Unction, last rite of the Catholic Church. | |
| As in most tragedies, there were countless tales of heroism. | | A nun, who refused to identify herself, made three trips into the blistering fire, each time leading out six pupils. “I felt untold strength,” she told newsmen while being treated for burns at St. Anne's Hospital. | | Casimir Janik, 38, a milkman, said an unexplainable impulse made him alter his regular route home. He arrived at the school before firemen. He parked nearby and several times ran into the school, carrying burned children to safety. | | “I found one girl, her shoes missing, hanging on to a banister, seemingly in a state of shock,” he said. “I yanked her loose, took her to church and placed her on a pew. Twice I carried two girls out, one under each arm.” | | Students in the school painted a grisly picture of terror. | |
| Linda Barleto, 12, said she was pushed out of a window in a second-floor classroom. “Our backs were burning. Then someone pushed me out the window.” She suffered burns and bruises. | | Her cousin Andrea Gagliareo, 12, told newsmen, “Some of the boys jumped out the window. When we looked out we saw them lying still on the ground. It was like a miracle when we saw the firemen with their ladders.” | | A boy who lives across from the school, Deroy Hewlett, 13, gave this graphic description: “Kids were hanging from the windows, jumping or falling in groups of three or four at a time. Smoke and flame poured from the windows. A little girl stood at the window of a ledge, screaming for help.” | | Early reports that there had been an explosion were discounted by firemen. Commissioner Quinn said the boiler room was intact. Then he said, “This could have been a touch-off. It spread too damn rapidly.” | | Fire investigators were closely checking the story of Mrs. Barbara Glowacki, who operates a candy store adjacent to the school on the north. She said just before she learned about the fire a man came into her store and asked to use at telephone. | |
| The man, said Mrs. Glowacki, ran out quickly, calling out, “The school is on fire,” after she told him she had no public telephone. | | Police began a search for the man, described as middle-aged. | | With a toll of 90 the fire is the nation's third most disastrous school tragedy in the last century. The toll is exceeded only by the New London, Tex., explosion and fire which killed 294 March 18, 1937, and the Collinwood school fire which claimed 176 lives March 4, 1908 in Cleveland. | | In Chicago it ranked as the second greatest fire killer of the century. On Dec. 30, 1903, 602 persons died when flames swept through the downtown Iroquois Theater. |
| Smoldering School Ruins Like A Cavern Of Death | | By Joe Albright | | In the drenched and smoldering ruins of Our Lady of the Angels parochial school, it is almost impossible to feel disaster. | | The rooms and halls where nearly fivescore died Monday suggest a subterranean cavern. Blackened plaster boards dangle from ceilings like stalactites, dripping water. Black-faced firemen poke through classroom rubble like archeologists — only not so gingerly. | | They don't have to be so careful—the bodies they seek are dead four hours, not 4, 000 years. | |
| Then the spell breaks. A fireman carrying a pickax says: | | “Hey, reporter, you got any dry cigarets?” | | The answer is no. | | “Well, then can you tell me how many are dead?” | | The answer stuns him. | | He points to a mound of debris in the second-floor classroom, caused by the cave-in of a section of roof. | | “There may be more in there,” he says. | | Charred and soaked school-books, plaster and cinders are ankle-deep on the floor. A copy of Charlotte Bronte's “Jane Eyre” has covers singed off. | | Then there is an eighth-grade spelling book. Among the words its owner spelled right were “skeleton,” “ambulance,” “safety,” “sadistic.” | | And neatly handwritten is the sentence: | | “What is the definition of 'fiery'?” | | One girl wrote the sentence before she died. | | In another second-floor classroom, geography books left on the desk tops remain open. | |
| On the desk of Annette La Mantia, 10, of 840 W. Springfield, is a wallet. It contains a picture of a boy friend and a little brother. | | She'll never see them again. She was one of the victims. | | In the second-floor halls, bone-weary firemen work mechanically. There are none of the customary wisecracks and at least one of them is praying that his child is not in the County Morgue. | | Illuminated by the powerful fire department hand torches, the death rooms cease to look like caves. Instead, the specter of a gaunt architectural skeleton has been created. | | The building's flesh—the lath and plaster ceilings, the linoleum floors, the plastered walls—has been picked off by the fire. What remains is wooden balloon frame construction resembling blackened ribs. Wire - bearing metal conduits are the arteries. | |
| A statue of Jesus stands on a pedestal, almost untouched by falling timbers. Its gilt is black and an ear is missing. | | A porcelain flowerpot is in the form of a Virgin Mary figure. The virgin smiles. The plant inside droops over the side, grotesquely scorched. | | A first-floor classroom wall bears the slogan: | | “Holy Communion is the shortest and surest way to heaven.” | | A book jacket says: | | “Are you listening? Maybe God is calling you.” | | And out in the halls are rows and rows of little coats and hats. |
| 87 Children, 3 Nuns Die in School Fire | | CHICAGO, Dec. 2 - (AP) - Ninety persons died Monday when fire struck a parochial grade school with terrifying swiftness, trapping pupils and teachers at their desks a few minutes before dismissal time. | | The final toll included 87 children and three Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. | | The fire was Chicago's worst since the disastrous Iroquois Theater fire of 1903. It was the third worst school fire in the nation in the last 200 years. | | More than 85 youngsters remained in hospitals, suffering from burns, broken bones received in frantic leaps for life and from the shivering shock of seeing playmates die in the fiery inferno. | | There were 1,300 students and teachers in the Our Lady of the Angels Roman Catholic school. | | In the Cook County morgue, sheet covered little corpses, a few charred nearly beyond identification, still lay awaiting to be identified by tearful parents. | | Sgt. Drew Brown, head of the police arson squat, favored a theory that a carelessly discarded cigarette caused the fire. | | “A carelessly discarded cigarette, tossed into a waste basket by a sneaky smoker,” Brown said was the best theory. | | He emphasized, however, that it is “strictly a theory.” | | Brown said his theory was based on these circumstances. | | Every day, about 2:30 p.m., pupils from each class go to the basement of the building and empty waste baskets into large cardboard containers. The waste later is burned in boilers by the janitor. | | Nearby is a boy's washroom - where, in Brown's theory, a boy might sneak a smoke. | | The fire started in the northeast corner of the building near the place where the waste paper is deposited. | | Two boys, who are among those performing the waste disposal chore, already have been questioned by police. | | Mayor Richard J. Daley started a fund for financial aid for families of children injured or killed in the fire. The fund, within minutes, soared to $11,000. | | Just 18 minutes was the difference between life and death. The first box alarm was turned in at 2:42 p.m. The school would have been let out at 3 p.m. | |
| Within minutes the building turned into a wild, screaming inferno. Smoke and heat filled staircases and second floor corridors so fast that normal exits were impassable. | | “We are trapped. We are trapped,” nuns screamed from the windows as they huddled with groups of pupils. | | Many children panicked, stampeded to windows. Some leaped the 30 feet to a crunching death on sidewalks below rather than face the singeing heat and burning smoke. | | “Nothing killed those kids but heat and smoke.” Quinn said. | | “They just couldn't get out into the corridor to go downstairs.” | | Nearly all of the eighth grade class in two upper-floor classrooms perished. | | The screams of the children trapped on upper floors drifted down to hundreds of horrified spectators and hysterical parents standing below in the 30-degree cold. | | Firemen raised ladders and brought down dozens of shocked pupils. Priests on the scene even before the firefighters, led out others. | | Nuns, with disregard for their own safety, rolled some students down staircases. Children ducked to the floor, seeking cool and fresh air, and crawled out. Others groped their way to freedom by grasping hands and belts of classmates and filing out the smoke-filled structure. | | For some there was no rescue, however. | | “God we tried, God, how we tried.” Sobbed one fireman. “But we couldn't move fast enough. No one could live in that fire.” | | As the bodies were brought down in the eerie, hazy light, parents pushed against police lines, crying, “Where are our children? Where are our children?”. | | The U-shaped school at 3808 Iowa Street was built some 40 years ago. It was remodeled about five years ago. | | A single fire escape, with exits from the first and second floors, was in the center of the rear, or east side of the building - the bottom of the “U” which joined the wings. |
| Probers of Fire Ask: Why? | | By Leroy McHugh and Basil Talbot. | | CHICAGO - Dec. 2, 1958 - Doctors and officials, red-eyed and sleepless, worked on today to save lives and unravel some mysteries in the aftermath of Chicago's worst school fire disaster. | | The doctors are battling to prevent the death toll from rising. | | Officials are trying to supply answers to the questions. | | “What caused the fire? What caused it to spread so quickly?”. | | Nearly 100 children - many burned critically - are in hospitals. | | In the County Morgue, arranged in rows, lay 90 sheet-covered bodies. | | A heavy grief lay over the city. | | The tragedy struck yesterday at Our Lady of the Angels Roman Catholic Elementary School, 3816-20 Iowa st. | | Fire swept up from the basement at the northeast corner of the two-story brick building. | | The flames and billowing black smoke - described as “oil type” - roared up a wooden stairwell, trapping many 5th, 6th and 7th grade children on the second floor. | | Many leaped from windows, their clothing - and in some cases their hair - in flames. | | Others were helped out by nuns, firemen and passersby, but were seared by flames. | | There were as many acts of heroism as there were scenes of horror. Many heros remained anonymous. | | Multiple investigations have begin. | | Arson is considered a possibility by some police and fire officials. It is based on a 30-gallon barrel, resembling an oil drum, which was found in the stairwell. No one can say whether it was there before the fire. | | The drum was turned over to Lt. John Ascher of the Police Crime Laboratory. | | Also considered suspicious are black smudges on the lower walls of the stairwell. No one can explain how they got there. | | As to the arson angle, Fire Commissioner Quinn says. | | “It's too early to tell - I can't say one way or the other.” | | Police also are mystified. | |
| Swarm of inspectors, including firemen and policemen, are checking the ruins in search of evidence. | | Building Commissioner Ramsey headed one crew. He carried building department inspection records of the school but did not disclose them. After a visit to the scene last night, he said: | | “Six exits from the second floor, including stairways and doors, were in good order. So was the fire escape on the east side of the building.” | | It is the only fire escape. Ramsey said. | | “The fire is a mystery - I don't see how it could have spread so quickly.” | | There were 1,200 children in the building when the fire started. Another 200 were in the annex, which did not burn. | | Children in the first floor classrooms - alerted by a fire alarm - were marched out safely. Those on the second floor heard the alarm but were trapped by flames before they could escape. | | Coroner McCarron and State's Attorney Adamowski are among those launching investigations. | | McCarron said he will impanel a jury of 15 members - a blue ribbon group to include fire experts and clergymen “of all faiths.” | |
| Adamowski and his first assistant, Frank Ferlic, appeared at the school during the night. They were accompanied by and investigator, Sidney Monz, and Detective Emil Demko. Adamowski said he is conducting an independent inquiry but would give no details. | | Ferlick was asked if wooden stairways in the school constituted a violation of building laws. He replied. | | “Well, what do you think? That's up to the building commissioner.” | | Queried on this point, Building Commissioner Ramsey said regulations specify steel stairways and enclosed stairwells, but added. | | “This does not apply to this school, because it was built before the stairway ordinance was adopted.” | |
| Police activity centered at Austin station. Detective Chief Patrick Deeley, his chief deputy, Frank Pape, and Capt. Harry Penzin, commander of the district, sought the answers to mysterious aspects of the tragedy. | | They questioned a 12-year-old boy, a seventh grade pupil, who carried a box of waste paper to the basement from his classroom about 12 minutes before the fire was discovered. | | It was his daily chore. | | They also questioned his 11-year-old companion, also a seventh grader, who had gone to the basement with him. | |
| One of the boys said a schoolmate he knows only as Richard was in the basement on a similar chore and did not come up the stairs with them. | | Deeley said Richard will be questioned when his identity is established. He said all other pupils will be interviewed, too. | | One story was told by Guilio Camerini, 20, of 732 N. Harding av., a pre-medical student at the University of Illinois, and a graduate of the elementary school. | | Guilio's brother, Mario, 22, was acting as assistant janitor at the school because of the illness of the regular janitor, David Cumbo, who is in a hospital. | |
| Guilio said he helped Mario on Nov. 25, at which time he noted an accumulation of rubbish under the stairway in the basement. He said this included old rags, some flower stands, a card table and some Christmas ornaments. | | After the fire, only ashes remained under the burned stairway. | | A section of the stairway was removed for examination at the crime laboratory. This was ordered by Sgt. Drew Brown, head of the police arson squad. | | He said the section would be examined by Daniel Dragel, head chemist of the laboratory, who also will make tests of the oil-drum type barrel and some rags. | |
| The purpose, Brown said, is to determine if inflammable chemicals are present - such as could have been used by an arsonist. | | The FBI men said they are making inquiries because of recent bomb threats at Chicago schools and incidents of racial-inspired arson and bombing of schools of various faiths throughout the country, chiefly in the South. | | Some of these incidents were related to the integration fight. But no Negros are enrolled at Our Lady of the Angels schools. | | The Army colonel would give no information excepting that he is “from counter-intelligence.” He did not consult police, firemen or other authorities. | |
| Chief Deeley said a search is being made for a stranger who appeared at the candy story of Mrs. Barbara Glowacki, 919 N. Avers av., near the school, about the time of the fire. | | Mrs. Glowacki said the man asked to use the telephone. | | She said she told him she had no public phone and that he walked out, remarking”. | | “I wanted to report a fire.” | | She added. | | “He seemed wholly unconcerned, but after he left I went into the street and looked toward the school - I saw smoke!”. | |
| She said he was well dressed and about 45 years old, but could not describe him clearly. | | The burned and injured (some fractured bones in their leap for life) were mostly in four hospitals - St. Anne's, Franklin Boulevard, Garfield Park and Walther Memorial. | | Frantic parents gathered at these places, some trying to force their way in. they had to be restrained and quitted so as not to interfere with the life and death battle going on in many rooms. | | At the County Morgue sorrowing parents collapsed as attendants lifted the sheets from bodies of loved ones. | | Morgue attendants are hardened - but they, too, shed tears. | | The covered bodies lay on planking. | | At the school, a crowd remained throughout the night. | | The neighborhood lay under a blanket of grief. | |
| Bells in many Catholic churches tolled in mourning. | | Perhaps all of the dead - 87 children and three nuns - may be buried the same day, possibly Friday. | | The 1,000 seat Our Lady of the Angels Church will not be able to handle the services - other churches will have to help bury the dead. |
| Schoolboy Smoking Cigaret Might Have Touched Off Fire | | CHICAGO, Dec 2 - (UPI) - A schoolboy who sneaked a forbidden cigaret may be the unwitting arsonist who touched off the fire which killed 87 children and three nuns at Our Lady of the Angels parochial school. | | This was the theory Tuesday of Police and Fire Department squads investigating Chicago's worst fire in 55 years, a holocaust which swept the West Side parochial school Monday and shocked the nation and the world. | | The horror and pathos of the fire mounted as Chicago became a city in mourning. There were these developments. | | Five of the 100 children injured, 82 of them still hospitalized, were not expected to live. | |
| The possibility arose that the death count might really be 91. Only three pitifully charred bodies remained unidentified at the at the county morgue, awaiting X-rays and an attempt to give them names. But four of the school's children were missing. Police hoped the extra missing child had wandered from the school in a state of shock and was being cared for by someone living in the neighborhood. | | The Chicago Archdiocese announced that Archbishop Albert George Meyer will preside at mass funeral services for the 87 dead children in a National Guard armory Friday. The church will bury the 53 girls and 34 boys, aged 9 to 15, together in the Holy Innocents section of the Queen of Heaven Cemetery if their parents wish. | | Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered all flags drawn to half mast on city buildings until the funerals. Appeals went out for donations of money and blood, although so many blood donors volunteered some had to be turned away. A citywide day of mourning was to be declared. | | Scenes of heartbreak and grief continued in scores of homes, empty by or more children, at the morgue, where parents collapsed in hysteria upon identifying their children, and at the Our Lady of the Angels rectory, where the nuns' bodies were brought Tuesday night. | |
| A large crowd, many of them nuns who could not restrain their sobs, watched the three black coffins, decorated with small silver crosses, taken into the rectory. An auxiliary bishop conducted services outside the building, where last rites for the nuns will be held Thursday. | | Police had all but ruled out the possibility that the fire was deliberately touched off by a deranged arsonist who somehow crept into the school. | | But their suspicions mounted that some teenage boy had ducked beneath the stairwell, taken a few puffs on a cigaret, and tossed it into a cardboard container stuffed with discarded examination papers before returning to his classes. | | The fire swept up the stairwell of the 2-story school and spread through the second floor. Suffocating black smoke boiled up from the well-waxed corridor floors. Then, it was theorized, a nun smelled smoke, ordered windows opened in a classroom, and provided the murderous draft for the flames. Within minutes, children were leaping from second floor windows or dying of heat or asphyxiation at their desks. | |
