Fire in the Big House. Mitchel P. Roth
tried to set a gas tank attached to a fire truck on fire as the main blaze came under control. Some threw blankets under the gas tank as others threw matches at it. Firemen jumped on the trucks and drove them and the gasoline tank away.66 Some prisoners tried to drain gasoline from the fire truck and as it was being driven away by firemen, others began throwing rocks at it, knocking out one of its headlights.67 Assistant fire chief Norris J. Ijams was attempting to connect a hose to fight the fire in the cotton mill when he was attacked and slightly injured. Convicts also cut two sections of the hose.
The clergy was well represented on Easter Monday. None though were as prominent as the Rev. Albert O’Brien. Following an excited phone call to Aquinas College in Columbus beseeching its Dominican priests to rush to the dying men at the penitentiary, he was among the first to answer the call of duty. Born in a small town in Ireland on January 14, 1888, O’Brien left for America in 1908 after completing high school. He was ordained in Washington, DC, in 1915 and served the Dominican Order in a number of states before landing at the Ohio State Penitentiary in October 1926 as chaplain to the prison’s Catholic inmates, a position he held until his death in 1933. His humor and kindness earned him well-deserved reverence among the prison population.68
O’Brien’s former secretary, identified only as Ex-Convict 59968, chronicled the priest’s heroism that night. He said that O’Brien was at home in his rectory at the St. Patrick’s Parish on East Naghten Street “preparing for dinner after a busy day” when he was informed by phone that the prison was on fire. He left immediately and made it inside the prison within ten minutes. Garbed in his purple stole, O’Brien immediately took charge of the Catholic clergy there. Once fourteen of them had arrived, equally divided between Dominicans and diocesan priests, he sent several to the prison hospital, where he knew they would be needed “to give Extreme Unction to those of the faith, who seemed yet to be living.” He positioned himself and the rest just outside the burning cellblock building, where they could give absolution to the convicts as they were brought out by fellow inmates and set down “among the long lines of the dead and dying” in the darkening yard. They were helped by a prisoner, who identified which were Catholics. O’Brien was standing so close to the cellblock that an inmate suggested that he move further away due to danger of the walls falling on him. The walls crumbled shortly after the inmate’s admonition, “burying prisoners beneath the smoldering debris.”69 Once he was sure that all had been tended to, O’Brien went into the still-smoldering block to help with the rescue, but like so many others before him was unable to get beyond the third tier. He went back into the yard, where he was temporarily overcome by the smoke.70
In the fire’s aftermath, Father O’Brien, the “hero priest,” noted that eighty-five Catholics were on the list of victims being compiled and that “all had received Holy Communion on Easter,” the day before the fire. He recounted a number of poignant scenes, including his walk “among the lines of the dying,” many of whom “reached up their hands, and died as I imparted absolution.” He was particularly struck by a young man who held a rosary in his hands and another who held “a tiny cross of palm on his coat.”71
The G&H cellblocks were adjacent to the prison courtyard, sometimes referred to as a quadrangle or quad. At first glance the bucolic plot of green space could have been located on any college campus, until one peered up at the barred windows looking down from all sides. As soon as a lifeless or injured victim was brought out of the cell-house building, he was placed in the darkening prison yard. The bodies were often joined by groups of convict survivors, many crying hysterically, others wrapped in blankets and drenched in the water from the fire hoses or seeking treatment for burns suffered in their escape from the blaze. The green lawns of the prison yard were soon dotted with the hulks of men bleeding and gasping for air, many of whom were soon covered with blankets in the repose of death. As the acrid black smoke billowed into the cellblock tiers, it began to fill the quadrangle as well, sending panic through the already terrified inmates.72
Poignant scenes played out across the yard. A severely burned white inmate was tenderly administered to by a group of about twenty black convicts. According to lore, he would owe his life to them. They had come upon the injured man lying on a blanket near the west wall and after gathering around him pleaded with him in unison “not to die,” telling him, “hang on friend, don’t leave us.” Witnesses reported them “bursting into strains of familiar plantation songs” as his life ebbed away. And then something miraculous occurred. “A grim smile appeared on his [burned] face” as “he clung to a meager thread of life” and appeared likely to recover.73
In another corner of the quadrangle ten convicts huddled in a circle around one of their buddies on the verge of death. They took turns working on him for two hours, one repeating over and over, “Come on Walter, don’t give in! We’re pulling for you!” As he succumbed to his injuries, one pal was crying into his ear, while another rubbed his arms and another pumped his lungs—all to no avail.74
One of the more embroidered accounts of the fire was published in the national edition of the Chicago Defender, among the country’s leading African American newspapers. It cited the death toll as “the heaviest in the history of disastrous fires in America,”75 noting the seventy-five “Race inmates,” as it referred to African Americans, among the dead. Actually, a perusal of the death certificates from the Ohio Penitentiary reveals that fewer than twenty prisoners of color perished in the fire. The Defender’s editors were obviously proud of the heroism displayed by many black convicts that evening, as illustrated by the following account: “Our prisoners were the outstanding heroes of the disaster. They made quick decisions at the critical time. They were the first to dash from the comparative safety of the prison yard into the fiery inferno of the doomed cell block to rescue their fellow prisoners, the majority of whom were white.”76
Other accounts offered by the Defender included the actions of a twenty-two-year-old inmate who carried a white inmate across his shoulders until he crumpled to the ground in front of the main gates. The white convict was already dead, and according to the paper’s account the young rescuer’s condition “was such as to give him slight chance to live. His clothing had been burned and his face was seared, but had a trace of a smile as a guard pumped air into his lungs.” Also mentioned were brave men such as George Alkens of Cleveland, who broke inmates out of the fiery cellblocks, and Roy Buttle, also from Cleveland, who went through a burning cellblock with a hammer “smashing locks to liberate half-crazed prisoners.” Another “unknown Race prisoner overpowered a guard who refused to open cells over which he had charge.” He allegedly secured the guard’s keys and saved men on the 5H tier.
Understandably, the African American paper tended to inflate some of the exploits of the black convicts, crediting them with herculean rescues that did not add up once the entire narrative of the disaster was in place. Their heroism was unquestionable, but the numbers saved by black prisoners do not jibe with the majority of the available accounts. For example, the claim that Howard Jones, who raced through the smoky tiers breaking locks with a sledgehammer, saved “the lives of 135 men” rests on shaky ground. Similar exploits were attributed to other convicts, such as Dan Evans, who rescued twenty-one men; Jack Wright, who carried seventeen prisoners to safety on his back; O. B. Hawkins, who saved seventy-five men “before he collapsed and was removed to the hospital”; and John Jackson of Columbus, who escaped the E Dormitory to help carry forty men from the top two tiers. This last claim is surely suspect, since all of the prisoners on the sixth tier perished, as did most of those on the fifth.
The Defender asserted that the “heroic trio” of Eddie Crawford, R. W. Mason, and George Thorpe were “the first men to gain entrance in the cell tier in which the flames were raging.” They very well might have been involved in cutting the screen with wire cutters and sledges and rescuing more than twenty inmates, but the Board of Inquiry left it beyond dispute that