Six

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AT 2:52 P.M. that Monday afternoon, nurses in the emergency room of St. Anne’s Hospital were preparing for the three-o’clock shift change when they heard someone screaming and banging on the doors leading to the ambulance bay outside. “Open up!” cried a man’s voice. “I’ve got lots of kids here. They’re all burned!”

When the nurses pushed open the doors and kicked down the door stops that would hold them in place for the next five hours, they found the pleading samaritan standing in the cold, holding a nine-year-old girl in his arms. The girl’s reddened face was swollen from burns and the hair on her head was singed from their roots. The globe of her scalp, white and waxy, glistened with water.

The man motioned to his car parked in the ambulance bay. “In there!” he yelled.

Inside the vehicle were five more burned and injured children, each moaning and screaming in pain. The youngsters’ blue uniforms and white shirts smelled of smoke, and their faces, arms, and hands were bloodied and black. As the nurses carried them into the emergency room, the man shouted a warning: “There’s more coming!”

There were more indeed. Many more. Almost immediately the 322-bed hospital operated by a small band of nuns known as the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ was besieged by a steady stream of vehicles, from ambulances and police squadrols to milk trucks and newspaper vans, arriving en masse with injured and dying children from the burning school sixteen blocks away.

In the next hour eighty children would arrive—children on stretchers, in policemen’s arms, supported by firemen; children shivering from cold, dazed by shock, whimpering in fear; children with cuts and bruises and broken limbs; children overcome by smoke and poisonous gases; children with the ugly odor of burned flesh, skin blackened or angry red with swelling blisters; children who were already dead.

Sister Mary Almunda Klaus, the hospital’s administrator, was immediately alerted. “Sister!” a nursing supervisor shouted excitedly over the telephone. “There’s a big fire at Our Lady of the Angels School. We’re receiving lots of injured.”

For twenty years Sister Almunda had supervised the emergency department at St. Anne’s, and she was experienced in dealing with emergencies. She had been on duty one day in 1947 when twenty-four horribly burned men, their lungs seared by live steam, died after being brought to the hospital following an explosion that ripped through a nearby factory.

As Sister Almunda moved toward the emergency room, she glanced at the hospital’s busy switchboard. Every line was lit up with incoming calls. She knew something dreadful had happened. She reached for a telephone and placed calls to Dr. James Callahan, the hospital’s chief of staff, and Dr. James Seagraves, chairman of the disaster plan committee. “Get down to the ER, quick!” she said, her voice ringing with authority. “Something major is developing.”

St. Anne’s 647 employees, its medical staff of 104, and its 120 student nurses moved into action with quiet precision. Ten minutes after he was called, Dr. Seagraves stepped into the emergency room and assembled a triage team to begin screening the victims according to the degree of their injuries. Hospital gurneys were brought into the emergency room, and intravenous racks were rolled into the auditorium of the hospital’s nursing school, designated as a temporary receiving area. Student nurses cleared away auditorium chairs and set up long tables for bandages, needles, plastic tubing, drugs, and syringes. Housekeeping sent down blankets and sterile sheets. Pharmacy workers checked their supplies.

Children were placed on gurneys, some unconscious, others rubbing at burned arms and hands, and wheeled from the emergency room to other areas for treatment. Those with life-threatening injuries were immediately taken upstairs to the hospital’s sixth-floor surgical area. The next level of injured were treated inside the emergency room. Children with the least serious injuries were wheeled or walked into the auditorium, where student nurses began tending the wounds.

“It was a long wait,” recalled Vito Muilli, who, after running home from the school, was driven to the hospital by his older brother. Vito was treated in the emergency room before being admitted that evening for a two-week hospital stay. Both his hands were chewed up like sausages, bloodied and black, with peeled skin. “All the kids there were lined up. They were all screaming. Many of them were burned worse than me.”

As the magnitude of the situation became apparent, the hospital’s emergency disaster plan was put into effect, bringing in stores of drugs, plasma, and other medical supplies. Other calls went outside the hospital, and a team of fifty doctors was mobilized, many summoned from private practices. Fortunately, because the fire occurred just as the hospital was beginning its three-o’clock shift change, twice the number of medical staff was present, and beefed-up physician-nurse teams were placed in action. Other physicians, nursing departments, interns, residents, and floor supervisors were also alerted.

Soon the community at large became aware of the grim struggle to save lives being waged inside the hospital, and before long the streets surrounding it became clogged with traffic. An ordinary community hospital, St. Anne’s was facing the greatest challenge in its history, stretching its resources to the limit.

Within the first hour, thirty-seven children and three nuns—Sisters Helaine, Davidis, and Geraldita—were admitted to the hospital. Ten other students, along with Sister Therese, were dead on arrival, their bodies taken to the basement and placed on the floor of an x-ray room. Two more students died before being admitted.

Of the students who arrived first, six had been burned over 60 percent of their bodies. Thirteen more had burns of 40 percent. Twelve had broken bones, including one broken neck, two fractured skulls, a crushed chest, and a shattered hip—thirty-six fractures in all. Included among the injured was a seventy-four-year-old man who had suffered a stroke while attempting to catch children jumping from the school windows. Four injured firefighters also were received.

AT THREE O’CLOCK that afternoon, Michelle McBride was wheeled into St. Anne’s emergency room, the first “bad one” to arrive. She was thirteen, an eighth-grader, one of a group of six girls who played and studied together. Of her clique, she would be the only survivor. Inside Room 209 Michelle shrank back from jumping while frightened classmates pushed and clawed their way to the windows. By the time she reached a ladder, the fire had swept its way through the room. A few rungs down the ladder, she fell.

