Twelve

RECOVERY

FOR THE CHILDREN injured in the school fire, the road to recovery was often long and painful, the suffering great. But so too were their courage and fortitude, traits manifested through youthful innocence and a determination to survive.

Eleven children and one nun—Sister Mary Helaine, the eighth-grade teacher from Room 211—required repeated skin grafting to replace the skin that had been seared off their bodies. Because the school fire occurred before the advent of regional burn centers, each hospital was left to treat its own bum patients. On the night of the fire, a critical decision was made at St. Anne’s Hospital, where most of the fire victims had been removed, to treat all their burns by the “exposure” or “open method.”

First introduced in 1949 in Scotland and later pioneered in the United States at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio—which dispatched a team of burn specialists to Chicago to assist in the treatment of the school fire victims—the open method simplified bum treatment and helped reduce the risk of infection, often a life-threatening complication for burn patients. Instead of being swathed in warm moist dressings—which encourage the growth of bacteria and must be changed every few days—the patient lies naked on a sterile sheet. Nature then takes over, covering the open wound with a thick brown crust, creating a natural barrier to the entrance of germs.

As practical and effective as it is, the treatment still presents complications, and meticulous attention to sterile techniques must be followed. Nurses treating the children were required to don sterile gowns and masks as they entered each room. They wore sterile gloves when they touched a burn. It would have been easier and safer to bar all visitors, but doctors recognized that the youngsters needed their parents, so they too were masked and gowned before being allowed inside their children’s rooms.

Parents of bum victims often found their naked children strapped onto circular-framed beds resembling large canvas slings, each designed to relieve continued pressure on the youngster’s uncovered burns. Because in many cases the burns covered both sides of their bodies, the children had to be turned constantly, as often as every two hours or sooner. The special beds were called Stryker frames—“the most uncomfortable bed in the world,” recalled one fire survivor. Two nurses were required to turn the bed over. When turned upside down, the beds were only a foot or so off the floor, so the hospital’s staff had to ensure that the floors were kept as clean and dust-free as possible to keep dirt, bacteria, and other particles from entering the raw, uncovered burn areas on the children’s bodies.

Added to the children’s discomfort was the cold. The skin is the largest of the body’s organs, and its covering helps regulate body temperature. Deprived of the natural insulation of their skin, their bodies untouched by blankets, many children complained of being hot on the outside and cold on the inside. Rooms were kept warm by adjusting the heat, and nurses created ingenious tents by draping sheets and electric blankets over the bars above each Stryker frame. Another major medical concern involved maintenance of fluid and electrolyte levels to prevent the children from falling into shock. Because the fluid levels of burn patients fluctuate markedly, physicians treating the children had to check levels on each patient up to six times each day.

Worst of all was the pain. Each time a nurse had to turn a child, touch a wound, pry it gently loose from a sterile sheet, or change a dressing, the pain was excruciating. Consequently many children were administered morphine and other painkillers to ease their discomfort. “Every time you took the linen off, you pulled off some of their skin,” recalled Henriette Rocks, a nursing nun at St. Anne’s who at the time was known by her religious name, Sister Kathryn.

On December I, 1958, Rocks, a blond-haired farm girl from downstate Streator, Illinois, was a thirty-one-year-old nursing supervisor in charge of the hospital’s surgical recovery ward where twenty children, most in critical and serious conditions, were admitted. Rocks had been a nurse for almost eight years and was regarded as “seasoned” by her peers at the busy West Side hospital. Never, though, had she faced a more challenging crisis. The demands were great, and for more than a month she and her staff of nurses worked day and night to administer medications, monitor vital signs and fluid levels, change dressings and linens, coordinate with housekeeping staff, scrub floors to reduce the risk of infection, and simply be there to help ease the youngsters’ fears.

“With the children,” Rocks remembered, “you tried to relate to them the best you could and try to explain what had happened. But we really didn’t talk about it much. In those days things were glossed over. Now what you try to do is reach the person and try to bring out their feelings. You try to support them in a much different manner. We tried to support them by not admitting what was going on. We tried to shield them, protect them.”

Encouragement for the children, Rocks recalled, came from many different sources and from all over the world in the form of letters, gifts, and visitors. Often big-name entertainers—Jack Benny, Pat O’Brien, and Ed Sullivan among them—would stop by St. Anne’s to visit the youngsters. It was good for the children to be remembered, for hospitalization was a lonely, isolating experience. Yet for Rocks and other members of the hospital staff, the visiting guests also created headaches. Even though the visits helped raise the children’s spirits, they also affected the nurses’ ability to isolate the burn victims from added risks of infection.

“Basically we had to protect them from people,” Rocks said. “We had every type of entertainer coming in. We had clowns. We had cowboys. We had all these reporters coming in. Everybody had to dress properly. They had to wear gowns and masks.

