Читать книгу Fire in the Big House - Mitchel P. Roth - Страница 12

2

THE FAIRGROUNDS

Those going in are alive; those going out, dead.

—A physician at the prison hospital, April 21, 1930

Once the fire danger had passed late Monday night, reporters and survivors in search of fellow convicts were curious as to the human consequences of what had just transpired. One intrepid reporter described scenes of carnage and the reactions of inmates as they searched the corpses in the penitentiary quadrangle before they were taken away to a temporary morgue at the fairgrounds. He saw “scores of closely cropped heads protruding from beneath water soaked blankets, pair after pair of roughly shod feet and here and there a seared hand … shapeless masses that lay row upon row.” One of the survivors “searched tirelessly among the corpses for his cell buddy, throwing the beams of his lantern into one horrible face after another.” One journalist on the scene as the identification process continued in the prison yard described “bobbing lanterns” throwing “ghastly circles of yellow light on the upturned faces as the men detailed to the job of identification made their rounds. They did not look at the features of the corpses” if possible, but focused their attention on the stenciled numbers on their prison uniforms.¹

Paul Ferguson, the son of the Plain City, Ohio funeral director, recalled sixty years after the fire what he considered “the darkest memories in his career as mortician.” The sixteen-year- old happened to answer the telephone at the family funeral home the night of the fire to find out one of the victims was the son of local residents who had just been notified by prison officials to come to Columbus to recover the body for burial. Ferguson and his brother Jay wasted no time heading out to retrieve the body. It is unclear where Ferguson’s father was at this time or how long the teenager or his brother had been involved in the family business, but it seems Ferguson was familiar with the mortuary business. He recounted in 1990, “I wasn’t even supposed to be in there, not at my age. But I sneaked in anyway because we had to get the boy.” While in the prison courtyard he took the opportunity to look at some of the dead bodies. The body he was to bring back “wasn’t burned nearly so bad as some were, but he was pretty bad. Some of these guys were pretty near cremated.”²

Young Ferguson witnessed firemen still struggling to put the fire out as shaken prisoners carried out dead convicts from the cellblocks and laid them prone in the yard. Some of them were embalmed on the spot. Ferguson observed one embalmer using a long tube, known as a trocar, “[inserting it] through the victim’s abdomen to shoot embalming fluid in.” He explained “that was about all you could do with a lot of them. They were too badly burned.” Ferguson recounted how, despite the frenetic aftermath of the disaster, the prison yard seemed “cloaked in sudden silence.”³

On Tuesday morning, parole officer Dan Bonzo released the “first official account” of the dead, tallied at 276. Given the confusion at the scene, the count would fluctuate over the first twenty-four hours. One spokesman for the prison hospital put the figure at 336, while journalists who had free rein following the fire counted the “dead strewn around” the prison yard as 305.⁴ Row after row of bodies were still lying on the water-soaked prison courtyard during the first body counts. Prison officials promised a more accurate death count once all of the bodies had been taken to the fairgrounds. Some 319 men would soon be laid out in long lines, “grim proof of the disaster.” One observer described the bodies as “seared and blackened.” The long horticulture building, “where flowers will be displayed next fall at the fair, was draped in black and blossoms from the state greenhouses.”⁵

Not surprisingly, some witnesses to the aftermath compared the scene to a battlefield. Many inmates and rescuers had served in the armed forces during the Great War, and would have been familiar with such scenes. According to Captain Tom W. Jones, who aided in the rescue attempt, the “scenes within were worse than anything he witnessed in the [battles of] Argonne or St. Mihiel.” One inmate compared the fire to warfare as “he leaned against a tree for support while his swimming eyes surveyed the sodden corpses.” A fellow convict shouted out, “The War! Don’t try to tell me this was like the war! I seen both, brother, over there we had a chance for our lives. We had two legs and could run if we couldn’t fight. But not here.” One local doctor, a war veteran himself, agreed that the prison yard “resembled an overseas emergency camp in the world war” as he reflected on the many victims “lying there burned to a crisp, while others suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning fumes which affected them like gas attacks” in the late war.⁶

