SETTING
SCHOOLS WERE NOT ALWAYS made of concrete and steel. There was a time when they were built of wood and plaster, encased by façades of exterior brick walls. To the naked eye the buildings seemed permanent, indestructible, and when parents sent their children off to learn in such structures, they usually did so without a second thought to safety, assured by routine that their youngsters would return home safely at the end of each school day.
So it was in most American cities, no more and no less than in the city of Chicago, not only in the public schools but also in the Roman Catholic school system.
In 1958 Chicago was filled with a mixture of human integrity and the transgressions for which it had become known the world over, very much the “Toddlin’ Town” that Frank Sinatra exalted in song and Al Capone and his mobster proteges had defamed with evil deeds. Under the new leadership of Mayor Richard J. Daley, a neatly groomed, ambitious former county clerk with slicked-back hair and piercing blue eyes, the city was poised to grow in stature and influence. Daley was a hard man to define. He could be immovable at times, sentimental at others. He had been elected mayor in 1955 and was busy constructing his legacy as the last political machine boss to dominate a major American city, forging alliances with business and labor, pushing forward with expansive civic projects. There was much work to do, and Daley knew how to pull people together to get it done.
A new airport, expressways, and skyscrapers needed building. Slums were torn down, replaced by featureless brick high-rises that in time would evolve into even greater slums. The heart of the city’s old Taylor Street Italian neighborhood was bulldozed to make way for the University of Illinois at Chicago, an arguably ugly urban campus spreading across several square blocks of city landscape.
Like the two Chicago mayors who preceded him—Edward J. Kelly and Martin Kennelly—Daley was of Irish Catholic stock and came from Bridgeport, a South Side working-class neighborhood heavily inhabited by Irish immigrants. Bridgeport’s homes sat near the sprawling, malodorous Union Stockyards, the slaughter-place that prompted Carl Sandburg to christen Chicago “Hog Butcher for the World,” and that Upton Sinclair exposed in less romantic prose in his 1906 muckracking novel The Jungle. As mayor, Daley was never far from these humble roots or the deep Catholicism he had inherited from his mother. He would remain in Bridgeport his entire life, living out his twenty-one years as mayor in a simple brick bungalow on South Lowe Avenue, less than a block from where he was born, worshiping his god a few blocks away in the same Nativity of Our Lord Church where he had been baptized as an infant.
The mayor took enormous pride in the city and wanted Chicagoans to feel likewise. Most did. He was a stickler for cleanliness, and during his administration the block-long City Hall and adjoining County Building were sandblasted of the grime that had accumulated for years. The cleansing job exemplified Daley’s paternal stewardship and symbolized the city’s defiant “I will” spirit.
Chicago has always been an action town, a place where the locals work hard and play hard, where good and bad happen in equal proportion. It was chartered as a city in 1835, and thanks to the railroads and Lake Michigan—the inland sea on which it sits—it boomed. The city grew with the pace of a speeding bull until one evening in October 1871 when a fire started behind Kate O’Leary’s barn in the Irish ghetto on West DeKoven Street and sparked a roaring blaze that—fanned by fierce winds—traveled north for three miles, destroying everything in its path, including the heart of the old downtown and Near North Side. Three days after the fire began, the skies turned grey and the heavens opened up. It started to rain and the flames died out. Chicago rose from the ashes, licked its wounds, buried its dead, then built itself anew. Before long it was booming again.
By the 1950s it had grown into the nation’s transportation hub, the crossroads of the country. Though its image and reputation had been smeared by bootleggers and machine guns, it nevertheless survived to become a center of business and industry, a nucleus of sophistication and culture that spawned some of the leading writers and academics of the twentieth century, and home to one of the great universities of the world. No longer a rebellious teenager, it had matured into a worldly adult. Yet it was still so unpredictable that it would clobber anyone who crossed it. It was the nation’s Second City, and it didn’t mind being so. Inside its 224 square miles lived 3.5 million residents; the greater metropolitan area held twice as many. Almost half of all Chicagoans—1.5 million—were members of the Roman Catholic church, either in name or in practice.
