Fourteen

MEMORIES

ACOLD unwelcome rain was washing the streets and pelting neatly kept lawns in Lombard, Illinois, a suburban bedroom community west of Chicago. John Trotta, a retired accountant with greying hair, metal-rimmed glasses, and a long, dark cigar clenched firmly between his teeth, stared vacantly through the front picture window of his home. He is a short man, vibrantly articulate, whose voice rises and falls with the passion of the moment. His wife, Lydia, was out, and he had the house to himself. He was dressed casually and wore a pair of leather slippers. Now he had fallen silent and was studying the gloomy, grey scene outside, looking but not seeing.

For more than two hours he had talked about his son, John David, a handsome eighth-grade student who had died in the Our Lady of the Angels fire. John David’s last minutes of life had been spent in Room 211, well removed from where the blaze had started.

The father talked about the times they had spent together, the ball games they had gone to, the trivial joys and disappointments they had shared. “There are a lot of happy memories,” Trotta finally said, “intermingled with what might have been. It didn’t have to be. God only knows what went through the boy’s mind at that time. No kid should have to die away from the arms of his parents. You know, we have an old saying that if a little baby dies, it will become a dream. But if a young son dies, it will always be a dagger in your heart.”

For all the years since the fire, John Trotta has lived with a dagger in his heart, as have many other fathers and mothers who lost children in the fire. Time has assuaged but not erased their bitterness. It is buried deep within them—a father’s anger over the delay in sounding the school’s fire alarm, the lapse in calling the Fire Department, the muddled actions of the coroner at the morgue, the inconclusiveness of the inquest, and what Trotta considers the callousness of some church officials in regard to the funerals and the settling of lawsuits.

An edge of bitterness crept into Trotta’s voice. “Not one priest from the parish attended my son’s funeral, which took place the following Saturday. The mass was at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in Melrose Park. They told us, ‘You can have either the funeral at the armory or find your own church.’

“The last time I was at Our Lady of the Angels Church was for Monsignor Cussen’s wake. He was a regular Joe. He never made a pitch for one red cent. He kept the church clean, the school clean, but it was an old structure. He made no bones about being human. You could talk to him. He’d appreciate anything you did for him. In the old days it was a good neighborhood, had a good parochial spirit and feeling.

“You don’t forget,” Trotta continued. “We were a close-knit family. Lydia, I hate to take her to the cemetery. It’s like a visit to church. It’s a terrible thing to carry with you. You’re so helpless to do anything about it.

“At the morgue my guy looked like he got off pretty easy. His hands were behind his head like he was resting. He died of asphyxiation.

“I kept his winter clothes. The other day I tried on his coat. I’ve kept his baseball mitt. There’s no reason to throw it away. His little end table. When I touch it, he touches me too. He had a big sixteen-inch Softball. It’s still in the drawer. He used to con me about baseball.

“We still miss him. He had a wry, quiet sense of humor. And he was a proud kid. One day he came home from kindergarten. I asked him, ‘How’d it go today?’ And his eyes lit up and he smiled, ‘I’m an assistant shoelace tier. I’m the only one in kindergarten who knows how to tie shoelaces.’

“He was athletically inclined, but not too fast on his feet. I used to tell him, ‘No use trying to run away from me, I’ll catch you.’

“He was a lot of fun in the privacy of family. Outside, he was shy and reserved. Among Italians we’d call him figlio della casa. He was ‘a son of the house.’”

Trotta paused a moment, his mind racing back over the years. “At one time there were sixteen hundred kids in that school. The ones that died, you often wonder what careers they’d have followed or what war they’d have died in uselessly.”

Trotta went to a closet and returned with a package, neatly wrapped in brown paper. “These were his books,” he said. “I’ll lay you five to one if I unwrap the package, you can still smell smoke.”

Immediately after the fire, police guards had barred the public from entering Our Lady of the Angels School. Trotta was disappointed. He wanted to see his son’s classroom, and he expressed his disappointment to Chief Fire Marshal Ray Daley, a longtime family friend.

“One day a fire lieutenant came to our home on Karlov Avenue and rang the bell,” Trotta recalled. ‘“Mr. Trotta,’ he says, ‘Chief Daley sent me. He said you wanted to go over to the school.’ So we got into the Fire Department car and went to the school. And lo and behold, the side doors were open. No guards around. And the young lieutenant says, ‘I’ll go up with you. I’d like to see what happened myself.’

“So we went up to my son’s room and looked around. There was a hole in the ceiling where the firemen had punched through the roof. My son sat in the front row on the west end of the room, right off the teacher’s desk. I knew where he sat. His English book was still open on his desk. There was snow on it. I took all his books, his little missal, everything, and put them in a metal wastebasket I found in the room.

“The basket I’ve been using ever since, in my office at home. It’s my wastebasket now. And I’ve still got the missal, keep it on my dresser.”

Trotta still finds it hard to accept that his son, sitting so close to the front exit stairs of the north wing, was unable to escape. “Maybe it’s like Monday morning quarterbacking, but you wonder why they stayed there, like sitting ducks, waiting for help. Instead of waiting, why didn’t they take a chance?

“Later on I visited with Sister Helaine. I asked her, ‘Sister, what did you do?’

“She said, ‘We prayed.’

“What in the hell could I say to that?

“But don’t get me wrong. Sister Helaine was a wonderful, intelligent nun. It’s just that I feel that no kid—and I am very emphatic about this—should die away from his family.

“This may sound irreligious, but afterward when somebody would come along and say, ‘Maybe God wanted the kids,’ I’d say, ‘Well, God must be pretty damn desperate if He wants innocent kids who die through no fault of their own.’”

In the months and years following the fire, John Trotta pursued his own investigation into the cause of the blaze. “I wanted to know myself what happened, not for any public purposes. I was just damned mad and wanted to find out on my own what I could do.

“I always said if I find the son of a bitch who did it, I’m gonna kill him. I promised my son at the grave. I said, ‘If I find out, son, that somebody did this deliberately, I’ll avenge you.’ Not that my son would have wanted me to do it that way, but this is the way I felt.”

When the closed hearing in Family Court was held in 1962 for the Cicero boy suspected of starting the fire, Trotta had a pipeline into the hearing through an attorney who was present.

“After it was over, I asked him, ‘What do you think?’”