The bodies’ repose in death offered a glimpse of the victims’ last moments of life. Those with “seared backs revealed how they turned to face to the walls of their cells protecting eyes and faces in vain.” Other victims were found in a crouched position, the so-called pugilist stance, “with arms outstretched in grotesque fighting poses,”⁷ the result of the contraction of larger muscles from the heat of the fire. In other instances, dying inmates had enough wherewithal to recognize their minutes were numbered and managed to scrawl notes or some type of identification information that could be used in case their fingerprints and faces proved unidentifiable. One doomed convict, a reporter wrote, possessed enough clarity “to seize pencil and paper and scribble as flames crept close.” Stopped midsentence, he only had time to write, “Dear Mother …” The note was found “scorched and water-soaked” as it was pried from “the stiffened fingers of a huge black man. He still held the pencil as he lay under a gray blanket in one of the rows upon the turf of the quadrangles. When the flares set off by the cameramen lighted his ebony countenance, there was not fear visible on it. Only resignation.”⁸

Inmate Gus Socha must have assumed this was not going to turn out well for him. When found in his cell he had a note pinned to the back of his shirt that read, “Notify John Dee Armory Avenue, Cincinnati.”⁹ Former blacksmith Theodore Cottrell, doing life for murder, was found among the “blanket swathed victims on the courtyard.” His intuition had been telling him he might die before his time, confiding to a friend the previous Christmas that it “will be my last Christmas here.”¹⁰ Of course he might have meant he hoped to escape or be paroled before then.

Much of the immediate postfire activity was centered at the prison hospital. Here the scene was chaotic at best, with doctors responding to emergency call broadcasts from the greater Columbus region. Their main task was to sort through the dead and wounded as each was laid down before them. As soon as a convict was declared dead, the identification number on his prison garb was taken off and matched with prison records to reveal his identity. The victim would then be declared “Checked out.”¹¹

One physician observed the “stream of pitiful forms, some gasping and shrieking, others horribly charred, pouring in and out” of the hospital, succinctly noting to one query, “Those going in are alive; those going out, dead.” One convict was overheard shouting, “Gangway! We’re bringing in my buddy.” But it was obvious the injured man was not going to make it, as “his face in death distorted by his last frantic effort to get a breath of fresh air in the holocaust which took his life.” As four men carried his blanket-wrapped body into the hospital, “onlookers fell away to make room.” A doctor in the hospital corridor checked the victim’s chest “gingerly” for a heartbeat. His stethoscope was silent, and all he could tell the man’s buddy was, “He’s dead.” In prison parlance, the four convicts bawled that he had “gone west,” screaming for vengeance as “another scorched human shell was placed alongside the endless rows of lifeless forms” in the prison courtyard just outside the hospital.¹²

Reporter Kenneth D. Tooill chronicled the tale of an inmate named “Pete” who was having his “good arm dressed” in the hospital. Pete noted that his other arm had been useless for years, “full of machine gun slugs.” But the “good arm did heroic work last night. It pulled man after man from the blackened cells.” Some were alive, others, such as his buddy, were not. Pete recounted that when he tried to pull his friend from the ruins of his cell “he came apart.” As the reporter listened, Pete began “raving about it and trying to rub his eyes out,” forcing a hospital assistant to “tie his good arm down.”¹³

By 5:30 a.m., the morning after the fire, many of the surviving inmates were herded into the prison chapel, where some turned benches into beds. Other convicts were sent to buildings untouched by the fire. In the meantime the prison yard was cleared of inmates. One local reporter wrote, “More horrible than the dead were some of the injured who had been carried to the prison hospital, stark, or raving mad, a few of them blinded and maimed.”¹⁴ By then the prison hospital was, like the prison itself, well over capacity.

On Tuesday, surviving victims spoke “quietly among [them]selves,” trying to find comfort on the “trim, white hospital cots” they were provided. Initial estimates placed 231 injured in hospital. A late check that day found only 5 of them in critical condition. The rough-hewn cons were attended to by prison nurses and inmates trained in the nursing arts. The inmate nurses were well respected by their comrades. Authorities recognized “their cool-headedness” and credited them with saving many lives and avoiding a near panic during the early hours of the catastrophe. They worked “systematically” as they “shunted case after case into the prison yard and administered oxygen under direction of a physician.”¹⁵ The hospital patients offered a variety of dispositions. One smoked “stoically and inquired about his pals.” Another asked for permission to go out and get fresh air, and another was more interested in reading the newspaper.¹⁶

Among the most prominent caretakers was the Ohio Penitentiary’s only physician, Dr. George Keil. On call twenty-four hours a day, he was at his post by 6 p.m. Easter Monday. As soon as he got to the hospital he called several local doctors, and after speaking with the warden was told to “call up all doctors you can get.” Keil called his wife and told her to do likewise. The response was more than was expected; he remembered that there got to be “more doctors than patients,” necessitating a directive to stop any more doctors from coming into the hospital.¹⁷

The hospital had bed capacity for 160, of which 147 were filled at the time of the fire. Anyone who was deemed ambulatory was asked to give up his bed to accommodate the avalanche of burn cases being brought in. By 8:30 p.m. the “National Guard or somebody” brought in a number of temporary cots, adding 150 more injured to the 160 already there.

