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School fire still burns

'58 scene haunting; 95 killed

By ASSOCIATED PRESS | Monday, December 1, 2008

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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.