The attorney said he thought the boy was guilty.

“I says, ‘How can we prove it?’

“He says,’We don’t.’

“After the fire, people in the parish used to stop me in the streets. Some of them looked to me for advice. Why, I don’t know. But they’d say, ‘Mr. Trotta, what should we do? What should we do? We can’t find out anything.’ I’d say, ‘Frankly, I don’t know what in the hell we can do. If we sue, it’s gonna cost a lot of money. Things have been suppressed, things have been glossed over.’ Then the coroner’s office makes the price of the inquest transcript prohibitive. The ordinary guy doesn’t have four, five, or six hundred dollars to get a transcript. So the people who had kids who died or were injured, they were sort of in a bind.”

After the inquest, “I was so mad,” he said, “I finally went to my lawyer. I says, ‘John, I don’t know what to do. I’m bumping my head against a stone wall. Maybe if we file a suit I can get some information, not for the money but just to get the complete truth on this thing.’

“He says, ‘Well, I’m not a personal injury man, but I’ll take you to a friend.’ So we make an appointment with this prominent PI lawyer. He says to my lawyer, ‘John, why did you bring this man here? You know we’ve been told not to handle any of these cases against the archdiocese.’

“Well, that’s when I hit the ceiling. Catholic lawyers weren’t supposed to handle any of these suits from the fire against the archdiocese. I remember there were five suits, all filed at the same time by the same lawyer. I did some checking up, and I found that other lawyers had siphoned these cases to this fresh, young lawyer just out of law school and used him to sue.”

In 1958 the Trottas lived on the first floor of a two-flat on North Karlov Avenue, a few blocks west of Our Lady of the Angels School. On the day of the fire, John Trotta was working in his office at home. “I had a feeling of foreboding,” he recalled. “To my sorrow, I have to say I had that same feeling when my mother died.

“I saw my kid at lunch. We had lunch at home. My wife had some errands to do that day, but for some reason she detoured to come home for lunch. The bus was going to take her right to the front of the bank, but she got off the bus at the corner and came home.

“The kid had a slight cold, and I asked him if he wanted to stay home.

“‘No, Poppa,’ he said, ‘I’ll be all right.’

“My son goes back to school. He was wearing an army jacket with a hood that my brother had liberated. He was keen on it because he didn’t have to wear earmuffs.

“Well, about ten minutes to three or somewhere close to it, I get a telephone call from one of his schoolmates who had stayed away from school that day because he was ill. He says, ‘Is John David home yet?’ And I say, ‘No.’

“‘Mr. Trotta,’ he says, ‘the school is on fire!’

“With that I ran out the front door. I ran like hell. I figured I could get there faster if I ran than if I took the car. It was about three and a half blocks to the school.”

By the time Trotta arrived at the scene, horror-stricken crowds were massed around the school. What rescue work that could be done had been done, and police were having difficulty controlling the crowd. Ropes were finally secured to hold back the spectators.

“There was a mob of people in front of me,” Trotta said, “But I forged closer and got in front of the rope. Ray Daley told them it was okay for me to be there. I’ll never forget the look on his face. It was ashen, like he wanted to cry. He knew what was up in those rooms. You could see the emotion in his face.”

Trotta watched the grim recovery of bodies. When he finally headed home, he wasn’t sure what fate had befallen his son, so with a friend driving the car, he went from one hospital to another, searching vainly for John David.

“What’s the use of going to the hospitals,” he told his friend. “Drive me to the morgue. I know the guy’s there.”

Trotta remembered the pandemonium at the morgue. “The parents and relations were there screaming, hollering, crying. And they wouldn’t allow those people to go down to look or identify the kids.

“Coroner McCarron, who was in charge of all this, he’s over there in a corner, cowering and trembling, all by himself. He had his back to the people, and was looking at the wall. He doesn’t know what to do.

“And out of all of this chaos, Monsignor Eddie Pellicore and his assistant, Father Tony Spina, saw me there, and say, ‘What’s the matter?’

“‘My kid,’ I said. ‘He’s got to be here somewhere.’

“And, fortunately, there was this cop there, Joe Sansone, a friend of mine, who came over and said, ‘John, what’s the matter?’

“‘The kid, Joe,’ and he knew the kid.

“He said, ‘They won’t let you down?’

“I said,’No.’

“So he and the monsignor and Tony Spina, we went to the door, and Joe talked to the cop there. ‘Let this guy down there,’ he said.

“So I went down there, the monsignor with his hand on one of my shoulders and Tony Spina put his hand on my other shoulder. And here they had all these kids laid out on the floor.

“This is the part you don’t sleep nights over. I said, The kid’s gotta be here.’

“And then some young lady, very compassionate, she says they have a few bodies in a little side room over there who came in first.

“And there was the guy.

“So I told the monsignor, I said, ‘Don’t worry, Eddie.’ I used to call him Eddie. He bowled with me. We belonged to the same Knights of Columbus council, and he was chaplain of our Fourth Degree club. I said, ‘Don’t worry, Eddie, I’ll be all right.’

“There was the kid there, in a position just the way he used to sleep with his hands behind his head. There was nothing I could do there anymore. This young lady gave me the things out of his pockets, but … after that I went home. My wife and daughter were waiting for me. They had already known because they were publishing the names on TV.”

Trotta was close to tears. “You never forget,” he said. “There isn’t a day you forget. This thing stays with you, weighs heavily on you. I know the wife feels the same way. We go to the cemetery once, twice a week. I stop every time I go by Queen of Heaven. The big monument they have there for all the kids that died, that was erected by Monsignor Joe Cussen.

“Cussen was a helluva guy. It was just that this thing, frankly, broke him. He had a good bunch of priests there then. The parish house was the kind of place a guy could go and feel welcome. It wasn’t like that in some parishes where it’s easier to see the pope than it is to see the pastor.

“In those days it was a jumping, thriving parish. You used to walk down the street going to church, and you’d be ‘hello-ing’ everybody. But after the fire the neighborhood changed.

“I was friendly with most of the nuns there—used to do errands for them, drive them to the cemeteries, things like that. In fact, the Wednesday before the fire, Sister Mary Canice Lyng asked me if I would drive her out to Mt. Carmel Cemetery to visit her parents’ graves. I did, and then the following Monday she was dead herself. The nuns used me as their chauffeur a lot. I was their ‘Uncle John.’