During his testimony to the Board of Inquiry in the following days, Keil attested that a number of deaths both in the yard and hospital “just breathed and gasped and died…. They seemed to have inhaled either flame or gas and died.” As soon as a victim was pronounced dead, the body was removed. With so little space, as soon as six dead victims were taken out, six live ones were brought in. He admitted there was no way of knowing for sure whether the deceased died from burns, but strongly believed, as did most other authorities, that the vast majority died from suffocation. Asked how many of the 150 in the hospital died there, he responded that “15 or 20 possibly died or were already dead when they were brought in,” but recalled losing only one who had died since 10 p.m. on Monday evening, a victim who succumbed to bronchial pneumonia “from inhalation of smoke and possibly flames.”¹⁸

Investigators were interested in whether any of the victims had shared any last words with the doctor before taking their last breaths. Keil responded that even if they did say something, he wouldn’t have had time to listen with the ranks of the injured growing so quickly. Moreover, any who died in the hospital were already unconscious when they were brought in. Pressed further as to whether he heard any inmates speak about how the fire might have started, he told the authorities he was there “to take care of the sick” and was “not interested” in how it started.¹⁹

Badly burned convicts were at the mercy of contemporary medicine. Before World War II, surprisingly little was known about treating burn victims. Most advances would come too late for the Ohio Penitentiary fatalities. The go-to drug during the aftermath of the fire was opiates. It wasn’t long after the fire was contained that the prison ran out of its supply. Opiates were noticeably scarce at the prison chapel next to the burnt-out cell house, where “nearly a score of men lay with severe flesh burns … but painless under the influence of opiates administered by scores of Columbus physicians.” Fortunately, appeals to city physicians “brought more than enough” new supplies.²⁰

Most fire victims, as in the case of the Ohio Penitentiary fire, die from carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning; indeed, it is rare for fire victims to die from burns. Most thermal damage to the body occurs post mortem. Carbon monoxide poisoning occurs when the deadly gas combines with the hemoglobin in the blood, preventing it from carrying oxygen. Blood cells loaded with CO are unable to transport the life-sustaining oxygen to the body, and consequently the body becomes starved of oxygen. But if the pathologist does not find CO in the blood, the victim was probably dead before the fire. In the case of the Easter Monday blaze, there were so many dead that it was impossible to perform more than cursory checks of the bodies before embalming them. Therefore, autopsies were out of the question. However, if autopsies had been performed, forensic pathologists would probably have found soot in the stomach or, if the victim had been alive during the fire, in the victim’s airway (nose, throat, larynx, trachea, and bronchi).²¹

The disposal of the more than three hundred bodies “was the most solemn task” confronting officials on Tuesday and Wednesday, as wives, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, and friends of the deceased continued to mass against “the iron bars of the main prison gate,” hoping and demanding to be admitted into the still-smoldering pen. Although an officer read off the names of survivors and those who had escaped injury, many in the throng refused to believe it until they could see them in person. “They stood in dazed groups after a night of horror splashed with acts of heroism by some of those who had been considered the most desperate inside the walls.”

As soon as the mother and wife of Herbert Ross of Cleveland, serving time for carrying a concealed weapon, heard of the fire, they “departed so quickly” from the dinner table that they were still “attired in house dresses and aprons.” Newspapers lavished ink on them for making the drive to Columbus in two and a half hours, considered a “record” time for the era. Upon arrival they found to their great relief that Ross had been housed in another section, “serving as a waiter in the dining room,” and was unharmed.²²

Once family members arrived and a protocol for collecting bodies had been established, they were instructed to pass through the outer gate and were handed pencils to fill out a reference book. Then they were taken in charge by the warden’s daughter, Amanda Thomas, and parole officer Dan Bonzo. Many stood around the main gate for hours until they received a burial permit that allowed them to reclaim the body once it was conveyed to the temporary morgue in the Horticulture Building at the Ohio State Fairgrounds.²³ This would serve as the staging area for medical response personnel, including doctors, embalmers, nurses, and other volunteers.

