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FIRE IN THE BIG HOUSE

I hope I never go to Hell if it’s this hot!

—Inmate Charles Oliver, 4H, April 21, 1930

My God what is going to happen next?

—Warden Preston Thomas, April 21, 1930

Sundown on Easter Monday 1930. The nightly lockup at the Ohio State Penitentiary had just ended. Although it was April 21, it was unseasonably cold outside, and within the forbidding thirty-foot walls of the aging and overcrowded Ohio State Penitentiary it probably wasn’t much warmer. Located less than a mile from the Columbus state capitol complex, the gray edifice was the most crowded big house in America, bulging at the seams with triple the capacity it was designed for.

While there has always been some debate over the exact time the fire broke out, all agreed that it occurred sometime after the second dinner shift, which began at 4:20. Given barely twenty minutes to consume their prison victuals, the eight hundred inmates assigned to the aging G&H cellblocks were marched back to their cells and methodically locked up for the night, four to a cell, each cell locked separately. This was rarely accomplished before 4:45. It was then customary for a cellblock officer to telephone the stockade to affirm that the night count was spot-on (that is, that the same number that left their cells for dinner had been counted on their return).

None of the inmates in the G&H blocks could have predicted, as they contemplated their well-practiced routine of winding down for the long night ahead, that by 8 p.m. more than one-third of them would be dead. Whiling away their last hours, some read or wrote letters, others played chess and checkers, and others surely dwelled on upcoming court cases and parole dates.

Although estimates as to the exact time the fire began vary by only several minutes, those minutes were enough time to mean the difference between life and death. Some convicts testified smelling smoke in the cellblock as early as 5 p.m. However, most accounts suggest that the fire became obvious sometime after 5:20 pm. Inmate trustee Liston G. Schooley was covering Deputy Warden James C. Woodard’s office by himself, just east of G&H, some 500–750 feet across the prison yard, when he first noticed smoke at 5:20 coming from the direction of the New Hall cellhouse. He had just returned from the last dinner shift and was getting ready to sit down and read a newspaper when he looked west and saw “smoke emitting from the roof or the upper windows of the cell block,” but partly hidden from view behind the chapel.

Schooley would later recount that at virtually the same time he spotted the fire from the office window, an inmate nurse was exercising, walking back and forth on the walkway in front of the deputy warden’s office. He turned and caught Schooley’s attention at the window and yelled, “The G and H cell block is on fire.” In his testimony before the fire inquiry, convened the day after the fire, Schooley noted that he called the central station in the guardroom and alerted the operator, a friend of his, who responded, “I know it, I got it.” Schooley told the operator to notify the fire department. Later he expressed certainty that this had been done in a “most efficient manner.” Predicting they would be needed elsewhere, Schooley went out on the front steps of the deputy’s office and told the exercising nurses to go to the hospital at once. By this time the yard was filling up with smoke and he found breathing already “rather difficult.”¹

Inside the cell-house building itself, survivors would mostly agree that someone screamed “Fire!” around 5:21 p.m., but certainly no later than 5:35. Many sources asserted that if it had been anyone else but the convict prankster Barry Sholkey who first raised the hue and cry inside the G&H blocks at 5:20, things might have turned out differently.² Housed on the second tier of the doomed six-tier cellblock, inmate Leo Lyon later testified that Sholkey always played the “jester or joker.” Lyon was playing cards in the cell above when he heard the fire warning and recalled telling his cellmates, “Oh, he is full of shit.”³ When nearby guards heard Sholkey’s warning, they refused to take the bait as well and simply scoffed at the alarm. Not surprisingly, when the first signs of smoke were detected, most guards played down the potential peril. They were used to small fires being set by prisoners from time to time, mostly to get attention or out of boredom. Some thought it was probably a mattress fire, since that was about the only item in a cell that could burn, and it was not uncommon for convicts to burn parts of their mattresses to smoke out bedbugs.

Nonetheless, Leo Lyon was curious enough to check it out. Getting up from his card game, he “flashed the range,” common prison parlance for the technique of taking a small mirror and sticking it through the bars to get a better look. It also allowed him to look over the wall in the building. That was when he first spotted “sparks between the blocks.” He called to his partners and told them that there was indeed a fire. He too said that Sholkey was the “first man to give the alarm.”⁴

A few minutes later, flames and dense smoke convinced the convicts and prison keepers that a fire was indeed threatening the prison building. Stiff winds from the northern part of the building fanned toxic smoke south into the blocks, and mayhem ensued as inmates closest to a now-billowing cloud of smoke began yelling and rapping the bars with their tin cups, like actors in some B-grade prison movie.

Many survivors pegged the time of day by their cheap dollar alarm clocks, while others depended on a centrally located wall clock to determine what time the fire began. Still others, serving relatively long prison sentences, had timed their daily routines to the minute and claimed they had little need for a clock. Edward Dolan, a prisoner out of Hamilton County, later testified that he was sitting in his cell on the first tier, reading a magazine, as three cellmates played cards, between 5:20 and 5:25 when he heard the shout of “Fire!” Asked how he was so sure about the time, he said it was because he was “waiting for the baseball man to bring the baseball extra [on the radio].”⁵

Six years into a ten-to-twenty-five-year stretch, Robert Farr was on the second tier playing checkers. He remembered the time because “it was customary like clockwork to play checkers from five to seven.” After just a couple of games he heard screams and shouts and the rattling of bars from prisoners on the upper ranges of the cellblock. Prisons get used to the almost nonstop noise and clamor that comes with caging up thousands of young men with nothing much to do. Like others, Farr first thought there was “nothing to it,” probably a cell fire, and no reason to get overly excited. So the checkers games continued. Farr remembered that he and his partner, whom he described as “rapid players,” had been playing long enough to have finished a game and started another one when the yelling became more intense. They finished another game and had started again when the “smoke began to roll in” and his partner insisted they had to quit.⁶

Inmate Roy Williams was “just getting ready to play a game of hearts” on the bottom range of cells when he smelled smoke coming from the direction of the cotton mill. He would later report, “We heard a couple of shots and smelled smoke, and we figured it was the cotton mill, the wind being from that direction, blowing the smoke into the cellblock.”⁷ Williams hoped that it wasn’t the cotton mill because he had already “rebuilt the place twice over” and “didn’t want that job again.” But if it was, he hoped “they burn[ed] it to the ground.” In moments, one of the boys looked out and spotted a big cloud of smoke and said, “Hell that is right out here.” On the same tier of cells, James Waltham asked a guard what was going on and was told by the nonchalant keeper that there “was some timber burning, nothing to get worried about.”

Two tiers up, Edward Saas was engrossed in a game of pinochle with his cell partner. He didn’t smell the smoke right away or become aware of the brewing disaster until he heard some hollering from tier two, just below him. He didn’t pay it much mind at first, thinking it was a joke: “they were hollering, but that whole bunch is mostly half-wits and always raising hell.”⁸ But the smoke “got bad quickly.” Saas and his cellmate were among the many convicts who took blankets and put them up on the cell bars to combat the smoke, but to little effect, as the smoke was now as low as their range on the third tier. Innovating moment by moment, they next soaked towels in water and wrapped them around their heads. It was only ten minutes since the first hint of fire.

George W. Johnson, better known by his hometown nickname “Cleveland,” was serving a five-to-ten-year bit for perjury. He had been paroled after five years but twenty-nine months later was back in stir for a parole violation to finish out his sentence. He was working in the chapel as a porter close to the G&H blocks, mopping up, dusting off erasers, and cleaning windows, when he first noticed some smoke between 5:20 and 5:25. Fellow Cleveland native Roy “Whitey” Steele was on the bottom tier when he heard some screams and saw a little smoke on the upper ranges. He didn’t think much of it at the moment, but curiosity got the better of him. He flashed the range with “a piece of mirror about an inch square” and “pushed it out in the block,” where he could see “flames and a lot of smoke and we got scared and tried to break down the cell, a one-armed man and myself.”⁹

Cincinnati-raised Edward J. Gallagher, a self-described “orphan asylum boy,” was housed on the fourth tier. Gallagher and his cellies had come back from the first mess about 4:10, “rolled a smoke,” and were waiting for the mailman. For Gallagher, the hand-rolled smoke was much more important; mail service didn’t mean much to him, since “I never get any mail, I ain’t got any family, but I like to see my partners get letters.” Gallagher dozed off, but woke up again between 5:20 and 5:30 to find that his cellmates had covered their faces with towels and handkerchiefs. In prison jargon he asked them, “What’s the come? What’s the kid?” They pointed to the outside, where he saw the smoke.¹⁰

Murray Wolfe, in the first cell on the first tier, had returned to his cell after the first mess sometime between 4 and 4:10. He proceeded to wash up and clean his teeth before hopping on his bunk to read the latest copy of the Saturday Evening Post. Following prison rules, which prohibited smoking in his bunk, Wolfe sat on the side of his bunk with his feet dangling over the side, “smoking and reading at the same time, making myself comfortable” until the evening papers were delivered: “just a procedure for myself in the evening. I try to keep my mind occupied while I am in here reading. That is the only way I can keep it occupied.” He later testified that he heard shouts of “Fire!” around 5:20. A former newspaper reporter, he had a good eye and ear for detail. He remembered that most of the inmates were talking, paying attention to each other, killing time, waiting for the papers. Like others, at first Wolfe thought it was typical mattress fire, having “no idea of the immensity” of the fire until “smoke began curling” up through the bottom ventilators.”¹¹

Wolfe’s location in the first cell of the lowest tier placed him closest to the chief day guard’s desk, situated in front of the cell, so he was well tuned to the rhythms of the guards night and day. From his vantage point he could see fifty-five-year old head day guard Thomas Watkinson washing his face and hands in the guardroom basin just outside his cell. Known as “the Englishman” for his nativity, he would probably have had his coat and hat off as he prepped to go home. Although he should have been on duty until his shift ended at 6 p.m., following his usual routine he began getting ready to end his day shift at 5:15 and then headed down to the guard room, where by 5:45 he would meet with the incoming night-shift guards, who went on duty at 6 p.m. This transition rarely took place later than 6:15. The fact that the fire occurred between shifts contributed mightily to the chaos and confusion that followed.