Michelle’s head was cut and almost two-thirds of her body was burned. Thick bobby socks protected her ankles, but the rest of her legs had been seared, the left one to the knee, the right one up to her thigh. Skin was also burned off her back and both hands, and burns seared her forehead and left cheek down to her earlobe.

Michelle’s heart was affected, its output diminished. Kidney action faltered and wastes were retained. Her blood pressure dropped. Her pulse rate rose. The rate of red blood cell destruction was increasing. She was sick and getting sicker. Within eight hours she would be in danger of death from shock. Her body, it seemed, was a big open wound.

“Wheel her in here,” someone shouted, pointing to an examining room. “She’s a bad one.”

Other “bad ones” were close behind.

GERRY ANDREOLI sat in the Fire Department ambulance parked on Avers Avenue for what seemed like a long time. At one moment he felt like he might lose consciousness. A classmate lying behind him was moaning in pain, and firemen were crowding other students into the vehicle. Gerry felt extremely hot, as if he were next to a campfire. He rested his head against a side window. Finally the driver hopped inside and took off for the hospital. Gerry looked out the window. Shocked faces stared back at him as the ambulance moved down the street.

Eight minutes later, when the ambulance pulled into the emergency entrance at St. Anne’s, Gerry was able to walk into the hospital by himself.

“In there,” somebody said, pointing Gerry into a small examining room off to his right. Inside another injured boy lay on a cot, his face and body swollen from burns.

A nurse stepped in. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Gerry Andreoli.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

Quickly and methodically, the nurse looked Gerry over. He had burns over 36 percent of his body, more than half of which were third degree. His head was swollen and encrusted, and parts of his ears had been burned away. The nurse pointed to a chair, then barked a command. “Wait right here,” she said.

Gerry obeyed, sitting down. It was the hardest thing to sit and wait. There was no place to lie down. People were running back and forth, hollering and shouting orders. He started to fall over when someone walked inside the room and helped him to a gurney in the hallway.

Gerry lay down on his back. Then he passed out.

IRENE MORDARSKI was lifted out of another ambulance, then carried inside the emergency room where she was placed on a gurney set just inside in the hallway. Inside the scene was one of hectic confusion. Nurses were running back and forth all around her. Someone kept saying, “What happened? What happened?”

“There was a fire at Queen of Angels,” someone else answered.

Irene tried to correct them. “It’s Our Lady of the Angels,” she said, but apparently no one could hear her. Then a nurse ran up and asked Irene her name.

“Irene Mordarski,” she answered.

“What?” said the nurse, unable to understand.

“Irene Mordarski,” the girl repeated.

“Spell it.”

“M-O-R-D-A-R-S-K-I.”

Irene thought for a moment. She was speaking clearly. Why couldn’t the nurse understand what she said? Had she looked in the mirror, she would have known why: her burned lips were swelled to five times their normal size.

The nurse was in a hurry. More kids were coming in. Quickly she scribbled something on paper, but what she wrote was incorrect. Consequently Irene’s name was misspelled on the hospital’s admitting sheet. The error would cause anguish for Irene’s parents, who had already begun searching for their two daughters. Little Monica was safe. But Stanley and Amalia Mordarski would end up traveling to three other hospitals and the county morgue before finally locating Irene at ten o’clock that night.

When Irene was wheeled into an examining room, her uniform was cut off and she was found to have third-degree burns on her legs, arms, and parts of her hands. First- and second-degree burns covered other parts of her body. She was sedated and her left hip was x-rayed. After being administered antibiotics and plasma, she was wheeled into surgery.

Irene looked up from the operating table. Someone was placing a cup over her face. She started feeling drowsy. She looked up again at the masked doctors bending over her on the operating table. She felt a jab from the metal pin being inserted into her left ankle. Then everything went dark. Anesthesia swam through her body. She was unconscious.

AS DOCTORS scrubbed down for the surgeries that would keep them busy through the evening, the hospital’s tiny corridors soon became crowded. Nurses and nuns ran from room to room carrying blankets, sterile sheets, and medications. Still more congestion developed. The three slow hospital elevators, each able to hold only two gurneys at a time, delayed movement of the sickest children to the sixth-floor operating rooms. Incoming calls jammed the telephone lines, and new lines had to be hastily installed.

Then came the parents, arriving in droves, parking their cars in the street or in nearby parking lots. Others riding city buses jumped off at the nearest bus stops and ran the rest of the way to the emergency room. More than a hundred parents jammed the hospital’s narrow corridors. They had rushed in from homes, shops, offices, and factories. The men wore work clothes, the women were pale and shaken. “Where are the lists? Where’s my baby?” They peered at each passing gurney, hoping—yet fearing—that a burned face would be familiar.

Nine-year-old Linda Friedeck was brought to St. Anne’s by her aunt after the woman located the girl in a home next to the school. Linda, a fourth-grader assigned to a first-floor classroom, escaped with her classmates relatively unscathed by the fire. But she was still frightened and darkened by smoke, and her aunt decided to take her to the hospital. After squeezing their way through the crowd of people outside the school, the pair walked south to Chicago Avenue, where they flagged down a milk truck whose driver picked them up and took them to St. Anne’s. When they arrived at the hospital around six o’clock, the scene inside the emergency room was still chaotic.

Linda remembered walking inside the emergency room where parents literally attacked her. “I was grabbed from everywhere,” she later recalled. “My aunt kept trying to cover me. The mothers, my God, they were screaming. ‘Did you see my Mary? Did you see my Johnny? Did you see my Paul?’ They were just hoping, just grabbing at something. They were asking my name and what grade I was in.”