The Horticulture Building, described by one reporter as a cattle barn, would serve as a combination morgue and hospital until the end of the week. Among the first on duty was the Red Cross, which set up a canteen at the fairgrounds. The Red Cross had charge of the fairgrounds and was assisted by members of the Columbus Junior League. As pleas for assistance continued to resonate throughout central Ohio, volunteers began arriving en masse. Among them was a delegation of physicians and students, led by Dr. J. C. McNamara from Marion. The Salvation Army, the Volunteers of America, and St. Francis Hospital offered their services as well. The Salvation Army set up a canteen in front of the prison to pass out food, coffee, and succor to exhausted firemen, rescuers, and inmates who aided in the rescue.

Every available physician was called to the disaster site, soon to be followed by an army of undertakers and coroners. They sped to the prison yard in trucks and private autos laden with spirits of ammonia, hoping to revive victims. But upon arrival they could do little to save the injured and dying in the prison yard, so they headed over to the state fairgrounds.

The work of transferring the deceased to the fairgrounds went more slowly than expected. There were only eighteen regulation-sized stretchers available. Using any other type of makeshift conveyance, such as blankets and quilts, could not prevent “bodies from falling apart.”²⁴ As the convicts carried the dead bodies to the trucks from the prison yard, one observer was struck by their “Cries of Gangway,” repeated with “monotonous regularity.” A prisoner who soon after the fire wrote a novel based on his experiences at the Ohio Penitentiary had one of his fictional characters take exception to the way the bodies were handled during transport. “There is nothing nice about the way they are handled. They are hoisted, carried to a truck which has high sides, then flung on the floor in the manner, possibly, that a dealer in hogs would throw his dead purchases into a lorry. One atop another, legs and arms in a jumbled batch, the dead are piled into the truck.” Taking one last look at the trucks as they headed to the fairgrounds, he watched a “receding view of a mass of legs and arms, of blackened faces and tousled hair.”²⁵

It was understood that the transporting of the bodies was supposed to be completed before dawn on Tuesday. Trucks and ambulances carried the lifeless bodies into the fairgrounds under heavy guard, in a process that to some observers resembled the ferrying of casualties from a battlefield. The large army trucks used for transporting the dead had been turned over to the state militia by the federal government shortly after World War I to be utilized as hearses. Few could have imagined they would be used for such a mass casualty event. One local reporter observed that “a caravan of death … rumbled in its grim way through the almost deserted streets of North Columbus early Tuesday morning.” Onlookers were struck by the “olive-drab army trucks looming gray under the garish light of street lamps” as they transported “their gruesome load of freight” from the penitentiary to the fairgrounds, where grieving relatives “braved the chill damp of the night to stand for hours waiting for the dreaded news.”²⁶ The first three trucks, driven by militiamen, delivered their “silent loads” at 1:35 a.m. Each truck transported six bodies. The grim task continued through the small hours before dawn, arriving on what one reporter dubbed “military schedule,” twenty minutes apart. The last of the bodies was removed from the Ohio Penitentiary by 4:14 a.m., making the dawn deadline.²⁷

By Tuesday morning one hundred embalmers and assistants were on duty. Before them were 230 operating tables covered with white sheets, all set up to await the arrival of the motor transport unit transferring the bodies from the prison yard. Several hours before the bodies arrived, a “small army of state employees” had dusted off the tables, all “arranged in orderly rows,” in preparation. A pad of absorbent cotton and other supplies were placed on each table. At the head of each table was a headrest, “a small box, a foot long, a foot wide and about three feet deep.” A reporter noted that “in happier times these little boxes had housed prize apples.”²⁸

Among the embalmers was the All-American Notre Dame football star Jack Cannon, one of the last “bareheaded” college football players, whom the noted sportswriter Grantland Rice would later call the best guard in Notre Dame’s history. A resident of Columbus, Cannon volunteered his services after letting it be known that he had studied embalming in college. He went directly to the Horticulture Building at the state fairgrounds soon after the first body was carried in, helped bring the second victim into the improvised morgue, and immediately set to work.²⁹

