Five

DISASTER

MONSIGNOR WILLIAM MCMANUS, the archdiocesan school superintendent, was sitting quietly in his downtown office on Wacker Drive, signing his name to letters he had dictated earlier that morning. Outside, directly across the Chicago River, the huge Merchandise Mart maintained its commanding presence on Chicago’s skyline. Soon the giant grey edifice would be emptying of workers, each making their way to buses or trains for the daily rush home.

McManus looked up from his papers as his secretary peeked her head through the door. “Monsignor,” she said. “The Sun-Times is on the phone. They want to know how many students are enrolled at Our Lady of the Angels School.”

McManus raised his brow. “Why is that?” he replied.

“They say there’s a fire out there.”

McManus stirred. A fire? How could that be? He had just been there the night before. “How bad is it?” he asked.

“They didn’t say, just that the school is on fire.”

McManus knew he should go to the school. That way he could see for himself how serious these fire problems plaguing the archdiocesan schools really were. Maybe then he could pressure those pastors who were slow to correct the violations being noted by the Fire Department.

The monsignor reached for his hat and coat, then headed for the door. “Go ahead and release the figures,” he told his secretary. “I’m going out there.”

After riding the elevator down to street level, McManus walked out onto Wacker Drive to hail a cab. “900 North Avers,” he told the driver. In the western sky the sun was beginning to set, and soon McManus could see smoke billowing up in the distance. He felt suddenly uneasy. He sensed it was a serious fire.

With fire engines screaming past, his fears began to mount. The cab made its way further west in traffic that started to slow, then ground almost to a standstill. It was a very cold day, and McManus was startled by the harrowing sight of schoolchildren running along sidewalks without coats and hats. Some were soaking wet. Equally alarming was the sight of panic-stricken adults running in the opposite direction—parents, he gathered—racing to the school in search of their children.

The cabbie inched his way through the bottleneck before being stopped by police, who began blocking the street, trying to make way for the caravans of fire engines and ambulances squeezing their way into the neighborhood’s tiny side streets. Already McManus could see there was plenty of fire equipment parked along the avenue. Quickly he reached over the seat to pay his fare, then jumped from the car, running the remaining few blocks to the school.

IT WAS JUST before three o’clock when Steve Lasker parked his car next to a fire engine on Iowa Street. The news photographer reached into the back seat, grabbing his large four-by-five lens camera and tote bag filled with fresh film and flashbulbs.

Lasker jumped from the car and ran the few steps to the front of the school. He looked up. A huge cloud of smoke was pouring from the building. Big fire. Plenty of action. He heard shouting and ran north, stopping at the courtway dividing the two wings. Firemen had battered down the fence leading into the narrow area, and children standing at the windows inside were screaming for help. Still more children, scores it seemed, were down on the pavement, moaning in pain.

For a brief, fleeting moment, Steve Lasker was bewildered. He’d been to his share of fires, and he knew the sight of death. But the scene before him was unlike anything he had ever witnessed.

Suddenly a voice in his mind jarred him back to reality. “Shoot! Shoot!”

He reached in his tote bag and took out some film.

WORD OF THE FIRE spread rapidly through the community. Residents and merchants had heard the continual wail of sirens, and soon telephones were ringing in homes, apartments, and shops all over the neighborhood. Bulletins on radio and TV reinforced these word-of-mouth reports and communicated the first official news of the disaster to the general public.

Emma Jacobellis was at home folding clothes in the living room of her brick two-flat on North Monticello Avenue, waiting for Victor, her nine-year-old, to arrive home from school. Nick, her husband, was at his job as a liquor store manager. Grace Ann, the couple’s four-year-old, was watching television with Emma’s father, who also shared the home.

Finished with the laundry, Emma looked at the clock. It was almost time to start supper. She was moving toward the kitchen when the telephone rang. She picked up the receiver. “Hello.”

“Emma!” the caller shouted. Emma recognized the excited voice of her cousin in the next block. “Where’s Victor?”

“He’s not here yet. Why?”

“Emma, the school’s on fire! It’s on the radio. You better get over there. Some of the kids can’t get out. They’re jumping out windows!”

Emma hung up the phone and grabbed her coat, sliding her short arms through its worn woolen sleeves. “Pa,” she said, heading out the door, “watch Grace Ann. I’m going to the school. There’s some kind of fire.”

Two miles south, Nick Jacobellis was going over his inventory sheets, checking his shelf stock at the Armanetti’s store he managed at Crawford and Fifth avenues. The holidays always meant more business, and he was readying the store for the increased traffic the coming weeks were sure to bring.