One nurse recalled: “A lot of these children were Italian, so it wasn’t just the parents coming in but the whole family. It was hard to control. We had statues at the end of each corridor. They were kneeling at the statues and praying out loud, and some of them were hysterical. Of course they wanted to be with the children. They were very emotional. We had to refuse admittance to some of them, and they weren’t happy about that. They went from being very sweet people to very mean, bitter, cantankerous.”

Soon the parents began impeding the hospital’s medical care, and a decision was made to huddle them into a large lounge located inside the hospital’s nursing school. There sandwiches, hot coffee, and bulletins on the children awaited.

Sister Stephen Brugeman, a strict but compassionate nun who was director of the nursing school, had been supervising a group of student nurses who were about to walk through the hospital and sing Christmas carols when word of the disaster first reached her office. After running to the emergency room, she was directed to the nurses’ lounge where the corralled parents waited nervously for word of their children. Finally someone brought Sister Stephen a clipboard with the names of the injured children who had been received at the hospital. “Please listen,” she said, stepping onto a chair so that her voice could be heard above the anxious crowd.

Slowly and methodically the nun began reading names, confirming that those on the list had been received at the hospital. But the list did not provide condition reports, which served only to heighten the parents’ tension and uncertainty. As more of them arrived, the noisy room grew substantially noisier. No longer could Sister Stephen be heard. She pointed to a man standing beside her. “Will you read these?” she asked.

The man stepped forward. He grabbed the list and started hollering out names. After the ninth name he stopped suddenly. “That’s my daughter!” he cried. Another father took over the reading.

From time to time Sister Stephen was joined by other attendants who would come from the emergency room with more names. The amended lists contained additional information, including condition reports. The news was either good or bad: fair, serious, critical, dead.

One woman slid to the floor when the word came of her daughter’s death. After another name, an anguished husband yelled at his wife: “Why didn’t you keep her home today?”

As the hours passed, scores of worried parents continued to arrive at St. Anne’s, and the streets outside stayed crowded with vehicles. Some parents showed up after searching other local hospitals and police stations. All screamed, sobbed, or otherwise whispered the same question: “Is my child here?”

Some were told yes, others were left to continue their search elsewhere. In the midst of the confusion, errors were made. One nun in the emergency room identified the body of a girl only to have the girl’s mother telephone the hospital later in the evening to say that her daughter had arrived home safely. One family’s joy turned to grief for another.

ALFRED AND MARY ANDREOLI arrived at St. Anne’s after searching for their son along the crowded sidewalks outside the burning school. While still at the fire scene, the couple had spotted a parish priest standing outside the rectory. They asked if he had seen Gerry.

“Yes,” the cleric answered. “Gerry’s in the hospital, at St. Anne’s. They weren’t all hurt but they took them just the same.”

Alfred Andreoli could sense that the priest was being only half honest, that he didn’t wish to alarm them further by admitting that Gerry was badly injured. If Gerry was okay, they’d have found him outside the school looking for his brother and sister. He was that kind of kid.

As soon as they entered the hospital’s main doors off Thomas Street, the Andreolis saw one of Gerry’s classmates sitting in a wheelchair. The boy’s clothes were smirched by smoke, his face smeared with grease. He looked in a daze. Alfred figured Gerry had to be there too, but in what condition he couldn’t imagine. He took his wife’s hand and walked to the reception desk in the lobby.

“Has Gerry Andreoli been brought in?” he asked.

“We don’t know yet,” the receptionist replied. “We don’t have the lists yet. Why don’t you sit down in the waiting room. Somebody will bring you some coffee.”

Alfred thought it odd that they be asked to wait and then be served coffee on top of it. He could see other parents arriving. They must be expecting a siege. He still didn’t know ambulances were streaming into the opposite end of the building, dropping children off in the emergency room.

More than an hour would pass before the Andreolis learned that Gerry was in the hospital, that he had been admitted in serious condition. Each time a nurse entered the room, Alfred would ask when they could see Gerry. “Just be patient,” came the reply, “you can’t see him yet.” Finally, at nine o’clock that night, a nurse came to collect the couple and take them upstairs. “Mr. and Mrs. Andreoli, you can come up now.”

Alfred and Mary followed the nurse to an elevator which transported them to the fourth-floor surgical recovery room, where twenty badly burned and injured children had been assigned. At the end of the corridor the nurse stopped and turned. “He’s in here,” she said, opening the door and showing the parents into their son’s room.

When Alfred and Mary passed through the door and looked down at the stricken figure lying in the bed, they were shocked. Gerry looked like a monster. His head, face, and arms looked like one large scab. His blackened face was grotesquely swollen and parts of his ears were burned away. His eyes were almost swollen shut; his eyelids resembled two tiny slits cut into a piece of burlap.

Gerry was sedated, and his parents fought to control their emotions as they laid eyes on him for the first time. Alfred broke the silence. “How do you feel?” he asked his son.

Gerry answered wearily, trying to smile. “Okay, I guess. How’s Randy and Barb?”

“They’re all right,” Mary said. Her two other children, thank God, had arrived home safely.

“Is Beverly okay?” Gerry asked.

“We don’t know,” Alfred hedged, not wanting to upset his son, “we’re not sure what happened to her.” Alfred knew his son was fond of the Burda girl, that they had gone dancing together at a school party. Beverly Burda, of course, was dead, one of only two fatalities to occur in Room 209.

During that difficult first visit to the hospital, Alfred and Mary Andreoli struggled to keep their composure as they chatted with their injured son. When at last they left the room to get a cup of coffee, they fell into each other’s arms and wept. They were still red-eyed when they met with their family physician who had come to the hospital.

