Chicago's Awful Theater Horror Part 24

It appears that Miss Blackburn had attended the matinee with her father, James Blackburn. They had seats in the first balcony. In the panic father and daughter became separated. The father escaped to the Randolph street lobby and then started back for his daughter. He found her body on the staircase horribly burned. Catching up the lifeless form and wrapping it in his overcoat, Mr. Blackburn rushed to the street and procured a cab, in which he was driven with his burden directly to the Northwestern station.

He caught the first train for Glen View and had the body of his child at home in half an hour.

SAD ERROR IN IDENTIFICATION.

Mrs. Lulu Bennett, Chicago, whose daughter, Gertrude Eloise Swayze, 16 years old, was a victim of the holocaust, thought she would avoid the gruesome task of making a tour of the morgues, so she asked a friend to search for her daughter's body. After visiting a number of morgues he finally found the body of a girl at Rolston's, in Adams street, which he identified as Miss Swayze. The body was conveyed to the mother's residence, but when she looked at the body she turned away with a moan and said: "That is not my Gertrude; take it away, take it away. There has been some terrible mistake made."

Mrs. Bennett made a personal tour of the morgues afterward and found her daughter's body.

THE HANGER OF THE ASBESTOS CURTAIN.

The asbestos curtain at the Iroquois theater was not hung in a manner satisfactory to Lyman Savage, the stage carpenter who put it up, according to a statement he made to his son, C. B. Savage, head electrician at Power's theater, a short time before his death which occurred indirectly as a result of the fire.

Mr. Savage, who lived at 1750 Wrightwood avenue and who was a stage carpenter in Chicago for twenty-five years, worked at the Iroquois theater until two weeks before the fire, when he was compelled to leave because of kidney trouble. His son ascribes his death to excitement over the Iroquois fire. That disaster was uppermost in his mind.

Mr. Savage said: "I asked my father if he hung the asbestos curtain at the Iroquois theater and he said he did. I then asked him if he hung the curtain according to his own ideas, and he replied in substance: 'No, that curtain was not hung my way, but c.u.mmings' (the stage carpenter's) way. If you want to see a curtain hung my way you should see the curtain in a theater I worked on in Michigan last fall.'

"My father did not specify what point about the hanging of the curtain he did not approve, and I do not know what feature of the work he was not satisfied with.

"I asked my father if the curtain was hung on Manila ropes, and he said that it was not, but that it was hung on wire cables. I know that to be a fact, for I saw the cables myself.

"I do not desire to s.h.i.+eld any negligent person, but Stage Carpenter c.u.mmings was not responsible for the lowering of the curtain only in so far as he was responsible for having some one there to lower it.

"I was on the stage when the fire broke out, having gone to the theater to see Archie Bernard, the chief electrician. The statement has been made that the lights were not thrown on in the auditorium after the fire was discovered. Just before the fire broke out Bernard was stooping down preparing to change the lights, and he had just said to me: 'I will show you how I change my lights.'

"When the fire was discovered I saw him reach down to throw a switch.

Whether he threw the switch that lights the auditorium I do not know, but I do know that the fire from the draperies fell all around the switchboard and burned out the fuses. Consequently if the lights had been turned on the fact that the fuses were burned out would cause them to go out.

"The first I knew of the fire was when I heard some one behind and above me clapping his hands. I looked up and saw McMullen trying to put out the blaze with his hands. If he could have reached far enough he would have extinguished the fire. He did the best he could.

"I carried four women out of the theater and burned my hands. I stayed on the stage as long as it was possible for me to do so."

KEEPSAKES OF THE DEAD.

Many Chicago people spent a part of the Sabbath following the fire in the dingy little storeroom at 58 Dearborn street, where the effects and the valuables of the Iroquois theater victims are kept.

The storeroom was crowded all day. The line formed at Randolph street and pushed its way to the north. A mother stepped to one of the show cases.

She had lost a boy and she had come to find his effects. She was looking through the gla.s.s when she called one of the policemen to her side.

"That's it. That's my little boy's," and she pointed at a prayer book.

The policeman took it from the case.

"Yes, that's it," she murmured.

From the street came the tolling of the half hour.

