SURVIVAL
EMOTIONAL EFFECTS of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels School, like the roots of a giant tree, reached far and deep. Essentially a neighborhood calamity, the school fire was also a microcosm of all great tragedies: swift, cruel, and unexpected. It served as an unforgettable reminder that fire, undetected at birth and uncontrolled in the early moments of its life, can grow into a savage, indiscriminate killer. It also left terrible feelings of grief, guilt, and bitterness.
Thirty years later a troubled Laurie Dann walked into Hubbard Woods Elementary School in the affluent Chicago suburb of Winnetka and shot five students, killing one. Those who lived through the Dann shooting were provided counseling and other mental health services to help them cope with the shooting’s aftermath. But the Our Lady of the Angels fire occurred at a time when it was not yet in vogue to send an army of social workers and psychologists into a community following a traumatic event. The children who survived the Our Lady of the Angels fire, and the parents of those who perished, were afforded no such intervention.
A great legacy of the school fire therefore concerns its deep effect on a small and closely knit community. It is a story of ordinary people uprooted from the daily routines of working-class life and forced to deal—virtually by themselves—with a terrible disaster. It is an acknowledgment of human fragility and a testament to the strength of human perseverance in the face of great personal tragedy.
Treatment of what is now recognized as posttraumatic stress disorder was not an option in 1958. Diagnostically the syndrome was not formally recognized by the psychiatric community until 1989, though research into the phenomenon had begun late in World War II and was expanded in the 1970s after American combat veterans began returning home from Vietnam.
Posttraumatic stress is not a disease. It is a normal reaction by normal people to an abnormal event. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s official definition of the disorder, persons may develop the syndrome if they have experienced or witnessed a violent event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury. A person’s response to the event must involve intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Three principal symptoms are persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic event (i.e., flashbacks), persistent avoidance of potentially troubling stimuli associated with the event (shying away from crowded buildings), and increased arousal (rapid heartbeat, feelings of panic and terror) when exposed to stimuli associated with the event.
Commonly, trauma survivors may suffer recurrent troubling thoughts or recollections of the event in question, as well as recurring dreams in which the event is replayed. In rare instances a person may even experience so-called dissociative states lasting from a few seconds to several hours or even days, during which time components of the event are relived and the person behaves as though experiencing the event at that particular moment.
Often a person may mentally revisit the event if he or she is exposed to some type of trigger. In the case of the school fire survivors, these may include the December 1 anniversary dates; fires, whether they be structure fires or campfires; fire and police sirens; old schools; and other disasters, natural or man-made.
“I thought I had gotten over the fire until I saw the movie Towering Inferno” recalled Vito Muilli, the former fourth-grader from Room 210. “I had a nervous breakdown right in the theatre, and that was fifteen years later. It put me in shock again because it looked so similar to what happened at the school—people jumping out of windows. My wife was next to me. I was frozen in my seat, squeezing her hand, just crying.”
The Catholic archdiocese was in many respects ill-equipped to help parish families psychologically with the fire’s aftermath, or to help soothe the widespread grief felt in the neighborhood. Although Catholic Charities provided a great many priests and nuns who infiltrated the neighborhood immediately after the fire, helping families cope with the loss of a child, their primary role was to console, not to provide professional counseling. When the fire shattered the aura of sanctity in which it held itself, the church retreated to a defensive posture, responding the only way it knew how: it tore down the old school, replaced it with a new one, then acted as if the fire had never occurred. It failed to deal with the individual and thus produced a major source of anger and criticism among survivors of the fire.
“They had to have some idea of what we were going through,” commented one woman, a sixth-grader in the fire. “They built a new school, but no one talked about the fire with the kids. No one ever came up to us to ask, ‘How are you doing? How do you feel? What do you think of this?’
“I really can’t buy into the excuse they didn’t know how. It’s just amazing that nobody thought of helping these people.”
Many survivors of the fire developed what is known as “survivor’s guilt,” an offshoot of posttraumatic stress which causes them to wrestle with the ponderous question, “Why did I survive and not the others?” Taken a step further, a survivor could instead ask, “Why didn’t I die?”