It had been a rough patch of days for the Englishman. The inmates had been “pestering” him because he had locked up the cons on the second tier on Easter Sunday, forcing them to miss their Easter dinner and the opportunity to attend Easter church services. As Watkinson dried off his hands and face, inmate Wolfe noticed that his “face changed terribly. I think the man was stupefied. I think he was frightened to death.” Another inmate claimed, “He just stood there like a damned fool.”¹²

During the day Watkinson was partnered with guard Hubert Richardson, whose recollections somewhat contradicted Wolfe’s testimony. Richardson claimed the Englishman was actually in the process of getting a convict shoeshine in the guardroom when Richardson alerted him to the fire. Richardson was posted on the sixth range when he spotted the fire in the north end of the cellhouse. A former decorator by trade, he blamed current health issues on his prior profession, admitting, “I can’t hold my water”; that is, the paint-related lead in his system from his previous occupation necessitated his constant urination. He had just returned from another run to the bathroom and was walking his range to make sure all was well when he looked to the north and saw “blazes” about 5:40.

The cantankerous “Englishman,” Thomas Watkinson, would later explain to a Board of Inquiry that Richardson was “kind of new.” Since there was “no place to take a leak there,” the rookie guard walked down the stairs and up to the neighboring E&F dormitory, “where there is a toilet and leaked up there.” He came back about seven to eight minutes later, went into the block, and then reported to Watkinson, “There is a Fire.”¹³ Richardson’s version varied somewhat from Watkinson’s. Richardson claimed that he hollered to the elderly guard, whom he referred to as “Shorty,” on the first floor from his vantage point above the fifth tier.¹⁴ Getting no response, he rushed down to deliver the alarm in person. He estimated it took him no more than a minute to do so.

Ohio Penitentiary warden Preston Elmer Thomas usually ended his workday around 5 p.m., but just happened to stay another twenty minutes on Easter Monday, before heading upstairs from his offices to his living quarters. He would remember being on his porch around 5:35 when he was told of the fire.¹⁵ Thomas, “affectionately known as the Pig” by some inmates,¹⁶ had been appointed warden in 1913 and by 1930 had a well-deserved reputation as a hardliner. Having personally helped stop past escape attempts, he was always fretful about the next one, lest it blot his résumé. He would come under withering criticism for not overseeing the immediate release of trapped prisoners from their cells as well as for not being in the prison yard directing rescue efforts, choosing instead to wait for the National Guard.

Warden Thomas would later claim he had a touch of asthma and could not smell the smoke, unlike almost everyone else, who smelled the fire before they saw it. He told the subsequent fire inquiry, “I can’t smell. I lost my smeller several years ago…. I can’t smell a skunk—I am not kidding…. I have had a good many operations for olfactory trouble.”¹⁷ His handicap might have been overlooked in the subsequent investigations if he had not consistently refused to institute safety devices, drills, or regulations to prevent fires. His main concern was preventing escapes at any cost. In his defense, in 1930, on the heels of a series of bloody prison riots the previous year, the primary focus of any prison warden was on keeping inmates in their cells, not necessarily preparing to get them out safely in the event of an emergency.

Looking out into the prison courtyard for a moment, Thomas saw the intensifying smoke to the west. He exclaimed something to the effect of “My God what is going to happen next.” He asked several guards whether an alarm had already been sent to the Columbus Fire Department and was told that it had. At this point he made a decision that he probably regretted in the days to come. Rather than lead the growing rescue efforts within the prison yard, he decided to station himself outside the prison walls to supervise efforts to prevent any convicts from breaking out. Profoundly disliked by many of his charges, the warden was usually hesitant to spend too much time in the yard without sufficient protection. He would not make an appearance within the prison walls until two days after the fire. The “hero priest,” Father Albert O’Brien, would later report that the convicts were indeed ready to kill the warden if he stepped inside the prison during the pandemonium.

Night guards Thomas Little and William Baldwin, as well as seventy-two-year-old Captain John Hall, had all arrived at the guardroom separately on Easter Monday, a half hour early for their shifts. It was customary for Baldwin to get to the guardroom before 6. His explanation was that he had an old car and “sometimes it don’t just jump as it should,” so he always liked to get a head start so he wouldn’t miss his shift.¹⁸ That day he stopped to speak briefly with Captain Hall, who was perusing a newspaper outside, before entering the guardroom. Following protocol, he signed in on two sign-in sheets and sat down. He recalled that he was sitting against the wall making small talk with night guard Thomas F. Little until about 5:45, when a prisoner ran into the guardroom yelling, “Fire.”¹⁹ As will be seen, the early arrivals of Baldwin and Little would prove serendipitous.

Leaving the prison yard, Warden Thomas made a beeline for the guardroom door and told Little and Baldwin rather cryptically to “get down there” on his way out of the building. The guards would later admit that no one was really sure which of them he was speaking to since there were others in the room as well, but they made off for the endangered cellblocks just the same.²⁰ Baldwin and Little hurried from the guardhouse through the E&F dormitory toward G&H, with the geriatric Captain Hall trying to keep up. Not surprisingly, the decrepit captain lagged behind the two younger guards. Reaching the cellblock, they found that Watkinson had stationed himself at the cage gate leading into the upper ranges. The cell house was rapidly filling with dangerous smoke, and flames could be seen in the upper reaches of the northern cellblocks (I&K). The guards intended, once Watkinson had opened the gate, to reach the men in the upper ranges. But this would have to wait, as some type of verbal altercation took place between the two night guards and the day guard Watkinson.

Watkinson, Baldwin, and Little all held the same rank, but since it was still before 6 p.m., the Englishman was in control of the cellblock, which he zealously protected. At this point Little and Baldwin had to overcome their first major challenge, which was to convince Watkinson to open the cage gate leading up to tiers two to six. The day guards had the cell keys to the upper tiers, but those would be worthless without access to the upper ranges. But Watkinson refused to cooperate, telling them, “I got no orders to unlock those men.”²¹ Even after they told the Englishman that he had verbal orders from the warden to release the convicts, Watkinson held firm, replying, “I have no order to open the door.”²² Little said, “We have to get it open and get up in there and get fellows out.” Watkinson adamantly responded, “Well I can’t open it without orders.” Outranked before 6 p.m., Little recognized he needed to act quickly. He ran around to the west side of the block, looking for any opportunity to get the men out, but the smoke was so dense he had to run back around to haggle once more with Watkinson, wasting at least five to six valuable minutes.

After being refused entry into the cage door leading up to the top five tiers, Baldwin and Little returned to the adjacent ground-level cells on the first tier, the only ones they had access to without passing through the cage first, and began releasing the convicts. They were the first guards to actually release any convicts from the cellblocks. Little told Baldwin that they had to “get this goddamn door [cage gate] open or those fellows are all going to die.” He could not know that they were already dying by the dozens. It was at this point that Watkinson finally came to his senses and decided to cooperate. He approached Little with the key, “but not fast enough.” Little grabbed it out of his hand, opened the cage door, and started upstairs. He is credited with leading the first rescuers up to higher tiers, but not without making sure that others followed him in case he was overcome with smoke and needed rescuing himself. Initially, when he turned around he only saw Baldwin.²³ Five to eight crucial minutes had been wasted by the time the rescue could begin.