“I was looked on as a real ‘bitch’ because I was yelling at people all the time, trying to keep them away from those children and make sure everything was clean, that they were protected. This included the families. They didn’t understand it at the time. What those kids needed most was to be held and hugged and reassured. But you couldn’t touch them. It was really a terrible thing. And I was put in the position of being the ‘bad person’ trying to protect them, and nobody was understanding why I was doing it.”

Susan Smaldone, with more than 80 percent of her body burned, was the most critical case to be admitted to Rocks’s ward. She had no skin. She was absolutely raw. For twenty-one days the little nine-year-old clung to life before finally succumbing December 22 from an overwhelming infection and kidney failure.

“With Susie,” Rocks said, “what you wanted to do was take her and hold her. Every once in a while she would say, ‘Oh, it hurts.’ Especially when you were moving her. It was excruciatingly painful for her. All the time. You hoped she was going to make it, but you knew she probably wouldn’t.”

On the evening Susan died, Rocks had left the floor early, around six o’clock, after working a twelve-hour shift. She had something to eat and then retired to her quarters inside the hospital. She was putting her head on the pillow when she received a call notifying her that Susan had died. Rocks got dressed and went back up to the floor. Susan’s parents had been at their daughter’s bedside.

“I took them into a room and we talked for some time,” Rocks recalled.”Her mother was a British war bride, and she really had a beautiful outlook on life. They told me about Susie and how she had epilepsy and was more or less near her parents all the time because they didn’t let her go out. Things revolved around her. They came back again after New Year’s Day and we talked. The gist of the conversation, since the fire happened, was that although it was a horrible tragedy for their family, it brought them closer. They were looking at their other children differently. They said they knew they had an angel in heaven now. But they wanted to come back and thank me for everything I did for her. It was a wonderful meeting with them. I saw so much bitterness among other parents, and to see these two act the way they did was very inspiring for me.

“I felt so close to Susie and even now I still do. I feel she’s my little angel in heaven. Every once in a while I say things to her.”

Another patient in Rocks’s care was Michelle McBride, the feisty, brown-haired thirteen-year-old from Room 209 who would later write a book about her lengthy hospitalization and recovery.

Over 60 percent of Michelle’s body was burned, and on December 19 she was wheeled into an operating room where she remained under anesthesia for two hours. Skin was transferred to her right shoulder, the back of her right knee and her right hand, and areas around joints in danger of permanent stiffness if scar tissue were allowed to form.

Michelle underwent seven skin-grafting procedures, the last performed two and a half months after the fire. Because only a small amount of her unburned skin was available, her surgeon, Dr. Paul Fox, used grafts the size of postage stamps on her lower legs. Instead of moving the skin in a single sheet, he cut it into one-inch squares, placing them a half-inch apart over her calves. Because skin grows outward, the gaps eventually filled in. Michelle was discharged from the hospital in March 1959, but she faced a life of suffering and adaptation. She was forever plagued by arthritis and stiffness of joints, and years later still required use of a cane. During the summer months, rising temperatures and humidity brought painful, smarting reminders of her reconstructed body. “The fire not only robbed me of a childhood,” she later commented, “it also robbed me of an adulthood.”

Another patient in the same ward, a nine-year-old girl, was among the most horribly burned children to survive the school fire. The tip of her nose and part of her lip were the only unburned areas of her face. She was unable to close her burned eyelids or mouth. The backs of both her hands and forearms were burned as well. St. Anne’s had no plastic surgeon on its staff, so it called in a consultant, Dr. Clarence Monroe. On New Year’s Day 1959 he started a delicate series of skin grafts to give the girl a passable face. Eight operations were performed at St. Anne’s, another ten at Chicago’s Presbyterian–St. Luke’s Hospital, where the girl had been transferred in March.

Even with the skin grafting complete, the road back to normalcy was not easy for her or any of the children. Doctors informed the girl’s parents their daughter would never look normal, but thanks to the operations she could at least now close her eyes and mouth. In time she also learned how to play the organ with her grafted hands. But years later, as an adult, she rarely ventured outside her home in an affluent Chicago suburb, preferring to avoid the stares of the outside world. On those rare occasions when she left her home, her face was heavily masked with cosmetics—items of luxury for some women to enhance beauty and hide subtle signs of aging, necessary tools for her to camouflage her disfigurement.

GERRY ANDREOLI, another “burn,” endured fourteen operations in which skin was grafted onto his arms, face, back, and hands, each painful ordeal lasting three to four hours. During the first month of his hospitalization, Gerry’s parents stayed at St. Anne’s, keeping an around-the-clock vigil, watching and agonizing as their pitifully burned son, his body naked save for his bandaged areas, lay motionless in a Stryker frame. At night the parents slept on couches in a closed-in porch and were furnished with extra blankets. They went home only to shower and change clothes. Relatives operated their store and took care of their younger children.

The Andreolis retained many sharp memories of their long stay at St. Anne’s. They remembered telling a young nurse to remove a large mirror from Gerry’s room. “It was right in front of him,” Alfred Andreoli recalled years later. “We didn’t want Gerry to see himself.”