| Police Sgt. Drew Brown, head of the arson squad, along with a special police squat of 35 men, began intensive questioning of boys who had been assigned by their teachers to carry wastepaper from classrooms to the trash bins near a stairwell. |
| One Family's Story | |
| Ronnie Sarno's day began like many others. | | Ronnie, 10, crawled out of bed in the back bedroom of the second floor apartment at 3804 Chicago av., about 7:35 a.m. | | The floor was cold. Outside the sun was shining. The mercury stood at 19 degrees. It was the coldest school day since last Feb. 18. | | Ronnie discovered that his brother, Billy, 13, who shared the back bedroom, had beaten him by five minutes in the daily scramble for the bath. | | But Ronnie had a five-minute lead on his sister, Joanne. | |
| After the usual splashing and snatching of towels, Ronnie and William donned long-sleeved shirts, ties, and dark slacks. Joanne put on white blouse and blue jumpers, regulation dress for pupils at Our Lady of the Angels School. | | Their dad, Oscar, 43, a truck driver, was at the table for breakfast, unusual for a week day. He was taking a day off to see a doctor at Garfield Park Hospital at 11 a.m. | | Mom was there, too, and, as usual, in charge. Joanne said the morning prayers. | | She and Ronnie decided they wanted only tea for breakfast. Billy wanted nothing at all. | |
| Ronnie left for school at 8:10. a.m. He had been instructed by the Sister teaching the fourth grade room on the second floor to come early to help distribute textbooks to the desks. | | He wasn't early enough. When he arrived another boy already had done his job. | | Billy left for the 8th grade class at 8:15 a.m., but Joanne in the fourth grade with Ronnie, waited until 8:25 a.m., then stopped next door at 3806 Chicago av. to call 7-year-old Dorothy Miceli and walk with her to school. | | All were in school when the bell rang at 8:40 a.m. Five minutes later, when the fourth grade Sister led the morning prayers, Joanne was in her seat in the second row from the windows. Ronnie sat in his a couple of rows closer to the door. | |
| The morning lessons were routine as far as Ronnie was concerned. He doesn't recall much about them. This is understandable in the light of later developments. | | When the morning session ended, he was the first one home. Joanne then arrived, and finally Billy. | | Mom—Catherine, 41, to the rest of the world—had soup and crackers, bologna sandwiches and milk ready for Joanne and Ronnie. For Billy there were his favorite peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. | | Dad hadn't yet returned from his appointment at the hospital. | |
| Joanne asked when she was scheduled to go to the dentist, and Mom told her 7 o'clock in the evening. Ronnie started back to school about noon, telling his mother. | | “Goodbye, Mom—don't work too hard.” | | Joanne and her mother left the apartment together. Mrs. Sarno was headed for her afternoon job as a typist. As she left, Billy, still inside, called. | | “Bye—see you later!”. | |
| In the afternoon session, the teacher gave Ronnie, Joanne and their classmates assignments in spelling and arithmetic. She then turned the class over to a lay teacher while she went to give religious instruction to another grade. | | When the sister returned, the class reviewed the arithmetic lesson. She demonstrated problems on the blackboard and called on Ronnie a couple of times to recite. | | The class was preparing to begin geography study when one of the hoys blurted out. | | “Sister, I smell smoke!”. | |
| Others did, too. They saw smoke creeping under the closed door. At that moment the fire bell rang. The sister opened the door, and swiftly slammed it shut as smoke billowed in. | | She ordered the youngsters to go to the windows, and to pray. Then there was a lot of pushing and screaming and coughing. The sister opened a window and shouted for help. The youngsters opened the other windows. Everyone was shouting and screaming. | |
| Ronnie and Joanne were within arm's reach at a window. The boy told his sister. | | “I'm going to jump. Do you want to come?”. | | As he went over the sill, he heard Joanne's voice. | | “Don't jump! Don't jump, Ron!”. | | Ronnie landed on his feet and then flopped over on his back. He got up and brushed himself off. Dorothy Miceli's mother came along, holding Dorothy by the hand. Mrs. Miceli had rushed frantically to the school and had found her daughter, who with her little classmates had marched out of their first floor room in routine fire drill order. | |
| Through the turmoil and confusion, Mrs. Miceli led Dorothy and Ronnie, both without wraps, home through the cold. Ronnie's mother was still at work. His dad was at the school, searching for his children. | | About 4 p.m., Mrs. Sarno rushed home, beside herself with fear. Ronnie was there. But there was no word of Joanne or Billy. Ronnie didn't want to bother his mother with his own troubles, but he thought his left leg hurt. He told her finally. She took him to Garfield Park Community Hospital. Attendants found a small burn which they treated. They could find no other injury resulting from his jump. | |
| Back home, Sarno came in defeated in his search but still hopeful. Relatives came rushing in. One hurried off to the morgue. | | There wasn't any supper, but no one missed it. Ronnie lay on a couch, covered with a blanket, occasionally weeping, surrounded by turmoil. | | About 9:30 p.m., hopes soared when someone telephoned that Joanne's little purse had been found in the schoolyard. | | Within minutes, the phone rang again. A relative at the morgue had definitely identified Joanne's body. | |
| Sarno took his wife in his arms. Ronnie demanded. | | “Daddy, what is it?”. | | Sarno replied. | | “Son, Joanne has gone to sleep.” | | Ronnie shouted. | | “You mean Joanne's dead — what about Billy?”. | | And his father replied. | | “We don't know yet, son.” | | The Sarno—nine of them by now—knelt on the floor, weeping and praying. Ronnie knelt on the couch, his blanket still around him. His prayer was loudest of all. | |
| The telephone bell broke in again. This time it was Billy's body that was identified. Ronnie sobbed himself into exhaustion. He whimpered. | | “I don't want to go to school no more. I want Joanne and Billy.” | | At last someone carried him back to his lonely bed in the back bedroom. Eventually he fell into a fitful sleep. | | The parents, surrounded by solicitous relatives, sat together through the night, immersed in grief. | | It was a day none of them will ever get over. |
| Throng Just Waits, Looks | | CHICAGO, Dec. 2 - (AP) - The milling throng had a life of its own - stretching and straining at a leash that was fastened to disaster. | | As each lifeless form, shrouded in canvas, came on the hands of firemen to the waiting line of ambulances, faces and forms surged forward, then back. | | Some heads turned aside at the sight of the pitifully small figures. Others faced ahead; blank, unbelieving. Monday as they watched firemen carry the dead from Our Lady of the Angels Catholic grade school. | | Through the broad door and stairway the tragic procession came - under the arch chiseled with “Our Lady of the Angels.” | | An old woman held a black kerchief to her thin lips. She crossed herself, her lips moved in prayer. | | Two men wept openly. They talked to each other in Polish. Hushed, soft Italian voices joined the murmur. | | Most just looked. A man touched the woman by his side - they turned away without words. | | And others waited. Those closest to the tragedy, the parents, went to hospitals, then to the morgue in a bitter search for their children. | | Nuns who taught the children, knew them, loved them, sat silent in the convent. | | Shades were drawn, but lights still burned in every home. | | Searchlights still bathe the ruin - but it was over. | | The new came, but for many the memory of the old was an etching in sorrow that will not yield to the dawn. |
| The Morgue | |
| By Peter Reic. | | CHICAGO - Dec. 2, 1958 - On hastily erected wooden planking in the basement of the County Morgue they were laid out. The bodies of the children - 4th and 5th graders from Our Lady of the Angels grammar school. | | A young father, ashen-faced, expressionless, walked as in a trance between a nurse and a deputy coroner. The group paused. The deputy gently lifted a white cotton sheet mercifully covering the first of the seemingly endless row of small, still forms. | | A shock of blond hair, a bobby pin still holding a curl, was exposed to the cold white light of the morgue's bare light bulb. | | The father bent forward hesitantly. His lips quivered. The deputy lifted the sheet a little more. | | The young father shook his head. “No,” he whispered hoarsely. It wasn't his daughter. | | The three figures moved silently to the next covered form. | | Again the deputy lifted the sheet. Again the father forced himself to bend forward for a closer look. | | Then it came. A scream. A deep-throated, anguished man's cry that strangled a second after it began - strangled because the father was screaming so hard he no longer could make a sound. | | Great, overwhelming sobs wrenched his body. He twisted from the nurse's restraining grip, flung himself on the dead form and lovingly cradled the lifeless head in his arms. | | He looked up then, his face hideously ravaged with grief, and nodding piteously, indicated he found what he had prayed so hard he wouldn't find. | | The strong arms of a policeman lifted him to his feet and supported him as he collapsed. | |
| At 5:15 p.m., there were 42 fire victims bodies in the morgue. Police, coroner's deputies, doctors from adjacent County Hospital, and morgue personnel clustered in a lobby and a hallway. | | Just arriving were a number of priests - summoned to give comfort to bereaved families expected momentarily. Some priests came so hurriedly they hadn't even had time to don clerical garb. | | In Polk street, just south of the yellow brick building housing the County Morgue, ambulances were lined up nearly a block - red mars lights blinking eerily in the dusk of evening. | | A growing knot of silent spectators watched as the procession of ambulances delivered bodies to the morgue's east entrance. | | A woman said: | | “My God, won't they ever stop coming?”. | | At 5:34 p.m., body-laden stretchers were blocking the morgue's basement corridor … the dead were arriving faster than an emergency team of attendance could place them in the viewing room. | | At 5:41 p.m., the count had grown to 58. the line of waiting ambulances had grown, too. | | Coroner McCarron directed deputies to show all arriving kin into the morgue's various inquest rooms, so grief-stricken parents and relatives could at least be seated while waiting to identify the bodies. | | The coroner also directed a team of County Hospital nurses to prepare smelling salts and strong coffee for the distraught kin. Nurses were instructed further to take names and descriptions of all missing youngsters being sought. | | The coroner added. | | “Don't let anyone into the viewing room until I talk to them. We don't want to add more deaths from heart attacks to this ghastly tragedy.” | | To a reporter, he said: | | “Have you seen them yet - the little ones, all burned up? My God, I don't know how I'll be able to take it. I've got five of my own, you know.” | | The coroner, frequently exposed to death and tragedy though he is, was very shaken. | | And still the bodies continued to arrive. | | A few minutes later, the count had reached 65. | | In the basement viewing room, the lifeless forms were gently placed on wooden planking, then covered with sheets. | | A small hand and arm showed from one. A child's wristwatch was strapped to it. The hands of the watch had stopped a little after 3 p.m. | | Morgue attendants and physicians now began the grim task of sorting bodies … male and female … larger and smaller. Item of identification, such as rings, or lockets, shoes or recognizable bits of clothing, were duly noted on charts. A doctor explained. | | “The clothing isn't much help. Most of the kids wore uniforms, apparently. | | “But personal items might help identify a youngster, and the sex and size classification will at least spare a parent the necessity of viewing all the bodies. A parent looking for a small daughter, for instance, will have to view only bodies in that category.” | | The doctor paused to pick up a slip of paper that had dropped on the floor, apparently from a pocket of one of the victims. | | It was a card with a child's prayer on it. | | Shortly before 6, the first parents arrived. | | A slim, young mother with dark hair and a husky man in a wind jacket are brought in by a man who identifies himself as Jay Staggs of 3027 Milwaukee av. He says. | | “I'm a Chicago Civil Defense volunteer. I've driven these people to four different hospitals looking for their youngster. This is a last resort. | | Neither mother nor father betray emotion. The woman waits silently as the father asks, and receives, permission to view the bodies downstairs. | | As the father starts to inspect the ghastly array, a deputy calls him back. The deputy tells him. | | “It's still too early, sir. There are 10 more bodies at St. Anne's Hospital, and Lord knows how many more elsewhere. It's no use putting you through this ordeal more than once. Please wait till we have all the kids here. | | The father agrees. He and his wife leave quietl. | | It is 6:15 p.m. The basement room is filled to capacity with small bodies row on row. A second third, even a fourth room are pressed into emergency service. | | A deputy announces the total number of bodies thus far received: 68. | | Now a steady stream of parents and relatives enters the morgue, all seeking a youngster who did not return from school. | | In the shuffling, dread-filled crowd that fills the lobby, snatches and fits of conversation are heard. | | A young mother. | | “I wanted to ask his teacher if she saw what happened to Johnny, but she's dead.” | | A nun. | | “I was about to release the patrol boys. It was shortly before 3 o'clock when I first smelled the smoke. | | A young man in the white gown of an intern. | | “I can't take this. I've got to get some fresh air before I go downstairs again. These poor little kids.” | | A father tells a policeman. | | “My little girl was wearing a little gold ring with a purple stone. Will that help?”. | | A priest to a woman near collapse. | | “There still are a lot of children unaccounted for. Perhaps your youngster is not even here. You must not despair. | | An elderly couple to a policeman. | | “We're looking for Joanne Sciolino. She's 11. We're her aunt and uncle. Can we see if she's downstairs?”. | | At 7 p.m., the count had risen to 78. A few minutes later, to 83. | | A deputy coroner tells a morgue attendant numbering a registration sheet. | | “You'd better leave room for a hundred names.” | | Another familiar face in the crowd, Ald. Patrick Petrone, in whose ward the fire occurred, helps several bereaved families coordinate search efforts by telephoning hospitals and friends. | | Downstairs, another flurry of activity as nurses rush to the aid of a mother who has lost consciousness on seeing the array of bodies. | | Thirty feet away, a father clutches his face with both hands as he acknowledges identity of a youngster as his. | | Except for the intermittent cries of anguish that mark identification of another youngster's body, the morgue is quiet. | | Even at this stage, hours after the tragedy, the impact is too great: the horror to overwhelming. | | Most simply are too stunned to react. | | A father near exhaustion, after viewing numerous bodies in a vain quest for his son, aged 10, he tells an attendant. | | “I want to see the other bodies, too. I must find my son.” | | Later, the attendant tells a reporter. | | “The bodies we didn't let him see wouldn't have done him any good to see. They're too charred to be recognizable. | | Another father, his eyes blank from horror and shock, staggers by. In his hand he clutches the contents of one victim's pockets - a nickel, a piece of string, a toy propeller, and a key. Those items tell him all he needs to know. | | By 8:06 p.m., the body count has risen to 87, with a scant dozen identified. The crowds at the morgue continue to grow. | | An hour later, 90 bodies are counted. | | The grim task of trying to identify them continues. | | The hollow-eyed men and woman aimlessly wandering corridors of the morgue, waiting their turn to view the remains, know in their hearts they'll find the worst. | | But some - just a fortunate few - are wrong. | | Like Joseph Dembinski, for instance. | | He is about to resign all hope when a deputy tells him. | | “I have good news, sir. Linda Zeogone, the niece you are seeking, isn't here. We have found out she is safe at one of the hospitals.” | | But Joseph Dembinski is the exception. | | For the vast majority of other people at the morgue, there is not awakening from the nightmare. |
| School Fire Chicago's Worst in 55 Years | | CHICAGO, Dec. 2 - (AP) - The fire that struck Our Lady of the Angels School Monday was the third worst school fire in the nation in the last 100 years and the worst in the city in 55 years. | | The greatest school disaster occurred March 18, 1937, when 294 died in a school explosion and fire in New London, Texas. | | The other major school fire claimed 176 lives in the Collinwood School in Cleveland on March 4, 1908. | | There have been 26 fires in this country in which as many as 50 persons died. | | More than 1,900 were injured in that conflagration. | | Twelve years ago, 61 persons perished in a fire in the LaSalle Hotel, Chicago. Nearly 230 others were injured in that blaze June 5, 1946, 30 of them seriously. | | The worst fire in Chicago took 602 lives on Dec. 30, 1903, when the Iroquois Theater burned. | | Worst of these recent fires was Coconut Grove Night Club blaze in Boston on Nov. 28, 1942, in which 498 died. | | Other fires with major losses of life in the last two decades are: Dec. 7, 1946 - 119 dead in Winecoff Hotel Fire, Atlanta, George. |
| “I'll Remember It to My Dying Day,” Says Fireman | | By Marty O'Conno. | | CHICAGO - Dec. 2, 1958 - Two of the first firemen on the scene at Our Lady of the Angels school fire afterwards had eyes as deep and troubled as those of combat infantrymen. | | Richard Duchene and George Harper, Hook and Ladder Company 26, sipped hot coffee less than 30 yards from where the worst ordeal of their lives took place. | | Gazing at the school building, lit now by floodlights, gleaming with running streams of water, Duchene said: | | “Nobody in the world would believe what went on there less than three hours ago. Merciful God.” | |
| Duchene said Hook and Ladder Co. 35 was already on the Iowa street side of the school when his own rig with its five men pulled up. He said: | | “We swung around the corner to the Avers avenue side and all we did was run up the 85-foot aerial ladder. | | “Civilians went up the ladders to do what they could. The firemen were too busy trying to catch or break the falls of children leaping from the bulding. | | “The children were screaming and jumping faster than we could catch them. It was the worst thing I ever saw. Children on the ground everywhere, some with their shoes knocked off in the fall. Everywhere.” | |
| Fireman Harper agreed. He said: | | “I never saw anything like it before and I never want to again. Some of the children were on fire, rolling around in the slush trying to put out the flames and screaming and screaming. | | “I'll remember it to my dying day.” | | Men of Hook and Ladder Co. 26 were under the command of Lt. Roger Hester. | | Also making the run on 26 were firemen Dan Bodner and Robert Thorpe. | |
