My family lived at 854 N. Homan Avenue, just one house away from Iowa Street and about a mile east of Our lady of the Angels School. I was the second of four sons, and was eight years old at the time of the tragedy. Many of our neighbors were Italian and Catholic and their children attended OLA. Our family was of German ancestry and was Lutheran, so my brothers and I attended public school (D.R. Cameron, on Monticello, just north of Grand Avenue). Many of our friends, of course, attended OLA, and we knew several children who died in the fire. My mother, Ardelle Fredrick, passed away in 2006. Among her belongings was a copy of the book, "To Sleep With the Angels." I found the book yesterday and began reading it. Inside the book was a note written by my mother. She wrote: "Our Lady of the Angels Church School Fire 12/1/58 It was about 3 PM when I went out to the back porch to shake a dust rag. The rear of our house faced west, we lived on the 2nd floor. I saw a poof of smoke go up - the telephone rang - it was Aunt Stella. I told her I hoped it was not our church (Hope Epiphany Evangelical Lutheran Church) which also was on Iowa St. but a few blocks west of OLA. The whole neighborhood was chaos for days. Jimmy Ragona - across the alley from us - died in the fire and lived upstairs on the corner of Trumbull and Iowa. The day before the fire, I'd found Jimmy burning matches, sitting on the pavement, against the garage directly in back of us. I immediately took him up to his mother. How could this be? Almost like a bad omen. Jimmy was their only child. They were not young. It took her a long time to get pregnant. Johnny and Dorothy Porcaro's daughter, Joan, had been transferred from the class that was found, all dead, sitting with folded hands praying - to another room. She'd begged her father to have them put her with her old friends. He said 'no' - how right he was. The whole neighborhood was in chaos for days and I have several other memories of that day, too." My mother believed the story that the chidren had died at their desks, hands folded and prying, because the nuns foolishly told them simply to trust God and did little to help the students. There was perhaps only a very small kernel of truth to that, but the story nevertheless most certainly caused some of the non-Catholics in the neighborhood to be skeptical of Catholic judgment in a real world. I was eight years old at the time of the fire. For the next 50 years I remained skeptical of religion in general. How could a God have allowed such a tragedy to occur? Even now, I attend church only for weddings and funerals. Would I have felt the same way without that tragedy? I don't know. My paternal grandfather, Elmer Fredrick, had been a blacksmith early in the 20th century. As the years went by, he lost his four-legged "customers" and turned his iron-working skills to iron railings and fences. Many of the more elaborate railings in the OLA neighborhood were the work of my grandfather - I would recognize them even today if I saw them again. His shop was on Chicago Avenue, not far from OLA. Elmer Fredrick grew up in Roberts, Illinois, where his grandfather (my great-great-grandfather) had a blacksmith shop. A tremendous fire in 1894 swept through Roberts and the entire main street, including the blacksmith shop, had to be rebuilt. Decades later in Chicago, my grandfather constructed and installed the sturdy iron fence at OLA. Until he died in 1966, he always felt a sense of guilt about that fence and gate. He heard the stories about firefighters having a difficult time knocking it down to get ladders into the school courtyard, and wished he hadn't done such a good job building it. Everyone told him it wasn't his fault the gate had been locked, but no doubt those words were of little comfort. Just a few years before the OLA tragedy was the much-publicized murder of young Bobby Peterson and the two Schuessler brothers. The Petersons were lifelong friends of my parents. That triple murder signaled a historic "loss of innocence" in Chicago in the 1950s, and the fire was, of course, an even more intense tragedy that signaled another end of innocence in Chicago in the 1950s. My mother's maternal grandfather was a skilled stonemason who helped build Chicago's Iroquois Theatre. As a bonus for his construction work, he was given tickets to a performance. At the last minute, he and his wife (my great-grandmother) decided not to attend - on the very same day in 1903 on which the theater was destroyed by fire, killing 603 people. At least two of my mother's ancestors witnessed the Chicago Fire of 1871, escaping the flames by taking to the Chicago River in a boat. It seems that my family has managed to escape fire tragedies over the last 150 years, despite being relatively close to them. I am now a semi-retired writer, living in a beach town in Brasil. Despite the vast distance in both time and location, from time to time I still think of that tragic December afternoon. I can still see the smoke rising in the distance, and can still hear the sounds of the wailing sirens that were too late for 95 innocent people. Don Fredrick
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