Early in Gerry’s hospitalization the Andreolis heard complaints from the children about the food they were receiving. Proper nutrition is important for burn victims, and it is essential that they eat often to replace vitamins and proteins vital to the healing process. One day the physician in charge of Gerry’s case entered his room and asked the boy if he was hungry.

“Yes,” Gerry answered.

The doctor turned to Gerry’s father. “There’s a steak house on North Avenue,” he said. “Get the biggest steak you can find and bring it in every day.”

“And that’s what I did,” Mr. Andreoli remembered. “I’d get a filet, bring it in, and feed it to Gerry. He couldn’t feed himself because his hands were burned. He couldn’t even go to the toilet by himself.”

Other parents were allowed to bring in food and feed their injured children. “It relieved the nurses and gave the parents time to be with their kids,” Mr. Andreoli said. But if the patient was bedded in a Stryker frame, the feeding process became a chore. It took about forty-five minutes to turn a child from an upside-down position near the floor to a position where they were lying on their backs, face up.

“At mealtime,” the senior Andreoli recalled, “some of these kids would be face down on a Stryker frame. Their faces would be a foot off the floor. The kids couldn’t wait forty-five minutes to be turned. The food would get cold. It was pathetic to see a mother lying on the floor, on her side or back, with a plateful of food, feeding it to a kid lying upside down.”

After his condition stabilized, Gerry began the first of his fourteen skin-grafting operations. Each time Gerry would go to surgery like a trooper. Later in the day he’d be returned, sometimes unconscious, sometimes screaming. For his parents, the reaction to his pain was tormenting. They felt helpless. “We’d be in the room and hear these screams,” Mr. Andreoli recalled. “He’d be down the hall maybe three hundred feet away. All we could do is bite our lips and say, ‘There’s Gerry.’”

As the process continued, the rawness of Gerry’s burn was replaced by the rawness of his skin grafts. Donor sites on his body used to take transplanted skin for grafts became new open sores. Much like placing a patch on an inner tube, in order to prepare an area to receive a skin graft doctors first had to create a granular texture over the skin bordering the area to be covered. Sheets of skin from donor areas were then thinly shaved from Gerry’s buttocks and legs and cut into small squares. The colorless layers of skin were then meticulously stitched onto the raw, sterilized burn areas with the hope that the little patchworks of transplanted skin would take hold, regenerate, and grow together to form new sheets of skin to cover the open burns.

When the skin was removed, donor sites became new islands of smarting pain. After a skin-grafting procedure was completed, the newly covered wounds would be dressed and bandaged. Donor sites were covered with sterile sheets of rayon, exposing them to the air. Large scabs would form. The scabs itched, but they could not be scratched. As soon as the donor sites healed, the process would be repeated.

On and on it went, for three grueling months—changing dressings, lying motionless on his Stryker frame, being prepped for skin grafts, wheeled into surgery. Only when he was released from the hospital on March 7, 1959, did his parents tell Gerry that his girlfriend, Beverly Burda, had died in the fire.

After his discharge Gerry was required to return to St. Anne’s for physical therapy three times a week. Therapy is another critical stage of the healing process for burn victims, consisting chiefly of active and passive exercises to rejuvenate muscles. Hydrotherapy—placing burn patients in large tubs of swirling water to facilitate healing and stimulate muscle—was another element of the process.

Often Gerry’s father would accompany him on the trips. One day in the spring, Alfred Andreoli asked a nurse if there were any other students from the fire still in the hospital. “Yes,” the nurse responded. “There’s a girl in the orthopedic ward.”

“Thanks,” Mr. Andreoli said. He looked to his son. “C’mon, Gerry, let’s pay her a visit.”

The girl was Irene Mordarski, and the visit that day was the start of a long relationship that would bring Gerry and Irene to the altar of Our Lady of the Angels Church eight years later to exchange wedding vows.

FOR IRENE MORDARSKI, recovery from her injuries was as long as it was arduous. She was confined to her bed until June 1959 and was hospitalized longer than any other school fire survivor save for the Edington boy, who died in St. Anne’s that August.

Irene had two pins placed in her hip. She remained in traction for four and a half months. She underwent additional hip surgery in April and considerable skin grafting at various intervals. From time to time she was haunted by bad memories. Like many of the injured children in St. Anne’s, she suffered from psychological trauma. She would wake up screaming in the hospital, often mistaking the dark of night for smoke. She was always planning an escape route and knew exactly where to go in the event the hospital caught fire.

When Irene was finally discharged from the hospital she immediately became a visible reminder of the fire, as did many of the children, hobbling through the neighborhood on crutches, marked by scars on their faces, necks, arms, and hands.

Irene was a captive of her own injured body, and more operations on her hip lay ahead. She couldn’t play. She couldn’t exercise. She couldn’t run. She couldn’t swim. She couldn’t roller skate. She couldn’t ride a bike. Later, at dances, she’d sit and watch as other teens moved around freely. The fire had robbed her of a normal adolescence. In addition to her physical limitations, she and her peers were affected psychologically. It would be years before she could strike a match. She couldn’t look at candles. If her parents took her to a movie, she’d insist on sitting near the exit doors. The nightmares, it seemed, never ceased.