| Thorpe suffered an eye injury in the furious battle to reach the burning children. Harper and Duchene were active in the removal of dozens of bodies. Duchene said: | | “The bodies seemed to be coming out by the truckload and for all I knew they were. | | “I don't know which was worst, putting kids in ambulances knowing they would be dead before the vehicle went a block or seeing the little forms trapped in the rear of the building. | | “Most of them never had a chance.” | |
| Another fireman who had just hit the coffee wagon joined the group. | | He eyed the smoking schoolhouse and a legend chiseled in stone over the doorway. The inscription reads. | | “Our Lady of the Angels.” | | The fireman said: | | “That's the name of this place now, all right … now and forever.” |
| Chronology Shows Speed of Disaster | | CHICAGO, Dec. 2 - (AP) - Chronology of Our Lady of the Angels Catholic school fire. | | 2:42 p.m. (CST) - “Still alarm” filed. (Such an alarm is the first response to any fire, calling for an engine, hook-and-ladder, a squad of men and a chief.” | | 2:44 - First firemen to arrive sound “box” alarm. (This is the first alarm filed by firemen asking for extra help. Sends additional hook-and-adder, three engines, second chief.” | | 2:47 - Firemen sound the “2-11,” the first in a series of “extra” alarm calling for still more help. | | 2:50 to 3:30 - Firemen try to bring as many children as possible down ladders but are hampered by thick smoke. Other children jump, many missing nets. Firemen attempt to rip open roof to give mushrooming flames chance to escape. | | 2:52 - Without filing the usual intermediate alarms, firemen put in a “5-11,” the top call. | | 3:30 - Firemen begin bringing down blanket-encased bodies. | | 3:45 - An increasingly fearful Msgr. William J. Gorman, Fire Department chaplain, now says there “may be up to 25 dead.” Parents begin pouring to the school, screaming their children's names in hope of getting response from milling survivors. | | 4 p.m. - The fire is officially termed “struck out.” (This means “completely under control.”.) | | 7 p.m. - Firemen say they believe last of the bodies has been recovered. |
| Girl Recalls Burning Backs Of Classmates | | CHICAGO, Dec. 2 - (AP) - Children from hospital beds, many with burns, told of the frenzy and hysteria, of escapes and rescues in the holocaust at Our Lady of the Angels School Monday. | | The scene they described were ones of horror. | | Linda Barleto, 12, in a hospital suffering burns and bruises, said as she sipped orange juice. | | “Our backs were burning. Then someone pushed me out of a window.” | | In an adjacent bed was Andrea Gagliareo, 12, Linda's cousin and classmate. | | “Some of the boys jumped out of the window,” Andrea said. | | “When we looked down we say them lying still on the ground. They didn't move.” | |
| Frances Panno, 10, her face and hands burned and her black hair charred, told from the Franklin Boulevard Hospital of her rescue of the school by firemen. | | “Other pupils were screaming and pushing behind me,” she said. “Then some firemen came up ladders put against the windows and took me down the ladder.” | | Mary Brock, 10, a fifth grade pupil on the second floor of the building, said someone in her classroom yelled, “I smell smoke.” | | “When the classroom door was opened, a lot of smoke blew in,” she said. “Sister Mary Clara Theresa told us to get out of the windows and get on the ledge and stay there. I got out the window and stood on the ledge, but lots of others jumped.” | | Mary Latianzio, 12, a seventh grader, said she knew nothing about the fire until she heard children screaming in an adjoining eight grade roo. | | “Smoke begin to pour into our room,” Mary related. “A lot of children began to cry. There was a big jam at the door of the room because so many wanted to get out. One boy collapsed from inhaling smoke. Another was hanging out of a window, calling for help.” | | Joseph Brocato, 11, a sixth grade pupil, was brought to St. Elizabeth's Hospital by his father. Anthony Joseph said he and a classmate were emptying waste paper baskets from his classroom in the boiler room. That was near 3 o'clock, the time of dismissal of classes for the day. | | “Suddenly,” Joseph told a reporter, “I saw the janitor running from the boiler room. The janitor yelled 'Call the fire department.' My classmate and I ran upstairs and were told by the nuns to go into the church (around the corner from the school). A lot of children were in the church. We then were told to go home.” | | Sylvia Tesauro, 13, an eighth grader, told her story from a room in the Walther Memorial Hospital, where she was confined with three other pupils. | | “Two girls entered our classroom and said the hall was filled with smoke,” Sylvia related. “Sister tried to lead the classroom downstairs. We were forced back by the thick black smoke and had to go to the windows to get air. Many of the girls were crying, sobbing like everything. | | “Firemen raised ladders up against the ledge and I came down a ladder. Other pupils were jumping and falling from windows. On the ground children were lying all around and there was a lot of blood on the ground.” | | George Tomilia(sic), 10, said [he climbed onto] the second floor ledge. He dangled briefly from the ledge by his fingertips, then jumped. He suffered a fractured hip. |
| Chicago Presses Search for Clues to Fire At School | |
| By RICHARD J. H. Johnston | | Special to the New York Times | | CHICAGO, Dec. 2 - Investigators searched without success today for the cause of yesterday's fire that took ninety lives in Our Lady of the Angels parochial school on Chicago's West Side. Eighty-seven of the victims were children attending the grade school and three were nuns, who were their teachers. | | Police, fire and other city officials, the office of the Coroner of Cook County and the local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation collaborated in attempting to determine the cause of the disaster. The death toll was the highest in a school fire in the city's history. | | [Officials throughout the nation reacted energetically Tuesday to the Chicago fire tragedy. In New York, city firemen were started on inspection of the 1,500 public, private and parochial schools. Governor Harriman ordered a state-wide check of all schools. Similar precautionary steps were taken in other areas.” | |
| Seventy-one children and three nuns remained in hospital today. Sixty-three were in good condition. Eleven, including one nun, were on the critical list. Four girls are still missing. | | Also in a hospital was James Raymond, 44 years old, a janitor of the school, at 3820 West Iowa Street. Mr. Raymond has not been able to give the police an account of the moments shortly before and after the outbreak of fire at 2:40 P.M. | | Mr. Raymond was known to have been on the scene of the fire. The police said they were eager to question him as soon as he was able to give a coherent account. | |
| Arson experts of the Police Department advanced the theory this morning that the blaze might have been caused by a cigarette carelessly discarded by someone who had sneaked a smoke. It is know that the fire started in the stairwell in the basement of the two-story brick building, which had been a church before being converted into a school. | | The police cautioned, however, that this theory lacked substantiation. However, they pointed out that a cigarette might have caused a stock of discarded papers to smolder for an hour or so before the blaze burst forth. | | Investigators were unable to say whether the possible “sneak” smoker had been a student. However, it was disclosed that some of the boys had told police that “sneak” smoking by boy students did occur occasionally. | | The flames spread through the building so rapidly that most of the children had no chance to begin their often-practiced fire drills. | | Many of them were killed when they leaped from the second floor windows of the school to the pavement. | |
| The stairwell, leading from the basement to the first floor, was the focal point of the investigation throughout the day. | | It was up this stair that an unidentified janitor had rushed to shout, “call the Fire Department.” That was twenty minutes before the school was to have been dismissed for the day. | | The stairwell is 25 feet long and 15 feet wide. The police found stacks of paper in the basement. Sgt. Drew Brown of the Police Department's Arson Squad said today the condition of the papers had prompted him to theorize that the blaze had started in them. | | However, it was established that within ten minutes before the blaze broke out from twelve to fifteen boys had taken wastebaskets of discarded classroom papers to the boiler room. The boys had gone to the room by varying routes, to dump the papers in a container. | | It was the custom, it was revealed, to store the papers until conditions outdoors were suitable for burning them in a container in the school yard. | | There were no reasons given as to why the papers had not been burned yesterday. The weather was clear and a light breeze was blowing in the afternoon. The temperature was slightly below freezing. | | Two boys, a little tardy in their chores, said one had mentioned to the other that he smelled “something different” in the basement as they started back to their home room. Before they reached it the janitor began to shout his warning. | | Mr. Raymond told the police last night that he had been walking toward the school, coming from the Our Lady of the Angels Church, in the same block, when he saw smoke coming from the northeast corner of the building. | | Whether it was he who gave the alarm could not be determined, it was reported, until the police were able to question him again. | |
| As Sergeant Brown reconstructed the episode, the blaze roared up the stairwell to the second floor. In moments that floor was enveloped in billowing smoke and fast-moving flames. It was on this floor that the trapped victims died. All on the first floor escaped. | | The draft created by the mounting flame and heat drew the fire directly to the second floor of the tightly closed building, it was believed. Fire Commissioner Robert J. Quinn said today, that it appeared that the dense smoke might have been caused by burning linoleum. | | Survivors continued to recount today how the smoke had rushed into rooms as doors were opened. Its density and the intenseness of the heat appeared to have driven back those attempting to escape into the rooms to seek safety at the windows. Those who were not immediately overcome leaped to death and injury from the windows. | | “Once a fire gets going,” commissioner Quinn said today, “it goes faster than you can run. All you need is one inhalation of that superheated air. It doesn't take much to trap a person and snuff out his life,” he added. | |
| He went on to say that the school had been inspected by the Fire Department during Fire Prevention Week, Oct. 5-11. | | “All the laws were complied with. The building actually was what one would term very clean,” Commissioner Quinn said. | | Commissioner Quinn agreed with other investigators that the fire escape leading from the northeast rear corner of the second floor to the ground had played no role in the loss of life. | | There had been a delay in pulling the balanced stairway to the ground and another delay in opening the second floor door leading to it. But these delays of a few moments did not cause any fatalities, authorities agreed. | |
| The fire escape door, in a corridor, was almost the width of the building away from the stairway, which funneled the smoke and flames to the second floor. | | It was found today that all twenty-four to thirty children who had used the fire escape got out of the building safely. Most of the victims died in the three rooms on the west side of the building and two on the east side. | | The police today amended last night's report that some twenty-four children had been found dead, seated at their desks. A few of the children were found still at their desks; others lay on the floor. | | Commissioner Quinn also agreed with a city building official that while the school building conformed with building and fire codes of the city, such a school could not be built in the same manner today. The parish's original church, now the school, was built in 1908. | | It was listed in city records as a “pre-ordinance” structure - not affected by the building code adopted in 1949. The new code requires “enclosure” of stairwells with fire-resistant materials. | | Mayor Richard J. Daley said today that the tragedy would bring about a “thorough review and survey by experts” of the city's codes for fire prevention. | | Walter McCarron, the County Coroner, said today he would start an inquest next week. | | Commissioner Quinn said that an examination at the police crime laboratory of various articles taken from the scene had not shown any evidence of arson. | | The police today were trying to find a boy known only as “Richard.” The boy was reported to have been seen by other boys loitering in the boiler room although he had no duties there. | |
| Public school officials said that in the last four years the city had conducted a fire prevention program, “which is the most extensive in a generation.” This has included the installation of fireproof stairwells, replacement of wooden floors and trimming with fireproof materials and relocation of boiler rooms in the city's older schools. | | The Right Rev. Joseph F. Cussen, pastor of Our Lady of the Angels Parish, said today that plans to replace the school would await reports from building inspectors and engineers. | | Meanwhile, pupils left without classrooms by the disaster will attend classes in near-by parochial schools as son as accommodations can be arranged. The headquarters of Catholic Charities here said today it would provide free bus transportation for the children. | | Catholic Charities will also furnish textbooks and other materials lost in the fire. | | The Cook County morgue today was a scene of heartbreak for scores of parents as one by one the bodies of the children were identified. In many cases, identification rested on such small personal items as a 10-cent ring on a girl's finger or a pocket knife in a boy's trouser pocket. | | Family dentists, carrying dental charts of their young patients, also helped in the identifications. | | On a table lay an assortment of Mickey Mouse watches, jewelry and small trinkets, once happily worn by the children. | | Last night there [were] sixty-eight bodies in the morgue. Today the number slowly dwindled as sorrowful identifications were made. | | The three nuns remaining today in St. Anne's Hospital are: Sister Mary Davidis, Sister Mary Helaine and Sister Mary Geraldita. Sister Mary Helaine is on the critical list. The other two nuns are reported to be in good condition. |
| 'I Won't Give Up Hope,' Says Father | | CHICAGO, Dec. 2 - (AP) - A morgue attendant gently lifted a sheet from a charred body and said, “This is a boy.” | | John Jakowski (sic) Sr., leaned over, looked intently at the lifeless form and screamed. | | “Oh my God, my boy, my boy!”. | | Upstairs in the crowded main hall at Cook County Morgue, a deputy coroner intoned into a megaphone. | | “We are looking for the parents of an 11-year-old girl with a medal and cross around her neck. She wore a full school uniform with long black stockings. She can be identified.” | | A little woman in a tan coat cried out, then sobbed uncontrollably into the ends of her scarf. | | A blue-clad student nurse guided the woman to a seat in a smoky meeting room. A policeman led her husband past 20 other anxious parents and relatives and down the long steps to the bodies in the basement. | | In the noisy lobby, Vincent Mucci tugged at the sleeves of coroner's deputies - seeking word of his niece, Elaine Pesoli. | | “She's 9,” he said, “wearing red bobby sox and black suede shoes.” | | Hours later, Elaine's name was posted on the official death list. | | Walter Kalinowski and his red-eyed wife sat in a coroner's jury room, waiting for news of their daughter, Angeline, 14. | | “I haven't given up hope,” Kalinowski said. “I won't, unless they take me down there and show her to me.” | | The megaphone drowned out the rest of his words. | | “Clear the aisle. Keep the aisle cleared,” the deputy coroner ordered. “We'll take you down as soon as we can.” | | The small bodies, covered with blankets, were carried into the morgue from ambulances and squad cars that drew up 10 and 12 deep in the street outside. Police carried the bodies into a waiting room and put them gently down on the cold concrete floor. |
| Boy Who Jumped Tells of Tragedy | | CHICAGO - Dec. 2, 1958 - A boy who jumped out of a second floor window lived to tell about it. | | He is Frank Gallo, Jr., 10, of 3147 Augusta blvd., a fifth grade pupil in Our Lady of the Angels school. | | From his bed in St. Anne's Hospital, Frank told how his class was studying geography. | | He and the other 45 or so pupils were reading about the Middle Atlantic states, Frank recalled. He said: | | “A kid in my room jumped up out of his seat and hollered, 'smoke.' And smoke started coming through the cracks in the door. | | “Our nun was writing on the blackboard. She told us to open the windows and start praying. | | “Then everybody started runnin' toward the windows 'cause they couldn't breathe. She (the nun) just stood there, cool as a cucumber.” | |
| Frank said five boys jumped out the window, then he hoisted himself on the sill, sat down and slid off, just as if her were easing himself into a swimming pool. | | When he hit the ground (” hard dirt with stones on top”) he said. | | “I felt like my back was broken. I crawled along a while and then got up. A lot of them couldn't get up. | | “I walked into a story - a little one across the alley from school. | | “I wanted to call my mother and tell her to come and help us and bring a car.” | |
| The proprietor of the store, however, wasn't there, having been attracted by the commotion across the street. | | Frank went back outside. He said: | | “Fire trucks were coming and everything.” | | Frank, who incurred possible internal injuries and possible fractures, doesn't know it, but the nun of whom he spoke, Sister Mary Clare Therese, is dead. |
| Pope John Wires Condolences to Bereaved Kin | | VATICAN CITY, Dec. 2 - (AP) - Pope John XXIII Tuesday sent the Chicago archdiocese of the Roman Catholic church a telegram expressing his profound sorrow over the Our Lady of the Angels school fire. | | “We have been profoundly saddened,” the telegram said, “to learn of the tragedy which has befallen the school of Our Lady of the Angels. We express from the heart our deepest sympathy with the parents. To the families thus sorely stricken we impart our apostolic benediction in token of the fullness of heavenly consolat”. |
| Arson Squad to Probe Fire in School Last Year | | CHICAGO - Dec. 2, 1958 - Sgt. Drew Brown, who is in charge of Fire Attorney Downes arson squad, is expected to start questioning officials of Our Lady of the Angels school about a mysterious fire in the school a year ago. | | The story about last year's fire was told to Sgt. Brown by Theresa Gorski, 10, a fifth grade pupil who lives at 935 N. Avers av. | | She said in October, 1957, when she was in fourth grade, there was a mysterious fire on the first floor in the boys wash room on the north side of the school. | | An investigation by school officials at the time disclosed burned paper and matches in the boys' wash room. | | Sgt. Brown said the nuns are too distraught over the loss of life in yesterday's fire for questioning now in the earlier fire. |
| “It's Just Too Much,” Laments Archbishop | | By Mervin Bloc. | | CHICAGO - Dec. 2, 1958 - Three bodies, grotesquely contorted, lay sid by side in the X-ray room. | | A nurse pulled back a blanket, revealing the blood encrusted head of a boy. | | Msgr. James Hardiman, the archbishop's secretary, gasped. | | In a moment he recovered his composure and said: | | “They're just kids … poor little kids.” | | The archbishop himself, Albert Gregory Meyer, looked as though he wanted to cry. | |