By leaving it to “God’s will” or some other simple explanation, rooted or not in religious metaphor, the children were, at a very young age, forced to assume a simplistic version of what had occurred. But the victims had not died “gloriously,” or “magnificently,” nor had God swooped down from heaven and scooped them into His bosom. Rather they had died violently in a fast-moving fire. Bad things aren’t supposed to happen to good little boys and girls; a church-oriented school ought to be a safe place.
Confusing too was the literal canonization of victims by some nuns in the parish who, fueled by their own repressed grief, explained to the children that “only the good ones were taken.” In a child’s mind, if only the good ones were taken, survivors could only assume they were not good, and hence were bad. Mary Jane (Nuccio) Cozzi, a fifth-grader who escaped the fire unharmed, recalled: “It’s funny how it plays on you, the message they were handing out to us. The ones who died were called the ‘lucky ones,’ the ‘chosen ones.’ They were the ones God wanted. Those of us who lived weren’t chosen. They were the ‘angels.’ We were the kids who were left behind.
“We didn’t know how to feel. No one explained to us how we were supposed to feel. You were programmed. You were supposed to be sad. You were supposed to pray to the ‘angels in heaven.’ In retrospect it seems pretty feeble.
“And the parents whose children died were being handed a lot of nonsense too. They were being told their child was now an ‘angel in heaven,’ but they were angry as hell about it—yet how could they be angry if that’s what God wanted for them or chose for them?
“They had to live with this their entire life. It’s a struggle. ‘Shame on you if you’re crying or being angry when God chose your child, when you really are a blessed person because you’ve got your own personal angel in heaven.’ It was so backward, so ludicrous.”
In the absence of counseling and organized intervention, many parents came to terms with their loss through their deep religious faith. Such was the case of Nick and Emma Jacobellis, parents of Victor Jacobellis, the nine-year-old who died after jumping from Room 210.
In 1994 the Jacobellises, both white-haired and eighty, were still active, living comfortably in retirement in a yellow-brick bungalow near a lush green forest preserve on the Northwest Side of Chicago. Their home, neatly furnished, was filled with mementos of a full life. Victor’s bronzed baseball mitt was set unobtrusively on a table in the living room.
The Jacobellises talked about the fire matter-of-factly, as if it were a distant relative. Their grief had not limited their lives. They appeared to have managed it well.
“We prayed a lot,” Mrs. Jacobellis said of the time. “It happened. We knew there was nothing we could do about it. Victor was such a wonderful child. And only in the fourth grade. We love him. We miss him. The hardest part for me came a couple of weeks after, when I went in to clean out his closet in the bedroom. That’s when it really hit me. After that I accepted it and went on.
“We stayed in the neighborhood for quite a few years after the fire, until 1970. We didn’t want to move. In the beginning everybody was there. By moving I felt we would be abandoning him. By staying there I felt he was close to us.
“We helped raise a lot of money for that new school. It made us feel connected to him. I think he would have wanted us to stay.”
For the children who lived through the fire, the event clearly served as a point of demarcation in their early lives. The fire took away something many consider an elemental right of every human being: it stripped them of their innocence, robbed them of their childhoods. It prevented them, as adults, from being able to remember the good times of youth when life was pure, wrought with simple routines and bright shiny bicycles. When survivors are asked to recall their childhoods, instead of a smile one sees watery eyes or a sad look. In order to access the memories of youth, they must first cross the threshold of the school fire.
John Raymond explained: “There are parts of your life that draw big lines, and that one definitely chops off everything else. When I think of my childhood, it goes right back to the fire. I have to go through that to get to my earlier years. I don’t think back to when I was five years old on a Radio Flyer or wearing out one gym shoe. I think back to then. It’s a barrier.”
Group therapy and shared experience has long been touted by mental health professionals as exceptionally helpful to those suffering the effects of trauma. Yet for the children of 1958, talking about the school fire and openly expressing their feelings was not encouraged. Instead the subject was regarded as almost taboo. Hence children and adults alike never learned how to cope with the psychological effects of the fire. Through no fault of their own, survivors kept their emotions locked inside. They were left to form and develop into adulthood seemingly unaffected, yet forever bound to the memories of their unconquered past.