Still, life went on, and the friendship between Irene Mordarski and Gerry Andreoli that began at St. Anne’s Hospital gradually blossomed in the years following the fire. Gerry attended Lane Technical High School on Chicago’s North Side; Irene was a year behind Gerry at Madonna High School. When Gerry was a senior, he took Irene to Lane Tech’s prom at the Aragon Ballroom on the city’s far North Side—their first big date away from the neighborhood. Irene’s mother made her a new dress.

That fall Gerry entered college at the Illinois Institute of Technology on Chicago’s South Side and spent the next year and a half living on campus. “I was away from her longer than I wanted to be,” he said. “It was hard for both of us. Eventually, I got a car so we could see each other on the weekends. Then I started working and went to evening classes, so we saw more of each other.”

Irene still had difficulty walking. She had gone through several operations on her broken pelvis. In 1963, almost five years after the fire, she received a total hip replacement. Her left leg had become shorter than her right leg, which caused her to limp. She was never without pain.

Years later Irene recalled her early plight. “From the day of the fire until the early part of June,” she said, “I never got out of bed. I was never on my feet. They had a pin about eight inches long right through my ankle, and I was in traction. They operated on my hip and did plastic surgery on my legs. While I was in traction, my left foot became bent, and to this day it’s a size and a half smaller than my right foot. Whenever I buy shoes, I have to buy two pairs, one pair larger than the other.”

Irene recalled taking her first steps in June 1959. “My mother was there,” she said, “and I’ll never forget the expression on her face. I guess she thought I’d just get up out of bed and start walking. The doctors and nurses were overjoyed I was up on my feet and my mother tried to act happy, but I could see the grief and shock in her face.

“I was on crutches throughout the eighth grade. I went to John Hay public school. Then I was operated on again in 1960, and they put me in a body cast so I had to take my first year at Madonna High School by telephone. The telephone company set up an intercom from my bed at home to the school. It seemed strange talking to classmates I never saw. I felt like I was missing my teenage years, that I was growing up without being young. It seemed like I was always in braces or casts or on crutches.”

On March 22, 1967, Gerry took Irene to dinner at Pitzaferro’s Restaurant on Chicago’s Northwest Side. He had brought along an engagement ring but hadn’t told her about it. He was twenty-one years old, she was twenty. They were in love. He asked her to marry him. She said yes.

They were married in August of that year in Our Lady of the Angels Church, and moved into a home on Chicago’s West Side. Now they live in a well-to-do suburb west of the city, have two boys and two girls, and have grown into a loving couple with a genuine kindness and gentleness rooted in the suffering they experienced as children.

Irene endured a second hip replacement in 1973 and a third in 1993. She has been told to expect at least two more hip replacements in her lifetime. Gerry, ever protective of his wife, remained worried about the future. “Irene can’t do things normal people can do,” he said. “If she does any strenuous housework one day, she can hardly move the next day because she’s in such pain.

“Both of us received settlements from the school fire, but you can’t put a price on pain or a mother’s inability to give her children the care she thinks they should have. I’m worried about Irene’s problems later in life. Arthritis, for one. A broken hip can bring never-ending problems. I’ll never be free of worry that one day she could be permanently disabled.”

More than thirty years after the fire, white scars were still evident on Gerry’s neck and on the right side of his face. Irene still favored her left leg when she walked, and at times required a cane. The injuries Irene suffered led Gerry to become interested in the profession that provides him with his livelihood. His business card reads: Dr. Gerald T. Andreoli, chiropractor.

ON JUNE 23, 1959, the first lawsuit was filed in Cook County Circuit Court on behalf of five children injured in the school fire. In their complaint the plaintiffs asked for $1,750,000 in damages against the Catholic Bishop of Chicago and the City of Chicago—$350,000 for each of the five students. The suit alleged that the Catholic Bishop had “carelessly, negligently and deliberately operated the school so that the same was highly dangerous to life and limb, and constituted a fire trap for the students attending.” The suit also charged that the City of Chicago had “engaged in a pattern of conduct which consistently and regularly exempted the school from maintaining reasonable standards of safety.”

A second lawsuit, filed July 8, 1959, sought $30,000 in damages on behalf of a father whose daughter had died in the fire. It was the first suit seeking compensation for a wrongful death in the fire.

One of the astonishing sequels to the school fire, however, was the refusal of a large majority of parents whose children were killed or injured in the blaze to bring legal action against the archdiocese. Their reluctance was in some measure a reflection of the times when church authority was still regarded with considerable awe among the faithful. It also could be attributed to the failure of the city’s power structure to fix responsibility for the tragedy. Some parents, however, remained passive strictly out of respect for the dead children. “Why should I sue?” lamented one father. “It won’t bring my son back.”