“What do you think?” Alfred inquired.

“I can’t say right now,” replied the doctor. “But he’s in good hands.”

At that point no one could foresee that Gerry Andreoli would remain in St. Anne’s Hospital for the next four months and that he would undergo several painful skin-graft operations to repair his shattered body.

WHEN SISTER DAVIDIS accompanied Sister Helaine into the emergency room at St. Anne’s, she was directed to sit in a corner of the busy room. She watched as doctors carted the critically burned Sister Helaine away to an examining room before taking her upstairs for surgery. Another doctor who had been attending to the arriving victims walked in and saw Sister Davidis sitting alone in the corner.

“Has anyone checked that one?” he asked, pointing to her.

“I’m all right,” the nun replied. “I brought Sister Helaine in.”

The doctor walked over and pinched Sister Davidis’s wrist, taking her pulse. “Get a cart in here, fast,” he shouted to an attendant.

After doctors administered a dosage of demoral to slow her rapidly beating heart, Sister Davidis was taken upstairs where she was admitted as an inpatient.

The nun thought all this attention was silly, for she felt fine. There was nothing wrong with her. She wanted to leave, sensing she was needed elsewhere. After about fifteen minutes of lying in bed, she called for the nurse. “I feel better now,” she said. “I think I can go.”

“No,” countered the nurse. “The doctor wants to see you.”

“I just saw a doctor.”

“I’m sorry, sister, you’re not to go.”

The nurse began removing Sister Davidis’s shoes.

“Shouldn’t I undress myself?” the nun asked.

“No,” replied the nurse. “We don’t want you to move.”

As Sister Davidis lay quietly in bed, her face blistering from the heat of the fire and her system fighting off shock, another, younger BVM nun entered the room.

“Sister,” she wept, “we just lost Sister Therese.”

“What do you mean ‘We lost her?’” asked Sister Davidis, whose usually quick mind was unable to comprehend what the nun meant. “Why can’t they find her?”

“She just died,” said the nun. “She’s dead!”

The news left Sister Davidis momentarily stunned. What in the world is happening? When a doctor entered the room a few minutes later, he examined Sister Davidis’s burned left hand. It was covered with blisters, and portions of flesh were charred by third-degree burns.

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to use that hand for a while,” he announced.

VICTIMS OF severe burns suffer a multitude of almost simultaneous afflictions. They are threatened with shock, infection, loss of vital body fluids, kidney malfunction, and heart failure. A single badly burned child becomes the subject of general concern and conversation in a hospital for weeks. But on the Monday night of the school fire, nineteen seriously burned children were admitted to St. Anne’s, each requiring special care and observation.

Somehow the hospital to which five serious burns might be a disaster was now caring for four times that many. A laboratory that normally performed a hundred specialized blood-chemistry analyses in a month was running three hundred in three days. The medical staff banded together in teams to provide constant attention to the injured children, and nurses maintained their watchfulness around the clock.

Initially it was decided that the burned children would be treated with ointments, the traditional “closed method” of burn treatment. But soon doctors switched to the newer “open method,” placing naked children between sterile sheets on special revolving bed frames known as “Strykers.” It was also a waiting game. Medical science found itself taking a back seat to the slow process of nature. It would take time, but before long scabs would form where skin had been seared off the victims’ bodies, providing a natural protective cover to keep out infectious germs. Only then could the painful ordeal of reconstruction begin.

SISTER ALMUNDA, the hospital’s administrator, remained in the emergency room at St. Anne’s for the rest of that Monday evening, leaving only once, when Archbishop Meyer arrived to visit the injured.

“Where are the children?” he asked the nun.

“Upstairs,” she answered. “I’ll take you myself.”

Meyer was escorted into the surgical rooms, where doctors were busy repairing the damaged little bodies of the injured. He saw and heard everything—the crying, the screaming, the moaning. He went from bed to bed, from gurney to gurney, blessing each survivor. When he came back downstairs he appeared bewildered, and his hands were shaking. He looked at Sister Almunda. “Is that all?” he asked.

“No, not exactly,” replied the nun. “We have bodies in the basement. I’m sure you don’t want to see that room.”

Meyer, however, insisted that he be taken down to view the dead. He was led into the basement x-ray room where twelve victims lay on the floor underneath sheets. After pulling back the sheets and viewing the remains, the archbishop nearly fainted.

IT HAD BEEN a long evening, but as the hours passed, order was eventually restored at St. Anne’s. By nine o’clock the auditorium in the nursing school and the operating rooms upstairs were empty, with every child bedded down. The crisis, however, was far from over.

At 8:30 that evening Dr. Callahan convened a meeting of twenty-five weary doctors who had treated the injured. They gathered inside a lounge to make plans. Their basic problem was one of logistics: who was to treat the children and how? Their solution: temporarily suspend the private practice of medicine. Dr. Thomas Moore, an internist, and Dr. Joseph Forbrich, a pediatrician, were appointed team leaders, and they enlisted the rest of the medical staff to carry out their orders. Doctors were assigned in groups of three, and each group was to be on duty for three to four hours, making continual rounds, checking the condition of each child, administering medications as needed.

By week’s end eleven patients remained on the critical list at St. Anne’s. Three of them died before the end of December. A fourth child finally succumbed to injuries the following March.

THE PANDEMONIUM at St. Anne’s was repeated at the seven other West Side hospitals that received victims from the school fire. They included Franklin Boulevard (twenty-six admitted, three DOA), Walther Memorial (fourteen admitted, two DOA), Garfield Park (twelve admitted), Norwegian American (four admitted), St. Mary’s (one DOA), Cook County (seven DOA), and the University of Illinois (one DOA). Because of its proximity to the school, almost twice as many children were admitted to St. Anne’s as at the other hospitals combined, and it was within its walls where most of the drama had unfolded.