In May 1958 Cardinal Samuel Stritch, the archbishop of Chicago, died in Rome after suffering a stroke. Stritch was an elderly, soft-spoken Southerner who had administered the largest archdiocese in the United States, including a massive system of churches and schools, most of them closely associated with the flow of neighborhood life in the city. His prelature covered the expanse of two counties and included 424 parishes, 399 elementary schools, 37 high schools, and 21 hospitals, as well as numerous service centers, orphanages, and other charitable institutions, involving a tremendous force of priests, 2,300 in all, as well as many religious brothers, nuns, and lay people. It was a vast operation indeed, one woven tightly into the city’s cultural fabric.
In September that year Archbishop Albert G. Meyer of Milwaukee was named Stritch’s successor. The youngest son of a second-generation German-American grocery store owner, Meyer took up residence in a red-brick mansion owned by the Chicago archdiocese on November 15, 1958, and was enthroned in Holy Name Cathedral the next day. He was fifty-five years old, a tall, reserved, scholarly man, a keen administrator who was good at detail. He was conscientious and perhaps more sensitive than Stritch had been to the urgency of preparing for the many social changes then impending.
As the youngest archbishop in the country, Meyer faced a number of problems. He had to resolve questions of forming new parishes or redrawing the boundaries of existing parishes. He had to act on several major building projects. It would take some time before he could familiarize himself with his new and many responsibilities, not the least of which was tending to Chicago’s large Catholic school enrollment, then listed at 270,299 elementary and high school students.
Meyer retained the superintendent of schools, Monsignor William E. McManus, who had been appointed by Stritch in 1957. One of the challenges facing them was the need, as pointed out by McManus, to build more elementary and high schools outside Chicago, where parishes were being formed to take care of the waves of Chicagoans leaving their old neighborhoods for the greener pastures of the suburbs.
The exodus of residents from the city, which had been going on for some time, had many causes, not the least of which was race—the movement by blacks into once all-white neighborhoods, especially those on the city’s West and South sides. Just the day after Meyer was installed as archbishop, Edwin Berry, executive director of the Chicago Urban League, called Chicago “the most segregated city in the nation.” To a degree it was. Even though the word “catholic” means “universal,” to embrace and tolerate all people, some Catholic pastors and parishioners in Chicago were openly and bitterly opposed to any sort of integration. They did not want blacks moving into their neighborhoods, and they were ready to battle to protect their “turf.”
As archbishop, Meyer was sensitive to the festering antagonisms brewing inside the archdiocese, but almost a year would pass before he admitted that the racial situation in Chicago was far worse than in Milwaukee, and that direct episcopal action was needed to diffuse animosities against blacks in many Catholic parishes and in the city at large. Still, not until 1961 would he see the end of segregation in all Catholic institutions.
Even as blacks moved into previously all-white neighborhoods, Chicago retained a rich pluralism of residents whose heritage defined them as Irish, Polish, Jewish, German, Italian, Czech, Lithuanian, Swedish, Greek, or Asian. Hispanics had not yet migrated in large numbers to the city, though they maintained sizable communities in South Chicago and on the Southwest Side. But with Mayor Daley at the controls, despite a varied electorate many key city positions were dotted with Irish names, including that of Fire Commissioner Robert J. Quinn, a boyhood friend of the mayor’s. Both had belonged to the Hamburg Social and Athletic Club, a group of young men better known for their antagonism toward unwanted strangers—especially those with dark skin—who happened to stray into the neighborhood, than for organized sportsmanship.
In keeping with his loyalty to old friends, especially Bridgeport Irish, in 1957 Daley appointed Quinn commissioner of the nation’s second largest fire department. The new fire commissioner was fifty-three years old, a rough-hewn character who kept his head shaved bald and preferred business suits over a Fire Department uniform. He had been as good a choice as any to head the department. Highly regarded as a firefighter in the early days of his career, he had once climbed eight floors to the roof of the Stock Exchange building to rescue three persons during a fire that heavily damaged the Union Stockyards. The exploit earned him the Lambert Tree Medal, the city’s highest award for valor. During World War II he had risen to the rank of navy commander in charge of firefighting and prevention for the entire Atlantic Fleet. The navy had also decorated him for his part in a daring, three-day battle against a raging fire aboard the tanker Montana, loaded with 100,000 barrels of aviation fuel.