A transistor radio was filling the store with Christmas music when an announcer’s voice interrupted the regular programming: “A 5-11 alarm fire is raging at Our Lady of the Angels School in the 900 block of North Avers on the city’s West Side. Initial reports say as many as twenty students have been injured in the blaze. Children are reportedly trapped on the building’s second floor, and some have jumped from windows. Police are asking that you avoid the area if at all possible. Stay tuned for further details as they become available.”

Nick couldn’t believe it. Just last week he had been talking about the school, when he and Victor had walked through the building during an open house. “If there’s ever a fire,” Nick mentioned to his son, “those stairs will burn like kindling.”

Victor was a student in Sister Seraphica’s second-floor classroom in the middle of the north wing. He had developed an early sense of things mechanical and had a flair for electronics. He was a whiz at building erector sets. He didn’t seem concerned with his father’s observation. “Don’t worry, Daddy,” he said. “If there’s ever a fire, I’ll jump out the window.”

Nick set down his papers and reached for his overcoat. “Sam,” he yelled to the young clerk behind the cash register, “watch the store. I’m going up to the school.”

Nick didn’t have a car, and he figured it was too far to walk. He ran to the street corner, looking for a bus. Instead he saw a police car, its red light flashing, trying to squeeze its way north through the traffic on Crawford Avenue. Nick figured the officer was headed for the fire. He started waving his arms, hoping to flag down the squad. It worked. The patrol car pulled over. Nick ran up and opened the passenger door. “I need a ride to the school,” he shouted to the lone police officer behind the steering wheel. “My kid goes there.”

The officer wanted to help. He couldn’t have civilians riding in the squad. But this was an emergency. Protocol could be broken. “Get in,” he said.

The officer stepped on the gas and hit the siren. Nick was jerked backward. He looked up. Black smoke was brushing across the sky ahead.

ALFRED AND MARY ANDREOLI were priding themselves on the fact that they had already decorated their men’s store on Chicago Avenue for the Christmas season. The small shop was located a block south of the school, where the couple’s children attended classes. Gerry and a younger son, Randy, were in the main school; Barbara was enrolled in the first grade in a building around the corner on Hamlin Avenue.

The Andreolis were passing the afternoon when a young man came into the store and began looking through a rack of trousers. “I’d like to buy a pair of slacks,” he said to Mr. Andreoli, standing behind the counter.

As the two men talked about size and style, they could hear the sound of fire sirens piercing the air. Andreoli looked up. “I wonder what that’s all about.”

“Oh, the school’s on fire,” the customer answered rather casually.

“What school?”

“The one over here on the corner,” the customer pointed. “The Catholic school.”

Mary Andreoli slipped on a coat. “I’m going over there,” she said to her husband, hurrying out the door.

As he heard more sirens, Mr. Andreoli began growing uneasy. He was trying to hurry the transaction with his lone customer, without being too abrupt, when the telephone rang. It was his wife’s sister. “Al,” she gasped, “the school’s on fire! Kids are jumping out the windows!”

The excitement in his sister-in-law’s voice was frightening. “Mary just went over there,” Andreoli said. “Can you come and watch the store?”

“I’ll be right there.”

As soon as he set down the phone, Andreoli saw his two younger children enter the store. They were hatless and coatless. Randy’s chin was smudged with soot.

“Where’s Gerry?” their father asked.

“I don’t know,” Randy answered. “I didn’t see him.”

FOUR MILES AWAY, at the Radio Steel plant on Grand Avenue, Mario Maffiola was busy operating his punch press. The short, handsome Italian immigrant took pride in his work, and he consistently outperformed his coworkers, turning out more steel hinges each hour than any of his peers. His weekly paychecks were always a little larger, part of the pay-for-performance program the company had implemented the year before.

Mario’s foreman, a large muscular man with friendly brown eyes and a worn baseball cap atop his head, walked up and placed his hand on Mario’s shoulder. “Mario,” the foreman shouted over the banging machinery. “Doesn’t your boy go to Our Lady of the Angels?”

“Yes,” Mario answered. Joseph, his ten-year-old, was a fifth-grader in Sister Therese’s room.

The foreman placed his face next to Mario’s ear. “There’s some kind of fire at the school. Maybe you should go over there.”

Mario looked puzzled. A fire? “How bad is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” the foreman answered. “It’s on the radio.”