“When John David died he was thirteen, had just been thirteen about ten days, and he was bragging about having finally become a teenager. He was not naive, but he thought the best of everybody. His sister, Judy, was almost four years older. They worshiped each other. We were an affectionate family.”

For months after the fire, John Trotta was in an emotional turmoil. He expressed his bitterness openly, and his feelings were known in the parish.

“For six or seven months after,” he admitted, “my wife and daughter didn’t know what was going to happen to me. One time we went to an anniversary party of a good friend. I won’t mention his name, but he lost his only daughter in the fire. He says to me, ‘John, we belong to an exclusive club. We’re drinking, having fun, but inside, I’m dying.’”

John Trotta knew exactly what his friend meant.

Some miles south of the Trotta home, John David is buried in the family plot at Queen of Heaven Cemetery. A grey marble monument marks the grave site. It is offset by two angels kneeling in prayer and carries the inscription: “May the angels lead us into paradise.”

The marker reads: “Trotta … Son, John David. Nov. 21, 1945—Dec. 1, 1958.”

IT WOULD BE impossible for a nonsurvivor to know what horrors were imbedded in the minds of children who lived through the Our Lady of the Angels fire. From their experiences they gained an appreciation for life known to few others. It is a lesson they feel compelled to share.

One spring day in 1994, Matt Plovanich talked about that earlier day. He was in his twenty-fifth year with the Chicago Police Department, a detective newly reassigned to the narcotics division after working many years in the organized crime unit.

Plovanich has a sly sense of humor and likes to tell jokes. But beneath the veneer he is deep thinking, contemplative, a bit of a philosopher. His voice is raspy and he speaks in short, clipped sentences. Following in his father’s footsteps, he joined the Chicago Police Department in March 1969. One of his brothers is also a cop.

Together with their five children—three girls and two boys—Plovanich and wife live in a spacious, older brick bungalow located in a comfortable, tree-lined neighborhood on Chicago’s far Northwest Side. The neighborhood resembles the suburbs that border it more than the city in which it sits. It is clean, quiet, and airy—an enclave that is home to many white Chicago police officers and firefighters who, as a condition of their employment, must reside within the city limits.

Despite several brushes with danger as a Chicago police officer, nothing Plovanich has seen matches the peril he experienced as a ten-year-old boy trapped inside Room 207. He could recall precisely the look of utter terror that swept his nun’s face when she realized that the occupants of the Cheese Box were trapped inside their tiny corner classroom.

“It really was a panic situation,” he said. “We had our backs to the wall. There was no way out. In those days the nuns were always in perfect, rigid control. But when we saw the look on her face after she realized the back door was locked, we knew the Rosary was basically the last rites.

“The nun led us in the Rosary. She said, ‘Okay, let’s get on our knees. We’re going to say the Rosary.’

“And I remember everybody fighting for the good air pocket on the bottom of the floor, huddled in the corner by the back door. We laid as flat as we could with our noses to the floor. The smoke was that thick. And I remember girls panicking and scratching and screaming and clawing.

“I think I reverted into a defense mode, where the horror gets so bad that the body short-circuits so the whole system doesn’t explode. It shuts part of your terror mechanism down and you don’t get so frightened anymore.

“The initial thrust is to save yourself, just to get out no matter what cost. And then, when you realize that getting out means jumping from a fairly high window and you’re too afraid to do it, you pretty much accept the fact that you’re gonna die and this is it. I think what happens is the mind will only let a human being go through so much terror and then it just kind of shuts it out and you get into a different state and you’re able to accept it a lot better. I found that happened in some of my other incidents on the police force—getting stabbed or having a parachute malfunction on my first jump.

“I just remember thinking of the irony of this whole thing—of going to school and dying. You’re supposed to learn in school. You’re supposed to be nurtured in school, and school’s supposed to be a positive experience, and here I thought, ‘This is unbelievable.’ I thought, ‘All of us, we’re all going to die here.’ It’s just incredible, you know?

“When Mr. Raymond and Father Hund finally got the back door open, they had to start pulling at us because some of the kids were just frozen. We were basically on our last breaths. There wasn’t much left. They actually had to go in and pull them to get them to move. Some of the kids were completely panic-stricken. It was that close.

“For many years I asked myself why I didn’t struggle more. Why I didn’t jump. Why I didn’t take more aggressive action. And like I say, I think you just struggle to a certain point and then you just give in to it. It was really like that.

“You think this is pretty hairy but you find this isn’t going to be so bad after all. It’s a very euphoric feeling. And that’s how I reacted to it. I was lying on that floor, in all that smoke, starting to drift off, and all the while I’m thinking, ‘It’s terribly sad and terribly unbelievable, but we are all gonna die here.’

“My grade—the fifth grade—was hit pretty hard. There were a lot of fifth-graders killed. It was almost a death sentence if you were assigned to those rooms that faced the alley.”

A comprehensive review of the school fire shows that the death toll would have been much higher had it not been for the quick action of school personnel and neighbors who rushed into the burning building to help save students before the Fire Department arrived. Matt Plovanich is keenly aware of this. He pondered how his family was spared: “There were two families that lost two kids. I mean, how can you figure—we had three kids in there and we lost nobody? And these families lost both children? That’s tough. That’s really tough.

“After the fire,” he continued, “there was a period of protection on the part of my parents. Not overprotection, but protection because they were concerned about us all the time. But the main feeling we had was shared grief for all the families that did lose people. Constantly. Especially those two families that lost two kids. Look at what those poor people went through and look at how God looked favorably upon us. He spared us.

“I’ve never had flashbacks, but I’m always aware of where exits are. I always have my bearings. Whenever I walk into a new building, I find out where the exits are, mentally planning an escape route, only because, again, when you’re in a fire that develops that quickly, you realize once it starts you better have a place to run, a direction, a plan of escape.”

Plovanich related how, years later, as a parent, he chose not to send his children to a particular Catholic school because it reminded him too much of the old Our Lady of the Angels School. “We were right on the border of two parishes,” he explained, “so I had the option of sending them to one or the other. I walked through the one school and it resembled Our Lady of the Angels so much that I decided to send them to the other one.