Watkinson’s account conflicts sharply with that of the guards Little and Baldwin, as it did with Captain Hall’s. The Englishman later claimed that he was just sticking his key into the cage lock to let the guards in when Captain Hall intervened and told him, “Don’t open that yet, don’t do that.” Since Hall was the captain, the Englishman would argue, “he had to follow superiors or he would be suspended for disobeying rules and order.” As to why Hall wouldn’t permit it, perhaps Hall thought it “didn’t look so dangerous in G&H.” At one point during the exchange over the keys, Baldwin commented, “Isn’t this hell?”²⁴

Contrary to Watkinson’s assertion that Hall had personally ordered him to keep the cells locked, both Little and Baldwin later testified under oath that Hall never even made it to the gate to prevent them from entering the tiers. In fact, they never saw Hall at the cage door. But they could definitely hear him hollering behind them for inmates to knock windows out to let in some air and the sounds of shattering glass. In fact, Hall could not possibly have reached the cage before them. Furthermore, if he had verbally directed Watkinson not to open the gate, he would have to have done this after the two guards got there, which simply never happened. Buttressing the guards’ claims was Captain Hall’s testimony that he “did not tell Watkinson anything.²⁵

By the time Baldwin and Little had retrieved the keys from Watkinson, it was clear that the source of the fire was in the wooden form work in the adjacent I&K blocks, which were undergoing construction. When they got through the gate, the guards parceled out the keys to convicts taking part in the rescue efforts, many of whom had come from the E&F dorms. Baldwin and Little reached the third tier and were soon joined by a prisoner, but they couldn’t make it farther than the fourth tier and had to retreat to the second range. Against his better judgment, instead of running outside for air, Little decided to keep up his rescue efforts and began unlocking the second range. As he ran up the second range, he could see the flames above but “couldn’t tell whether they were in the ceiling or in the lumber on top.” It was impossible at that point to ascertain whether the fire was actually in the roof or on top of it because there was only one story separating the roof from the fifth tier under construction in I&K.

Little was able to get everyone out on one side of the second tier. When a “colored” inmate came around, he told him to “get these fellows” out on the other side of the second tier. He went back up to the fourth tier, where he passed out from smoke inhalation and was carried out by Baldwin and three or four inmates. He later lamented, “I was so damned near all in I couldn’t remember…. There was no man in the world who could have got up there at the time we got in the cage, no man, I don’t care who it was.”²⁶ Within five minutes the fire made a decided change. “Oh, it was fast, yes, it come down there, the smoke seemed to come all at once, just come down there in a big billow.” In retrospect, Little and other rescuers regretted not starting at the top and working their way down. This was a moot point, though, since by the time the keys were turned over to Little most of the convicts in the top two tiers were at death’s door.²⁷

It was well documented that none of the G&H cells were opened before 5:45, six minutes after the fire department was officially contacted. Little would later note that by the time he and fellow officer Baldwin began opening cells the smoke was already too intense on the top range to save anyone on tier six. Little and Baldwin were quickly overcome by the dense smoke as they opened the first two tiers of G&H. One convict reported noticing blood trickling out of Little’s nose. Abandoning their efforts for the moment, they passed on cell keys to other convicts, including William Robert Noel from the F Dormitory, who opened the third-range cells.

Baldwin and Little recovered after getting some fresh air out in the yard and returned to aid the rescue efforts in the doomed cellblock. But in the meantime the dense smoke had become even more suffocating. The valiant keepers could go no higher than the fifth tier before retreating. Curiously, some witnesses later reported seeing the two guards on the fourth tier and as high as the sixth, but as with so many other observations, the tumult of the night’s events prevented the substantiation of many statements.

Guards Baldwin and Little, whose presence the warden regarded as a “godsend,” would later testify, as mentioned above, that the warden only took time to shout several cryptic orders to them in the guardroom before disappearing outside. However, as the warden told it, “I told guards to take those keys and go down there.” His badinage with the inquisitors the following day sounded like part of the Abbott and Costello “Who’s on First” sketch. When the warden was asked if he had specifically told them what to do when they got down to G&H with the keys, Thomas, obviously losing patience, responded, “Unlock the prisoners; wouldn’t take the keys down there and play with them.” However, both sides would eventually agree that he probably only said, “Get the keys down quickly.”²⁸

While it is uncertain who was actually the first to observe the fire, “it was presumably seen by several at about the same time.” By some accounts “a guard in the tower on the outside wall,” a short distance beyond the north end of the building where the fire originated, was among the first and “called someone at street level who pulled fire alarm box 261, at the head of Dublin St.”²⁹ A day guard named Porter, working near the wagon stockade, testified that he had turned in the fire alarm three times beginning around 5:40 before firing his rifle to get someone’s attention.

It is also conceivable that the fire was first observed by a trustee who was driving back from town to the prison, after running an errand for the warden’s wife, sometime between 5:30 and 5:35. When he noticed smoke outside the cell-house structure, he went to a fire-alarm box and turned in the first fire alarm at exactly 5:39, the time when Columbus fire chief A. R. Nice claimed he received the first alarm from box 261, outside the penitentiary on the corner of Dennison and Dublin Avenues. This clearly contradicted the claim of Liston Schooley in the deputy warden’s office that his friend had notified the fire department around 5:20. Times were logged immediately at the firehouse, making the fire company’s reported times the most reliable. But the time of this first fire alarm was almost twenty minutes later than the times reported by convicts and guards inside the walls. By 5:39 the fire already had an almost half-hour head start. During the subsequent Board of Inquiry that began the day after the fire, Nice declared that all could have been saved if they had been released from cells as soon as fire was discovered. He told the board that “there must have been undue delay because the first alarms came from a box outside the prison walls,” rather than from inside the facility when smoke was first spotted.³⁰

At 5: 40 another alarm was received from the box closest to the penitentiary. After another alarm at 5:42, the fire chief left his home on Gilbert Street and arrived at the Spring Street gate on the corner of Spring and Dennison Streets within seven minutes, where he was met by assistant fire chief Ogburn, who had responded with Company #1. Seeing the fire burning at the north end of the building, Nice, he later testified, turned in the fourth alarm at 6:03, summoning more fire companies to the scene.

Deputy Warden James C. Woodard, who had been on a brief hiatus and was on his way back to the prison when he was alerted to the brewing disaster, arrived close to the same time the fire department did. The warden recalled telling Woodard to “hustle right inside, you take care of the inside and I will take care of the outside.”³¹ After making sure that prisoners were being released from their cells in G&H, Woodard ordered prisoners from the adjoining E&F dorm to be released as well. As smoke threatened the upper blocks of A&B and C&D, the infamous White City (so named because the interior was painted white), Woodard, fearing that flames might follow, returned to the guardroom, grabbed keys for those blocks and released its inmates into the prison yard.

Woodard was careful to prevent convicts in the so-called Bad Boy Company, Company K, from also being released. To assuage their fears, he told Company K convicts that the fire did not yet pose a threat to them and promised to return and release them if it did.³² Woodard was quite sensitive to claims made later on that some of the K Company convicts actually had been let out of their cells. “While it is said some of them was in the yard, but there wasn’t,” he testified later, explaining that this rumor got started “when a man without clothes went to the commissary and got whatever he could,’ which turned out to be the same “striped shirts and striped coats” worn by K Company.³³ For good measure he placed death row prisoners in solitary cells for safety as well.

In the fire’s immediate aftermath, much of the blame for the tragedy would be directed at Warden Thomas, in no small part due to his decision to station himself where he did “to prevent escapes.” To be fair, the warden’s main concern, like that of other big house wardens of the era, was to prevent inmates from escaping at any cost. It was an era when keeping inmates behind bars always took precedence over getting them out of their cells safely in an emergency. The warden later admitted that “he considered the menace of a possible break for liberty by the prisoners as more pressing than the fire itself.” He also assumed that the proximity of the prison to the fire department, just blocks away, was his ace in the hole. But he placed too much faith in the firefighters’ response time.

Convinced that the fire was part of a larger escape attempt, the warden phoned the headquarters of the 166th Infantry Regiment of the Ohio Militia for support and went out to the street to await their arrival. As he left, he issued orders to shoot any escapees.³⁴ When Columbus city police officers and federal troops from Fort Hayes arrived before the guardsmen, the warden, some ten minutes after positioning himself outside the walls, put his defensive strategy into practice, ordering the troops to facilitate the entry of the fire department through the stockade gate. By 6 p.m., Columbus city police had been ordered into the prison yard to restore a semblance of order. They were soon joined by other day guards. Unaware of the scale of the pending disaster, guards rushed to and fro, adding to the general disorder, picking up machine guns and shotguns, shouting for ammo, and preparing for a prison riot, while outside, grim-faced guards, police, and members of the arriving military units trained their gimlet eyes and weapons on the walls.

As the subsequent Board of Inquiry would prove, the warden had plenty of reasons to keep himself scarce within the prison walls. Father Albert O’Brien, who had reported that the convicts were probably ready to kill the warden if he stepped inside the prison courtyard during the pandemonium, added, “Those men had no thought of escape. They were thinking of those men perishing in the flames like moths. They were enraged because of the utter helplessness; because they were beyond the help of those gathered outside the wall.” When the warden finally entered the walls on Wednesday, two days after the fire, hundreds of convicts “let loose a crescendo of jeers and catcalls.”

There is some controversy over when Little and Baldwin retrieved the keys for the endangered cellblocks. Most accounts agree with their claim that Little already had the range keys in his pocket before he had heard anything about a fire.³⁵ The two guards had established a well-rehearsed routine and had an understanding that Little would always open the small door in the guardroom containing the keys when they got ready to go on shift, take one set of keys, and carry it on to the cellblock. As night guards on G&H, either Baldwin or Little would work on the bottom range and hold on to the bottom range key while the other took the keys to the higher ranges. They would then switch range watch and keys each hour.

