On December 1, 1958, there was a fire at the Lady of the Angels Catholic School in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood.
On that day, shortly before classes were to be dismissed, a fire broke out at the foot of the stairway. Even though it took firefighters only four minutes to arrive, there was only so much they could do as 92 students and three nuns died.
The Tribune devoted eight pages to the tragedy. Every parent of school-aged children were terrified. The severity of the fire shocked the nation and surprised educational administrators of both public and private schools.
My wife was a second grader at Our Lady of the Angels' sister school, Our Lady of Grace, and her father ran a deli in the Humboldt Park area so she knew some of the families who lost children. She still gets upset every December 1.
Some solace can be found as this fire sparked major improvements in standards for school design and safety codes. Particularly fire drills.
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