As fire commissioner, Quinn commanded a department that in 1958 responded to more than 65,000 fire and special duty alarms and included a force of 4,278 men who worked twenty-four hours on duty followed by forty-eight hours off. He was a stickler for discipline within the ranks, and he demanded that personnel assigned to individual fire companies stay in good physical shape. A committed bachelor, he neither smoked nor drank and stayed fit by playing handball at the Fire Department gymnasium near Navy Pier on the city’s lakefront. His first-floor office in City Hall was filled with photographs and memorabilia; he also kept a set of exercise weights there.
Quinn liked nothing better than to show up at extra-alarm fires in his battered white fire helmet and take command. He had his detractors who claimed he was a poor administrator, but no one questioned his firefighting credentials or his dedication to the job. He could be brusque with people, but there was a sentimental side to him. He looked after the department’s rank and file like a big brother.
One of Quinn’s priorities upon being named fire commissioner was fire prevention, particularly for schools. Chicago had more than 800,000 buildings, including 404 public, 354 Catholic, 90 Jewish, and 49 Lutheran schools. Through the end of October 1958, the Fire Department had responded to 89 emergency calls from schools—60 public, 17 parochial, and 12 private. Like many large cities, Chicago faced serious problems not only of providing adequate classroom space for its burgeoning young student population, but also in making sure that fire-prevention standards were being observed in older educational buildings. Catholic elementary schools in particular were fully occupied, and it was not uncommon to find classrooms in the city’s parochial schools jammed with more than fifty to sixty pupils. Typical of such structures was Our Lady of the Angels School on the city’s West Side.
An ordinary parochial school virtually indistinguishable from hundreds like it in the Chicago archdiocese, OLA, as it was known, did its work quietly and was barely known beyond the confines of the city and the order of sisters that administered it. But though no one paid much attention—not even a fire inspector who reviewed the premises that October—part of a deadly formula was in place at Our Lady of the Angels that would make it famous the world over: crowded classrooms and an aging school building.
WITH 4,500 REGISTERED FAMILIES, Our Lady of the Angels in the late 1950s was a thriving parish, one of the largest in the Chicago archdiocese. It was spread over 150 blocks about five miles west of the downtown Loop. Within its confines was a tree-lined, working-class enclave that featured modest, well-kept homes interspersed with two- and three-flat apartment buildings.
In the early days of the parish, the Irish had been the dominant ethnic group in the community. Gradually the neighborhood around Our Lady of the Angels changed, and by 1958 it was about 60 percent Italian and 30 percent Irish, with the remaining 10 percent Polish and other Eastern European extraction. Many residents, both young and old, had immigrated to the United States, and many spoke an English tinged with the dialects of their native homelands.
The neighborhood was close-knit and boasted a convivial spirit, like an overgrown family. Its residents were proud to say they were from OLA. Their religious faith was deeply rooted in the teachings of the Catholic church, and the parish church and social hall were centerpieces of the neighborhood. On Sundays ten prayer services were held, with Masses and confessions conducted both in English and Italian.
Parishioners for the most part were ordinary hardworking people who cared deeply about their families and took pride in their community. The men were chiefly blue collar and made their livings with their hands, as carpenters, electricians, and plumbers, or in various jobs in factories, warehouses, on construction sites, or with the railroads. Some held city jobs—policemen, firemen, or sanitary workers—while others owned and operated many of the neighborhood’s small shops and businesses. Most of the women were housewives and mothers; some held small jobs that helped bring in a few extra dollars. A good number of the adults had witnessed the horrors of World War II, either as Allied or Axis servicemen or civilian refugees forced from their homes; more than a decade later they had settled comfortably into the neighborhood, striving daily to provide their families with a good life.