Whoever was manning the first tier was also responsible for the second tier and would stay at the desk located near the first tier, answering phone calls and the like. Unlike the other five tiers, the first floor was not enclosed, but the guard on the range was responsible for that floor and held the key to the cage as well as the first-tier range key, just in case incoming prisoners came in too late to be assigned a new cell. So, in effect, one guard would have two keys and the other would have five keys for the other five double ranges.³⁶

Little was later queried why the keys were not returned to the safekeeping of the administrative offices after each count and why it was necessary for guards to hold onto the keys while on duty, since they were not really necessary for the count. Moreover, this strategy brought up serious security concerns in the event one of the guards was overpowered. Little explained that it was convenient to have them since the G&H guards were stationed “quite a distance” from the guardroom, and almost every evening packages were delivered, including new shoes and other items that could not be slid under the cell door like mail. Little also noted that the cellblock housed the machine shop company and all of the construction companies, and almost every day there were a few prisoners on special detail, so the keys were needed to let them back into their cells.³⁷

Between 5:30 and 6, Ray W. Humphries, the editor of the popular civic publication Columbus This Week, returned to Columbus from Grove City. While taking a shortcut home that took him by the corner of West Spring and Dennison Avenue, he “noticed under the viaduct west of the penitentiary” members of the fire department and a lot of commotion. His journalistic instincts were strong, and he proceeded closer to the prison. “Some chap yelled at me from the filling station on the corner” and told him, “There is a Fire in the Penitentiary.”³⁸

Humphries continued driving north on Dublin Avenue when he realized he had his Graflex camera with him. He got out of his car and looked for a good spot to take pictures from. He quickly spotted clouds of smoke coming from the cellblock. He then ran over to the Paragon Oil Co., where he took five pictures. He remembered an old newspaper adage: “When you get through taking pictures that are ‘unusual,’ you usually look at your watch.” He did; the time was 5:47. He went back to the corner of Spring and Dennison to get closer to the action but was forced back each time by a police cordon. He lamented that he “didn’t have a badge like a news photographer would.”³⁹

Other locals took note as well. The operator of a nearby filling station near the southwest corner of the penitentiary remembered seeing flames and hearing cries as he rushed to the prison gate. “It seemed like a thousand men were yelling and beating on the bars.” He made out a lone voice screaming, “For God’s Sake let me out. I’m burning—I’m burning.” This proved too much for the attendant, and he reversed course away from the fire. When he came back about fifteen minutes later, “most of the cries had stopped” by then. One reporter would describe how the prisoners screamed in terror as a “snakelike coil of heavy black smoke crawled into the cells through ventilators.”⁴⁰

The fire seemed to draw spectators like moths to a flame. Indeed, “The blazes leaping into the sky acted as a beacon for the curious from all over the city…. Rooftops were crowded in the vicinity, and thousands clambered upon every available point of vantage to see something.” Radio broadcasts also contributed to the growing crowds, especially since the late newspapers had not been delivered yet. “Even the radio, broadcasting its appeal [for help], struck alarm into the homes of thousands,” who would drive, walk, and run to Spring Street. Police were faced with the task of controlling the area so that rescue workers, doctors, guards, soldiers, and others could make their way into the burning Ohio Penitentiary.⁴¹

Radio transmissions might have brought legions of curious citizens, but the broadcasts’ ability to summon emergency personnel was inestimable. “Radio played one of the principal roles when Old Man Terror staged his recent thrilling two week melodrama…. Almost as the curtain rose on that spectacle of fire and disorder, radio was on the stage, and it stayed there until the show, from spot news standpoint, was over.”⁴²

The blaze flashed along oil-soaked forms and dry timbers from I&K, undergoing reconstruction, southward into the ill-fated cellblocks, igniting the ancient wooden roof, which was overdue to be replaced. Clouds of smoke billowed out, filling not just the cellblocks but the prison quadrangle as well. Assistant Fire Chief Osborn would later suggest that the guards “seemed a little slow getting cells open,” but followed up by diplomatically commenting that he could “understand” their lack of progress “in the face of terrific heat, dense smoke and so many cells.”⁴³ As the heat grew more intense, some prisoners still locked in the G&H tiers ran water in their sinks and dashed water on their faces and each other; others soaked blankets and hung them in front of their cells to keep smoke out; still others dipped their heads into their water-filled toilet bowls (some of the dead were found in this position). Several reportedly slit their own throats rather than burn alive, while others pleaded with guards to shoot them, forgetting that guards, even if they wanted to oblige the desperate men, were prohibited from carrying guns inside the cellblocks.

The convicts responded to the fire in a variety of ways. One of the more curious responses was a submissiveness that took over certain prisoners, not unlike death row inmates who had already made their peace with walking down the long “green mile” to the death chamber. Chester Himes, who would later gain fame as the author of a series of detective novels set in Harlem featuring the black detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, was a witness to this behavior, which he called “that queer docility common to prisoners.”⁴⁴ He would draw on his experience as a survivor of the prison fire in his short story “To What Red Hell?,” in which a prisoner finds himself utterly incapable of functioning during the Ohio inferno. Prison conditioning has so diminished the protagonist that when he hears a voice tell him, “Get a blanket, and give a hand here,” he can only say, “‘No can do,’ in a low choky whisper…. He really wanted to go up in that smoking inferno where heroes were being made…. But he couldn’t, just couldn’t, that’s all.”⁴⁵

But other convicts utilized their ingenuity and survival skills, honed during long hours of idleness and contemplation, and managed to live to tell their tales. Many improvised as the smoke poured into their cellblock. Inmate Wolfe advised his cellies to wet their handkerchiefs at the water fountain inside their cell and place them over their faces. Several convicts picked up chairs and started banging on doors for attention. Meanwhile, “bedlam was raring in the building” as the rest of the inmates began pounding on their doors to be let out.⁴⁶

Charles Oliver of Toledo was trapped in his cell on the fourth tier. “Almost before we realized it the flames were sweeping along the cellblock and it began to get hot.” Together with his three cellmates, “We yelled and yelled for them to open the cell but they wouldn’t. When it seemed that we would be roasted alive we started the water running in the faucets of our cell and as the floor became flooded we lay down in the water,” putting their faces in it and splashing each other. “We were scared. I’ll admit it, scared to death … seemed we would be roasted alive. It got hotter and hotter. I hope I never go to hell if it’s this hot.” They had fully “expected to die, lying there in the water with flames all around us,” until miraculously some convicts came and knocked the cell locks off with sledgehammers. Oliver and his two companions got safely out of the cell, but not before they had a good bit of hair “singed off” their heads. It was a small price to pay for rescue. Once freed, rather than make a mad rush to freedom, Oliver and his partners joined others, dashing through a wall of flames to help free the inmates on the next range of cells.⁴⁷ The scorching heat forced the rescuers to beat a hasty retreat after knocking the locks off just three cell doors.

Columbus residents, inmates, and guards survived with indelible images etched into their memories. One recalled a “negro clutching at the iron grilling of a window” on the fourth tier, pulling frantically at bars that wouldn’t budge. “Delirious with fear … he shouted at the guards, firemen and police below,” but no one could understand him as “he gibbered high up behind the grilling” of a solid window.⁴⁸ A guard looked up at the caged convicts and “saw faces at the windows wreathed in smoke that poured through broken glass.” A United Press reporter observed a fellow being lowered down with a rope until it slipped and tightened around his neck, strangling him to death—a public hanging.⁴⁹

Convicts on the fifth and sixth tiers, closest to the blazing roof, cursed and prayed, others broke down and cried, while others uttered “blasphemies, too horrible to repeat.” Some early accounts described men scratching at the doors to their cells “with bleeding hands.” Others “ripped at their hair” or “chewed at the steel barriers with their teeth like caged animals.” One report had a prisoner slashing his own throat with an improvised knife. One of the heroes of the evening, later confined in the hospital with severe burns, remembered passing one cell as he held an unconscious victim in his arms, where he saw a fellow convict “dangling at the end of a twisted shirt in the last throes of death by strangulation.”⁵⁰

Few prisoners chronicled their Easter Monday fire experiences, and those who did often recorded their memories decades later, when they were liable to be distorted by the passage of time. Sugar Bill Baliff, a bank robber doing fifty years, was interviewed about the fire almost twenty years later. He was housed in a nearby cellblock, and it wasn’t long before the smoke was being pushed into his quarters. He recalled shouting for help until he was rescued by two men bearing sledgehammers, who helped break him out of the cell. Baliff claimed to have joined others from his block who headed to the burning cellblock to help in the rescue. He said, “We started to move the men. We didn’t have enough stretchers, so we used blankets. Some of the boys died locked together. After we [delivered] them out in the yard, we counted them—322.”⁵¹

Sonny Hanovich shared some of his memories over a half century later, offering some of the most detailed and insightful comments on the event. He remembered that it had been “a beautiful spring day. The sun was shining. The shadows were slowly creeping over the huge quadrangle and I noticed this sort of haze or mist.” He didn’t pay attention to it until it got darker and “began to sort of roll, like a fog. The next thing I know someone says that’s smoke, dammit, that’s smoke.” One of his cellmates asked him, “Sonny, do you hear anything?” He responded, “Yeah, the last few minutes I’ve been hearing something like screams, or something like that,” and in the next moments he heard someone shout “Fire.”