“The interior looked like our hallways. Highly varnished woodwork. Wooden desks. The windows were all the same. The pastor to this day is mad at me for making the decision to send my kids to the other school. I told him, ‘Father, please, you gotta realize what I went through. This is a real gut-emotional thing, but the plan reminds me too much of Our Lady of the Angels. I just can’t send my kids here.’”

Plovanich thought for a moment, then continued. “Death is truly around the corner for us,” he said. “We really don’t realize how close it is in many cases. The fire just made me appreciate life because I feel that every one of those kids who survived is living on borrowed time. When you look at it, we all should’ve perished. I remember going to one of our reunions, and this guy who was in the Cheese Box with me looked at me and said, ‘Looking back, we should not be here right now.’

“It’s kind of inspirational. You think maybe God left you down here for a reason and we shouldn’t squander our time down here. We should live a good life and be positive because we are blessed by Him. He did me a big favor.”

OGNIBENE in Italian means “every goodness,” and if there was one person in Our Lady of the Angels parish at the time of the fire who was considered to have an abundance of good qualities, it was Father Joseph Ognibene.

Ognibene is an unpretentious man who imparts a sense of inner strength. He speaks in a soft monotone, and his once-black hair is now grey. Dressed in a blue sweater and black slacks, he talked in an office inside the rectory of Our Lady Mother of the Church on Chicago’s far Northwest Side, where he was pastor. There was still a lean, athletic appearance about him, a carryover from his seminary days when his talents as a ballplayer were highly regarded.

Ognibene had strong emotional ties to many people in Our Lady of the Angels parish, and they to him. The children were especially fond of him. So it was only natural that despite the passage of years—thirty-two of them at the time he was interviewed—he still found it painful to resurrect his memories of the school fire.

“For a long time,” he said, “I wanted to black it out, to get it out of my mind, to purge it from my life. Other reporters called me, and I always said no because there was so much written that wasn’t true.

“My faith was shaken, I’ll be very honest. A lot of times I asked myself, ‘Why? Why?’ I couldn’t say why. I had no answers.

“The fire brought big changes in my life. Until then I was a little boy. I grew up a lot. I think it helped me. In those days we were ordained at age twenty-six, but we were still like little boys. In our seminary life we had no TV, no newspapers, no radio. We came home for just a week or two. We didn’t associate with anyone else. There were no women in our lives. I was thirty-two at the time of the fire.

“I was active in athletics and I knew so many of the kids. I was able to cope with it right away, but I had a hard time whenever I heard things that weren’t true. I carried an awful lot of anger inside me. I wouldn’t express it, and that wasn’t good. I would’ve been a lot better off if I’d let it out.

“What I’m talking about now comes after an awful lot of reflection, things I was finally able to determine for myself, like ‘Why was I always so damn angry?’”

After the fire, priests and nuns from the parish were asked if they wished to remain at Our Lady of the Angels or be transferred to other assignments. Father Ognibene chose to stay, remaining there until 1961.

“In a way,” he said, “I thought the fire made us closer as a parish, but at the same time there were a lot people who were very angry. Many people moved out. They disappeared.

“In those days, in that neighborhood, the kids respected the church. We had a good rapport with the kids. They didn’t shy away from us. They respected us. We were very active with them. They never defaced the church, never threw eggs at it. It was beautiful. It was probably the closest-knit parish I have ever been to in my entire life. Everybody knew everybody else. They helped each other.”

Ognibene paused for a moment, looking pensively at his clasped hands. He continued: “There was a lot of suffering, personal hurt, but there was a lot of kindness and compassion too. I saw people who were having trouble in their marriages brought back together. And families too. So there was still good that came of it. Through death there is resurrection. We saw the worst and we saw the best.

“In the aftermath there was a lot of criticism about the dirty school, the papers at the bottom of the stairwell. It was an old building, but it was a clean building. It was kept up pretty well.

“I got letters galore from all over the world. Some people thought I was the pastor because evidently my name was used in a lot of the syndicated news articles. I opened only one. They called me every name in the book. They said I was probably over in the rectory having ‘tea and crumpets’ and wasn’t concerned with what was going on over in the school. So I decided to just forget it, not to open any more. I can’t remember if I burned them or threw them away or what.

“We had police protection. There were police in the house all day and all night long.

“I remember there was a fellow out to kill me. On the day of the fire he ran up to me outside the school, during all the commotion when I was running back and forth, in and out of the school. He grabbed me and asked me about his son. I said, ‘He’ll be fine. It’s okay. Don’t worry.’

“Well, the kid died in the fire. As a result, he used that against me. If I would have told him things were bad, he could’ve gone in the school and saved his son. But because I told him things were fine, he felt he was going to get me for that. We were very close too. His son was going to become a priest because of ‘Father Joe.’ That’s all he ever talked about.”

Once, while vacationing in California, Father Ognibene dropped in at a local church rectory to go to confession. “The old monsignor came to the door,” he said, “and I told him where I was from. I told him Chicago. He asked where, and I said, ‘Our Lady of the Angels.’

“The minute I mentioned that, he said, ‘So you’re the sons of bitches that caused us all these problems. You’re the guys who caused us to have to put out all this money.’

“I guess they had to put sprinkler systems in their schools. So I just said, ‘Forget it,’ and turned around and said, ‘See ya later.’”

Of all the priests and church officials interviewed by the authors, Ognibene was the only one who did not dance around questions about the cause of the fire. He knew the Cicero youth who confessed to starting the blaze and was familiar with the youngster’s troubled background. In 1962, when the closed Family Court hearings were held before Judge Cilella, Ognibene was one of those called to testify as a character witness.

“It was an unfortunate accident,” Ognibene sighed. “A sick kid playing with matches. I’m sure he had no idea what he was doing would result in what happened. I don’t think it was our fault or anybody’s fault. I think people under the circumstances did the best they could.

“There were stories saying, ‘If Sister So-and-So would’ve done this, this wouldn’t have happened.’ That’s a bunch of baloney. All that possibly could’ve been done was done.

“Those nuns were just beautiful people. They loved the children. I crawled through that corridor myself—you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I’m sure I would’ve done the same thing. There was no way you could’ve got through that dense, black smoke. Where would you go? I’m sure they were thinking, ‘Let’s stay here and hopefully we’ll get out the windows. Eventually the Fire Department will come and put out the fire and it will clear up.’

“It was something that happened and it’s nobody’s fault. Why God allowed it to happen, I have no idea. I saw good come out of it and I saw bad come out of it.”