Mario looked at the clock. It was a little after three. Delia, his wife, was still at her assembly-line job at a nearby Motorola factory. The couple’s three-year-old, Linda, was in day care at a local preschool. Mario decided to pick them up. That way, he figured, they could drive to the school together. He switched off his machine and fumbled for his keys.

MONSIGNOR ED PELLICORE, a big, friendly extrovert of a man, was sitting in his office inside the rectory of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, three miles away from the fire scene, when he received a call from a friend whose son was in the seventh grade at Our Lady of the Angels.

Pellicore had served as an associate pastor at Our Lady of the Angels before the north wing had been converted to classroom use. He was familiar with the composition of the building. He also knew many of the Italian families in the parish.

“Monsignor,” Mary Sansone said. “They’ve got a big fire at OLA, and Jimmy hasn’t come home yet. I’m worried.”

“I’ll get over there right away,” the monsignor answered. He called to an associate, Father Tony Spina, to accompany him. Spina had attended Our Lady of the Angels School as a boy. As the two priests drove north, Pellicore could see the column of smoke in the sky.

“Oh, boy, Tony,” he said. “This is bad. That place is like a matchbox. Those stairs are dry as a bone!”

MATT PLOVANICH was sitting restlessly with his classmates inside Our Lady of the Angels Church. The smell of smoke permeated the interior of the long building, and lines of children evacuated from the burning school next door continued to stream into its pews. Matt watched as nervous teachers busied themselves by taking head counts. He didn’t hear anyone praying, just a lot of talking. “The school’s on fire. Did you see it? The school’s on fire. Oh my God!”

Matt decided he didn’t want to stay any longer. He wanted to go home. Hatless and coatless, he stood up on his own and walked to the side door, then slipped out into the cold. When he reached the alley, he looked up at the school. The scene was still one of sheer panic. Firemen were running up ladders, and kids were tumbling out windows. The alley was littered with bodies. Firemen on the ground were running from window to window, trying to catch kids in life nets. It was futile; there were too many windows to be serviced.

In one of the windows Matt could see the outline of a figure struggling to get up over the ledge, its hands grabbing on to the windowsill, just trying to hold on. The little grey face was silhouetted by smoke, and for a second or two, it bobbed up and down. Then it slipped back into the flames. At the next window was a small girl, her long brown hair on fire. She started falling. Matt watched as she hit the ground. He couldn’t tell if she had jumped or was pushed out. It didn’t matter, for Matt knew he was seeing horror. There was horror coming from every window. It left him stunned. He knew he and his classmates had been in a bad situation, but he couldn’t imagine anything like this. Standing in the alley, he was frozen both in fear and in awe. This was his school. These were his friends. He couldn’t believe what was happening.

Terrified, Matt took off running for his family’s apartment building on West Division Street. He didn’t know yet that his father, off duty from the Police Department, had arrived at the school only a few minutes earlier. Rudy Plovanich had made a date to drive some of the nuns downtown for shopping. Instead, at that moment he was making his way through the south wing, looking for his sons, helping to evacuate other stricken children.

When Matt reached his apartment building a few minutes later, he went around to the back porch and ran up three flights of stairs. He turned to look back toward the school. To the east, smoke was rising in the sky. It was black and thick, like an atomic bomb. Matt was pounding on the back door when his mother opened it and let him in.

“Where’s your coat?” Irene Plovanich yelled. She grabbed Matt by the arm and pulled him inside the doorway. “Who’ve you been fighting with?”

“Mom,” Matt answered, “the school’s on fire!”

“Yeah, right. C’mon, get in here.”

“No, Mom, really. It’s on fire. It’s bad.”

It wasn’t until they were inside the tiny kitchen that Matt’s mother noticed the black mucus running from her son’s nostrils. Then she caught an odor of smoke coming from his disheveled clothing.

“Matty,” she said, “are you serious?”

“Mom,” he repeated, “it’s bad.”

Just then the front doorbell rang. It was Mr. Gordon, the elderly man who lived across the hall. He looked worried. “Reenie,” he asked, “do you have all the kids?”

“No. Matty just came home.”

“Reenie. The school’s on fire. It’s really bad.”

Matt’s mother turned to look back at her son. “Oh Matty,” she cried, pulling him close. “What happened?”

MICHELLE BARALE picked herself up and started walking along Avers Avenue. She felt dizzy, like she might faint. Her throat was burning and her stomach felt sick from smoke. She wanted to vomit. Instead she coughed. From the sidewalk she wandered across the street. An old Italian couple, their faces streaming with tears, took her by the hand and led her into their home.