Fifty years later, Sonny still vividly remembered the bodies: “[I] thought … these were all colored men in there, because when we started carrying them out, stretching them out on the grass there, I thought they was all colored, that’s how charred they were.” Sonny was among the observers who were under the impression that “no one burned to death,” and that the burns must have been received after suffocating to death.

Although Hanovich was not housed in the threatened cellblocks, he recounted that many of the convicts in his block feared the whole pen was going to go up in flames, while others took “any opportunity at all” to “join in the melee and make as much racket as they could.” Sonny considered himself lucky for having been recently transferred from the fatal 6G tier to the A&B blocks in another building.

Like many other rescuers, Sonny could only make it up to the fourth range before being forced back by smoke. He backtracked to the third tier. By then “the smoke there was already down to a couple of feet from the top of range…. We walked along the cells there peering in to see whether or not we could see any signs of life…. This one man ahead of me, he passed one cell, and just as I approached it, I thought I see a man make a movement. Now there was inmates lying in all positions, some on the bed, some on the floor, and one guy had his head in the toilet, see. This one particular body, he had his fingers entwined in the cell grating and was just hanging there.” As he and another inmate tried to pull him away from the cell bars, “it just left most of the right hand there.” Thinking he saw one body move, Hanovich “hollered to this guy, ‘Hey get back here.’ He came back and I said ‘I think I saw that guy move.’ We stood there watching for a couple of seconds and he said, ‘No hell, all these guys along here are gone. Let’s go down to the next range, maybe we can help them.’” On their way down they could hear men battering with hammers, sledgehammers—but “there was no order…. There was no one there to take command, no guard or anything.” Sonny would later help remove the bodies. He and the other rescuers were instructed to use regular stretchers, instead of the makeshift alternatives they had assembled from blankets and other materials, “to make sure bodies didn’t fall apart.”⁵²

One guard recounted “the heart rending” screams of the dying and those helpless before the searing flames. Agonized screams echoed through the cellblocks, probably not unlike how caged animals in a zoo respond in similar circumstances. Meanwhile, terrified guards, who had been conditioned against liberating their charges, saw the flames but hesitated to immediately unlock the cells, thus losing the brief window of opportunity. This delay doomed hundreds of prisoners.

When rescuers reached the top two tiers, they found that the keys would not unlock the cells. Due to the intensity of the heat, some locks had been melted shut or were too warped to open. Guards, firemen, and inmates resorted to axes and sledgehammers to smash the locks. Of the 262 prisoners housed on the top two tiers, only 13 survived. By the time Fire Chief Nice entered the blocks at 6:16, most of the men were dead. At 6:40 the roof over G&H collapsed, preceded by bits of burned timber that ignited anything that would burn, including bedding and mattresses.

One of the more remarkable aspects of the disaster was how guards and convicts forgot their mutual antagonism, at least for the moment, in order to save their brethren. Indeed, for probably the first time in the history of the Ohio penitentiary system, convicts were entrusted with ropes, axes and hammers, and other rescue equipment, items that in quieter times might have been turned into deadly weapons to be used against each other or the guards. In the bedlam, “a Negro convict [ran] with a piece of white cloth over his nose,” carrying a rope and hook, which he made “valiant efforts to throw into a barred window.” He finally succeeded and proceeded to shinny up the rope in an effort to gain entrance to the burning block. At the same moment others were assaulting locked doors with sledgehammers.⁵³ Once freed from their cells, most inmates headed to the safety of the prison yard, while others returned to the cellblocks to help in the rescue efforts.

Inmate survivor Chester Himes featured the fire and the heroism of the convicts in several of his early stories. In one of them, his fictitious alter ego Jimmy Monroe was most impressed by the gallantry of the convicts as they rushed into the burning G&H block. He tried hard to fathom the binary lives of these men “who were in for murder and rape and arson, who had shot down policemen in dark alleys, who had snatched pocket books and run, who had stolen automobiles and forged checks, who had mutilated women and carved their torso into separate arms and legs and heads and packed them into trunks.” How could you explain these men now “working overtime at their jobs of being heroes, moving through the smoke with reckless haste to save some other bastard’s worthless life…. All working like mad at being heroes, some laughing, some solemn, some hysterical—drunk from their momentary freedom, drunk from being brave for once in a cowardly life.” Monroe figured it out: “It was exciting. The fire was exciting. The live ones and the dead ones were exciting. It gave them something to do … something to break the galling monotony of serving time.”⁵⁴

People die in fires for two reasons: they are burned to death or asphyxiated. Smoke and hot gases produced by a conflagration unite as “deadly enemies.” When fire reaches a certain stage, it creates its own draft and carries itself along. The heat mushrooms up and settles down and suffocates, as it did in the upper tiers of G&H blocks. Making matters worse were the ancient timbers and sheeting exposed on the interior side of the roof in the cellblock under construction. As fumes meet an obstruction like a ceiling or a roof, they spread out laterally until they reach the wall. In this case the wind and the flames conspired to spread death, trapping many convicts in their cells, beyond human aid and fearing what was to come. Their voices joined in a mighty crescendo of screams.

One of the best-chronicled building fires in the history of the United States, the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston, offers insight into how victims often die in fires. The patrons were of course not locked in cells like the Ohio inmates, but they might as well have been. One account described nightclub victims who “seemed to be falling down without even trying to run or to push. They were suffocating. Some were falling victim to carbon monoxide in the thick smoke that was already replacing the oxygen in their bloodstream. Others were burning up inside as they inhaled the superheated air—burning wood and fabric that can generate temperatures … that seared shut their throat and lungs.”⁵⁵

There were a number of other parallels between these two fires. Both were first reported at 5:20, and both moved with “astonishing speed.” Both were shortlived but resulted in high mortality. At Cocoanut Grove, firefighters not only had to battle flames quickly but had to cope with a frenzied dinner crowd running helter-skelter in the dense black smoke. Similarly to the Ohio Penitentiary event, where guards failed to take charge and use common sense, at the Grove a waiter asked one of the employees for keys to the locked service door, which he knew were kept in the kitchen, and was told, “Not until the boss tells me.”⁵⁶

The almost twenty-minute gap between when the fire was first discovered and 5:39, when the Columbus Fire Department received its first alarm, meant the difference between rescue and mass death. It took about two minutes for one fire truck and three engine companies under the command of Assistant Fire Chief Osborn to reach the pen from the No. 1 firehouse on Front and Elm Streets. By the time they arrived the fire had already spread through two-thirds of the cell house containing the four blocks. Despite their best efforts, the strong northerly wind continued to push the fire and smoke into the occupied G&H block.⁵⁷ By 5:45 the firefighters had brought their equipment into the prison. Two minutes later, the first photograph of the fire, taken at 5:47, “showed the north quarter of the roof of cell building already burned down and all the remainder of the roof visible in the picture gutted or in full flame.”⁵⁸

Upon their arrival the firemen connected a hydrant at the northwest corner of the new auditorium (across the yard from the E&F dormitories and the closest building to I&K) and directed a stream of water into a notch window in the I&K cellblocks. Unfortunately, the heavy iron grilling on the windows caused the stream of water to become “so broken up as to be rendered ineffective,” and the line was soon cut off.⁵⁹

By the time all pumpers were operational and connected to hydrants, “the fire was burning fiercely and the entire roof over I and K had fallen in.” Initially several convicts took the hose away from some firefighters they thought were not responding fast enough and attempted to carry it into the ranges themselves. They were quickly persuaded to let the firemen work unimpeded. Several more lines were hooked up to pumpers to extinguish the fires burning in bedding and cell furnishings in various cells.

It took the firefighters ten to fifteen minutes after arrival to ascend to the top range of cells, having first had to direct the laying of hose lines outside. Once there, they saw dead men in the cells.⁶⁰ The firefighters would spend most of their time that evening inside the walls, since they also assisted in the removal of bodies. According to a spokesman for the department on the scene, they believed the fire started from the north end and traveled south with the stiff wind.

Ohio has a legacy of firefighting knowhow. The nation’s first paid fire department was inaugurated in 1853 in Cincinnati, just a hundred miles from Columbus. A year earlier, Boston had introduced a fire box system, making “telegraphy the servant of firefighting.” The precursor to the call box used to summon firefighters to the Columbus fire, it was described as “a system of metal alarm boxes that when ‘pulled’ would immediately transmit their location to a central office. From here the location of the box would be tapped out to all firehouses in the vicinity, so that the nearest one knew to respond first.⁶¹

Unlike their modern-day counterparts, alarm boxes in the 1930s were purposely made so they would be difficult to pull. Authorities were concerned that “light-minded people would play with the fire alarm equipment and cause needless runs.” In order to even open the box, an individual reporting a fire would have to retrieve the key, which was kept at a nearby house or business. Not surprisingly, this process often led to delayed alarms. Except for these devices there were surprisingly “few innovations in firefighting until the early twentieth century.”⁶²

The assistant fire chief, who would go on to help direct the removal of the bodies after the catastrophe, remained firmly of the opinion that the fire started in the north end and traveled south with the wind. Moreover, he was convinced that the fire must have started no more than half an hour before the alarm sounded.