SISTER MARY DAVIDIS DEVINE, the venerable teacher of Room 209, never second-guessed the actions she took when smoke began to curl through the cracks around her classroom’s two wooden doors. Of the five larger classrooms on the second floor of the north wing, hers suffered least. Only two fatalities occurred. Still, the numbers gave her little consolation, even though the death toll surely would have been much higher had it not been for her quick thinking and cool head.

In 1995 Sister Davidis was still living, at age eighty-nine, in retirement at the BVM motherhouse in Dubuque, Iowa. Her recollections of the fire, however, came during a 1976 interview, eighteen years after the event. At the time she was seventy years old. She no longer wore a black habit, preferring more conventional clothing.

“If you knew as much on Monday as you know on Tuesday,” she remarked, “we’d all be geniuses. Commissioner Quinn told me, ‘If you didn’t block up the cracks around the doors, you wouldn’t have made it out.’”

Sister Davidis remembered how classrooms in the school were extremely crowded that year. “They had put extra rows of desks in Sister Helaine’s room and in my room,” she said. “My desk was in the corner at the west end. When the pastor would come in to hand out report cards, I had to get up and go down an aisle to meet him because there was just enough room for one person to get by. It was that congested.”

After the fire, Sister Davidis did not return to Our Lady of the Angels. “I prayed that I wouldn’t have to go back there,” she admitted. “Too many memories.

“I try not to think of the fire too much. If I did, it would affect my outlook on the future. But I do remember the children who died. I remember them each morning at Mass, every day.”

IN THE FALL of 1976, when Sister Mary Andrienne Carolan was asked to recall her memories of the fire, she arranged for an interview at Immaculata BVM convent, located on the North Side of Chicago near Lake Michigan. She had turned fifty-three and was taking a brief vacation between assignments that had placed her in various teaching and counseling assignments since 1958.

Like Sister Davidis, she had long given up wearing the religious garb of the BVM nuns in favor of civilian dress, and she no longer used the name of Andrienne. “I’m known as Sister Mary Carolan,” she said.

Unlike Sister Davidis, however, Sister Carolan had difficulty holding back her emotions as she recalled the day that affected the lives of so many people. She wept as she talked about her former roommate, Sister Mary Clare Therese Champagne, the young nun who died alongside her students in Room 212, and she could not restrain her tears as she described the frightened children at the windows overlooking the street who called to her for rescue.

Her memory of the thick smoke that flowed into the south wing was still keen. “When the smoke came over to our side of the school,” she said, “it went ‘shish-shish-shish.’ You could smell the tar paper. It was the kind of smoke that took your breath away completely.

“In the south wing of the school we had handicapped children. They were in leg braces. You think you have all this strength, and you do things under stress that affect you later in life. I ruined my back that day trying to carry those kids. Father Ognibene was helping us. God bless Joe. He was fantastic.

“I’ve had three surgical operations on my back. Nothing has helped. But that’s beside the point. The children were saved. If I had lost one child in that wing of the school, I’d never have forgiven myself.”

Sister Carolan recalled how she returned to her room after leading most of her students safely outside the school, and how several of the children had desperately pinched her legs in order to keep in contact with her in the blinding smoke as they crawled into the hallway and groped for the stairs.

“Later,” she said, “a doctor looked at the bruises on my legs. ‘What are those?’ he asked.

“I said, ‘Never mind. Those are my scars of victory.’”

Sister Carolan spoke of the prolonged emotional effect of the tragedy on the BVM community. “It was years before any of us who were in it could talk about it,” she said. “I still can’t look at fire, even if it’s only on television.”

Toward the end of her conversation, the nun began recalling the names of children who died or were injured. She remembered Bill Edington, the eighth-grader who fought so gallantly to live, only to succumb eight months after the fire.

“Oh my Billy,” she sighed. “He was burned over 80 percent of his body. When I went to see him in the hospital, he said, ‘Look, Sister, I can still be a priest. My hands aren’t burned.’

“His two hands, from the wrists down, weren’t touched. He wanted to go to Quigly Seminary after he graduated. But it wasn’t to be.”

JOHN RAYMOND was still racked by appalling memories of jumping out of his classroom window and landing on the hard pavement, of looking back up to see other burning children falling to the ground and bouncing off the hard surface of the alley. He has worked hard to distance himself from these memories.

But he also saw his father, James, the school’s janitor, destroyed, beaten down by allegations that his negligence contributed to the disaster. John Raymond always believed those accusations were unfounded, and he remained disturbed by his father’s lack of vindication.

“It’s all hearsay,” he said. “I don’t want my children to read some day that their grandfather started the Our Lady of the Angels School fire.

“I understood my father’s grief,” he continued. “I remember him crying at Christmas for all the children who died. And then later they were making accusations and saying, ‘Maybe it was your fault.’ And he was having a tough time understanding that.

“My father didn’t have any help except for an old-timer who used to come around and give him a hand. He would give him a broom and a buck. Today if you had a school that size, there would be four guys working there. But he was working alone. He had to do everything, and you couldn’t do it well. It was impossible. But that’s how they cut corners in those days.”

It wasn’t until later that John Raymond learned his father had been made into a scapegoat. “When I was seventeen,” Raymond recalled, “I finally realized my father had been taking a lot of shit from people. I heard more and more about this. And soon after, some man on the street said to me, ‘I know you. You’re the kid who’s dad started that fire and killed all those kids.’

“That was the final straw. I went nuts and ran after the guy and started beating him right there on the corner. My friends had to pull me off. There’s a ton of people out there who probably think the janitor did it. I shock people when I tell them, ‘My father was the janitor. He didn’t do it.’”

Raymond admitted he was still angry over the lack of psychological counseling made available to the children. “The archdiocese failed miserably,” he said. “The church fell on its face in that respect. They did us an injustice. To this day I feel that way. They never came by. Nobody ever came up to me to ask, ‘Hey, how are you doing? How do you feel?’

“All they did was send you a letter telling you to come downtown and pick up some money. Money is not the answer. [Raymond’s family received $500 compensation for his injuries.] People were appalled at those first families that sued the church. People were saying, ‘They should be happy. Their children are alive.’

“Yeah, they’re alive, but they’re burnt, and the burns aren’t the worst of it. It’s what’s in their heads that bothers them more than anything. But those families who sued were looked upon as traitors.