Michelle was coughing when she sat down on a big overstuffed chair in the living room. Outside, smoke and screams filled the air. The girl’s face was smudged from soot, and her blue skirt was ripped. Her white blouse was wrinkled and wet, and both her shoes and one of her socks were missing.

The old couple tried talking to her, but they spoke little English. They were rubbing her shoeless feet, trying to get her to drink from a glass of anisetta, an Italian liqueur, to help soothe her throat.

The old woman handed Michelle the telephone. “Call mother,” she said in her broken English.

Michelle dialed a number. Her mother was at work. Her grandmother answered.

“Grandma,” she cried. “Come get me.”

ON THE NEAR WEST SIDE, the bums and down-and-outs of Skid Row were fighting the cold, scrounging for change and half-smoked cigarettes in the gutters along Madison Street.

Around the corner, inside the Aberdeen Street firehouse, Hal Bruno was spending his day off riding with Squad 2. A reporter for the Chicago American, Bruno was thirty years old and had literally grown up in the Fire Department. He began hanging around firehouses in Rogers Park when he was eight. At fifteen he started riding the rigs, and in his early twenties he began performing the same duties as a firefighter, complete with his own set of black turnout gear and fire helmet.

Squad 2 shared the narrow brick firehouse with Engine 34, and the two companies were among the busiest in the city. So far, however, Monday had been quiet. Bruno was passing time in the firehouse kitchen, sipping coffee and thumbing the pages of a magazine. He was waiting for five o’clock, when he would leave to teach a skiing class downtown at the Merchandise Mart.

At around a quarter to three, Bruno’s ears tuned in to the fire radio at the front of the station. He could hear urgent voices coming over the air. Leroy Dean, the captain, was sitting on watch when a 2-11 alarm was struck for Chicago and Hamlin. He reached over his desk and turned up the radio.

“Send us all available ambulances,” a voice cried. “We’ve got a school. Kids are injured!”

“Get ready,” Dean warned. The men were jumpy. Squad 2 would be due if it went to a 3-11.

Bruno and the other firemen gathered around the desk. Hearing the commotion on the radio, they stepped over to the rig, donned their fire coats and helmets, and slipped into their boots. Just then the joker started its incessant clacking, and a voice blared over the radio: “Battalion Eighteen to Main! Give us a 5-11.”

Dean hit the house bells. “Let’s go!” he shouted.

The men didn’t wait for the speaker. They jumped on the rig and pushed out the door.

AFTER THE COLLAPSE of the roof, firefighters had regained their footing and began to battle their way back into the blazing school. Smoke poured furiously from the upper windows, and flames licked angrily from the large, gaping hole in the remaining roof. Two fire companies operating in front of the school picked up their hose lines and, on hands and knees, climbed back up the front stairway, trying desperately to push back the fire blocking access into the main corridor and classrooms. Without breathing apparatus, the men were hit hard by the intense heat and smoke. But they refused to retreat, fighting for every inch of space. Outside, other firefighters straddling ladders were trying to climb through windows and enter the second-floor classrooms where, still unknown to them, scores of children and nuns lay dead.

When Squad 2 pulled up at Hamlin and Iowa, in front of the Our Lady of the Angels Church, Hal Bruno and his partners grabbed their pike poles and axes and started running to the school. Smoke blanketing the neighborhood was thick, the smell of burning strong. Ambulances and police squadrols were pulling away with injured children.

The sidewalks in front of the church and south wing were crammed with adults searching for their children. As he ran through the crowd, Bruno saw a woman in hair curlers and a scarf, her face in absolute anguish. “Where’s my baby!” she yelled. “Where’s my baby!”

When the squadmen reached the front of the south wing, they climbed up an aerial ladder to the roof, where they were ordered to cut holes to ventilate the smoke. Once up top, Bruno looked across to the north wing where fire was leaping up through the collapsed hole in the roof. The firemen started swinging their axes, ripping apart the roofing material, pulling it back with their pike poles. Next to them an engine company was throwing a heavy stream of water across the courtway.

Standing on the edge, Bruno peered down into the courtway. Through a window he could see another company stretching a line into the annex. Never before had he seen a group of firemen look so determined. The smoke was incredible. They were taking a terrible beating. Bruno wondered: What’s going on? Why are they trying to get in there like that?

Bruno watched as another fireman climbed up a wooden ladder to one of the windows inside the courtway. When he reached the top, the man ducked his head inside the window and nearly fell off the ladder, dropping his pike pole. “Oh my God!” he screamed. The shrill of his voice was terrifying. Bruno felt the hairs standing up on his neck. “These classrooms are filled with children!”

