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To this very
day, whenever I hear a fire bell or alarm ring when I'm in a
building, I feel my heart skip a beat or two. When that
happens, I'm instantly taken aback, remembering Sister Grace Louise,
the principal of my grade school, St Anthony's School in Hawthorne,
NJ, screaming at us:
"Get out, get out, get out when you hear that bell;
we're not going to die in here like those 90 kids and three sisters
who died in that Chicago school!"
I never really knew the
story of this fire until I read a book in 1999 called "To Sleep With
Angels" which explains how the fire started in a
Chicago Catholic school's stairwell and quickly spread throughout
the building. Ninety students and three sisters died in their
classrooms when they could not escape the flames. Since that
fire, many fire protection technologies and policies, such as
sprinkler systems and connections to central alarm systems, were put
into the schools across the country.
That thought of being
burned alive in a building haunted me whenever I heard a firebell,
even years later when I was at an Air Force school and the firebell
went off or when I worked in the private sector at a company that
practiced fire drills.
In 1999, I
made peace with Sister's scream about the dead children and sisters
when I visited Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois,
outside Chicago, not far from where Howlin'
Wolf is buried, and
stopped for a while at the Our Lady of the Angels School Fire
Memorial.
If you're like me, as you
walk from the road towards the statue, you're struck like a stone in
your tracks as you realize each of those flat tomb stones is one of
the children killed in the fire. You can see at least four, if
not six rows of them, in this picture.
As you approach the statue
of Our Lady of the Angels, you read the inscription on the
bottom: "In Devout Memory of the Victims of the Fire, December
1, 1958, at Our Lady of Our Lady of the Angels School"
If you move off to the
side, the enormity of the loss of life becomes vividly
apparent to you--the two granite tablets list each child and
nun who died that fateful December day.
I felt like a huge chapter
in my life closed that day at this site--now I understood why Sister
screamed on the P.A. system at the start of the fire drills, "Get
out, get out!"
* * * * *
For more info, please visit
these fine web sites:
Find-A-Grave page on OLA fire
victims' memorial
OLA Fire Summary Story
Another
story documenting the OLA fire's impact on school
safety
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