As the evening waned, many parents still had failed to locate their children. For them a trip home would be useless; their homes were empty, their children “unaccounted.” For these parents there remained one final and dreaded destination. As hope began to fade, they drove sick with fear to the drab yellow building on West Polk Street, the Cook County Morgue. Here the grimmest of all scenes took place.

Adults began trickling into the morgue around 6 p.m. At first the scene was a mix of crying and whimpering. Agonized with uncertainty, the families could find comfort nowhere. In a desperate attempt to be told the inevitable, they pushed and shoved their way in a line, waiting to check in with expressionless attendants seated behind tables and desks.

Early on officials at the morgue decided to wait until all the dead had arrived before allowing anyone downstairs to begin identifying the bodies. During this period the families were seated in four large inquest rooms, then called up one by one and asked to provide the physical information that would help officials make a positive identification.

Meanwhile, downstairs a procession of black police squadrols containing the dead was backing into the basement parking garage. The officers driving the vehicles thought of their own children, silently wondering if the badly burned bodies would ever be identified. But experience had taught them otherwise, that through medical science, dental records, and what little clothing remained there were sufficient clues to provide answers, even where fire had turned skin to ash.

More than twenty priests from around the city as well as dozens of nurses and doctors from the giant grey monolith of Cook County Hospital across the street had been called to the morgue to help process the dead or comfort grieving relatives. Reporters with television and still cameras showed up to capture the pathetic scene on film. For the families, the terror was made worse by the waiting. Dressed in their work clothes, overcoats, and hats, they sat stoically, their faces stained by tears. Others wandered about the room dazed, gulping cups of coffee, chain-smoking cigarettes, staring out from behind sullen, blank eyes at the now unfamiliar world.

As the waiting continued, one group of parents gathered in a corner to recite the Rosary. There wasn’t enough space for all to kneel, so most stood as the Reverend Alfred Abramowicz of the archdiocesan chancery office led the prayers. “As we say this last decade,” Abramowicz prayed, “let us ask our Blessed Virgin Mary for holy recognition, realizing that she too lost her only son on the Cross.” When he finished, the priest raised a wooden crucifix and gave his blessing to all those assembled. Some parents broke down when he approached them. A few looked on bravely, still hoping that somehow, somewhere, their child would turn up safe.

But downstairs, spread out in long rows on the cold concrete floor, were ninety stretchers, each covered by a white sheet, each containing the body of a child or a nun. They were nameless numbers waiting to be claimed.

MONSIGNOR ED PELLICORE was one of the first priests to arrive at the morgue, and he went straight to the basement. The large room resembled a crude dungeon. Bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling cast a yellow pall, and a cold, icy draft swirled about the interior, spreading the stench of death into every corner. Pellicore walked along the line of sheet-draped bodies, his footsteps echoing off the white concrete walls.

Slowly and hesitantly, the monsignor bent over to pull back a few of the sheets, looking to see if he could recognize the children who lay beneath. As soon as he did, he balked, and a sick feeling rose from the pit of his stomach. Pellicore had been a priest for many years, and he knew the look of death; it was never pretty. In this case it was awful. Some of the children, he could see, had died from smoke inhalation. Others were badly burned, some beyond recognition. Their bodies had no names, only yellow tags indicating whether the deceased was a “Boy” or a “Girl.” Regardless of their condition, he recognized none of them.

When Pellicore looked up he noticed, for the first time, Cook County Coroner Walter McCarron, whose responsibility it was to identify each of the victims. At that moment McCarron was standing nervously in a corner, mumbling orders to one of his deputies. The coroner was dressed in a grey suit, and his bespectacled, bulldog face was balanced atop one of his familiar bow ties. He looked pale and shaken. If someone walked up and handed McCarron a bottle of whiskey, Pellicore thought, he’d surely drink it right there.

Even though Pellicore wasn’t wearing a priest’s collar, McCarron recognized him. The two men approached each other. “We’ve prepared for a hundred bodies,” the coroner warned. “We’re just about ready to let them downstairs.”

Pellicore thought for a moment. It was unwise; he didn’t like the idea. He knew these Italian families. To let them down all at once would cause a riot.

Instead he offered a suggestion. “You don’t want these parents coming down here to look at each body just to find one child,” he said to the coroner. “Why don’t we get some articles of clothing—a belt buckle, a wristwatch or a ring or whatever we can find, and then tell the people upstairs what we have. If we find one of the kids wearing a Mickey Mouse watch, then somebody upstairs should be able to identify the child without having to look at all the bodies.”

McCarron agreed with the proposal. “Okay,” he said. “Whatever you say.”

McCarron was an elected county official, a wealthy trucking executive from Oak Park who had a reputation as a handshaker. Although he was well schooled in the art of politics, he had no background for the coroner’s position, no training as a medical examiner. Other than viewing homicide victims on an individual basis during his one term in office, he was totally unprepared for the task at hand.

While priests and nurses comforted the growing crowd of parents and relatives, Pellicore took over downstairs, helping in the identification of bodies. Gradually a semblance of order began to emerge from the turbulent scene. Bodies that were recognizable were laid in one row. Those who appeared beyond recognition were placed in another. Sheets were pulled back, and pieces of jewelry and clothing were removed from each of the deceased, then given a corresponding number. Attendants began going from body to body, scribbling down notes: “Boy. Approximate age ten. Black hair. Brown loafers. Brown corduroy pants. White T-shirt. St. Christopher’s medal (silver).”

