Fire in the Big House. Mitchel P. Roth
Monday was Columbus station WAIU. It had its own remote-controlled equipment already inside the prison walls, making it possible to broadcast directly from the scene of the disaster. So, as the reporters for the city newspapers were sitting down for dinner, the conflagration was simultaneously broadcast by radio. It would be another several hours before all of the newspapers were fully staffed.103
The Ohio Penitentiary was so inundated with phone calls from Ohio and beyond that special telephones and switchboards had to be placed in its lobby.104 Magnifying the confusion were an estimated five hundred telegrams sent from the penitentiary to the families of the deceased at midnight on Easter Monday, alerting them to the tragedies that had befallen their loved ones as well as where they could reclaim the bodies.105 The telegrams and news dispatches about the fire challenged the “physical and human capacity” of the employees of the Western Union Telegraph Company and the Postal Telegraph Company. By the following morning Western Union had handled two hundred thousand words in seventy-five hundred different messages, while the Postal Telegraph Company had handled more than thirty-five thousand words during one six-hour period ending Tuesday at 1 a.m. Messages sent included special correspondent reports to their newspapers as well as convict messages to relatives and agencies involved in identifying the dead and the survivors.106 (Prisoners had to pay for their own messages to be sent.)107 More than one thousand telegrams had inundated the prison from the relatives of convicts from throughout the country. The entire workforce from the outer office, augmented by volunteers, worked to check prison records on individual inmates.
One of the few feel-good stories to be had in the direct aftermath of the prison catastrophe was that of Convict 46812, better known as Otto W. “Deacon” Gardner, a graduate of the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, whose actions on Easter Monday earned him national acclaim. The thirty-five-year-old Pennsylvanian, who had entered the Ohio Penitentiary in 1917, was doing life for the murder of his wife and another woman in Youngstown, Ohio. According to the African American newspaper the Chicago Defender, Gardner was one of the most popular and best-known inmates. The night of the fire he delivered “one of the epoch events in radio broadcasting.”108 As he vividly chronicled the fire on station WAIU, the prison radio station, “his voice was carried into thousands of homes throughout America over the Columbia Broadcasting System.” (The prison radio station was a unit of the Columbia system.) CBS president William S. Paley rewarded him with a check for $500 (over $7,000 in 2017). “At a time when the entire country was anxiously awaiting news of the worst catastrophe in American prison history,” Paley told him, “you willingly, in the face of great danger, gave a sympathetic and accurate word picture of the holocaust.” From 7 to 12 p.m., Gardner, who was “only 30 feet from the blaze at the time,” reached out for doctors, nurses, and “narcotics.”109
Between 8 and 9 p.m. the fire might have been under control, but the prison yard was seething with anarchy as thousands of prisoners freely milled about, screaming, shouting, and menacing firefighters. Fire chiefs threatened to let the whole prison burn down unless guaranteed protection. The first reporters on the scene often embellished and exaggerated what they saw or heard, mostly the latter. Firefighters and guards may have testified seeing convicts drop in their tracks, but reporters’ claims that they saw prisoners “literally burned alive before our eyes” is rather farfetched considering the totality of evidence and accounts of the fire. But it did sell papers. These reports would be dispelled in the days to come as the morticians and coroners did their jobs, finding that the overwhelming majority died from smoke inhalation, and that most burns had been postmortem. All the prisoners on the sixth tier, all but thirteen on the fifth tier, and a number on the fourth range were dead. Now it was up to a Board of Inquiry to begin the truth-seeking process.
2
THE FAIRGROUNDS
Those going in are alive; those going out, dead.
—A physician at the prison hospital, April 21, 1930
Once the fire danger had passed late Monday night, reporters and survivors in search of fellow convicts were curious as to the human consequences of what had just transpired. One intrepid reporter described scenes of carnage and the reactions of inmates as they searched the corpses in the penitentiary quadrangle before they were taken away to a temporary morgue at the fairgrounds. He saw “scores of closely cropped heads protruding from beneath water soaked blankets, pair after pair of roughly shod feet and here and there a seared hand … shapeless masses that lay row upon row.” One of the survivors “searched tirelessly among the corpses for his cell buddy, throwing the beams of his lantern into one horrible face after another.” One journalist on the scene as the identification process continued in the prison yard described “bobbing lanterns” throwing “ghastly circles of yellow light on the upturned faces as the men detailed to the job of identification made their rounds. They did not look at the features of the corpses” if possible, but focused their attention on the stenciled numbers on their prison uniforms.1
Paul Ferguson, the son of the Plain City, Ohio funeral director, recalled sixty years after the fire what he considered “the darkest memories in his career as mortician.” The sixteen-year- old happened to answer the telephone at the family funeral home the night of the fire to find out one of the victims was the son of local residents who had just been notified by prison officials to come to Columbus to recover the body for burial. Ferguson and his brother Jay wasted no time heading out to retrieve the body. It is unclear where Ferguson’s father was at this time or how long the teenager or his brother had been involved in the family business, but it seems Ferguson was familiar with the mortuary business. He recounted in 1990, “I wasn’t even supposed to be in there, not at my age. But I sneaked in anyway because we had to get the boy.” While in the prison courtyard he took the opportunity to look at some of the dead bodies. The body he was to bring back “wasn’t burned nearly so bad as some were, but he was pretty bad. Some of these guys were pretty near cremated.”2
Young Ferguson witnessed firemen still struggling to put the fire out as shaken prisoners carried out dead convicts from the cellblocks and laid them prone in the yard. Some of them were embalmed on the spot. Ferguson observed one embalmer using a long tube, known as a trocar, “[inserting it] through the victim’s abdomen to shoot embalming fluid in.” He explained “that was about all you could do with a lot of them. They were too badly burned.” Ferguson recounted how, despite the frenetic aftermath of the disaster, the prison yard seemed “cloaked in sudden silence.”3
On Tuesday morning, parole officer Dan Bonzo released the “first official account” of the dead, tallied at 276. Given the confusion at the scene, the count would fluctuate over the first twenty-four hours. One spokesman for the prison hospital put the figure at 336, while journalists who had free rein following the fire counted the “dead strewn around” the prison yard as 305.4 Row after row of bodies were still lying on the water-soaked prison courtyard during the first body counts. Prison officials promised a more accurate death count once all of the bodies had been taken to the fairgrounds. Some 319 men would soon be laid out in long lines, “grim proof of the disaster.” One observer described the bodies as “seared and blackened.” The long horticulture building, “where flowers will be displayed next fall at the fair, was draped in black and blossoms from the state greenhouses.”5
Not surprisingly, some witnesses to the aftermath compared the scene to a battlefield. Many inmates and rescuers had served in the armed forces during the Great War, and would have been familiar with such scenes. According to Captain Tom W. Jones, who aided in the rescue attempt, the “scenes within were worse than anything he witnessed in the [battles of] Argonne or St. Mihiel.” One inmate compared the fire to warfare as “he leaned against a tree for support while his swimming eyes surveyed the sodden corpses.” A fellow convict shouted out, “The War! Don’t try to tell me this was like the war! I seen both, brother, over there we had a chance for our lives. We had two legs and could run if we couldn’t