Only three of a possible ninety-two wrongful death suits were filed against the archdiocese, and only nineteen of a possible seventy-six personal injury suits were filed.

One person who had detailed knowledge of all the personal injuries incurred in the school fire was Cornelius J. Harrington, Jr., a bright young lawyer with the prestigious law firm of Kirkland, Ellis, Hodson, Chaffetz and Masters, which represented the Catholic archdiocese. “I spent about a year at the school gathering information on all the injured children,” Harrington recalled. “It was something I agreed to do after talking to Cardinal Meyer. We invited families in for interviews and asked them to bring updated medical reports on their children.

“Donations to the school were pouring in from all over the world. They had bushel baskets full of money and checks out there. These funds were used to help pay all the immediate hospital and medical bills.

“Meyer told me, ‘I think we should try to settle not only all the suits that are filed, but we should also compensate every family whose child died or was injured regardless of whether they filed a suit or not. The question is: How do we go about it?’”

Harrington thought the courts should decide, and he did not foresee any difficulty in providing equitable settlements for families whose children had died in the fire. “At that time,” he said, “juries did not award large settlements in cases of wrongful deaths of children. The average settlement by a jury was about $10,000. Under Illinois law the maximum for wrongful death of a child was $30,000.”

In personal injury cases, however, there was no ceiling on the amount of compensation a child might receive. Harrington knew the awards could be astronomical unless some agreement was reached between the archdiocese and the attorneys for the plaintiffs. He visited with Judge Harold G. Ward, head of the law division of the Cook County Circuit Court, seeking his counsel in working out settlement procedures.

“I told him the cardinal wanted it to be fair for everyone and showed him a list of suits we had on file at that time,” Harrington recalled. “Most of them were for minor injuries. I told him of the difficulty we were experiencing with some families refusing to file suit. He said to me, ‘Well, I don’t know how you can get people to sue if they don’t want to.’”

Harrington talked with Chief Judge John S. Boyle, seeking his advice. Boyle suggested that settlements be negotiated in pretrial hearings by a panel of judges acceptable to both sides. Eventually a formula for the discussion of settlements was ironed out in a meeting among Harrington, Boyle, and Burton Joseph, the twenty-nine-year-old lawyer representing a committee of attorneys who had by 1965 brought fifty-nine lawsuits against the archdiocese—forty wrongful death and nineteen injury suits. Each side submitted a list of six sitting judges experienced in personal injury cases. From these twelve judges, Boyle selected Ward, Thomas C. Donovan, and Henry W. Dieringer.

In the spring of 1965 the judges began holding pretrial hearings. They heard each case separately, evaluated the potential jury verdict, and made recommendations for settlements accordingly. The judges had access to complete medical reports from hospitals and physicians, along with all the data compiled by Harrington. They took into account the pain, suffering, and disability of each child. The panel did not have to consider medical expenses amounting to approximately $1 million, which had been covered to a large extent by Mayor Daley’s Our Lady of the Angels fund, by grants from Catholic Charities, and by other voluntary contributions.

Cardinal Meyer died in April 1965 after surgery for a brain tumor, and the following June, John P. Cody was named archbishop of Chicago. “When Cody finally came to Chicago,” Harrington recalled, “this is the first thing we hit him with.” In September, Cody, whose father had been a deputy fire chief in St. Louis, agreed to the settlements recommended by the three-judge panel. The total came to $2,996,400, including attorneys’ fees.

“The money to be paid,” Cody announced, “will be borrowed from Chicago banks and no special solicitations will be made. This I consider to be a moral obligation of the archdiocese and we shall meet our obligations. In accordance with the wish of the late Albert Cardinal Meyer, in which I concur, the proposed settlement includes those who did not file suit as well as those who did.”

The judges’ recommendations stipulated an award of $7,500 to parents of each child who died. Recommendations for personal injuries ranged from $350 to $350,000. In response to the first suits filed in June 1959, seeking awards of $350,000 for each of five injured children, the recommended settlements were: $3,500, $3,500, $14,000, $28,000, and $31,000.

The largest settlement recommended by the panel was awarded to a fourth-grade student regarded as one of the most seriously injured of the survivors, a girl whose face had to be virtually reconstructed through plastic surgery. Hospital, nursing, and doctor bills for the girl, amounting to more than $12,400, had been paid for out of the school fire fund established by Mayor Daley.

In the final breakdown the archdiocese agreed to pay $690,000 for ninety-two child death cases and $2,256,525 for seventy-six personal injury cases. Attorney fees were $26,875 in the injury cases and $23,000 in the death cases.

JOHN TROTTA was one parent who accepted the $7,500 death settlement. Like many parents who had lost children in the blaze, the money was of little consequence to him, and he was reluctant to sue the archdiocese. Trotta was nonetheless disturbed by the manner in which the settlements were reached.

“Here we are in this little room in the City Hall building downtown,” he recalled of the final court hearing with the three-judge panel. “There were three of them sitting on one side of the table, and I’m on the other side.

