Fire in the Big House. Mitchel P. Roth
burned to a crisp, while others suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning fumes which affected them like gas attacks” in the late war.6
The bodies’ repose in death offered a glimpse of the victims’ last moments of life. Those with “seared backs revealed how they turned to face to the walls of their cells protecting eyes and faces in vain.” Other victims were found in a crouched position, the so-called pugilist stance, “with arms outstretched in grotesque fighting poses,”7 the result of the contraction of larger muscles from the heat of the fire. In other instances, dying inmates had enough wherewithal to recognize their minutes were numbered and managed to scrawl notes or some type of identification information that could be used in case their fingerprints and faces proved unidentifiable. One doomed convict, a reporter wrote, possessed enough clarity “to seize pencil and paper and scribble as flames crept close.” Stopped midsentence, he only had time to write, “Dear Mother …” The note was found “scorched and water-soaked” as it was pried from “the stiffened fingers of a huge black man. He still held the pencil as he lay under a gray blanket in one of the rows upon the turf of the quadrangles. When the flares set off by the cameramen lighted his ebony countenance, there was not fear visible on it. Only resignation.”8
Inmate Gus Socha must have assumed this was not going to turn out well for him. When found in his cell he had a note pinned to the back of his shirt that read, “Notify John Dee Armory Avenue, Cincinnati.”9 Former blacksmith Theodore Cottrell, doing life for murder, was found among the “blanket swathed victims on the courtyard.” His intuition had been telling him he might die before his time, confiding to a friend the previous Christmas that it “will be my last Christmas here.”10 Of course he might have meant he hoped to escape or be paroled before then.
Much of the immediate postfire activity was centered at the prison hospital. Here the scene was chaotic at best, with doctors responding to emergency call broadcasts from the greater Columbus region. Their main task was to sort through the dead and wounded as each was laid down before them. As soon as a convict was declared dead, the identification number on his prison garb was taken off and matched with prison records to reveal his identity. The victim would then be declared “Checked out.”11
One physician observed the “stream of pitiful forms, some gasping and shrieking, others horribly charred, pouring in and out” of the hospital, succinctly noting to one query, “Those going in are alive; those going out, dead.” One convict was overheard shouting, “Gangway! We’re bringing in my buddy.” But it was obvious the injured man was not going to make it, as “his face in death distorted by his last frantic effort to get a breath of fresh air in the holocaust which took his life.” As four men carried his blanket-wrapped body into the hospital, “onlookers fell away to make room.” A doctor in the hospital corridor checked the victim’s chest “gingerly” for a heartbeat. His stethoscope was silent, and all he could tell the man’s buddy was, “He’s dead.” In prison parlance, the four convicts bawled that he had “gone west,” screaming for vengeance as “another scorched human shell was placed alongside the endless rows of lifeless forms” in the prison courtyard just outside the hospital.12
Reporter Kenneth D. Tooill chronicled the tale of an inmate named “Pete” who was having his “good arm dressed” in the hospital. Pete noted that his other arm had been useless for years, “full of machine gun slugs.” But the “good arm did heroic work last night. It pulled man after man from the blackened cells.” Some were alive, others, such as his buddy, were not. Pete recounted that when he tried to pull his friend from the ruins of his cell “he came apart.” As the reporter listened, Pete began “raving about it and trying to rub his eyes out,” forcing a hospital assistant to “tie his good arm down.”13
By 5:30 a.m., the morning after the fire, many of the surviving inmates were herded into the prison chapel, where some turned benches into beds. Other convicts were sent to buildings untouched by the fire. In the meantime the prison yard was cleared of inmates. One local reporter wrote, “More horrible than the dead were some of the injured who had been carried to the prison hospital, stark, or raving mad, a few of them blinded and maimed.”14 By then the prison hospital was, like the prison itself, well over capacity.
On Tuesday, surviving victims spoke “quietly among [them]selves,” trying to find comfort on the “trim, white hospital cots” they were provided. Initial estimates placed 231 injured in hospital. A late check that day found only 5 of them in critical condition. The rough-hewn cons were attended to by prison nurses and inmates trained in the nursing arts. The inmate nurses were well respected by their comrades. Authorities recognized “their cool-headedness” and credited them with saving many lives and avoiding a near panic during the early hours of the catastrophe. They worked “systematically” as they “shunted case after case into the prison yard and administered oxygen under direction of a physician.”15 The hospital patients offered a variety of dispositions. One smoked “stoically and inquired about his pals.” Another asked for permission to go out and get fresh air, and another was more interested in reading the newspaper.16
Among the most prominent caretakers was the Ohio Penitentiary’s only physician, Dr. George Keil. On call twenty-four hours a day, he was at his post by 6 p.m. Easter Monday. As soon as he got to the hospital he called several local doctors, and after speaking with the warden was told to “call up all doctors you can get.” Keil called his wife and told her to do likewise. The response was more than was expected; he remembered that there got to be “more doctors than patients,” necessitating a directive to stop any more doctors from coming into the hospital.17
The hospital had bed capacity for 160, of which 147 were filled at the time of the fire. Anyone who was deemed ambulatory was asked to give up his bed to accommodate the avalanche of burn cases being brought in. By 8:30 p.m. the “National Guard or somebody” brought in a number of temporary cots, adding 150 more injured to the 160 already there.
During his testimony to the Board of Inquiry in the following days, Keil attested that a number of deaths both in the yard and hospital “just breathed and gasped and died…. They seemed to have inhaled either flame or gas and died.” As soon as a victim was pronounced dead, the body was removed. With so little space, as soon as six dead victims were taken out, six live ones were brought in. He admitted there was no way of knowing for sure whether the deceased died from burns, but strongly believed, as did most other authorities, that the vast majority died from suffocation. Asked how many of the 150 in the hospital died there, he responded that “15 or 20 possibly died or were already dead when they were brought in,” but recalled losing only one who had died since 10 p.m. on Monday evening, a victim who succumbed to bronchial pneumonia “from inhalation of smoke and possibly flames.”18
Investigators were interested in whether any of the victims had shared any last words with the doctor before taking their last breaths. Keil responded that even if they did say something, he wouldn’t have had time to listen with the ranks of the injured growing so quickly. Moreover, any who died in the hospital were already unconscious when they were brought in. Pressed further as to whether he heard any inmates speak about how the fire might have started, he told the authorities he was there “to take care of the sick” and was “not interested” in how it started.19
Badly burned convicts were at the mercy of contemporary medicine. Before World War II, surprisingly little was known about treating burn victims. Most advances would come too late for the Ohio Penitentiary fatalities. The go-to drug during the aftermath of the fire was opiates. It wasn’t long after the fire was contained that the prison ran out of its supply. Opiates were noticeably scarce at the prison chapel next to the burnt-out cell house, where “nearly a score of men lay with severe flesh burns … but painless under the influence of opiates administered by scores of Columbus physicians.” Fortunately, appeals