Once the bodies arrived, they were rigorously inspected for identification before they were allowed to remain at the fairgrounds. An elaborate checking system was required before bodies could be turned over to relatives. All of the records for the convicts in the G&H cellblocks were relocated from the prison records office to the fairgrounds. To prevent mistakes, Bertillon measurements, prison numbers, and other forms of identification were checked. The potential for misidentification was brought home on Wednesday, when three men previously listed as dead turned up alive, including William Law and Andrew Jackson from Cleveland and one of two Cincinnati brothers.³⁰ One final step was to require all convicts to return to the very cells they had cried to be released from less than forty-eight hours earlier. With close to fifty bodies so charred and disfigured that no forensic tools at the time could identify them, a process of elimination was used. Each of the cells where the fire took place contained the prison numbers of its occupants. Numbers were then checked to see who was unaccounted for. Once this task was completed, the convicts were allowed back out.

Fire survivor “James R. Winning,”³¹ the anonymous convict turned novelist, claimed in his 1933 roman à clef Behind These Walls that he had been talked into helping with the identification process. His contribution was taking shipping tags from the deputy warden and helping mark the dead in the cells and prison yard. In order to be sure, he needed access to the prisoners’ shirts, which had the numbers written on them. Many were without shirts, however. For those victims who could not be identified he was told to leave behind a blank card. Other victims were so charred they had to be rolled over to pull the shirttail from underneath them. By this time many of the bodies were growing stiff from rigor mortis. Their arms were often sticking straight out, “with the forearm and shoulder forming a pivot so it is impossible, almost, to roll them over.” When he was able to recognize a body, a helper held a flashlight while he wrote down the convict’s number on the tag. “As fast as we tag a group they are carried away.”³²

A number of physicians with stethoscopes made sure “life was extinct” before bodies were prepared for burial. Once they were satisfied with the identification, the bodies were turned over to morticians and undertakers, who were busy “working with their fluids and instruments.” Captain C. B. Weir, representing Edward E. Fisher Undertakers, was selected by the state to take charge of the bodies. Weir noted that three hundred suits had been ordered from different stores to clothe the dead for burial. In addition, he mentioned to one reporter that “300 conservative caskets and 300 rough boxes in which caskets will be placed when bodies are buried” had been ordered. Ohio state authorities not only made sure that bodies were properly prepared for burial, but also paid for bodies to be sheathed in black shrouds, white collars, and wing ties,³³ placed in plain coffins, and provided transport to their hometowns. Relatives who could not make the trip were permitted to telegraph instructions to the warden.³⁴ After the dead were identified and placed inside their caskets, “some were covered by flowers placed there by friends or relatives.”³⁵ These flowers would stay in place until the floral arrangements donated by the Columbus Flower Growers and Dealers Association arrived.³⁶ One observer described “evenly placed caskets, their lids now closed, gray and pearl and black, a spray of roses and lilies on each one.”³⁷

Undertakers were kept busy throughout the day and by noon on Tuesday, April 22, had finished more than two hundred embalmings. They planned to finish the rest by nightfall. Arrangements had already been made to transfer eight bodies to the Whitaker mortuary for funeral services. Likewise, protocol was in place to make sure all of the Cincinnati victims were returned to their homes for burial. Embalmers from all over central Ohio also worked quickly. The bodies were checked by coroner Murphy.

In the days ahead, sobbing wives, relatives, and friends began the grueling task of identifying hundreds of cadavers. The protocol for claiming the bodies began with a visit to the warden’s office at the Ohio Penitentiary, where next of kin were given passes that would get them into the temporary morgue in the Horticulture Building. Pass in hand, relatives were transported to the fairgrounds, where they waited outside the building until the body had been located, before being taken inside to view it. One reporter described the relatives of the dead men “assembled in droves at the temporary morgue … where victims were laid out in caskets of gray, white and pink.”³⁸ Weeping relatives moved along the long line of caskets. Several women passed out when they spotted their loved ones. The army trucks that had brought the bodies to the fairgrounds would also take them to railroad stations for the final journey to their hometowns. If families could afford the expense, hearses were available as well.³⁹

