Fire in the Big House. Mitchel P. Roth
years after the fire for a spree of petty thefts. His codefendant Don Ford, however, was the nineteen-year-old son of an inmate who did die in the fire. Croninger had been friends with his father, who perished while serving time for child abandonment.89
One “big burly negro convict” told three rescuers, “I can walk, leave me alone” after they dragged him to safety from the building ruins. Once they let him go, the convict “straightened up, brushed a brawny hand across a pathetically seared face and headed down the path to the hospital. Took several resolute steps then faltered and plunged face downward into a pool of water. He managed to roll over on his side. ‘I can’t walk,’ he muttered, ‘lay me down.’ They did and he was dead.”90
One of the most difficult challenges was bringing out the bodies of the dead from the top three tiers. A number of them were lowered to the ground with ropes and, once prostrate on the quadrangle, were covered with blankets, “where they lay in grotesque positions” until removed by National Guardsmen. The process began before the fire was out but after most victims had succumbed to smoke. Demonstrating the ingenuity shared by longtime inmates, bodies were lowered from tiers with ropes as “flames still licked at ruins” and lethal smoke filled the air. A score of convicts managed to find some ropes somewhere. “Tripping over the hot and smouldering [sic] embers they scrambled up the six tiers of the ruined prison. Howling, eager, unorganized, they managed to get into shape for the work. They distributed themselves, a few men on each level, and strung their ropes from one tier to another. The first body was dangled down and swayed a moment in midair,” before one rescuer yelled from above, ‘Here comes one! Here comes one!’” Another disembodied voice chimed in, “Here he comes, here he comes, ketch ’im, don’t let him fall…. The bodies dangled down in an endless stream” as the prisoners got the hang of working together. Occasionally cries of alarm rent the air; in one case they indicated that “a body had fallen on the backs of laboring men on the third tier.”91
Above the din inside the walls, parallel acts of boldness were taking place as volunteers from all walks of life volunteered to assist. Although gate regulations prohibited anyone except soldiers and law enforcement officers beyond the bullpen Monday night, “a Boy Scout of ‘half-pint’ size, his shoulders thrust back, trooped through the phalanx of guards to gain the inner sanctum.” Joining the legions of volunteers, Bertillon identification system officers Homer Richter and Johnny Rings of the city police “donned a uniform Monday night for the first time in many years and acted as patrolmen.”92
Sirens and ambulances could be heard speeding back and forth through the rubbernecking crowds interfering with traffic down Spring Street from High Street all the way to Front Street. Doctors and medical personnel responded in great numbers. As they drove up to the gate they were stopped by police and asked, “Are you a doctor?” Those who answered in the affirmative were told “Go on, hurry” and directed down to the railroad yards on the east side of the prison, where they got out of their cars and walked to the pen doors. They moved snakelike through the guardroom out into the prison yard and into the hospital, where they found the dead and dying crammed into every conceivable space “like sardines.”
As a result of the overwhelming response, doctors soon had little space to navigate in. Others were told to go and sit in the front office until their colleagues needed relief. Likewise, nurses, described by one reporter as “calm, cool, and efficient looking,” swarmed through the front doors.93 They too waited until needed in the hospital, when they headed across the prison quad in small groups. Few had time to worry about walking through a gauntlet of hundreds of Ohio’s most dangerous convicts, including Dr. Betty Morris, the first female physician at the scene of the fire. It was hard to miss her moving through the prison yard reviving men with “spirits of ammonia.” Her bravery led one journalist to write, “The only woman among a crowd of workers and white and black prisoners, she was treated with utmost respect.”94
In perhaps the oddest moment of the tragic evening, Ohio State University junior James F. Laughead, who happened to be driving past the prison as the fire was raging, tried to gain entrance by representing himself as a physician’s assistant. When his ruse failed, he tried another plan. He signed the name of a prominent Columbus newspaper editor to gain entry and managed to make it as far as the prison yard just as casualties were being brought out from the cellblocks. However, he was soon mistaken for a convict and forced into a cell, as the fire was still blazing and a riot was on the verge of breaking out. He was kept behind bars for two hours until he could be properly identified.95
The Ohio Penitentiary fire was the first major American disaster to be covered instantaneously by sound motion picture crews, radio stations, and newspaper reporters, the three major arms of the mainstream media. After Fox Movietone covered Lindbergh taking off for his solo flight to Paris in May 1927, audiences had to wait several days to watch it in person, and only those in New York would have been able to see and hear the airplane take off, since the “sound equipment was still confined to” movie palaces in the Big Apple. Nonetheless, audiences would thrill to the hum of the iconic monoplane Spirit of St. Louis taking off and then “ris[ing] above Roosevelt Field.”96 Within a few years and by 1930, “sound news-reels” were issued twice weekly by Fox, Pathé, and Paramount and shown on almost twelve thousand screens across the United States.
Airplanes played a significant role in transporting news to the free world. During the first hours of the unfolding disaster, photographs and news articles were rushed to their home offices by plane. In fact, that evening airplanes were warmed up and on standby at the local Norton and Sullivan Fields, in case they were needed to transport photographs or other tasks.97 The Dallas Morning News reported its photographers transmitting photos “by telephoto” over regular phone lines to Chicago. From there the photos were flown to Dallas.98 Thanks to advances in newspaper technology, the world of news was rapidly changing, and editors wanted to tell stories in pictures whenever possible.
The penitentiary fire had burned itself out after about two hours, but by three o’clock the next afternoon, only twenty-one hours after the first alarm, theater patrons in moving-picture houses on Broadway, some six hundred miles away, “not only [saw] the harrowing sights; they also heard the shrieking of the prison siren, the hissing as water hits the flames, the howling of desperate prisoners, the crackling of burning logs, the thud of falling beams, the commands of Army officials and jail officials.”99 The short clips were accompanied by a “brief talkie lecture by an expert on prison conditions, explaining the causes of the tragedy and suggesting means of preventing its occurrence.” One leading popular science journal declared that this should be “considered a world’s record in the speedy gathering and presentation of audible photographic news.” Except for a few photos transmitted by special wire, “the pictorial story was in the theaters before the New York dailies had their pictures in print.” The 300 feet of Pathé film played in about two and a half minutes. The “sound newsreel” had come into its own in April 1930 as a “talking newspaper.”100
It is worth noting that the sound men who were on their way to cover the fire “narrowly escaped death” when their “camion” or sound truck was hit “by a high tension electric wire during a wild night drive through a storm to the scene of the disaster.” Beating their competition to record the fire in Columbus was made possible by the fact that they were already in Cleveland, 126 miles away, reporting the opening of the American League baseball season when the disaster took place.101
Every form of communication was utilized during the course of the disaster. Ohio State Journal staff reporter Ray Coon, besides contributing print coverage, also broadcast the details of the fire over WLW Cincinnati. He somehow managed to set up an emergency broadcasting station in the Department of Education building in the statehouse annex. From there he stayed in touch with his newspaper in order to offer descriptive