| He make the sign of the cross, uttered a silent prayer and quietly left the room. | | “It's just too much,” he remarked as he completed a 40-minute tour of St. Anne's Hospital. | | The archbishop had been informed of the disaster while praying is his residence, 1555 State pkwy. Msgr. Hardiman, who brought the news, summoned the archbishop's chauffeur and the three went to the hospital. | | When they set out shortly after 4 p.m., the radio in their car told of 20 dead. By the time they pulled up at St. Anne's 35 minutes later, the radio said 40 were dead. | |
| Sister Almunda, administrator of the hospital, recognized the archbishop as he entered the lobby. He asked. | | “Where are the children?”. | | She led him into the auditorium, which had been converted into a makeshift ward. | | The archbishop want from bed to bed, cart to cart, making the sign of the cross and intoning a prayer over each survivor. | | “May the blessing of Almighty God, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost descend upon you and remain with you forever. Amen.” | |
| The nurses scurrying back and forth with supplies were too busy to notice him. Those who did gave no sign. | | Obviously disturbed by the moaning, the crying and the injuries, the archbishop became particularly upset as he viewed one badly burned child. With a catch in his throat, he exclaimed. | | “That's awful.” | | After the archbishop had blessed the 14 children in the huge room, Sister Almunda led him to an elevator. | | As soon as the elevator door slid open on the sixth floor, the passengers were unnerved by the most piteous screams. | | Besides outbursts due to pain, many victims were screaming for their mothers. | | The archbishop strode from room to room, blessing the greviously hurt, encouraging the staff. | | In the corridor, doctors and nurses hurried past, too preoccupied even to nod to him. | | When a photographer asked the archbishop to linger a few seconds over one motionless form, the archbishop replied:\” No, we're just in the way.” | |
| A hideously burned boy, clutching a crucifix, was wheeled into an empty room. The archbishop followed him, administering his blessing as attendants adjusted intravenous feedings. | | Then the archbishop walked into the sugery section. | | While doctors cleaned wounds, set fractures and sewed incisions, the tall priest tiptoed into six of the operating rooms. | | After blessing the patients there, he walked down to the third floor to visit two nuns injured in the fire. | | One, her face blackened, arms wrapped in bandages, opened her eyes and whispered. | | “I'm fine.” | |
| As he emerged from the room, two nurses and a nun were running down the hall pushing a large green tank of oxygen on a dolly. | | From there he went down to several suites adjoining the emergency room. | | Father Richard Bermingham, hospital chaplain, who preceded the archbishop down the passageway, opened a door and announced”. | | “They're all dead in here.” | |
| The archbishop waled in. a fireman shifting the bodies dropped to his knees as he entered. | | The archbishop spent several minutes there, then went to the site of the fire. | | The archbishop's driver, Vince McAleer, a policeman on leave, was overwhelmed by the suffering. However, McAleer spoke not of his own feelings but of the archbishop's when he said: | | “He's very, very upset.” |
| Hospitals Work Around Clock to Relieve Injured | | By Norton Ka. | | CHICAGO - Dec. 2, 1958 - Hundreds of doctors, nurses, nuns and medical aides last night worked around the clock in four hospitals, administering drugs, sedatives, blood and blood plasma in the battle to save lives and relieve the agony of 100 children burned or injured in the fire at Our Lady of the Angels Catholic school. | | The four hospitals are St. Anne's, 4590 W. Thomas st.; Franklin Boulevard Community, 3240 W. Franklin blvd.; Walther Memorial, 1116 N. Kedzie av., and Garfield Park Community, 3821 West Washington blvd. | | At St. Anne's, Sister Almunda, administrator of the hospital, realized what lay ahead when the first charred body was brought into the emergency room. She immediately put in calls for Dr. James Callahan, chief of staff, and Dr. James E. Segraves, chairman of the hospital's disaster plan. | |
| Her next move was to call in more telephone operators to answer the anguished calls of parents. | | But even before the summons doctors, nurses, laboratory and X-ray specialists throughout the city were making their way to the hospital to offer their services. | | Needed badly was whole blood, also plasma plus glucose solution containing what are know as the body's electrolytes. They are minerals, such as potassium, sodium and magnesium, which are lost in bad burns. | | Early today blood supplies began to run short. | | Another phase of the disaster plan went into effect. The Chicago Blood Donor Service, Inc., 2056 N. Clark st., was called. So was the Michael Reese Foundation and Mt. Sinai Blood Center. All responded quickly with plasma and whole blood. | | Despite requests that calls to the hospital be limited, the switchboard continued buzzing. Some calls offered their blood. | | Most difficult were the calls starting with: “My name is ….. and my boy or girl hasn't been found. I wonder if …”. | |
| The story at St. Anne's is only one. | | At Franklin Boulevard Community Hospital, the staff had been practicing an emergency disaster plan. | | An official trial run had been scheduled for Dec. 26. | | Dr. Patrick A DeMoon, administrator, and Dr. William J. Krulick, chief of staff, last night found that emergency. There was no humor when DeMoon said: | | “We moved up the date. Last night we saw it.” |
| Other School Tragedies | | CHICAGO, Dec 2 - The Chicago school explosion and fire Monday was among the worst such disasters ever to strike in the United States. | | According to the World Almanac, the worst school tragedy occurred on March 18, 1937, at New London Texas, when an explosion destroyed a schoolhouse, killing 294 persons. | | The almanac says a total of 174 children and two teacher were killed in a fire and panic at the Lakewood School in Collinwood, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb, on March 4, 1908. |
| Moscow Says School Fire No Accident | | LONDON, Dec 2 - (UPI) - Moscow radio said Tuesday the Chicago school fire was no accident because many American schools were firetraps. | | “According to official data of the American education authorities, over five million American children attend school in buildings which are regarded as not safe from the point of view of fires,” the broadcast said. | | The broadcast said it was significant that the U.S. Government “tabled in Congress a bill providing for a sum equal to only half of 1 percent of the allocations for military ends to be spent on new school buildings.” | | The fire was the major foreign story in European newspapers Tuesday. Morning and afternoon editions in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Lisbon, Madrid, Vienna, Stoockholm and Copenhagen put the story on the front pages, many with banner headlines. |
| Memories of Horror Rack School Janitor | |
| The janitor at Our Lady cannot go back again. James Raymond, 43, said from his hospital bed: “I couldn't work alongside memories of those horrible minutes.” | | HE IS recovering in Garfield Community hospital from loss of blood suffered when he cut his wrist while breaking a window. | | In a broken, weary voice he 'talked of the dead. “I don't want to know their names,” he said. | | He described a “peculiar kind of smoke” in the burning school. “I can breathe coal and wood smoke,” he said. “But I couldn't breathe that.” | | RAYMOND is expected to be a central figure in the inquest next week into the deaths. | | He has maintained the school stairwell was free of rubbish. But inspectors have said they found evidence of debris in the stairwell that helped spread the fire. |
From his hospital bed, Raymond insisted, “There was nothing in that stairway that could start a fire. | | HE SAID he was in the boiler room when he first saw “a red glow” through the window in a wall separating the room from the basement section of the stairwell. He ran to the church kitchen, adjacent to the boiler room, and told a cook to call the fire department. He said his next thought was the safe exit of the children. | | He ran into a first-floor room, he said, and lifted 11 children out a window. Then he turned and ran up a stairway to the second floor to open the fire escape door and lower the fire escape. | | BUT BY the time he reached the second floor, children were at windows gasping for air and some were mounting window ledges from which many jumped. | | He lowered the fire escape and turned back to try to lead children to safety. | | But the smoke began searing his lungs. He broke a corridor window with his flashlight. It was here that he cut his wrist. | | FROM THIS point, he said he could only recall dimly what happened afterward. | | He saw blood streaming from his wrist. With nothing to bind it, he rushed back to the boiler room and grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his wrist. | | Then he dragged himself to a door on the first floor, stumbled outside, and fainted. | | The next thing he recalls was the ambulance ride to the hospital. | | HIS OWN five children were in the school when the fire broke out. | | A son, John, 11, is in Franklin Blvd. Community hospital with a broken hip suffered when he leaped from a second-floor window. | | The four others escaped without Injuries. | | Raymond, of 1008 N. Hamlin, had been janitor at the school for 13 years. |
| How Fireman Feels Carrying Out Victims | | By Norman Glubo (Chicago American Newspaper) | | What does a fireman think about as he goes about the grim task of recovering bodies from a burning school. | | If he is a father himself his thoughts are probably the same as those of Richard Scheidt, who says: | | “I thought of my own four children at home and all the times I could have been nicer to them. | | “I thought about what I hope they will become some day. | | “And I tried to put myself in the place of the parents of the children I was carrying out. I knew many of them were down in the street below the second floor classroom I was working in. | | “I wondered how anyone could tell them that their children didn't escape.” | |
| Scheidt, who was pictured carrying an unconscious boy from the Our Lady of the Angels School fire on page 1 of yesterday's CHICAGO AMERICAN, is typical of the 250 firemen who fought the blaze that claimed 90 lives Monday. | | Scheidt is a 30-year-old veteran of seven years in the fire department. He lives with his wife Nancy and their three sons and a daughter in a six-room cottage at 1345 W. 97th st. | | His $5,400-a-year salary, a little less than $104 a week, doesn't begin to compensate for the tremendous risks he takes. He drives a 1953 Chevrolet and never has been able to afford a vacation. | | But there are other compensations besides money. Says the slim, balding six-footer. | | “It's a good position in life, even if you are just a fireman. | | “When I'm in my uniform I have the respect of the people. It's a nice feeling to know you're doing something people are grateful to you for. | | “I've never heard an angry word about a fireman.” | | Scheidt is a member of Rescue Squad 1, stationed at 209 N. Dearborn st. | |
| Life on a rescue squad, nicknamed the “dizzy wagon” because its members are kept so busy, is the most hectic in the fire department. | | There are only 13 squads to cover the entire city and each is manned by half a dozen young, vigorous volunteers. | | Where an engine or a truck company may respond to an average of only one alarm each 24 hours, rescue squads are called out as often as 10 or 15 or even 20 times. | | Monday started out as a typical day in the Scheidt household. | | Up to 6 a.m., Scheidt had coffee and toast with his pretty brown-haired wife. | | At 7 a.m. he and Nancy got the kids out of bed to kiss them goodby. | | Richard, 8, is a third-grade pupil and Nancy, 6, is in first grade at St. Margaret of Scotland Parochial School. The others are Thomas, 4, and Timothy, who will be 2 years old the day after Christmas. | | Scheidt drove to the Loop, parked his car across the street from the firehouse and reported in for 8 a.m. roll call. | |
| Thirty-five minutes later the squad reported to a fire at 229 Hill st., got back to the station at 9:05 and was out again at 9:10 on an inhalator call at 55 W. Van Buren st. | | Back in the station by 9:27 a.m. Scheidt and his buddies went through their regular Monday morning drill, testing their gas masks and cutting torches. | | After lunch the day was quiet until 2:42 p.m. when the first alarm from the school came in. | | Seated in an easy chair in his living room last night, his red-haired son Timothy in his lap, Scheidt recalled. | | “We had no idea it was a school on fire. It was out of our territory and we didn't think much about it until the radio operator called all available ambulances and police wagons to the scene. | | “Then we knew someone was trapped or injured. We thought it must be a factory. We get them all the time. It never occurred to us that a school could go like that.” | |
| At exactly 3:09 p.m. the loudspeaker in the firehouse called for Squad 1 to proceed to 3800 Iowa st. Continued Scheidt. | | “One of our guys who lives on the West Side told us it must be the Our Lady of the Angels School. But we tried to put it out of our minds And we still thought it must be a factory across the street, or something.” | | As the red doors to the station swung open, Scheidt leaped to his post at the rear of the truck. | | By the time the driver turned north into Dearborn street Scheidt had slipped on his rubber fire coat. As the truck rumbled across the bridge over the Chicago River, Scheidt yanked off his shoes, and pulled on his boots. | | Squad 1 took Dearborn street to Chicago avenue, then headed west to Hamlin avenue. Recalls. Scheidt. | | “It was a very clear day. It wasn't at all uncomfortable.” | |
| As Scheidt's squad pulled up a block from the fire scene at about 3:18 p.m. the men saw smoke pouring from the school building. Says Scheidt: “I grabbed my ax and pike pole and ran after our captain, Harry Whedon, to the school. | | “As we got close I saw flames still shooting out of the northwest windows on the second floor and I knew we were in for some rescue work.” | | Scheidt recalls that it didn't look like much of a fire from the outside. He said: | | “If it hadn't been for the children inside it probably wouldn't have been more than a box alarm with maybe half a dozen pieces of equipment.” | | Scheidt's squad reported to Chief Fire Marshal Raymond Daley who ordered them to the second floor to get into the school rooms. | | As Scheidt and his buddies climbed a stairway on the opposite side of the building from the flames, they found the corridor already crowded with firemen operating hose lines. | |
| Entering the first classroom, Scheidt was greeted by a scene that turned an ordinary day into one he will never forget. Said Scheidt. | | “There wasn't much sign of fire in the room at all. But the water was shin deep. | | “Then up at the far end of the room I saw about a dozen children all huddled together. And the nun was lying over the children as if she was trying to protect them. Nobody was burned. | | “They had all suffocated.” | | Scheidt made trip after trip downstairs to carry the lifeless forms to waiting ambulances. | | When everyone was removed from the first room, he said, his squad broke through the wall to the next room where they found about 20 bodies huddled near the windows. The youngsters had been asphyxiated before they could leap to safety. | | When the second room was cleared, Scheidt's men moved on to a third room where they removed 20 more bodies. Said Scheidt: “You know, after a while on the fire department you think you have seen the worst. | | “I worked on the Reliance Hotel fire when five firemen were killed. I was at the Barton Hotel fire on Skid Row when 29 men were killed. | | “I was out at the “L” wreck at Wilson avenue a couple of years ago and I thought nothing could be worse. | | “But I've never seen anything like that school fire. All those children up there and all those parents outside hoping and praying that their kids weren't in there. | | “It wasn't like the usual crowd. There was no screaming or shouting. Everyone seemed to be in a state of shock. They couldn't even move. | | “How did I feel? It's hard to put it into words. I was just numbed.” | |
| When the last body was removed from the charred building, Scheidt's squad was sent back to its station where it logged in at 6:32 p.m. | | At 7:50 p.m., the station record book shows, the squad was called to sweep water from a broken main in a store at 17 N. State st. But nobody remembers much about that. | | An ex-Marine who followed three brothers on the fire department, Scheidt said he would be happy to see his three sons follow in his footsteps. | | Said Scheidt: “It's a wonderful job. To me it is the greatest public service there is.” | | “Echoes Nancy, her brown eyes gleaming. | | “It's a good life. We'd be proud of them.” |
| Third Worst In Nation | | CHICAGO, Dec. 3 - (AP) - The fire that struck Our Lady of the Angels School Monday was the third worst school fire in the nation in the last 100 years and the worst in Chicago in 55 years. | | The greatest school disaster occurred March 18, 1937, when 294 died in a school explosion and fire in New London, Tex. | | The other major school fire claimed 176 lives in the Collinwood School in Cleveland March 4, 1908. | | The worst fire in Chicago took 602 lives Dec. 30, 1903, when the Iroquois Theater burned. | | On June 5, 1946, 61 persons perished in a fire in the LaSalle Hotel, Chicago. | | There have been 26 fires in this country in which as many as 50 persons died. Two were school fires. Only eight fires with such a loss of life have occurred in the last 20 years, none of them in schools. | | Worst of these recent fires was the Cocoanut Grove Night Club blaze in Boston Nov. 28, 1942, in which 498 died. | | Other fires with major losses of life in the last two decades are. | | Dec. 7, 1946 - 119 dead in Winecoff Hotel fire, Atlanta, Ga. | | Oct. 20, 1944 - 135 killed in Cleveland liquid gas explosion and fire. | | July 6, 1944 - 168 dead in Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus fire at Hartford, Conn. | | April 23, 1940 - 198 killed in Negro dance hall fire at Natchez, Miss. |
| Priests Try Vainly To Comfort Bereaved Relatives And Parents | | By ODMUND D'MOCH | | CHICAGO, Dec. 3 - (AP) - The acrid stench of burned bodies and clothing hung heavily over the morgue at the Cook County Hospital today. | | Inside, scores of priests and hospital attendants tried to comfort bereaved relatives still trying to identify the bodies of schoolchildren who died at Monday's fire at Our Lady of the Angels Roman Catholic School. | | Ninety sheet-covered bodies lay on stretchers in three rooms of the morgue basement. Some had been identified within hours after the fire. | | Some fire-blackened bodies contorted in agony may never be identified. | | Among white-clad nurses and morgue attendants could be seen the frocked figures of priests. Here was one, his arm around the shoulder of the weeping woman, trying to console her. | | “It was the will of God,” was heard in a low whisper from the priest. “Your daughter is an angel in heaven.” | | The woman wept unrestrainedly. | |
| From the other side of the room came a shriek. A woman collapsed and immediately attendants ringed her, eased her into a chair and administered smelling salts. | | Nearby stood a couple in their 30s. Pale, dry of tears, they fingered a rosary, their lips moving wordlessly. The man had said earlier his daughter was not reported in any of the half-dozen hospitals to which many of the children had been taken. The couple came to the morgue, but had not looked at any of the unidentified children. They were praying she still might have only been injured, perhaps still in a hospital through some mixup in names. | | Hovering among the parishioners was Father Joseph Oginibene. This 32-year old priest, a native Chicagoan, came to Our Lady as the parish was know, in 1952. It was his first assignment after ordination. | |