At 5:30 Tuesday evening an army officer from the Horticulture Building apprised waiting survivors there would be no more identifications that night. At this point 149 bodies, nearly half of the 317 dead, had been identified, and 37 had already been released for shipment. The army officer informed the milling crowd that transportation and lodging would be provided by the Salvation Army to anyone who wanted to wait until the next day. Several who waited moved in for a last look at the “evenly placed caskets, their lids now closed, gray and pearl and black, a spray of roses or lilies on each one.” For the 168 families who decided to wait the night out there would be “another black night of suspense lighted only by the hope that a beloved face would be white, and whole and familiar.”⁴⁰

There was very little that could be done to make the Horticulture Building welcoming to bereaved family members, but building manager C. K. Rowland “did what he could to make the grim room less dreary” by moving plants that would have decorated the grounds at fair time into the makeshift mortuary. By one account, “they were the only ‘bouquets’ for those who had gone west, and somehow they made the grisly scene a bit more bearable.”⁴¹ The weather seemed to have reverted to winter, with light frost expected in exposed areas as the sky cleared. Indeed, it was so cold that the opening baseball series between the Columbus Senators and the Milwaukee Brewers had to be rescheduled to June. Tuesday night the mercury had plunged to thirty degrees, and the following morning was expected to be fifteen to twenty degrees below normal. It was imperative, therefore, to offer some type of seating inside the building. But the fifty chairs set up for mourners provided minimal comfort.

The fairgrounds housed many of the overnighters in its colosseum. Around “a roaring fire” one family sat with “immobile faces, benumbed by catastrophe. A daughter and granddaughter watched anxiously a tired old face which alternately dropped in slumber and raised in vague grief.” Two Newberry boys,⁴² of the four the old woman had raised, were listed among the dead. One had not been identified yet, but once he was, his mother could say “they played together, lived together and now they have died together.” That’s all she wanted at this point. She managed to smile as she took a tin cup of coffee that was handed to her.

Although the state capital, Columbus, was used to visitors, it is doubtful that anyone could remember so many cars from so many different Ohio cities in town at the same time. “Car after car bearing licenses issued from remote corners of the state and which gave the evidence of being driven at a terrific clip over the state’s highways pulled into the fairgrounds disgorging drawn faced occupants.”⁴³ It wasn’t long before the fairgrounds were teeming with so many cars that it became necessary to close the gates to all but selected visitors, in an attempt to create a bulwark between the bereaved and morbidly curious rubberneckers. Anyone found lurking around just out of curiosity was “routed in short order.” Among those volunteering to keep curious bystanders at bay were a number of “actives and pledges” of Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity at Ohio State University, who helped guard the doors to the Horticulture Building.⁴⁴

Orders were sent out Tuesday night by Colonel J. S. Shetler, from the 37th Division of the Ohio National Guard that relatives of the victims would not be allowed to enter the Horticulture Building until Wednesday morning, April 23. Shetler’s 150 guardsmen would remain on duty until Wednesday night to keep the curious throngs from the building. Relatives who were able to provide burial and shipping permits were spared the ordeal of the initial protocol requiring first going to the prison to make arrangements for the bodies. Instead, they could now go directly to the fairgrounds, where state officials assisted in identification and bodies were neatly grouped in sections arranged in alphabetical order. By the end of Tuesday fingerprints had been taken of fifty-five yet to be identified men in hopes of establishing their identities.

Word came Wednesday that the 318th convict had died, thirty-year-old Edward Willis, doing five to seven for larceny. Cause of death was reported as pneumonia. Wednesday morning at 9 a.m. the “parade of sorrow started,” as relatives from distant reaches of the state who had been notified by telegram that their loved ones had perished gathered at the Horticulture Building to identify husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers, “some seared beyond almost recognition.” They found 318 “different colored coffins in rows the length of the building,” some covered with flowers placed by friends or relatives. One reporter described long lines of women making their way down the rows of caskets, “seeking but fearing to find.”

The Ohio State Journal’s Mary V. Daughtery, one of the few women to report the tragedy, was perhaps better able to empathize with the bereaved women than her male counterparts. She noted, “Women used to screaming, screamed, and mothers with suddenly bitter faces [railed] against the state” for the deaths of their misdemeanant sons. “Then there were quiet little women with ancient black hats perched, dusty and bent, on their wisps of hair. They did not weep or rail, but now and then an epidemic of frenzy caught the long line in its grasp, and then they searched their purses for handkerchiefs, and reached for support.”⁴⁵

