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Show ADVENTURERS' CLUB j - HEADLINES FROM THE LIVES . -" OF PEOPLE LIKE YOURSELF! 'While Eight Men DiccP By FLOYD GIBBONS Famous Headline Hunter HELLO, EVERYBODY: Here's a red-hot one right from the sixth floor of a burning building in mid-Manhattan. Joe Miller of New York City is the lad who sends it in, and Joe is also the hero of one of the most thrilling rescues I've ever heard of. It happened hap-pened this way: In March, 1923, Joe and his brother were living together in a room D the rear end of a furnished apartment, on the sixth floor of a building it Eighth avenue and Fifth-seventh street, New York. If you're a fire-nan fire-nan in that neighborhood, maybe you remember what happened there 3n the night of March 26. But this yarn is more concerned about 'hat happened to the people in the building. And here is the story: Cut OS From Stairs by Flames. It was a bitter cold night. Joe slept a few hours when he awoke suddenly. He seemed to hear faint shouts of: "Fire! Fire!" coming from somewhere overhead, and saw his brother leave the room, only to come back a moment later, grab a blanket and yell to Joe to do the same. Joe was only half awake. Before he could get out of the room, his Drother was back, shouting that the stairs were afire that they were :ut off and with that, he ran to the window and disappeared over the sill. Joe went to the window and looked out. Six stories below lay his brother, groaning and shouting to Joe not to try to follow. Joe turned away then went out into the hall trying to find the door of the rear apartment, apart-ment, where the fire escapes were. The smoke was so thick in the hall that he had to crawl along the 3oOr. He found the other apartment, but the door was locked. Gasping for breath, he struggled back to his own room and once more found himself him-self looking out of his open window. As he stared out of that window he noticed, for the first time, a brick smoke stack running up the side of the building and held to the wall by steel brackets. Those brackets were sa placed that one was about two feet below each window sill on every floor. It was a four-foot jump to the nearest bracket, but Joe had to take chances. He climbed to his window sill, leaped and made it. Two Women Burning at a Window. Then, as Joe stood hesitating on that first bracket, he saw a terrible sight in a window next to his. Two screaming women were caught in that i r- - . . , .. . . . : i . -1 1 ' " 1 r 1 I 1 "111 i -i i ' ' " Two Screaming Women Were in the Window. window with the flames so close to them that one's negligee had caught fire and she was forced to take it off. Joe did some quick thinking and some even quicker acting. He pushed back one woman who was getting ready to jump, and climbed back into his room again. There, he took the sheets from his bed, tied them together and tossed one end to the girls. Then, leaping back to the bracket again, he tied the other end of the sheets. The knotted sheets made a rope that was only about eight or ten feet long. It would do to get from one bracket to the next one below it, though, and that's just what Joe used it for. Carrying one girl in his arms, he slid down to the bracket at the fifth floor. He shouted to the other girl to follow, but she was so unnerved that she could do nothing but stand in the window and scream. So Joe went back up that rope of sheets, climbing hand over hand, to carry the second girl down as he had the first It was a tough job, sliding down that rope with a woman in his arms. To make matters worse, the knot that held the sheds together began to slip. For one breathless moment Joe thought It was going to let go and hurl them both to the court five and a half stories below. But the knot finally tightened and held, and Joe deposited the second woman on the fifth floor window sill. Carried Them Down a Rope of Sheets. The fire on the fifth floor was as bad as it had been on the sixth. Joe broke in a fifth floor window, grabbed two more sheets from a bed, and went back to repeat his performance on the floor above. He carried car-ried the two women down to the bracket at the fourth floor level and then it was the same thing all over again. Two sheets from a fourth floor bedroom, and the long, heart-breaking struggle of carrying the women down another flight. At the third floor, Joe met the firemen coming up after him. The fire there was under control the stairway clear to the street. The girl Joe held in his arms had fainted on the last lap down the improvised rope, and there was a struggle before the firemen could get her through the third floor window. The other girl followed the first, and at last Joe, reeling with exhaustion, clambered through the window and made his way, staggering, to the street. By this time, the whole upper part of the building was In flames. Joe went around to the rear in search of his brother, but he was gone. Firemen had picked him up and Bent him to a hospital, and there Joe found him later, with both legs broken and suffering from Internal injuries. Eight people were burned to death in that fire plenty mure were injured. But the casualty list would have been just three names longer if Joe hadn't been able to use his hands and feet and his head. Copyright. WNU Service. |