The notes and items were then taken upstairs and shown to the parents, beginning the gruesome process of identification.

FATHER JOSEPH OGNIBENE was among the priests who had hurried to the morgue, and when he arrived there early that evening he was near collapse. Our Lady of the Angels had been his first parish assignment following his ordination in 1952. It was also his first love. As he approached the morgue he tried thinking of happier times, but his memories were clouded by awful visions of that afternoon. It would get worse, for he was about to enter a world that would leave him with even greater nightmares.

When Ognibene entered the building, a policeman standing guard by the basement doorway nodded him through. Once downstairs he joined the other officials gathered inside the big room. On hand were several priests and nuns along with a handful of doctors, nurses, and morgue attendants. Uniformed police and plainclothes detectives stood off to the side, pens and notebooks in hand. The stench of death was everywhere. Ognibene reported to Monsignor Pellicore, who was busy issuing orders.

“Joe,” the monsignor pointed, “go see if you can make out any of the kids before we start bringing the parents down.”

It was a natural assignment, for Ognibene knew many of the students. Slowly, numbed with grief, he and two nuns from the parish, Sister Andrienne one of them, went from body to body, pulling back sheets, trying to recognize the tiny forms that lay beneath—boys and girls who only yesterday they had winked at or smiled to in church. It was a long, painstaking process, and in the end, after viewing all the remains, the trio could identify only ten of the victims.

Reporting his findings to Pellicore, Ognibene took a moment to collect himself. He was still trying to catch up with events. Everything had happened so fast—it was unbelievable, simply unbelievable. He looked back at the rows of white sheets covering the floor. He had never envisioned anything so horrible in his life. How could God let such a thing happen to little innocents like this?

His thoughts were interrupted when a tall, sandy-haired nurse noticed him rubbing his left arm. “What’s wrong?” she inquired.

Ognibene rolled up his sleeve to reveal a bloodied patchwork of blisters and burns running up his arm.

“Those need to be seen,” said the nurse.

The priest was walked across the street to Cook County Hospital where for the next hour a doctor in the emergency room tended to his wounds. Afterward Ognibene returned to the morgue, his arm bandaged. He remained there until well after midnight. Before leaving, he was finally tracked down by his brother, Sam, another archdiocesan priest assigned to the nearby Our Lady of Mercy Mission. Sam Ognibene was unusually excited. “Joe!” he yelled. “Call Mom! She thinks you’re dead!”

Father Joe was confused. “What?” he said.

“It was on the news! The news showed your name on the casualty list as being dead. Go call Ma right now and tell her you’re all right.”

Joe Ognibene hurried to a pay phone to call his mother.

“Mom! It’s me, Joe. I’m okay.”

INSIDE THE morgue’s inquest rooms, where death was the normal business of the day, the precise, orderly system fell apart. Overwhelmed by heartbreak and exhaustion, nurses and nuns who tried to console grieving parents broke down themselves. Newsmen wiped their eyes before snapping photographs. Tough, hardened, policemen wept like babies.

Soon the last of the dead had arrived, and with them the time to escort families downstairs. Where possible, officials decided to allow only men downstairs. They sought out fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, and in-laws. Many were hardworking people who had witnessed the brutalities of World War II. Nothing would have prepared them for what they were about to encounter.

First the tormented relatives were led into an anteroom where they were asked to identify a piece of underwear, a necklace, a wristwatch or ring. Then they were walked into the large holding room and escorted along the rows of white sheets. When they reached a number that was thought to be their child, a sheet was pulled back to reveal a body. Screams of anguish confirmed the findings.

After locating his son among the dead, one father, dressed in blue work clothes, had to be brought out of the room while supported by two larger men who sobbed loudly. Another father was carried out by a policeman and a priest. Still another emerged bravely from the basement, simply nodding his head to a group of relatives huddled in a corner. He walked over to a table, removed his hat, then confirmed for a morgue attendant the positive identification. The clerk made an entry into a ledger, and another number had turned into a child. One by one, as the hours passed, they would all be identified and given a name to be buried by.

Lloyd Chambers identified the body of his nine-year-old daughter, Margaret, after calling his wife at home to see if the girl had worn a red ruby ring on her finger that day. She had.

Eighth-grader Lawrence Grasso was another child whose body was identified by the ring he had worn to school that day. He received it over Thanksgiving and had just become a member of the American Legion Alamo Post Drum and Bugle Corps.

Fourteen-year-old Mary Virgilio was adopted by her aunt and uncle and had come to Chicago as a World War II orphan. She was identified by the gold chain and crucifix around her neck.

Joseph Modica, aged nine, had escaped the school but ran back inside in search of his younger sister. He didn’t know that she had been safely evacuated. An I.D. bracelet made of sterling silver was found on his right wrist.

Sister Mary Seraphica Kelley was identified by a curl of red hair from one of her students, Kathleen Carr, who had been found lying on the nun when the two were discovered buried together inside the ruins of Room 210.

Sister Mary St. Canice Lyng was wearing a religious medal she had been given the night before by Sister Andrienne.

ONE OF THE bitter ironies of the Our Lady of the Angels tragedy involved Captain Tony Pilas of the Fire Prevention Bureau. His only daughter, Nancy, was a student in Room 211.

Pilas had joined the Chicago Fire Department in 1937 and had served with engine, truck, and squad companies before being promoted to superintendent of field inspectors for the bureau in 1957. He was forty-four, a short, soft-spoken man of Italian descent. He and his wife, Ann, lived just two blocks from Our Lady of the Angels Church, where they were active parishioners. Pilas visited the school often, not in an official capacity but as an interested parent.

