At the time of the fire I was 9 years old and a parochial elementary school student in Detroit, Michigan. The Detroit News was delivered to our house daily. I could look at it as long as I put it back together exactly as delivered. The fire was the leading story on Tuesday, December 2nd. My father came home to find me sitting on the living room floor transfixed by the images of the burned school. He was furious and took the paper away from me saying, “You shouldn't be looking at this” and went outside to the garbage can behind our garage and threw the newspaper away. This is the only day in my memory that he did not read the paper after dinner. I wanted to sneak out and retrieve it, and did just that the next day after school - but the newspaper was gone. I never saw the edition of Life Magazine that covered the fire even though we received it weekly. After the tragedy we had fire drill after fire drill at school. I remained haunted by the pictures I had seen and, as an adult, read everything I could find about that fire. Years ago I lived in Chicago and found Michele McBride's book The Fire That Will Not Die, and recently To Sleep With The Angels as well as the WTTW documentary. Thoughts of that fire haven't surfaced for decades. Recently, while visiting Chicago, I was walking to Manny's and came upon the Fire Museum of Greater Chicago and went inside. Along the wall of pictures from famous Chicago fires was that of fireman Richard Scheidt carrying the body of John Jajkowski along with other photos from that day. It all came back to me and at 60 years old I was back looking at the Detroit News. Thank you for this site and to those who add their stories.
|