School fire still burns

CHICAGO

Seven-year-old Dan Taglia heard the fire alarm bell from his classroom on Dec. 1, 1958, but hoped it was a signal that students were getting ice cream. It was too late in the day for a fire drill, and anyway the nuns wouldn’t send the children out coatless on such a cold day.

“But what does a third-grader know?” recalled Mr. Taglia, now of Katy, Texas.

On the first floor at Our Lady of the Angels School, where Mary Ellen Hobik was taking an English test, the nun in charge of her fourth-grade class dismissed the alarm as a mistake.

“I was glad, because I knew I was doing well on the test,” said the current Mary Ellen Reeves, now an elementary school principal in Addison, Ill.

But the alarm was real, and fire and toxic smoke engulfed the elementary and middle school on Chicago’s West Side with terrifying swiftness.

Three nuns and 92 students died. Some burned to death. Others died of smoke inhalation or were trampled. Still others died when they jumped or were pushed or thrown from windows.

The disaster threw the city into mourning and brought messages of condolence from around the world, including from Pope John XXIII and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

It brought about an almost immediate reform of school building and safety codes in Chicago and across the nation.

And it left deep physical and emotional scars that remain 50 years later.

By the time the alarm rang, heat already was shattering the glass transoms over classroom doors, letting in a deadly mixture of smoke and gas. The fire had invaded the attic space above the second-floor rooms, dropping burning ceiling tiles onto the students below.

Smoke and superheated air made the second-floor hallways impassable and for many the only escape was through the windows - 25 feet above the paved school yard. Horrified neighbors came running with ladders, but they were too short.

In Room 209, 13-year-old Gerry Andreoli followed the orders of Sister Mary Davidis Devine to stuff textbooks into the cracks around the door, but the air soon became unbreathable. He climbed to a windowsill and jumped to the top rung of a ladder two feet below. The skin had burned off his hands, so he skidded down the ladder on his back, catching the rungs with his heels.

“I don’t know now how I did it,” said Mr. Andreoli, now a chiropractor in Bloomingdale, Ill.

Across the hall in Room 210, Irene Mordarski couldn’t reach the ladder. An explosive blast of air knocked her off the windowsill, and the 13-year-old fell to the pavement, shattering her pelvis.

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