On the afternoon of the fire he felt uneasy and vaguely ill as he sat at his desk in Fire Department headquarters in City Hall.

“I’ve got a bum stomach,” he finally told another officer. “I’m going home early.”

Pilas checked out of the office shortly after 2 p.m., got in his car, and headed west on Chicago Avenue. As he approached Hamlin Avenue, he saw Engine 85 racing across the intersection. He decided to follow, turning north on Hamlin. Almost instantly he saw smoke issuing from the school. His progress was slowed by other vehicles and by people running across the street, but he managed to find a parking space north of the parish church. He jumped out of his car and ran back to the school.

Pilas first tried to gain access to the building at the back door on the alley side of the school. When he saw flames roaring up the stairwell, he ran around to the front doors on Avers and tried to climb the stairs there, but dense smoke and heat forced him back outside. He returned to the alley side, where he broke the fall of a youngster who tumbled out one of the second-floor windows.

Tears were streaming down his face when he ran back around to the courtway separating the two wings. By then Sister Helaine, his daughter’s teacher, had been brought down a ladder from Room 211. She was lying against the side of the building, critically burned. Pilas crouched down next to her. “Sister,” he shouted. “This is Mr. Pilas. Where’s Nancy?”

“Oh, God bless Nancy,” the nun moaned incoherently. “God bless Nancy and all the kids.”

Tony Pilas knew then that his daughter was still inside the room.

Later that night his brother-in-law identified Nancy’s body at the morgue. Pilas’s wife had told him how Nancy always laced her shoes backward, tying the bow at the toe end. That’s how the girl was identified; her shoelaces were tied backward.

ACROSS THE STREET from the morgue, inside his room in Cook County Hospital, Stanley Burda had drifted into a false sleep.

The thirty-seven-year-old army combat veteran recently had experienced a string of bad luck. Only days before he had been laid off from his job as a milkman with the Bowman Dairy. He was worried about paying his mortgage and supporting his wife and four children.

Compounding Burda’s plight, on the day after Thanksgiving, while he was chopping wood in his basement, a piece of metal from the axe or a nail flew up and buried itself in his left eye. He had been taken to County, a public hospital caring mostly for the indigent, where doctors that Monday had operated to remove the metal chip from his eye.

As he lay in the hospital bed after surgery, Burda asked himself what else could go wrong. Not long after, a priest entered the room to inform him that his eldest child, thirteen-year-old Beverly Anne, had been killed in the fire.

After struggling with the news, Burda regained control. He thought of his wife and asked his doctors if he could go home. “I have to be with my wife,” he told them. Reluctantly the doctors granted permission. But before he was allowed to leave, Burda was given a strange pair of eyeglasses fitted with pinhole openings and a special shield for the left eye. He was sent home but was advised not to cry.

“If you cry,” his doctor warned, “the salt from your tears might scald your eye. If that happens, it could blind you.”

On his way out the door, Burda said simply, “God’s will be done.”

MARY MALINSKI, sitting in her apartment on Lawndale Avenue, was beside herself with fear. Linda had failed to show up. But, thank God, Gerry, her son, had escaped the school unharmed. When Nick Malinski arrived home from his job at a manufacturing company in the suburbs, the couple began their frantic search. First they went to the parish rectory where the names of children who had been taken to various hospitals were being recorded in a ledger. Then they traveled to three hospitals. Still no word. Finally Nick Malinski said to his wife, “I’m going to the morgue.”

After dropping Mary off at home, Nick, with his brother-in-law, drove east to the county morgue. When the pair arrived they checked in with an attendant. “I’ve been everywhere,” Nick said. “I can’t find my daughter. She has blond hair.”

“What’s her name?” the attendant asked.

“Linda Malinski,” Nick said, nearly choking on his words.

The attendant picked up a telephone. “One moment,” she said.

A few minutes later a nurse appeared. “Mr. Malinski?”

“Yes,” Nick answered.

“This way, please.”

Nick and his brother-in-law followed the nurse downstairs, where they found Linda in a row of bodies. The girl’s features had been blackened by smoke, but she was not burned. She had suffocated to death. Nick walked upstairs to use the telephone. Mary was waiting to hear from him.

OSCAR AND CATHERINE SARNO were anxious. Two of their children, nine-year-old Joanne, a fourth-grader assigned to Room 210, and thirteen-year-old Billy, an eighth-grader in Room 211, were still missing. Ronnie, their ten-year-old, had escaped with only a burned leg. He too was assigned to Room 210 and had escaped the burning school by jumping out the window.

Earlier that day, when fierce heat and smoke forced the fourth-graders from their seats, Ronnie was not more than an arm’s reach from his sister. “C’mon, Jo,” he had yelled to her. “I’m jumping!”

As he went over the windowsill, he could hear Joanne screaming. “Ronnie! Don’t jump!”

Incredibly, Ronnie Sarno had not been injured in his fall. He landed on his feet and flopped over onto his back, then got up and brushed himself off. He was taken home, coatless and shaken, by a friend of the family. When Catherine Sarno rushed home to their apartment on Chicago Avenue around four o’clock, Ronnie was on the couch. “Mom” he said, “my leg hurts a little.”

Catherine drove Ronnie to Garfield Park Hospital where he was treated and released for a small burn. When she returned home she found her truck-driver husband, Oscar, pacing the living room next to a pile of freshly wrapped Christmas presents. “I went to the school,” he said nervously. “I can’t find Billy and Joanne.”

The Sarnos had followed the advice of police who told them to wait at home for a telephone call. Later in the evening, when the telephone inside the tiny apartment did ring, it brought crushing grief. Billy and Joanne Sarno had been positively identified by another relative as being among the sheet-covered bodies lying in the county morgue.