“On one occasion, after we went back to school, the nun whom my father brought out of the fire was teaching us religion class, and all of a sudden she just put her head down on the desk and started sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. Finally one of the girls went across the hall and got someone and they took her away and we never saw her again.

“A lot of the kids she had taught died in the fire. The nuns never forgot you. They cared about you. They went through pure hell over this. I don’t think a lot of people realize this.

“How the hell are we going to forget this? We’re not. Never. Everyone who lived in that neighborhood clings to this.”

After the fire, Raymond recalled, “people were going out of their way telling me how special I was, how brave I was. All I knew is when I looked across the street, Wayne Wisz wasn’t there anymore. Peggy Sansonetti down the street wasn’t there anymore. Larry Dunn wasn’t meeting me to go to school anymore. He lived over on Grand Avenue, and he’d walk over to Hamlin and stop by or I’d wait for him. But he wasn’t coming by anymore. All these guys, these buddies of mine, were all dead.

“Annette LaMantia, the most beautiful, intelligent girl in the school, she was gone.

“I remember my mom, who graduated from that same school years earlier, saying how the school was meant to be torn down after such an enormous tragedy, that from Day One, God knew when they built it that it would be torn down under such tragic circumstances.

“Even with the new school, you go around there and you can tell it’s a sacred place. You can feel something when you drive by there. It’s a part of history. It belongs. It has to live. They should never close it. Everybody feels that way about their parish, but this is too special.

“Sometimes you have nightmares when you hear fire stories on the news—apartment fires or house fires where people are trapped and they die and the firemen find them huddled in corners or in closets. You know the horror these people went through. Your own experience comes right back.

“I think the fire has kept me glued to the past. My friends tell me they can’t believe how I can remember things with such detail. They’re all successful. They think of the future. I always think back to what could have, should have, might have …

“Whenever I see an old red-brick school I think about it. And there are a lot of old red-brick schools.”

THE CHICAGO Fire Department’s performance at Our Lady of the Angels School became an object of popular criticism. Yet a review of the facts shows that everything humanly possible was done by firefighters to save those who perished or were injured in the blaze. The catastrophic scene that greeted them at the school was among the worst ever encountered by any first-arriving team of firefighters in the history of the American fire service.

Among the myths associated with the fire are those which falsely attribute the high loss of life to the Fire Department for not having ladders long enough to reach the school’s high second-floor classroom windows, and for its delayed response. The first of these contentions arose immediately after the fire, following the publication of news photos which showed several ladders on the alley side of the school that fell short of window ledges. In fact, the short ladders were placed before the Fire Department’s arrival by neighbors and church personnel. All but one of these were too short. The exception was the one ladder thrown up to Room 208 by assistant janitor Mario Camerini, which enabled an estimated twenty-five pupils to reach safety.

Three ladder companies were at the burning school within seven minutes of the first alarm, and all windows on the school’s north wing were adequately laddered shortly after. Twenty-two engine companies, seven ladder companies, and ten squad companies responded to the fire.

Just one Fire Department ladder placed against the building was indeed too short. This was the twenty-four-foot extension ladder thrown up to Room 212 by the first-arriving firefighters from Engine 85. Even though this one ladder fell short of the window by about three feet, it nonetheless enabled firefighters to reach children hanging off the windowsill.

On the second point, the delay, which surely helped to seal the fate of many who died, occurred in transmitting an alarm to the Fire Department. For this the men who fought the fire can hardly be blamed. Once the alarm was finally received by the main fire alarm office, it took the first fire company only two and a half minutes to reach the scene. Additional companies were not far behind.

While it may be small consolation, the Chicago Fire Department’s record for the number of rescues effected at any single fire in the city was set at Our Lady of the Angels School. Operating under extremely hazardous conditions, firefighters managed to rescue 160 children and nuns within the first thirteen minutes of their arrival. Unofficially the number saved by the Fire Department probably lies around 200.

Today as in 1958, the primary objective in firefighting is to get water on a fire as quickly as possible. With the exceptions of diesel fire apparatus with larger pumping capacities, hydraulic aerial ladders, the introduction of self-contained breathing apparatus in the early 1960s, and better fire-retardant clothing worn by firefighters, almost forty years later little has changed in the way structure fires are fought in this country, particularly in older brick and frame buildings that lack sprinkler systems.

It might be said that entry into the school building was hampered because firefighters in 1958 were not equipped with breathing apparatus. But the smoke conditions present at Our Lady of the Angels were among the worst ever encountered by Chicago firefighters. Even if they had had breathing apparatus, they might not have gained quicker access to those trapped inside the school’s blazing classrooms. According to one fire chief who fought the school fire, breathing apparatus “would not have made any difference. That smoke was so bad, all you would’ve had was a bunch of dead firemen.”

LIKE THE SURVIVORS and their families, firefighters who fought the blaze were deeply affected by the tragedy. Most of them rarely discussed their experiences at OLA, choosing instead to follow contemporary norms by keeping their feelings inside.

Joan Hoffman, widow of Engine 85 firefighter Charles Robinson, told how the fire affected her late husband: “He used to wake up at night and head for the windows and yell, ‘Hold on. Don’t jump. Help’s on the way.’ I’d have to get up and calm him down.”

“There was no such thing as counseling for emergency workers back then,” recalled Thomas O’Donnell, who, as a young firefighter with Engine 24, was among the two hundred firemen summoned to the school. “But if there was counseling in those days, I’m sure quite a few guys would’ve sought it. I saw a lot of firemen cry, and I cried too. I was pretty much a rookie back then, but I saw a lot of hardened firemen take that fire really badly. If it didn’t shake you, you weren’t a human being.”

When he was interviewed for this book, more than three decades had passed since Lieutenant Charles Kamin raced up a ladder to rescue children from the grip of fire that consumed Room 211. But as he lay in bed at night, Kamin would still hear the screams of that December day that refused to go away. He would hear them as if the fire had occurred yesterday. And when he talked about it, his eyes welled with tears.

“I remember those kids screaming,” he recalled. “That’s what I remember the most. The screaming.”