For Bruno, the fireman’s discovery was the first indication of what lay inside the smoldering ruins. They had plenty of firemen on the scene, but as far as he knew, he was the only reporter. He turned to Dean. “Cap,” he yelled. “I gotta go to work as a reporter!”

“Go!” Dean said.

Bruno descended the ladder and sprinted around to the Avers side of the building. Almost immediately he bumped into a priest. “There’s gotta be seventy-five kids in there!” the cleric shouted to him. Bruno pulled out a pen and notebook and started scribbling notes. He ran around the corner into the alley. The sight was incredible. Unbelievable. He had to find a telephone. Running north on Avers, he began picking up eyewitness accounts along the way. “I’m Bruno with the American. What did you see?”

After taking more notes, Bruno ran up to a woman standing outside her home across the street. “Lady,” he shouted. “I’m with the American. You got a phone?”

The woman led Bruno into her kitchen. “There,” she pointed.

Bruno picked up the telephone and quickly dialed his paper. He looked at his watch. They still had time to get a bulletin out for the afternoon edition. After a couple of rings, the harsh voice of an editor came on the line. “City desk.”

“This is Bruno. I’m at this school fire. Stop the press!”

The editor connected Bruno to a rewrite man, and the reporter began to relay his story.

LIEUTENANT JOHN “RED” WINDLE, in charge of the Fire Department’s new snorkel unit, was standing inside the department’s repair shops at 31st Street and Sacramento Avenue when the box alarm was struck for the school. The snorkel was due, and as the company began its long trek to the scene, Windle was worried. There’s going to be a mob of people around there, he thought to himself. We might have a tough time getting in.

The lieutenant’s fears gradually diminished as the snorkel cleared the clogged streets and was quickly maneuvered into position in the alley north of the school. Windle climbed into the snorkel basket and took himself high into the air, steadying the basket just above roof level. Once he had water, he cracked the turret pipe and began directing a powerful stream into the gaping hole in the roof and through the windows of the second floor. He looked down into the rooms and could see one or two children slumped at their desks. He had to be careful not to come down too low with the pipe, fearful that he might wash the kids right out of their seats.

Flames were shooting out the two roof ventilators like blow torches. Windle raked his stream back and forth through the windows on Rooms 208 and 210, washing the plaster off the walls and ceilings, directing the stream into the cockloft where the fire had been burning unchecked for some time. The water from the turret had a tremendous cooling effect, and the flames soon began to subside. Firemen started climbing into the darkened classrooms. Although the men wore no breathing apparatus, they were now able to gain a footing inside the smoke-filled classrooms. They began to pass lifeless forms through the windows, descending the ladders with limp, blackened figures of children slumped precariously over their shoulders.

Windle could see that the second-floor classrooms had been badly ravaged by fire. He knew it was unlikely anyone inside had survived.

AT 3:09 P.M. the first of two special alarms was sounded for additional manpower, and the loudspeaker inside the downtown firehouse of Squad Company 1 came to life:

“SQUAD I, TAKE IN THE FIVE-ELEVEN, AVERS AND IOWA.”

Richard Scheidt and his mates on the squad dropped what they were doing and ran to the rig. Thirty seconds later the squad pushed out the door, headed north and west through the mid-afternoon traffic.

Standing on the back step, Scheidt winced as the cold wind brushed against his face. On the horizon, a column of black smoke was climbing into the sky. He turned up the collar on his fire coat and pulled his boots up over his knees. A few minutes later, when the rig was stopped by traffic, Scheidt and the four other men assigned to the squad jumped off and fell in line behind their captain, Harry Whedon, who took off running for the school two blocks away.

By this time all squad companies on the scene had been ordered to the front of the school building. Whedon reported directly to Fire Commissioner Quinn who, flanked by two other chiefs, was standing outside the north wing, directing fire crews already engaged in firefighting. Quinn looked stunned. Never before had he seen smoke this black or this thick pour from a building under such pressure. It was the worst he had ever seen or ever would see. “Harry,” he shouted to Whedon from under his battered white fire helmet, “take your gang upstairs and start making those rooms.”

Without hesitation the firefighters bounded up the crowded front stairway. At the top of the landing, conditions were barely tenable, the heat incredible. The main corridor was still impassable. Firemen from several engine companies were crouched on their knees, wrestling charged hose lines, trying to push back the smoke and flames. Scheidt and his mates began swinging their axes and sledgehammers, trying desperately to breach the walls so they could access the classrooms and search for signs of life.

