OCR Text |
Show ; FIRE! FIRE! By F. P. Gallagher I $ T CAN imagine that fire-worship was the most jtf " natural form of religion for primitive peoples. u The small boy is a fire-worshiper even before i . he is told much about religion. The love, the fear, f and the fascination of fire appeal to his childish , imagination and soul beyond any phenomenon , with which he is likely to become acquainted un- -, less he happens to bo born in a land where ava- n lanches, earthquakes or wars are frequent. - ,' Running to fires is a diversion which attracts ' us even when we have ceased to be small boys. fr But, of course, it no longer has the appeal of first ' impressions and it is mingled with the pain that x affects every mature mind when it dwells on the ( loss that will be caused by an element so beautiful and yet so terrible. In fiction fire is a competitor of love, of war J?t $ and of the oceans. In it we shall find the spell of romance and the terror of tragedy. When it be- i comes a conflagration it is as if a beautiful woman should suddenly become a vamp"ire bent on ven-l ven-l , geance and murder. It is the sunshine and the f" blazing hearth transformed into a destroying angel. Last year 15,000 deaths were caused by fire in JVi the United States. Last year the United States lost about 60,000 men killed in battle or dead of yv wounds received in battle, that is to say only four times the number that died by fire. i h np HE average yearly loss in a financial way had J- been $250,000,000 from the year of the San Francisco fire until last year. In the year of the San Francisco conflagation the national loss was $400,000,000 and last year it was $300,000,000, due to the intensifying of industry to meet the needs of war. A few calculations will show that even - war hardly outstrips its rival fire. At an average aver-age of $250,000,000 a year it would require only twenty years to inflict a loss of $5,000,000,000, and that is about what the civil war cost the nation. And the $250,000,000 average will increase with the growth of the nation unless the campaign for fire prevention which the National Board of Fire Underwriters is carrying on meets with unexpected unex-pected success. Already the campaign has shown wonderful results, but the nation is growing and so, too, is destruction wrought by fire. The loss per capita for ten years was $2.50. In 1918 it was $3. Every day, ac Chief Bywater has told us, a church or a schoolhouse is dissolved in fire. Every $ minute $500 goes up in smoke. Each year there 4.' is destroyed that which would amount to the ft buildings constructed on both sides of a street 7 reaching all the way from New York to Chicago. $ Q PEAKING of the tragedy of fire reminds me of 3 a fire which occurred some years ago in a mid- die western city. It furnished the topic for sermons ser-mons in a dozen churches on the Sunday follow- V One winter morning at about 3 o'clock, when v the firemen were called to extinguish a fire which ' had broken out in one of a row of cottages, the thermometer stood at zero. The fire burned almost without a crackle, for there was no wind. A crowd of several thousand people gathered to watch the firemen battle with the flames and they enjoyed the spectacle until it became whispered about that the family had not been seen to escape. From time to time the spectators had been at- itracted by the actions of a woman on ithe porch of a cottage next door. She was wringing her A hands hysterically and crying out unintelligible $ words. The crowd thought that she' was made frantic by fear that the flames would spread to her own house, but when the fire had been, put out she continued her strange movements "and cries. Then someone near her heard her say , that the entire family had been burned to death and that .she had seen them burning. From a bedroom bed-room in her house she and her husband had seen a man and two women struggling for possession of a baby. Suddenly the room became enveloped in flames. A fow minutes later the man dragged half his body out upon the window sill and burned to death there. THE firemen passed down between the cottages and found the man's charred body. A few minutes min-utes later the bodies of an elderly woman, a young woman, a baby and of a little boy were taken from the bedroom. The case promised to be mystery until a lad about seven or eight years of age Tommy Fox was found and told the story. Tommy was a grandson of the elderly woman and she had taken him that day to visit her daughter Mrs. Killane. Killano, a bartender, had 'been home for several weeks, a victim of delirium tremens. At times he was violent and at times tender toward the wife, his little boy and the baby. The women had been afraid to go to bed and had remained up beside a stove fire in the sitting room. Killane had made several trips to the saloon sa-loon and had returned home to throw himself, moaning and shrieking on the bed in the adjoining room. Shortly after midnight he took a notion that ho wanted to play with the baby. He held the child in his arms and soon began to treat it roughly because it cried. The mother rescued the baby and her husband, maddened by jealousy and a fantastic sense of wrong, cursed and wept and called the women names. Finally, he tore the baby from the mother's arms, ran into the bedroom. The mother, her little boy and grandmother rushed after him. In the struggle he closed the door, seized a lighted oil lamp and threw it on the floor. Instantly the room was in a blaze. With the baby in his arms and his back to the door he battled with the women until they fell in the flames. Then a sense of his own danger percolated into his insane mind and dropping the baby, he tried to get out at the window. He raised the sash and succeeded in forcing half of his body across the ledge when he was overcome. Tommy Fox, paralyzed with terror, stood in the next room watching the struggle until the door closed and then he ran from the house. It was only after questioning the boy and the neighbors that the firemen were able to "reconstruct the scene in the bedroom." THE cause of that fire was unusual, but many causes produce many fires. How easily