The result is that they are slightly different from the rest of the society in which they exist. Silently they still suffer; the fire is never far away. A few who were left disfigured remain recluses, locked away in their own private cells, sentenced to a life of limitation, their only crime being that they attended school at a time when local government still had not fully addressed the dangers of housing children in unsafe school buildings.
Many survivors can vividly recall the sound of screaming children and the smell of the thick, black smoke that rolled into their classrooms. Some of them who were crowded at the windows admit to claustrophobia; others find it difficult to look at fires or other disasters and accidents on television newscasts. Generally they have a heightened awareness of their vulnerability and mortality. In restaurants, theatres, or multilevel shopping malls, they find themselves instinctively looking for alternate exits. On business or pleasure, they often ask for hotel rooms no higher than the second floor. If they have children, they take more than a casual interest in the conditions of the schools their youngsters attend.
More than a few survivors indicate recurring nightmares related to the fire, especially in the autumn months leading to December. Still others have difficulty enjoying the holiday season, mentally returning to that bleak Christmas of 1958, which came on the heels of the tragedy. To say that the fire remains a difficult subject for them to discuss is an understatement. And even though many years had passed when the major work for this book was under way, many had never recounted their experiences at length. Most surviving firefighters who fought the blaze found it an equally troubling memory. The sights and sounds of that day are buried deep within them.
AGAINST THIS BACKDROP of unfinished business, Linda Maffiola got an idea. Even though she hadn’t been in the fire, her life was forever changed by it. It was the day her older brother, Joseph, never came home. Linda was just three and a half years old when the fire occurred, a preschooler unable to comprehend the profound changes taking place in her household. Her parents, devastated by the loss of their son, were consumed by grief. Shortly after the fire her father developed serious physical problems and was hospitalized for a month; he nearly died from an infected kidney. Her mother, severely depressed, broke down after the coroner’s inquest at which she was the first parent to testify.
Still, life went on. In 1960 Linda’s mother, following the advice of her doctors, had another child, a girl, and that year Linda was enrolled as a kindergartner in the new Our Lady of the Angels School. Parents whose children had died in the fire no longer had to worry about the school burning down, for “OLA” was now the safest school in the city. There Linda studied music and piano and developed a love for literature. When she graduated in 1969 her family packed up and moved away from the neighborhood, relocating to the far Northwest Side of Chicago, where many other parish families had landed.
For Linda, almost three decades passed before she began to address the grief of losing her brother in the fire. It came when her own two children transferred to a grade school in a suburb where she had moved—the school reminded her of the old Our Lady of the Angels School. “Each day when I dropped off my kids,” she explained, “as we approached the building I started having flashbacks of the fire. I would have to shake my head and remind myself that this was not 1958, and this school was not OLA.”
Linda’s family had never talked at length about the fire or the way it had affected them or their community. Not until years later did her father reveal that she had been outside the school on the day of the blaze. “My dad was recalling the events of the day to my younger sister,” Linda recalled, “and he mentioned that he and my mother had picked me up from nursery school, and that we had gone together to OLA to search for my brother. Well, I almost fell out of my chair. All my life I just assumed that a relative picked me up from nursery school, that I was shielded from the actual fire. Here thirty-five years later I discover I witnessed the event.
“Unexpectedly I was filled with great peace and comprehension. All my life I had suffered from nightmares and flashbacks of the fire. It finally made sense to me, because I have no conscious recollection of being at the scene. Try as I can, I can’t remember a thing about the fire, the search for my brother in the area hospitals, his funeral, and the weeks following. I was told that my brother died in the school fire, which I could not comprehend at all. I was very angry with him for allowing the fire to take his life when he was supposed to be with me, to take care of me and play with me. I was told he was in heaven with ‘Jesus and the angels,’ and I thought that was totally absurd. I felt I needed him more here on earth than Jesus ever would.”