| He was “Father Joe” to everyone. | | It was his daily routine to walk about the schoolyard and near the entrances during recess, the noon lunch period and as the children left the building at 3 p.m. | | Monday, Father Ognibene met an old friend for lunch. They dallied at the table. Then he noticed it would soon be time for his young parishioners to leave school for home. | | “I was hurrying to the school in my car,” he said. “I saw smoke coming from the upper windows and drove my car the wrong way up a one-way street. I parked the car and ran into the building. | | “Some children were leaving the building in an orderly fire-drill manner. Others were running about, screaming. Then everything was ablaze. | | “I tried … I wanted to … It was the will of God.” | | When the first bodies began arriving at the morgue, Father Joe was asked to make tentative identification. He knew the greatest force of the fire was concentrated in the section housing Rooms 207, 208, 209, 211 and 212. | |
| Scores of these children he knew by name. All were his friends. | | Yet, when he had to identify them by name, or grade, he could only whisper: “I'm not sure of this little one … I think this one was in 209 … This boy was … I'm not sure.” | | He pressed a thin, shaking hand to his temple. For a moment, it appeared that he might collapse. An attendant slipped a bottle of salts to the priest's nostrils and he straightened up, backing away from the pungent odor. | | Then he walked among the bereaved relatives. He stopped, talked with a weeping father. | | “It was the will of God, Stanley. Your daughter is now an angel in heaven.” |
| Struggle to Save Fire Survivors Continues | | CHICAGO, Dec. 3 - (AP) -. | | A long, hard struggle to save survivors of Chicago's tragic school fire was in progress in the quiet hospitals Wednesday while the 90 dead were mourned in the hush of funeral homes. | | Puzzled investigators pushed efforts to determine the cause. | | They were joined by officials from other cities seeking to make sure their schools are protected against a similar disaster. | | An appeal for blood for children under treatment in hospitals touched off a rush of donors. | | Gifts of money to help familes of the injured and the dead poured in at a rate of more than $2000 an hour. The fund passed the $60,000 mark 24 hours after it was established. | | Still in hospitals were 72 patients who were burned or injured in other ways, and 14 were on the critical list. Those with severe burns confronted doctors with the difficult double task of preserving life while healing bodies. | | Fire Commissioner Robert J. Quinn expressed belief the fire started in papers stacked near the bottom of a wooden staircase in the northeast corner of the school. | | But how it began remained an unanswered question. Arson is being considered. So is the possibility that a schoolboy sneaked a smoke in the basement and carelessly flipped away his cigaret. | | While schools in many parts of the nation were being rechecked for fire hazards, officials of at least a half dozen cities arranged to come to Chicago to get a first hand account of the disaster of Our Lady of the Angels School. Among them were officials of New York, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Miami, San Francisco and CLeveland. |
| Fire Leads to School Checkups | | WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - (AP) - Schools in many parts of the nation were being rechecked anew for fire hazards Wednesday in the wake of the Chicago blaze which took 90 lives. | | Numerous steps to insure safety for children were instituted, including new fire drill procedures. | | Some cities, such as New York, St. Louis and Pittsburgh, were sending officials to Chicago for a first-hand account of what authorities had learned there. California was doing likewise. | | At New Haven, Conn., city officials announced that they are placing school fire prevention and evacuation procedures under direct supervision of the fire department. | | In Kansas City a special new check of schools was being made by a team of 30 inspectors. | | Both New York state and city authorities ordered sweeping new safety surveys. | | Meanwhile in Chicago anguished parents prepared to bury their 87 children who with three nuns died in Chicago's worst school fire, the puzzling cause of the fiery catastrophe still plagued investigators. | |
| As the search for clues went on, plans for a single funeral for the children were announced by church officials. | | Seventy-five of the injured still required hospitalization. Two of them were nuns and one a school janitor. Eleven children were in critical condition. | | Their battle was made easier by the overwhelming response to appeals for blood and even skin for grafts. Calls from prospective blood donors across the country were so great that many were told to call later in the week, and even after. | | In the morgue, three charred bodies still lay unidentified. Three girls were missing but hopeful parents refused to believe the victims where their daughters. |
| Rites Held for Nuns Killed in School Fire | | CHICAGO, Dec 4 - (AP) -Funeral rites for the first of 90 victims claimed by the fire which swept through a parochial grade school began Thursday in the church a few steps away from the seared hulk of the school building. | | Archbishop Albert Gregory Meyer sang a requiem high mass for three blacked-robed nuns who perished trying to save their young pupils in the Our Lady of the Angels School. | | Burial was in Mount Calvary cemetery. | | A mass funeral for some 28 of the 87 child victims will be held Friday in an armory in the northwest side neighborhood. | | One of the most tragic cases following the fire was that of Stanley Burda, whose daughter, Beverley Ann, 13, died in the blaze. Burda had an eye operation the day of the fire to remove a piece of steel chip. | | He left the hospital to be at his wife's side, but was warned by doctors that he must not cry - salt tears might scald the wounded eye and blind it. | | At the scene he broke down and the tears streamed down his face. |
| 10,000 Mourners at Funeral Of Three Nuns Killed in Fire | | CHICAGO, Dec 4 - (UPI) - Three heroic nuns and five children - the first of 90 dead in the Our Lady of the Angels School fire - were laid to rest Thursday. | | Ten thousand mourners came to the parish church, where the smell of smoke and charred wood from the school next door still hung heavily in the air. | | They honored the selfless sisters who died with their children in Monday's tragedy. | |
| The text of their funeral sermon was the same which had guided their lives and given meaning to their deaths - 20 words from St. Mark. | | “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for of such is the kingdom of God.” | | In other West Side churches, services were held for five of the school's 87 dead children - Charles Nuebert, 9, Lorraine Nieri, 12, Mary Virgilio, 15, James Rogona, 9, and Karen Margaret Hobik, 13. | | Archbishop Albert G. Meyer of Chicago and Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York will offer masses in a National Guard armory for 27 of the victims Friday. Private services will be held for the others Friday and Saturday. | | The city's sorrow Thursday centered on the three women of God who were caught up in Chicago's greatest fire desaster in 55 years. | | The archbishop celebrated their funeral mass and Msgr. William McManus, superintendent of Chicago's Parochial schools, delivered their sermon. | | “Our three sisters died a magnificent death,” the monsignor said. “When the fire broke out they knew what to do - pray and save the children - and they did this until their death.” | |
| He recalled that firemen heard the voices of the doomed nuns through the smoke and fire Monday. | | They were serenely repeating the last words of the Hail Mary - “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death; amen.” | | “No mother of any child killed in this fire could have been more unselfish or more heroic than these nuns,” the priest said. | | “They had taught, and believed, that all that matters is a happy death,” he said. “No lesson was ever so well taught as their last lesson.” | | Msgr. McManus did not mention the nuns' names in his sermon because “they would not have wanted it.” But their names and the way they died were well known to the mourners. They were. | | Sister Mary Clare Therese, 27; Sister Mary St. Canice, 44; Sister Mary Seraphica, 48. | | They were nuns of the order of Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin. |
| Mass Offered for 28 Small Victims of Fire | | CHICAGO, Dec. 5 - (AP) - Twenty-eight small coffins lay in the austere setting of a military armory Friday morning for last solemn tributes to the young victims of Monday's parochial grade school fire. | | It was a harsh setting - although black and purple draperies softened the atmosphere and a portable altar stood at the front of big Northwest Armory drill hall. But there was no church big enough. | | Four of the 87 children and three nuns who died when flames swept Our Lady of the Angels school were buried Thursday. Private services were being held in churches Friday for many of the other children. Other services will be held Saturday. | | Meanwhile, scores of medical authorities - including two Army doctors - worked to save the 70 of them on the critical list. | | A special detail of 50 fire department officers stepped up citywide inspection of schools. | |
| The Most Rev. Albert Gregory Meyer, Roman Catholic archbishop of Chicago, offered the Solemn Requiem Mass for the 28 children. | | The Mass in the 6,100-seat armory was not opened to the public. Families of the 28 children were given 150 tickets each to distribute among parents, relatives and close friends. | | Students from all Catholic schools attended services in some 400 churches in the Chicago archdiocese while the funeral was held in the armory. |
| Fire Victim's Souls Commended to God | | CHICAGO, Dec. 5 - (AP) - The souls of 27 small victims of Chicago's tragic school fire were commended to God Friday in a color-rich ceremony conducted in the stark setting of a military drill hall. | | The fire tonight claimed its 91st victim, Victor Jocobellis, 9. He suffered extensive burns. | | A hushed crowd of 7000 mourners jammed the Northwest Armory for the mass funeral. | | Archbishop Albert Gregory Meyer sang a requiem high mass while Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York looked on from a red-draped throne to the left of the altar. | | Bishop Raymond Hillinger thanked the world for its compassion and told it, in turn, that love and charity had risen like the fabled phoenix from the ashes of the fire. | | These were the final rites for 27 of the 88 youngsters who perished in the blaze that spread quick death Monday in Our Lady of the Angels school. Separate services were held for the other children and the three nuns who died with the. |
| 91st Chicago Victim Of School Fire Dies | | CHICAGO, Dec. 6 - (AP) - Puzzled investigators Saturday began anew the somber task of finding the cause of Monday's fire at Our Lady of the Angels School, which has claimed the lives of 88 pupils and three nuns. | | As mass funeral rites for 27 of the young victims in the severe surroundings of a National Guard armory ended Friday, Fire Commissioner Robert J. Quinn pledged. | | “We are going over everything we know and we will cover the building again from basement to roof.” | | Mourners who returned from four chill, windswept cemeteries sorrowed at the news of the death of Victor Jacobellis, 9, a victim of extensive burns. | |
| His death boosted the toll to 91 victims in the third worst school fire in the nation's history. | | Roman Catholic Bishop Raymond Hillinger of Chicago sought to supply his church's answer to the question on the lips of many Christians, Roman Catholic and non-Catholic alike: how could heaven permit such a tragedy. | | In his funeral sermon, while looking over the draped coffins, Bishop Hillinger recalled that Jesus himself cried out. | | “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”. | | “God does not allow disasters to take place without reason,” he said. “He will draw untold good from the purgatory of this week. | | “We have seen faith that must move mountains of doubt, perhaps even the doubt in the minds of Communists and unbelievers. We have seen hope in the tear stained faces of the bereaved, and they knelt in prayer to, and in communion with him who said, 'I am the resurrection and the life.'”. | | Archbishop Albert Gregory Meyer, who assumed his post only 16 days before disaster struck his flock of nearly two million Catholics in the Chicago area, sang the mass before 7.000 mourners in the northwest side armory. Other services were constructed throughout the city. | |
| More than 30 victims were buried side by side in the Holy Innocents section of the Queen of Heaven cemetery. Other youngsters were laid to rest in family plots. Services for more than a score of other victims were to be held Saturday. | | The death Friday night of the Jacobellis boy left 10 young victims of the fire still in critical condition in hospitals. Fifty-six others remain in area hospitals. |
| 500 Children Face Questioning In School Fire | | CHICAGO, Dec. 6 - (UPI) - Heavy-hearted city authorities Saturday mapped additional steps in an exhaustive, formal investigation into the Our Lady of the Angels fire. | | Commissioner Quinn said police and fire experts would quiz at least 500 of the 1200 boys and girls who escaped from the inferno that saddened the world. | | Quinn, top assistants and police and building experts revisited the charred, water-soaked ruins of the school late Saturday. | | Quinn said each pupil who was in the upper floor of the old 2-story building when the fire broke out Monday afternoon would be asked. | | What children left the classrooms during the half-hour or so before the fire was noticed. | | What students smoked cigarets. | | What students dumped wastepaper in the basement on the fatal day, and what was the procedure. | | The fire commissioner said investigators were sure of one thing - the blaze started at the bottom of the northeast stairway of the school. |
| Bereaved Families Mourn in Chicago | | CHICAGO, Dec. 7 - (UPI) -. | | Priests fought vainly Sunday for words to comfort grief-striken families of Our Lady of the Angels Roman Catholic Church, where 91 lives were lost Monday. | | “Any words we say to these people will fall short of the experiences they have lived through this week,” the monsignor said. | | Cause of the blaze which killed 88 children and three nuns still has not been determined. | | Eighty-seven children and three nuns were buried after services Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Seventy of the children, ranging in age from 9 to 15, were buried Friday, 27 of them after mass services in Northwest Armory with Archbishop Albert G. Meyer celebrating the mass and Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York presiding. | | A wake for Victor Jocobellis, 9, who died Friday in St. Anne's Hospital to become the 91st victim of the fire, was to be held Sunday night, with funeral services Monday. | | Father John Egan, another priest of the parish, said he sought help from the Gospel in his sermon. The Gospel today, the second Sunday of Advent, was Matthew 11, and included these words: “...and Jesus answered ... 'Go and report to John what you have heard and seen: The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise, the poor have the gospel preached to them: What did you go out to the desert to see? A reed shaken by the wind...” | | Families also received their copies of the parish weekly bulletin at their entrance of the church Sunday. Across the front of the bulletin in heavy black letter were the words. | | “Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted.” |
| 9-Year-Old Boy Dies, Raises Chicago School Fire Toll to 92 |
CHICAGO, Dec. 8 - (AP) - The fire at Our Lady of the Angels School last week claimed its 92nd victim Monday. | | Kurt Schutt, 9, died in Edgewater Hospital where he had been getting special treatment for burns and other injuries. | | Eighty-seven children and three Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary died in the fire last Monday. Friday night another of the critically injured died in a hospital. | | There still are 57 persons in seven hospitals with burns and injuries as a result of the blaze. Ten of them are on the critical list. | | Coroner Walter E. McCarron went about selecting a blue ribbon coroner's jury. The inquest will open Wednesday. He promised “everything will be brought out.” | | He said he hopes to have available the fire and building inspection records of the school. |
| Boy Becomes 92d Victim of Chicago Fire |
CHICAGO, Dec. 8 - (UPI) - An artificial kidney failed Monday to save the life of the 92d victim of CHicago's Our Lady of the Angels School fire. | | Kurt Shutt, 9, died in Edgewater Hospital just one week after the West Side parochial school turned into an incinerator of death. | | Eighty-seven children and three nuns died within a few minutes last Monday, and the fire claimed another child victim in a hospital Friday night. | | Kurt had been burned over 80 percent of his body. Doctors used Chicago's only artificial kidney to drain off body poisons, but the boy was too horribly burned to survive. His mother, Dorothy, 32, was at the bedside when her son died. | | There were still 57 children in the hospitals, 10 of them in critical condition. | | A blue ribbon coroner's jury was named to investigate the causes of the tragedy. |
| School Fire Horror Probed | | CHICAGO, Dec. 11 - (AP) - A coroner's jury of experts Wednesday visited the ruins of Chicago's worst school fire in an effort to establish what caused it. | | Members of the jury, principally specialists in fire investigations and build construction, carefully inspected the fire-blackened Our Lady of the Angels school where 89 children and three nuns were fatally injured Dec. 1. | | On the upper floor of the two-story school house, where virtually all the victims were trapped, they saw charred walls and what little remained of the roof. Now covered open text books on most of the desks in what once were crowded class rooms. | | The jurors credited a closed steel door that shut off a stairway at the rear of the building with holding back the fire from the first floor as it raced upward from the basement. There was no such door on the second floor. | | The stair well, acting as a flue, appeared to have carried the full force of the fire to the upper floor. | | Earlier, the jury heard pleas from several weeping mothers of fire victims that steps be taken to prevent a repetition of the tragic blaze. | | Mrs. Fred Wisz, 31, whose son, Joseph, 10, perished in the fire, was led to the witness stand by her husband, Mario, 38. | | “As a mother, I hope and pray it never, never, never, will happen again,” she said. “Make our schools more safe. It happened. It was God's way. Who knows why? I hope my son did not lose his life in vain.” |
| Chicago School Afire Long Before 1st Alarm | | CHICAGO, Dec. 11 - (UPI) - The janitor of Our Lady of the Angels School testified Thursday that the tragic fire was blazing 17 to 22 minutes before the first fire alarm was turned in. | | James Raymond's testimony on the second day of an inquest into the Dec. 1 disaster increased the mystery surrounding Chicago's worst fire tragedy in 55 years. Ninety-two children and nuns were killed. | | Raymond, 44, a tense, lean father of seven children, insisted he saw wisps of smoke and a red glowing window in the basement of the school at “between 2:20 and 2:25” on the afternoon of Dec. 1. | | He said he dashed into the neighboring rectory, shouted to the housekeeper “call the fire department quick,” and then ran into the school. | |