Daugherty interviewed one grandmother who had told her grandchildren that their father was dead rather than admit that he was in the big house. She said, “I’d hate to have anybody see me here. You see I tried to think of him as dead too, for the children’s sake.” But she admitted having saved money for his burial. During their conversation the grandmother “shivered at the sudden scream of another woman.” The reporter described “a tall, lanky figure in a brown coat” reaching toward a casket and taking off the roses that had been placed there. She threw them to the ground and then “ground them into the floor with her heel.” A “Junior League Woman” who had accompanied her tried to offer support, but the “woman turned on her violently, as if to strike.” A man in uniform rushed over to intervene. “It was the end as she fell to the floor in a violent fit of weeping which continued until she was removed in a state of collapse.”⁴⁶

No matter where one looked, “serenity was rare on any face, whether of the waiting bereaved or of the hundred or more workers from the Red Cross and Salvation Army who went to and fro among the moving ranks, giving comfort and advice.” On the edge of the crowd, correspondent Mary Daugherty espied “two well-dressed gentlewomen” who seemed to be in their late thirties. Daugherty apparently learned their stories from Salvation Army volunteers or “sympathetic bystanders.” It turned out they were sisters who had found their younger brother among the dead “on the rough tables.” The dead boy had made the mistake of joining a friend, the son of a bank cashier, in a bank heist. Their brother had agreed to drive the car and help take care of the stolen bonds. The cashier’s son escaped with the cash, leaving his partner in crime to face the music as a co-conspirator. He was due to be paroled in June, in part because of his extreme youth.⁴⁷ Little did he expect that he would get out much sooner—but in a coffin.

Almost anywhere the reporter turned there was a human interest story. There was the case of a youthful mother of five. One of her children happened to be in a Cleveland hospital with a serious disorder at the same time she was reclaiming her husband’s body and trying to find out if she had insurance to cover expenses. Daugherty saw her walking around the fairground for almost an hour “in a sort of apathy” before collapsing.

Once the dead had been removed from the prison and the fairgrounds, it was time to take stock of some of the Ohio Penitentiary personalities who had perished. Among them was Robert Stone, serving a life sentence for the murder of a railroad detective, the brother of celebrated magician Howard Thurston.⁴⁸ One of the more infamous victims was Oren Hill, a former Ohio Penitentiary guard who was imprisoned for helping an inmate escape on March 10, 1929. His fate was set once he harbored the fugitive John Leonard Whitfield. Though the jailbreak was well planned, Whitfield was traced to Hill’s house the very next day. Rather than give himself up, Whitfield took his own life after being cornered by Columbus city detective Norwood E. Folk and Ohio Penitentiary record clerk Dan Bonzo. Both Hill and his wife were indicted for helping the fugitive. Hill was sentenced to one year, which turned into a death sentence on Easter Monday.⁴⁹

In a great example of “Beware of what you wish for,” John Bowman had been given a 128-month sentence for forging an eight-dollar check. He was originally sentenced to the Mansfield Reformatory, but asked the judge to relocate him to Columbus so he could be closer to his parents. Thirty-two-year-old Albert Holland had only been behind bars for several hours, beginning a six-to-thirty beef for forgery and a robbery in Coshocton, Ohio, when he perished.⁵⁰ He was known for his connection to Irene Schroeder, Pennsylvania’s “notorious gun woman,”⁵¹ who was confined in the Lawrence County Jail in New Castle, awaiting execution for the murder of a Pennsylvania state trooper. Future best-selling popular historian Bruce Catton, who reported on the fire for a Texas newspaper, chronicled the irony of several of the deaths, including Holland’s.⁵² Ernest Brown and Mack Talley had just become eligible for parole after serving three years but died in the fire as well.

Carl Lyons, twenty-one, came to the fairgrounds to look for the bodies of his brother, Charles, twenty-five, and cousin Everett, twenty-nine, both in their fourth year of a twenty-five-year stretch for highway robbery. Scrupulously searching the Horticulture Building, he found his brother but no sign of his cousin. Garland Runyon from Lawrence County had only been admitted hours earlier to serve a stint for abandoning his children in Ironton. Joining these unlucky victims was Joe Pedro, who had just been admitted on Monday.⁵³ Jack Beers had just recovered from an illness and had been transferred back to his cell from the hospital in time for the fire. Tubercular Leslie Humphrey, a lifer and a patient in the prison hospital, was probably a roommate with Beers. But he left the hospital “and groped through smoke to help other prisoners until he dropped exhausted.”⁵⁴