death may result is suggested by a fire I once saw in the heart of the same city. A four-story building filled with chemicals was burning. Explosions at the front had made it difficult dif-ficult to fight the flames from that direction. Five men were sent to the rear of the bunding with a ladder and were instructed to climb to the second floor. The ladder was iron-bound and no sooner had they raised it than it came in contact with a live wire. The current felled the five men instantly. in-stantly. Several doctors were present and by means of artificial respiration revived one of the men. The physician placed him gentl against the wall of of a building, warning him not to move. "I feel all right," said the man, smiling up at the spectators. specta-tors. He raised himself to his feet, walked about ten paces and fell dead. One of the firemen was the strongest man in the city. Although only twenty years of age he had overcome every strong man who ventured to contest with him in wrestling, weight-lifting and other stunts. A few days before Gieseke his name was something like that had defeated the champion strong man of the police force. I believe be-lieve he was dead when the doctors reached him, but they continued for some time trying to pro- M duce artificial respiration. M Not a hundred feet away there was a littlo M cottage in which the strong man's mother was ill. The fire had so frightened her that she had left M her bed and gone to the back door. There she M stood weeping and trembling as she watched the H flames . A few minutes later she saw the strange skurrylng about in the alley and noted the sudden' H arrival of ambulances. She asked what had hap- pened. M When they told her that her son was dead she H fell to the doorstep unconscious. M H ONE of the mystorles of fire is pyromania, an insane tendency to incendiarism. An alien- H ist has defined it as "an impulsion to sot things ' H on fire." M In 1917, at Iowa Falls, Iowa, occurred a series H of mysterious fires. A livery barn was set afire H and thirty-three horses perished. Soon afterwards H a firebug put a match to refuse in the basement H of a hotel. An icehouse went up in flames, then H a barn at the pdge of town. H A few hours after the barn fire a man forty- H four years of age entered the hotel which had H been fired a few days before. He seated himself H in the lobby and began talking to the bus driver. H "I smell cobs burning,' 'he said. H The quick-witted bus driver, who did not de- H tect the scent of anything burning, became sus- H picious that this man, a familiar acquaintance of H his, was a pyromaniac and reported him to the po- H lice. When arrested the man, who was a station- H ary fireman and also a member of the fire depart- H ment, confessed. He would slip out, set fire to a H building, hurry back and then join his fellow fire- H men in battling the blaze. He was rated one of H the best firemen in the department. H Ole E. Roe, state fire marshal of Iowa, has had H experience of many other cases in addition to the H one just cited. In that case, despite the defense H of pyromania, the prisoner was sentenced to a life H terjn because he had been convicted of setting ,H fire to an inhabited building in the night time H that is to say, the hotel. H A peculiar case relates to a boy sixteen years H of age who set many fires in Estherville, la. H Speaking of this case the state fire marshal H writes: H "This boy was somewhat precocious, but oth- H erwise apparently normal, excepting that he de- H veloped a sudden and insane impulse to set fires. H Most of the fires set by him occurred early in the H evening. In his confession secured by this de- H partment he admitted having set at least a dozen H fires and described minutely just how he set some H of them. H "At one time in walking past a barn door he H found it was not locked. He walked in, saw some H excelsior on the floor and thought it a good place H to set a fire. He took out a safety match, scratched H it twice before it lighted, then set fire to the ex- H celsior and went home. H "On another occasion he went to another bam, H but seeing someone coming, went away. Later, however, ho went back to the same barn, raised one of the windows, went in and up into the haymow, hay-mow, where he saw some wall paper. Theie he took a match out of his pocket, set file to the wall paper and ran home. About ten o'clock the same evening he went over to another bain, but In i this case the door was hooked. He, however, " pulled off the hook, went in, set the hay on fiie and then went home, and later slipped out of the house, went to another barn and seeing some sacks hanging by the rafters, set thorn on fire and went home. "At another time he set a feed store on fire. He first reached through a window that was bioken (Continued on Pago 9.) i q FIHEI FIRE (Continued from Page 5.) and unhooked the door, then went in and set the place on Are. He then unhooked all the doors so that the horses which were in a barn attached to the feed store could get out. He then left, but stood on the street not far away and watched the fire burn. "At another time he passed a church, and said he thought he must have had fire on the brain, so he set another fire. At that time he had his violin with him, which he loft at a house nearby and told the folks he was going up-town for an hour. Instead of going up-town, he slipped back into the church, set fire to some cotton and carpets in the basement and ran away. "The last fire set by this boy, so far as we are advised, was that of his father's barn. He said he ate supper that evening about 5:45, hurried from the table a few minutes before the rest were through eating, and went to the barn, climbed up the ladder, opened the trap door a few inches, took a match out of his pocket and set the hay on fire, then slipped back into the house and mixed with the family so that no suspicion would be attached to him. "He affirmed that all of these 'fires were set by him without the knowledge of anyone other than his little brother to whom he states he paid money that he might keep still. This boy was sent to the hospital for the. Insane for treatment." |