In 1992 Linda Maffiola, a vivacious, dark-haired church musician and former Catholic elementary school teacher, organized the first memorial Mass for the fire to be held in years. It was celebrated at St. Paul of the Cross Church in Park Ridge, a suburb just outside of Chicago, and was offered by the Reverend Carl Morello, a young associate pastor of the church whose cousin, Annette LaMantia, had died in the school fire. “Not only did we remember the victims,” said Linda, “we now remembered the survivors.”
The next year she organized another memorial Mass, this one to coincide with the fire’s thirty-fifth anniversary. It was celebrated at Our Lady of the Angels Church in the old neighborhood and drew an often passionate response from survivors and their families, former parishioners, firefighters, and others who began sharing with Linda their unresolved feelings about the fire.
Moved by the outpouring of emotion, Linda teamed with Terri Schmidt, a social worker, to organize a healing workshop for the survivors. The idea was endorsed by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, who agreed to help finance it. The workshop, held in November 1994, brought together about two hundred people, among them fire survivors, parents, firefighters, nurses, teachers, and former parishioners who had lived in the neighborhood at the time of the fire. It marked the first time they had gathered as a group, and they talked freely about their experiences.
Jane Cozzi, the former fifth-grader, was one survivor who attended the workshop. Cozzi had grown up a half-block south of the school on Avers Avenue. Her fifth-grade class had been assigned to a first-floor classroom in the school annex, and she and her classmates were evacuated without harm. One of her cousins, a girl, was among the eighth-grade students lifted to safety from Room 209 by Father Ognibene. Cozzi’s second cousin, James Ragona, age nine, was killed in the blaze, as was her next-door neighbor, Peter Cangelosi, a ten-year-old. Both had been fourth-grade students in Room 210.
“I was trained from a very young age that the show must go on,” she said. “We were programmed not to talk about it. So things were suppressed, repressed. There was no outlet.
“As a child I didn’t grasp the reality of how enormous this event was. At ten years old, how could you? It was an eerie feeling. When you’re a little kid, you don’t understand death, you really don’t know what’s going on. The next thing I knew we were back to school at Our Lady Help of Christians, on half-day schedules, being fed sandwiches, and we thought, ‘Hey, this is great, no big deal.’
“Later, they let us go back inside OLA and get our books and coats. We got our jackets, and of course they smelled of smoke. We never wore them again. And why they let us go in there to get them, to see everything, is beyond me. There was stuff everywhere, books, papers.
“For a while it seemed like the mourning never stopped. As a child I never realized the impact. But now as a parent, you think, ‘Oh my God! What did those parents go through?’ A lot of people were never the same, especially those who suffered a personal loss.”
Cozzi, like many child survivors of the fire, did not begin to look at the tragedy from this vantage point until years later. “I didn’t deal with any of that until I was a grown woman,” she said. “From 1958 to 1990, you could say I was in a vacuum. My best friend was in the fire, with burn marks all over her legs; my next-door neighbor was killed—but nobody ever talked about it. My parents talked about it. They said how blessed we were because none of our kids got hurt, that we were spared, but that was it.
“All I remember was this cloak of sadness. Everyone was sad. This was a sad neighborhood now. You had to be careful of who you were around, what you might say, what you might not say. How could a neighborhood survive that? It didn’t. The whole neighborhood started changing, people started moving. It was not the same neighborhood anymore. The whole sense of family and community in the neighborhood was destroyed, and the fire is what destroyed it. People couldn’t face those who suffered. They couldn’t deal with it. They should have had support groups right then, immediately. They should’ve got these families together who lost kids right then. They should’ve brought together these kids who were burned.
“Seeing kids who were scarred—you never knew a person could be burned so badly, that they could be so disfigured. You didn’t even want to be around them, to look at them. Yet at the same time you wanted to because you never saw anything like this in your life. These little kids in uniform going to school, all scarred up for life.”
Because no one ever discussed the fire with the children, Cozzi said she sensed a message: “What I got from that is, you don’t talk about things that are tragic and upsetting. You have to be strong and just go on with your life. You have to bury it because it’s over and there’s nothing you can do now. You just go on.
“But now we know it will never be over. For us, it was the night that went on forever.”