The Columbus firefighters discovered multiple secondary fires, including a “burning pile of rubbish, rags and paper” under the steps leading to the chapel and fires in the cotton mill building and the E&F dormitory.⁶³ Fire officials testified later that these fires were of incendiary origin, not part of any prearranged prison escape but just convicts being convicts, taking advantage of the pandemonium to “add to the excitement and general confusion.”

The chapel fire was controlled quickly with only slight damage to the exterior. The cotton mill fire, the largest of the secondary fires, was located on the first floor of the north end of the building. The chief engineer at the power house luckily discovered the blaze and was able to break through the building’s door and spray the contents of a two-and-a-half-gallon chemical extinguisher. It would come out during the fire inquiry that extinguishers were only available in the factory buildings. (Since extinguishers were frequently targeted by incendiaries and there had never been a fire of any magnitude in the cellblocks, this was considered an appropriate strategy under the Thomas administration.) With the assistance of a hose line manned by firemen, this fire too was extinguished. Except for some water damage, the cotton mill building was little damaged.⁶⁴ The third of the incendiary fires was found in the bunkhouse housing black prisoners. It turned out that several beds had been torched, and when a fireman stepped in to put it out he was threatened by the occupants. He was soon joined by other firemen supported by prison guards, and this fire was extinguished as well.

One firefighter would later lament that “the prisoners expected us to do the impossible. Our line wouldn’t reach to the second floor. We had hell. The prisoners took the line away from us…. If they had any leadership we would have been completely mobbed.” They implied that the prisoners wanted them do something “we couldn’t do.” By some accounts there were an estimated 140 firemen on the scene at the height of the fire, working twenty-three lines, so as to direct twenty-three different streams on all sides of the burning cell house, and eight pumpers, each with a one-thousand-gallon capacity. However, an initial fire report suggested that the number of firefighters was actually higher, as it was “considerably” supplemented by members of the off shift.⁶⁵

When the hoses didn’t work, firemen resorted to acetylene torches to open cells. Unfortunately, their hoses did not reach the sixth tier, and they were soon surrounded by frantic convicts trying to wrest them away. One firefighter commented, “I don’t think they were trying to be malicious—just crazy with the horror of seeing their fellows die like rats” on the upper tiers. But other cons did make deliberate attempts to stop them from doing their jobs, such as the madman who cut a hose line before being seen running away gripping a knife.

Prisoners and firemen were both adversaries and collaborators. At one point they spent almost three hours helping to loosen the No. 1 ladder truck, which had become stuck in mud in the prison yard. Conversely, convicts tried to set a gas tank attached to a fire truck on fire as the main blaze came under control. Some threw blankets under the gas tank as others threw matches at it. Firemen jumped on the trucks and drove them and the gasoline tank away.⁶⁶ Some prisoners tried to drain gasoline from the fire truck and as it was being driven away by firemen, others began throwing rocks at it, knocking out one of its headlights.⁶⁷ Assistant fire chief Norris J. Ijams was attempting to connect a hose to fight the fire in the cotton mill when he was attacked and slightly injured. Convicts also cut two sections of the hose.

The clergy was well represented on Easter Monday. None though were as prominent as the Rev. Albert O’Brien. Following an excited phone call to Aquinas College in Columbus beseeching its Dominican priests to rush to the dying men at the penitentiary, he was among the first to answer the call of duty. Born in a small town in Ireland on January 14, 1888, O’Brien left for America in 1908 after completing high school. He was ordained in Washington, DC, in 1915 and served the Dominican Order in a number of states before landing at the Ohio State Penitentiary in October 1926 as chaplain to the prison’s Catholic inmates, a position he held until his death in 1933. His humor and kindness earned him well-deserved reverence among the prison population.⁶⁸

O’Brien’s former secretary, identified only as Ex-Convict 59968, chronicled the priest’s heroism that night. He said that O’Brien was at home in his rectory at the St. Patrick’s Parish on East Naghten Street “preparing for dinner after a busy day” when he was informed by phone that the prison was on fire. He left immediately and made it inside the prison within ten minutes. Garbed in his purple stole, O’Brien immediately took charge of the Catholic clergy there. Once fourteen of them had arrived, equally divided between Dominicans and diocesan priests, he sent several to the prison hospital, where he knew they would be needed “to give Extreme Unction to those of the faith, who seemed yet to be living.” He positioned himself and the rest just outside the burning cellblock building, where they could give absolution to the convicts as they were brought out by fellow inmates and set down “among the long lines of the dead and dying” in the darkening yard. They were helped by a prisoner, who identified which were Catholics. O’Brien was standing so close to the cellblock that an inmate suggested that he move further away due to danger of the walls falling on him. The walls crumbled shortly after the inmate’s admonition, “burying prisoners beneath the smoldering debris.”⁶⁹ Once he was sure that all had been tended to, O’Brien went into the still-smoldering block to help with the rescue, but like so many others before him was unable to get beyond the third tier. He went back into the yard, where he was temporarily overcome by the smoke.⁷⁰

In the fire’s aftermath, Father O’Brien, the “hero priest,” noted that eighty-five Catholics were on the list of victims being compiled and that “all had received Holy Communion on Easter,” the day before the fire. He recounted a number of poignant scenes, including his walk “among the lines of the dying,” many of whom “reached up their hands, and died as I imparted absolution.” He was particularly struck by a young man who held a rosary in his hands and another who held “a tiny cross of palm on his coat.”⁷¹

The G&H cellblocks were adjacent to the prison courtyard, sometimes referred to as a quadrangle or quad. At first glance the bucolic plot of green space could have been located on any college campus, until one peered up at the barred windows looking down from all sides. As soon as a lifeless or injured victim was brought out of the cell-house building, he was placed in the darkening prison yard. The bodies were often joined by groups of convict survivors, many crying hysterically, others wrapped in blankets and drenched in the water from the fire hoses or seeking treatment for burns suffered in their escape from the blaze. The green lawns of the prison yard were soon dotted with the hulks of men bleeding and gasping for air, many of whom were soon covered with blankets in the repose of death. As the acrid black smoke billowed into the cellblock tiers, it began to fill the quadrangle as well, sending panic through the already terrified inmates.⁷²

Poignant scenes played out across the yard. A severely burned white inmate was tenderly administered to by a group of about twenty black convicts. According to lore, he would owe his life to them. They had come upon the injured man lying on a blanket near the west wall and after gathering around him pleaded with him in unison “not to die,” telling him, “hang on friend, don’t leave us.” Witnesses reported them “bursting into strains of familiar plantation songs” as his life ebbed away. And then something miraculous occurred. “A grim smile appeared on his [burned] face” as “he clung to a meager thread of life” and appeared likely to recover.⁷³

In another corner of the quadrangle ten convicts huddled in a circle around one of their buddies on the verge of death. They took turns working on him for two hours, one repeating over and over, “Come on Walter, don’t give in! We’re pulling for you!” As he succumbed to his injuries, one pal was crying into his ear, while another rubbed his arms and another pumped his lungs—all to no avail.⁷⁴

One of the more embroidered accounts of the fire was published in the national edition of the Chicago Defender, among the country’s leading African American newspapers. It cited the death toll as “the heaviest in the history of disastrous fires in America,”⁷⁵ noting the seventy-five “Race inmates,” as it referred to African Americans, among the dead. Actually, a perusal of the death certificates from the Ohio Penitentiary reveals that fewer than twenty prisoners of color perished in the fire. The Defender’s editors were obviously proud of the heroism displayed by many black convicts that evening, as illustrated by the following account: “Our prisoners were the outstanding heroes of the disaster. They made quick decisions at the critical time. They were the first to dash from the comparative safety of the prison yard into the fiery inferno of the doomed cell block to rescue their fellow prisoners, the majority of whom were white.”⁷⁶

Other accounts offered by the Defender included the actions of a twenty-two-year-old inmate who carried a white inmate across his shoulders until he crumpled to the ground in front of the main gates. The white convict was already dead, and according to the paper’s account the young rescuer’s condition “was such as to give him slight chance to live. His clothing had been burned and his face was seared, but had a trace of a smile as a guard pumped air into his lungs.” Also mentioned were brave men such as George Alkens of Cleveland, who broke inmates out of the fiery cellblocks, and Roy Buttle, also from Cleveland, who went through a burning cellblock with a hammer “smashing locks to liberate half-crazed prisoners.” Another “unknown Race prisoner overpowered a guard who refused to open cells over which he had charge.” He allegedly secured the guard’s keys and saved men on the 5H tier.

Understandably, the African American paper tended to inflate some of the exploits of the black convicts, crediting them with herculean rescues that did not add up once the entire narrative of the disaster was in place. Their heroism was unquestionable, but the numbers saved by black prisoners do not jibe with the majority of the available accounts. For example, the claim that Howard Jones, who raced through the smoky tiers breaking locks with a sledgehammer, saved “the lives of 135 men” rests on shaky ground. Similar exploits were attributed to other convicts, such as Dan Evans, who rescued twenty-one men; Jack Wright, who carried seventeen prisoners to safety on his back; O. B. Hawkins, who saved seventy-five men “before he collapsed and was removed to the hospital”; and John Jackson of Columbus, who escaped the E Dormitory to help carry forty men from the top two tiers. This last claim is surely suspect, since all of the prisoners on the sixth tier perished, as did most of those on the fifth.

