Monsignor John Joseph Egan had a call from Bishop William E. McManus, superintendent of Chicago's parochial schools, on the first day of December, 1958. “There's a fire out at Our Lady of Angels,” he told Jack, “and I think you should get out there.” Monsignor Joseph F. Cussen had given Jack Egan a room on the third floor of Our Lady of Angels rectory. The location on the near West Side at Iowa and Hamlin Streets was convenient to Jack's downtown office.

“I put on my hat and coat and jumped in my car and followed one of the fire trucks racing out Chicago Avenue. I couldn't park within two blocks,” Jack recalls. Archbishop Meyer—only two weeks since his installation—and the pastor, Monsignor Cussen, milled with the thousands of people jamming Avers Avenue. Parents were struggling with the police to get past them to the school doors. A nun inside the building was screaming, “We are trapped. We are trapped.” Children were jumping from the second floor windows. Some had leaped toward firemen's ladders and missed, falling to ground already littered with children and soaked with blood. Other children were clinging to the ledges. Scores of onlookers fainted at what Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn called “the worst thing I have ever seen or ever will see.” Battalion chiefs wept. “We tried. God, how we tried, but we couldn't move fast enough. No one could live in that fire.”

Firemen were battling through the flames to bring out the victims. Parents searched frantically for their youngsters as firemen emptied the smoldering building built at 909 N. Avers Avenue in 1904, substantially expanded in 1911, and remodeled in 1951. The Tribune reporter described priests kneeling to give last rites “to canvas covered forms which were once children.” He described a desperate young father yelling at his wife, “Why didn't you tell her to stay home today?”

Tales of heroism were many. An eleven-year-old mourned his teacher Sister St. Canice, who struggled to get her students out the second story window. “She helped me onto a ladder there,” Thomas Handschiegel told a Tribune reporter. “The last I saw of her was when she went back into the room and disappeared into the smoke. I think she could have gotten out, but she stayed to help the kids.” A nun who wouldn't identify herself to the reporter made six trips into the building to lead out groups of sixth and seventh graders. She rolled some of her students down the stairs to get them out quickly.

The priests from the rectory had run to save the children at the first alarm. Father Joseph Ognibene, who'd been in the parish ten years and knew many of the children well, was part of a chain of rescuers. A father who'd heard girls shouting, “Save me, save me,” straddled an open window from which he lowered the girls, one by one, through the window five feet down to a ledge above the school entrance. There Father Ognibene and another parent grabbed them and pulled them to safety. A neighbor who heard a priest yell, “There's children in there. It's on fire,” made six trips in to lead children out until the smoke and flames made it impossible to enter. Later, a reporter saw Father Ognibene, near collapse, at the morgue trying to recognize the bodies of the children he knew so well.

“It wasn't a great fire,” Jack Egan remembers, “but the smoke was unbelievable. The fire equipment was poor. The ladders didn't reach to the second floor. The children suffocated.” Father Egan accompanied a fireman into a schoolroom where forty-four children sat in parochial school decorum, at their seats, heads in hands—dead. And at the front of the room, her head in her hands, sat their teacher, like the children—erect, disciplined and dead. As Jack Egan reconstructed their last minutes, “A lot of nuns asked children to sit there and pray. I'll never forget it. Everything perfectly orderly.”

[Webaster's note: The preceeding account, which became a popular urban legend, has been completely discredited - no such thing happened in any room. A few students were found dead sitting at their desks, overcome by smoke before they could move, but never an entire class.]

The fire had erupted at 2:40 p.m., only twenty minutes before the children would have been dismissed for the day. The alarm went in at 2:42. Fire trucks were on Avers within three minutes. But smoke engulfed the second floor so quickly—the firemen called the accumulation of smoke, heat and flames that coursed through the hall when doors and windows were opened “a hot box”—that three Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and ninety-two children died. Seventy-six children were injured. The school was almost completely destroyed. “I have to admit it,” Father Egan says, describing the firemen carrying child after child out, “I was relieved when they carried the body of a nun out. They carried three out. It would have been a greater tragedy if no nuns had died along with their students.”

The whole city mourned, every citizen able to put him/herself into the position of the parents who had sent bright, lively, uniformed children to learn about the exports of Egypt that morning and now would never oversee another page of their scribbled homework. Chicagoans read about Mayor Daley's arrival at the scene, about Archbishop Meyer's visits to the injured at St. Anne's Hospital, and about the drab, yellow brick building at 1828 Polk where “three hundred mothers and fathers huddled in stricken groups or, crazed with grief, roamed the corridors trying to buttonhole hurrying attendants” at the county morgue.

Priests and Sisters from all parts of the city quickly gathered at the scene. “Thank God I was able to keep my composure,” Father Egan says today, “and thank God for the priests and Sisters of the archdiocese of Chicago. As the firemen put each child into each ambulance, I put a priest or a Sister with the child. `You stay with that child and you stay with that family,' I said.”

Jack was firm with each of the religious, understanding the stress under which each of them was operating. “This is your family,” he would stress with each one. “Now pay attention to me. You visit the hospital. You go to the wake. You sit with the family. You go to the funeral with them. You come back with them and then you visit them and visit them and visit them. You are their personal chaplain.” He followed the same routine with the families of injured children. “I think that helped the grieving parents.”

Both Fathers Egan and Joseph Fitzgerald quit their jobs and stayed at Our Lady of the Angels for the next month. “We worked morning, noon, and night,” Egan recalls. Archbishop Meyer celebrated a Solemn Pontifical Mass for twenty-seven of the fire victims on December 5 at the Northwest Armory at North Avenue and Kedzie. Funeral Masses continued throughout the day in other churches of the archdiocese for the remaining victims of the fire.

Archbishop Meyer did his best to solace the grieving parents and relatives. He was comforted in turn by a little man from New York. As priests vested for the funeral Mass at the armory, Father Egan saw Francis Cardinal Spellman come up to the archbishop, holding out his hands. The archbishop looked down with gratitude at the fellow religious who'd come to his side in this time of greatest need. The two most powerful prelates in the American Church embraced.

Father Tom McDonough, chaplain of the Calvert Club at the University of Chicago, had taken Father Egan to Florida for some much-needed recuperation after the Our Lady of the Angels fire. Walking and praying through the tragedy with the mourning families had taken a monstrous toll on the priests involved. “Monsignor Cussen, poor man, never recovered,” Father Egan recalls. “He just sat in his rocker and rocked away the rest of his life.”

“I was sent to the grocery store at Hamlin and Division, as I recall, for a loaf of bread. After leaving the store, a kid around my age yelled to me that Our Lady of the Angles School was on fire. Bread in hand, I ran to the school and saw smoke in back where I couldn't get to. It didn't look big at the time and nobody was even there, so as a kid, I didn't think much of it and thought that it would be taken care of. Besides, as I recall, I couldn't get any closer or I would have.

“I returned home to drop off the bread and then went back to see what happened. I don't remember if that was a few minutes or an hour later, but when I returned I was really shocked to see it was a big fire with children dying.

“It was something I'll never forget. I don't think anyone could. I think what effected me the most was the sounds of mothers screaming for their child and the sight of sheet-covered bodies being carried out by firemen. I had nightmares for a few months after that.

“Looking at the faces of the ones that died hurts my heart -- some I knew and some just remember seeing in our area. The stories started flowing after that, some good and some bad.

“I feel for all the parents, relatives, and friends who were affected, and for the firemen who have to carry the burden of what they see and face the dangers that they do.”