City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago Read Online Free Page A

me, screaming, ‘Oh my God, it’s raining hell!’ ” Then Hayford saw great columns of fire rising almost majestically above the line of teller cages before him. He could make out silhouetted figures struggling in the flames. “The screams were indescribable,” he said. “I turned sick. A man—I don’t know his name—staggered out ofthe cage carrying the body of a girl. His own face was covered with blood.”
    By this time, the central court was, according to workers in the balcony, “a well of fire, a seething furnace.” Clerks, stenographers, and bookkeepers, many of them with clothes ablaze, were clawing toward the two exits; others managed to escape through the narrow teller windows. “I saw women and men burning,” said Joseph Dries, a clerk in the bond department. “I saw everybody trying to get out through the doors of the cages.”
    But many didn’t move fast enough. Stenographer Maria Hosfield looked on in horror as her boss was burned alive: “I was sitting next to Helen Berger and saw her become enveloped in flames,” she said. Several men ran to the chief stenographer and tried to extinguish her burning clothes. “She was saturated with gasoline,” said bank guard William Elliott. “Everything was so confused … but I heard the screams, and I looked and saw flames eating her.” He took off his coat and wrapped it around her. Pushing her to the ground, he rolled her on the floor to douse the flames, severely burning his hands. But he knew he had been too late. 15
    By now, police and firefighters were arriving on the scene. The intense heat of the fire, however, made it difficult for them to enter the caged rotunda. People were pouring out of the bank’s windows like bees escaping a burning hive. Half-naked, dazed, and bloodied, many were now wandering numbly through the streets of the financial district. “When I got to the street,” bank employee W. A. Woodward said, “I noticed that my face, head, and arms were covered with blood.… A man I had never seen before rushed up to me and said, ‘Man, don’t you know that you are badly hurt?’ There was no ambulance near, so this man hustled me into a taxicab and took me to St. Luke’s Hospital.”
    A crowd estimated at twenty thousand people had been drawn to the streets of the southern Loop to watch the disaster. Many weretrying to help the victims. Several gathered around Milton Norton. The photographer lay in the street in front of the Board of Trade Building, still attached by rope to his smoldering parachute. By all appearances, the man seemed dead. But someone flagged down a passing automobile and ordered the driver to take the battered man to the hospital. 16
    Meanwhile, Jack Boettner had made his way to the street. After detaching himself from his burning chute on the roof of the Board of Trade Building, the pilot had found a fire escape and started down. It took a long time for him to reach street level. Amazed to find himself only slightly injured, he set off amid the confusion to search for his men. He was intercepted on the street by two police detectives, and when he told them who he was, they immediately arrested him and took him away for questioning.
    Back at the Illinois Trust Building, firemen struggled to bring the blaze under control. Charred and bloody bodies were now being removed from the rotunda. Friends and relatives of bank employees ran frantically around the streets, looking for their loved ones. Bystanders were doing what they could, wrapping the injured in their own jackets and helping them to waiting automobiles. Even those people who had only witnessed the disaster were stunned, incredulous. No one could quite take in the reality of what had happened. How had this experimental blimp—this enormous, floating firebomb—been allowed to fly over one of the most densely populated square miles on Earth? Shouldn’t someone have recognized the potential disaster and prevented it?
    It was a question that would