The Defender asserted that the “heroic trio” of Eddie Crawford, R. W. Mason, and George Thorpe were “the first men to gain entrance in the cell tier in which the flames were raging.” They very well might have been involved in cutting the screen with wire cutters and sledges and rescuing more than twenty inmates, but the Board of Inquiry left it beyond dispute that guards Baldwin and Little were the first to gain admittance to the smoke-filled G&H cellblocks. Rescued inmates, prison officials, and guards recounted their actions in separate testimony Other black convicts mentioned included one named Tucker, who carried the bodies of six men before he died, and Henry Caldwell, a lifer, who almost paid with his life saving inmates.

Among the most celebrated actors on Easter Monday was the warden’s daughter, Amanda, who has been credited in most contemporary accounts with giving the alarm that “brought every piece of fire apparatus in Columbus, every available policeman, a company of the National Guard and 600 soldiers, and every doctor and nurse from miles away.”⁷⁷ One reporter described how she “worked frantically at a telephone hook and talked herself hoarse to a mechanic on the other end in an effort to get power turned on” from a different power station.⁷⁸ Some accounts had Amanda Thomas ordering guards to their posts while she “issued guns and ammunition, called doctors and nurses, summoned troops and performed many other duties.”⁷⁹ Another described her as “one of the outstanding figures in maintaining peace and order among the convicts during the disaster.” The account boasted that “throughout the fire and panic” she worked “untiring, helping her father place guards, directing the activities of physicians and nurses and broadcasting appeals for assistance.”⁸⁰ The warden’s daughter, for all of her spunk and courage, relinquished much of her gravitas when it was revealed that as the fire approached her family’s residence in the penitentiary main building, she turned her attention from the unfolding prison holocaust to “ordering her valuables removed” from the house.⁸¹

In reality, Amanda Thomas was one of many women who pitched in Easter Monday. Elizabeth Sampson, director of the Physicians and Surgeons Bureau, “played an important part in the rescue work,” calling all the area physicians to the prison after she was contacted to do so by Warden Thomas. For the time, the exchange represented a big stride toward more effective emergency response communications. Each doctor in the area called the exchange hourly and it was only through Sampson that the doctors could be quickly contacted. She was assisted by several young women in contacting doctors at their last reported locations.⁸²

Caught up in the excitement of the moment, newspaper reporters went out of their way to create heroes in order to capture the fancy of readers in a newspaper-saturated era. Like those of the African American inmates chronicled in the Defender, Ms. Thomas’s contributions were likely embroidered for public consumption. While initial reports cast her as a central figure, she was barely mentioned in the 722-page Board of Inquiry report. Indeed, early reports suggested that the “women members of the Thomas family [were] all panic stricken standing near the door to their home to watch guards and volunteers remove valuables from the warden’s residence,” fearing it was in the path of the fire.⁸³

Monday night the warden’s wife collapsed, but she was revived and placed under the care of a physician at 7:15. An African American newspaper correctly reported that a “Race” convict had come to her aid, supporting her on his arm and giving her a drink of water to revive her. However, his “race” was not reported in the local newspapers at the time. After some rest and the application of restoratives she declared herself fit to render aid.⁸⁴

With darkness approaching on Easter Monday, it was obvious that more lighting would be required inside the prison walls. Floodlights were set up above the prison by the Superior Electric Company, allowing workers to more effectively administer first aid. Soon a large number of smaller lights, removed from the swimming pool at Olentangy Park, were brought to the pen.⁸⁵ By sundown soldiers had delivered a boxload of new flashlights as well. Meanwhile, electricians were feverishly attempting to hook up a power line so that wall lights and inside lights could be used.⁸⁶

One story that continued to gain traction as it was passed around through the prison grapevine was that a guard had refused to let a convict out of his cell and a black inmate had tried to liberate him with the help of a chisel. In one version of the events, the guard supposedly shot both prisoners and ran away. Another account had a Cincinnati convict named Albert Johnson crying as he showed a reporter his hand, saying, “Mister, we pleaded and pleaded with that guard to let us out but he wouldn’t…. He only said get back there you black ——— and forced us away from the door. Then he ran out and left us to die.”⁸⁷

The story was given significant attention by the African American press. An article in the Chicago Defender entitled “Guard Slays Two,” based on the recollections of several survivors, reported that “two Race prisoners were killed by a guard when they attempted to escape from their cell.” The paper preferred the sobriquet “Race prisoner” over other identifiers used by mainstream press.

The most graphic account of the shooting was provided by the Ohio State Journal, reported by a white lifer who refused to give his name.

That guard was the worst coward I ever saw. I feel sorry for him if he ever shows his face inside the prison again. It wasn’t so bad when he just refused to open the gates, but then I and another convict, who had been freed by Guard Little, went to the coward and begged him to open the doors, and again he refused. My partner had a heavy chisel and he offered to the 2 boys locked in the cell. The guard tried to take it away from the men, but they refused and went to work on the lock fighting to get out. The guard said, ‘Give me that chisel or I’ll shoot you’ at the same time cursing loudly. They refused and he fired twice. We saw both men fall and the guard run from the tier, taking the keys with him … we heard he had been placed under arrest by the warden.

Prison officials denied these charges but refused to report where the guard was.

One of the rare accounts of an inmate killed by gunshot wounds came from Sonny Hanovich, who claimed, more than a half century later, to have seen one body with a bullet hole in the back, and to have heard of another shot in his cell. Perhaps he was referring to the aforementioned account, but this incident is all but missing from every modern chronicle of the fatal fire and has never been satisfactorily substantiated.

Although there were several accounts of bullet wounds and shootings of inmates, no bullet wounds were ever authenticated. But the story gained credence the more times it was told. Tell a story enough times and it becomes fact. Although the shooting was quickly “corroborated by a group of twenty or more men,” officials continued to deny it, saying there was nothing to it. To the credit of the officials, in order to put the rumors to rest, a careful check for bullet wounds was made of every corpse at the temporary morgue, as well as all bodies being taken away for burial.

Several inmates and guards later reported hearing gunshots right before the inferno moved into G&H. During the investigation in the days after the fire, it was revealed that day guard Harold Whetstone, on watch above the warden’s residence (his perch consisted of a little walkway about fourteen or fifteen feet long that ran along the Spring Street wall), had heard several gunshots being fired over in the yard north of the chapel at about 5:40. Looking in the direction of the shots, he saw another guard named Porter around five hundred feet away, firing shots into the air. He deduced correctly that it was an attempt to grab his attention. Whetstone responded in kind, firing his 30-30 into the air. Porter, a day guard at the wagon stockade that ran through the cellblock, yelled back, “Turn in the fire alarm.” Whetstone pointed to the guardroom and hollered back, “I did.” In fact, he had done so three times before a shot had been fired.⁸⁸

The night of the fire witnessed the actions of remarkable heroes, while others in the days to come would be given credit for actions they could not have taken. One inmate, “Wild” Bill Croninger, was credited with having saved twelve men before collapsing and dying. As some told it, he went into the dense smoke repeatedly until he could not go any further. Injured and overcome by smoke, he sank down, said, “I’ve done my part,” and took his last breath. It made for a sensational story—but it wasn’t true. According to several Columbus historians, Croninger was not listed among the dead. In reality he was arrested several years after the fire for a spree of petty thefts. His codefendant Don Ford, however, was the nineteen-year-old son of an inmate who did die in the fire. Croninger had been friends with his father, who perished while serving time for child abandonment.⁸⁹

One “big burly negro convict” told three rescuers, “I can walk, leave me alone” after they dragged him to safety from the building ruins. Once they let him go, the convict “straightened up, brushed a brawny hand across a pathetically seared face and headed down the path to the hospital. Took several resolute steps then faltered and plunged face downward into a pool of water. He managed to roll over on his side. ‘I can’t walk,’ he muttered, ‘lay me down.’ They did and he was dead.”⁹⁰

One of the most difficult challenges was bringing out the bodies of the dead from the top three tiers. A number of them were lowered to the ground with ropes and, once prostrate on the quadrangle, were covered with blankets, “where they lay in grotesque positions” until removed by National Guardsmen. The process began before the fire was out but after most victims had succumbed to smoke. Demonstrating the ingenuity shared by longtime inmates, bodies were lowered from tiers with ropes as “flames still licked at ruins” and lethal smoke filled the air. A score of convicts managed to find some ropes somewhere. “Tripping over the hot and smouldering [sic] embers they scrambled up the six tiers of the ruined prison. Howling, eager, unorganized, they managed to get into shape for the work. They distributed themselves, a few men on each level, and strung their ropes from one tier to another. The first body was dangled down and swayed a moment in midair,” before one rescuer yelled from above, ‘Here comes one! Here comes one!’” Another disembodied voice chimed in, “Here he comes, here he comes, ketch ’im, don’t let him fall…. The bodies dangled down in an endless stream” as the prisoners got the hang of working together. Occasionally cries of alarm rent the air; in one case they indicated that “a body had fallen on the backs of laboring men on the third tier.”⁹¹

Above the din inside the walls, parallel acts of boldness were taking place as volunteers from all walks of life volunteered to assist. Although gate regulations prohibited anyone except soldiers and law enforcement officers beyond the bullpen Monday night, “a Boy Scout of ‘half-pint’ size, his shoulders thrust back, trooped through the phalanx of guards to gain the inner sanctum.” Joining the legions of volunteers, Bertillon identification system officers Homer Richter and Johnny Rings of the city police “donned a uniform Monday night for the first time in many years and acted as patrolmen.”⁹²

Sirens and ambulances could be heard speeding back and forth through the rubbernecking crowds interfering with traffic down Spring Street from High Street all the way to Front Street. Doctors and medical personnel responded in great numbers. As they drove up to the gate they were stopped by police and asked, “Are you a doctor?” Those who answered in the affirmative were told “Go on, hurry” and directed down to the railroad yards on the east side of the prison, where they got out of their cars and walked to the pen doors. They moved snakelike through the guardroom out into the prison yard and into the hospital, where they found the dead and dying crammed into every conceivable space “like sardines.”

