“The good Lord never intended him to burn.
CHARLES COLLINS WAS DUMFOUNDED by what he saw. Ninety minutes earlier he had been at the theatre talking with one of its owners about ticket scalping. Now as the afternoon sun began to sink, long shadows descending over the Loop and slanting through the tracks of the elevated line, he was standing inside police barricades in muddy Randolph Street which was choked with fire engines, wagons, halted trolleys and crowds of bystanders watching an endless procession of blanket-covered bodies being removed from the Iroquois’ once-grand entrance.
He never remembered the cold. He stood, numbly staring at the blanket- and sheet-wrapped forms laid out on the curb, some dumped into the slush.
“The bodies,” he said, “extended about one hundred yards on either side of the theatre’s entrance. A long line of horse-drawn vehicles waited to haul the dead or dying to hospitals, morgues or funeral parlors.” The throng in Randolph Street, he thought, might have swelled to as many as five thousand people.
“They were gazing at the theatre, absolutely quiet, hushed as if they were in awe. There was total silence.”
A few men, but mostly women and children, much of their clothing missing and some horribly injured, had been carried next door into Thompson’s Restaurant, which in the space of fifteen minutes had cleared dishes and flatware from its marble-topped tables and become a first aid receiving and triage station.
Collins had first learned of the disaster in the InterOcean building, where a clerk behind an advertising display counter had casually mentioned that “a fire alarm has come in from the Iroquois.” Collins immediately asked to use a telephone and told Central to ring the Record-Herald at Main 3315. Al Bergener, the editor, calmly confirmed the report. Yes, he said, there had been an alarm and there seemed to be trouble. He told Collins to come in. But by the time the reporter had hurried the four blocks to his paper, the editor was no longer calm. “It’s bad, very bad,” he yelled to Collins. “You’d better get over there.” Collins left the building on the run, irritated that he had been so rushed that he had forgotten to bring a notepad, and that Bergener, a “fidgety, fox terrier type,” had given him no specific assignment or instructions except to “get over there.”
“I must find survivors,” he told an officer as he entered Thompson’s.
Behind the glass of Thompson’s window with its large lettering: “Serving Lunches and Dinners,” was a sight both unimaginable and stomach-churning. Men, women and children were piled along walls and stretched out on table tops as doctors, nurses and medical students frantically worked to revive the injured and clear away the dead to make room for the new arrivals streaming in. The shouted orders of physicians were punctuated by shrieks of pain. Clothing was cut away and burns dabbed with olive oil and swathed in cotton while oxygen, small quantities of brandy and other resuscitation aids were given to those who were unconscious but still breathing: mechanical respirators were still three years away. Nurses and students held pocket mirrors under victims’ nostrils to detect any breath of life. If all efforts failed, the body was quickly wrapped in a blanket and slipped beneath the table to make way for the next victim.
“Some were charred beyond recognition, some only scorched and others black from suffocation; some crushed in the rush of the panic, others … the broken remains of those who leaped to death. And most of them were in the forms of women and children,” reported one eyewitness. “So fast came the bodies for a time that there was one steady stream of persons carried in … there was the figure of a man with broad shoulders and dressed in black whose entire face was burned away, only the back of his head remaining to show he ever had a head; yet below the shoulders he was untouched by the fire. There lay women with their arms gone, or their legs, while one had [her] side burned off, with only the cross shoulder-bone remaining. She had worn a pink silk waist and black skirt; the fragments of the garments still clung to her like a shroud … There was a little boy, with a shock of red-brown hair, whose tiny mouth was open in terror and whose baby hands were burned off so that his tiny wrists showed like red stumps.”
Collins went into Thompson’s back kitchen where a female employee was sitting in a corner calmly peeling potatoes, presumably for that night’s dinner. A distraught father was there being treated for burns. Collins jotted the man’s name on a small piece of paper he had found. The father, who had become separated from his daughter as they fled the theatre, was weeping uncontrollably as he described his child. Collins tried to reassure him that she would eventually turn up safe.
Minutes later, Collins crossed Couch Place, stepping in the mud over snaking hose lines and around slippery pools of frigid water, to visit a first aid station set up in a paint shop opposite the theatre. Through the window he saw “a very bright and intelligent girl of seven or eight who was walking around with a little olive oil on the bridge of her nose, which was slightly scorched.” In the paint shop, the child, who appeared too dazed to cry, told the reporter she had lost her father. On a hunch, Collins asked some nurses if he could carry the child back across the alley to the restaurant. Sure enough, the weeping man inside Thomson’s kitchen was her father and the two were tearfully reunited. Collins left them alone and never saw them again.