Unlike Hyde Park, Edgewater, or Roseland, other well-known Chicago neighborhoods, the community around Our Lady of the Angels had no special name. Yet it enjoyed a sense of place, what Italians call compagnismo, a feeling of permanency that tied each family to the community. People were entrenched; they were not transients. They maintained their homes, produced homemade wine in their basements, tinkered with small gardens, and in general stayed put. When the evening was warm, they would often take to their front porches and chat with neighbors or passersby.
Like most others in Chicago, the neighborhood had all the ingredients of an urban village, a small town in the big city. The main street for shopping was Chicago Avenue, an east-west artery that cut through the heart of the area. Chicago Avenue was known throughout the city as a bustling, eclectic commercial strip that had the feel and smell of a European high street. Its many storefronts included a mix of businesses sprinkled with Italian names. Bakeries and butcher shops, cafes and produce stands were jammed among an array of small grocery stores, dime stores, drugstores, clothing stores, tailor shops, barber shops, pool halls, social clubs, restaurants, taverns, bowling alleys, and two movie houses. There were doctor and dentist offices for the living, funeral parlors for the dead. It was a place where women pulled shopping carts and bartered with merchants, where soda fountains and corner saloons stayed open late, and where the scents of baked bread, sweet confectioner’s sugar, pungent garlic, and fresh produce filled the air.
Vice was represented mainly by gambling and booze. Bets could be placed in many a back room, and if a loan was needed to pay off a bookie, juice could be squeezed from defaulters in unpleasant ways. Still, for the most part the neighborhood was safe. A person could walk the streets at any hour of the night without fear. No one was malicious. The cops bothered few because they had nothing to bother them about. There were no strangers. Persons who walked the street would “hello” everyone.
It was a good neighborhood for growing up, a place where a kid could still be a kid. Parents expected their youngsters home when the streetlights came on. During the day, alleys behind the homes and apartments were crowded with milkmen, junkmen, and fruit peddlers, all competing for space with neighborhood boys playing softball on the narrow concrete surface.
Kells Field at Kedzie and Chicago avenues was the site of hotly competitive softball games involving older players from the neighborhood who belonged to such teams as the Bobcats, Stompers, and Shotwells. The field was named after George Kells, a former alderman and Democratic committeeman of the Twenty-eighth Ward. In the 1951 aldermanic elections, organized-crime figures decided Kells should retire, so he bowed out of politics and left Chicago the same year, claiming his wife had taken ill. He was replaced by Patrick Petrone, brother of State Representative Robert “Happy” Petrone, a close associate of syndicate boss Tony Accardo. Both Petrones were members of the city’s West Side Bloc, a group of elected officials who were under the tight control of the Chicago mob.
To the young men who played softball at Kells Field, such weighty matters were of little concern; no one paid much attention to the “made guys.” Instead they had their own heroes who wore steel spikes and carried wooden bats. One of these was a muscular kid named Bill Skowron who did what no one had done before: he smacked a home run out of Kells that flew clear across Chicago Avenue, soaring to the third floor of the Rockola Building across the street. The news spread fast, and Skowron became known. He later made a name for himself slugging homers in the major leagues, mostly with the New York Yankees.
THE BIRTH OF Our Lady of the Angels coincided with the massive European immigration to America late in the nineteenth century. It was chartered as a parish in 1894 when Archbishop Patrick Feehan found the need to open a church west of Humboldt Park. Feehan sent Reverend James Hynes to establish the new church, which Hynes named after his alma mater, Our Lady of the Angels Seminary in Niagara, New York.
For the first few years of its existence, religious services were conducted in a store building. The first church building was erected in 1900 on the northwest corner of Hamlin Avenue and Iowa Street, later the site of the present-day church, whose cornerstone was laid in 1939. In 1903 a parish school was built next door to the west, on the northeast corner of Iowa Street and Avers Avenue. The school featured four classrooms on the first floor while the second floor contained a chapel and living quarters for the nuns, whose order was the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM).
In September 1904 Our Lady of the Angels School began educating children. Due to the rapid growth of the parish, the next year the chapel on the school’s second floor was converted into two more classrooms to accommodate the seventh and eighth grades. In June 1906 the school saw its first graduating class, consisting of seventeen students.