As a result of the overwhelming response, doctors soon had little space to navigate in. Others were told to go and sit in the front office until their colleagues needed relief. Likewise, nurses, described by one reporter as “calm, cool, and efficient looking,” swarmed through the front doors.⁹³ They too waited until needed in the hospital, when they headed across the prison quad in small groups. Few had time to worry about walking through a gauntlet of hundreds of Ohio’s most dangerous convicts, including Dr. Betty Morris, the first female physician at the scene of the fire. It was hard to miss her moving through the prison yard reviving men with “spirits of ammonia.” Her bravery led one journalist to write, “The only woman among a crowd of workers and white and black prisoners, she was treated with utmost respect.”⁹⁴

In perhaps the oddest moment of the tragic evening, Ohio State University junior James F. Laughead, who happened to be driving past the prison as the fire was raging, tried to gain entrance by representing himself as a physician’s assistant. When his ruse failed, he tried another plan. He signed the name of a prominent Columbus newspaper editor to gain entry and managed to make it as far as the prison yard just as casualties were being brought out from the cellblocks. However, he was soon mistaken for a convict and forced into a cell, as the fire was still blazing and a riot was on the verge of breaking out. He was kept behind bars for two hours until he could be properly identified.⁹⁵

The Ohio Penitentiary fire was the first major American disaster to be covered instantaneously by sound motion picture crews, radio stations, and newspaper reporters, the three major arms of the mainstream media. After Fox Movietone covered Lindbergh taking off for his solo flight to Paris in May 1927, audiences had to wait several days to watch it in person, and only those in New York would have been able to see and hear the airplane take off, since the “sound equipment was still confined to” movie palaces in the Big Apple. Nonetheless, audiences would thrill to the hum of the iconic monoplane Spirit of St. Louis taking off and then “ris[ing] above Roosevelt Field.”⁹⁶ Within a few years and by 1930, “sound news-reels” were issued twice weekly by Fox, Pathé, and Paramount and shown on almost twelve thousand screens across the United States.

Airplanes played a significant role in transporting news to the free world. During the first hours of the unfolding disaster, photographs and news articles were rushed to their home offices by plane. In fact, that evening airplanes were warmed up and on standby at the local Norton and Sullivan Fields, in case they were needed to transport photographs or other tasks.⁹⁷ The Dallas Morning News reported its photographers transmitting photos “by telephoto” over regular phone lines to Chicago. From there the photos were flown to Dallas.⁹⁸ Thanks to advances in newspaper technology, the world of news was rapidly changing, and editors wanted to tell stories in pictures whenever possible.

The penitentiary fire had burned itself out after about two hours, but by three o’clock the next afternoon, only twenty-one hours after the first alarm, theater patrons in moving-picture houses on Broadway, some six hundred miles away, “not only [saw] the harrowing sights; they also heard the shrieking of the prison siren, the hissing as water hits the flames, the howling of desperate prisoners, the crackling of burning logs, the thud of falling beams, the commands of Army officials and jail officials.”⁹⁹ The short clips were accompanied by a “brief talkie lecture by an expert on prison conditions, explaining the causes of the tragedy and suggesting means of preventing its occurrence.” One leading popular science journal declared that this should be “considered a world’s record in the speedy gathering and presentation of audible photographic news.” Except for a few photos transmitted by special wire, “the pictorial story was in the theaters before the New York dailies had their pictures in print.” The 300 feet of Pathé film played in about two and a half minutes. The “sound newsreel” had come into its own in April 1930 as a “talking newspaper.”¹⁰⁰

It is worth noting that the sound men who were on their way to cover the fire “narrowly escaped death” when their “camion” or sound truck was hit “by a high tension electric wire during a wild night drive through a storm to the scene of the disaster.” Beating their competition to record the fire in Columbus was made possible by the fact that they were already in Cleveland, 126 miles away, reporting the opening of the American League baseball season when the disaster took place.¹⁰¹

Every form of communication was utilized during the course of the disaster. Ohio State Journal staff reporter Ray Coon, besides contributing print coverage, also broadcast the details of the fire over WLW Cincinnati. He somehow managed to set up an emergency broadcasting station in the Department of Education building in the statehouse annex. From there he stayed in touch with his newspaper in order to offer descriptive details of the scene inside the prison.¹⁰²

Also on the spot Easter Monday was Columbus station WAIU. It had its own remote-controlled equipment already inside the prison walls, making it possible to broadcast directly from the scene of the disaster. So, as the reporters for the city newspapers were sitting down for dinner, the conflagration was simultaneously broadcast by radio. It would be another several hours before all of the newspapers were fully staffed.¹⁰³

The Ohio Penitentiary was so inundated with phone calls from Ohio and beyond that special telephones and switchboards had to be placed in its lobby.¹⁰⁴ Magnifying the confusion were an estimated five hundred telegrams sent from the penitentiary to the families of the deceased at midnight on Easter Monday, alerting them to the tragedies that had befallen their loved ones as well as where they could reclaim the bodies.¹⁰⁵ The telegrams and news dispatches about the fire challenged the “physical and human capacity” of the employees of the Western Union Telegraph Company and the Postal Telegraph Company. By the following morning Western Union had handled two hundred thousand words in seventy-five hundred different messages, while the Postal Telegraph Company had handled more than thirty-five thousand words during one six-hour period ending Tuesday at 1 a.m. Messages sent included special correspondent reports to their newspapers as well as convict messages to relatives and agencies involved in identifying the dead and the survivors.¹⁰⁶ (Prisoners had to pay for their own messages to be sent.)¹⁰⁷ More than one thousand telegrams had inundated the prison from the relatives of convicts from throughout the country. The entire workforce from the outer office, augmented by volunteers, worked to check prison records on individual inmates.

One of the few feel-good stories to be had in the direct aftermath of the prison catastrophe was that of Convict 46812, better known as Otto W. “Deacon” Gardner, a graduate of the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, whose actions on Easter Monday earned him national acclaim. The thirty-five-year-old Pennsylvanian, who had entered the Ohio Penitentiary in 1917, was doing life for the murder of his wife and another woman in Youngstown, Ohio. According to the African American newspaper the Chicago Defender, Gardner was one of the most popular and best-known inmates. The night of the fire he delivered “one of the epoch events in radio broadcasting.”¹⁰⁸ As he vividly chronicled the fire on station WAIU, the prison radio station, “his voice was carried into thousands of homes throughout America over the Columbia Broadcasting System.” (The prison radio station was a unit of the Columbia system.) CBS president William S. Paley rewarded him with a check for $500 (over $7,000 in 2017). “At a time when the entire country was anxiously awaiting news of the worst catastrophe in American prison history,” Paley told him, “you willingly, in the face of great danger, gave a sympathetic and accurate word picture of the holocaust.” From 7 to 12 p.m., Gardner, who was “only 30 feet from the blaze at the time,” reached out for doctors, nurses, and “narcotics.”¹⁰⁹

Between 8 and 9 p.m. the fire might have been under control, but the prison yard was seething with anarchy as thousands of prisoners freely milled about, screaming, shouting, and menacing firefighters. Fire chiefs threatened to let the whole prison burn down unless guaranteed protection. The first reporters on the scene often embellished and exaggerated what they saw or heard, mostly the latter. Firefighters and guards may have testified seeing convicts drop in their tracks, but reporters’ claims that they saw prisoners “literally burned alive before our eyes” is rather farfetched considering the totality of evidence and accounts of the fire. But it did sell papers. These reports would be dispelled in the days to come as the morticians and coroners did their jobs, finding that the overwhelming majority died from smoke inhalation, and that most burns had been postmortem. All the prisoners on the sixth tier, all but thirteen on the fifth tier, and a number on the fourth range were dead. Now it was up to a Board of Inquiry to begin the truth-seeking process.