| Sgt. Drew Brown of the police arson squad, hammering away at the janitor's story, asked, “Are you sure the call was made by the housekeeper?”. | | “I'm not sure,” Raymond replied. | | Fire department offficials have insisted the first alarm on the fire was not received until 2:42 - 17 to 22 minutes after the time Raymond said he saw the glowing window. | | Fire trucks were at the scene within two minutes after the alarm came in. But by that time children were leaping in flames from second floor windows or dying in the smoke and heat which swirled into the classrooms. | |
| Raymond, who had five of his children in the school, fought to save the students until he was knocked out from behind. It was believed a fireman hit the janitor to prevent him from running back into the school. | | Raymond appeared at the inquest with his left arm bandaged and a lawyer by his side. He has refused to take a lie test on his attorney's advice, claiming he is still in a state of shock. | | The lawyer, John J. Hogan, protested Thursday that Raymond is still “not physically and emotionally able to give an account of the events of Dec. 1.” | | Hogan also objected when the coroner's jury forman asked if Raymond had ever been under a doctor's care for physical or mental ailments. | | Raymond's testimony left several key questions unanswered. | | He did not explain how he fixed the time when he said he saw the fire. | | He was not clear on whether a steel door was closed between the school's boiler room and the stairwell where the fire apparently started. |
| Terror, Torment Related by School Fire Victims | | BY TOM LEAC. | | CHICAGO, Dec. 13 - This is the story - the children's story-of the terror and confusion and heroics in the burning classrooms of Our Lady of the Angels School. | | Unlike most stories, it does not have a happy ending. It concludes with 89 children and three nuns dead and many others still in hospitals with painful burns and injuries. | | This is the injured children's story. | | A reporter and photographer for THE CHICAGO AMERICAN visited Franklin Boulevard Hospital. | | The youngsters lying in clean, white beds manage to smile despite their agony from the searing burns. Scars they will bear for the rest of their lives will be reminders of the tragedy. Others have broken bones and bruises received when they jumped from second floor windows. | |
| For the dead it is over. For the injured and for parents of the dead, the horror of the holocaust lives on. | | It lives on for Diane Traynor, 9, of 956 N. Springfield av. She lies on her stomach, a huge drum protecting her badly burned back, legs and arms from contact with the bed covers. Skin grafting probably will be needed because of second and third degree burns. | | She said haltingly: “We suddenly saw smoke and everyone got excited. Sister Mary Seraphica (one of the nuns who perished) told us not to be frightened and to pray. But everybody was scared. The room got filled with smoke and I felt like I was burning all over. Everyone was pushing toward the windows. I can't remember how I got out. It was so dark in the room.” | | Asked what she would like most, the diminutive girl replied. | | “To go home and back to school.” | | Sharing the room with Diane, Theresa DePalma, 10, of 1006 N. Lawndale av., sits up in bed. She can't use either of her badly burned hands. A fifth grader, she was in room 212, in which many children perished. | |
| She said: | | “We were studying geography when we saw smoke coming through cracks in the door. Sister Mary Clare Therese_(she also died in the fire) opened the door and then shut it when the smoke came in real fast. Everyone was running and pushing toward the window then. I started praying. | | “A fireman helped me down a ladder and I sat down on the ground. Someone put a blanket on me. My brother Don, who's 13, was looking for me. When he found me, he took me to an ambulance. I was really glad to see him. | | “I never did find my best girlfriend, Pat, who sat near me. The room was so full of smoke and everyone was choking. You couldn't see anything or hardly breathe. I think Pat died.” (Patricia Kpzma, 10, of 847 N. Hamlin av., was one of the children who perished.) John Uting, 10, of 3225 W. Division St., forces a smile. She is one of Theresa's classmates. She said: “The sister tried to open the door, but there was too much hot smoke. 1 tried to run over and help her, but it was so hot I thought was burning up.” | |
| The fire seems like a nightmare to James Krajewski, 12, of 946 N. Avers av. He suffered fractures of both legs a spine injury when he jumped out of a second floor window. He keeps asking himself why he didn't wait for firemen instead of jumping. He said: | | “The door started to shake and rattle and when the sister opened it smoke poured in. Everyone was yelling. Another boy and I ran to the window and opened it. Everyone was pushing and it got real hot. Then I jumped. I think I was knocked out for a while. I still don't remember deciding to jump.” His hospital roommate, Frank Consiglio, 10, of 376 N. Hamlin blvd., is amazed he's still alive. He described how black, hot smoke got so thick that he fainted. How long he was out or why he woke, he doesn't know. He recalled. | | “When I woke up, the room was real hot and almost everyone was gone. I stayed close to the floor so I could breathe and made my way to the window. A fireman helped me out.” Detectives have been questioning the children in the hospitals about smoking in the school. | |
| Several pupils told a reporter they hadn't seen any schoolmates smoking in the school, but had seen them with cigarets after clas. | | They couldn't identify any of them. | | This was the children's story. Many of them will return to their homes shortly. For others there are weeks of hospitalization and painful skin grafts. |
| Girl Fire Victim, 9, Wonders Why Cards Have Stopped Coming | | “Charlene, Charlene. I'm so afraid.” | | That was Jannet Gasteier calling to her best friend, classmate and across-the-street neighbor. | | Teary-eyed, both girls fought blindly to escape the angry heat that rushed into Room 210 at Our Lady of the Angels School that awful day almost two weeks ago. | | When she could stand it no longer, Charlene Campanale, 9, of 1054 N. Springfield, jumped from the second-floor window. | |
| Jannet Gasteier, 9, of 1057 N. Springfield never got out. She died in the inferno. | | When Charlene struck the ground outside the school, she broke her back and split her hipbone. | | Rescuers snatched her away from the other falling bodies and sped her to Norwegian Hospital, 1044 N. Francisco. | | She's been there ever since. Flat on her back. Unable to look any way but up at the ceiling. | | Doctors have put her head in traction. They say she must not turn over. Not even move, if possible. Otherwise her spinal injury might be permanent. |
But she has nightmares. In the lonely hours of the night, she awakens from tortured dreams in which she hears Jannet calling to her. | | “Mommy, Mommy. Hold me. I'm scared, mommy.” | | And her mother is there to hold her, because that is when Charlene tries to turn over. Her mother is there not just to comfort her, but to keep her from aggravating her injury. | | Blue-eyed, brown-haired Charlene doesn't know Jannet is dead. | | Mrs. LaVergne Campanale, 28, her mother, can't bring herself to tell Charlene. “Charlene keeps asking about Jannet. I tell her that she has a broken leg, but that I don't know which hospital Jannet is in. Charlene wants to send her a card. Cards. They have become the big thing in Charlene's life.” Mrs. Campanale said. | | Doctors have fitted Charlene with special prism glasses, so that even though she must lie on her back she can see the cards her mother has tacked to the wall. | | When Charlene first arrived at the hospital, she received the brightly colored cards by the dozens. | | Now the number sent to her has dwindled to almost none. This has saddened the sick little girl who told her mother: “Gee, mommy. They are so nice. They make me feel so good, I enjoy them more than comic books.” | |
| Mrs. Campanale feels well-wishers may be overlooking Charlene because she is the only one of the injured hospitalized at Norwegian American. Most of the efforts to ? the children are concentrated at hospitals where several are being treated. | | The pastor of Our Lady of the Angels issued another kind of appeal. | | The Rt. Rev. Msgr. Joseph F. Cussen said that trained nurses and blood donations “from people who have been victims of burns themselves” are urgently needed to help the injured children. | | He said nurses and donors should telephone him at the church. | | Meanwhile Saturday, the Chicago Our Lady of the Angels Fund which was nearing $300,000 received another boost. | | The publishers of the World Book Encyclopedia announced $1,000 will be donated in memory of an employe's(sic) brother who died in the disaster. | | Bailey K. Howard, president, said the donation will be made in the name of Lawrence Grasso, 13-year-old brother of Mary Ann Grasso, 531 N. Trumbull, who is employed in the firm's IBM department. | | Howard said the board of directors also voted to replace books destroyed in the school fire with five sets of the World Book Encyclopedia. |
| Fire. Thirty-Eight O Eight Iowa...The Alarm Was Desperate, the Tragedy Incredible! | | CHICAGO, Dec 15 - (Newsweek)- At 2:40 of a clear and cold afternoon on Chicago's West Side, the janitor of Our Lady of the Angels parochial school - a 50-year-old red-brick building that used to be a church - had just completed a routine check of the school's boiler room on Hamlin Street. The janitor, James Raymond, was walking slowly along the north side of the two-story building when he noticed smoke coming out of a second-floor window. “I ran to the door of the rectory, jerked it open, and yelled to the cook inside: 'Call the Fire Department, quick!'”. | | In a second-story, eighth-grade classroom, Sister Mary Davidis was at the blackboard explaining a problem in arithmetic. There were twenty minutes to go before school would be over for the day. “One of the boys in the back row said, very quietly: 'Sister, I smell smoke.' I thought the most important thing was to prevent panic, so I slowly walked to the back door and opened it. Thick smoke started pouring in. I urged the children to be quiet and to move all the chairs away from the windows because I could see that was probably the only way out.” | | At 2:42, the speaker box at Engine Co. 85, Eighteenth Battalion, five blocks away, rasped: “Engine 85, Fire. Thirty eight O eight Iowa. Engine 85, Fire. Thirty eight O eight Iowa.” Lt. Stanley Wojnicki picked up his phone and acknowledged the alarm. “Thirty-eight O eight Iowa.” Then he jumped aboard the clanging engine that was already pulling out. | | Inside the north wing of the school, flames were shooting up the back stairwell. Where they had started, or how, no one could be sure but apparently the fire had got its impetus from trash at the back stairway's foot. Sister Mary Davidis told her class to shout across the courtyard to the south wing: “The school is on fire, the school is on fire.” Seconds later, the alarms began to ring throughout the building. In the south wing, the children started filing out. In the north wing's ground floor, the four lower grades did the same, excited but orderly. Sister St. Florence, the principal, led her third grade to the street. “Then I went back. I saw that the children from the second floor had stopped half way on the stairs. They were afraid to go farther. 'Come on,' I called, 'it's safe down here. Just hurry up'.” On the second floor, Sister Mary Davidis had been right: The windows were the only way out. One after another, the children climbed out to the ledge, then dropped. | | At 2:43 janitor Raymond was running up the front staircase. “The hallway was full of smoke. The dirtiest and thickest smoke I ever saw. Kids were wandering all around coughing and crying. I grabbed a few by their hands and took them to the fire escape. I went back to one of the locker rooms where I heard somebody banging on the door. The door wouldn't open so I busted it. I grabbed a few kids and led them through the smoke to the fire escape. I must have made about five trips like that. Then I passed out.” | | On the second floor, Sister Andrienne, tall among her frightened children was trying to get them down the smoke-choked stairs. “I kept telling them: 'Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, just run down the stairs.' But the stairway was beginning to burn now and the children balked at going through. Some of them I had to roll down these stairs. And some I carried. God gave me untold strength.” | | At 2:44 Patrolman Matthew Landers, who had heard the alarm in his squad car, skidded up in front of the school. “It was a horrible sight. About twenty kids laying around on the ground, all twisted and some unconscious. I carried three of them to my car and put them on the back seat. Some other fellow got in next to me carrying a girl who was all bleeding. I never found out who he was. We took off for Garfield Park Hospital and I saw the first firemen coming.” | | Engine 85 roared up. “It couldn't have taken us more than a minute or two to get there,” said Lieutenant Wojnicki. “When we pulled up, we saw hell.” (Tough, thickset Stanley Wojnicki broke down and wept while talking to Newsweek's reporter two days later.. | | Like Sister Mary Davidis, 27-year-old Sister Clara Therese - “always cheerful and of beautiful face” - realized that her class could escape only by the windows. She perched herself quietly on the sill and handed the children out to the ledge, encouraged them to drop with words like: “It's not really so far.” (It was actually about 25 feet.) The classroom by then was aflame. It was furnace hot. But the children got out and to the ground. Sister Clara Therese, duty done, fell back into the classroom. And there Sister Therese died. | | At 2:45 Hook and Ladder Co. No. 35 got there with five men and Lt. Charles Kamin. “Children were jumping out of the second-floor windows or leaning out yelling for help,” said Kamin. “I ordered one ladder run up, then I ran around the corner and saw more bodies in the court and more kids at the windows. I yelled at my men to bring the other ladders and the life net to that side. I ran up one of the ladders myself. I looked around and the man behind me was being sick at his stomach. The sight was too much.” | | The kids in Sister Mary Davidis's room were luckier than others. Broken legs and twisted ankles, but alive. “By the time the firemen ran up the first ladder to our window, most of the children were already on the ground. But the air was so hot I burned my hand just by touching the window sill. After all of the children had left, I got down with a fireman's help). The room was an inferno.” (Sister Mary Davidis was hospitalized with burned hands and blistered face.) | | At 2:51 the Fire Department sounded the five-eleven alarm calling all available city equipment to the scene. Capt. Harry Penzin of the Austin Police Station called on his radio for every police wagon and ambulance in Chicago. “I sent my men out to direct the traffic, make sure we didn't have any collisions of rescue equipment. In minutes, we had twenty stretcher cars there.” All the streets around the school were filling up now with heavy equipment and cars. Among the firemen and policemen were inextricably mingled the swelling crowd of frenzied parents. | | Thirteen-year-old Joey Urban was pressed into a second-floor window when he saw his mother, Mrs. Lucille Urban, frantically waving to him in the turmoil directly below. “I hollered to my boy to jump, for god's sakes, jump, because I saw there was no time for the firemen to pick him up. Joey yelled something back, and then he came down. I stood there and just tried to catch him. Heavens be blessed, I did. I broke his fall with this here knee” - it was bloody and bruised - “and we both fell on the ground. But I saved my boy.” | | At 3 o'clock Lieutenant Kamin had all his ladders working at top speed. “My men were passing the children through the windows.” Then, at the top of his own ladder, “I saw the most terrifying thing in my life. In front of me was a smoke-filled window full of kids laying on top of each other in I don't know how many layers. They must have been screaming but I couldn't hear a thing. All I could think was, get them out, get them out. The ones on top of the pile were pushing so hard against the ladder I had to push them back so I could grab them one at at time by their clothes and pull them out. The heat was terrific. The kids were completely hysterical. I worked like a robot, pushing in, reaching out, dropping them down on the ground. I didn't have time worrying about the ones I dropped. If they were to live I had to get them out. I only hoped they'd fall on other children and it would break their fall. I pulled out eight - seven boys and one girl. When I pulled the eighth kid out, the air ignited and the whole window was suddenly a mass of fire. The boy's clothes caught fire but I pulled him out. | | “Then I saw that big pile of kids, as close to me as you are, just turning dead like a burned pile of papers. Poof. And they were dead.” | | In a seventh-grade geography class, the sister had evidently seen that escape was shut off and instructed her children to remain seated at their desks until help arrived. But help did not arrive in time. Some of the children died at their desks where obediently they sat. “They all looked so lifelike,” said Dr. M. H. Turek, “so unprepared for anything. They suffocated instantly. They couldn't have suffered much.” But no one would ever know for sure what happened in that room. | | At 3:19 a blackened Lieutenant Kamin climbed down the ladder and “started organizing the routine work, breaking the roof to let the gases out and so on. For the kids there was nothing more we could do.” It had all happened in 30 minutes. Now it was all over. |