“So help me God, this is how it went:

“‘What is your name?’

“‘John J. Trotta.’

“‘You were the father of?’

“‘John David.’

“‘Your address?’

“‘The same.’

“It all must have taken about two and a half minutes. And you know what they’re doing? They’re marking the information down in one of those little two-column journals the old grocer used to keep when your mother went to the store.

“It was either take their offer of $7,500 for the death settlement, or go into court. That was it. This is the hearing they were going to have to discuss with you … the whole bit. To me, it was a travesty.

“Remember, this was seven years after the fire. You talk about justice delayed being justice denied. This thing wasn’t only delayed, it was detoured and sidetracked.”

Monsignor McManus, though not directly involved in the litigation or settlements, sympathized with the parents. “Would I understand parents who would say, ‘No amount of money could compensate for what happened to my child’?” he asked. “Of course I would, especially after the whole situation about shortcomings in fire safety in the schools was revealed.”

In 1970 the Our Lady of the Angels Fire Fund set up in the wake of the disaster by Mayor Daley was transferred, under court supervision, to the Chicago Community Trust, one of the city’s oldest and largest public trusts. The First National Bank of Chicago was named as depository. In Daley’s words, the fund had been set up “to relieve the suffering caused by the fire.” Some eleven thousand contributions were received from all over the world; the balance eventually amounted to $640,000, including interest and investment income.

For the next twenty-four years, fire survivors who required continuing treatment for their injuries could draw money to cover medical costs. Then, in 1994, the bank moved legally to close out the fund. Cook County Chancery Court Judge Edward Hofert, after considering the bank’s petition and hearing from fire survivors, ordered that the fund’s remaining $140,000 be distributed among six claimants who had come forward seeking money to pay bills for continued medical and psychiatric treatment.

As of mid-1995 a dozen or so survivors were still undergoing treatment for injuries sustained in the fire, or required continued use of medical aids such as special shoes, canes, cosmetics, and physical therapy. Now that the trust money is gone they must pay for their care themselves—through insurance, if they are covered, or by digging into their own pockets. They receive no assistance from the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago.

In the end, the financial toll from the fire at Our Lady of the Angels, including funeral and burial costs, court settlements, insurance benefits, medical care, and the cost of constructing a new school building, reached an estimated $5.5 million.

THE HOLOCAUST at Our Lady of the Angels School clearly helped to bring about improved fire safety measures in schools throughout the country. Public outcry was swift, and Chicago newspapers echoed the fears of parents by waging editorial campaigns urging city and archdiocesan officials to act promptly to upgrade the city’s aging schools.

Immediately after the fire Chicago was in “a state of terrible turmoil,” Monsignor McManus recalled. Although McManus—as the archdiocesan school superintendent—had attended every inquest hearing, he was not called to testify. Still, he realized something had to be done to prevent a public panic.

“Parents were screaming all over the place about safety,” he recalled. “And pastors were screaming about the cost of safety. Nobody knew what to do. And the things the Fire Department were now noting in their fire inspections had been there before, during all the previous inspections in all the schools before the fire. But all of a sudden, everything they could find in the schools was wrong. And there was plenty wrong, no doubt about it. But we got a lot of very negative publicity.”

McManus sought advice from a local safety consulting firm, which recommended that the archdiocese install approved sprinkler systems in all its schools. The Catholic school board was at first open to the idea, but when McManus told the board it would cost the archdiocese $8 million to $12 million to implement such a plan, its members nearly choked; the cost estimate was almost fifty times greater than what the church was paying in liability insurance. Nevertheless, for a school like Our Lady of the Angels, the cost breakdown for a sprinkler system seemed nominal—about eight dollars per parent, the same price as one football helmet used by the school’s football team—a reasonable price, it seemed, for a child’s life.

Debate on the matter was short-lived, for on January 21, 1959, just two weeks after the coroner’s jury released its findings, the Chicago City Council, steered by Mayor Daley, adopted retroactive amendments to the city’s building code requiring automatic sprinkler systems in all city schools—public and private—of two or more stories in height and of ordinary frame construction with wooden floors and joists. Most such buildings had been constructed before World War I, when steel and concrete came into common use. Another change required that all school buildings be equipped with internal fire alarm systems directly linked with the city’s fire alarm office, and placement of fire alarm boxes within one hundred feet of the main entrance. Fire drills were required monthly and had to be witnessed by Fire Department personnel.

The Illinois General Assembly that convened in 1959 directed the state superintendent of schools to consult safety experts and draft needed changes to cover all schools in the state. A steering committee produced a bulky, two-volume set of building and safety standards regulating everything from the brightness of exit signs to the proper installation of furnaces. The next year the General Assembly enacted the standards into the Life Safety Code of 1960.

Legislation also allowed individual school districts in Illinois to levy a special homeowner tax to pay for life-safety improvements without the need for a referendum. Ironically, the tax legislation did not cover parochial schools, and Chicago, where the Our Lady of the Angels fire occurred and where schools in later years would fall into notorious disrepair, was exempted.

