DISASTERS: The Chicago School Fire

In a fifth-grade geography class, ten-year-old John Mele wrote in his notebook: “Where along the Atlantic Coastal 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: SKELETON, AMBULANCE, also “What is the definition of fiery?”

It was 2:35 p.m., and already, through the highceilinged, 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, sirens 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 classrooms, 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 305 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 fireman, 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 aproximate age and sex. “Maffiola?” a hite-coated attendant called out. “The Maffiola family?” Another attendant died: “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, TO 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 .” 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.