| Nightmare in the News | | CHICAGO, Dec 15 - (Newsweek)- Probably no disaster in history has been reported with such sickening immediacy as Chicago's school fire last week (see page 31). Less than an hour after the first fire alarm was sounded the bulky impedimenta of radio and television - vidicon cameras, sound trucks, cables, and recorders - were on the scene and moving in close along with the usual small army of newspaper reporters and still photographers. Cameras immediately began focusing on the smoldering school building. A helicopter from WGN hovered overhead. Reporters talking into chest microphones recorded on tape the horrifying testimony of witnesses and survivors. | | As the scene of the drama moved from street to hospital and morgue the lumbering equipment followed, flood-lighting corridors, peering through elbows and over shoulders to catch a glimpse of the grief of the victim's families. Coffins and stretchers were borne across the camera's paths. Nurses comforting bereaved parents walked in and out of camera range. A policeman announced through a megaphone the heart-rending details of the clothing on the unidentified dead, not only to the parents at the Cook County morgue but to the nation at large: “Blue velvet shoes, white bobby socks. About 10 or 11 years old. Black and white saddle shoes, medal and cross around her neck.” | | At one of the seven hospitals receiving casualties a distraught nurse turned on a cameraman and told him to get out. He went without protest - “I know, I got three kids myself.” At the morgue, when a TV cameraman tried to move one victim's father aside to get a better angle on his wife's grief-stricken face, the man gently placed his hand over the camera lens and murmured, “Oh God, have a heart.” | | 'Help!': In the mass of detailed coverage (there were 42 program interruptions and news flashes about the holocaust, in both the U.S. and Canada, on CBS radio and TV alone*) the most painful fragment was undoubtedly the brief four-minute testimony of a 29-year-old candy-store proprietor whose shop was a few doors away from the school. Listeners to CBS's regular 6:30 radio news heard the thickly accented, emotion-charged voice of proprietor, Mrs. Barbara Glowacki, whose own 8-year-old daughter had escaped injury in the fire: “When I look up I see all the children. I see them looking out the window and scream - Most of the children, they know me by name, they usually come for candy - they call - 'Barb, Barb, please come and help!”. | | “One by one they start to come down: I took them under the arms and I pull them all the side by our house there and I line them up. One was broken down so bad, the head twisted. I was afraid something had happened. I was afraid to touch. The others start whimpering” 'Come on, help me.' One I see the foot all twisted. Just say: 'My foot is so cold, come cover my foot' - and the skin was hanging down, burned - and the hair - it was just terrible. I tried to do as much as I could. | | CBS reporter Hugh Hill, who had parked his tape recorder on the fender of an automobile in front of the charred building, thrust his mike into Mrs. Gowalki's trembling hands to get his tragic scoop. After interviewing other survivors, he went on to the hospital and morgue, piecing together the heartbreaking story. “At 2:30 a.m., I was still awake,” he recalled later. “I couldn't take my mind off this thing. Then I dozed off. I had nightmares.” | | Two days later radio and TV were still at it. The cameras, tape recorders and sound trucks were at Chicago's Northwest Armory and suburban Queen of Heaven Cemetery to record the funeral of 23 of the fire's 90 victims and the graveside despair of the survivors. | | One remote aftermath of the tragedy: Five pupils set fire to a frame classroom building at St. Martha's School in Sarasota, Fla. There were no casualties but the head of the school had an upsetting explanation: The children, she theorized, “probably tried to reproduce what they saw on television that night.” | | | * NBC, caught with two of its three cameramen out of town, and ABC, with no local camera crew, were off to a slow start in covering the fire. |
| Disasters - The Chicago School Fire | | CHICAGO, Dec 15 - (Time)- In a fifth-grade geography class, ten-year-old John Mele wrote in his book: “Where along the Atlantic Costal Plain can oysters be found?” In a seventh-grade history class, twelve-year-old Andrea Gagliardo was studying “The Missionaries in Florida and Louisiana.” In an eighth-grade classroom, a boy had written in his spelling book: s-k-e-l-e-t-o-n, a-m-b-u-l-a-n-c-e, also “What is the definition of fiery?”. | | It was 2:35 p.m., and already, through the high-ceilinged, 48-year-old Our Lady of the Angels grammar school in West Side Chicago, many of the 1,200 youngsters were beginning to turn away from books, fidget in their seats, wonder if the 3 p.m. dismissal bell would ever ring. In fifth-grade geography on the second floor, the teacher thought that the room was getting too warm. Said she: “Why don't some of you boys open the windows?” In fourth-grade arithmetic, a boy blurted: “Sister, I smell smoke.” Smoke began to seep under classroom doors, through open transoms. A fire alarm clanged. The fourth-grade teacher opened the door, found the corridor full of smoke, slammed the door shut. She told the children to go to the windows and pray. | | “ I'm Going to Jump!” Driving his Buick south on Avers Avenue, Salesman Elmer Barkhaus, 61, glanced at the school, saw smoke coming out of the back door. Before he could get out of the car, flames were shooting out of the school. At 2:42 he gave the first alarm. At 2:44 the first company of firemen got there, siren screaming. The situation: a flash fire had started in the rear-basement stair well of the school's north wing, had been shut out of the first floor by fire-prevention doors, was now engulfing the second floor - fire doors open - with five classroom, upwards of 200 children. | | On the second floor the fire blowtorched down the 35-yd. corridor behind clouds of thick, black smoke, blocked all ways to the only fire escape at the rear. Out of the last of the five classrooms a nun in her 30s crawled with 40 seventh-graders to a front staircase, desperately rolled the children down the stairs to safety before coming down herself. But in the four other classrooms the children were trapped. | | They panicked, ran screaming to the windows, fighting, kicking, pummeling. Some jumped 25 ft. down to concrete pavements below, limped or crawled away with twisted limbs. Some hung on, waited for the firemen. Fourth-Grader Ronnie Sarno, 10, fought to a window, called out to his nine-year-old sister Joanne: “I'm going to jump! Do you want to come? As he eased himself over the sill, he heard her scream: “Don't jump, Ron! Don't jump!” And never saw her alive again. | | “ Where's the Daughter At?” By 4 o'clock the firemen, with feats of businesslike heroism, got control of the fire, fought on to the smoke-foul second floor, began carrying out bodies. Police lines held back parents and relatives, some standing frozen and numb, some crying hysterically. As dark fell, the watchers moved on to St. Anne's Hospital 16 blocks from the school, waited for word of dead and injured. Doctors rushed children into surgery. Nurses parted crowds to wheel beds carrying children and plasma poles. Priests moved slowly from group to group, lips moving. One man in the crowd, a truck driver, said: “I heard it on the radio. I come straight home. I told my wife, “Where's the daughter at?” I looked here. She got a little burned on the side.” Another screamed at his wife: “Why didn't you keep her home today?” A nurse came out of a ward packed with children with burns, broken limbs, asked gently: “Is anybody looking for a little boy wearing a boy Scout ring?”. | | From St. Anne's scores of parents went on to the county morgue, a dark building surrounded by police ambulances with red lights flashing. There bodies were sectioned off beneath white sheets by approximate age and sex. “Maffiola?” a white-coated attendant called out. “The Maffiola family?” Another attendant called: “Sarno? Anyone here for Sarno?” A deputy coroner told a registrar: “Better leave room for 100 names.” The names: Michele Altobell … Karen Baroni … David Biscan … Philip Tampone … Christine Vitacco … Wayne Wisz. The toll: 91 dead - 53 girls, 35 boys, three nuns - and more than 100 injured. | | “ Come On Out, Son.” Next day Chicago dazedly, sadly, tried to find out what had gone wrong. Known point was that the second-floor fire doors had been left open, making a flue for the flames. Not known was how the fire had started at the foot of the stair well itself. A cigarette tossed into wastepaper in the basement? Spontaneous combustion. | | And dazedly the neighborhood was left to fathom the unfathomable. Dead was Joseph Modica, 9, who was almost through making a Christmas present for his family out of letters cut from a cereal box and glued onto a backing. It read: I, Joseph, promise to do my best do do my duty to God and my country, to be square and to … Alive was Kenny Travers, 7, whose mother told a reporter. “I hugged him and hugged him” - whereupon Kenny interrupted, “And you said I can get candy whenever I want it.” Two days later police watched understandingly as a man beat his hands against the door of Our Lady of the Angels, crying: “Come on out now, son. I'm out here waiting for you.” | | Behind that door, black laths hung down like macabre pennants. Jagged bits of glass were yellowed by the heat. Desks were overturned, heaped with rubble. A ballpoint pen lay here, a plastic billfold embossed Ponytail there. Charred coats still hung on hooks. A couple of odd shoes, one a loafer, one red-strapped, lay together filled with ice from fire hoses' water. On top of one blackboard, black letters still read: Come, Little Lord, here is Thy bed. |
| How Safe Are The Schools | | CHICAGO, Dec 15 - (US News)- A school fire killed 87 children in Chicago last week, and people across the country immediately began asking: How safe are our schools. | | In city after city, State after State, officials have set out to find the answer. | | Special investigations are being made, school buildings are being rechecked in a nation-wide search for fire hazards. | | Causes for alarm. Already, these investigations are turning up some alarming facts. | | Michigan's State superintendent of public instruction, Dr. Lynn Bartlett.. estimates that his State has at least 1,800schools which must be considered fire hazards. Kentucky's State Fire Marshal, Ray Humkey, says that the Chicago disaster could be duplicated in -1 5 per cent of Kentucky's schools. Two experts on fire in Utah say that State has many two-story schools which are improperly equipped for fire emergencies. | | A public school and two private schools in New York City were ordered closed last week when fire hazards were found in a recheck of the city's 1,500 schools. Seven public schools were found hazardous in Washington, D. C. | | As a result of such findings, new programs are now being organized and new building codes drawn up in many localities to eliminate fire hazards in schools. | | A look at the records. Events show the danger that exists. The National Fire Protection Association estimates that there are more than 2,100 school fires each year, on the average, in the United States. There were 128 last year in York City alone. | | In the great majority of school fires, no lives are lost. Fires often occur outside of school hours. When fires strike during class sessions. pupils trained in fire drills usually march out to safety. | | Yet, all too often, school fires become horrible tragedies. In the last 50 years, according to the National Fire Protection Association, at least 726 American youngsters and teachers have been killed in 36 fires. | | Last week's fire in Chicago killed 90 persons - 87 children and three nuns. Yet it ranks third among the worst school disasters of this century. The worst was at New London, Tex., in 1937, when 294 were killed by an explosion which destroyed a schoolhouse. There were 175 killed in Collinwood, Ohio, in 1908; 77 at Camden, S.C., in 1923, and 36 at Hobart, Okla., in 1924. | | Lessons for parents, officials. What happened in Chicago is bringing home to parents and officials all over the country a realization of how fire can strike even in a school that is thought to be safe.. | | The fire in Chicago was at Our Lady of the Angels School, a Roman Catholic parochial school with an enrollment of 1,700. It was a two-story building, built of brick. Chicago's fire commissioner, Robert J. Quinn, said the building had been inspected by the fire department during Fire Prevention Week, October 5 to 11, and was found to comply with all the safety laws. “The building actually was what one would term very clean,” he said. | | Yet this is what happened. | | Fire broke out in a stair well in the basement of the school. The blaze swept up the stair well to the second floor so fast that scores of children were trapped. The inside stairway was ablaze, and the single outside fire escape was at the end of the building farthest from the victims. | | How could this happen, in a school so recently inspected and declared safe. | | What started the fire may never be known. But one explanation for the rapid spread of the blaze was given by investigators. They said there were no doors at the top of the stairway on the second floor, and this permitted the fire and hot gases rushing up the stair well to leak out into the second-floor corridor. The investigators said that, if there had been doors and they had been closed, the flames could have been held back long enough for all children to escape. | | The big question. Not, with the Chicago disaster fresh in their minds, people everywhere are wondering about the schools attended by their own children. | | These questions are being asked: How can a school be made safe against fire? And, if fire should strike a school, how can the occupants of that school be assured of a safe escape. | | What people are finding as a result of the nation-wide check now under way, is that there are no national fire-safety standards laid down for schools. There is no national agency with any authority to say how a school shall be built, no nation-wide records of school conditions are kept. | | School safety is left, in most areas, to local regulations. Only a few States impose State-wide requirements and State inspections. | | Result is a hodgepodge of school-building standards - and many possibilities for dangerous conditions to exist. There is no way of knowing how many of this country's schools are “fire traps.” | | It is often difficult to tell, even by close inspection, whether a school is safe. | | Guides for building There are, however, some basic rules for school boards to follow in planning school construction. Check lists are provided by which parents, school?board members and teachers can measure the safety of school buildings. | | These guides to school safety can be obtained by any person for only a few cents. Following are some of the publications that are available, and how they can be obtained. | | ♦ “School Fire Safety” - Bulletin 1951, No. 13, issued by the U. S. Office of Education. For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington 25, D. C. Price: 20 cents. | | ♦ “Checklist of Safety and Safety Education in Your School” - issued by the National Commission on Safety Education of the National Education Association. Available from the National Education Association, 1201 Sixteenth Street, N. W., Washington 6, D. C. Price: 50 cents. | | ♦ “Fire Safe School Buildings” - published by the National Board of Fire underwriters. Copies can be obtained, without charge, through the office of the inspection board or rating bureau maintained by the fire insurance companies in your State, or by writing to the National Board of Fire Underwriters at 85 John Street, New York 38, N.Y.: 222 West Adams Street, Chicago 6, 111., or 465 California Street, San Francisco 4, Calif. | | ♦ “School Fires” - obtained from the National Fire Protection Association, 60 Batterymarch Street, Boston 10, Mass. Price: 50 cents. | | Some points to watch What these publications tell you to watch for in measuring the safety of your school is set out in the chart on page 43. Following are some of the suggestions the experts offer for making schools safe against fire. | | School buildings should be constructed of fire?resistant material. Buildings of more than one story should have masonry walls?not wooden ones?and contain fire?resistant walkways from each classroom to the outside. One?story buildings are safest. Buildings of more than two stories are not recommended. | | “Hot spots” where fires are likely to originate?such as furnace rooms, laboratories and classrooms for manual training and domestic science?should be segregated from other areas by fire?resistant construction or by distance. | | Areas where large groups congregate ? such as auditoriums and gymnasiums - should be on the ground floor with direct exits from the building. | | Stair wells should be enclosed, because open stairs invite an upward flow of heat, smoke and fire which increases the danger on upper floors and often makes the stairway unusable. Heavy doors should close off the stair wells at their entrances to each floor. This was demonstrated in the Chicago fire. | | Vertical openings in the partitions should be blocked at each floor level to prevent the fire from rising. | | Corridors and stairways should wide enough to accommodate all the students. A minimum suggested is a stair lane at least 22 inches wide for each 60 pupils. There should be at least two stairways?and they should be remote from each other. Entrances to stairs should be protected by smoke-retaining shields. | | All exit doors should open outward, and be equipped with a “panic lock” - a wide bar that opens the door when pushed at any point. | | The best “fire escape,” according to experts, is an enclosed, fire?resistant stair well. Outside fire escapes should be pro. vided, however, for buildings where enclosed stair wells are not feasible. | | Each building should have an automatic warning device that notifies the fire department as well as the occupants. | | One safety precaution highly recommended is an automatic sprinkler system that sprays a room with water when set off by heat. Officials of the National Fire Protection Association say their records show no fatal fires in schools with sprinkler protection. | | A new danger In these days of growing enrollments, a new fire hazard is often added: that of overcrowding. If the classes in your school are large,' special safety measures must be taken. | | At this time of year, there's another thing to watch: Christmas decorations. Make sure they are not flammable. | | At all times, teachers and janitors should be on guard against accumulations of flammable waste material. The Chicago fire is believed to have started in a pile of papers. | | Inspections and fire drills of course, should be standard procedure. But what the nation is finding now is that these are not always enough. | | Schools, to be safe, must be built for safety - and they must be kept safe by constant vigilance. | | As a result of the Chicago fire, the people of this country are alerted to the danger. Outlook is that a lot of schools now are going to be made safer against fire. |
| Fire Hazards Found At 2 City Schools | | City and public school officials Wednesday said two local elementary schools have some of the same fire hazards as a Chicago parochial school in which 89 students and three nuns perished in a fire Dec. 1. | | But the officials hastened to add that corrective measures had been scheduled at the two schools long before the Chicago blaze. | | The chief city building inspector and administrative assistant of operations and maintenance for city public schools, said the two schools are old elementary schools. | | Both schools have wooden floors and do not have enclosed stairwells. Plans have been drawn for both buildings, however, to enclose the stairwells, said the administrative assistant. | | Three local officials, the school Administrative Assistant of Operations and Maintenance, the head of the Fire Prevention Bureau, and the Building Department supervisor, recently visited the scene of the Chicago fire as an aid in making recommendations that might further protect local school children from the hazard of a school fire. | |
| The three men have written reports on their Chicago observations which were expected to be in the hands of their immediate supervisors late Wednesday. | | The building department supervisor, while not disclosing the nature of his report, said Tuesday he personally believed the loss of life in Chicago would not have been nearly as great if that school had had enclosed staircases. He said the floors at the Chicago school were also oil soaked and were covered by asphalt tile which undoubtedly caused the blaze to spread more rapidly. | | The administrative assistant said Wednesday the local school district had not used any type of oil cleaning compound on its floors for years. | | The reports of the three officials may lead to a restudy of fire safety provisions incorporated in the physical structures of the school system, including local parochial schools. | | “It's not a question of improving fire drills,” the head of the fire prevention bureau said, “because surprise tests have shown us that any school can be evacuated in two minutes.” | | The school system has spent $500,000 in the past five years installing corridor firewalls and enclosing stairwells. |