As noble as the new state law was, its authors failed to provide adequate oversight. Numerous Illinois school districts over the years exploited the tax provision by broadly interpreting the definition of “life safety.” Instead of limiting themselves to expending the tax money on specific life-safety items—such as exit signs, emergency lighting, sprinkler systems, furnace repairs, and the enclosure of stairways—school boards stretched the safety definition to permit the use of tax money to fund new gymnasium floors, new school lockers, remodeling of auditoriums, new carpet, the repair of swimming pools, and new bleachers at athletic fields.

One school district used safety tax money to convert a shower and locker room into a faculty dining facility, and a gym into a school cafeteria. Yet another school district earmarked $44,000 to resurface a running track. That project was never realized, but the district used the funds to replace chalkboards, improve an athletic field’s drainage system, build a learning center, and renovate a teachers’ lounge.

In the parochial school system, raising money for school fire safety proved to be problematic from the very beginning. Everyone wanted safer schools; how to pay for them was another matter. Parish pastors have always felt handcuffed by limited, shrinking budgets, and new expenses are never welcomed.

In Chicago’s Catholic school system at the time, Monsignor McManus recalled “a lot of grumbling” from some pastors inside the archdiocese who remained opposed to spending money to put sprinkler systems in their schools, despite the enormous public outcry that resulted immediately after the Our Lady of the Angels fire.

“I knew the sprinkling people saw a bonanza that they never anticipated,” McManus said. “We had to be careful so that we would not be overcharged and given sprinkler systems that didn’t meet the specifications, so the pastors could be assured of getting a good sprinkling job for their money, that it would work.”

Because the new safety requirements required the outlay of millions of dollars, changes did not occur overnight. In Chicago the City Council had set December 31, 1963, as the deadline for compliance, but the deadline was extended one more year to accommodate financing and other logistics. The amended deadline was met, and—as far as installed fire alarms and sprinklers, safety lighting, and supervised fire drills were concerned—the schools were brought up to code. But other problems of aging schools, such as the enclosure of stairwells and the general condition of multistory brick and wood-joist constructed school buildings, remained unchanged for years. Still, according to a nationwide survey published in 1960 by the National Fire Protection Association, major improvements in life safety were made in 16,500 school buildings in the United States within one year of the Our Lady of the Angels fire.

AS THE CONCERN for fire safety produced concrete results, so too did plans to build a new Our Lady of the Angels School. The gutted remains of the old school were razed in late February 1959, and construction on a new school building began that June.

In the interim, beginning the week after the fire, more than twelve hundred students from the parish school were bused each day to four neighboring parochial schools. Monsignor Cussen and Monsignor McManus also made arrangements with the Chicago Board of Education to rent thirty-seven classrooms in the nearby Hay, Orr, and Cameron public elementary schools to accommodate students from Our Lady of the Angels as construction proceeded on the new school.

Monsignor McManus recalled that first morning—Tuesday, December 9, 1958—when displaced students from Our Lady of the Angels assembled outside the parish church to board chartered buses. “That was heartwrenching,” he said. “The children were assembling by classroom. In one class there were just three kids left who weren’t dead, burned, or seriously injured. So it was very traumatic for those kids. It was a bitter cold day. When the kids came back at four o’clock in the afternoon that first day, the parents were all there to meet them. They were still terrified. They didn’t want to let those kids out of their sight.”

The children were uneasy as well. Most of the schools they were sent to were older multistory structures—buildings that resembled their burned-out school. Some youngsters were frightened by the thought of climbing stairs and sitting in classrooms two and three stories up. And there were new nuns and lay teachers to contend with. One fire survivor who temporarily attended classes at Our Lady Help of Christians School recalled that “In the beginning, the nuns were very rough. They were always probing your mind. If you were daydreaming, they’d call you up and ask what was the matter. I think they were trained to look for trauma.”

Fire survivor John Raymond recalled that while he was in class at the Orr public grammar school, building engineers were cleaning the school’s heating system when, without warning, the furnace kicked on, sending fumes throughout the building. John and other children from Our Lady of the Angels didn’t wait for the fire alarm before leaving their seats and fleeing the building. One girl in John’s room was so hysterical he had to carry her out the front door. “And they couldn’t stop us,” he said. “The teacher just let us go. She could see the panic in our faces. She knew exactly what was going on.”

The decision to replace the old Our Lady of the Angels School with a new one came within days of the fire. Monsignor Cussen, still badly shaken from his experience, had vowed the day after the fire to construct a new school building in memory of those who had perished.

“The first decision we had to make was whether we would ever consider bringing children back into that school,” McManus recalled. “Some in the chancery thought we should. They felt the school was in good condition, that the burned part could be repaired. I thought the trauma had been so terrible that you could never, never carry on education in that building again. You could never bring children back into that burned school and expect them to learn in an atmosphere like that. The place was haunted.”