AT 3:30 P.M. Monsignor William Gorman, the Fire Department chaplain, crawled out of the building to inform newsmen that ten to fifteen children were dead. Fifteen minutes later a fearful Gorman raised the figure to twenty-five. As firemen advanced their hose lines deeper into the smoky school, the loss of life became more evident. Gorman’s figures to the press grew steadily higher.

As word of the blaze spread, the narrow side streets around the school soon were clogged with spectators, fire vehicles, ambulances, and police squadrols. Broadcast warnings to stay away from the area only drew more people. Parents left work and rushed to the scene. Firemen with children attending the school left their firehouses in other parts of the city to join in the rescue efforts. All drove as close to the school as possible before parking their autos in the streets and running to the fire.

Disbelieving parents grew more agitated with each passing minute. This could not be happening, they thought. Not here. Not now. Not to us. Some tried several times to break through police lines. Women spilled into the streets, chasing ambulances and squadrols, trying to open the back doors to get a look at the feet of victims being transported to local hospitals, hoping to identify the children by their shoes. Some parents, after learning their youngsters had left school without coats and jackets, stood outside clutching the small coats they had brought with them.

As more fire companies arrived, firefighters laddered all windows on the school’s north wing, and hose lines were spread through the streets like loose spaghetti. The narrow streets became so clogged with emergency vehicles and spectators that firemen were ordered to cut down trees and shrubs so that ambulances and police squadrols could drive along the curbs and reach the front of the school.

With sufficient manpower and fire equipment at the scene, the fire was gradually brought under control. At 3:45 p.m. all companies not engaged in actual firefighting operations were ordered to the front of the building on Avers to assist in the search for the dead. Although some victims had already been removed, fire officials were waiting to take out the remaining bodies, fearing a stampede of frantic parents.

At the top of the second-floor landing, through the grimy smoke, firefighters were swinging their axes, pike poles, and hammers, pulling away splintered pieces of wall. After a few minutes, an opening had been breached large enough to allow entry into the burned-out classrooms. Guided by lanterns and flashlights, the men groped their way forward through the smoke, searching for life. What they found instead was a gruesome scene of death that would forever be etched in their memories. The devil himself could not have created a more horrible picture.

Strewn about the smoky, blackened classrooms, amid the charred woodwork and caved-in ceilings, were piles of small bodies. Overturned desks and charred books and papers bore witness to the swift unexpectedness of the blaze. Water-drenched plaster and wood lathing hung down from what were once the walls. Chalkboards had either fallen or had been burned off the walls, and broken glass from shattered transoms and light fixtures littered the floors. Scorched religious statues lay toppled beneath pieces of burned timber from the collapsed roof. In one room a porcelain figure of the Virgin Mary stood on a bookcase. It had been a planter, but the leaves were now ashes. Outside in the hallway, a blackened statue of Christ looked down over the scene.

With tears streaming down their faces, the firemen crawled into the rooms, hacking at the debris to reach the bodies. The children had been burnt to varying degrees, and some were virtually cremated. The men wept as they carried the bodies to the windows, handing them off to other firefighters perched outside on the ladders.

The stench of death permeated the darkened corridor. Still, the firemen pressed on with their work. They began separating the charred remains, carefully placing the little ones into canvas body bags or wrapping them in blankets and tarps. They scoured the rooms with their flashlights, overturning desks and furniture, searching the floors and debris for signs of life. There were none to be found. They had been called too late.

Inside Room 212 firefighters found twenty-seven dead children. Lying on the desk tops were waterlogged books and papers that would never be graded. Sister Therese was dead. Her desk had been hurled forward as she struggled to reach her charges and avoid the flames.

In Room 210 a stack of dead fourth-graders was found beneath the windowsills, the tiny victims unable to reach over the high ledges. Underneath another pile of students lay Sister Seraphica. She had stayed until the end and was among the room’s thirty fatalities.

In Room 208 the badly burned body of Sister Mary Canice was found draped over another pile of dead pupils, evidence of her futile attempt to shield the children from the flames. Ten of the room’s occupants were dead. Lying on the floor was an electric wall clock. It had stopped at 2:47 p.m.

Across the corridor, in Room 211, Lieutenant Charles Kamin and his crew from Truck 35 slogged through water that in some places was ankle-deep. They entered the room carrying blankets, salvage tarps, and hose covers—whatever they could use to wrap the fragile remains. The sight was appalling. Several blackened shapes resembling small human forms were stacked by the windows. In the back of the room, against the east wall, more bodies lay piled atop one another. Kamin counted fifteen of the pathetic figures. Just a mound of dead bodies. Looking closer, he could see that some of the children had the skin burned off their bodies. Others were tangled or fused together by the intense heat. A few had bones sticking out where fire had consumed flesh. One child’s skull was plainly visible.

