One of My Weird Fixations

Most people who know me well, know that I have an odd range of interests. Stephen King, in a foreword to one of his books, explained it pretty well--it's like everyone has a series of filters in their heads, which all your thoughts and all outside input has to go through. Some ideas pass through the filters and other ideas get caught in them. And what catches in my filter, might pass right through yours, and vice-versa.

When I was much younger, I was a nearly-obsessive keeper of pop music statistics. Every New Years' Eve, I would hunker down in my bedroom with a transistor radio and a portable cassette recorder--this was before boom boxes--and listen to the entire "Big 89 Countdown" on WLS Radio. I would painstakingly write out the list, song by song, as they were played, and I would record the ones I liked, sitting in motionless silence so the tape recorder wouldn't pick up any unwanted noise. At the end of the song I would play DJ, reading off the title and the artist with a sense of deep gravity. I dreamed of a career in radio.

During the other fifty-one weeks of the year, I was no less obsessive. I would pick up the WLS weekly countdown sheet, with the top 45 singles and the top 33 albums, every time I went near a record store, and follow my favorite songs' progress up and down the charts. But even that wasn't enough; though I couldn't afford the $100 for a subscription to Billboard, but I had the next best thing; each Sunday, the Chicago Tribune printed the Billboard Top 10 in their "Arts and Fun/Books" section. I would snip the Top-10 chart out (I left the Country and the Adult Contemporary charts alone--who wanted THOSE?) and add it to my collection.

It was on one of these Sunday-afternoon chart-snipping expeditions that I first encountered the story of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels school. I was about twelve years old, and on the same page as that week's charts, there was a review of a book called The Fire That Will Not Die, by Michele McBride, who had survived the fire. I read the review, and somehow the story really hit me hard; maybe because I was twelve years old myself, it caught my interest, and so I mentioned it to my parents, who told me the story.

The story of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels is one of those tragic stories which every big city seems to have. Back in 1958, before fire drills were mandatory for schools, and during a time when Catholic schools were mostly filled beyond capacity, a fire broke out in the school basement on a Monday afternoon, about forty-five minutes before dismissal. There was a rule that only the principal could pull the fire alarm, and so was some delay before the Fire Department got there; rather than risk an unauthorized evacuation, the nuns who were teaching the classes told their students to stay in their seats and pray until the firemen came to rescue them. It was the 1950's; children obeyed their teachers, especially Catholic children, especially when the teachers were nuns; in the end, 92 children and three nuns died as a result of the fire.

I was horrified, when I heard the story; I was an obedient child, for the most part, and I couldn't imagine how hard it must have been to stay there. I always wanted to read "The Fire That Would Not Die", but that was awfully harsh reading for someone so young, and so my parents never bought it for me. I tucked the story away in my subconscious, and there it sat for another thirteen years.

Unlike my parents and the rest of their generation, I was fairly uninformed about the Catholic geography system of Chicago--in my parents' day, you were not identified by what neighborhood you came from--Beverly, Marquette Park, Logan Square--but by what parish you lived within--St. Barnabas, St. Rita, and so on. My parents and grandparents could tell you where ANYTHING was, as long as they knew the parish name. I, however, had grown up without that system of landmarks, and so I had no idea, really, where Our Lady of the Angels was located...

...until a late-winter afternoon in early 1995. JP had heard from someone that there was a really incredible heroin spot at Chicago and Lawndale, and so we drove over that way. As usual, we circled the block a couple of times. We pulled around the corner, and on a wall of sky-blue tile, I read the words: Our Lady of the Angels. "Oh my God," I said. JP, of course, had never heard the story; he was the first of several people to whom I'd tell it. It felt strange, to me, circling around the block where so many innocent lives had ended; it felt a little profane, even, to be buying heroin within sight of the building itself. (It wasn't the actual school building as it had stood in 1958; that building had been torn down and rebuilt.) But of course, we continued to do what we were there for; it was just another way the past and the present were dovetailed together.

A few months after JP died, when I was still living at my mom's house and had about four or five months sober, I found that someone had finally made an effort to tell the whole story of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels. A book--"To Sleep With the Angels"--was a definitive account of the disaster. It was written by a former fireman, and filled with recollections from people who were actually there, who had survived, or who had lost family members or friends.

Needless to say, I bought the book. Bought, and devoured, and analyzed, and in some cases memorized. My collection of "disaster" books expanded from that point onward, but OLA, as it was called by its students, was always the first story, as far as I was concerned.

