Fire safety lessons still matter today

Talk to any veteran who fought at Omaha Beach, Khe Sanh or Fallujah and he'll tell you stories of the horrors of war. But he'll know that unless you were there you can't possibly understand what it was really like.

Now consider what that experience might have been like for an 11-year-old, someone who didn't sign up for duty. Who was armed only with a rosary and prayer. Who was only waiting out the last minutes of a long Monday at school to go play in the snow before it got dark. And only then can you begin to appreciate what it must have been like 50 years ago today for the students of Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago.

On a raw winter's afternoon Dec. 1, 1958, fire roared through the Catholic grammar school, claiming the lives of 92 children and three nuns.

The 48-year-old school was a tinderbox. Wood throughout, much of it heavily varnished. No automatic alarms to the fire department. No sprinkler system. The building didn't meet the codes of the day, but its deficiencies had been grandfathered into compliance because the school was old. It was built in 1910, when horse-drawn steam pumpers were still all the rage.

Staff Writer Kerry Lester in a series that began Sunday and concludes today had read much about the fire. She wanted to know how the survivors of the fire were affected by it and what went through their minds as they sent their own children to school. She spoke with four survivors who shared their stories with us.

John Raymond, now a Mount Prospect father of two, was 11 years old the day of the fire. As smoke crept over the transom of his second-floor classroom, he froze, not knowing what to do. Most of his 54 classmates had gone to the windows as instructed. Eventually he ran to the windows and jumped 25 feet to the alley below. He watched as others jumped, hung from windows or fell. One boy was on fire.

As an adult, Raymond sent his kids to school with a message: Look for the exit. Not just the first one, but the second one and the one after that.

Mary Ellen (Hobik) Reeves, now a mother of three and principal of Fullerton Elementary School in Addison tells her kids to treat drills seriously; do what your teacher tells you to do.

Matt Plovanich has worked with each of his five kids, since the age of 4, to learn how to get out of various fire scenarios.

"I don't want them to face what I faced, feeling scared to act, second guessing myself," he said. "You want to know what you'll do before it happens."

Annette (Danesi) Szafran's advice: "In fire drills, they never tell you what do you do if you can't go down those stairs. What's your other means of access? Do you know where the extinguisher is at? Try to think outside the box."

While the Our Lady of the Angels fire may have caused sweeping changes in school fire safety here and across the country, kids will be kids and still not take drills seriously.

The vigilance its survivors still exhibit should be something from which we all can learn.