In Thompson’s restaurant, William McLaughlin, the Ohio Wesleyan student from Buenos Aires, lay dying. A young medical student attending him noticed the Delta Tau Delta pin in his lapel and said, “I’d better take off your frat pin, old man; someone might take it if you go, you know.”
“No, I guess not,” replied McLaughlin, his life slipping away. “It’s been a friend of mine for quite a while and I’d not like to have it taken off now; just let it stay on to the finish.” The pin remained until the young man died hours later in a hospital.
There were many heroes that December afternoon. Among them was the Reverend J. P. Muldoon, Auxiliary Bishop of Chicago, who had been passing by the theatre when the fire broke out. Without hesitating, the bishop had rushed inside, stripped off his coat, climbed over bodies and entered the smoke-filled gallery to begin administering the last rites even as flames were licking the walls of the auditorium. He was repeatedly asked to leave for his own safety and finally had to be forcibly removed by authorities who feared that one of the walls might collapse. Muldoon was later commended by the Pope for his selflessness.
Dr. H. L. Montgomery, one of the first physicians to work on victims inside the theatre, said:
“I was with the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. I rescued one hundred and fifty people during the Chicago fire. I have seen the wreckage of explosions. But I never saw anything so grimly horrible as this.”
In the confusion, there were some men who entered the darkened theatre posing as rescue volunteers, but who had another agenda—to rob the dead. The press dubbed them “ghouls,” and most were chased away by O’Neill’s men or arrested on the spot for pocketing money and jewelry and even attempting to pry rings from victims’ fingers.
Sadly, not all the thieves were civilians. George Dunlap, the Northwestern undergraduate who had first helped to set up the plank bridge, would never forget what he happened to see that afternoon. “I worked day and night carrying out bodies,” he said. “I still can’t get over seeing some policemen taking money out of women’s pocketbooks and throwing the pocketbooks away.”
As the afternoon drained into a dreary twilight, hundreds of terrified people materialized, not just outside the theatre but also at makeshift aid stations and at hospitals, morgues and newspaper offices, pleading for any information about loved ones they knew had been in the audience.
Collins had a deadline to meet. His final stop of the day was the Sherman House, where Eddie Foy was describing the tragedy to a large group of reporters. Collins reported that Foy was “hysterical” and suffering from superficial burns. “I never saw anything happen so quickly as that fire,” the comedian said, weeping. “It was like a flash in the pan, and the entire theatre was in flames, men were screaming and women were fainting. It reminded me of the Chicago fire. You know I was through that.” Foy said that after he found his son in the freezing alley and they set out for the hotel, a kindly spectator offered to lend him his overcoat. Foy’s wife was just leaving the hotel to go to the theatre with two of his children, and he remembered getting greasepaint all over his wife’s face as they tearfully hugged. In a daze at the hotel, he had handed the borrowed overcoat back to the Good Samaritan, but to the end of his life Foy regretted not getting the man’s name so that he could write him a personal note of thanks.
By the time Collins returned to the Record-Herald, “the city editor, Leigh Reilly, was much too busy to listen to play-by-play talk. He merely said to me, ‘write escapes and rescues’ and handed me a batch of Chicago City Press Association reports. I remembered everything I saw,” said Collins, who began writing his “father-daughter” reunion piece before tackling the wire copy. It was strangely quiet in the city room that night; Collins considered himself fortunate to be assigned to the rewrite desk. It allowed him to stay at the paper while other staff men were given the exhausting, depressing job of seeking victim identifications at morgues, funeral homes and hospitals in different parts of the city. “Many of the reporters,” he said, “worked all that night, all the next day and the following night,” piecing together elements of the story and adding names to the growing list of victims.
Within the city’s nine newspapers, the Tribune, Record-Herald, InterOcean, Chronicle, Examiner, Daily News, Journal, Post and American, a story began to circulate that evening which would become a legend among generations of Chicago newspapermen.
It was said that Walter Howey, a reporter for the City Press Association, was on his way to City Hall when the fire broke out. The Press Association, which covered metropolitan stories and distributed its copy to the city’s papers through a system of underground vacuum tubes, prided itself on beating the local competition. The story went that as Howey neared Courthouse Square, he heard bells clanging and saw firemen rushing to the theatre after the horse pulling their wagon was injured in a collision with another vehicle. Normally, the firemen would have tended to their horse, and the fact that they hurried off without doing that caught Howey’s attention. He raced after the firemen and reached the Iroquois just in time to see the first frantic adults and children come stumbling out the front doors, many in tears, some bruised and bleeding and others able to give brief but coherent accounts of what had happened minutes before.