Kamin could feel a sickness rising in his stomach. It was the same room from which he had earlier rescued students while atop the ladder. Tears were rolling down his cheeks. He felt helpless. All he could do now was untangle these kids and cover them and take them away.

When firefighters entered Room 209 they could locate only one body. Beverly Ann Burda, the thirteen-year-old who had dreamed of becoming a nun, was found lying near the window, felled by smoke.

Across the hallway, inside Room 208, Captain James Neville of Engine 43 could see that the men were having trouble removing the remaining bodies from the classroom, where the children had been exposed to the worst of the fire’s fury. The bodies were fragile, and as the firemen tried picking them up, some broke apart. “Hold it,” Neville yelled. “Find all the blankets and hose covers you can and start making packages.”

This is what they did.

During one of his many trips outside the school, Neville was stopped by Captain Tony Pilas of the Fire Prevention Bureau.

“Jimmy!” Pilas asked, “are all the kids out?”

“I don’t know,” Neville answered. “But I’ll find out.”

Pilas’s twelve-year-old daughter, Nancy, was one of the packages.

NUMBED BY FATIGUE, firefighter Richard Scheidt was slowly making his way down the front stairs, part of a procession of somber, black-faced firemen removing dead children from the school. The men were headed for a side door on the north wing that opened onto the alley, where other rescue workers waited with stretchers. In Scheldt’s arms was the limp, water-dampened body of a young boy. Using his flashlight as a guide, Scheidt had located the youngster lying on the floor below a window inside Room 212. The boy’s hair was tousled and his face and clothing had been smudged by smoke. Both of his shoes were missing. He weighed about ninety pounds, and Scheidt guessed he must have been about ten years old.

Standing on the back step of a fire truck parked just inside the alley, Steve Lasker raised his camera as he saw the firemen coming down the stairs carrying the bodies. He noticed Scheidt. As soon as the figure came through the doorway, the shutter on Lasker’s camera snapped. Scheidt didn’t notice the cameraman standing before him. He bent down to set the boy on a waiting stretcher, then went back upstairs.

The image of Scheidt and the boy captured by Lasker’s camera at that moment would become famous the world over, describing better than words the tragedy of the school fire.

INSIDE THE SCHOOL, amidst the destruction of the north-wing classrooms, Salvatore Imburgia leaned out a window and peered down at the crowd of parents on the sidewalk below. He was grimy from soot, and beneath his heavy, black fire coat his body was soaked with perspiration. The adults were standing in silent disbelief, watching as firemen carried stretcher after stretcher through the front doors. To Imburgia, the spectators bore familiar faces; he recognized many. This was his parish, his neighborhood. They were his people.

Imburgia was shaken, wrestling with his emotions. His kids were this age. What if his kids had burned up like this? What would he do? How would he react? How would he tell his wife?

The number of bodies was overwhelming. When he first entered the classrooms he couldn’t believe how many were dead. He expected to find ten, maybe twelve kids. But then it was fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty. What the hell is this? What the hell happened?

Imburgia shelved his questions. The time to think would come later. Right now he was a fireman, a professional. He had a job to do. Go for the bodies. Find the bodies. Be careful. Don’t get emotional.

He and three other firemen bent over to pick up the body of an eight-year-old boy slumped over a desk. The men laid the boy on a stretcher, covering the little figure with a blanket. As they carried him downstairs, Imburgia thought of his wife’s aunt. She had a child enrolled in the school. He didn’t know at the time that the boy had stayed home sick that day. How many kids in the family were here?

In the foyer just inside the front door, priests with purple stoles around their necks were bending over, administering the final rites of the church to victims being carried from the building. Imburgia and his partners stopped momentarily. A priest pulled back the blanket covering their stretcher. He began anointing the forehead of the child who lay underneath. Imburgia looked down. The boy’s eyes were closed, as if he were sleeping. When the rite was completed, the firemen carried the boy into the street to a waiting police squadrol. Imburgia looked at the crowd. He saw a few of his friends. They ran up, grabbing him by the arm.

“Sal,” one cried, “did you see my kid? I can’t find him!”

Imburgia didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Right now he was a fireman. He had to be strong. He couldn’t break down in front of civilians. Besides, he wasn’t sure if he recognized any of the kids he had pulled out. To him they all looked the same. Young. Innocent. Helpless.