John Anderson, a convict from the Columbus area, ran from his cell at the outbreak and raced over to his brother’s cell, but too late. “Big” Ben Henderson, a highway robber out of Cincinnati, also failed to save his brother from a burning cell. He pointed out the cell on the sixth tier to a reporter, telling him, “This is where my brother died.” The reporter described him as half sobbing, with “no rancor visible in his voice. Only Sorrow.” Big Ben continued, making sure everyone would know his story, “Yep, Hank died in there like a rat. He never had a chance…. There is what is left of his radio. And there is the box where he kept his stuff.” Ben turned away, perhaps to compose himself, still speaking. “I did my best to reach him when they released me from the white cell block [White City]…. But we couldn’t get near the place.” Hank had entered the Ohio Penitentiary in 1922 and was serving one to fifteen years for burglary; Ben followed in 1929.⁵⁵

Even more memorable was the story of the four Anglian brothers, all housed together in the “doomed cell block.” Two of the brothers, William and John, serving life for murder, were held in the lower tiers and were among the first to be released when the fire broke out. Both risked their lives trying to save others in the ruined cellblock as they searched in vain for their brothers Frank, twenty-one, and Theodore, twenty-three, both serving ten to twenty years for robbery with intent to kill.⁵⁶ Two other brothers, Walter and Harry Smith, died valiantly after carrying out close to ten men each. Both were overcome by fire and fatigue and took their last breaths in the prison hospital.⁵⁷

All but a few, who were burned beyond recognition, were eventually claimed. A number of victims remained unidentified, leaving it to the state to establish identifications based on fingerprints. Any trouble identifying a corpse was usually remedied by checking fingerprints, as Bertillon officers went through the painstaking process of “pressing lifeless fingers on ink pads and paper.”⁵⁸ As the week came to an end, most of the bodies had been sent home either by train or hearse, but that still left a number of unclaimed, and unidentified bodies. Plans were to bury the men at the East Lawn Cemetery on Friday afternoon, but last efforts to check fingerprints pushed the “wholesale burial” to 11 a.m. Saturday. Two trenches were dug in the east end of the cemetery, 150 feet long, 7 and a half feet wide, and 5 feet deep.

Just a mile away was Evergreen Cemetery, where African American victims, unclaimed or unidentified, were set to be interred in a separate ceremony.⁵⁹ A grave 75 feet long and 6 feet wide had been prepared for the fire victims. But according to the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper, only “two bodies were buried in the Jim Crow cemetery” on Sunday: convicts Robert Thompson, twenty-six, from Lucas, Ohio, and Dempsey Brown, twenty-four, from Hamilton, under the direction of cemetery manager J. W. Williams. According to a Defender reporter, “No ceremonies and blowing of trumpets were accorded them. These demonstrations were held in lily-white cemeteries where ministers of many faiths and various organizations took part in burial services.”⁶⁰

Lloyd Vest, a Columbus police officer, was asked several days after having visited the fairgrounds whether he had seen anything unusual. He reported that his attention was called to “a knife, [a] dagger about two and a half inches long, that was cut to a knife edge and come to a point, very sharp, and had a wooden handle on it wrapped.” He said it had been taken off one of the victims. He was alerted by workers to other items of interest, with one telling him, “We have a lot of other stuff over here we have taken.” Vest was then shown a box, two feet long and eighteen inches wide, a .32 automatic Colt inside of it. He was informed that “it come off of the prisoners…. We taken that off of a man that we taken [sic] $140 in money off of.” Other items that could have been put to deadly use included files and saws. One of the fire investigation inquisitors, Director of Public Welfare Hal H. Griswold, shrewdly observed, “They all have knives in there now, don’t they?” Vest said, “I don’t know anything about it,” which was probably true since he worked outside the prison as a police officer. Griswold flippantly responded, “If they don’t have them it is probably the only institution in Ohio where those things are not manufactured.”⁶¹

On April 22, as the bodies were being prepared at the fairgrounds for burial, Governor Myles Cooper, who had arrived early the morning after the fire, was convening a Board of Inquiry (BOI) to look into the causes of the fire. The outset of the investigation was marked by conflict between the county and state authorities over whether to suspend Warden Thomas. The issue was settled quickly when Governor Cooper took the case out of the hands of the local prosecutor and assigned the attorney general to take over the official inquiry. The hearings began in the prison records office, which had been converted into a temporary courtroom.