"Just a week ago he started for Sunday school with it. It was a Christmas present and he took it to church for the first time."

A young man, well dressed and prosperous looking, came in and walked along the wall, gazing at the dresses and the furs. Suddenly he seized a fur boa and kissed it.

"It was her's," he cried. "May I take it with me?"

The officer told him to visit the coroner and get a certificate.

Two young men entered the place and began making flippant remarks. The officers overheard their conversation and escorted them to the threshold of the door. Two heavy boots a.s.sisted in making their exit into the street a rapid one.

THE SCENE AT THOMPSON'S RESTAURANT.

John R. Thompson's restaurant at 3 o'clock in the afternoon of the fatal day was an eating-house, decked here and there with late lunchers; at 3:20 it was a hospital, with the dead and dying stretched on the marble eating tables; at 4 o'clock it was a morgue, heaped with the dead; at 7:30 it was again a restaurant, but with chairs turned on top of the tables that had been the slabs of death, with the aisles cleared of the human debris, and the scrub woman at work mopping out the relics of human flesh, charred and as dust, and sweeping in pans the pieces of skulls that had lain about the mosaic floors, yet damp with the flowing length of woman's hair.

The terror, the horror, the tragedies, the martyrdom, the piercing screams of the dying, the agonized groans, the excitement of the surging mob, the hurrying back and forth of the police with their burdens of death and life that only lasted a moment, the pus.h.i.+ng of physicians, the casting of dead about on the floors like cord wood, one on top of the other, to make room on the marble slabs of tables for the oncoming living, the cries of children, the sobbing of persons recognizing their loved one dead, or worse than dead--this unutterable horror can never be imagined, and was never known before in Chicago, not excepting the horrors of the great fire, or the martyrdom of war.

LIKE A FIELD OF BATTLE.

The scene presented was most horrible. It was like a battlefield where the dead are being brought to the church or the residence that has at a moment's notice been turned into a hospital. In they came, the dead and the injured, at first at the rate of one every three minutes; then faster, several at a time, until the restaurant was heaped with maimed bodies lying on the tables or the floor, with surgeons bending over them, and on the cas.h.i.+er's counter, with the girl there sobbing with her face hidden in her hands, afraid to look at the ghastly spectacle.

There were scores of physicians, three to each table, and they worked with vigor and earnestness and skill, but with the tears coursing down the cheeks of many a one. At first the bodies were carried into Thompson's, then they went across the street; many of them were put in ambulances and taken to the emergency room for women in Marshall Field's store, and still many others of the injured--those yet able to walk--were half dragged, half carried to the offices of physicians in the Masonic temple.

WOMEN EAGER TO HELP.

Women fought and shoved and pushed their way through the crowd to get to the door of the improvised hospital, that became a morgue only too rapidly.

"I am a nurse. Let me help," said some.

"I am a mother. My boy may be dead inside. For G.o.d's sake, let me save a life," said another, a woman in middle age.

Others came in from the crowds, neither mothers nor nurses, women with the spirit of heroism who longed to serve humanity when humanity was at so low an ebb.

"She's dead," was more often than not the verdict after much work. "Next!"

and the cold and stiffened form of the victim was dragged, head first, from the marble eating table, thrown quickly under the tables, and another form, perhaps that of a tiny child, took its place.

STEADY STREAM OF BODIES.

So fast came the bodies for a time that there was one steady stream of persons carried in--the still living--while without the morgue stood the ambulances waiting for their burdens. The sidewalk, muddy and crowded, was strewn with the dead, lying on blankets or else thrown down in the mud, waiting to be taken to the various morgues of the city.

There was a figure of a man--a large man with broad shoulders and dressed in black--whose entire face was burned away, only the back of the head remaining to show he had ever had a head; yet below the shoulders he was untouched by the fire.

There lay women with their arms gone, or their legs, while one had one side burned off, with only the cross shoulder-bone remaining. She had worn a pink silk waist and black skirt; the fragments of the garments still clung to her like a shroud that had lain in the grave.

There was a little boy, with a shock of red-brown hair, whose tiny mouth was open in terror and whose baby hands were burned off so that his tiny wrists showed like red stumps.