With the Angels

Looking through the archives of the past, and the tragedy of the Our Lady of the Angels Fire of December 1958 came to mind. This was one of the deadliest fires in Chicago History, behind the Iroquois theatre fire of 1903.At the time of the fire, the school, built around 1910 in the Humboldt Park section of Chicago,  housed students from Kindergarten through the eighth grade.  According to the remembrance site OLA Fire, the fire occurred near the end of the school day on December 1, 1958, when a fire was spotted at the bottom of a staircase. The fire spread upstairs to the second level of classrooms, where fourth-eighth graders were located. The fire alarm was sounded too late and many of the students on the upper floors were first told to pray by the nuns, and when the conditions became unbearable, the students went to the windows of their classrooms and began jumping out of windows, where many died or suffered broken bones. When the firefighters and medical personnel arrived, they evidenced many of the students near windows waiting for help. The victims were taken to various hospitals on the west side of Chicago, with a separate facility being used as a makeshift morgue so parents could locate their children. After the last victim died in August 1959, there were 95 souls taken, 92 students and three nuns. A week after the fire, funerals and Interment services were held at the Illinois National Guard armory in Chicago and Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, where many of the fire victims rest today. A new school was built and opened in 1960, nearly two years after the fire. As I read the book To Sleep with the Angels, I find out that the case has never officially been solved. A young man that attended the school at te time had confessed to setting the fire, but later recanted his confession, because he feared punishment from his parents. The Chicago Tribune recently posted some pictures of the event on the 60th anniversary.