The archdiocese commissioned Chicago architect James L. Barry to design a new school. Before signing the contract, McManus gave Barry just one directive: “Everything that’s related to fire safety, put it in there.”

Barry designed a three-story reinforced concrete structure with a $1.25 million price tag. The building featured exterior yellow-brick walls accented with large, blue porcelain panels and granite trim. It contained thirty-two classrooms and a kindergarten, and its interior components included ceramic tile walls, marble stairs, and stainless steel handrails. Classrooms surrounded a central core containing a library, visual aids department, two lunchrooms, a book store, washrooms, and maintenance rooms. Interior partition walls were built of concrete block with ceramic tiles. A sprinkler system and smoke detectors were installed and hooked into a central fire alarm panel connected directly to the main fire alarm office via telephone circuits. In short, the school was rock solid, a superb model of fire-resistant construction, a symbol of atonement for what had happened on the site in 1958.

The cost of the new school was paid for by public donations that came in from all over the world, and by local fund-raising efforts, including benefits, carnivals, raffles, and weekly contributions by church parishioners.

By the summer of 1960 the new school was completed. On October 2 of that year, before a large crowd of parishioners, city and church officials, and news reporters, the school was dedicated by Cardinal Meyer, who blessed every classroom with holy water. In celebrating the dedication Mass in Our Lady of the Angels Church, Meyer had decided early on against making any direct references to the school fire dead. One reason, according to Monsignor McManus, was that on the night of the fire the cardinal had tried to assure parents at St. Anne’s Hospital that despite the dreadful circumstances, God still cared for them. Now he wished to strike the same theme at the Mass.

“I remember saying to him directly,” McManus recalled years later, “‘I think you ought to mention something about the fire and the way people suffered,’ and he said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that. You wait and hear how I’m going to handle it.’”

In his homily, Meyer set the fire in a religious perspective, comparing it to the dictates of God’s providence. “Be sincere of heart and steadfast, undisturbed in time of adversity,” he preached. “Accept whatever befalls you. In crushing misfortune, be patient, for in fire, gold is tested, as are worthy men in the crucible of humiliation.

“Trust God and He will help … remind you of the tears of yesterday and the joys of today. … It is His image which gives meaning to the generosity of those who have made it possible for us to build this new school. It is His example which gives courage to continue to believe in Divine Providence, despite appearances to the contrary, because of suffering, sin or disaster.

“Here, in this school of Our Lady of the Angels, we understand better the meaning of our Lord’s word: ‘Suffer the little ones to come unto me … for such is the kingdom of heaven.’”

WHEN THE NEW Our Lady of the Angels School opened in the fall of 1960, it marked the first time since December I, 1958, that children from the parish were together in their own school building. “We were all excited about going back,” fire survivor Matt Plovanich remembered. “There was a lot of pride. It was a glistening new school. It was a whole different feeling. We felt so safe. It was so bright. The windows were so large. You were really happy to go back to your school and see how nice it had become.”

But the homecoming was also bittersweet. Instead of talking about the fire and discussing their feelings, the children were discouraged by their nuns from ever referring to it. Johnna (Uting) Bovenzo, a survivor from Room 212 who had broken both her ankles after leaping from a second-floor window, recalled that “If we talked about the fire, the nuns wanted to treat it like it never occurred. It was suppressed.”

In front of the new school, near the Iowa Street curb, stood a device that had not been there two years earlier: a red fire alarm box. Yet within the school itself there was no visible memorial to the children or sisters who had died in the fire. “The school,” said one nun, “is their monument.”

DURING THE turbulent 1960s, survivors of the school fire grew into young adulthood. By the end of the decade, many of them had joined the work force as police officers, school teachers, or hourly wage earners. Others entered colleges, professional schools, and religious orders. Some saw combat in Vietnam. They became husbands and wives, mothers and fathers. Families that had lived in Our Lady of the Angels parish gradually drifted away, many moving to the city’s far Northwest Side or into the western and northwestern suburbs.

With the exception of a brief flurry of stories about the settlement of court cases and the annual announcement of a memorial Mass celebrated in Our Lady of the Angels Church each December 1, only scant mention of the tragedy appeared in the news media. A collective subconscious seemed to prefer to forget the school fire.

In 1965 Monsignor Cussen retired as pastor of Our Lady of the Angels, a position he had held for thirty years. He was still suffering from the effects of a crippling stroke that had weakened him in 1964, and for the next ten years he lived with his brother. “He never talked much about the school fire,” Mort Cussen later recalled, “but I’m quite sure he thought about it a lot.”

In October 1975 Monsignor Cussen died in the home of a niece in Tinley Park, a suburb south of Chicago. He was eighty-three. The grief he had tried so hard to hide—even from his own relatives—had finally come to an end. During his funeral mass at Our Lady of the Angels Church, Father Joe McDonnell, an associate pastor at the time of the fire, delivered the eulogy. Not once in his talk did he refer to the school fire or to its lasting physical and emotional impact on Monsignor Cussen.