Without hesitation, Howey dashed to a nearby saloon, slipped a friendly bookmaker twenty dollars for the exclusive use of his telephone, and called his editor with the stunning news, brazenly adding that he had taken charge of the situation and all available Press Association people should report to him at the scene. Then, to further insure that he had an exclusive, Howey handed some pocket change to a neighborhood kid with instructions to purchase a package of straight pins, run to every public telephone in the vicinity and stick a pin into each phone wire, effectively rendering the instrument inoperable, thus foiling other newsmen.
From the Press Association’s office in the Western Union building, carbons of Howey’s stories were immediately walked across the hall to the Chicago AP bureau, where telegraphers could transmit in Morse Code at thirty-five words a minute. The Iroquois disaster, which would keep the wire service men working through many days and nights to come, traveled over a 34,000-mile network to the service’s 648-member papers. People in foreign countries knew details of the tragedy before many Chicagoans awoke the next morning to the terrible headlines.
For some journalists, the story became personal. The AP’s Frank Moore, who had been called in from his regular beat at the stockyards to cover the disaster, was asked to go to a city morgue that evening by friends whose daughter had attended the theatre. “She was burned so badly I was unable to recognize her,” Moore said. “Her folks never got a positive identification but they buried her, thinking that it might be their daughter.”
One very weary Western Union telegrapher who had worked without stopping throughout the afternoon and evening sending out endless details, returned home late that night to learn that his wife was among the victims.
The InterOcean reported: “With tears in their eyes, and with faltering voices, thousands of people thronged the [newspaper] last night, inquiring for missing relatives and friends, trying to secure one little article of information of missing ones, and hoping against hope they would receive favorable replies. More often than not, the news was bad.”
But there were the fortunate few.
Found crouching beneath the theatre steps, Ruthie Thompson had been lifted up and carried to a nearby aid station where she met her Aunt Abby. Like Ruthie, Abby had made it to safety through the stage exit. Ruthie’s little brother John had been swept up by a kindly man inside the theatre who had lifted him high in the air and passed him to other adults, hand over hand, over the heads of the screaming, struggling mob and out through the theatre’s front doors. Aunt Dot had escaped through the front lobby. Stranger still, Grandpa Holloway had somehow made it out the stage entrance and was found waiting patiently at the edge of Couch Place, watching Engine 13 pump tons of water into the smoking interior.
Ruthie’s father George Thompson first learned of the fire from a passerby while he was walking near his State Street office. Oblivious to the heavy traffic and slippery cobblestones, Thompson dashed into the middle of State Street, ran the length of the block, turned down Randolph and elbowed his way through the crowd at the theatre’s entrance, screaming, “Get out of my way! My children are in there!”
He was blocked by a cordon of uniformed officers. A fireman whom he recognized stopped him and said sadly, “No, Mr. Thompson, you can’t go in. There’s not a soul alive in there now.”
Out of breath and crazed with fear, Thompson made his way past the dead and dying to the rear of his restaurant and clambered up a steep flight of steps to the bakery. He saw that a ladder had been rigged from one of his windows to the theatre, helping a few people to escape. He was about to cross over it into the smoking building when an employee, a heavy-set baker, restrained him. “Let me go,” Thompson shouted. “My children are in there!”
“No,” said the baker. “No one is alive in there now.”
Thompson could not contain himself. “You’re fired!” he screamed.
“Then I’m fired,” said the baker. “But you can’t go in there.”
At that moment, the restaurant manager appeared at the top of the stairs and gasped, “All of them got out! They were all in here and they’ve gone to your office and are waiting there.”
“When father burst into the office,” Ruthie said, “my two aunts and I fell on him, weeping hysterically. My brother … cried too. The only calm person was my grandfather, who was sitting in a straight-backed office chair. He merely waited until the storm was over.”
That night at home, as they recounted their experiences, Aunt Abby reminded them that their grandfather had “always thought the theatre was the province of the Devil, and the first time he set foot in one, all hell broke loose.’”
“My mother shook her head,” said Ruthie. “‘Don’t you realize,’ she said calmly, ‘that the good Lord never intended him to burn?’”