AT 4:19 P.M. Fire Commissioner Quinn radioed the main fire alarm office, ordering that the 5-11 alarm be “struck out” on his authority. Although almost thirty minutes had passed since firefighters first brought the flames under control, the commissioner had decided to wait before officially declaring so, hoping that perhaps some signs of life could be discovered.

Soon after, Mayor Daley and Archbishop Albert Meyer arrived at the scene. Quinn, his face begrimed by smoke and soot, accompanied the two men inside the school for an inspection of the ruins. The mayor was dressed in an overcoat and galoshes. He sloshed through the darkened interior, touring the grim scene in stunned silence. The father of seven children, Daley was not a cold, unfeeling man as some of his political foes portrayed him. Now, standing outside Our Lady of the Angels School, he appeared bewildered, as though wondering why God had allowed innocent children to perish. Few if any people outside his immediate family knew the mayor’s innermost thoughts, but clearly he took the tragedy personally and considered it an irreparable stain on his beloved city and church.

By the same token Daley was pragmatic and had to be thinking about the legal ramifications of the disaster. Was there negligence involved in the fire? Would the city or Fire Department be held accountable? And what about the liability of the Catholic archdiocese?

After viewing the classrooms on the fire-ravaged second floor, Meyer was so overcome by grief he had to be led away to the convent across the street, where the school’s principal, Sister St. Florence, was being sedated by doctors.

Outside, an endless parade of gaunt-eyed firemen continued to emerge from the school carrying sheet-covered stretchers, all trying their best to shield the bodies from the spectators’ view. They placed the inert little forms into waiting ambulances and police squadrols staged in a long line running north on Avers past the school’s front doors. Once loaded with their dreadful cargoes, the vehicles crept slowly northward to Augusta Boulevard and headed for the Cook County Morgue four miles away.

For the hundreds of students who had escaped the hell on the school’s second floor, the world suddenly took on a new, ugly face. No longer was it a safe, friendly place. Here and there adults would pluck youngsters from the crowd and wrap them in a blanket or overcoat. “You’re safe now,” the children were told. “It’s okay.” But things were not okay. Nor would they ever be. Some unclaimed children wandering in the crowds were taken into nearby homes. Others were stopped by adults who begged them for information regarding the whereabouts of their own missing sons and daughters. One woman located her daughter after ninety minutes of frantic searching. Other parents would not be so lucky.

On Iowa Street, sheet-covered bodies were laid on the lawn outside the parish rectory, and a temporary morgue was located inside a private home across the street on Avers. Parents and relatives of missing schoolchildren let out crazed shrieks as the line of bodies outside the rectory grew longer and longer. Some parents who watched bit trembling hands and pulled at their hair. One grandfather standing in the crowd suffered a heart attack. The sight was too much.

A temporary Red Cross station was set up inside the rectory, and workers began compiling names of the known dead and injured, listing the hospitals to which they had been transported. The information, however, was sketchy, and nothing could be confirmed. With hundreds of emotionally distraught adults roaming outside in the streets, the little office soon became overwhelmed. “Go home,” the parents were told. “Wait for a phone call.”

Instead the adults continued plodding through the neighborhood, ringing doorbells at houses and apartment buildings. Many youngsters had been taken into homes by neighbors and passersby, and scores of children were found lying on floors, on furniture, in kitchens, and in bedrooms. The houses smelled like smoke, and the cries of injured and frightened children filled every room. Still more injured children had been carried away by strangers to parked cars and driven through almost impassable streets to local hospitals. Police began advising parents unable to account for their children to start searching the seven area hospitals where the injured had been taken. As hope began to dwindle, adults began their bitter rounds.

A mile and a half away, at the Austin District police station on Chicago Avenue, a missing-persons bureau was established, and detectives in the squad room began reading names off hastily prepared lists to the parents who showed up there. Those whose children were on the injured lists ran from the police station and drove to local hospitals. Others unable to get answers stood in line at a single pay phone, placing calls home to see if their little ones had showed up. Still others heard the two dreaded words: “County morgue.”

Darkness soon arrived, and a cold wind swept the neighborhood. Streetlights began to glow, and two Fire Department light wagons were called in to illuminate the burned-out building. By seven o’clock firefighters had recovered the last of the victims from the charred classrooms. For the firemen, there was little more to do, just the “routine work” of salvage and overhaul, checking for hot spots, picking up hose lines. Fire and police officials turned their attention to finding the cause of the blaze. But for those parents who had failed to locate their children, a long and in some cases heartbreaking search was under way.