Further growth made it necessary to expand parish facilities. In 1908 a six-flat apartment building at the southeast corner of Iowa and Avers was purchased and converted into a convent to house the nuns, whose numbers had grown to twenty-two. In 1910 a combination church and school was built just north of the original school, at 909 North Avers Avenue, increasing the number of classrooms to eighteen.
In 1939 construction began on a new church and rectory under the direction of Monsignor Joseph F. Cussen. Following the death of Father Hynes in 1936, Cardinal George Mundelein named Cussen parish pastor and commissioned him to erect the two new buildings at a cost of $220,000. The Italian-Romanesque church was designed with a large parish in mind; it would seat more than eleven hundred and featured colorful marble columns behind the altar and a high, wood-plank roof. The three-story brick rectory was built on Iowa Street between the church and south wing of the school. When the two structures were completed in April 1941, the chapel on the first floor of the school’s north wing was converted into classrooms, and a new chapel was built in its basement. The school’s two wings were connected in 1951 with construction of the annex, giving the building a U shape. At the front of the U, abutting the Avers Avenue sidewalk, was a seven-foot-high iron picket fence, designed to keep out trespassers.
In keeping with the architecture of its day, the two-and-a-half-story school was built of ordinary brick and timber joist construction. Its interior, including all but the stairway in the annex, was made of wood, wood lathe, and plaster. Ceilings were finished with acoustical tile, and the entire structure featured wood trim throughout. The building was of the “Old English” style, where the basement stood a half-story above street level. It was 125 feet long by 105 feet wide.
In the fall of 1958 classroom space at the school was jammed to capacity. Enrollment stood at 1,668 kindergarten to eighth-grade pupils. Two hundred of these children in kindergarten and first grade were accommodated in two separate buildings around the corner on Hamlin Avenue.
The main school building contained twenty-four classrooms with high ceilings from which hung round electric globe lights. Classroom doorways were six and a half feet high, over which were eighteen-inch-high inward-opening glass transoms. The building had six exits, and its only fire escape was located at the rear of the annex. The north wing faced Avers Avenue while the south wing fronted on Iowa Street. The school was heated by a series of radiators fueled by a coal-burning boiler located in the basement of the north wing. The coal supply was kept in an adjacent room.
All second-floor stairway landings were open; on the first floor, fire doors were in place. Although Chicago’s 1949 municipal code required that all new school buildings be constructed of noncombustible materials and contain enclosed stairways and fire doors, the law was not retroactive and did not affect existing buildings. Our Lady of the Angels School had no sprinkler system. Save for the first-floor fire doors, a series of pressurized-water fire extinguishers, and a local fire alarm that rang inside the school but did not transmit a signal to the Fire Department, the school, like many of its contemporaries, was without an adequate fire-protection system.
THE PARISH SCHOOL was Monsignor Cussen’s pride and joy. “Father Joe” loved kids, and he liked to stand outside the school’s front doors each morning to greet the youngsters as they arrived for classes. He knew virtually every child in the school by name and had married many of their parents.
As pastor, Cussen was a levelheaded, unpretentious man whose personality was probably best mirrored by the type of food served in the rectory—a basic meat-and-potatoes fare which rarely aspired to haute cuisine. A priest for forty years, he was sixty-six years old, a large, imposing, good-hearted man who stood over six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds. He wore a wry, almost sardonic look, and his black hair was just starting to show signs of grey.
When the new Our Lady of the Angels Church and rectory were being constructed between 1939 and 1941, Cussen watched every brick put in place, and it was not uncommon for him to return home at the end of the day covered with plaster dust. Outside of his own family, the parish and its people were all that mattered to him. He was a watchful, concerned shepherd, completely devoted to his flock. Unlike most pastors, he never hounded parishioners for money; instead he nickel-and-dimed his way to keep the parish running. He led a limited social life and, unlike some pastors, rarely accepted dinner invitations at people’s homes. He had a cool reserve about him that sometimes bordered on piety, yet he remained extremely popular among parishioners and never lacked for friends. In the evenings he enjoyed taking walks through the neighborhood, often stopping to chat with residents sitting outside their homes.