December 1st was the 50th anniversary of that fire. In some ways, fifty years seems like an impossibly long time ago; then I consider: The children who were involved in that fire were between 8 and 14 years old. This would make them between 58 and 64 years old now; the survivors, the friends and siblings of the ones who died--even the parents of some of the younger children could conceivably still be alive. Suddenly fifty years isn't that long ago.

We had our yearly fire drill at work this week. As hundreds of people filed out of the building, I heard one of my co-workers say to another "Hey, did you know last week was the 50th anniversary of that fire?" The person to whom he was speaking had no idea what he was talking about, so between the two of us we went on to explain: this is why we have fire drills, fire stairs, panic hardware on the doors. Most of the things we take for granted about fire safety came in part from that fire. There are children in schools in California and New York who have no idea why they have fire drills; fifty-one years ago they wouldn't have had anything to wonder about, because there were no laws mandating such things. (My colleague was unimpressed. "Government intervention at its finest," he concluded, but then again he's a contrarian; we've learned to expect these kinds of comments, from him.)

I don't think about "government intervention", though; I think about ninety-two children and three nuns; about their ninety sets of parents, untold numbers of siblings. I think of the two families who each lost TWO children in the fire--I cannot imagine losing ONE child, let alone two. I think of Mr. Raymond, the janitor, who was blamed for "shoddy housekeeping"; I think of the nameless twelve-year-old boy (now dead) with a history of firesetting, who was widely believed to have set the fire in a trash-barrel in the basement so he could get a day off school. I think of the ones who escaped with burns and broken limbs, and the scars they carried for the rest of their lives; I think of the ones who escaped with no visible wounds, who still panic when they smell smoke, or hear a siren. I think of the hundreds of children who were told "God took them to heaven to be his angels," or "only the good die young"--and who spent the rest of their childhoods wondering why, then, they were left behind.

Many of the friends and families who spoke years later said that the fire was the beginning of the end for that neighborhood. Grieving families moved away, and those that stayed seemed set-apart. Then, of course, the 1960's intervened, and the same scare-tactics which led to the so-called "white flight" on the rest of the West Side were repeated in the OLA neighborhood. By the time JP and I made our circuits of the neighborhood, it was indistinguishable from any of the rest of the West Side--unless you knew the story, of course.

People who know me well, know that I don't make a profession to any particular religious faith. I don't think, despite what Tim says, that I'm an atheist; I'm more a "recovering Catholic" with an unhealthy level of skepticism as regards the afterlife. I try not to get my hopes up by thinking of an eventual reunion with our lost loved ones, for reasons I'm sure will be fairly apparent; likewise, I'm not willing to embrace the concept of reincarnation, for much the same reasons.

But....IF I believed in such things as reincarnation, or remembering past lives, or such-like...I would be inclined to postulate that in some previous life, I was somehow involved in the fire at Our Lady of the Angels. Between my early interest in the fire itself, and my almost-immediate love for the neighborhood (when I started house-shopping, my original intention was to buy in the square mile surrounding OLA. Unfortunately I was priced out, at that point--but that was where I wanted to live)--plus a few other things I haven't mentioned, like my lifelong fear of fire...I can't explain it, and if someone else claimed such a thing, I would probably quirk an eyebrow at them and wonder at their sanity, but it's one of those unprovable thoughts that have come to roost in my strange little brain.

The school was rebuilt after the fire, but once the real-estate vultures and the crack epidemic had blighted much of the neighborhood, sometime in the 90's the parish was combined with another, and the parish school was likewise shut down in the mid-90's sometime. I believe the building now houses a charter school--but to those who know, it's still OLA, still hallowed ground. For many years there was no memorial anywhere to the victims of the fire; now, recently, they've dedicated a memorial...several miles to the south and east, at Holy Family Church--in a "revitalized" neighborhood, where those who would want to see it wouldn't have to travel to some "scary" part of the city. It makes me sick, honestly; I hope someday the memorial will find its way back to the neighborhood where it belongs.

And if I ever buy another house in the city, I have promised myself that it will be somewhere in the area of OLA. Whether it's real or not, whether it's memory from several years back or the memory of another lifetime--I love that neighborhood, and even though I've never lived there, it feels more like "home" than any of the places where I -have- lived. I can't explain it, but that's nothing unusual; there are a lot of things that I can't explain.