AS NIGHT TURNED to early morning, a steady stream of hearses began pulling up to the back door of the morgue to pick up the dead and transfer them to local funeral homes. By 4 a.m. the bodies of eighty-three children—ranging in age from eight to fourteen—had been claimed by grieving families. The three nuns killed had also been identified and removed to a funeral home. The fire-ravaged bodies of four more children would remain unidentified for two more days.

In the confusion of the evening, at least one mix-up occurred at the morgue, which resulted in two families claiming the wrong child. One, a Polish couple whose daughter had been killed, learned that the body they had claimed turned out to be a boy. Although the boy’s body was burned beyond recognition, the genitals were found to be partially intact, enabling funeral directors to determine gender. As the mistake became apparent, rather than call each of the bodies back to the morgue, the parents agreed to accept the boy’s body and bury it as their own. Officials never learned which family had claimed the other misidentified body.

SHORTLY BEFORE midnight, as parents still agonized at the morgue, Hook and Ladder 35 was ordered to pick up from the school and return to its quarters. After the truck had been backed into the firehouse, Lieutenant Charles Kamin headed upstairs for a shower to wash the grime from his body and mull over his earlier decisions. His right arm was sore from burns, and the muscles in his upper body ached.

As the shower soothed his body and eased his mind, Kamin thought about the locked gate that had barred entrance into the school courtway. It left him frustrated. Surely, he pondered, they could’ve gotten more out if that damn thing had been unlocked. Why did churches and schools always lock their gates? They must have spent a whole minute trying to knock that thing down. How many lives had it cost? Had he known sooner that the gate was locked, he would have ordered his driver to ram it with the truck. So they wreck the truck and save the lives of three, maybe four more kids. Hell, the truck isn’t worth anything compared to kids’ lives.

Kamin had seen his share of death at fires. But this was beyond belief. Before picking up from the school, he had heard someone say the students died because they panicked. For chrissakes, he thought. Adults would panic too. That fire was hot. Super hot. And it was bearing down on them fast. What the hell do they expect people to do? They were fighting for survival. They wanted to live.

After his shower, Kamin changed into a clean shirt and trousers and walked downstairs to write his report. The firehouse was quiet. The men were sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, watching the news. No one could sleep. And no one was talking.

As he picked up his pen to write, Kamin could feel the pain shooting up his right hand and wrist. As he neared the bottom of his report, he entered the following: “There were approximately sixty-three children rescued by this company, some with the help of civilians and other firemen, some individually.”

He did not specifically mention the eight children he had pulled from Room 211.

LATER MONDAY NIGHT, church bells across Chicago tolled in mourning for the school fire dead. Most of the grief, however, was concentrated inside modest frame and brick houses and apartment buildings in Our Lady of the Angels parish.

Inside the stricken neighborhood’s little bungalows and two-flats, lights burned through the night as families and friends gathered to comfort the bereaved. Relatives of the dead arrived home carrying small coats and jackets they had taken with them to hospitals and the morgue.

In some of the homes, many still held out hope, waiting for the telephone to ring, praying it would bring news of a located child. Instead, when the phones did ring, it was usually relatives calling to offer condolences or ask for the latest information. Reporters assigned to the awful but necessary task of obtaining photographs of the victims for the next day’s newspapers traversed the neighborhood, ringing doorbells, hoping their requests wouldn’t be viewed as cruel or insensitive. Most families cooperated, providing portraits of their children’s first Holy Communion or latest school pictures taken that fall.

Meanwhile, despite a darkened interior that resulted from power lines being knocked down during the height of the fire, an endless procession of faithful continued to stream through Our Lady of the Angels Church. The worshipers, many sobbing, included the grief-stricken families of the dead as well as their friends, neighbors, and classmates. At the front of the church, beside the altar, was a small vigil of lights—candles set in red and blue cups, each lit with a prayer for a dead child.

Across the street from the church, in the convent, the aggrieved sisters of the parish were trying to comprehend what had happened. Among them was Sister St. Florence, the principal, who kept reliving what she had seen. “I don’t think I’ll ever lose the picture of those children who jumped out the windows,” she later told another nun who arrived by train from the order’s motherhouse in Iowa, to be with the anguished sisters in Chicago.

Inside the rectory, priests were trying to persuade Monsignor Cussen to rest. The events of the day had proven too much. The pastor was distraught, his normally cool demeanor unmasked. “I heard nothing,” he kept mumbling. “I didn’t feel any explosion. I just heard a couple of boys yelling, ‘Fire. Fire.’ Then I saw everything.”

One of the priests produced a bottle of whiskey and Cussen was handed a drink. The men were concerned about the pastor. They were determined to get him to bed—one way or the other. “Here,” they said, refilling his glass, “have another one.... And another.... And another.”

Finally, after four or five drinks, the pastor fell asleep.

AS WIND SWIRLED the stench of burnt wood and death, crowds of curious continued to file past the ruined school, hoping to get a glimpse of its charred shell. Fire Department light trucks illuminated the eerie scene, showing in the half-light the broken windows and partially damaged wall on the north side of the school. Sidewalks were cordoned off, and police stood guard at each door. Inside, arson investigators carrying large portable lanterns crept through the darkened corridors and up and down water-drenched stairways, sifting through the debris, looking carefully for clues they hoped would lead them to the fire’s cause.

For the small, closely knit community, the events of that afternoon seemed almost apocalyptic. Nothing would ever be the same. In a moment nearly one hundred neighborhood schoolchildren had disappeared. And for those who survived, the innocence of childhood was forever lost.

The chief question being asked now was, How did it happen?