| Two Schools To Be Closed As Fire Risks | | Two local public schools will be closed next semester as an indirect result of the recent Chicago school fire that took 92 lives. | | The school board is expected to approve the action Wednesday. | | Dr. Smith, school superintendent, said Monday that Westside Elementary School and Middle Elementary School will be closed on Jan. 23, at the close of the first semester. | | The two are among the oldest school buildings in the city and the only two remaining with open stairwells. | | About 180 pupils in the two schools will be affected by the move. | | For the last five years the school district has been enclosing stairwells and installing corridor firewalls in all the older building on order of the Fire Department. | | Mr. Jones, assistant superintendent in charge of buildings, said Monday closing of Westside and Middle has been considered for some time. They also are among the smallest buildings in the school system. Middle has four classrooms and about 100 pupils and Westside seven rooms and about 80 pupils. | | Jones said fire drills were held regularly in both schools and a custodian is on duty at each all the time school is in session. | | When the buildings are closed, Westside and Middle pupils probably will attend nearby schools. | | Open stairwells were blamed for the rapid spread of the Chicago fire, which trapped dozens of pupils on the upper floors. | | Dr. Smith said no decision had been made on the disposal of either school, but it was unlikely either would be replaced because of declining population in the areas. |
| Texas School Tragedy Of 294 Dead Recalled | | The death in a Chicago school fire Monday of 90 persons sent horrified memory racing back 21 years to New London, Texas, an oil field town in the piney woods and sandy hills of East Texas. | | The world's worst school tragedy occurred there March 18, 1937, killing 294 children and teachers. Gas had collected in a sub-basement and it apparently was ignited by a spark from the switch of a sanding machine in the manual training room located by the side of a door into the sub-basement. | |
| It was all over in seconds. There was no fire. Three-quarters, of the building-only a corner was left standing-went straight up. | | The building, reduced to concrete slabs, steel beams and debris, collapsed. It crushed the children who had no chance to seek escape. Only three bodies suffered burns, indicating the collapsing building snuffed out the flames. | | As the second newspaperman on the scene, after speeding from a town 18 miles away, I came upon a scene of almost complete silence. There was some whispering from those who were injured but the injured were very few. Most of the children of junior and senior high school age were either killed outright or escaped with bruises. | | By the time I got there, the narrow roads were crowded with ambulances front 15 neighboring towns and by heavy earth-moving equipment bulldozers and cranes to lift the building off the crushed bodies There was to have been a PTA meeting that afternoon and mothers had begun to drive or walk towards the building in bright spring sunshine. | | Many saw the building which was a modern school, erected with oil money some from six wells on the school grounds, disintegrate before their eyes. | |
| They ran toward the building and the appalling silence. As bodies were brought from the debris, they were lined up along side an athletic field fence uncovered and in the grotesque positions of the recently dead. | | One turned his face away and looked up to the steelwork of what remained of one comer of the third floor. Men supported in the bucket of a crane were at work, trying to pry loose the body of a blond teen-age girl, a body which had been impaled on torn, jagged steel. | | This was not an old school. It had been completed less than two years before. It was strong and fireproof. But it was heated by wild gas, unmetered cheap and varying in pressure as it came from the wells. | | Apparently there was a gas leak in the connections under the building and the gas had collected there. | | The bodies were taken to makeshift morgues and the injured to hospitals in a dozen towns round about. | | In red sand cemeteries all over the area are graves whose headstones all bear the same date and birth dates indicating how brief can be the span of life. In the memories of many remains the example, the worst in history, of the senselessness of fate and the remorseless tragedy which can come from carelessness. |
| $50,000? So What? | | Fire Commissioner Robert J. Quinn, who directed firefighting and rescue operations at the tragic fire in Our Lady of the Angels grade school Monday, estimated damage to the two-story brick building at $50,000. | | “What does that mean in the face of this tragedy?” Quinn asked. |
| New School Open | | By Norman Glubo | | Little Tom Cleary, 9, brushed a tear from his cheek as he walked into the new Our Lady of the Angels school this morning. | | “He's still upset about what happened.” explained his mother. Mrs. Grace Cleary of 1046 N. Pulaski rd., as she nudged him toward his fourth grade classroom. | | For the first time since Dec. 1, 1958, when 92 pupils and three nuns were killed in Chicago's worst school fire, Tom and his 1,500 classmates are together again under one roof. | | The handsome million dollar structure, built on the site of the old school at 3816 W. Iowa st. as a memorial to those who lost their lives in the fire, opened today for the first time. | | Built of tan brick and reinforced concrete, its architects call it Chicago's safest school. | | “This is it,” beamed Msgr. Joseph F. Cussen proudly as he took a reporter on a tour of the three story building. He pointed out. | | “Look. Except for classroom doors there's not a piece of wood in the school. Everything's metal—desks, lockers, all the furniture.” The pastor said he planned no special ceremony for the occasion. | |
| “We just want to get started again,” he added. | | Since the tragic fire, parish pupils have been attending classes in three nearby public school buildings— Hay, Orr, and Cameron. | | “The public school people were just wonderful to us,” said Sister St. Florence, the principal, as she registered new pupils. “But we're happy to be back together again.” | | For some it was a day of sad memories. Theresa Whittaker and Marie Hartman, the most seriously injured survivors of the fire, rejoined their seventh grade classmates for the first time. Until now they have been “attending “ classes by telephone as they recovered in their homes. | |
| Karen Cascio, 12. of 3748 W. Thomas st., remembers the fire vividly. | | “We were trapped in our room for quite a while,” she told a reporter outside her new 8th grade classroom. “Then one of the boys broke window and pulled down the fire escape. | | “He ran for help and the janitor came and broke down our door with an ax. Everyone escaped.” | |
| Aside from the fireproof construction, the school has the latest fire safety and alarm equipment. All stair wells are inclosed by heavy metal doors. | | At strategic locations thru-out the building are smoke and heat rise detectors that set off an automatic fire alarm. | | At the end of each corridor a red fire alarm lever within each reach of the shortest child. | | And outside on the sidewalk is a shiny, new fire alarm box, number 25539. | | The box sets off an automatic alarm in the fire alarm office and in the school. Due for All School. | | Such boxes are being installed outside every school in Chicago as a result of the city's new fire code adopted after the Our Lady of the Angels fire. | | The box on Iowa street is guarded during school hours by a patrol boy. | | “You know, it's been pulled five times already by pranksters,” explained Msgr. Cussen. “And every time that alarm goes off we get an awful lot of engines.” | | (Article contributed by Sally Konley) |
| Judge Rips Lie Tester On Boy's Story Of Fire | | Chicago, Jan. 16 - Family Court Judge Alfred J. Cilella Tuesday assailed the lie detector operator who reportedly obtained a 13-year-old boy's confession to touching off Chicago's worst school fire. | | The jurist also implied criticism of the police investigation of the boy in connection with the Our Lady of the Angels fire. | | Meanwhile, State's Atty. Daniel P. Ward said a delinquency petition would be filed, calling for the boy's appearance at 11 a.m. Wednesday in Family Court. Attorneys retained by the boy's parents said they would surrender him at that time. | |
| Chief target of Judge Cilella's ire was John E. Reid, polygraph expert to whom the youth allegedly confessed setting the fire that claimed the lives of 92 children and three nuns Dec. 1, 1958. | | “Reid's conduct was most unusual,” said the judge. “I don't know what information he had pertaining to the boy but I think that information would be regarded as confidential.” | | The jurist said his first knowledge of the boy's purported confession came Friday afternoon through a phone call from Reid. Reid started to tell him details of the confession, according to Cilella, but Cilella cut him off. | |
| “I suggested to Reid that he take steps with the proper authorities,” Cilella said. “My function would be to receive a delinquency petition filed by any citizen or law enforcing agency.” | | The judge also complained that Cicero police and other investigators made no move before late Tuesday to take proper steps “to bring this thing to a head.” | | Cilella added that, according to the new state criminal code effective Jan. 1, the court may not suggest, require nor accept the evidence of lie detector tests. | | The question of lie detector tests was not the only legal problem posed by the case. The new code may also bar the boy's prosecution on a felony charge. | | Ward said the code forbids the conviction of any person for any offense unless he had observed his 13th birthday at the time the offense was committed. | | The boy under suspicion, now an eighth grader at a Cicero school, was a 10-year-old fifth grader when he attended Our Lady of the Angels School. | | Ward announced the decision to file a delinquency petition after a conference with Reid, Assistant Corporation Counsel John Thornton, the city fire attorney; representatives of the police and fire department arson squads and Cicero police officials. | | The state's attorney would not disclose the substance of the petition. | |
| Cilella said his duty will be to determine whether the boy is guilty of delinquency under the petition. | | If he finds the boy guilty, he may place him on probation in custody of his parents with a recommendation for psychiatric care or he may refer him to the Illinois Youth Commission. | | If the boy is referred to the youth commission it may, after a period of observation, assign him to one of the state's 10 forestry camps, to the Illinois Training School for Boys near St. Charles or to the Sheridan Reformatory. | | Walter P. Dahl, an attorney engaged by the boy's stepfather and mother, said he would surrender the youngster for the hearing and that John J. Cogan, veteran trial lawyer and former assistant state's attorney, would conduct the defense. | | The attorneys said the boy has insisted, since he took the lie test, that he never set the school fire. They said he told his parents that if he made any such admission, he did so only because he had been tricked into it by the lie-detector operator. | | The parents complained, according to counsel, that the boy had been kept under questioning by Reid for seven hours, from 1:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. last Friday. | | The lawyers said the mother had agreed for the boy to take the test, with the understanding that he would be asked just five questions about fires in Cicero. They said she sought the test voluntarily to determine whether the boy had anything to do with starting the Cicero fires. | | The stepfather said Reid deleted a section of the boy's statement in response to questions about a fire in a Cicero bowling alley, according to the attorneys. They said the parent charged Reid held out that section after it was demonstrated to him that the boy could not have had a hand in starting the fire. |
| Cicero Won't Let Police Talk to Youth | |
| Chicago, Jan. 16 - Authorities investigating the alleged confession of a 13 year old boy that he set the tragic Our Lady of the Angels school fire today described the youngster as “very disturbed.” They expressed reservations as to the validity of his statements. | | Chicago police officials smoldered over what they termed the lack of cooperation from Cicero police who questioned the youth. | |
| “Our men never have been permitted to question the boy,” one Chicago police official said, and added. | | “We weren't allowed to talk to him because the Cicero police said his family was so distraught they wanted no part of the police at the time. | | “We planned to hold a 'council of war' today with the Cicero police and attorneys for the boy's family to ask that the boy be given a second lie test.” | |
| News that the youth had confessed setting the fire which claimed the lives of 92 children and 3 nuns 3 years ago, came as a “surprise” to Chicago authorities. | | John E. Reid, polygraph expert, obtained the so-called confession Friday while questioning the boy on a polygraph at Reid's headquarters at 600 N. Michigan av. | | Altho Reid declined to reveal the boy's identity or to discuss details of the case, he told CHICAGO'S AMERICAN. | | “Unless this boy gets he help I think he needs, he could even destroy his whole family.” | | Reid said the boy's history as a firebug dated to when he was 5 years old. If he doesn't get psychiatric help, Reid said, he might set fire to his own home. |
| Memories stay forever - Our Lady of Angels fire survivor | | By Bob Wiedric. | | FOR REV. John Kobus of Visitation Catholic Church. | | Thursday is an anniversary of sorrow. On this date 25 years ago, he was a 7-year-old 2d-grader in Our Lady of the Angels School in the Austin neighborhood. | | It was the day on which 92 children and three nuns perished in a blazing inferno that within minutes transformed the school, packed with 1,200 pupils, into a charnel house. | | Father Kobus' older brother, Milton, now an educator, was five years older and in the 7th grade. The brothers miraculously escaped injury, while more than a hundred surviving classmates suffered burns. | | “We smelled smoke,” Father Kobus recalled. “We heard pupils hanging out of windows upstairs crying for help. “I was a very scared little boy. I ran out a door into the street. Shortly after that, kids started jumping from the windows. The children started panicking. | | “MEN ON THE STREET were trying to break the children's falls with their arms and their bodies. Some children who had escaped ran back into the building to find their brothers or sisters. | | “The firemen did a spectacular job. But the building was so old. And there weren't enough ladders. | | “Out on the street, as the crowds gathered, some of the parents were hysterical. Many of the pupils were children of Italian immigrants. They spoke only a little English. And their parents spoke little English at all. | | “I remember some things vividly, some not so vividly—all the confusion on the streets, the cries and the screaming. I stayed until I saw my brother was safe and our grandfather came to find us.” | | The origin of the fire was never proved, but most investigators came to believe that it was started by a disturbed young pupil who confessed to the arson but later recanted his story. | | LESS THAN TWO years after the blaze, a phoenix of concrete, glass and steel rose from the ashes at 909 N. Avers Ave. A new school building was erected as a monument to the dead and to those who had battled to save lives at the risk of their own. | | A now-retired firefighter, Walter Roman, was at the wheel of Truck 35, a hook and ladder unit that was among the first fire companies to arrive at the blaze. His longtime buddy Willard Martens was the tiller man, in charge of guiding the long and cumbersome trailer through the narrow residential streets. | | “We didn't know it was a school fire when we left our quarters at 1713 N. Springfield Ave.,” Roman recalled. “It took us less than a minute to get there. We were the best team in town. Thank God, we had only five traffic lights and they were all green. I never took my foot off the accelerator. | | “WE WHEELED UP to the curb. Martens and I put up a ladder to the second floor. That was a 50-foot ladder that usually takes six men to put up in two sections. We did it by ourselves. | | “I got my foot inside the window. The building was billowing black smoke. I could see the kids milling around. I yelled, 'Over here, over here!' I must nave gotten 35 or 40 kids out of there, just pushing them onto the ladder as I grabbed for another one. | | “Once that room emptied, we grabbed the net and caught other kids. Some children missed other nets. But none missed ours. It was after midnight before we left. But the memories stay forever.” | | This reporter also was among the first to arrive at the scene. | | IN ONE ROOM, the bodies of six children lay crumpled against a wall. The charred body of their teacher, a nun, was buried by debris. | | In a room nearby, a porcelain figure of the Virgin Mary stood on a bookcase, looking out over desks on which pupils had been working on an arithmetic problem when super-heated gasses exploded from the ceiling. The papers never would be graded. Teacher and pupils were dead. | | (Article contributed by Sally Konley) |
| 'Born fireman' wanted to be part of the action | | By Joan Giangrasse Kate. | | Special to the Tribun. | | Even as he rose through the ranks, Louis A. "Bud" Miehle remained the kind of firefighter who would rather enter a burning building than give orders from the sidelines. | | A member of the Chicago Fire Department for more than three decades, Mr. Miehle served from the 1940s through the '70s and assisted in many of the city's worst fires. | | "Bud was a bom fireman, a Johnny-on-the-spot kind of guy, who went where the action was despite the danger to his own life," said Helen, his wife of 59 years. "He was motivated by a strong desire to help people, and in his line of work that sometimes meant saving their lives.". | | Mr. Miehle, 87, of Lake Zurich, formerly of Chicago and Lake Placid, Fla., a retired deputy chief fire marshal for the Chicago department, died Tuesday May 27, in Lexington Healthcare Center in Wheeling after a heart attack. | | "Bud could be hard-nosed and blunt, but he always had the respect of his crew," his wife said. "One of the hardest things for him was to have to stand by and direct a fire, when what he really wanted to do was to be right in there fighting it.". | | Born in Chicago, Mr. Miehle worked for several years in the steel mills of Gary before joining the Chicago Fire Department in 1943. He became a lieutenant soon after and was stationed out of Loop and North Side firehouses for the rest of his career. | | In 1958, Mr. Miehle was on the scene of the fire that destroyed the Our Lady of the Angels elementary school on the city's West Side, taking the lives of 92 children and three nuns. | | "Bud wasn't one to show his emotions, but when he came home and told me about that fire, he just broke down and cried," his wife said. "He and the other firemen felt helpless, watching children scramble for their lives and jumping out of windows. He said he left a part of his heart there that day". | | Mr. Miehle, who won numerous awards for his service, retired in 1979 with the rank of deputy chief fire marshal. In 1985 he moved with his wife to Lake Placid, Fla., and in 2001 the couple moved to Lake Zurich. | | Other survivors include a daughter, Kathleen; a sister, Marge; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. | | A memorial mass will be held at 10 a.m. Monday in St. Edna Catholic Church, 2525 N. Arlington Heights Rd., Arlington Heights. |
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