The burns that Kamin sustained that day to his ears and arms had long since healed. But the emotional scars remained. “Those kids,” he said, “how the hell I ever picked them up I’ll never know. They must’ve weighed a hundred pounds each. I don’t know where I got the strength to pick them up like that by their belts. Under normal circumstances, I couldn’t have done that. But I guess that’s God’s way—you get that superhuman strength.

“After I went into those rooms to get the bodies out, it made it worse. If I hadn’t seen them die it would have been different. But I saw them die and that’s what sticks with you more than anything else. To see all those kids die in front of you, you can only do so much.”

Along with grief, Kamin lived with frustration. He remained angered by the confusion that led up the Fire Department’s arrival at the school—first by being given the wrong address, then by having to spend precious time knocking down the locked courtway gate.

“Maybe I could’ve got another five or six kids out of there if it wasn’t for all those damn delays,” he said. “People don’t realize how long a minute is. A minute is a hell of a long time.

“If I was there two minutes sooner, I could’ve gotten fifteen to twenty more kids out. If only we didn’t have to break that damn gate down. There are so many ifs.

“If it’s true that the nuns had to see the sister superior before they pulled the fire alarm, that’s stupidity. They should’ve pulled the alarm and got those kids out of there. I can’t see any child or any person staying in their seat. When that fire is burning your butt, you have to move. I can’t believe they were so disciplined that the nun would tell them to sit there and they would stay there.

“I just don’t know why they held them in those rooms. Even with the heavy smoke they could’ve tried to go out the door, and then within steps, they’re out and down the stairs. But in a situation like that you’re second-guessing. The nuns didn’t know. It wasn’t their fault. They were doing what they thought was right.”

Recalling the meeting in Fire Commissioner Quinn’s office the day after the fire, Kamin defended the actions of Lieutenant Wojnicki, in charge of first-arriving Engine 85. “Quinn really laid into Wojnicki,” Kamin said. “He was really abusive. Quinn called him a ‘dumb so-and-so’ and asked him why he didn’t start getting kids out.

“I felt sorry for Wojnicki. He did a helluva good job. He did exactly what he was supposed to—get water on the fire as soon as he got there. His gang got their line right into that stairwell, right at the base of the fire. As it turned out, he saved a lot of kids just by doing that.

“You do what you think is right. And Wojnicki did what he thought was right. His job was to put out fire, not rescue kids.”

Kamin said he never talked much about the fire. Only once in a while would it come up in conversation around the firehouse kitchen. He had never entertained thoughts of leaving the Fire Department. “I didn’t want to quit,” he said. “It’s just one of those things that’s part of the job. You never forget. And I never did.”

AFTER THE FIRE, Salvatore Imburgia said he seriously considered resigning from the Fire Department. “I didn’t think I could take this anymore,” he said. “I wasn’t afraid. I was never afraid of anything. That wasn’t the point. It’s just that I didn’t think I could take another disaster like this.

“But I remember talking to this German guy I used to work for on my days off. I was an upholsterer. I said, ‘Werner, I think I’m going to resign.’ He said, ‘Why?’ So I told him. And he said, ‘Think about it. I salute you and I salute the Chicago Fire Department for what you done there. If you’re thinking of quitting, I think you’re making a big mistake because we need people like you firemen. You have a job that has to be done.’

“I thought about it for the next couple of days. Finally I said, ‘Hey, what the hell. I did the best I could there. I think we all did good. We all tried.’ After that I figured this is a good job. I don’t want to leave it.

“The fact that this was my neighborhood and my parish made it worse,” he said. “These were my people. These were my buddies’ kids.

“Oscar Sarno, he used to own a pizza place on Chicago Avenue. He was a good friend of mine. He lost two kids. Another friend of mine was a barber who owned a shop on Chicago Avenue. He lost a child.

“I remember Oscar’s daughter being up there in the window. I screamed up to her to jump. She was afraid to jump. She fell back in.”

Shortly after the fire, Imburgia was temporarily detailed from Truck 36 to inspect schools as part of the plan implemented by Commissioner Quinn to station a fireman in any school building found to have fire code problems. Imburgia was posted to a West Side Ukrainian church school.

“It was right before Christmas,” he recalled, “and I was in the church. These kids were having choir practice. I remember listening to them practicing and it was so beautiful—the music and those little kids singing in the choir. And then I thought about those kids in the fire, and I just broke up. I closed my eyes, and all I could see were those other kids in the fire.”

LIEUTENANT JOHN MCCONE was one of six firefighters assigned to Squad 6, among the first-arriving still-alarm companies to reach the school. He too had grown up in Our Lady of the Angels parish and had attended the parish school as a boy.

Squad 6 was returning to its Humboldt Park firehouse from an inhalator call when it was dispatched to the fire. “You didn’t know what to do first,” McCone recalled, “whether to catch these kids when they were coming down, try to break their fall, or run up the ladder and try to pull them out. They were coming down head first. I tried to catch this one kid and he went right through my arms. I heard his skull hit the sidewalk. It was sickening. But I did manage to stop a couple. And that’s when I got my double hernia. You could break their fall a little but you couldn’t catch them.”

As he talked, McCone, who had risen to the rank of captain, was sipping coffee in the pilot house of the fireboat Joseph Medill—Engine 37—moored downtown in the Chicago River. “Emotionally,” he said, “it makes you feel like you just didn’t do enough. I had kids in school myself at the time. You sit back and say, ‘Why didn’t I do this? Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I do more?’

“I was forty years old at the time of the fire. I was familiar with the area because I went to school there. I was baptized there in the old church that became the school.

“If I was to venture an opinion, it appeared to me those kids were so well disciplined they wouldn’t get up out of their seats because somebody told ‘em not to. In my opinion the nuns could’ve gotten those kids out. But they stayed there until they were told to move, and by that time it was too late.”

After the fire, McCone was emotionally distraught. He was transferred to Fire Department headquarters, where he took a desk job handling special assignments for the mayor’s office. He was later assigned to the fireboat. Although he rarely discussed the fire, even with members of his own family, his friends in the department said it had a lasting effect on him. “We did as much as humanly possible,” he said. “But it was too late. About four minutes too late.”

AFTER LEAVING the Chicago American, Hal Bruno went on to a highly successful career in journalism. He wrote for Newsweek magazine and eventually became director of political coverage for ABC News, working out of the network’s Washington, D.C., bureau.