For the other priests who lived in the rectory, a large, fortresslike structure, Cussen provided convivial, fraternal accommodations. The pastor was a hospitable man with a remarkable tolerance for newly ordained priests. He was referred to by his peers as the Babysitter, because the archdiocese liked to send him recently graduated priests straight from the seminary. Cussen liked the nickname as much as he did the opportunity to train young priests.
In 1958 two other monsignors lived in the rectory—John Egan, who would go on to become a social crusader known throughout Chicago, and Joseph Fitzgerald, who later would die after choking on a toothpick. Their presence in the house caused Cussen to joke about how “red” the upstairs bedrooms had become. Together the three elders shared the residence with four younger associate pastors: Joseph Ognibene, Joseph McDonnell, Alfred Corbo, and Charles Hund, men in their late twenties to early thirties. The priests in the house enjoyed one another’s company, and at dinner, a meal that was rarely missed, they would gather around the long oak dining room table, talk about goings-on in the parish, and share jokes.
When it came to dealing with troubled marriages and other domestic difficulties, Cussen often would delegate such matters to his younger associates, preferring to avoid controversy. He stayed busy tending to the everyday administrative duties of the parish. He enjoyed a good reputation among the higher-ups in the archdiocese chancery office, and when he asked for something, he usually got it.
ON SUNDAY EVENING, November 30, 1958, Superintendent McManus drove to Our Lady of the Angels where he had been invited to speak before the school’s parent-teacher organization. The meeting was held in the large basement social hall beneath the parish church, where a couple of hundred parents, seated in folding aluminum chairs, had gathered to listen to the superintendent’s talk. An articulate man whose speech revealed the hint of an Irish brogue, McManus was dressed in a black suit and white priest’s collar. He stood behind a wooden lectern at the back of the room and spoke about the importance of parent-teacher cooperation, and how one had to reinforce the other if a child was to receive an “integrated education” both in school and at home. It was a theme he had been espousing at the time.
The monsignor also related to the parents how he was busy reorganizing the entire archdiocesan elementary school program, attempting to change it from individualized schools to a “harmonious system.” Among the items McManus was pushing for included conformity in such matters as the school calendar, textbooks, and pay scales for lay teachers. The changes, McManus explained, would help to bring uniformity into the schools and ensure an equal education for Catholic school students throughout the city and suburbs.
Scanning the audience, McManus was impressed by the turnout, and he could sense that the mothers and fathers obviously cared about their children’s education. The reception he received was a welcome change of pace, for during the past several weeks he had been “crabbing a bit” with a number of pastors who had failed to respond to notices issued by the Fire Department for code violations following inspections of their schools.
McManus had been on the job for little more than a year, having succeeded the aging Monsignor Daniel Cunningham as head of the Catholic school board. From the outset he had made it a point to be more active than his predecessor in riding herd on pastors and managing the day-to-day operations of the schools. Cunningham, known as “Diggy” among his confreres, had been noted more for his golf skills than his administrative abilities. He had been in charge of the Catholic school system since the days of Cardinal Mundelein, and his management philosophy was a fairly simple one: leave the pastor alone and let him run his own shop. Hence whenever a violation notice was received from the Fire Department, it was assumed that the pastor of a school being cited would know what to do about it—to respond to the notice or simply let it be. Cunningham would never have thought of calling up a pastor to ask, “What do you intend to do about that fire code violation?” But when McManus did just that—often to men who were very much his senior in the priesthood—the elder prelates would brush him off, treating him as an unwanted nuisance impinging upon their realm. Thus his harping about the urgency of correcting such violations often fell on deaf ears.
Less than twenty-four hours after his Sunday night talk, the superintendent would return to Our Lady of the Angels under much different circumstances. The hope and optimism of the parents gathered inside the church basement that night would be replaced by grief, anger, and disbelief. The north wing of the parish school would be a smoldering wreck, and the name Our Lady of the Angels would forever be linked with death and disaster.