In the weeks following the fire, Bruno was involved in covering the investigation into its cause. The American campaigned for the immediate installation of sprinkler systems and enclosure of stairways in city schools. Before Our Lady of the Angels, the paper had run a similar campaign following a series of fatal flophouse fires in Chicago.

“We ran head on into the powers of the church and education lobby, who didn’t want to spend the money,” Bruno recalled. “It’s ironic and infuriating that we could force the city council to protect the bums on skid row, to change the law requiring sprinkler systems in those buildings, but not the children in the schools.”

What sticks in his mind more than anything, though, are the anguished faces of parents he saw standing outside the school. About ten years after the fire, Bruno recalled waking up in a cold sweat. He had been dreaming about a woman he saw outside the school. “I saw her for a fleeting second while I was running for the ladder truck,” he said. “She was outside looking for her child. I was puzzled as to why I was dreaming about her so many years later.

“By then I was married and had children of my own. So I got up and went into their bedroom to check on them. Then I realized why it had all come back to me that night. My oldest son had just turned eight, and that was the age of the children—eight to ten mostly—who lost their lives at Our Lady of the Angels.

“It’s interesting the way things stick in your mind, the psychological impact of what you are seeing without knowing it. Today they have counseling for emergency service people, which we didn’t have in those days. Everybody was supposed to be a macho tough guy. The truth is that us ‘macho tough guys’ were bothered by what we saw and what we had to do at times.”

STEVE LASKER was no stranger to horror stories. He carried his camera to thousands of them, including plane crashes and streetcar and automobile accidents in which people were burned and dismembered. All those incidents bothered him, but none so much as what he saw through his camera lens on December I, 1958.

Lasker shot eighty-four photographs for the Chicago American at Our Lady of the Angels, the most notable being that of firefighter Richard Scheidt carrying the Jajkowski boy from a side door of the school. More than thirty years later Lasker talked about the fire while a police radio squawked in the background in his home. He was still working in the news business as a camera operator for WBBM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Chicago.

“When I first got there, I figured some of the kids had panicked and didn’t know what to do, that there were a few unfortunate ones. And then they kept a count. I remember somebody kept yelling how many children had been brought out, and the number kept going up. It started at ten or twelve and then nineteen, twenty-eight. It kept going. We thought, ‘My God. How many are in there?’ And you could hear it in the voices of these firemen. There’s dozens up there.’ We didn’t know yet how many rooms had been affected.”

Lasker stayed at the school until seven o’clock that evening, then went to the morgue and hospitals. Later that night he and other photographers returned to the neighborhood around the school to collect photographs of the students who had died.

“We’d go to the homes and ask folks for a picture of their son or daughter or whoever it was that had perished. We explained that the newspaper was going to run a memorial the next day on the front page. Some of the people wouldn’t hear of it. Others were glad to do it, but they were crying, hysterical. I was crying. I felt terrible. It was for a good cause. Now does that make it right? I don’t know.”

Lasker never met with the Jajkowski parents, but he did talk with Richard Scheidt. “I didn’t know who the fireman was,” Lasker said. “I knew his brother, Peter Scheidt. I used to hang out at Engine 45. But I didn’t know at the time this fireman in the photo was Peter’s brother.”

A few days after the fire, Lasker went into Richard Scheidt’s firehouse in the Loop. “We had gone down to meet him,” he recalled. “Everybody put their arms around me and said, ‘Good job’ and all that. But I didn’t want to talk about it. I was still sick in my brain, not only my stomach.

“Scheidt’s reaction was he didn’t like publicity. None of the guys liked publicity, except some of the chiefs, the old-timers. The firemen aren’t in it for that. They just do their job. This is what they’re paid to do. And when it involves children, it hits them hard, as it did me. I just had a little girl in April. So I was looking at it as a parent.

“When I met him, it was not a warm greeting but it wasn’t cold either. We were there meeting each other because of a disaster, and I felt it and he felt it. And I said, ‘I’m very sorry that it had to be like this.’ He said, ‘Well, I tried to do the best I could. There was nothing we could do to bring these kids back.’”

RICHARD SCHEIDT himself could never put into words what it was like to enter the fire-scarred rooms inside Our Lady of the Angels School. “It was beyond most people’s imaginations,” he recalled. “When we got there almost a half-hour after the first alarm, there was still a lot of fire. The smoke was still in the air. When a fire takes off and it’s burning and it’s got plenty of oxygen and it’s allowed to burn for a while, it turns into a monster, and this thing was a monster. That’s exactly what it was.”

Scheidt recounted his experience at Our Lady of the Angels School while sitting in the kitchen of his home in a suburb southwest of Chicago. He was in his early sixties and had a calm, quiet sincerity about him.

“I remember being on the second floor and looking down at the crowd and seeing the parents looking for their kids,” he said. “The silence of the crowds is what really struck me. At most fires there’s so much noise—equipment working, men working. But not at this fire. This fire was silent. It was the silence—that’s what I remember the most. You just couldn’t believe what had happened. Everybody was stunned.

“We went up to the second floor with hose lines, trying to make that hallway. Engine companies were stopped right at the landing with their two-and-a-half-inch lines. They were trying to push back the fire. So that’s where we started breaching the walls, right there on the landing. We couldn’t get through the hallway so we went through the walls. I never made an effort to get into a building like I did there. We knew they were inside, beyond those walls. We gave it all we had.

“We didn’t have masks in those days. We stayed up there in that smoke and that heat and we breached those walls. When we got inside, in those first two rooms on the north side, that’s where we found a lot of kids, lying along the floor below the windows.

“They were all dead. In that first room they were piled up on the dais around the nun’s desk. And as we removed the bodies from the pile, we noticed the children were not burned. They were asphyxiated. In the next room they were burned very badly.”

Scheidt paused for a moment before continuing, his eyes filling with tears.

“The effort, the expenditure of energy to take down that wall was tremendous,” he said, “and then to have this hit you in the face, ‘Hey, we’re too late. We’re absolutely too goddamn late.’ It was tough.

“I had three brothers who preceded me on the fire department,” Scheidt said. “I’d seen death a lot on the job, but not on the scale of this thing. This was something that I don’t think any of us who were there were prepared for. I don’t think you can ever explain how you feel after something like that. It was the worst fire I have ever been to, and I’ve been to some goddamn bad ones. But nothing like that one. Never in my wildest dreams …”